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.