The Quiet Pools

CHAPTER 5 —GCC— “… our gentle mother.”

Friday found Christopher McCutcheon a reluctant traveler, Oregon-bound.

The New Orleans-Houston-San Antonio feeder loop of the tube was still a year from completion, so he was obliged to make the 200-mile-plus run to DFW in his skimmer. By the time he reached the transplex, it was after seven o’clock, late enough to escape the commuter bulge, though not enough to dispel the air of chaos.

But then, it was never really quiet at the Dallas-Fort Worth transplex. Not with the confluence of the third busiest airport in the world, the ninth busiest spaceport, a mainline station for the primary southern tube, the metroplex’s own double-line tramway, plus flyer and surface traffic to boot. DFW was a traveler’s rite of passage, a nightmare despite the load cycling and smart-guides. Locals avoided DFW whenever possible; survivors asserted blackly that its initials stood for “Don’t Forget to Write.”

Humor was a good weapon, patience a better one. Christopher ran into a ten-minute hang at the flyer storage stack, a twenty-minute backlog at the security checkpoint. On escaping those lines, he found that the slidewalk to the tube station was out of service, obliging him to walk the half-mile connecting corridor.

It was like running a gauntlet. Seven years in San Francisco had given Christopher a don’t-bother-I’m-not-buying look which discouraged most ordinary panhandlers and deadweight. But DFW’s parasites were bred for persistence. Discouraging look or not, Christopher was accosted four times—by a Mormon revivalist, by two canvassers for the Greens, and twice by joybirds working N Corridor’s bed-box hotel. The revivalist was the hardest to brush off; the whores were the most entertaining, offering to perform acts Christopher suspected were physically impossible in the confines of a sleep capsule.

The final hurdle was the annoyingly slow-moving line at the tube fare machine, where an attempted cut-in precipitated a shoving match violent enough to attract the rentacops. But once inside the station, matters proceeded more smoothly. An escalator carried him down to a half-filled lounge; five minutes later, his train was called, and he continued down to the chutes.

One moment the track was empty, the red and green lights above each boarding chute marking the number of seats available on the approaching train. Then the great interlock separating the station from the evacuated stone tunnel opened, and the massive red and white cylinder slid through the aperture, its entry almost silent save for the rushing air. Boarding was swift and efficient. Christopher took the last seat in compartment 11, tucking his night bag in the underseat basket. In less than two minutes, the train continued on its way.

The cities flew by like subway stops: El Paso-Juarez, Phoenix-Tucson, the San Diego-Los Angeles sprawl. Christopher’s compartment emptied, filled, and emptied again. From outside San Diego north to the California border the trains ran on the surface, at half their underground speed—no one wanted to have to rebore a five-meter tunnel after an earthquake. But the scattering of lights glimpsed at high speed through tiny windows was little distraction from his thoughts.

Christopher tried to concentrate on the unfinished lyric of a new song, tried to interest himself in an odd little book on neoteny, halfheartedly tried to engage the jet-eyed Filipino woman who boarded at Sacramento in conversation. He was successful at none of those efforts, which left him sitting half curled in the half-darkness, thinking about Oregon. Thinking about William McCutcheon.

It had always been a mystery to Christopher how he could feel so uncomfortable in the presence of someone he loved so much. He had found it difficult living in the Vernonia house with his father, the more so as he left childhood behind. William McCutcheon was a magnet toward which everything turned. When he was home, it was clearly his home, and he filled it with his unequivocal expectations—expectations of excellence and, less nakedly stated, of obedience. Lines of force, radiating outward to bind everything in their reach to he who stood at the center.

When his father was absent—as he often was for business, for a month or more at a time—the house was calmer. Christopher felt a better balance with Deryn, who threatened none of his ambitions. In the glare of his father’s light, Christopher had trouble seeing his own. Against the weight of his father’s opinions, Christopher had trouble holding his own.

In one of their few conversations on the subject of William McCutcheon, Deryn had told him, “Your father doesn’t know how to be anything other than what he is. Try to appreciate what’s best in him, and try not to take the rest personally.”

It had seemed an odd thing to say. His father’s flaws were not the problem—it was his own flaws that Christopher felt so acutely. Measured against his father’s accomplishments, Christopher found his own achievements shabby and wanting. It was the same at fifteen, at twenty-five, as it had been in the open-eyed infant years. Mere age and physical stature had changed nothing. He could still only see his father by looking up.

