The Quiet Pools

CHAPTER 13 —UUC— “… for the silent Earth.”

Eyes closed, Hiroko Sasaki endured the final touch-up of her makeup and powder. The corporation’s image doctor, a round-bellied American named Edgar Donovan, hovered nearby, fretting.

“You have to remember that no matter how much Minor smiles at you, he’s not your friend,” Donovan said. “The smiles don’t go out to the audience. When they cut to him, it’ll be for a raised eyebrow or a frown.”

“I will remember.”

“And don’t be surprised if he tries something to provoke you. You took a lot of power out of his hands by insisting on a live interview. He’s going to try to get that back.”

“I fully expect so.”

“I’m not saying you were wrong, mind you,” Donovan added. “The board’s delighted that you finally agreed to come out of the shadows and stand up for the company. And I’m delighted with the conditions—live, ninety minutes, and here at Prainha. That’s as close as we can get to a level playing field. Which tells us how much RCA wanted this one.”

“Yes,” Sasaki said. The makeup artist stepped back, her work finally complete, and Sasaki opened her eyes. She looked around the inner office until she found Mikhail Dryke, a silent spectator in a window well. “Are you ready?”

“We’re ready,” Dryke said.

Sasaki smiled a brave smile. “Then I will go face the jaguar.”

Except for his eyes, Julian Minor, senior correspondent for RCA Telecasting’s Newstime, looked more like a terrier than a jaguar. Barely 170 centimeters tall, with a round-heeled walk and close-cropped fuzzy beard, he seemed unequal to the attention he received when he entered a room.

But on camera, the walk and the height were irrelevant, and the beard became a mask which served only to focus attention on Minor’s eyes. His eyes unmasked the hunter in him. They could punctuate a comment with an angry flash, puncture a defense with a skeptical smirk. From just a meter or two away, the challenging intensity of his gaze could paralyze thought.

It was a candidate for the Russian presidency who had given Minor his nickname. Emerging from what would be a career-ending interview with Minor, Sterenkov had complained bitterly that to look across into Minor’s eyes was like looking into the tall grass and seeing the gleam of a jaguar’s eyes. In time, Minor’s reputation itself became a weapon; later victims sometimes destroyed their own credibility simply by trying to avoid his gaze.

For all that, Minor enjoyed a reputation for fairness. He was tough, direct, and aggressive; if you were strong, direct, and honest, you could survive, and might even earn a sympathetic hearing.

Or so Donovan promised.

Centered and calm, Hiroko Sasaki sat in the bergere armchair Donovan had chosen for her (“You disappear in a big, soft couch”) and waited for the interview to begin. On a monitor a few meters away and angled toward her, the introductory backgrounder on the Diaspora Project and the Singapore “disaster” was continuing.

Almost certainly, the backgrounder was infuriatingly slanted and misleading. But Sasaki was not watching. She had already succeeded in making herself not see the screen, had drawn in her focus until it and the camera operator and the Skylink engineer disappeared. Once the interview began, there would be no temptation to watch herself.

Minor looked up from his notes and smiled at her. She became a shadow and let the smile pass through her like a breeze.

“One minute,” someone said. Sasaki tugged the sleeves of her red blouse (Donovan again: “Dress international. Let’s not play to latent racism by looking ethnic”) down to her wrists, rested her elbows on the slender wooden armrests, folded her hands in her lap. The next time Minor looked up at her, she met his gaze and answered his smile with a bow of her head.

“Good evening,” he said to his camera. “This is Julian Minor in Prainha, Brazil, the busiest spaceport on the globe. Just five kilometers from where I sit, a launch cannon identical to that blamed in the tragedy in Singapore is busy hurling twenty-ton shells into the sky.

“With me is Hiroko Sasaki, Director of the Diaspora Project, a division of Allied Transcon, which owns and operates this spaceport. Director Sasaki, are we safe here? And how can you be sure?”

