The pilot spilled onto the damp ground like a bag of meat. His face was hairless and blackened where it wasn’t a shocking, charred red. He wore a pair of aviator glasses, one lens missing and the other lens crazed. But he was breathing. His chest lifted and fell in cresting waves.
The men behind him dashed close enough to pull the pilot away from the wreckage. Chris found himself hesitating pointlessly. Was there something more he was supposed to do? The heat had made him dizzy.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, felt himself tugged away from the flames. Just a few feet away the air seemed dramatically colder, far colder than it had been on the hillside with Tess. He staggered away, then sat on the hood of an undamaged automobile and let his head droop. Someone brought him a bottle of water. He drained it almost at once, though that made him feel sicker. He heard an ambulance screaming down the road from Blind Lake.
Tess, he thought. Tess on the hillside.
How much time had passed? He looked for her on the slope. Everyone had come down, they had all gathered in the parking lot a safe distance from the burning plane. Everyone but Tess. He’d told her to stay put, and she had taken him literally. He called to her, but she was too far away to hear.
Wearily, he hiked back up the slope. Tess was standing immobile, staring at the wreckage. She didn’t acknowledge him when he called to her. Not good. She was in some kind of shock, Chris supposed.
He knelt in front of her, put his face in her line of vision and his hands on her small shoulders. “Tess,” he said. “Tess, are you all right?”
At first she didn’t react. Then she trembled. Her body shook. She blinked and opened her mouth soundlessly.
“We need to get you someplace warm,” he said.
She leaned into him and started to cry.
Marguerite lost track of Charlie in the noisy chaos of the control room.
For a fraction of a second there was utter blackness—complete electrical failure. Then the lights flickered back and the room was full of voices. Marguerite found an unoccupied corner and stayed out of the way. There was nothing she could do to help and she knew better than to interfere.
Something bad had happened, something she didn’t understand, something that had driven the engineers into a frenzy of activity. She focused on the big wall screen, the direct feed from the Eye, still alarmingly blank. It could end at any time.
Her phone buzzed. She ignored it. She caught sight of Charlie and watched him orbit the room, coordinating activity. Since she was helpless—or at least unable to help—she began to feel a presentiment of loss. Loss of intelligibility. Loss of orientation. Loss of vision. Loss of the Subject, with whom she had struggled across a desert to the heart of a sandstorm. Periodically, the wall screen erupted into stochastic cascades of color. Marguerite stared, trying but failing to extract an image. No signal, just noise. Only noise.
A few more green lights, she heard someone say. Was that good? Apparently so. Here came Charlie, and he wasn’t smiling, but the expression on his face wasn’t as grave as it had been—how long ago? An hour?
“We’re getting a little something back,” he said.
“An image?”
“Maybe.”
“We’re still fixed on the Subject?”
“Just watch, Marguerite.”
She focused again on the screen, which had begun to fill with new light. Tiny digital mosaics, assembled in the unfathomable depths of the O/BEC platens. White faded to tawny brown. The desert. We’re back, Marguerite thought, and a tingle of relief flowed up her spine—but where was the Subject, and what was this blank emptiness?
“Sand,” she murmured. Fine silicate grains undisturbed by wind. The storm must have passed. But the sand wasn’t still. The sand mounded and slid this way and that.
Subject lifted himself out of a cloak of sand. He had been buried by the wind, but he was alive. He pulled himself up by his manipulating arms, then stood, unsteadily, in the startling sunlight. The virtual camera rose with him. Behind him Marguerite saw the sand squall where it had retreated to the horizon, trailing black vortices like mares’ tails.
All around the Subject were lines and angles of stone. Old stone columns and pyramidal structures and sand-scoured foundations. The ruins of a city.
Part Three
The Ascent of the Invisible
Man, on Earth, could go no further
toward conquering the limitations of atmosphere,
metals, and optics. Through
this gigantic mirror, underlying a telescope
in whose construction the efforts
of dozens of great minds had been
united for years to produce an instrument
of unrivaled accuracy, intricacy,
and range, equipped with every device
desired by and known to astronomers,
study of the universe had reached
a climax.