Even more, Christopher knew that he did not yet truly understand his father, that he did not yet see him clearly. There were unresolved paradoxes in William McCutcheon. Quick-witted, but he used his humor as a weapon. An incisive thinker, but close-minded and stubborn. A genteel, well-spoken man who could turn curt and coldly dismissive in an eye-blink. Who drew people to him, and yet had opted to live alone for the last dozen years.

Somehow, he was all of those things. And the pieces would not fit together, frustrating Christopher’s quest to close with this man who still, at more than a decade’s remove, from half a continent away, piped the tune to which Christopher danced.

William McCutcheon.

Father.

The moment it cleared the Portland flight-restriction zone, the Avanti Eagle carrying William and Christopher McCutcheon home soared skyward five hundred meters and surged forward at full thrust through the night. The diffuse glow of Hillsboro and Beaverton, the scattered lights of the wheelies and skimmers bound to Highway 26, fell away below and then behind them.

Still Christopher pressed his face to the window, more hiding than watching.

His father had not met him at the gate, but paged him instead from the pickup curb. That was both annoying and merciful— merciful because it avoided any waiting-lounge hugs or other embarrassing efforts at intimacy. All Christopher had to do was clamber in, flash a quick smile and say “Hello, Father” to the man driving, and settle back in his seat.

The Eagle, a six-figure six-seater appointed with expensive natural fibers and a whisper-quiet extended-range flight package, was new since Christopher had last seen his father. Letting him relate its pleasures and mysteries had avoided the inevitable awkwardness for the first few minutes; sight-seeing and reminiscing had postponed it still further. But his father did not do his part in fueling the idle chatter, and Christopher had run out of landmarks.

“Not much to see out there,” his father said.

Innocent enough words from anyone else’s mouth, the observation struck Christopher as a reproach. “More than I saw the whole way up,” he said truthfully.

“But what’s to see from the tube?” William McCutcheon asked. “Houses stacked one upon the other like cancer cells, and serving as little purpose. Consider yourself lucky, Christopher. The railway designers were kind.”

“I think the engineers had the last word, not the designers.”

“If the engineers had had the last word, there’d be no windows in the cars at all,” McCutcheon said, downshifting into a lecture. “If you want to look out, look up. You’ll never see a night as clear as this one in Salem or Sacramento or San Bernardino, not with the haze hanging and the sick-sodium halo.”

“Maybe so,” Christopher said, heading it off. “But I wish it was daytime. The stars are the same here as in Texas. What I’d like is a look at Mount Hood.”

“I expect it looks more or less like it did the last time you saw it,” McCutcheon said.

“Wyeast,” Christopher said. “That’s what the Indians called it. Did you know that?”

“Wyesr,” his father said, correcting his pronunciation. “Yes, I knew that.” He shook his head. “Why I know it, I couldn’t tell you.”

The correction irritated Christopher. “Maybe Deryn told you,” he said, the mention of her name a bold bit of defiance.

“She used to tell me Nisqually and Okanagon stories—how the Coyote made the Columbia, the story of the Changer.”

“Did she.” His father’s voice was cold.

“I’d forgotten until a few weeks ago, when I indexed a book of Indian legends.” He laughed. “It’s odd. The Indians were here for hundreds of years, but we name the mountain after a British admiral who never even saw it. Doesn’t seem right, somehow.”

“ ‘Das Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,’ ” his father quoted. “The world’s history is the world’s judgment, now as in Schiller’s time. We’re here—where are the Nisqually? Mount Hood will do for us. Or are you rewriting history down there in Houston as you compile it?”

“No,” Christopher said. “But there’s more than one history of the world, I’m discovering. And the Nisqually’s version has a place in the library along with ours.”

To Christopher’s surprise, his father surrendered the point. “Fairly answered,” McCutcheon said. “How is your work going?”

Another surprise. Christopher felt as though he had wandered into conversational quicksand. “There’s too much of it, and not enough of us,” was his cautious reply. “Or enough time.”

“That’s regrettable,” McCutcheon said. “The work you’re doing is valuable. It is, to my mind, the only worthwhile aspect of the Diaspora Project.”

Allowing his surprise to show, Christopher said, “I didn’t think you approved of my being there.”

“You’re not going to Tau Ceti,” McCutcheon said matter-of-factly. “You’re not even helping those who are going to leave. What you’re doing is helping us find knowledge we’ve lost.”

“On the payroll of Allied Transcon.”

McCutcheon gestured with his right hand as though waving off an irrelevancy. “Do you realize how many people believe that everything we know is in DIANNA? That it’s the first and last source? The Authority. But it only contains the tenth part of everything we are.”

