Ten more steps, he thought. Ten steps and I’ll be close enough to pick her up and carry her away from here. But ten steps was a long way.
The toes of her shoes tested the abyss.
“Is he dead?” Tess asked.
Every instinct told him she would not be easily reassured. She wanted the truth.
The truth: “I don’t know. I can’t see him, Tess.”
“Come closer,” she said. Another step. “No! Not to me. To the edge.”
He moved slowly and obliquely, trying to narrow the space between them without alarming her. When he reached the pit he looked down.
Pale crystals crawled up the rim of the chamber, but the O/BEC platens were lost in a pearlescent fog. No sign of Ray.
“She’s only protecting herself,” Tess said.
“She?”
“Mirror Girl. Or whatever you want to call her. She couldn’t depend on the machines to keep her safe anymore. So she made her own.”
Was Tess talking about the O/BECs? Had they contrived to regulate their own environment and eliminate their dependency on human beings?
“I can’t see him,” Tess mourned. “Can you see him?”
“No.” Ray was gone.
“Is he dead?”
Tess wasn’t crying, but her grief was etched into her voice. A wrong word could fuel her despair and send her toppling over the edge. An obvious lie could have the same effect.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t see him either.”
That was at least some of the truth, but it was also an evasion, and Tess gave him a scornful glare. “I think he died.”
“Well,” Chris said breathlessly, “it looks that way.”
She nodded solemnly, swaying.
Chris took another small step closer. How many more of these incremental movements before he could grab her and pull her back from the edge? Six? Seven?
“He didn’t like the story he was living in,” Tess said. She caught Chris in motion and shot him another warning glance. “I’m not Porry, you know. You don’t have to save me.”
“Step back from the edge, then,” Chris said.
“I haven’t decided. Maybe if you die here you don’t really die. This is turning into a special place. It isn’t Eyeball Alley anymore.”
No, Chris thought, it isn’t.
“Mirror Girl would catch me,” Tess said. “And take me away.”
“Even so, there’d be no coming back.”
“No…no coming back.”
“Porry wouldn’t jump,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Porry died,” Tess said.
“She’s—” He was about to deny it but stopped himself in time. Tess watched his face closely. “How did you know that?”
“I heard you talking to my mom.” The ultimate Porry story. “How did she die?” Tess asked.
The truth. Whatever that meant. Where did “truth” live, and why was it so alluring and so evasive? “I don’t like to talk about it, Tess.”
She shifted her weight deliberately, one foot to another. “Was it an accident?”
“No.”
She looked back into the pit. “Was it your fault?”
Another infinitesimal step closer. “She—I could have done better. I should have saved her.”
“But was it your fault?”
Those memories lived in a dark place. Porry’s murderous boyfriend. Porry’s boyfriend, weeping. I swear to God, I won’t touch her. It’s the fucking bottle, man, not me. Porry’s boyfriend, on the last day of Porry’s life, stinking of drunk sweat and promising redemption.
And I believed the son of a bitch. So was it my fault?
How to unravel this monument of pain he’d built? Mourning his sister with every self-inflicted wound.
Tess wanted the truth.
“No,” he said. “No. It wasn’t my fault.”
“But the story doesn’t have a happy ending.”
A step. Another. “Some stories don’t.”
Her eyes glistened. “I wish she hadn’t died, Chris.”
“I wish that too.”
“Does my story have a happy ending?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. I can try to help give it one.”
Tears rolled from her eyes. “But you can’t promise.”
“I can promise to try.”
“Is that the truth?”
“The truth,” Chris said. “Now give me your hand.”
He swept her into his arms and ran from the gallery, ran toward the stairwell, ran against the beating of his heart until he could taste the edge of winter and see at least a little of the sun.
Part Four
Intelligibility
Marvel not, my comrade, if I appear
talking to you on super-terrestrial and
aerial topics. The long and the short of
the matter is that I am running over the
order of a Journey I have lately made.