—Donald Wandrei, “Colossus,” 1934
Seventeen
Coming into February now, and it was obvious to Marguerite as she drove home from her Saturday ration trip what a different place the Lake had become.
Superficially, nothing had changed. The snowplows still emerged from the back bays of the retail mall whenever it snowed, and they kept the streets passably clear. Lights still burned in windows at night. Everybody was warm and no one was hungry.
But there was a shabbiness about the town, too, an unwashed quality. There were no outside contractors to repair winter potholes or replace the shingles that had been torn from so many roofs in the post-Christmas storms. Garbage was collected on the regular schedule but it couldn’t be trucked off-site—the sanitation people had set up a temporary dump at the western extremity of the lake, near the perimeter fence and as far as possible from the town and the preserved wetlands; still, the stench drifted with the wind like an augur of decay, and on especially breezy days she had seen crumpled papers and food wrappers wheeling along the Mallway like tumbleweeds. The question was so commonplace no one bothered to ask it anymore: when will it end?
Because it could end at any time.
Tess had come back from the site of the airplane crash weak and dazed. Marguerite had wrapped her up and fed her hot soup and put her to bed for the night—Marguerite herself hadn’t slept, but Tess had, and in the morning she had seemed herself again. Seemed was the key word. Between Christmas and New Year’s Tess had not so much as mentioned Mirror Girl; there had been no provocative episodes; but Marguerite had recognized the worry creases on Tessa’s face and had sensed in her daughter’s silences something weightier than her customary shyness.
She had been extremely reluctant to send Tess for her weeklong visit with Ray, but there was no way around it. Had she objected, Ray would almost certainly have sent one of his rent-a-cop security guys around to collect Tess by force. So, with deep unease, Marguerite had helped her daughter pack her rucksack of treasured possessions and ushered her out the door as soon as Ray pulled up at the curb in his little scarab-colored automobile.
Ray had remained a silhouette in the shaded cab of the car, unwilling to show her his face. He looked indistinct, Marguerite thought, like a fading memory. She watched Tess greet him with a cheeriness that struck her as either false or heart-breakingly naive.
The only upside of this was that during the next week she would have more free time for Chris.
She pulled into the driveway, thinking of him.
Chris. He had made a powerful impression on her, with his wounded eyes and his obvious courage. Not to mention the way he touched her, like a man stepping into a spring of warm water, testing the heat before he gave himself up to it. Good Chris. Scary Chris.
Scary because having a man in the house—being intimate with a man—provoked unwelcome memories of Ray, if only by contrast. The smell of aftershave in the bathroom, a man’s pants abandoned on the bedroom floor, male warmth lingering in the crevices of the bed…with Ray all these things had come to seem loathsome, as objectio
nable as a bruise. But with Chris it was just the opposite. Yesterday she had found herself not only volunteering to wash his clothes but furtively inhaling the smell of him from an undershirt before she committed it to the washing machine. How ridiculously schoolgirlish, Marguerite thought. How very dangerously infatuated she was with this man.
She supposed it was at least therapeutic, like draining venom from a snakebite.
People talked about “lockdown romances.” Was this a lockdown romance? Marguerite’s experience was limited. Ray had been not only her first husband but her first lover. Marguerite had been, like Tess, one of those awkward girls at school: bright but gawky, not especially pretty, intimidated into silence in any social setting. When boys were like that they were called “geeks,” but at least they seemed able to take solace in the company of others like themselves. Marguerite had never made real friends of either sex, at least not until she was in graduate school. There, at least, she had found colleagues, people who respected her talent, people who liked her for her ideas, some of whom had progressed to the status of friends.
