Blind Lake

  “I’m driving out to the Eye,” Chris said.

  “The Eye? I’m sorry, but what the hell for? Ari says it’s being evacuated.”

  “I can’t explain.”

  She grabbed his arm before he could open the door. “Come on, Chris, you can do better than that. You think Tess and Marguerite are at the Eye? How is that even possible?”

  Please, Elaine thought, let this not be one more case of Blind Lake lunacy.

  “Tess wasn’t just wandering around out there. Her footprints are straight as a ruler, and they’re pointed directly at the Eye.”

  “But the footprints stop?”

  “Yes.”

  “So maybe she just came back to the clinic door. You know, stepping in her own tracks.”

  “Walking backwards in the snow? In the dark?”

  “Well, what do you think? If she’s at the Eye, how’d she get there? Did she sprout wings, Chris? Or maybe she beamed herself there. Maybe she traveled in her astral body.”

  “I don’t pretend to understand it. But the last time she disappeared from school, that’s where she went.”

  “You really think she walked that distance in this weather?”

  “I don’t know about walked. But I think that’s where she is, I think she’s in trouble, and I think Marguerite would want me to go find her.”

  “You can read minds too? Ari and Shulgin and a bunch of other people are already keeping their eyes out for Tess and Marguerite. Let them do their work. They’re better at it than you are. Chris, listen to me, listen to me. I got a call from one of my contacts on the Security force. A whole fucking battalion’s worth of military gear and personnel just showed up at the main gate, and they’re coming inside. You understand? The siege is over! I don’t know what comes next, but in all likelihood the Lake will be evacuated by nightfall—you, me, Tess, Marguerite, everybody. I’m heading down the main road, and I want you to come with me. We’re still journalists. We’ve got a story here.”

  He smiled at her in a way Elaine didn’t like, rueful and sad. She decided she hated all tall young men with doleful eyes.

  “You take it, Elaine,” he said. “It’s your story. You’re the one to tell it.”

  Elaine watched him angle his big body into the car, watched as he drove off through the still-falling snow at a reckless speed.

  Sebastian Vogel, crammed into his lobby chair like a Buddha into an airline seat, said, “I think I finally figured it out.”

  Elaine sat next to him wearily. “Please. No more metaphysical bullshit.” There were things she needed to do. Pack up her server and her written notes and keep them with her, even if some armed bureaucrat wanted to confiscate them. Consider facing the exterior world, whatever the exterior world had become, with its pilgrims and falling airplanes and roadblocks east of the Mississippi.

  “Ever since Crossbank,” Sebastian said, “I’ve been wondering why you agreed to take this assignment. A veteran scientific journalist, hired by a frankly second-rate New York magazine to address a subject that’s been done to death, sharing the spotlight with a crank theologist and a discredited scandal-monger. That never made any sense to me. But I think I figured it out. It’s because of Chris, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, fuck off, Sebastian.”

  “You read his book, followed his story in the press, watched his congressional testimony. Maybe you’d already picked up hints about Galliano’s ethical problems. You saw Chris being pilloried, and you knew he was right in spite of all the outrage and bad press. You were curious about him. Maybe he reminded you of yourself at that age. You took the job because you wanted to meet him.”

  This would have been less annoying had it been untrue. Elaine mustered her fiercest go-to-hell stare.

  “Was he a disappointment?” Sebastian said. “As a personal project?”

  I don’t have time for this, Elaine thought. She felt dizzy with lack of sleep. Maybe she could just sit here until the soldiers came for her. All the really important work she’d done was stored in her pocket server, after all, and they would take her server from her only when they pried it out of her cold, dead hands. “When I met Chris I thought they’d beaten him down. He was obviously unhappy, he wasn’t writing, he was a little too free with the recreational chemicals, and he was carrying a load of guilt that was way too big for him.”

  “I’m not sure that’s all because of his experience with Galliano.”

  “Probably not. I just thought…”

  “You wanted to help,” Sebastian said gently.

  “Yes. I’m a fucking saint. Now shut up.”

  “You wanted to lend him some of your cynicism.”

  “He’d be a better journalist if he learned not to care.”

  “Though perhaps not a better human being.”

  “I’m not discussing this.”

  “What he needed, Elaine, and I don’t mean this badly, but what he needed, it wasn’t in your power to give it to him.”

  “Speaks the guru.” She bit her lip. “So what do you think? You think he found it? Whatever it is he needs?”

  “I think he’s looking for it right now,” Sebastian said.

  Chris ran into outbound traffic on the road to the Eye. Night staff leaving the facility, he guessed, as rumors circulated that the siege was coming to an end.

  Even in this wan daylight the road was treacherous driving. He saw more than one car abandoned in the drifts, workers in burly winter coats flagging rides from colleagues.

  He drove past an untenanted guardpost directly to the entrance to the Eye, where he found Charlie Grogan herding stragglers out of the lobby into the cold morning air. The sound of Klaxons beat against the raging wind.

  “Not even remotely possible,” Charlie said when Chris explained what he wanted to do. “The building suffered a tremor of some kind early this morning and all kinds of electrical and communications problems since then. We’ve got strict protocols about this. I can’t let anyone in until the building is declared structurally sound. Even after we get inspectors inside, we still have to worry about containment on the cryogenics.” He looked mournful. “The O/BECs are probably dead already.”

