“Elaine—”
“You want to flush your career away, pretending to work and not working and blowing deadlines and screwing waitresses with big tits and drinking yourself to sleep? Because you can totally do that. You wouldn’t be the first. Not by a country mile. Self-pity is such an absorbing hobby.”
“A man died, Elaine.”
“You didn’t kill him.”
“That’s debatable.”
“No, Chris, it’s not debatable. Galliano went over that hill either accidentally or as a willed act of self-destruction. Maybe he regretted his sins or maybe not, but they were his sins, not yours.”
“I exposed him to ridicule.”
“You exposed work that was dangerously shoddy and self-serving and a threat to innocent people. It happened to be Galliano’s work, and Galliano happened to drive his motorcycle into the Monongahela River, but that’s his choice, not yours. You wrote a good book—”
“Jesus, Elaine, how badly does the world need one more fucking good book?”
“—and a true book, and you wrote it out of a sense of indignity that was not misplaced.”
“I appreciate you saying this, but—”
“And the thing is, you obviously got nothing useful from Crossbank, and what worries me is that you’ll get nothing here, and blame yourself for it, and you’ll blow off the deadline in order to conduct more efficiently this project of self-punishment you’ve embarked on. And that’s so goddamn unprofessional. I mean, Vogel is a crackpot, but at least he’ll produce copy.”
For a moment Chris entertained the idea of getting up and walking out of the restaurant. He could go back to the gym and interview some of the stranded day workers. They would talk to him, at least. All he was getting from Elaine was more guilt, and he’d had enough, thank you.
The salmon arrived, congealing in drizzled butter.
“What you have to do—” She paused. The waiter dangled an enormous wooden pepper mill over the table. “Take that away, thank you.”
The waiter fled.
“What you have to do, Chris, is stop acting like you have something to be ashamed of. The book you wrote, use it. If someone’s hostile about it, confront them. If they’re afraid of you because of it, use their fear. If you’re stonewalled, you can at least write the story of how you were stonewalled and how it felt to walk around Blind Lake as a pariah. But don’t blow this opportunity.” She leaned forward, her sleeves dangling perilously close to the butter sauce. “Because the thing is, Chris, this is Blind Lake. Maybe the great unwashed public has only a vague notion of what goes on here, but we know better, right? This is where all the textbooks get rewritten. This is where the human species begins to define its place in the universe. This is the fulcrum of who we are and what we’ll become.”
“You sound like a brochure.”
She drew back. “Why? You think I’m too wrinkled and cynical to recognize something genuinely awesome when I see it?”
“I didn’t mean that. I—”
“For what it’s worth, you caught me in a moment of sincerity.”
“Elaine, I’m just not in the mood for a lecture.”
“Well, I didn’t really think you were in the mood for it. Okay, Chris. Do what you think is best.” She waved at his plate. “Eat that poor assaulted fish.”
“A tent,” he said. “The Gobi Plateau.”
“Well, sort of a tent. An inflatable habitat airdropped from Beijing. Rechargeable fuel cells, heat at night, all the satellite channels.”
“Just like Roy Chapman Andrews?”
“Hey,” she said. “I’m a journalist, not a martyr.”
Five
To Marguerite’s dismay, and Tessa’s grave disappointment, video and download reception did not improve over the weekend. Nor was it possible to put a call or net connection through beyond the fenced perimeter of Blind Lake.
Marguerite assumed this was some new incarnation of Blind Lake’s elaborate security protocols. There had been several such shutdowns back at Crossbank during the time Marguerite had worked there. Most had lasted only a few hours, though one such occasion (an unauthorized overflight that turned out to be nothing more than a private pilot who’d burned out both his nav chips and his transponders) had created a minor scandal and sealed the security perimeter for nearly a week.
Here at Blind Lake the shutdown was, at least for Marguerite, not much of an inconvenience, at least so far. She hadn’t planned to go anywhere, and there was nobody on the outside to whom she urgently needed to speak. Her father lived in Ohio and called her every Saturday, but he was savvy about security issues and wouldn’t worry unduly when he couldn’t get hold of her. It was a problem for Tessa, however.
Not that Tess was one of those kids who lived in front of the video panel. Tess liked to play outside, though she mostly played alone, and Blind Lake was one of the few places on Earth where a child could wander unaccompanied with negligible fear of drugs or crime. This weekend, though, the weather wasn’t cooperating. A crisp, sunlit Saturday morning gave way by noon to rolling asphalt-colored clouds and brief, violent squalls of rain. October sounding the horn of winter. The temperature dropped to a chilly ten degrees Centigrade, and although Tess ventured out once—to the garage, to root through a box of dolls not yet unpacked from the move—she was quickly back inside, shivering under her flannel jacket.
