He took out his pocket server and spoke her name again. No answer. He tried Marguerite. Also no answer.
“This is just spooky,” Elaine said.
It was worse than that. Chris felt as if he had stepped into one of those nightmares in which something absolutely essential had evaporated in his hands. “What room is Sue in?”
“Two-eleven,” Elaine said promptly. “Upstairs.”
“You ring the duty nurse and ask her to look for Tess. I’ll find Marguerite.”
Elaine watched Chris sprint for the stairwell. Elaine herself wasn’t terribly worried. The kid was probably down in the cafeteria or off riding a gurney cart. “Quite the family man,” she said to Vogel. “Our Chris.”
“Don’t begrudge him what he found here,” Vogel murmured. “It could end at any time.”
He discovered Sue Sampel very nearly asleep, alone in her darkened room. “Marguerite left already,” she said. “Chris? Is that you? Chris? Is Marguerite lost or something?”
“I can’t raise her server. It’s nothing to worry about it.”
She yawned. “Bullshit. You’re worried.”
“Go on back to sleep, Sue.”
“I think I will. I think I have to. But I can tell you’re lying. Chris? Don’t get lost in the dark, Chris.”
“I won’t,” he promised. Whatever that meant.
He walked the hallway from end to end, opening doors. Apart from the room where Adam Sandoval lay motionless in his coma there were only empty storage spaces, locked pharmaceutical closets, vacant boardrooms, and darkened offices.
His server buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and talked to Elaine, who told him the night nurse had called Security and that the staff on duty were beginning a room-to-room search. “But there’s something going on out at the Eye, too. I got hold of Ari Weingart, who says the Alley is being evacuated.”
Chris looked at the server in his hand: if his was working, why not Marguerite’s or Tessa’s?
If Marguerite and Tess were both missing, did that mean they were together? And if they weren’t in the building, where had they gone?
He made his way back to the lobby, to the heavy glass doors. If Marguerite had left the clinic she would have taken the car. There was no other way to travel in this weather. If the car was gone, maybe he could borrow a vehicle and follow it.
But Marguerite’s conservative little runabout was parked where Chris had left it, wheels on the curb, under a fresh layer of snow. He opened the door and snow came into the lobby on a fugitive wind, small flakes turning to watery diamonds on the tiled floor.
Elaine stood behind Chris and put a hand on his shoulder. “This is freaky, but you need to calm down.”
“You think Ray has something to do with this?”
“I thought of that. Ari said he’d been on the phone to Shulgin, who talked to Charlie Grogan. Ray’s out at the Eye somewhere.”
Chris held the door open a crack, letting frigid air play over his face. “She was right here, Elaine. Playing with that fucking wooden truck. People don’t just disappear.”
But they do, he thought. They slip through your fingers like water.
“Mr. Carmody?” This was Rosalie Bleiler, the duty nurse. “Could you close that door, please? Elmo—Elmore Fisk, he’s our night guard—would like to see you at the back entrance.”
“Did he find Tess?”
Rosalie flinched from his voice. “No, sir, but he found some child-sized footprints in the snow out there.”
Tess wasn’t dressed to be outdoors. “Did he follow the footprints?”
She nodded. “About fifty yards out past the visitor’s lot. But that’s the problem. He says the footprints don’t go anywhere. They just sort of stop.”
Thirty
To date there had been seven serious attempts to break out of Blind Lake. Three of them had resulted in the deaths by pocket drone of those who breached the fence and entered the no-go zone. Four more had been interrupted in the attempt by Security forces within the Lake. The most recent case had been an agoraphobic caterer who had elected to scale the fence solo but had lost his nerve halfway up. By the time Security found him and talked him down he had suffered frostbite to the fingers of both hands.
Herb Dunn, a fifty-two-year-old navy veteran, had worked in Civilian Security ever since he was downsized from a FedEx branch in Fargo ten years ago. The quarantine of Blind Lake had severed communications between Herb and his creditors (including two ex-wives), which he regretted not at all. He missed access to current movies and web-based erotica, but that was about it. Once he realized he wasn’t about to contract some kind of plague, Herb had settled into the lockdown quite comfortably.