  “Tessa’s inside.”

  “So you said, but I doubt that a whole lot, Mr. Carmody. Our Security people conducted a very orderly evacuation. What would Tessa be doing here at five in the morning, anyway?”

  Looking for Mirror Girl, Chris thought. “It wouldn’t be the first time she got inside without being seen.”

  “You really have a solid reason to believe Tess is in this building?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to share that information with me?”

  “I’m sorry. You’ll have to trust me.”

  “I’m sorry too. Look, even if she is inside, we’ve got the Lake’s Security people headed in. Maybe they can give you some advice.”

  “Charlie, you need to double-check on that. I heard Shulgin’s men were detoured to the south gate.”

  “What, this thing about the military coming in?”

  “Call Shulgin. Ask him when you can expect to see a Security detail.”

  Charlie sighed. “Look, I’ll talk to Tabby Menkowitz and see if she can get a volunteer from our own people to do a walk-through—”

  “If Tess sees a stranger she’ll just hide. In an installation this big, I’m sure an eleven-year-old girl can avoid getting caught.”

  “But she’ll come out for you?”

  “I believe there’s a chance she will.”

  “What do you mean to do, look inside every room in the building?”

  “Last time you found her in the O/BEC gallery, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “It’s the O/BECs she’s interested in.”

  “I could lose my job,” Charlie said.

  “Is that really an issue at this point?”

  “Jesus, Chris.” Then: “If they end up pulling your body out of the rubble, what am I supposed to say?”

  “Say
you never saw me.”

  “I wish it was true.” Charlie’s server buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it. “Tell you what. Take this.” He gave Chris his yellow-striped hard hat. “There’s a transponder in the crown. It’ll give you emergency all-pass privileges if any of the automated security is still up. Put it on. And if she’s not where you think she is, get the fuck out of there, all right?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Just bring back my goddamn hat,” Charlie said.

  Thirty-Three

  As soon as Marguerite identified the voice as Tessa’s, Tess herself stepped out from behind (or somehow inside) the nearest iridescent pillar.

  But it wasn’t really Tess. Marguerite knew that instantly. It was the image of Tess, down to the denim overalls and yellow shirt in which Marguerite had hurriedly dressed her daughter for the trip to the Blind Lake clinic. But Tess had never looked so surrealistically flawless, so lit from within, so unblinkingly clear-eyed.

  This was Mirror Girl.

  “You don’t have to be scared,” Mirror Girl said.

  Yes, Marguerite thought, I think I do, I do have to be scared. “You’re Mirror Girl,” she stammered.

  “Tess calls me that.”

  “What are you really, then?”

  “There’s no simple word for it.”

  “Did you bring me here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this is what you wanted.”

  Was it? “What do you have to do with my daughter?”

  “I learned a lot from Tess.”

  “Have you hurt her?”

  “I don’t hurt people.”

  This creature, this thing that had appropriated Tessa’s appearance, had also mastered Tessa’s diction and Tessa’s oblique way with questions and answers. “Tess said you live in the Eye. In the O/BEC processors.”

  “I have a sister at Crossbank,” Mirror Girl said proudly. “I have sisters in the stars. Almost too many to count. I have a sister here. We talk to each other.”

  This conversation was too bizarre to be real, Marguerite decided. It had the trajectory and momentum of a dream and, like a dream, it would have to play itself out. Her participation was not only necessary but mandatory.

  Ursa Majoris 47 had begun to settle toward the horizon, casting long and complex shadows into the maze of arches. “This planet is years and years away from Earth,” Marguerite said, thinking of time, the passage of time, the paradox of time. “I can’t really be here.”

  “You’re not out there,” the image of Tess said, gesturing at the desert; “you’re in here. It’s different in here. More different the farther inside you go. It’s true, if you walked out of here you would die. Your body couldn’t breathe or go on living, and if you counted the hours they would be different hours than the Blind Lake hours.”

  “How do you know about Blind Lake?”

  “I was born there.”

  “Why do you look like Tess?”

  “I told you. I learned a lot from her.”

  “But why Tess?”

  Mirror Girl shrugged in a distressingly Tess-like fashion. “She knew my sister at Crossbank before I was born. It could have been someone else. But it had to be someone.”

  Like the Subject, Marguerite thought. We could have picked any individual to follow. It just happened to be him.

  The Subject regarded this exchange indifferently, if his motionlessness signified anything like indifference.

  “Go on,” Mirror Girl said, “talk to him. Isn’t that what you want to do?”

  Ultimately, yes, but it had never been more than a daydream. She didn’t know how to begin. She faced the Subject again.

  “Hello,” she said, feeling idiotic, her voice cracking.

  There was no response.

  She looked back helplessly at Mirror Girl.

  “Not like that. Tell him a story,” Mirror Girl suggested.

  “What story?”

  “Your story.”

  Absurd, Marguerite thought. She couldn’t just tell him a story. It was a childish idea, a Tess-like idea. She had been here too long already. She wasn’t like the Subject; she couldn’t stand in one place indefinitely. She was still a mortal human being.

