“You don’t know? Talk to Anne. Maybe it’s a good thing you showed up when you did. What I hear is, the O/BECs are putting out strange numbers and the Obs people are all excited about something…but it’s not my department. All I know is, everybody’s too busy to play politics with management. So keep Mr. Scutter on hold.”
“I don’t think he’s in a mood to wait. He—”
“Charlie! I’m busy, okay? Handle it!”
Charlie hurried back to his office. Something major was happening with the O/BECs, and he wanted to get downstairs and look into it. But first things first. See Ray out the door, if possible, or put him on the phone to Tabby if he had a problem with that.
But the office was empty.
Ray was missing. Also missing, Charlie realized, was his own all-pass card, plucked off the lapel of the jacket he had hung up on the hook by the door.
“Shit,” Charlie said.
He called Tabby Menkowitz again, but this time he couldn’t get through. Something wrong with his pocket server. It chimed once and went blue-screen.
He was still fiddling with it when the floor began to move under his feet.
Twenty-Seven
Chris came out of a black and dreamless sleep to the chirping of his pocket server, which he had left on the bedside table and which glowed there like a luminous pencil. He checked the inset clock before he thumbed the answer button. Four in the morning. He’d had about an hour of real sleep. The storm was still gnawing at the skin of the house.
It was Elaine Coster calling. She was at the Blind Lake clinic, she said, with Sebastian Vogel and Sue Sampel. Sue had been stabbed. Stabbed by Ray Scutter. “Maybe you guys ought to get down here, if you can make it in this weather. I mean, it’s not totally dire; Sue’s going to live and everything—in fact, she was asking after you—but I keep thinking it would be wise for the bunch of us to stay together for a while.”
Chris watched Marguerite turn uneasily under the blankets. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
He woke her and told her what had happened.
Marguerite let Chris drive through the snow. She sat in the back of the car with Tess, who was only grudgingly awake and still ignorant of what her father had done. Marguerite meant to keep it that way, at least for now. Tess was under more than enough stress.
For the duration of the drive, with Tessa’s head cradled in her lap, and snow clinging to the windows of the car, and the whole of Blind Lake wrapped in a gelid, bitter darkness, Marguerite thought about Ray.
She had misjudged him.
She had never believed Ray would let himself be reduced to physical violence. Even now, she had a hard time picturing it. Ray with a knife. It had been a knife, Chris had said. Ray with a knife, using it. Ray putting the knife into Sue Sampel’s body.
“You know,” she said to Chris, “I only fainted once in my life. It was because of a snake.”
Chris wrestled the steering wheel as they turned a corner toward the mallway. The car fishtailed, microprocessors blinking loss-of-traction alerts before it straightened out. But he had time to shoot her a curious look.
“I was seven years old,” Marguerite said. “I walked out of the house one summer morning and there was a snake curled up on the porch stairs, basking in the sun. A big snake, bright and shiny against the old wood step. Too big and too shiny to be real. I assumed it was fake—that one of the neighbor kids had left it there to tease me. So I jumped over it. Three times. Three separate times. In case anyone was looking, just to prove I couldn’t be fooled. The snake never moved, and I went off to the library without giving it a second thought. But when I came home my father told me he’d killed a rattler that morning. It had come up on the porch and he’d used a shovel to cut it in half. The snake was lethargic in the cool air, he said, but he had to be careful. A snake like that can strike faster than lightning and carries enough venom to kill a horse.” She looked at Chris. “That’s when I fainted.”
They reached the Blind Lake clinic twenty minutes later. Chris parked the car under the shelter of a concrete overhang, its passenger-side wheels straddling the sidewalk. Elaine Coster met them in the lobby. Sebastian Vogel was there, too, slumped in a chair, his head in his hands.
Elaine gave Marguerite a hard look. “Sue wants to see you.”
“Wants to see me?”
“The wound is more or less superficial. She’s been stitched and drugged. The nurse says she ought to be sleeping, but she was wide awake a few minutes ago, and when I mentioned you guys were coming in she said, ‘I want to talk to Marguerite.’”