—Lucian of Samosata, Icaromenippus,
c. 150 AD
Thirty-Eight
They crossed the Ohio border at the end of a languorous August afternoon.
Chris drove the last leg of the trip while Maguerite listened to music and Tess dozed in the back of the car. They were ultimately bound for New York, where Chris was scheduled for a series of meetings with his publisher, but Marguerite had lobbied for a weekend at her father’s house, a couple of days of gentle decompression before they were borne back into the world.
It was reassuring, Chris thought, to see how little this part of the country had changed since the events of last year. A National Guard checkpoint stood abandoned at the Indiana border, mute testimony both to the crisis and its passing; otherwise it was cows and combines, truckstops and county lines. Many of these roads had never been automated, and it was a pleasure to drive for hours at a time with no hands on the wheel but his own—no proxalerts, overrides, or congestion-avoidance protocols; just man and machine, the way God intended.
He nudged Marguerite as they approached the county limits.
She took off her headphones and watched the road. She had been away too long, she told Chris; she was distressed by the shabby mallways, drug bars, and cordiality palaces that had sprung up along the old highway.
But the heart of the town was just as she had described it: the century-old police station, the commons lined with chestnut trees, the more modern trefoil windmills riding the crest of a distant ridge. The several churches, including the Presbyterian church where her father used to preside.
Her father was retired now. He had moved from the rectory to a frame house on Butternut Street south of the business district. Chris followed her directions and parked at the curbside out front.
“Wake up, Tess,” Marguerite said. “We’re here.”
Tess climbed out of the car smiling groggily at her grandfather, who came down the porch steps beaming.
Marguerite had worried that the meeting between Chris and her father might be awkward. That fear proved baseless. She watched in mild surprise as her father shook Chris’s hand warmly and ushered him into the house.
Chuck Hauser had changed very little in the three years since her last visit. He was one of those men who reach a physical plateau at middle-age and glide into their seventies only lightly touched by time—same salt-and-pepper beard, stubble-cut scalp, respectably small paunch. Still wearing the monochrome cotton shirts he had always favored, in and out of fashion. Same blue eyes, despite a recent keriotomy.
He had prepared a meal of meat loaf, peas, corn, and mashed potatoes, served on the big dining room table where (he informed Tess) Marguerite used to do her homework when she was a girl. That had been at the rectory on Glendavid Avenue. She had worked out math problems every evening after dinner, sitting next to a big fake-Tiffany lamp that cast a light she remembered as buttery yellow, almost warm enough to taste.
Her father’s dinner table conversation made no
reference to Crossbank, Blind Lake, Ray Scutter, or the global events of the previous year. He encouraged Chris to call him “Chuck” he reminisced at length with Marguerite; and when Tess grew obviously restless he let her take her dessert into the living room, where she turned on the quaintly rounded old video panel and began to search for cartoons.
He came back to the table with a pot of coffee and three mugs. “Until the day I got that call from Provo last February I didn’t know whether you were alive or dead.”
Provo, Utah, was where the people of Blind Lake had been held after the end of the lockdown—six more months of medical and psychological quarantine, living like refugees on a decommissioned Continental Defense Force base. Six months waiting to be declared sane, uncontaminated, and not a threat to the general population. “It must have been awful,” Marguerite said, “not knowing.”
“More awful for you than me, I imagine. I had a feeling you’d come through okay.”
The sky outside had grown dark. Chris finished his coffee and volunteered to keep Tess company. Her father switched on a floor lamp, illuminating the oaken bookcase behind the table. As a bookish child Marguerite had been both drawn and repelled by these shelves: so many intriguing buff or amber-colored volumes, which turned out on closer inspection to be marrowless church-related or “inspirational” works. (Although she had swiped the Kipling Just So Stories.) She noticed some books he had lately added—astronomy and cosmology titles, most published within the last couple of years. There was even a copy of Sebastian Vogel’s god-and-science doorstop.
