The Quiet Pools

CHAPTER 27 —AGU— “… I knew no fears…”

In the Creation time, said a tale Deryn once told, Coyote subdued the monster of the Columbia for the animal people. The wisest and smartest of all animals let Nashlah swallow him and then cut out the monster’s heart.

“A new race of people are coming, and they will pass up and down the river,” Coyote told the monster. “You may shake their canoes if they pass over you, but you must not kill all of them. This is to be the law always. You are no longer powerful.”

Thereafter, though the wind still blew unchecked through the river’s winding gorge, Nashlah slumbered in the deep waters. And Eagle and Beaver and Bear and Salmon came to the river without fear.

The world had changed, and animals no longer spoke like men. But in fulfillment of mythic prophecy, the once-wild Big River had been thoroughly tamed by the new race of people which came to live along its banks. The Army Corps of Engineers had finished what Coyote had begun. The river’s flagstone rapids and net-fishing falls had vanished below the surface of the lakes which formed behind the great dams. Its currents were now shaped by the needs of turbines and barges, rather than by gravity and geology.

But the salmon, Chief of the Fishes, still ran—over the concrete falls and ladders, under the barge props and jetboat hulls, through the silted, oft-polluted water. And when Christopher woke in the chair, stiff and twisted, his neck and back aching, and found his father’s chilling essay on the comsole display, he knew where he had to go.

His father had taken him to Bonneville Dam once before, a dozen years ago, to look down into the long generator bay in the north powerhouse, to marvel at the navigation lock slicing through the Oregon shore. They had spent less than an hour in the visitor center on Bradford Island, and a spare few minutes of that on the lowest level, where the fish ladder’s underwater windows and the counting room were located.

Dimly, Christopher remembered dirty water and silver fish which all looked alike to his eyes. But it seemed his father had seen something more.

To someone traveling upstream from Portland, Bradford Island appeared as a mere sliver of land, flat and forested with red and white transmission towers. It was the sole natural barrier in the string of dams and powerhouses spanning the two-and-a-half-kilometer width of the river; the smaller Cascades Island had been created when a third channel was carved out of the Washington shore.

The Corps maintained a flight control zone over the site, so Christopher was forced to merge the Avanti into the I-84 flyway and dive down with the wheelies at the Bonneville exit. A few minutes later, he was climbing out of the car in the nearly empty parking lot outside the visitor center.

“Lila, when do they open?” he said, his DBS band relaying the query.

“In half an hour, Christopher. Winter hours are ten a.m. to five p.m.”

He was not well disposed to waiting. “Damn.”

Even though the building was closed, the courtyards and walkways behind it were not. The walkways paralleled the fish ladder, the surface of which appeared as a staircase of tumbling water, passing beneath a small bridge and curving out of sight. Leaning out over the railing, he tried to peer down through the turbulent water into one of the cells. It was impossible to see anything but swirling silt and a chaos of bubbles.

His arms crossed and ungloved hands tucked in his armpits for warmth, Christopher settled on a concrete bench and waited for the silver flash, the white-foam splash of a sockeye or coho breaking water for an upstream leap. But in half an hour of watching the ladder, not once was he rewarded with that sight.

If there was life in the churning cells of the ladder, it was hidden below.

Finally, a stoop-shouldered brown-clad ranger appeared to unlock the lower-level doors behind where Christopher was seated. The ranger seemed surprised to find him waiting there.

“Morning,” he said, holding the door open as Christopher approached. “I don’t usually have company this early, ’specially not between Winterfest and the New Year. Welcome to Bradford Island—”

Christopher brushed wordlessly past him.

The lower level was much as Christopher remembered. The center of the room was filled with museum-style exhibits on the life cycle of genus Oncorhynchus. On the wall by the fish counting room, digital displays cataloged the traffic by species—day, month-to-date, and year-to-date.

But the focus of the room was the Living Theater—a row of large viewing windows which looked out into the ladder itself. Spaced across the longest wall, each window marked a bend in the ladder’s serpentine underwater path. An electronic map of the maze appeared above, its color-coded tracking lights marking the progress of several shad, three steelhead trout, and one solitary chinook salmon.

Christopher came to the railing at the window the chinook was approaching. The water rushing by beyond the glass was a soupy yellow-green, as though it were some bilious paniculate stew. A small American shad, a wriggling silver submarine, fought its way around the turn and vanished into the liquid fog. Another, darker fish squirted by, tail fins beating furiously.