Sunday was the same, with wind gusting around the eaves troughs and piping through the bathroom ceiling vent. Marguerite asked Tess if there was anyone from school she’d like to play with. Tess was dubious at first but finally named a girl called Edie Jerundt. She wasn’t certain about the spelling, but there were, thank goodness, only a few J’s in the Blind Lake intramural access directory.
Connie Jerundt, Edie’s mother, turned out to be a sequence analyst from Imaging who promptly volunteered to bring Edie over for a play date. (Without even asking Edie, who was, Marguerite had to assume, just as bored as Tess.) They arrived within the hour. Mother and daughter looked so much alike they might have been Russian dolls, one nesting comfortably inside the other, distinct only in their dimensions. Both were mousy and wide-eyed and tousle-haired, features softened by Connie’s adulthood but concentrated, grotesquely, in Edie’s small face.
Edie Jerundt had brought along a handful of recent downloads, and the two girls settled down immediately in front of the video panel. Connie stayed a quarter of an hour, making nervous conversation about the lengthy security shutdown and how inconvenient it was proving—she had hoped to make a trip into Constance for some early Christmas shopping—then excused herself and promised to stop by and pick up Edie before five.
Marguerite watched the two girls as they sat in the living room staring at the video panel.
The downloads were a bit babyish for Tess, Panda Girl adventures, and Edie had brought along those image-synched glasses that were supposed to be bad for your eyes if you wore for them for more than a few hours. Both girls flinched from the enhanced 3-D action sequences.
Apart from that they might have been alone. They sat at opposite ends of the sofa, inclined at contrasting angles against plump pillows. Marguerite felt immediately and obscurely sorry for Edie Jerundt, one of those girls designed by nature to be picked on and ostracized, arms and legs awkward as stilts, her grasp approximate, her words halting, her embarrassment perpetual and profound.
It was nice, Marguerite reflected, that Tess had befriended a girl like Edie Jerundt.
Unless—
Unless it was Edie who had befriended Tess.
After the downloads the girls played with the dolls Tess had liberated from the garage. The dolls were a motley bunch, most collected by Tess at outdoor flea markets back when Ray used to make weekend drives from Crossbank into the New Hampshire countryside. Sun-paled fashion dolls with strangely twisted joints and mismatched clothes; oversized baby dolls, a majority of them naked; a scattering of action figures from forgotten movies, arms and legs frozen akimbo. Tess tried to enlist E
die in a scenario (this is the mother, this is the father; the baby is hungry but they have to go to work so this is the baby-sitter), but Edie quickly grew bored and was reduced to parading the dolls across the coffee table and giving them nonsense monologues (I’m a girl, I have a dog, I’m pretty, I hate you). Tess, as if gently nudged aside, retired to the sofa and watched. She began to bump her head rhythmically against the sofa cushion. About one beat per second, until Marguerite, passing, steadied her head with her hand.
This ryhthmic bumping, plus a worrisome speech-delay, had been Marguerite’s first clue that there was something different about Tessa. Not something wrong—Marguerite would not accede to that judgmental word. But, yes, Tess was different; Tess had some problems. Problems none of the well-intentioned therapists Marguerite had consulted were ever quite able to define. Most often they talked about idiosyncratic threshold-level autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. Which meant: we have a labelled bin in which to toss your daughter’s symptoms, but no real treatment.
Marguerite had taken Tess for physiotherapy aimed at correcting her clumsiness and “poor proprioception,” had tried her on courses of drugs designed to modify her supply of serotonin or dopamine or Factor Q, none of which had made any perceptible change in Tess’s condition. Which implied, perhaps, only that Tess had an unusual personality; that her skewed aloofness, her social isolation, were problems she would have to carry indefinitely or overcome as an act of personal will. Fooling with her neurochemical architecture was counterproductive, Marguerite had come to believe. Tess was a child; her personality was still a work-in-progress; she should not be drugged or bullied into someone else’s notion of maturity.
And that had seemed like a plausible compromise, at least until Marguerite left Ray, until the trouble back at Crossbank.
There had not even been a newspaper this weekend. Usually it was possible to e-print sections of the New York Times (or most any other urban paper), but even that meager connection to the outside world had been clipped. And if Marguerite missed the papers, how the news junkies must be suffering! Cut off from the great global soap opera, left to simmer in ignorance about the Belgian Accords or the latest Continental Court appointment. The silence of the video panel and the periodic sputtering of the rain gave the afternoon a yawning lassitude, made Marguerite content to sit in the kitchen and leaf through old issues of Astrobiology and Exozoology, her attention fluttering mothlike over the dense text, until Connie Jerundt returned for Edie.
Marguerite rooted the girls out of Tess’s room. Edie was sprawled on the bed, her feet against the wall, picking through Tess’s shoebox of faux jewelery, ornamental combs, and tortoiseshell barrettes. Tess sat at her dresser, in front of the mirror.
“Your mom’s here, Edie,” Marguerite said.
