“Back at the auditorium, you said, ‘You can’t kill her.’ Who were you talking about?”
“You know.”
“You mean Mirror Girl?”
“I guess.”
“I don’t think Dad was talking about Mirror Girl. He was talking about the processors out at the Eye.”
“Same thing,” Tess said, obviously uncomfortable.
“Same thing? What do you mean?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. But that’s where she really lives. It’s all the same thing.”
When Marguerite pressed for details Tess became unresponsive; finally Marguerite let her retreat to the sofa. Still, it was a new twist, this idea that Mirror Girl lived at the Eye. Perhaps meaningful, but Marguerite couldn’t decipher it. Was that why Tess had snuck off to the Alley last week? Tracking Mirror Girl to her lair?
When all this craziness ends, Marguerite promised herself, I’ll take her somewhere away from here. Somewhere different. Somewhere dry and warm. Marguerite had often thought of visiting the desert Southwest—Utah, Arizona, Canyonlands, Four Corners—and Ray had always vetoed the idea. Maybe she would take Tess to the desert for a vacation. Dry country, though perhaps disconcertingly like the Subject’s UMa47/E. Looking for salvation in empty places.
Chris put a call through to Elaine. Marguerite’s office server picked up the audio and relayed it through the transducers in the walls, a connection so clean Chris could hear the sound of the storm in back of Elaine’s voice. “Are you next to a window?” he asked her. “Sounds like dogs howling.”
Elaine bunked in a two-room utility apartment left vacant by a maintenance man who had gone to Fargo for lithotripsy the day before the lockdown. It was a ground-floor unit with a view of the Dumpsters in back of Sawyer’s Steak & Seafood. “Not a lot of room to move around in here…is that better?”
“A little.”
“That’s all we need right now, another northeaster or whatever they call these fucking storms out here in cow country. So, did you read the docs? What do you make of them?”
Chris considered his answer.
The documents were exactly what Sue Sampel had suspected: text messages that had languished in the servers of the senior scientists who had gone to Cancun for the annual conference. They contained news that had been tightly held but would have been made public at the conference: the discovery of an artificial structure on the surface of HR8832/B.
The structure resembled a spiky hemisphere with radial arms. One note compared the shape to a giant adenovirus or a molecule of C60. Ray summarized what he’d read: “Apparently it expresses a mathematical principle called an ‘energy function’ that can be written as an expression of volume in a higher-dimensional space—but so does any icosahedron, so that proves nothing. If it really is an artifact, the builders seem to have vanished. One of the messages claims the interior of the structure is ‘uniquely difficult to image,’ whatever that means….”
“And so on and so forth,” Elaine said. “Lots of really intriguing science, but tell me something: do you see anything here that looks like a threat? Anything that would explain the stuff in that magazine clipping?”
“There must be a connection.”
“Sure, but think about what Ray was saying at the Town Hall meeting. He claimed he had evidence the O/BEC processors at Crossbank had become physically dangerous.”
“You could draw that inference.”
“Fuck inference; do you see any actual evidence of it?”
“Not in these papers, no.”
“You think Ray has evidence we don’t know about?”
“It’s possible. But Sue has been pretty close to Ray, and she doesn’t think so.”
“Right. You know what, Chris? I don’t think Ray has any real evidence at all. I think he has a hypothesis. And a giant-sized bug up his ass.”
“You’re saying he wants to shut down the Eye and he wants to use this as an excuse.”
“Exactly.”
“But the Eye could still be a threat. The fact that he’s biased doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
“If he isn’t wrong, he’s at least irresponsible. There’s nothing in these docs he couldn’t have shared with the rest of us.”
“Ray doesn’t like to share. They probably wrote that on his kindergarten report card. What do you propose to do about it?”
“Go public.”
“And how do we do that?”
“We forward these documents to every domestic server in Blind Lake. Plus I’d like to write a little summary, like a covering letter, saying we got the docs from a protected source and that the contents are important but inconclusive.”