“No one is ever perfectly safe, anywhere, anytime, Mr. Minor,” she said smoothly. “But you are safer now than you would be waiting on a railroad platform for a train or crossing a city street. You are safer now than you were when flying from New York, to Belem last night for this interview. Every year, more than two hundred thousand people die worldwide in transportation accidents. Space flight is the safest form of transportation, and the T-ships are the safest form of space flight.”

The eyebrow arched. “Is your answer to the families of the thirty-seven dead in Singapore that they were just unlucky?”

“Mr. Minor, when I heard what happened that day, I wept,” Sasaki said. “It was a terrible moment, and one I deeply wish could have been prevented. But—”

“But you could have prevented it,” Minor pounced. “Isn’t that true? Don’t your own operating rules, Allied’s own documents, anticipate exactly the kind of failure that took place? If you knew it could happen, why didn’t you take steps to prevent it?”

Launch services were the responsibility of Allied’s Starlifter Division; Sasaki and the Diaspora Project were, properly speaking, merely their customers. But Donovan had warned her that there was no point in trying to draw fine distinctions or correct every misstatement.

“But of course, we did,” Sasaki said. “Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a perfect machine.”

“That’s certainly true of your launch cannon,” Minor said. “I have reports here of more than sixty launch failures. It seems to me that the only way you could feel safe here is not to think about it.”

Sasaki frowned. “In thirteen years of operation at Kasigau and thirty-five years here, Allied has launched more than a million pay loads. There have been just sixty-one launch aborts. And only once has an abort resulted in any loss of life. I regret the Singapore accident. But I don’t see where I need apologize for the safety record of the Kare-Kantrowitz launchers or of Allied’s Launch Services Division.”

Minor settled back in his chair. “I notice that you avoid calling these systems ‘launch cannon,’ an expression which is in such widespread colloquial use that it’s in every general lexicon. Why is that?”

“I resist the coinage,” she said. “It’s misleading.”

“Well, now, I’ve heard those launchers at work,” Minor said with a convivial smile. “They sure sound like cannon to me. Isn’t this linguistic legerdemain an attempt on your part to mask the military origins of Allied’s technology, what Jeremiah calls your bloody heritage?”

“I find an interesting irony here,” Sasaki said. “Yes, nationalist tensions drove the technologies that lifted us into space. We use high-energy lasers and tracking systems created for a ballistic missile defense. The first all-points aerospace plane was designed as a bomber-interceptor for the United States Air Force. The first space station was a Russian spy base. The first moon landing was a political power play. The first boosters began as weapons of war.”

“Then you admit—”

She did not pause. “I am prompted to wonder at times where we would be if we humans hadn’t been fighting each other tooth and nail. I am not ashamed of the pedigree of our tools. On the contrary, I think that in many cases we have redeemed the creators of those tools by finding better uses for them than those for which they were originally intended.”

“I hear in that answer exactly the kind of arrogance of which Allied stands accused—”

“Stands accused by whom, Mr. Minor?”

“By Homeworld. By public opinion. Isn’t arrogance implicit in the fact that within an hour of the Singapore tragedy, the Kasigau cannon was back in operation?”

“What’s implicit is necessity,” she said calmly. “Prainha and Kasigau are lifelines for the orbital communities—for Technica and Horizon and Aurora. All of the aerospace vehicles owned by all of the planet’s governments and corporations could not make up the shortfall if Prainha and Kasigau shut down—”

Donovan and Dryke had been monitoring the broadcast from Sasaki’s private inner office, using the center four cells of the display wall. While Donovan sat self-evidently at ease, lounging back in Sasaki’s Swendon club chair, Dryke stood, sometimes pacing by the windows, sometimes standing close enough to the display that its changing patterns of light played on his face.

“Come on, come on,” Dryke muttered to himself.

“She’s doing wonderfully,” Donovan said. “She’s absolutely fine.”

“I wasn’t talking to Hiroko,” Dryke said.