Maybe that was why she had been so impressed with Ray when Ray began to take an explicit interest in her. Ray had been ten years her senior, doing cutting-edge astrophysical work back when she was still struggling to find a way into Crossbank. He had been blunt in his opinions but flattering toward Marguerite, and he had obviously been sizing her up for marriage from the beginning. What Marguerite had not learned was that for some men marriage is a license to drop their masks and show their true and terrible faces. Nor was this merely a figure of speech: it seemed to Marguerite that his face had actually changed, that he had shed the gentle and indulgent Ray of their engagement as efficiently as a snake sheds its skin.
Clearly, she had been a lousy judge of character.
So what did that make Chris? A lockdown romance? A potential second father for Tess? Or something in between?
And how could she even begin to construct an idea of the future, when even the possibility of a future could end at any time?
Chris had been working in his basement study, but he came up the stairs when he heard her puttering around the kitchen and said, “Are you busy?”
Well, that was an interesting question. It was Saturday. She wasn’t obliged to work. But what was work, what wasn’t work? For months she had divided her attention between Tess and the Subject, and now Chris. Today she’d planned to catch up on her notes and keep an eye on the direct feed. The Subject’s odyssey continued, though the sandstorm crisis had passed and the ruined city was now far behind him. He had left the road; he was traveling through empty desert; his physical condition had changed in troublesome ways; but nothing absolutely critical was happening, at least not at the moment. “What did you have in mind?”
“The pilot I pulled out of the wreck is stabilized over at the clinic. I thought I’d pay him a visit.”
“Is he awake?” Marguerite had heard the man was in a coma.
“Not yet.”
“So what’s the point of visiting?”
“Sometimes you just want to touch base.”
Back in the car, then, back on the road with Chris at the wheel, back through the bright, cold February afternoon and the tumbling windblown trash. “How could you possibly owe him anything? You saved his life.”
“For better or worse.”
“How could it be worse?”
“He’s severely burned. When he wakes up he’s going to be in a world of pain. Not only that—I’m sure Ray and his buddies would love to interrogate him.”
That was true. Nobody knew why the small plane had been flying over Blind Lake or what the pilot had hoped to accomplish by violating an enforced no-fly zone. But the incident had turned up the anxiety level in town more than a notch. In the past couple of weeks there had been three more attempts to breach the perimeter fence from inside, all by individuals: a day worker, a student, and a junior analyst. All three had been killed by pocket drones, though the analyst had made it a good fifty or sixty yards wearing a rigged thermal jacket to disguise his infrared signature.
None of the bodies had been recovered. They would still be there, Marguerite thought, when the snow melted in the spring. Like something left over from a war, burned, frozen, and thawed: biological residue. Vulture bait. Were there vultures in Minnesota?
Everyone was frightened and everyone was desperate to know why the Lake had been quarantined and when the quarantine would end (or, unspeakable thought, whether it would end). So, yes, the pilot would be interrogated, perhaps vigorously, and yes, he would certainly be in pain, despite the clinic’s reserve of neural analgesics. But that didn’t invalidate the act of courage Chris had performed. She felt this in him more than once, his doubts about the consequences of a good act. Maybe his book about Galliano had been a good act, at least from his point of view. A wrong righted. And he had been punished for it. Once burned, twice shy. But it seemed to go deeper than that.
Marguerite didn’t understand how a man as apparently decent as Chris Carmody could be so unsure of himself, when certified bastards like Ray walked around in the glow of their own grim righteousness. A line from a poem she had studied in high school came back to her: The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity…
Chris parked in the nearly vacant clinic parking lot. The solstice was past and the days were getting longer again, but it was still only February and already the watery sun was close to the horizon. He took her hand as they walked to the clinic door.
There was no one at reception, but Chris rang the finger bell and a nurse appeared a moment later. I know this woman, Marguerite thought. This bustling, chubby woman in nursing whites was Amanda Bleiler’s mother, a familiar face from the weekday-morning grade-school drop-off. Someone she knew well enough to wave at. What was her first name? Roberta? Rosetta?