Oh, God, Marguerite thought. “I guess if she’s still awake—”
“I’ll show you the way.”
Chris promised to look after Tess, who was taking a sleepy interest in the waiting-room toys.
“Come on in, hon,” Sue said. “I’m too feeble to bite.”
Marguerite edged inside the room.
Sue’s room was just down the hall from the room where Adam Sandoval lay comatose—the man who had dropped into Blind Lake in a damaged aircraft. Sue definitely wasn’t comatose, but she looked dismayingly weak. She was propped in a semireclined position, a saline drip plugged into the crook of her elbow. Her face was pale. She seemed much older than her forty-something years. But she managed to smile. “Honest,” she said, “it’s not as bad as it looks. I lost some blood, but the knife didn’t cut anything more important than what Dr. Goldhar calls ‘adispose tissue.’ Fat, in other words. I guess I was rescued by every dessert I’ve ever eaten. Like the guy in the movies who would’ve been shot through the heart if not for the Bible in his pocket. There’s a chair by the bed, Marguerite. Don’t you want to sit down? It makes me tired to see you standing there.”
Dutifully, Marguerite sat. “You must be having a lot of pain.”
“Not anymore. They pumped me full of morphine. Or something like it. The nurse says it usually makes people sleepy, but I’m an ‘idiosyncratic responder.’ I think that means it made me want to sit up and talk. Do you suppose this is how drug addicts feel? On a good day?”
“Maybe at first.”
“Meaning it won’t last. I’m sure you’re right. It has that house-of-cards feeling, like it can’t go on forever. Euphoria with a price tag. I want to enjoy it while it lasts.”
It could end at any time, Marguerite thought. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“Thank you, but you don’t need to be sorry. Really, I appreciate you guys coming out here in this awful weather.”
“When I heard it was Ray—that he was the one who hurt you—”
“What about it?”
“I owe you an apology.”
“I was afraid you’d say that. Which is why I wanted to talk to you.” She frowned. It made her face seem even more pallid. “I don’t know you real well, Marguerite, but we get along okay, don’t we?”
“I think so.”
“Well enough that I can get a little personal?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I get the impression I’ve had more experience with men than you have. Not necessarily good experience, but more of it. I’m not saying I’m a slut or you’re a virgin, just that we fall on different parts of the distribution curve, if you know what I mean…I’m sorry, I’m a little light-headed. Bear with me. One of the things I’ve learned is you can’t take responsibility for what a man does. Especially if you’ve already kicked him out for being an asshole. So please, please don’t apologize on behalf of Ray. He’s not some pit bull you should have kept on a shorter leash. He’s totally responsible for how he behaved when you guys were married. And he’s absolutely responsible for this.”
She gestured at the bandage bulging under the thin clinic sheet.
Marguerite said, “I wish I could have done something to stop him.”
“Me too. But you couldn’t.”
“I keep thinking—”
“No, Marguerite. No. Really. You couldn’t.”
Perhaps not. But she had consistently undere
stimated the degree of Ray’s madness. She had jumped over that rattlesnake a hundred times, a thousand times, with only her dumb innocence to protect her.
She could have been killed. Sue nearly had been.
“Well…can I say I’m sorry you got hurt?”
“You already did. And thank you. I want to talk to Chris, too, but, you know, maybe I am getting a little sleepy here.” Her eyelids retreated to half-mast. “Suddenly I feel all warm and sort of—what’s the word? Oracular.”
“Oracular?”
“Like the Oracle of Delphi. Wisdom for a penny, if I can stay awake long enough to dispense it. I feel very wise and like everything’s going to be okay, ultimately. That would probably be the morphine talking. Chris is a good guy, though. You’ll do okay with Chris. He’s trying real hard, whether it shows or not. All he needs is a reason to think better of himself. He needs you to trust him, and he needs to live up to that trust…but that part’s up to him.”