“Director Sasaki, how much has Memphis cost?” Minor was asking.

“How much does a city cost?” Sasaki replied.

“Excuse me?”

“Before I answer, I want to know that you’ll have something appropriate to compare it to. How much is invested in a modern community of ten or fifteen or twenty thousand? Draw a circle around one and tell me. How much in their roads, their businesses, their homes? How much in their play yards and factories? Don’t draw the circle too small—”

Attagirl,” Donovan said, sitting forward and beaming.

“—don’t leave out the land that grows their food, the quarries and mines and wells that supply their stone and water and steel. How much for the endless maintenance to keep what you’ve built whole? How do you value the man-years of unpriced labor? How much did it cost to bring it all together? How much has it cost to keep it alive?”

“Not a billion dollars a person.”

“That’s your figure, not mine,” Sasaki said. “How much, Mr. Minor? Everything that goes into Memphis has a price tag, because it’s all being done at once, by one organization. I know what building this city cost. But that number would mean nothing to you or to the audience, because you don’t know the value of what you’ve inherited yourselves.”

If she said more, neither Donovan nor Dryke heard it. There was a buzzing sound, which Dryke later decided sounded like electric butterfly wings. The four-cell display seemed to collapse toward its center, then stabilized with a new image: a red-haired, bearded man perhaps forty years old.

“Of course you know what Memphis costs,” said the image. “A good thief always knows the value of what he steals—”

“Yes,” Dryke said approvingly. “There you are.”

“What the hell is that?” Donovan demanded, brow wrinkling.

Dryke walked forward a step and studied the face. “Not what, Mr. Donovan. Who.”

“And who is—”

“Jeremiah.”

Recovering quickly from his surprise, Donovan scrutinized the display. “Any chance that’s what he really looks like?”

“Not much.”

“I thought not,” Donovan said, then looked quizzically at Dryke. “Ah—shouldn’t you be doing something?”

Dryke shook his head. “It’s being done.”

There was confusion in the outer room. The monitor at hand still showed Sasaki’s face, but Minor was on his feet and demanding explanations for something he had heard through his earpiece.

“Are we on or off? Off? How—then give it to me here, goddammit, so I can see what’s going on.”

The image of a gentle-eyed bearded man replaced Sasaki’s puzzled expression on the monitor.

“Sound,” barked Minor. “I want sound.”

“—it is arrogance, arrogance in the service of imperialism, which forgives such plundering,” the man was saying. “They want, and so they take. They call their wants needs and justify their greed with necessity—”

“Jammed? From where? Are you sure this isn’t their doing?” Minor demanded. “No—who? Are you sure?” He stared at the monitor. “Jesus,” he said, turning to his crew. “Let’s go back live.”

“Nothing’s getting through,” the engineer protested.

“Do it,” Minor snarled.

“—what do they want? More, always more. For those who are empty inside, there is no such word as enough. Never enough power, never enough wealth—”

The engineer shrugged. “On three. But you’re talking to yourself. Three—two—one—”

Minor looked into the lens. “Jeremiah? Jeremiah, this is Julian Minor of Newstime. Can you hear me?”

“—never enough to satisfy the unsatisfiable need.” Then he paused. “Yes, Julian,” he said. “I can hear you.”

“You’re Jeremiah, leader of the Homeworld?”

“I am Jeremiah,” said the pirate.

“Would you answer a few questions?”

The bearded man nodded. “Ask your questions.”

“Some have called you the John Muir of the Earth. You use an Old Testament prophet’s name—a reluctant prophet with a flair for theater and an uncompromising message of danger and destruction. Do you see yourself as an oracle for the twenty-first century—”

“I am not important. Ask another question.”

Minor blinked in surprise. “Very well. Jeremiah, why do you oppose the Diaspora?”

