Tess was quiet in the car as they left the Alley.
Marguerite drove slowly, struggling to assemble her thoughts. She had an important choice to make.
But first she wanted to know what had happened. Tess had left school and wandered over to the Eye to bother Charlie, that much was obvious, but why?
“I’m sorry,” Tess said, shooting apprehensive glances at her from the passenger seat. Am I, Marguerite wondered, as frightening as that? Judge and jury? Is that how she sees me?
“You don’t have to apologize,” Marguerite said. “Tell you what. I’ll call Mr. Fleischer and tell him you had an appointment but you forgot to give him the note. How’s that sound?”
“Okay,” Tess said cautiously, waiting for the hook.
“But I’m sure he’s worried about you. So am I. How come you didn’t go back for class this afternoon?”
“I don’t know. I just wanted to go to the Eye.”
“How come? I thought you didn’t like it there. You hated the tour, back at Crossbank.”
“Just felt like it.”
“Badly enough to skip school?”
“I guess.”
“How’d you get inside? Mr. Grogan seemed a little upset over that.”
“I walked in. Nobody was looking.”
That, at least, was probably true. Tess was too guileless to have bluffed her way in or found a hidden entrance. In all likelihood she had just walked up to the front door and opened it: Charlie’s investigation would discover a sleepy security guard or some employee who’d wandered out to smoke a joint. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I wasn’t really looking for anything.”
“Learn anything?”
Tess shrugged.
“Because, you know, that’s pretty unusual behavior for you. You never skipped school before.”
“It was important.”
“Important how, Tess?”
No answer. Only a teary frown.
“Was it because of Mirror Girl?”
Tessa’s unhappy expression condensed into misery. “Yes.”
“She told you to go there?”
“She never tells me anything. She just wanted to go. So I went.”
“Well, what was Mirror Girl looking for?”
“I don’t know. I think she just wanted to see if she could see her reflection.”
“Her reflection? Her reflection where?”
“In the Eye,” Tess said.
“A mirror at the Eye? It isn’t that kind of telescope. There’s no real mirror.”
“Not in a mirror—in the Eye.”
Marguerite didn’t know how to proceed, how to ask the next question. She was afraid of Tessa’s answers. They sounded crazy. Crazy: the forbidden word. The unspeakable thought. She hated all this talk of Mirror Girl because it sounded crazy, and Marguerite didn’t think she could bear that. Almost anything else, an injury, a disease; she could imagine Tess in leg braces or with her arm in a sling, she knew how to console her when she was hurt; that was well within the range of her mothering skills. But please, she thought, not craziness, not the kind of refractory madness that excludes all comfort or communication. Marguerite had worked nights at a psychiatric hospital during college. She had seen incurable schizophrenics. Crazy people lived in their own nightmarish VR, more alone than physical isolation could ever make them. She refused to imagine Tess as one of those people.
She pulled into the school parking lot but asked Tess to sit for a minute with her.
Death and madness: could she really protect her daughter from either of those things?
I can’t even protect her from Ray.
Ray had threatened to keep Tess with him, to take physical custody of her—in effect, to kidnap her. But she’s with me now, Marguerite thought. And if I had a choice I’d take her away from here, drive her down the road to Constance and from there away, away, anywhere away from the quarantine and the distressing rumors Chris had brought home, away from Eyeball Alley and away from Mirror Girl.
But she couldn’t do that.
She had to send Tess back to school, and from school Tess would go home to Ray and the increasingly fragile illusion of normality. If I keep her with me, Marguerite thought, then I’ll be the one violating the letter of our agreement, and Ray will send his security people to get her.
But if I let her go back to him, and something happens—
“Can I get out now?” Tess asked.
Marguerite took a deep, calming breath. “I guess so,” she said. “Back to school with you. No more expeditions during class, though, all right?”
“All right.”
“Promise me?”
“Promise.” She put her hand on the door handle.