But the solitary chinook in the ladder seemed stuck midway down the last leg of its maze, its bright white marker edging forward and then easing back.

“Come on, come on,” Christopher said aloud.

“This is the slow season,” a voice said behind him.

It was the ranger, come to check on his curious visitor. Christopher turned at the rail to see him standing beside the exhibits in the middle of the room. “What?”

“Chinook and steelhead pretty much quit running by the end of November, and the king won’t start up again till March, at least. That’s worth seeing. Still fill up the windows at the peak of the run, day and night, like the river’s half quicksilver. Those-uns are stragglers—not likely to get where they’re going, or to make anything of it if they do.”

Christopher settled his buttocks against the railing, hands grasping the wood to either side. “Sounds like I’d be better off talking to you instead of waiting for the show to begin,” he said. “How long have you worked here?”

“Twenty-two years next May.”

“That long? Then you were probably here the last time I was,” Christopher said. “In ’81.”

Nodding, the ranger said, “Probably was. Hope you picked a better day back then.”

“I was with my father,” Christopher said. “He just died a few days ago.” He could not understand why he blurted that out to this stranger. But when it was said, there was a sudden tightness in his throat that made it hard to swallow.

Sage and sympathetic eyes answered him. “That’s hard. I guess you’d like me to leave you be.”

“No,” Christopher said quickly, suddenly afraid to be alone. “You must know a lot about salmon, working here that long.”

“I know my piece. Used to work the counting room over there, before they brought in the AIP. Fifty minutes on, ten minutes off, eight hours a day with an eye on the window and a hand on the tally bar. I can tell one fish from the next, I guess.”

“That sounds incredibly dull.”

The ranger stepped forward, tucking his hands in his back pockets. “People thought so, but it never seemed so to me. I put in six years as a counter. It was kind of like being plugged into the river, to the whole cycle of things. No two days alike.”

An impolitic chuckle escaped Christopher. “Really?”

“Laugh, but it’s true. And when I was done, I was done. Never took my work home to my lady,” he said with a self-amused smile. “Never any complaints about the guys at the office.” The ranger looked past Christopher and nodded toward the window. “There. Looks like she might make it this time.”

Christopher turned back just as the thick-bodied shape of a chinook salmon, tail fins thrashing the water, hove into view at the right edge of the window. The upper third of the body was freckled with black spots. Below them, behind the pectoral fin, a triangular tear the size of Christopher’s palm flapped in the current, baring red flesh beneath.

There were rips and notches in the tail fins and first dorsal as well, and the silver skin seemed pale and flaccid. The chinook hovered for a few seconds before the window, then was swept backward into the maze. The tracking lights marked its retreat, and in less than a minute it flashed past the next downstream window, its body at an odd angle, making only the most feeble effort against the current.

“Not much longer for that one,” the ranger said, clucking. “Probably failed at The Dalles, upstream, and been kicking around Bonneville Lake with the spring running down. They won’t feed in fresh water, you know, no matter how weak they get. Odd thing is they’ll take a fisherman’s fly, even though they’re fasting, but that’s as far as it goes—say, are you all right?”

Christopher barely heard the question and could say nothing in answer. While the ranger rattled on and the salmon tumbled past, the tightness in Christopher’s throat had returned, quickly growing into a strangling ache beneath his ribs. His throat was raw, and each breath hurt more than the last. He took his air in little gasps that were chopped off with sounds like sobs.

Clutching the railing and struggling for air, Christopher blinked away tears in a feeble effort to staunch them, until his cheeks were shining wet and the anguished sobs unmistakable. He sleeved the moisture away, infuriated that he did not know what had triggered his crying, and even more that he could not stop it.

But fury, like embarrassment, was a feeble weapon against the flood of pain, and his defenses crumbled. Racking, body-wrenching sobs seized him, and aching primal sounds tore free from prisons deep inside him. He slipped down to a seat on the stepped floor, clinging to the railing like an anchor with one arm, tear-blurred eyes hooded behind the wall of his hand—one final, feeble grasp for dignity in the midst of the kind of naked moment that shatters dignity and pretense and self-deception.

