The Quiet Pools

“I’m sorry, Christopher. I don’t know.”

No easy answers. He had allowed himself to hope someone from Homeworld would appear to offer kindly explanations and refuge, to acknowledge a debt and pledge a bond of kinship. But he saw now that it was not going to happen. He was not going to be embraced by his father’s friends—by Jeremiah’s friends. If his father had not welcomed him, had not trusted him, how could he expect that anyone else would? He would have to find answers to his other questions on his own.

“Lila, what’s the status of the house library?”

“The house library is empty.”

“Hidden files? Protected files?”

“I’m sorry, Christopher.”

“Is there anything left? Anything from my father? Anything about my father? About my family?”

“Mr. McCutcheon kept personal files in off-line storage, not as part of the house library,” said Lila.

Reason to hope, however feeble. “Then Dryke may have taken them. Where were they? What medium?”

“Books,” Lila said.

Christopher did not have to be told where to look. He went directly to his father’s bedroom, to the long shelf below the west-facing window and the long row of hardcover books atop it. He had noticed them during his imprisonment, even picked one up and glanced briefly through it.

He had noted them as curiosities, both because books in general were rare and because the particular form of these books was unusual. For, with one or two exceptions, the books were all Portables—traditional print volumes with their contents duplicated electronically in the binding for access by a computer. The Portables were designed to be shelved on special bookcases, “plugged in” to smart ports, although the shelf in his father’s room was not one such.

It was a transitional technology, predicated on the notion that traditional readers would resist surrendering their words-in-boards for slates, but might welcome having the contents of their libraries on-line for quick reference. Never more than a modest success, the Portables had all but vanished from the marketplace before Christopher was born. They survived only as collectibles, and he had not known his father was a collector.

Scanning the titles, Christopher found historicals, art books, Locke, Eiseley, Kant, a biography of John Muir, and one fiction best-seller, Wolf’s Lord of Sipan. And that was all. “Nothing personal here. Dryke must have taken them,” Christopher said. His voice was heavy with disappointment.

“Did you find any books?”

“Yes—”

“Would you count them, please?”

Christopher’s eyes skipped down the line. “Thirty-one.”

“Then none are missing. They are all there.”

“But I don’t see any journals, any diaries, any albums—”

“There are none to find, Christopher. The bindings are standardized. The texts vary in length. So there is always unused space in a Portable’s chipdisk. Each of those books contains more than its cover admits to,” said Lila. “As much as several hundred kilobytes per book.”

“That isn’t very much.”

“It is when you are only storing words, Christopher.”

Shaking his head, Christopher said, “I didn’t know this was possible, and cultural media are supposed to be my specialty.”

“If you had known, then probably Mikhail Dryke would also have known, and the books would be gone.”

Christopher’s face screwed up into a mystified frown. “Lila, how did you know about this? It had to be in the restored files.”

“Yes, Christopher.”

Tentatively, he reached out and pulled Clark’s Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest from the ranks. “But only some of your files were restored.”

“Yes, Christopher.”

He looked up from the book in the direction of Lila’s voice. “Then this was important. He wanted me to know they were here. He wanted me to read them.”

“Yes, Christopher,” said Lila. “After he was dead, and only if you asked about them.”

“Who else?”

“I am not allowed to show them to anyone else.”

“Not even Lynn-Anne?”

“No.”

He pulled more volumes from the shelf, carefully making a stack in his arms. “I want to see them now.”

“There is one condition. Mr. McCutcheon asked that you read them all, or not at all.”

That brought him up short. “Why?”

“I’m sorry, Christopher. I don’t know.”

Though the archive had been opened to Christopher, he saw very quickly that it had not been created for him. Save for a few decades-old “letters” from a father to his new son, it was not even addressed to him.

And instead of the systematically organized, theatrically perfect deathbed soliloquy Christopher had expected, the archive was a fragmented and incomplete potpourri, a scattering of the thoughts and reflections and memories of a man of complexity. It was his attic, the bottom drawer of his rolltop desk, the notes scribbled in the margins of his days.

Together, they said, “This was my private world, which I never shared with you in life. This is who I was.”

Christopher rooted himself in the seat for two hours, reading his way through the first six volumes of archiviana. Then, as dusk was settling over the ridge, he pushed back from the desk and retreated to the kitchen to fortify his body with its first food since breakfast.

He also needed the break to fortify his determination. Reading William’s private archives was akin to raking a mine field in search of a lost treasure. Dangerous forces were concealed beneath the surface. Inevitably, he would stumble on them. There was no way to predict when, no way to prevent the intersection, no way to protect himself. Not if he wanted to reclaim the treasure. Not if he was to honor his father’s final request.

So far, there had been more wonder than pain. He had found nothing about Sharron, nothing about Deryn. He did find a self-conscious episodic letter which began “Dear Christopher” and spanned more than four years. The contents of the letter explained little and illuminated little more. But it was fascinating all the same, for it was filled with details of a sort that he would not have thought his father would take the trouble to notice.

But he had taken the trouble, not only to notice, but to record.

The letter began two years after Christopher was born, and the tone was both self-conscious and oddly apologetic, as though his father felt he had been caught procrastinating. It was written in simple language, as though his father was speaking to the child he was, not the adult he would be.

But it offered a snapshot, all the same: a portrait of a cheerful, self-amusing two-year-old who knew the alphabet and could count to thirty, and who liked to “play a game”—saying words and seeing them appear on the screen—on the old computer in Lynn-Anne’s room.

Because such things were important to his father, Christopher expected the catalog of the hundred and one landmark achievements of childhood—the ever-changing answers to a parent’s “Do you know what my boy can do now?” But he was surprised to hear about the soft-stuffed gray mouse that went everywhere with him until it disappeared on a family trip to Long Beach— and about Traveler Pup, the bow-tied hound who succeeded Friend Mouse.

Friend Mouse was beyond remembering. But Christopher remembered Traveler Pup with a twinge and a tug. He could see it, worn and worried, its bow tie gone, its golden fur gone gray with handling, lying in the basket of toys in the corner of his room on B Street. But he could not remember what had become of it. Surrendered without a thought during a housecleaning, most likely, the emotion imbued in it leached away by time.

The letter’s entries were spotty, tantalizing, maddening. Snapshots. An imaginary friend named Birdy, who