Except this week. This week he was on what the Security force called Dawn Patrol, nobody’s favorite duty. The idea of Dawn Patrol was to send out a guy in an all-weather vehicle to ride the circuit of the fence, presumably to rescue miscreants from their own misguided escape attempts. Dawn Patrol had yet to encounter even a single miscreant, but Herb supposed it had a certain deterrent effect. Today, given the shit-awful storm that had blown through the Lake overnight, Shulgin had told him his route was cut short: just a drive out to the main gate and back. But that was bad enough.
The snow had begun to taper off when he left the garage, but a fierce wind out of the northwest was still complicating matters. These Security vehicles were decent machines, smart-drive Hondas with mutable-tread tires, but a snowmobile would have been more efficient, Herb thought.
The main road from the Plaza at the center of town had been plowed during the night, but only as far south as the staff housing tracts. From there to the fence it was all blown and drifting snow, not quite deep enough to conceal the road but slow going even for the Honda. Herb took some consolation from the fact that there was absolutely nothing urgent or even necessary about this run. It made the delays easier to endure. He settled back in the steamy warmth of the cab and tried to picture his current favorite actress in a state of radical undress. (Back home, he had videoserver apps that did this trick for him.)
By the time he approached the main gate dawn had come and gone. There was enough light now to mark the limits of vision, a bubble of windblown snow around the cab of the Honda and a glimpse of ponderous clouds in a sky like a muddy river.
He reached the turnaround point at the main gate—no daring escape attempts in progress—and stopped, idling the vehicle’s motor. He was tempted to close his eyes and make up for some of the sleep he’d lost, sitting up after midnight watching old downloads, up at 3:30 to get ready for this pointless expedition. But if he was caught sleeping he’d be on Dawn Patrol for the rest of his natural life. Anyway, his breakfast coffee had worked its way through him and he had an urge to write his name in the snow.
He was climbing out of the cab into the frigid morning when the low clouds lifted and he saw something moving beyond the main gate. Something out there in no-man’s-land. Something big. He supposed at first it was one of those robotic delivery trucks carrying food and supplies, but when the wind shifted again he saw more of these uncertain shapes. Huge machines, just outside the fence.
He goose-stepped a few feet closer through the snow. Just to see, he told himself. He was as near the main gate as he meant to get when without warning it began to swing open. There was another lull in the wind, a moment of almost supernatural calm, and he recognized the vehicles out there as Powell tanks and armored personnel carriers. Dozens of them, lined up outside the Lake.
He turned and took a few awkward steps back toward the Honda, but before he reached it he was surrounded by a half-dozen soldiers in camouflage-white protective suits and aerosol masks. Soldiers wearing enhanced-vision goggles and carrying sonic-pulse rifles.
Herb Dunn had been in the service. He knew the drill.
He put up his hands and tried to look harmless.
“I only work here,” he said.
Thirty-One
Confused beyond the point of terror, Marguerit
e forced herself to focus on her breathing. She ignored the sandy soil under her hands and knees, ignored the sensation of dry heat, above all closed her eyes and ignored the presence of the Subject. Draw breath, she thought. Breathing was important. Breathing was important because—because—
Because if she were really on the surface of UMa47/E, breathing would be impossible.
The atmosphere of UMa47/E was less oxygenated than Earth’s and highly rarefied. The pressure differential would have burst her eardrums, had she traveled here from Blind Lake.
But it was fear, not anoxia, that was making her gasp, and her ears felt normal.
Therefore, she thought—still kneeling, eyes tightly closed—therefore, therefore, I’m not really here. Therefore I’m in no immediate danger.
(But if I’m not here then why do I feel the grains of sand under my fingernails, why do I feel the breeze on my skin?)
The summer Marguerite turned eleven, her parents had vacationed in Alaska. Much to Marguerite’s dismay, her father had bought the family a ride over Glacier Bay National Park in a tiny single-engine aircraft. The aircraft had dipped and rocked in the mountain winds, and Marguerite had been terrified to the point of nausea, far too terrified to even think about looking out the window.