Marguerite just stared.
“Now,” Sue said, spectacularly pale against the off-white bedsheet, “I believe I really do need to sleep.”
She closed her eyes.
Marguerite sat quietly while Sue’s breathing steadied. Then she tiptoed into the hallway and closed the door behind her.
Sue had surprised her tonight. So had Ray, in a much more terrifying fashion. And if I can’t figure out these people, she thought, how can I even pretend to understand the Subject? Maybe Ray had been right about that. All her big talk about narratives: it was absurd, ridiculous, a childish dream.
Her server trilled in her pocket—a message from the Eye with a priority tag on it. Marguerite thumbed the ANSWER button, expecting more bad news.
It was a text message, a heads-up from the guys in Data Acquisition: Get to a screen ASAP, it said.
“I understand,” Sebastian Vogel said to Chris, “the wound isn’t as bad as it seemed at first. In all honesty, I thought she might die. But she was talking when I drove her here, almost nonstop.”
Sebastian looked fragile, Chris thought, his round body crammed into the ungenerous circumference of a waiting-room chair. Elaine Coster sat at the opposite side of the clinic’s reception space, scowling, while Tess played listlessly with waiting-room toys meant to amuse children much younger than herself. She ran a train of colored beads around a wireframe roller-coaster. The beads clacked together when they slid from peak to valley.
“She insisted on talking about my book,” Sebastian said. “Can you imagine that? Considering the pain she was in?”
“How nice,” Elaine said caustically from across the room. “You must have been flattered.”
Sebastian looked genuinely hurt. “I was horrified.”
“So why mention it?”
“She might have been dying, Elaine. She asked me if there really was a God, the sort of God I described in the book. ‘From which our minds arise and to which they return’—she was quoting me.”
“So what did you tell her?”
“Maybe I should have lied. I told her I don’t know.”
“How did she take it?”
“She didn’t believe me. She thinks I’m modest.” He looked at Elaine, then at Chris. “That fucking book! That piece of shit book. Of course I wrote it for the money. Not even a lot of money. Just a small advance from a minor-league press. Something to pad out my pension. No one expected it to take off the way it did. I never meant it to be something people take as a creed. At best, it’s a kind of theological science fiction. A thinking man’s joke.”
“A lie, in other words,” Elaine said.
“Yes, yes, but is it? Lately—”
“Lately what?”
“I don’t know how to say this. It feels more like inspiration. Do you understand the history of that word, inspiration? The pneuma, the sacred breath, the breath of life, the divine breath? Inhaling God? Maybe something was speaking through me.”
“Sounds like your bullshit detector has malfed,” Elaine said, though she said it more quietly, Chris noticed, and with less obvious scorn.
Sebastian shook his head. “Elaine. Do you know why your cynicism doesn’t hurt? Because I share it. If I was ever sincere about the existence of God, I grew out of it not long after I reached puberty. If you call my book bullshit, Elaine, I won’t argue with you. Remember when you predicted I’d write a sequel? You were absolutely right. I signed the contract the week before I left for Crossbank. Wisdom & the Quantum Vacuum. Laughable, isn’t it? But, oh, Jesus, the money they offered me! To write a few harmless aphorisms in fancy language. Who could it hurt? No one. Least of all me. My academic career is finished; any credibility I had as a scholar was flushed away when I published the first volume. Nothing left to do but milk the cow. But—”
Sebastian paused. Elaine came across the tiled floor and sat down next to him.
Chris watched Tess play with a crude wooden car. If the girl was listening, she showed no sign of it.
“But?” Elaine prompted.
“But—as I said—I find myself wondering—that is, I wake up some mornings believing it. Believing it wholeheartedly, believing it the way I believe in my own existence.”
“Believing what, that you’re a prophet?”
“Hardly. No. I wake up thinking I stumbled on a truth. Despite myself. A fundamental truth.”
“What truth, Sebastian?”