  But even as she had these thoughts she felt a wave of calm coming over her. It was like the feeling she had putting Tess to bed, tucking her in, reading (before Tess had become too sophisticated for this) something from the old, strange children’s books she had found so fascinating: Oz, The Hobbit, Harry Potter. Marguerite’s fatigue lifted (perhaps this was a spell cast by Mirror Girl), and she closed her eyes and found herself wondering what she could tell the Subject about the Earth, not its history or geography but her own experience of it. How frighteningly strange it would no doubt seem to him. Her story: born in the customary manner of human biology to human parents, her memory emerging diffusely from a haze of cradles and blankets; learning her name (she had been “Margie” for the first twelve years of her life); plunged into the tedium, terror, and rare joys of school (Miss Marmette, Mr. Foucek, Mrs. Bland, the stern deities of grades 1, 2, 3); the cycle of the seasons, naming the months, September and school, November and the first truly cold days, January dark and often painful, the storming and melting months before June, June hot and full of promise, the fleeting freedoms of August; childhood dramas: appendicitis, appendectomy, influenza, pneumonia; friendships begun, sustained, or aborted; a growing awareness of her parents as two real, separate people who did more than cater to her needs: her mother, who cooked and kept house and read large books and made charcoal sketches (of abstracted rural villages, notionally Spanish, drenched in clinical sunlight); her father, distant and equally bookish, a Presbyterian minister, sonorous lord of Sundays but gentle on the home front, who had often seemed to Marguerite a lonely man, lonely for God, lonely for the deep architecture of the cosmos, the scaffolding of meaning he imagined when he read the synoptic Gospels and in which, he confessed to her once, he had never really been able to believe; her own dawning curiosity about the world and its place in time and her place in nature, a curiosity strictly scientific, at least as she understood “science” from video shows and speculative novels: how good it felt to master what was generally known of planets, moons, stars, galaxies, and their beginnings and ultimate ends, relishing even the unanswered questions because they were shared, acknowledged, and systematically challenged, unlike her father’s fragile religiosity, which he had been reluctant even to discuss, faith, she surmised, being like an antique tea set, beautiful and ancient but not to be exposed to light or heat; knowing, too, the pride he took in her growing list of accomplishments (straight A’s in everything but music and physical education, where her clumsiness betrayed her; the math badges and science-fair awards; the scholarships); the sudden indecencies of adolescence, making sense of the female body that had begun to surprise her in so many ways, learning to equate the blood spots in her underwear with the biology of reproduction, eggs and seeds and ovaries and pollen and a chain of carnal acts connecting her to the common ancestor of everything alive on Earth; her own skirmishes with the erotic (a boy named Jeremy in the furnished basement of his house, while his mother hosted a party upstairs; an older boy named Elliot, in his bedroom on a winter night when his parents were stranded by monsoon weather in an airport somewhere in Thailand); her early fascination with the O/BEC images of HR8832/B, ocean-scapes like Victorian color-plate illustrations of Mellville (Typee, Oomoo), a fascination that led her to astrobiology; the Princeton scholarship (at her graduation her mother had wept with pride but suffered, that night, the first of a series of ischemic attacks that would culminate in a killing stroke half a year later); standing with her father at the funeral, willing herself to stay upright when she wanted to lie down and make the world disappear; her first real long-term relationship, a university affair with a man named Mike Okuda who had also been obsessed with O/BEC images and who once admitted fantasizing, when they made love, that he was unde
r invisible surveillance from other worlds; the pain of separation when he took a job designing Hall Effect engines somewhere on the West Coast, and her subsequent realization that she would never stumble into love but would have to construct it from its constituent parts, with the help of a willing partner; her apprenticeship at Crossbank, working out tentative classification systems for chthonic plant species based on images sequestered from Obs (the four-lobed peristem, the pale taproot exposed by a storm); her first encounter with Ray, when she had mistaken her admiration for him for the possibility of love, and their first physical intimacy, sensing in Ray a reluctance that bordered on distaste and for which she blamed herself; the erosion of their marriage (his relentless vigilance and suspicion, begrudging even visits to sick friends, his aloofness during her pregnancy) and the things that sustained her during that difficult time (her work, long walks away from the house, the weight of winter sunsets); her water breaking, and labor, and giving birth dazed and sedated in a hospital delivery room while Ray, in the hallway outside, conducted a loud argument with a nurse’s aide; the miracle and fascination of Tessa, sensing some divinity (her father might have said) in the exchange of roles, daughter become mother, witness to what she had once herself experienced; her increasing frustration when the Blind Lake installation began to derive images of a new inhabited world while she continued to catalogue seaweed and lagoon flowers; the divorce, the bitter custody dispute, an increasing physical fear of Ray which she dismissed as paranoia (but shouldn’t have: it was a real snake); the transfer to Blind Lake, fulfillment and loneliness, the lockdown, Chris….

  How could she put any of this into words? The story wasn’t one story. It was fractal, stories within stories; unpack one and you unpacked them all, quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius…And, of course, the Subject wouldn’t understand.