“So Ray can’t act unilaterally. He’ll have to explain all this….”
“And maybe get some input from the rest of us before he pulls the plug.”
“That might cause trouble for Sue.”
“She’s a good-hearted lady, Chris, but I’d say she’s already in trouble. Way deep. Maybe Ray can’t prove anything, but he’s not stupid.”
“Might get us in trouble.”
“How do you define ‘trouble’? Locked up indefinitely in a federal installation run by a lunatic, that sounds like trouble no matter what else we do. But I’ll leave your name off the forward if you like.”
“No, use my name,” Chris said. “Keep Marguerite out of it, though.”
“No problem. But if you’re thinking of Ray’s reaction, I have to repeat, he’s not stupid. Keep your doors locked.”
“They are locked,” Chris said. “Securely.”
“Good. Now get ready for a shitstorm that’ll make this blizzard look like summer rain.”
At dinner Tess ate sparingly and spoke little, though she seemed to find the ritual reassuring. Or maybe, Marguerite thought, she just liked having Chris nearby. Chris was both a big man and a gentle one, an intoxicating combination for a nervous little girl. Or even a nervous full-grown woman.
After the meal Tess took a book to her room. Marguerite brewed coffee while Chris briefed her on the contents of the stolen documents. Many of them had been written by Bo Xiang. She had worked with Bo back at Crossbank, and he wasn’t the type to get excited without good reason.
There had never been even the slightest hint of a technological civilization on HR8832/B. The structure must be immensely old, she thought. HR8832/B had oscillated through a number of severe planetwide glaciations; the structure must predate at least one of them. The resemblance to the equatorial coral floaters was suggestive, but what did it mean?
But these were unanswerable questions, at least for now. And Chris and Elaine were right: none of it constituted evidence of a threat.
The storm rattled the kitchen window as they talked. We can image worlds circling other stars, Marguerite thought; can’t we make a window that doesn’t rattle in bad weather? The darkness outside was deep and intimidating. The streetlights had become veiled beacons, distant torches. It was the kind of weather that would have made the news in the old days: Winter Storm Blocks Highways in the West, Airports Closed, Travelers Stranded….
Tessa’s usual bedtime was ten o’clock, eleven on weekends, but she came into the kitchen at nine and said, “I’m tired.”
“Been a long day,” Marguerite said. “Shall I run a bath for you?”
“I’ll shower in the morning. I’m just tired.”
“Go on up and change, then. I’ll tuck you in.”
Tess hesitated.
“What is it, honey?”
“I thought maybe Chris would tell me a story.” She hung her head as if to say: It’s a baby thing to ask for. But I don’t care.
“Happy to,” Chris volunteered.
It would be hard not to love this man, Marguerite thought.
“What kind of story would you like?” Chris asked, perched on the edge of Tessa’s bed. He supposed he already knew the answer:
“A Porry story,” the girl said.
“Honest, Tess, I think I’ve told all th
e Porry stories there are to tell.”
“It doesn’t have to be a new one.”
“You have a favorite?”
“The tadpole story,” she said promptly.
Tessa’s bedroom window was still crudely boarded. Cold air came through the cracks and snaked down under the electric panel heaters and across the floor, seeking the house’s deepest places. Tess wore her blankets up to her chin.
“That was back in California,” Chris said, “where we grew up. We lived in a little house with an avocado tree in the backyard, and at the end of the street there was a storm drain, like a big concrete riverbed, with a wire fence to keep the local kids from getting in.”
“But you went there anyway.”
“Who’s telling this story?”
“Sorry.” She pulled the blanket up over her mouth.
“We went there anyway, all the kids in the neighborhood. There was a place you could duck under the fence. The storm drain had steep concrete walls, but if you were careful you could climb down, and in spring, if the water was low, you could find tadpoles in the shallow pools.”
“Tadpoles are baby frogs, right?”