“One more thing,” Marguerite said. “Listen to me. Listen. This is important, Tess. If anything strange happens at Dad’s, you call me. Doesn’t matter what time of day or night. You don’t even have to think about it. Just call me. Because I’m looking out for you even when you’re not with me.”
“Is Chris looking out for me, too?”
Surprised, Marguerite said, “Sure he is. Chris too.”
“Okay,” Tess said, and she opened the door and scooted out of the car. Marguerite watched her daughter cross the desolate parking lot, scuffling through whirls of old snow, her jacket still cross-buttoned and her winter hat clasped in her small gloved hands.
I’ll see her again, Marguerite told herself. I will. I must.
Then Tess vanished through the front door of the school and the afternoon was still and empty.
Twenty-Two
Sue Sampel woke up nervous.
It was Saturday morning, and today she was supposed to perform the small act of information theft she had so rashly promised earlier in the week. Her hand shook when she brushed her teeth, and her reflection in the mirror was the perfect image of a terrified middle-aged woman.
She let Sebastian sleep another hour while she made herself coffee and toast. Sebastian was one of those people who could sleep through storms or earthquakes, while a noisy sparrow was enough to bring Sue to groggy, unwelcome consciousness.
Sebastian’s book was on the kitchen table, and Sue leafed through it for distraction. She had read it all the way through weeks ago and had lately taken a second run at it, trying to absorb ideas that had slipped past her the first time. God & the Quantum Vacuum. A weighty title. Like a couple of sumo wrestlers balanced on an ampersand.
But the book had not been sappy or superficial. In fact it had taxed her to the limits of her bachelor of science degree. Fortunately, Sebastian was pretty good at explaining difficult concepts. And she had been privileged to have the author handy when she got stuck on something.
The book was not overtly religious nor was it a work of rigorous science. Sebastian himself called it “speculative philosophy.” Once he had described it as “a bull session, writ large. Very large.” That, Sue supposed, was modesty speaking.
The book was full of arcane scientific history and evolutionary lore and quantum physics. Heady material for a college religion prof whose previous published works had included such torrid bodice-rippers as “Errors of Attribution in First-Century Pauline Texts.” Basically, his argument was that human beings had achieved their current state of consciousness by appropriating a small piece of a universal intelligence. Tapping into God, in other words. This definition of God, he argued, could be stretched to fit definitions of deity across a spectrum of cultures and beliefs. Was God omnipresent and omniscient? Yes, because He permeated all of creation. Was He singular or multiple? Both: He was omnipresent because He was inherent in the physical processes of the universe; but His mind was knowable (by human beings) only in discrete and often dissimilar fragments. Was there life after death, or perhaps reincarnation? In the most literal sense, no; but because our sentience was borrowed it lived on without our bodies, albeit as a tiny piece of something almost infinitely larger.
Sue understood what he was gettin
g at. He wanted to give people the consolation of religion without the baggage of dogmatism. He was pretty casual about his science, and that pissed off people like Elaine Coster. But his heart was in the right place. He wanted a religion that could plausibly comfort widows and orphans without committing them to patriarchy, intolerance, fundamentalism, or weird dietary laws. He wanted a religion that wasn’t in a perpetual fistfight with modern cosmology.
Not such a bad thing to want, Sue thought. But where’s my consolation? Consolation for the petty thief. The larcenous office-worker. Forgive me, for I know exactly what I do and I’m of two minds about it.
Assuming any of that mattered. Assuming they weren’t all doomed. She had read the magazine fragment at Sawyer’s and she had drawn her own conclusions.
Sebastian came downstairs freshly showered and dressed in his casual finest: blue jeans and a green knit sweater that looked like something an English vicar might have thrown away.
“Today’s the heist,” Sue said.
“How do you feel?”
“Scared.”
“You know, you don’t have to do this. It was good of you to volunteer, but nobody will say anything if you change your mind.”
“Nobody except Elaine.”
“Well, maybe Elaine. But seriously—”
“Seriously, it’s okay. Just promise me one thing.”