“Marguerite,” the woman said, recognizing her. “And you must be Chris Carmody.” Chris had phoned ahead.
“Rosalie,” she said, the name popping into her head a moment before she pronounced it. “How’s Amanda doing?”
“Well enough, considering.” Considering the lockdown, she meant. Considering that there were dead bodies buried under the snow outside the perimeter fence. Rosalie turned to Chris. “If you want to look in on Mr. Sandoval, that’s okay, I cleared it with Dr. Goldhar, but don’t expect much, okay? And it’ll have to be a quick visit. Couple of minutes tops, all right?”
Rosalie led them up a flight of stairs to the clinic’s second floor, where three small rooms equipped with rudimentary life-support gear punctuated a row of offices and boardrooms.
Not very many years ago, the pilot wouldn’t have survived his injuries. Rosalie explained that he had suffered third-degree burns over a large part of his body and that he had inhaled enough smoke and hot air to seriously damage his lungs. The clinic had fitted him with an alveolar bypass and packed his pulmonary sacs with gel to hasten the healing. As for his skin—
Well, Marguerite thought, he looked ghastly, lying in a white bed in a white room with ebony-white artificial skin stretched over his face like so much damp Kleenex. But this was very nearly state-of-the-art treatment. In less than a month, Rosalie said, he would look almost normal. Almost the way he had looked before the crash.
The most serious injury had been a blow to the head that had not quite cracked his skull but had caused intracranial bleeding that was hard to treat or correct. “We did everything we could,” Rosalie said. “Dr. Goldhar is a really exceptional doctor, considering we don’t have a fully equipped hospital to work with. But the prognosis is iffy. Mr. Sandoval may wake up, he may not.”
Mr. Sandoval, Marguerite thought, trying to take the measure of the man under all this medical apparatus. Probably not a young man. Big paunch pushing up under the blankets. Salt-and-pepper hair where it hadn’t been charred from his skull.
“You called him Mr. Sandoval,” Chris said.
“That’s his name. Adam San
doval.”
“He’s been unconscious since he got here. How do you know his name?”
“Well…” She looked distressed. “Dr. Goldhar said not to be too free with this information, but you saved his life, right? That was really brave.”
The story had been broadcast on Blind Lake TV, much to Chris’s horror. He had declined an interview, but his reputation had been massively enhanced—not a bad thing, surely, Marguerite would have thought. But maybe Chris, a journalist, felt uncomfortable at the center of a media event, however small-scale.
“What information?” Chris asked.
“He had a wallet and part of a backpack on him. Mostly burned, but we saved enough to read his I.D.”
Chris said—and Marguerite thought she heard a concealed edge in his voice—“Would it be possible to look at his things?”
“Well, I don’t think so…I mean, I should probably talk to Dr. Goldhar first. Won’t this all eventually be police evidence or something?”
“I won’t disturb anything. Just a glance.”
“I’ll vouch for Chris,” Marguerite added. “He’s a good guy.”
“Well—just a peek, maybe. I mean, it’s not like you’re terrorists or anything.” She gave Chris a somber look. “Don’t get me in trouble, that’s all I ask.”
Chris sat with the pilot a while longer. He whispered something Marguerite couldn’t hear. A question, an apology, a prayer.
Then they left Adam Sandoval, whose chest rose and fell with the exhalations of his breathing apparatus in a queerly peaceful rhythm, and Rosalie took them to a small room at the end of the corridor. She unlocked the door with a key attached to a ring on her belt. Stored inside were medical sundries—boxes of suture thread in various gauges, saline bags, bandages and gauze, antiseptics in brown bottles—and, on a foldout desktop, a plastic bag containing Sandoval’s effects. Rosalie opened the bag cautiously and made Chris put on a pair of throwaway surgical gloves before he touched the contents. “In case of fingerprints or I don’t know what.” She seemed to be having second thoughts.