“It’s a digest. An electronic encyclopedia,” Christopher said. “That’s all it was ever meant to be.”

“And the more we come to depend on it, the more its weaknesses show. Washington knows that. And Allied Transcon knows that. It’s inevitable that DIANNA will be upgraded with the Memphis hyperlibrary. The only issue is the price.”

Christopher was slow to answer. “I’m surprised to hear you say that.”

“That I value learning? That I believe in the Twenty-ninth amendment? Access to information doesn’t mean much when all you have access to is rewritten secondhand truth.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Christopher said. “I’m just surprised to hear that you support anything that Allied is doing. In fact, I imagined you celebrating what happened this week.”

“Celebrating? Why?”

“Because of what you’ve said before.”

“What I’ve said is that I object to the obscene expenditure of energy—human and otherwise—on such a dubious enterprise. And you agreed with me, as I recall. Have you changed your mind?”

“No,” Christopher said, wondering if he had agreed or merely acceded. “It’s just that I thought you’d be happy to see the Project stopped.”

” Did you celebrate?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Christopher considered. “I suppose because I don’t think it can be stopped. All Homeworld can accomplish is to make it more expensive. And maybe convince a few pioneers to change their minds and stay here.”

Ahead, a single light atop a dark tree-covered ridge marked their destination. It seemed as though William McCutcheon fixed on it and did not hear. Then he shook his head.

“Earth is better off without them,” he said, his voice cold. “She is full, and she is tired. Why should we try to stop them? They’re the ones who want more from her than she has left to give. I don’t begrudge their leaving. We give them up gladly.”

There was an edge in his father’s voice, a finality to his words, that warned against any attempt to disagree or even to continue the discussion. But as the flyer curled downward toward his father’s hilltop hermitage, Christopher wondered in silence why the words and the emotion behind them sounded so familiar.

It was a cliché out of a storybook family life Christopher had not lived, and he did not take note of it until after the fact.

“Would you mind if I took the skimmer? I’d like to run down to Vernonia for a little while.”

His father did not mind. Saturday was the same as any other day to the self-employed, and William McCutcheon was already settled before the comsole in his den, attending to some of the myriad details of his multiple businesses.

“Be back by noon, though,” McCutcheon called back over his shoulder. “I want to hike across to the fire tower and see if that last storm finally did in the roof. But I have a couple of hours of work in front of me here first.”

“Okay.” It would take them two hours to traverse a distance the Avanti could cover in ten minutes, then two more hours back, but Christopher did not object. He had wondered how they were going to fill the hours until Sunday morning; a walk through the forest was among the most attractive options.

The skimmer, a five-year-old Saab, gave no sign of having been used since Christopher was last there. As he stowed the cover and ran through the power-up sequence, he found himself wondering exactly what his father would be doing while he was gone.

Christopher had never been invited to share the fine details of family—that is to say, his father’s—finances. He had never been offered a clear picture of where his father’s money came from— nothing as simple as, say, his grandfather Carl, who had been a millwright, or his great-grandfather William, who had been one of the last of the logging-truck drivers to work the twisting highways and narrow dirt roads of southwest Columbia County.

As best as Christopher understood, his father was at once a land broker, a biomechanical engineer, and a political consultant. The engineering had come first and was the only profession which could be deduced from the contents of his father’s den-office—the shelves and walls featured models and drawings of clever and impossible gadgets, as well as the certificates for the two nanotech patents McCutcheon held in his own name.

Profits from the patents had apparently led him to land and then to brokering, which seemed to take the most time, return the most headaches, and generate both the most income and the least discussion. The consulting had come along but recently, growing out of ever-more-healthy contributions to the Oregon Greens and the Republican National Party. Christopher was not sure exactly what his father had to offer them beyond money, nor how much he had had to do with the successes of “his” candidates for governor and, in the last election, U.S. senator.

But whatever the source, there was no question that there was money, in more than adequate supply. The host contract with Deryn had run to six figures (he had found a copy playing teen-hacker games with the housecom files), and the nurture contract had probably more than doubled that. His sister, Lynn-Anne, had gone to Bennington, Christopher to Salem Academy at fifteen and then to Stanford, all institutions with if-you-have-to-ask tuitions. And though the house, a double-dome Fuller in redwood and seal-shingle, was modest to the eye, it sat in the heart of more than six thousand acres of fir forest which had not seen a saw for a century—and to all of which his father held title.