“What?”
“When you’re at that Town Hall meeting…I mean, I know the others are looking out for me, they’ll call if Ray takes off for the Plaza. But the only one I really trust is you.”
He nodded, owl-eyed and ridiculously solemn.
“I need at least five minutes warning if Ray is on his way.”
“You’ll have it,” Sebastian said.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
The morning crept past too quickly. The Town Hall meeting started at one, and she asked Sebastian to drive so he could drop her off inconspicuously outside Hubble Plaza. They didn’t talk much in the car. She gave him a quick kiss when he stopped. Then she stepped out into the cold air, carded herself into the Plaza’s main entrance, waved hello to the lobby guard, and walked without obviously hurrying to the elevators. Her footsteps resounded in the tiled lobby like the tick of a metronome, allegro, in time with the beat of her heart.
Marguerite arrived at the community center auditorium at 12:45, and when she spotted Ari Weingart looking for her in the lobby crowd she turned to Chris and said, “Oh, God. This is a mistake.”
“The lecture?”
“Not the lecture. Going on stage with Ray. Having to look at him, having to listen to him. I wish I could—oh, hi, Ari.”
Ari took a firm grip on her arm. “This way, Marguerite. You’re up first, did I mention that? Then Ray, then Lisa Shapiro from Geology and Climatology, then we throw it open for audience questions.”
She took a last look back at Chris, who shrugged and gave her what she guessed was a supportive smile.
Really, she thought, trailing Ari through a staff-only door into the backstage dimness, this is crazy. Not just because she would be forced to appear with Ray but because it would be a charade for both of them. Both pretending they hadn’t seen clues about the Crossbank disaster (whatever it was). Both pretending there had never been a confrontation over Tess. Pretending they didn’t despise each other. Pretending, not to civility, but at least to indifference.
Knowing it could end at any time.
This is a prescription for disaster, Marguerite thought. Not only that, but her “lecture” was a series of notes she had made for herself and never really planned to reveal—speculation about the UMa47 project that verged on the heretical. But if the crisis was as bad, as potentially deadly, as it seemed, why waste time on insincerity? Why not, for once in her life, stop calculating career goals and simply say what she thought?
It had seemed like a good idea, at least until she found herself onstage behind a closed curtain with Lisa Shapiro sitting between her and her ex-husband. She avoided his eyes but couldn’t shake a claustrophobic awareness of his presence.
He was impeccably dressed, she had noticed on the way in. Suit and tie, creases razor-sharp. A little pursed smile on his face, accentuated by his jowls and his receding chin, like a man who smelled something unpleasant but was trying to be polite about it. A sheaf of paper in his hands.
To the left of her there was a podium, and Ari stood there now signaling for someone to raise the curtain. Already? Marguerite checked her watch. One on the dot. Her mouth was dry.
The auditorium accommodated an audience of two thousand, Ari had told her. They had admitted roughly half that number, a mixture of working scientists, support staff, and casual labor. Ari had arranged four of these events since the beginning of the quarantine, and they had all been well-attended and well-received. There was even a guy with a camera doing live video for Blind Lake TV.
How civilized we are in our cage, Marguerite thought. How easily we distract ourselves from the knowledge of the bodies outside the gates.
Now the curtain was drawn, the stage illuminated, the audience a shadowy void more sensed than seen. Now Ari was introducing her. Now, in the strange truncation of time that always happened when she addressed an audience, Marguerite herself was at the podium, thanking Ari, thanking the crowd, fumbling with the cue display on her pocket server.
“The question—”
Her voice cracked into falsetto. She cleared her throat.
“The question I want to pose today is, have we been deceived by our own rigorously deconstructive approach to the observed peoples of UMa47/E?”
That was dry enough to make the laypeople in the audience feel sleepy, but she saw a couple of familiar faces from Interpretation coagulate into frowns.