And when Christopher sensed the ranger beside him, felt the uncertain touch on his shoulder, and heard the kind-voiced question “You want to tell me about it?” all he could think to say was I hurt, and that seemed too mean and petty a thing to share.

It was hard to escape the ranger’s unwelcome solicitude, and harder still to persuade him that he did not want to be left alone. The arrival of other visitors, a family with two children in tow and an infant in arms, was the first wedge, destroying the illusion of privacy and reminding the ranger of his other duties.

“Look, you want to come upstairs, I can let you sit in the staff workroom awhile,” said the ranger. “Seems like you need to take a little time to pull together.”

“I’m okay,” Christopher lied, his voice unpersuasively hoarse and thready. “I just got clobbered by an old memory, that’s all. My father used to take me fishing up by The Dalles.”

The ranger frowned, teetering between resistance and acceptance. “We’ve got a counselor over at the administration center,” he said. “Maybe I should give him a call.”

“No,” Christopher said, pulling himself to his feet. “I’m all right. Just go back to the desk and be your smiling self.” He turned and looked up, feigning interest in the fish tracker.

Rudeness did what diplomacy could not. The ranger hesitated, then finally walked off. When he disappeared into the elevator, Christopher hurried to the stairs.

From the plazalike observation deck atop the center, Christopher could look down four stories into the fish ladder, as well as downstream toward the Beacon Rock monolith and across the island to the dry, quiet spillways of the dam. By the time he had made a slow walking circuit of the deck, he also had a clearer view of what had spilled from him downstairs.

His father’s death had been remote and somehow sanitary, easily denied, curiously unaffecting. Moreover, there had been no one but Lila to talk to, no one to help him catalyze his emotions. Consequently, he had managed to pretend that he was whole, ignoring the growing sac of emotional pus. The sight of the blooded, failing chinook had slashed it open, the two-edged blade of futility and finality doing the damage.

But other questions, more important questions, remained unanswered. His father’s ruminations on the blind, all-sacrificing drive of the pioneers were unsettling. It was clear to Christopher that his father had meant it as more than metaphor—Jeremiah’s actions were proof of that. He had seen something out there to fight against, something tangible and threatening.

Which made no sense to Christopher. There were some poetic parallels, to be sure, but there were also fatal—even foolish—incongruities. There were no dissenting chinooks barricading the mouth of Columbia, no coho plotting to destroy the fish ladders. The salmon’s migration was an expression of their being, an uncontested conation pointed toward survival, the sole moral barometer of evolution.

The human Diaspora, by contrast, was the rough-and-tumble marriage of romance and hubris, blessed by the twin gods of technology and opportunity. Choice was the key variable—a minority’s choice, it was beginning to appear, but choice all the same. In evolutionary terms, Memphis was merely a whim, no more essential a part of the human pattern than the colonization of the Americas by the Asiatics or the subsequent invasion by the Europeans. Economics and natural resources, national and international politics, greed, glory quests, idealistic visions— surely they were enough to explain humanity’s mythical “frontier spirit.”

Conation on the one hand. Choice on the other. It was ludicrous to think that they could be part of the same thing. And yet his father had believed it, and his father was not a fool. His father had believed it, and that belief had killed him.

Christopher’s questions pointed back toward the Project, and he could only think of one person there who might be both able and willing to answer them.

As soon as he cleared the Bonneville flight control zone, Christopher gunned the Avanti and pointed it skyward.

“Lila?”

“Yes, Christopher?”

“Would you see if you can get through to Daniel Keith at AT-Houston?”

“Secure or direct?”

Christopher considered. “You still know some of your routing tricks?”

“Yes, Christopher.”

“Secure.”

“Calls into Allied Transcon should be assumed to be monitored. A voice-only connection should be untraceable for three minutes.”

“Do your best. Put it through.”

It took but a second for the green bar on the dash to glow. “Keith,” said a voice.

“Daniel, this is Chris.”

An ominously long silence followed. “I don’t think I can talk to you, Chris.”

“I’ll call you later, then. At home.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I think you know.”

Christopher had been half prepared for this. “Daniel, you have to know that whatever they’re saying about me is a lie.”

“Then why did you resign?”

“Who says I did?”

“Chris, Loi called me last night, worried about you. She asked me if I knew where you were.”

“Why didn’t she call me?”

“She did. You’re off-net. The call just came back to the house,” Keith said.