It had never been a silver-spoon life. But if his father had ever had those tastes, it probably could have been.

Once a sodden mud track beaten down by an endless parade of heavily laden trucks, the old logging road leading down to Vernonia Road—which the state insisted on calling Route 47— was long since impassable for a wheeled vehicle. The forest had a tumbling-over-its-heels vitality, an irrepressible fecundity that had reached out to claim back the right-of-way the moment it was abandoned, a dozen, a hundred species of plant conspiring to soak up the scattered sunlight and heal the wound.

All that remained to mark the road was a serpentine trench of young trees winding through the taller Alpine fir and lodge-pole pine blanketing the ridge. Taking the skimmer down it was a challenge to its ground-hugging flight system and to the reflexes of its driver. The reward was seeing the forest the way it showed itself best—from below, surrounded and looking up.

It was five miles and fifteen minutes to the bottom. At times the ranks of evergreens to either side seemed like the pillars of a grand cathedral. The air was humid and rich with the scents of life and decay. Christopher drew it in and breathed back out the tension in his muscles, the tightness in his chest. If only I could relax with him, he thought. If only he could see me as I am.

A hailer marked the end of McCutcheon property, and a few hundred meters farther the logging road met the highway. It had been at least a decade since 47 had been maintained for wheelies, and the ancient pavement of Vernonia Road was cracked and fissured and carpeted with moss. Most of what little traffic the artists and cityfleas of Vernonia generated had taken to the air, though the moss bore the crushed tracks of the fat-tired omnis which brought freight in from Forest Grove, fifty kilometers to the south.

Christopher cruised slowly, noting with idle interest how fungus and rot were fast pulling down what had been a home near the roadside, that one nearly denuded hillside was beginning to come back from the fire that had blackened it, where a sterile new white package house had been tucked in among the trees above tumbling Beaver Creek. But it was less than half a year since his last visit, and little had changed except the season. His pace was set less by the desire to sightsee than by the fact that he really had nowhere to go.

The house on B Street had been his home for fifteen years. A dozen years had passed since he left there, long enough for all of his peers to have moved on or mutated into strangers. As for adults, Jimmy, who had given him his first guitar lessons, and Nick, the haiku poet who had befriended him, both still lived in town, so far as Christopher knew. But he had not progressed very far along the path that either man had urged on him, and he did not think either would think much of the path he was on.

As he headed north toward Vernonia, Christopher considered stopping at old Hamill Observatory, the one-time private astronomy center sitting on a thousand-foot ridge just to the east, a mile up McDonald Road. In its prime, the observatory had been a mecca for amateur astronomers, and its presence had helped retard development in the forested Nehalem-Pebble Creek watershed for half a century.

But it was an idea whose time had passed. Astronomy now belonged to the satlands brightening Earth’s night sky. While Christopher lived on B Street, Hamill was limping along, ingloriously, on tourists’ curiosity and pay-per-view satland-sightseeing. And while Christopher was at Stanford, Hamill’s owners finally bowed to the inevitable, retiring its ninety-year-old telescopes and shuttering the silver domes. There had been talk of making it a county museum, a state education center, but nothing had come of the talk. Christopher let the turn-off flash by. There would not be much to see now.

Then, rounding the last big curve south of town, his attention was caught by the red-rusted gray steel of the Nisqually trestle. There had been dozens of bridges and trestles along the old narrow-gauge logging spurs through Columbia County, as both the river and the railway switched back and forth at the dictates of the land. Most had been torn down; a few had been preserved as part of the Columbia County Linear Park.

But the trestle just south of town was the trestle, a temptation and a challenge to every child of Vernonia. The rails were long gone; the timber approaches had rotted away to stumps. Inertia and engineering kept the rest there, a giant box bridge beam hanging just two meters above the flowing waters, anchored at either end by concrete footings.

On impulse, Christopher pulled off the road and parked the skimmer. He clambered out and studied the span with a smile, remembering how much higher and longer it had seemed when he was seven and ready to cross it for the first time. The metal had been slick with condensation, the river surging from a recent rain. But I was most afraid of being caught, he thought. I had no idea that I could die here. I was fearless then.

The last thought stuck uncomfortably in his ego, and before he quite realized what he was doing, he was standing atop the north end of the trestle, looking down through the web of metal at the river and across at the thicket of birches into which the roadbed vanished.

What the hell, he thought, and took a step forward. By the time he reached the far end he was laughing with rediscovered childhood joy. By the time he returned he was crying, and the reason was the same.