“That there’s something living in the physical processes of the universe. Not necessarily creating it. Modifying it, maybe. But chiefly living in it. Eating the past and excreting the future.”
Tess gave him a curious look, then rolled her car a little farther away.
“You know,” Elaine said, “that’s like the final stage of lunacy. When you start to actually pay attention to the voices in your head.”
“Obviously. I may be crazy, Elaine, but I’m not stupid. I can diagnose a delusion. So I ask myself whether Ray Scutter might be right, whether Blind Lake has been infected with a contagious madness. It would explain a great deal, wouldn’t it? It would explain why we’ve been quarantined. It would explain some of Ray’s own behavior. It might even explain why Sue is in a clinic ward with a knife wound in her belly.”
And it might explain Mirror Girl, Chris thought.
He looked for Tess, worried that she had overheard this remark about her father, but Tess had abandoned her wooden car next to the swinging doors marked HOSPITAL PERSONNEL ONLY and disappeared down the corridor.
He stood and called her name. No answer.
Tess was looking for her mother when she opened the door into the sleeping man’s room.
At first she thought the room was empty. It was only dimly lit, but from the doorway she could make out the bed, the window, a silently blinking medical monitor, the skeletal shape of an IV tree. She was about to retreat when the sleeping man said, “Hey there. Don’t go.”
She hesitated.
The sleeping man lay motionless in his bed, but apparently he wasn’t sleeping after all. He sounded friendly. But you could never tell.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” the man said. He said “hafta” for “have to,” Tess noticed. Somehow, that made him less frightening.
She took a cautious step closer. She said, “You’re the man from the airplane.”
“That’s right. The airplane. My name is Adam. Like the palindrome. ‘Madam, I’m Adam.’” His voice was an old man’s voice, gravelly and slow, but it sounded sleepy, too. “I’ve had my pilot’s license for fifteen years,” he said. “But I’m a weekend flier mostly. I own a hardware store in Loveland, Colorado. Adam Sandoval. The man from the airplane. That’s me. What’s your name?”
“Tessa.”
“And this must be Blind Lake.”
“Yes.”
“Sounds like it’s cold outside.”
“It’s snowing. You can hear the snow blowing against the window.”
“Poor visibility,” Adam Sandoval mused, as if he were taxiing down some imaginary runway.
>
“Are you badly hurt?” Tess asked. He still hadn’t moved.
“Well, I don’t know. I’m not in pain. I’m not sure I’m even altogether awake. Are you a dream, Tessa?”
“I don’t think so.” She thought about what this man had done. He had literally fallen out of the sky. Like Dorothy. He had come to Blind Lake on a whirlwind. “What’s it like outside?”
“Snowing, you said. And it seems to be nighttime.”
“No, I mean outside of Blind Lake.”
The man paused. It was as if he was rummaging around in a box of memories, a box that had been locked up so long he was no longer sure what he might have left inside it.
“It was hard to get in the air that day,” he said at last. “There was National Guard at the airports, even the local strips. Everybody worried about the starfish.” He paused again. “The Crossbank starfish took my wife. Or she took it, maybe that’s a better way of saying the same thing.”
Tess didn’t understand this, not even a little, but she was patient while the man kept talking. It would be rude to interrupt. She hoped at least some of what he said might sooner or later make sense.
“Karen, that’s my wife, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer six years ago. They couldn’t cure it because of some quirk of her immune system. The treatment would have killed her as quick as the disease. So she had some surgery and took a handful of pills every four hours to inhibit metastasis and she would have lived another twenty years, no problem, and so what if you have to choke down a few capsules of this and that now and then? But Karen said the pills made her sick—and I have to admit, she was running to the bathroom all the time, made it hard for her to leave the house—and the surgery left her tired and feeling old, and I guess she was clinically depressed on top of all that, though she seemed more sad than sick, sad all the time.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Tess said.
“She watched a lot of video when she was home by herself. So when that Crossbank starfish popped up she saw it right away on the panel. Made me print out the newsmagazines for her, too.”