“Right, but they don’t look like frogs at all. More like little black fish with long skinny tails and no fins. On a good day you could catch hundreds of them just by dipping a bucket. All the adults told us not to play around the storm drain, because it was dangerous. And it was, and we really shouldn’t have gone there, but we did it anyway. All of us except Porry. Porry wanted to go but I wouldn’t let her.”
“Because you were her older brother and she was too young.”
“We were all too young. Porry must have been about six or seven, which would make me eleven or twelve. But I was old enough to know she could get in trouble. I always made her wait by the fence, even though she hated that. One day I was down at the storm drain with a couple of friends, and we took maybe a little too long poking around in the mud, and by the time I got back Porry was tired and frustrated and practically crying. She wouldn’t speak to me on the way home.
“This was springtime, and Southern California gets big spring rainstorms some years. Well, it started to rain later that day. Not just a little rain, either. ‘Raindrops big as dinner plates,’ my mom used to say. After dinner I did my homework and Porry went to play in her bedroom. Or at least that’s what she said. After an hour or so my mom called her and Porry didn’t answer, and we couldn’t find her anywhere in the house.”
“Couldn’t you just ask the house server?”
“Houses weren’t as smart in those days.”
“So you went to look for her.”
“Yup. I probably shouldn’t have done that, either, but my dad was ready to call the police…and I had a feeling I knew where she’d gone.”
“You should have told your parents first.”
“I should have, but I didn’t want to let on I knew how to get down to the storm drain myself. But you’re right—it would have been braver to tell them.”
“You were only eleven.”
“I was only eleven and I didn’t always do the bravest thing, so I snuck out of the house and ran through the rain to the gap in the fence, and I pushed under it and started to look for Porry.”
“I think that was brave. Did you find her?”
“You know how this comes out.”
“I’m pretending I don’t.”
“Porry had taken a bucket and gone down to the culvert to collect her own tadpoles. She was halfway back up that steep embankment when she got scared. It was the kind of scared where you can’t go forward and you can’t back up, so you don’t do anything at all. She was crouched there, crying, and the water in the culvert was running hard and rising fast. A few more minutes and she might have been carried away by it.”
“But you saved her.”
“Well, I climbed down and took her arm and helped her up. The embankment was pretty slippery in the rain. We were almost at the fence when she said, ‘My tadpoles!’ So I had to go back and get her bucket. Then we went home.”
“And you didn’t tell on her.”
“I said I’d found her playing in the neighbors’ yard. We hid the bucket in the garage….”
“And forgot about it!”
“And forgot about it, but those tadpoles did what tadpoles do—they started to turn into frogs. My dad opened up the garage a couple of days later and the floor was covered with little green frogs, frogs jumping up his legs, frogs all over the car. An avalanche of frogs. He yelled, and we all came running out of the house, and Porry started to laugh…”
“But she wouldn’t say why.”
“She wouldn’t say why.”
“And you never told.”
“Anyone. Until now.”
Tess smiled contentedly. “Yeah. Were the frogs okay?”
“Mostly. They headed into the hedges and gardens all up and down our street. It was a noisy summer that year, all that croaking.”
“Yes.” Tess closed her eyes. “Thank you, Chris.”
“You don’t have to thank me. Think you can sleep?”
“Yeah.”
“I hope the sound of the wind doesn’t keep you up.”
“Could be worse,” Tess said, smiling for the first time today. “Could be frogs.”
Marguerite listened from the doorway to the first part of the story, then retreated to her office and switched on the wall screen. Not to work. Just to watch.
It was near dusk on the Subject’s small patch of UMa47/E. Subject traversed a low canyon parallel to the setting sun. Maybe it was the long light, but he looked especially unwell, Marguerite thought. He had been scavenging for food for a long time now, subsisting on the mossy substance that grew wherever there was water and shade. Marguerite suspected the moss was not terribly nutritious, perhaps not even enough to sustain him. His skin was creased and shrunken. You didn’t have to be a physicist to parse that equation. Too many calories spent, too few ingested.