Then her father had put an arm around her and said in his most profoundly ministerial voice, “It’s all right, Margie. You’re perfectly safe.”
She had repeated that phrase to herself for the rest of the flight. Her mantra. You’re perfectly safe. Oil on troubled waters. It had calmed her. The words came back to her now.
You’re perfectly safe.
(But I’m not. I’m lost, I’m helpless, I don’t know what’s happening, and I don’t know the way back home—)
Perfectly safe. The perfect lie.
She opened her eyes and forced herself to stand.
The Subject stood motionless more than a meter away from her. Marguerite knew from experience that, once he was still, he would probably stay that way for a while. (She remembered Chris’s comment—not a great party planet—and suppressed an incoherent urge to giggle.) Those inscrutable white eyes stared at her, or at least in her general direction, and she was tempted to stare back. But first things first, Marguerite told herself. Be a scientist. (You’re a scientist. You’re perfectly safe. Two enabling lies.)
Evaluate your surroundings.
She stood just inside the perimeter of the structure the Subject had entered. Looking back through its arches Marguerite could see with a shocking immediacy the desert, which she instinctively put into the context of the geography of UMa47/E: the central plateau of the largest continental plate, far from any of the planet’s shallow, salty seas, at the equatorial extreme of a temperate zone. But it was so much more than that. It was a sky as luminous and white as freshly fired china; it was a range of eroded basaltic hills fading into the distance; it was the long light of a foreign sun, and shadows that lengthened visibly as she watched. It was an irregular wind that smelled of lime and dust. It was not an image but a place: tactile, tangible, fully textured.
If I’m not here, Marguerite thought, where am I?
The ceiling of this structure screened the direct light of the sun. “Structure,” she thought, was one of those weasel-words so beloved of the people in Obs; but could she really call it a “building”?
There were no proper walls, only rank upon rank of pillars (abalone-white and coral-pink) arranged in a series of irregular arches that joined to form a roof. Farther in, the shadows deepened to impenetrability. The floor was simply blown and drifted sand. It resembled nothing in the Lobster city. It might have grown here, she thought, over the centuries. She touched the nearest pillar. It was cool and faintly iridescent, like mother-of-pearl.
Her hand began to tingle, and she pulled it away.
Of course it was all impossible, and not just because she was breathing normally on the surface of a planet unfit to support human life. The O/BEC images of UMa47/E had traveled across fifty-one light-years. What the monitors had displayed was almost literally ancient history. There was no such thing as simultaneity, not unless the O/BECs had learned to defy the fundamental laws of the universe.
Maybe it was better to think of this experience as deep VR. Immersive observation. A vivid dream.
Flimsy as that scaffolding was, it gave her the courage to look directly at the Subject.
The Subject was half-again taller than Marguerite. None of her observation had prepared her for the sheer animal bulk of him. She had felt the same the first time she went to a petting zoo back in grade eight. Animals that had looked innocent on television had turned out to be larger, dirtier, smellier, and far more unpredictable than she had imagined. They had been so disconcertingly themselves, so indifferent to her preconceptions.
The Subject was very much himself. Apart from his erect bipedal stance, there was nothing human about him. Nor did he resemble an insect or a crustacean, despite the ridiculous “lobster” tag that had been foisted on him.
His feet were broad, flat, leathery, and lacking toes or nails. Built for standing, not running. They were coated with the dust and grime of his long walk, and in some places the pebbly tegument had been eroded to a raw smoothness. Marguerite wondered if they hurt.
His legs were no longer than her own but nearly twice as thick. There was an implied muscularity about them, like two tree trunks wrapped in brick-red leather. His legs met seamlessly at his crotch, where there was none of the complex paraphernalia of human sexuality, perhaps not surprisingly: there might be better places to install one’s genitalia, not that anyone had ever demonstrated that the Subject or his kind even possessed genitalia of the conventional sort.