“This is deliberately provocative language—the observed peoples. From the beginning, the Crossbank and Blind Lake projects have sought to purge themselves of anthropocentrism: the tendency to invest other species with human characteristics. This is the fallacy that tempts us to describe a panther cub as ‘cute’ or an eagle as ‘noble,’ and we have been doing it ever since we learned to stand on two legs. We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge—to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.
“And so, we tell ourselves, the subjects of our study at 47 Ursa Majoris should be called ‘creatures’ or ‘organisms,’ not ‘peoples.’ We must presume nothing about them. We must not bring to the analytical table our fears or our desires, our hopes or our dreams, our linquistic prejudices, our bourgeois meta-narratives, or our cultural baggage of imagined aliens. Check Mr. Spock at the door, please, and leave H.G. Wells in the library. If we see a city we must not call it a city, or call it that only provisionally, because the word ‘city’ implies Carthage and Rome and Berlin and Los Angeles, products of human biology, human ingenuity, and thousands of years of accumulated human expertise. We remind ourselves that the observed city may not be a city at all; it may be more analogous to an anthill, a termite tower, or a coral reef.”
When she paused she could hear the echo of her voice, a basso resonance returning from the back of the hall.
“In other words, we try very hard not to deceive ourselves. And by and large we do a good job of it. The barrier between ourselves and the peoples of UMa47/E is painfully obvious. Anthropologists have long told us that culture is a collection of shared symbols, and we share none with the subjects of our study. Omnis cultura ex cultura, and the two cultures are as imiscible, we presume, as oil and water. Our epigenetic behaviors and theirs have no point of intersection.
“The downside is that we’re forced to begin from first principles. We can’t talk about a chthonic ‘architecture,’ say, since we would have to strip from that seemingly innocent word all its buttre
sses and beams of human intent and human esthetics—without which the word ‘architecture’ becomes insupportable, an unstable structure. Nor dare we speak of chthonic ‘art’ or ‘work,’ ‘leisure’ or ‘science.’ The list is endless, and what we are left with is simply raw behavior. Behavior to be scrutinized and catalogued in all its minutiae.
“We say the Subject travels here, performs this or that action, is relatively slow or relatively fast, turns left or right, eats such-and-such, at least if we don’t balk at the word ‘eats’ as creeping anthropocentrism; maybe ‘ingests’ is better. It means the same thing, but it looks better in the written report. ‘Subject ingested a bolus of vegetable material.’ Actually, he ate a plant—you know it and I know it, but a peer reviewer at Nature would never let it pass.” There was some cautious laughter. Behind her, Ray snorted derisively and audibly. “We patrol the connotation of every word we speak with the censorious instinct of a Bowdler. All in the name of science, and often for very good reasons.
“But I wonder if we aren’t blinding ourselves at the same time.
“What is missing from our discourse about the peoples of UMa47/E, I would suggest, is narrative.
“The natives of UMa47/E are not human, but we are, and human beings interpret the world by constructing narratives to explain it. The fact that some of our narratives are naive, or wishful, or simply wrong, hardly invalidates the process. Science, after all, is at heart a narrative. An anthropologist, or an army of anthropologists, may pore over fragments of bone and catalog them according to a dozen or a hundred apparently trivial features, but the unspoken object of all this work is a narrative—a story about how human beings emerged from the other fauna on this planet, a story about our origins and our ancestors.
“Or consider the periodic table. The periodic table is a catalog, a list of the known and possible elements arranged according to an organizing principle. It looks like static knowledge, exactly the kind of knowledge we’re accumulating about the Subject and his kindred. But even the periodic table implies a narrative. The periodic table is a defining statement in the story of the universe, the end point of a long narrative about the creation of hydrogen and helium in the Big Bang, the forging of heavy elements in stars, the relationship of electrons to atomic nuclei, the nucleus and its process of decay, and the quantum behavior of subatomic particles. We have our place in that narrative too. We are in part the result of carbon chemistry in water—another narrative hidden in the periodic table—and so, I might add, are the observed peoples of UMa47/E.”