The Quiet Pools

have to be lucky enough to run it past his mouth without him sensing the hook.”

“You spoke of Javier Sala,” she said. “We cannot allow Jeremiah such an opportunity. I am reluctant to permit any pioneers to board Memphis until Jeremiah has been found.”

Dryke shook his head vigorously. “Delaying habitation would be a mistake. The closer we are to succeeding, the bolder he’ll be in trying to stop us.”

“But will he be more reckless, or merely more ruthless?”

“Truthfully? I expect both.”

“Memphis is not replaceable, Mikhail.”

“I know,” he said. “But there’s no safe way to gamble.”

CHAPTER 17 —CAU— “… the voice of the banished…”

The Call icon popped up in one corner of Christopher McCutcheon’s work space, accompanied by a polite cheep.

“Who is it, Dee?” he asked his secretary.

“Lenore Edkins, Section 15,” answered the AIP. “You last talked to him on November 8.”

Edkins was a senior archaeolibrarian in the Culture Section. “I remember. I’ll take it,” McCutcheon said, suspending the error audit he had been conducting on the pre-Columbian thread of the North American Mythology stack. “Hello, Lenore.”

“Morning, Christopher,” said Edkins, a monk-haired black man with soulless eyes. “I’ve got some answers for you on that inquiry about your hyper entry. The Tunnel Visions telecast hadn’t been reviewed, now has been. It won’t be added to the hyper. Sorry.”

Crestfallen, McCutcheon asked, “Any idea why?”

“You play well enough, at least so I’m told by people more accustomed to hearing antique instruments. But the quality of the recording is only fair, and the auditor says that, taken as a whole, the music you three performed on the broadcast has ‘no significant entertainment or ethnomusicological value.’ Pretty standard phrasing. I’m afraid your Project connection wasn’t enough to swing the decision.”

“No value? We did the Bach cello suites in the Segovia arrangement—”

“Which are apparently in the hyper, as performed by Segovia, Parkening, and the e-pop version by Helix.”

“—’Mountain Storm,’ by Michael Hedges—”

“Also in the hyper by the composer’s own hand.”

“—and Kristen’s ‘Elegiac,’ which had everyone in the studio in tears.”

“A nice piece. But it was never professionally recorded, never published, and this Kristen Carlyle doesn’t come up in the stacks as either a performer or a songwriter. As near as I can tell, Tunnel Visions was as high as she ever got—thirty minutes on a regional arts showcase funded under USDC.”

Christopher gritted his teeth. In the smug economic classism of the Los Angeles ent-art world, Department of Culture grants were viewed as welfare handouts, and the work they supported little more than vanity indulgences. He hadn’t expected Edkins to show such colors. “What does any of that have to do with the music?”

Edkins sighed. “Look, you’ve done some work on the fiction stacks, haven’t you? What gets something in? Impact. Impact is the final criterion. You look at sales, cross-media citations, major reviews. You look for seminal ideas, innovative techniques, representative examples. What did the work give us? How did it change us?”

“So it has to be popular and prestigious,” said Christopher. “It’s not enough to be good.”

“It isn’t even necessary to be good,” said Edkins. “There are inferior fictions in the stacks because they added a single new word to the language, inferior songs because they caught everyone’s ear one summer. It’s not always fair. ‘Elegiac’ is a nice piece of work. I felt a tug, too. But it’s foam on the ocean, and no one’s going to miss it if it’s not there. Sorry, but that’s the truth.”

Discomfiting as it was, Christopher knew that Edkins was right, and that arguing was pointless. He had gotten Biography to add his degrees and his Hastings Award; he knew what a victory looked like, and this wasn’t one.

“All right, Lenore,” he said. “Thanks, anyway. I appreciate your taking a look at it.”

Edkins shrugged. “You’re family. No thanks needed. Sorry I couldn’t bring back better news. If you’re interested, though, I’ll tell you where the door is open.”

“Oh?”

“Tidwell’s holding a lot of space open for a Folklife stack on the Diaspora,” Edkins said. “The impact arrow points the other way on this one—we’re looking for what effect the starship Project’s had on people’s hearts and minds and muses. He’s particularly interested in off-net material, according to recent memos. So if you’ve got any material dealing with the Project, make sure I see it.”

Christopher brightened. “I might just have something. I’ll need to get a good recording made.”

“I can’t make an unconditional promise, mind you, but I’d say there’s a good chance that your musicianship and family connection would carry even a borderline piece in.”

“Charity, Lenore?”

Edkins shrugged. “I won’t spin you. It’s the back door. But it’s a door. Do you want to live forever, or not?”

Christopher swallowed any further words of indignation, and with them a measure of his pride. “What’s the timetable?”

“The sooner the better, I’d think. We’ll probably close late, but we might have to be more picky toward the end.”

Christopher nodded. “Okay. I’ll be in touch. Break, Dee.” He sat back in his big chair, thoughtful, troubled. Is that what it was about, this ache? Living forever? Edkins seemed to see so readily something Christopher had not yet acknowledged in himself. Edkins presumed an understanding Christopher wanted to deny.

Living forever. A little piece of immortality. A mark, more permanent than a handprint in cement, than initials carved on a wooden railway trestle. More permanent than memory. More permanent than life.

He circled the thought cautiously, unwilling to embrace it. He had scorned and pitied Jessie for this same passion. It was hard to be more forgiving of himself.

But already one part of his mind was thinking, Need to work on the middle eight— could use the date at Wonders—have to rent a v-cam, Greg can do tech—be nice to get some friends down for it—

“Ego and hypocrisy,” he chided himself aloud.

“Excuse me?” asked Dee.

“Ego and hypocrisy,” he repeated. “Not so different from Jessie, after all.”

Barely five minutes had passed when the phone cheeped again—little enough time that Christopher had barely found his place in the audit. Little enough time that he didn’t bother to glance at the Caller ID, automatically concluding it was Edkins calling back.

“I’ll take it, Dee,” he said.

But it was not Edkins, not a call he would have taken had he checked the identifier. It was, in fact, a call he had been avoiding.

“Hello, Christopher,” said William McCutcheon.

His father seemed to have a sixth sense for trouble in his life. Sure as sunrise, his father would call exactly when Christopher most wanted to avoid him—in the wake of crisis, calamity, or failure. Christopher half suspected his father of spying on him somehow, except he could not convince himself his father was sufficiently interested to take the trouble.