“It is those who support it, not those who oppose it, who must explain themselves,” said Jeremiah. “Ask Hiroko Sasaki to explain. Explain by what right you squander your inheritance, the Earth. Explain what you have bought at such a dear price. The choking summers. The burning forests. The rising oceans. The killing rays of the Sun. You have trampled the Earth underfoot in your headlong rush to the stars.”

Sasaki held her head high as she answered. “We are all collaborators in that crime. Not Hiroko Sasaki alone. Not Allied Transcon. But I, and you, Jeremiah, and you, Julian Minor, and each of those listening, and ten generations dead and departed. The Amazon forest was burning, the river poisoned by mercury, long before Allied began to build at Prainha. The Earth was warming, the ozone vanishing, when starships were only engineers’ dreams.”

The Starlink technician was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “It’s not going through.”

“What?”

“He doesn’t want an answer,” Sasaki said quitely. “He only wants an audience.”

“Jeremiah, this is Julian Minor again. I still have Director Sasaki here, on camera just as I am. Are you stopping her answers from being heard? Are you afraid of what she might say?”

“Hiroko Sasaki is programmed with lies,” said Jeremiah. “She is abducting ten thousand of our brightest and best to send on a modern Children’s Crusade. What can she say that we can believe?”

Minor looked to Sasaki. “What about that, Director? Have you taken a look at what the effects of giving up that many people of that quality might be? From a human resources standpoint, it seems that Jeremiah has a reasonable case.”

“Jeremiah controls the airwaves. What point is there in answering?”

“We’re recording here,” Minor said. “If we have to, we’ll put it together and rebroadcast it later. Director Sasaki, one way or another, I promise you that your answers will be heard.”

She frowned, looked to the floor as she marshaled her thoughts, then up at the camera. “The pioneers are a select group of very special people,” she said. “They have to be, to face and triumph over the challenges ahead. But they’ve chosen this for themselves, earned it for themselves. No one is being abducted. Thousands more would join them if there was only room.

“Even so, Memphis won’t be leaving the Earth poorer. The Diaspora Project has been the single greatest stimulus to education and self-development since the invention of the computer. It’s motivated people of three generations across every continent to say, ‘I want to contribute,’ and work to better themselves. Most of those people, and all of that human capital, will remain here.”

Minor turned back to his camera. “Jeremiah, you can’t dispute the fact that millions worldwide bought options for the Diaspora Project. The pioneers are volunteers, the lucky few. Why not let them go? Why is it important to you to stop them?”

“It is important to all of us,” Jeremiah said. “We need what they represent. We need their will and energy here. There is so much work left to do, so much damage to repair. We need to focus on stewardship, not starships. Otherwise this endless expansionism will exhaust us and leave us empty. We have a choice between living in the Sun and dying in the dark. We must raise our voices. We must reclaim the choice from the corporations and their collaborators. It is our future.”

“Director Sasaki—” Minor began.

“Gone,” said the Skylink operator, shaking his head. “Nothing up or down.”

Minor looked helplessly at Sasaki. “Director, believe me when I say that we had nothing to do with any of this.”

“I do believe you,” she said, rising.

“I can give you a chance to make a closing statement.”

“Thank you. It’s not necessary,” Sasaki said.

“You’re going to give him the last word? This story’s going to be in the A queue for the rest of the week.”

She turned and met his perplexed look with a gentle smile.

“My mission is not to win converts. My mandate is to build starships.”

“Mandate?”

“Have you ever tried to push a string, Mr. Minor?”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

“Do you think that the Diaspora Project is something that was created from the top down?” she asked chidingly. “This is not something that we are doing to the Earth. This is something I do for the Earth. Those who can, already understand. Those who do not, never will.”

When Sasaki rejoined Dryke and Donovan in the inner office, the latter greeted her with a disapproving look.

“I should have been told,” Donovan grumped. “The board should have been told.”

“Told what, Mr. Donovan?” All sixteen cells of the display were occupied, and she began to scan them.

“Listen, I’m not an idiot. You set up this interview to sucker Jeremiah. Mikhail here spent the whole time itching and fidgeting like he was waiting for the main act to go on stage.”