His thorax broadened to the shape of a fat disk, to which his arms were attached. His manipulating arms were slender, lithe, and equipped at their ends with what looked roughly like human hands—three fingers and an opposable digit—although the joints were all wrong. The stubby food-grasping arms, just long enough to reach from his shoulders to his mouth, were altogether stranger, as much an externalized jaw as an extra set of limbs. Instead of hands, these secondary arms possessed bony cup-and-blade structures for cutting and grinding vegetable material.
Subject’s head was a mobile dome with wattles of loose flesh where human anatomy would have put a neck. His mouth was a vertical pink slit that concealed a long, rasping, almost prehensile tongue. His eyes were set apart almost as widely as a bird’s, cosseted in bluish-purple gristle, the eyes themselves not purely white, Marguerite realized, but faintly yellow, the color of old piano keys. No interior structure of the eye was visible, no pupil, no cornea; his eyes might have been unorganized bundles of light-sensitive cells, or perhaps their structure was concealed under a partially opaque surface, like a permanent eyelid.
The orange coxcomb atop his head served no purpose anyone had been able to define. On Earth such features were usually sexual displays, but among the Subject’s people it could hardly be gendered, since every individual possessed one.
The most prominent—or most prominently strange—feature of the Subject was the dorsal cavity running down the center of his thorax. This was widely understood to be a breathing orifice. It was as long as Marguerite’s forearm, and it opened and closed periodically like a gasping, lipless mouth. (Ray, in one of his more classless moments, had told her it looked like “a diseased vagina.”) When it opened she could see porous honeycomb-like tissue beneath it, moist and yellow. Fine silver-gray cilia made a fringe surrounding the opening.
I’m perfectly safe, she thought, but in all honesty she was frightened of the Subject, frightened by the obvious weight and substance and implicit animal strength of him. Frightened even of the smell of him, a faint organic stink that was both sickly sweet and richly unpleasant, like the smell of a citrus rind gone green with mold.
Well, then, Marguerite thought, what now? Do we pretend this is a real meeting? Do we speak?
Could she speak? Fear had dried her m
outh. Her tongue felt numb as a wad of cotton.
“My name is Marguerite,” she whispered. “I know you don’t understand.”
He might not understand even the concept of a spoken language. She stood staring at him for a long moment. Maybe his silences spoke volumes. Maybe he spoke a language of immobility.
But he wasn’t totally immobile.
His breathing slit opened wider and emitted an almost inaudible wheezing sound. Could this be language? It sounded more like respiratory distress.
How fucking laughable, Marguerite thought, to be here—whatever this place was—and for whatever reason—only to be confronted once again with the impossibility of communication. I can’t even tell whether he’s talking or dying.
The Subject finished his discourse, if that was what it was, exhaling a gust of sour-milk air.
Apart from that, he still had not moved.
If this was an opportunity, Marguerite thought, and not just a hallucination, it was a wasted one. Her fear was laced with frustration. To be so incredibly, implausibly near to him. And still as far away as ever. Still mute, still dumb.
Outside, the shadows lengthened toward nightfall. The pale sky had turned a darker, bluer shade of white.
“I don’t understand what you said,” Marguerite confessed. “I don’t even know if you said anything.”
Subject exhaled and fluttered his cilia.
Yes, he spoke, said a voice.
It wasn’t the Subject’s voice. The sound came from all around her. From the mother-of-pearl arches, or from the shadows farther in.
But that wasn’t the strangest thing.
The strangest thing was that the voice sounded exactly like Tessa’s.
Thirty-Two
Elaine Coster tagged Chris as he headed out the clinic door. “Whoa,” she said, “hang on—where are you going?”
She knew he was freaking out over the disappearance of Tess and Marguerite. The duty nurse had shared with Elaine the story about the girl’s footprints, how they had vanished in the snow. Elaine hated to think of Tess, who had seemed like nice enough kid, out in this bitter weather. But there was daylight coming fast, and the girl shouldn’t be that hard to find, Elaine thought, if only Chris would exercise reasonable patience. As for Marguerite—