He pulled his chair next to Marguerite’s. “How’s Tess dealing with the death of her father?”
“Well enough, given the circumstances and considering she just turned twelve. She still insists he might not be dead.”
“He vanished inside the starfish.”
Marguerite winced at that popular name for the O/BEC-generated structures. Like “Lobsters,” it was a gross misnomer. Why must every unfamiliar thing be compared to something washed up on a beach? “Lots of people vanished the same way.”
“Like those so-called pilgrims at Crossbank. But they don’t come back.”
“No,” Marguerite said, “they don’t come back.”
“Does Tess know that?”
“Yes.”
That, and perhaps more.
“There were times,” Chuck Hauser said, “when I despised that man for the way he treated you. I was more relieved than I let on when you divorced him. But I think he genuinely loved Tess, at least so far as he was able to love anyone.”
“Yes,” Marguerite said. “I think that’s true.”
He nodded. Then he cleared his throat, a phlegmy bark that reminded her just how old he had become.
“Looks like a clear night,” he said.
“Clear and cool. You’d hardly know it’s August.”
He smiled. “Come out into the backyard, Marguerite. There’s something I want to show you.”
Tess had already found something to watch on the video panel: one of those twentieth-century black-and-white movies she was so fond of. A comedy. The jokes were either bizarre or incomprehensible, it seemed to Chris, but Tess laughed obligingly, if only at the expressions on the actors’ faces.
Chris leafed through a stack of magazines Marguerite’s father had left in the rack beside the sofa. They were all news magazines, and the oldest dated back to September of last year.
It was a year’s history in miniature. The Burbank murders, military setbacks in Lesotho, the devaluation of the Continental dollar, the Pan-Arab Alliance—and of course, above all else, the screaming headlines about Crossbank/Blind Lake.
Everything he had missed during the lockdown, history from the outside looking in.
ASTRONOMICAL FACILITIES CLOSED IN
UNEXPLAINED GOV’T MOVE
No real details, but much speculation about the O/BEC platens. There was a sidebar explaining how Crossbank’s processors differed from the usual quantum computers: Qubits, Excitons, and Self-Evolving Code.
Another issue, dated a week later:
STARFISH STRUCTURE RESEMBLES FINAL IMAGES
CAPTURED BY CROSSBANK QUANTUM SCOPE
Crossbank had discovered an apparently artificial structure on the watery world of HR8832/B. The Crossbank processor had promptly generated a near-exact copy of the structure around itself, like a kind of spiky armor.
Was this contamination or procreation? Infection or reproduction?
Both Crossbank and Blind Lake had been immediately quarantined.
CONFUSION AT CROSSBANK: SOME RESEARCHERS
DISAPPEARED INSIDE STRUCTURE SOURCES SAY
Automated probes revealed that the labyrinthine interior of the Crossbank “starfish” was a very strange place. Human volunteers retreated in confusion; robots vanished; remote telemetry quickly became unintelligible.
EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS OF CROSSBANK ANOMALY
The now-familiar image. From the air, the six radial arms; from ground level, the iridescent arches and spongiform caverns. In the text, a note that the material from which the anomaly was constructed was “scale invariant—under a microscope, any piece looks much like the whole thing does to the human eye.”
Chris leafed ahead:
SECOND “STARFISH” APPEARS HUNDREDS OF MILES
FROM CROSSBANK, SPARKS PANIC
The second structure had manifested overnight in a soybean field south of Macon, Georgia. Apart from a few acres of fallow ground, it destroyed nothing and killed no one, though a curious farmhand disappeared inside it before local authorities could establish a cordon. Nevertheless, large numbers of residents had fled their homes and spread confusion across the Southeast.
(Since then five more “starfish” had appeared in isolated areas around the globe, apparently following force lines in the Earth’s magnetic field. None had proved dangerous to anyone prudent enough to avoid stepping inside.)
NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS CALL FOR CALM, CITE
“NO EVIDENCE OF HOSTILE INTENT.”
These had been the weeks of greatest panic. The apocalyptic pronouncements and instant cults; the hawks and the pilgrims; the blockaded highways.
PRIVATE PLANE REPORTED SHOT DOWN OVER
BLIND LAKE NO-FLY ZONE.
Introducing Adam Sandoval, 65, owner of a Loveland, Colorado, hardware store, who had since admitted his intention of flying his aircraft directly into the Blind Lake O/BEC installation (a.k.a. the Alley), in order to prevent another manifestation of the kind that had lured his wife away from him. (Sandoval’s wife had been a pilgrim, vanished and presumed dead in a group penetration of the Crossbank artifact.)
Chris had gotten to know Adam Sandoval during the post-lockdown confinement in Provo. Sandoval had recovered from his coma and his burns, though his skin was still shockingly pink where it had been restored. He had been contrite about his aborted suicide attempt, but remained bellicose on the subject of his wife’s disappearance.
Introduced to Sebastian Vogel in the Provo provision line one evening, Sandoval had refused to shake Sebastian’s hand. “My wife read your book,” he said, “shortly before she decided to run off looking for transcendence, whatever that fucking word means. Don’t you ever think about the people you peddle your bullshit to?”
Last week Sebastian and Sue had left Provo to set up housekeeping in Carmel, where a friend had offered Sue a job at a real-estate firm. Sebastian was refusing interviews and had announced that there would be no sequel to God & the Quantum Vacuum.
BLIND LAKE EVENT PROMPTS MILITARY
INCURSION AND RESCUE
BLIND LAKE DETAINEES REMOVED TO UNDISCLOSED
LOCATION FOR QUARANTINE, DEBRIEFING
“Rescue” meant a terrifying roundup initiated as soon as the Blind Lake Eye began to transform itself into the familiar symmetric starfish structure. “Quarantine” meant six more months of detention under the newly enacted Public Safety Protocols. “Debriefing” meant a series of interviews with well-dressed and
well-meaning government personnel who recorded everything and often asked the same questions twice.
Most of the population of Blind Lake had cooperated willingly. Everyone who had lived through the lockdown had a story to tell.
The last and most recent issue of Chuck Hauser’s newsmagazines contained no screaming headlines, only a guest editorial in the back pages:
What We Know and What We Don’t: A Survivor’s Perspective.
…and as the fear subsides, we can begin to take account of what we’ve learned and what we have yet to understand.
Something momentous has happened, something that still defies easy comprehension. We’re told that we created, in our most complex computers, what is essentially a new form of life—or else we have assisted into existence a new generation of a very old form of life, a form of life perhaps older than the Earth itself. We have evidence from the now-defunct facilities at Crossbank and Blind Lake that this process has already happened on two life-bearing worlds elsewhere in the local neighborhood and perhaps across the galaxy.
But the “starfish”—and can’t we come up with a more elegant name for these really quite beautiful structures?—seem little interested in contacting us, much less intervening in our affairs. We have the example on UMa47/E of a sentient culture that has coexisted with the starfish for (probably) centuries, without any meaningful interaction at all.
This lends credence to those who suggest the starfish represent not only a wholly new form of life but a wholly new form of consciousness, which overlaps only minimally with our own. We have looked deep into the sky, in other words, and met at last the limits of intelligibility.
But there is the counterexample of HR8832/B, a planet on which those who constructed the quantum nuclei of the starfish have disappeared altogether. Perhaps naturally, in an extinction event, or perhaps not. Perhaps we are being offered a choice. Perhaps a species that pursues a genuine understanding of the starfish can reach that goal only by becoming something other than itself. Perhaps, to truly understand the mystery, we will have to embrace it and become it. Wasn’t it Heisenberg who observed that the seer and the seen become inextricably interlinked?