As the sky darkened a few stars emerged. The brightest was not a star at all but a planet: one of the system’s two gas giants, UMa47/A, almost three times the size of Jupiter and big enough to show a perceptible disc at its nearest approach. Subject stopped and swiveled his head from side to side. Taking his bearings, perhaps, or even performing some kind of celestial navigation.
She heard Chris closing Tessa’s bedroom door. He leaned into the office and said, “Mind if I join you?”
“Pull up a chair. I’m not really working.”
“Getting dark,” he said, gesturing at the wall screen.
“He’ll sleep soon. I know it sounds dumb, Chris, but I’m worried about him. He’s a long way from—well, anywhere. Nothing seems to live in this place, not even the parasites that feed on him at night.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“But, technically, they’re probably not parasites at all. There must be a benevolent symbiosis, or the cities wouldn’t be full of them.”
“New York is full of rats. That doesn’t mean they’re desirable.”
“It’s an open question. But he’s clearly not well.”
“He might not make it to Damascus.”
“Damascus?”
“I keep thinking he’s St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Waiting for a vision.”
“I suppose we’d never know if he found it. I was hoping for something more tangible.”
“Well, I’m no expert.”
“Who is?” She turned away from the display. “Thanks for helping Tess settle down. I hope you’re not sick of telling her stories.”
“Not at all.”
“She likes your—what does she call them? Porry stories. Actually, I’m a little jealous. You don’t talk much about your family.”
“Tessa’s an easy audience.”
“And I’m not?”
He smiled. “You’re not eleven.”
“Did Tess ever ask you what happened to Portia as a grown-up?”
“Thankfully, no.” r />
“How did she die?” Marguerite asked, then: “I’m sorry, Chris. I’m sure you don’t want to talk about it. Really, it’s none of my business.”
He was silent a moment. God, she thought, I’ve offended him.
Then he said, “Portia was always a little more headstrong than she was bright. She never had an easy time at school. She dropped out of college and got in with a bunch of people, part-time dopers…”
“Drugs,” Marguerite said.
“It wasn’t just the drugs. She could always handle the drugs, I guess because they didn’t appeal to her all that much. But she had bad judgment about people. She moved into a guy’s trailer outside of Seattle and we didn’t hear from her for a while. She claimed she loved him, but she wouldn’t even put him on the phone.”
“Not a good sign.”
“This happened when my book about Galliano had just been published. I was passing through Seattle on a tour, so I called Porry up and arranged to meet her. Not where she lived—she insisted on that. It had to be somewhere downtown. Just her, not her boyfriend. She was a little reluctant about the whole thing, but she named a restaurant and we got together there. She showed up in low-rent drag and a big pair of sunglasses. The kind you wear to hide a bruise or a black eye.”
“Oh, no.”
“Eventually she admitted things weren’t going too well between her and her friend. She’d just landed a job, she was saving money to get a place of her own. She said not to worry about her, she was sorting things out.”
“The guy was beating her?”
“Obviously. She begged me not to get involved. Not to pull any ‘big brother shit,’ as she put it. But I was busy saving the world from corruption. If I could expose Ted Galliano to public scrutiny, why should I put up with this kind of thing from some trailer-park cowboy? So I got Porry’s address out of the directory and drove out there while she was at work. The guy was home, of course. He really didn’t look like any kind of threat. He was five-nine, with a rose tattoo on his skinny right arm. Looked like he’d spent the day killing a six-pack and greasing an engine. He was belligerent, but I just braced him against the trailer with my forearm under his chin and told him if he touched Portia again he’d have me to answer to. He got very apologetic. He actually started to cry. He said he couldn’t help it, it was the bottle, hey buddy you know how it is. He said he’d get himself under control. And I went away thinking I’d done some good. On my way out of town I stopped by the office where Porry worked and left her a check, something to help her get independent. Two days later I got a call from a Seattle emergency ward. She’d been beaten badly and was hemorrhaging from a cranial artery. She died that night. Her boyfriend burned the trailer and left town on a stolen motorbike. Far as I know, the police are still looking for him.”