Christopher looked at his bare wrist dumbly. “I lost my band.” Lange or the sentries must have taken it from him, but he had no memory of that.

“Doesn’t matter. The point is, I asked a few people a few questions, as a favor. My curiosity wasn’t exactly rewarded.”

“Damn it, Daniel, corpsec murdered my father.”

Another long silence. “I can’t discuss that,” Keith said finally.

It was such a surprising answer that Christopher’s mental wheels stalled as he tried to embrace it. “I need to see you.”

“I’m sorry,” Keith said curtly. “I can’t help. Call Loi, will you? She deserves better.”

Calling Loi was a duty which had tugged at him more than once since Dryke and his people had left the ridge. Something had always intervened—most often the sobering finality of being severed from his life in Houston, paired with the stark futility of trying to reclaim any part of it. Thinking about Kenning House only evoked feelings of helplessness and rootlessness. He wanted to go home too much to be able to admit to Loi—even to himself—that he could not.

Instead, he called Skylink Customer Service and changed his residence pointer to the Avanti, which had a comsole almost as powerful as the one in Houston. The next distraction was replacing his personal phone—now that he had noted its absence, he felt naked without it.

Lila steered him to an executive supplies retailer in one of Portland’s older mail-malls, who offered him a Brazilian-made four-channel wrist phone at Pacific Land Management’s customary generous discount. Outside in the car, he completed the process, initializing the phone with his account number and checking that his directory was intact. When the confirming message came back on the bounce, his last excuse was gone.

“Lila—Skylink is owned by Tetsu Communications?”

“That’s correct.”

“Which is a corporate sibling to Takara Construction, Allied’s primary contractor for Memphis.”

“Yes. Both are subsidiaries of Kiku Heavy Industries, Ltd., a Tokyo-based private stock corporation.”

“How hard is it for Skylink to listen in on the traffic that they’re carrying?”

“It is quite easy, Christopher. Mr. McCutcheon used it only as a last resort, and always with encryption,” Lila said. “If you need to send a message, I can handle it more safely.”

“That’s all right,” Christopher said. “I just wondered.” He touched his phone, and the command bar glowed. “Message to Loi Lindholm. Hold to end, then send,” he said, then paused. “Begin.”

“Hello, Loi. This is Chris.” His heart was racing, even though he did not have to fear her response. “Daniel said that you were worried,” he said, speaking slowly. “I’m sorry. I— these last few days have been the hardest days of my life. Allied’s thrown me out. They think I’m a security risk. And my father—” The tightness threatened to return, and Christopher found other, safer words. “I’m staying at my father’s for a while. I need to figure out what to do.

“I miss you. I wish to God I could come home.” He swallowed hard. “End of message.”

The delivery acknowledgment came back on the bounce.

“Well, Lila—do you know anywhere I can buy a life transplant, cheap?”

“I’m sorry, Christopher. I do not.”

He sighed and squeezed the throttle. The Avanti edged forward. “Then I guess I’ll just come on back to the house.”

For no good reason he could divine, only twice during the drive did he think about crashing the car at full throttle into an approaching ridge.

Curled up on the couch in front of the high-D TV, propped up by pillows and a flask of Puerto Rican rum, Christopher let the sounds and images wash over him.

The TV came up with a pop station out of Los Angeles preselected. But he made no effort to search through the channels, for he was no more interested in one offering than another. He was escaping, and he knew it—and it hardly mattered where he escaped to, so long as he got away.

So a chat show on lesbian incest, with a bioethicist, a Catholic Reform priest, and the national director of Family Love dueling at close quarters, was as good a diversion—no better, no worse— as the seven thousandth rerun of a medical comedy. He remained a passive observer of both, asking no questions and voicing no opinions during the former, declining his part as a heavily bandaged patient in the latter.

He was feeling a bit more participatory during a half-hour pitch for the Because You’re a Woman diet, drawing gargoyle faces on the men and undrawing the clothing of the women. Even the insanity of Denali Devil’s Downhill amused him, at least until a grinning Irish skier missed a gate at the seventeen-thousand-foot level and fell off the mountain at what the announcer straight-facedly called a “high terminal velocity.”