She glanced at Dryke, a hint of a smile on her lips. “Jeremiah is his own master.”

“Bullshit. You were laying for him. You used the Singapore business as cover for changing your colors. The only thing I can’t figure is what you got from doing it.”

“I appreciate your help in preparing for the interview, Mr. Donovan,” Sasaki said, gliding toward the display. “Please thank the board for making you available. You can relay to them that I do not expect to be granting any further interviews in the near future.”

Donovan frowned. “Yeah,” he said as he stumped out. “I’ll tell them.”

As the door was closed behind Donovan, Sasaki asked for Privacy One. “Well, Mikhail?” she asked. “How did we do?”

Dryke pulled the plug from his ear and broke into a smile. “We have a piece of him,” he said. “A good piece.”

“Tell me.”

“The Jeremiah image was synthesized with a Palette HI broadcast animator. Images, I mean. There were three different ones.”

“Three!”

“An equal-opportunity air pirate. He blanketed Europe and North Africa with a vaguely Mediterranean synth through SIRIO, fed the Far East with an Oriental bounced up through AUSSAT, and gave us the mountain man through Hiwire.”

“All things to all people,” Sasaki said wryly.

Dryke continued, “The video lab says that if all three had the same root image, they may be able to correlate them and back-form a fair picture of the real Jeremiah.”

“Is that all we have—a hope?”

“No,” Dryke said. “More than that. You know, you can route a call to your neighbor around the world if you know how, and by ten thousand different routes if you want to be creative. Jeremiah knows how, and he was creative. All three images were scatter-routed to the uplinks in short bursts—too short to track back. Jeremiah used one hundred and eighty routes—good for three minutes. But thanks to Mr. Minor, he stayed on for seven. And with a second and a third look, we were able to map six of his routes back to a common entry node.”

“Which is—”

Dryke looked up at cell 4, which contained a map of North America. “Monterrey, Mexico.”

“Monterrey! Is that his base?”

“Almost certainly not,” Dryke said, shaking his head. “He’s not that foolish. But it makes the odds very good that his base is in the Americas. He needs land-line access to the node. Jeremiah’s a neighbor, Hiroko.”

“Or an insider?”

“Perhaps,” Dryke said. “Can’t rule it out.”

Sasaki crossed her arms and nodded. “This is very heartening, Mr. Dryke. I can see progress at last. I am comforted that I did not endure Mr. Minor’s questions and Mr. Donovan’s molding in vain.”

“I’m not finished,” Dryke said. “There’s one piece more. The best piece.”

“Oh?”

“We always thought that Jeremiah’s voice was synthesized. Nothing exotic to it,” Dryke said. “But there’s one kind of solution for a canned track like we’ve seen before, and another for a live exchange like we just had.”

“The difference is important?”

“Very. For live work, the easy way is to give an AI translator—maybe an IBM Traveler—a cross-file of another voice, just like you’d give it a cross-file for French, say, and let it do the substitutions on the fly. But something interesting happens when you throw a word at a translator that it can’t find in the file. It passes that word through unchanged.”

Sasaki looked suddenly hopeful. “Did that happen?”

“Yes. With Julian’s name. Your name. And ‘starships,’ near the end,” said Dryke. “All different from the rest. All in Jeremiah’s own voice.”

“Can you do anything with so little?” Sasaki asked. “A few syllables—”

“It’s as good as a fingerprint. It’s enough to do a cross-match search in the Memphis hyper. Enough to set up a monitoring program on the corporate com net.” Dryke smiled, a smile full of threat. “You know, you can’t hardly work for Allied without saying your name or ‘starship’ now and again. If Jeremiah is an insider, we’ll find him very soon.”

“And if he’s not?”

“A little longer. But not much longer. We’re coming up behind him in the dark. One more gag and we’ll have him.”

“What will it take this time?”

Dryke thought for a moment. “A sacrifice.”