Emboldened by liquor and pity, Christopher risked a glimpse at Current Events, morbidly curious about what they were saying now about him, about Malena Graham, about Jeremiah. He was almost disappointed to find that Current Events wasn’t saying anything at all—not so many as five of the nine hundred stories in the Current Events stack had anything to do with the Diaspora.

Displacing them was a juicy drama—the collapse, just after midnight, of a centuries-old room and pillar salt mine a thousand feet under the trendy Melvindale section of Detroit. Sixteen square blocks had subsided ten meters in a jolt, dropping short-stack condos into their own basements and folding a crowded spin club flat.

One hundred sixty-three were known dead, and at least six hundred were missing, including the Detroit city manager, a noted poet, and three members of the Detroit Pistons basketball team. What’s more, officials feared that the collapse had burst thousands of containers of colloidized hazardous waste stored in the mine in the 1990s. The Archbishop of Detroit, with wages-of-sin solemnity, called it God’s warning to Sodom.

Death in the night, earthquakelike devastation, holiday-season tragedy, toxic poisons, missing celebrities, government neglect, holy vengeance—it was a news executive’s wet dream. Christopher watched the coverage with a rum-flavored bemusement, finding black humor in the absurdities of the event, the stupidities of the reporters.

Christopher’s mood had turned increasingly savage, cynical. It was already unpleasant sharing his mind with such thoughts, and promised to grow uglier still. He needed an escape from his escape. When it finally came, it was from a most unexpected source.

“Christopher, are you awake?” Lila asked. On the TV, dancers writhed to a backbeat.

“Sorry to say.”

“Daniel Keith is calling.”

He looked dumbly at his band. “My phone didn’t ring.”

“It’s a station call to the house, Christopher. Shall I put it up for you?”

Christopher uncrossed his legs and pulled himself closer to vertical. “Sure.”

Keith’s face came up in a box on the TV. “Hello, Chris.”

“Hello yourself.” He shook his head, mostly to clear it. “Surprise, surprise. After this morning—”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to be that short. But I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t even tell you that I couldn’t. Not till I could get out of the complex.”

“You home now?”

“No. Look, Chris, the hair on my neck is standing up just being on the line with you. There’s been a lot of talk around here the last day or two, very strange stuff, none of it official. I didn’t know how much of it to believe. I guess you told me. Your father was Jeremiah?”

“So I’m supposed to believe. I swear I didn’t know.”

Keith nodded. “I might be the only one in the center who’d believe that,” he said slowly.

“I need some answers, Daniel.”

“You want some wisdom? Don’t ask the questions.”

“My father left notes that have me confused. I have to know if what he believed was true.”

“Why?” It was a cautionary, challenging question. Why do you have to know? Are you sure you want to know?

“So I can let go of it. So it’ll let go of me. Will you meet me somewhere?”

Keith frowned and looked away momentarily. “Are you coming back to Houston?”

“I can’t,” Christopher said. “Meet me in Portland. No, better, San Francisco.”

“I’ve got no reason to come west. And I need a reason. A good reason. There’s a limit to how much of a friend I can be to you now. I’m sorry. That’s just the fact.”

“I know. Where, then?”

Keith was silent for a time. “I think I’m going to go up to Chicago and visit my parents when we finally get cleared to leave. Nobody around here’s gotten their winter holiday yet.”

“When?”

“Not tomorrow. Probably not till Friday.”

“I’ll be there Friday. Call me.”

“I don’t know,” Keith said, shaking his head.

“Please, Daniel. An hour. Half an hour.”

“Why do you think I can help?” He almost sounded angry.

“I went out to watch the salmon at Bonneville Dam this morning.”

“Oh? Were they helping each other?”

“I need to know why it’s happening. I need to know why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

Keith looked cross, distracted.

“Will you talk to me?”

“I don’t know,” Keith said. His tone hardened the words to a no.

Christopher chose to ignore the subtext. “Friday in Chicago. I’ll call you.”

“No,” said Keith, shaking his head. “Don’t. Maybe I’ll call you. I have to think about it. Let’s leave it at that.”

There was nothing to be gained by pushing him. “All right. We’ll leave it at that.”

“Thank you.” Eyes lowered, Keith looked as though he were unhappy with himself. “I don’t know why I called you this time.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Sure. Chris—”

“Still here.”

Keith did not look up. “If you’ve got nothing better to do, you might ask DIANNA about von Neumann machines.”

He signed off before Christopher could reply.