Edie blinked her froggishly large eyes, then scurried downstairs to hunt for her shoes.
Tess remained at the mirror, twining her hair around her right forefinger.
“Tess?”
The hair made a glossy curl from fingernail to knuckle, then fell away.
“Tess? Did you have a good time with Edie?”
“I guess.”
“Maybe you should tell her so.”
Tess shrugged.
“Maybe you should tell her now. She’s downstairs, getting ready to go.”
But by the time Tess had loped down to the front door, both Edie and her mother were already gone.
By Monday, what had begun as a tedious inconvenience began to feel more like a crisis.
Marguerite dropped Tess off at school on her way to Hubble Plaza. The crowd of parents in the parking lot—including Connie Jerundt, who waved at Marguerite from her car window—boiled with rumors. Since there was no local emergency to account for the shutdown, something must have happened outside, something big enough to create a security crisis; but what? And why hadn’t anyone been told?
Marguerite refused to take part in the speculation. Obviously (or at least it seemed obvious to Marguerite), the logical thing to do was to get on with the work at hand. It might not be possible to talk to the outside world, but the outside world was still providing Blind Lake’s power and presumably still expected Blind Lake’s people to go about their business. She kissed Tess good-bye, watched her daughter walk a long stochastic loop through the playground, and drove off when the bell sounded.
The rain had stopped but October had taken charge of the weather, a cold wind blowing out of a gem-blue sky. She was glad she had insisted on a sweater for Tess. For herself she had selected a vinyl windbreaker, which proved inadequate on the long hike from the Hubble Plaza parking facility to the lobby of the east wing. Snow before long, Marguerite thought, and Christmas coming, if you looked past the looming headland of Thanksgiving. The change in the weather made the quarantine that much more unsettling, as if isolation and anxiety had rolled in with the thin Canadian air.
As she waited for the elevator Marguerite caught a glimpse of Ray, her ex-husband, ducking into the lobby convenience shop, probably for his morning fix of DingDongs. Ray was a man of fiercely regular habits, one of them being DingDongs for breakfast. Ray used to go to amazing lengths to guarantee his supply, even during business trips or on vacation. He packed DingDongs in Tupperware in his carry-on luggage. A day without DingDongs brought out the worst in him: his petulance, his near-tantrums at the slightest frustration. She kept her eye on the shop entrance while the elevator inched down from the tenth floor. Just as the bell chimed, Ray emerged with a small bag in his hand. The DingDongs, for sure. Which he would devour, no doubt, behind the closed door of his office: Ray didn’t like to be seen eating sweets. Marguerite pictured him with a DingDong in each fist, nibbling at them like a mad squirrel, dribbling crumbs over his starched white shirt and funereal tie. She stepped into the elevator with three other people and punched her floor promptly, making sure the door closed before Ray could run for it.
Marguerite’s own work—though she loved it and had fought hard to get it—sometimes made her feel like a voyeur. A paid, dispassionate voyeur; but a voyeur nonetheless.
She hadn’t felt that way at Crossbank; but her talents had been wasted at Crossbank, where she had spent five years distilling botanical details from archival surveys, the kind of scut-work any bright postgraduate student could have done. She could still recite the tentative Latin binomials for eighteen varieties of bacterial mats. After a year there she had grown so accustomed to the sight of the ocean on HR8832/B that she had imagined she could smell it, smell the near-toxic levels of chlorine and ozone the photochromatic assays had detected, a sour and vaguely oily smell, like drain cleaner. She had been at Crossbank only because Ray had taken her there—Ray had worked administration at Crossbank—and she had turned down several offers to transfer to Blind Lake, mostly because Ray wouldn’t countenance the move.
Then she had sucked up her courage and initiated the divorce, after which she had accepted this Obs position, only to discover that Ray had also had himself seconded to Blind Lake. Not only that, but he moved west a month before Marguerite was scheduled to do so, establishing himself as a fixture at the Lake and probably sabotaging Marguerite’s reputation among the senior administrators.
Still, she was doing the work she had trained for, longed for: the closest thing to field astrozoology the world had ever seen.
She picked her way through the maze of support-staff desks, said hello to the clerks and secretaries and programmers, stopped by the staff kitchen to fill her souvenir Blind Lake lobster-motif cup with overcooked coffee and half-and-half, then closed herself into her office.
Paper covered her desk, e-paper littered her virtual desktop. This was work pending, most of it the kind of procedural checkmarking that was necessary but frustratingly tedious and time-consuming. But she could clean up some of that later, at home.
Today she wanted to spend time with the Subject. Raw time, realtime.
She closed the blinds over the window, dimmed the sulfur-dot ceiling lights, and ill
uminated the monitor that comprised the entire west wall of the office.
Good timing. UMa47/E’s seventeen-hour day had just begun.
Morning, and the Subject stirred from his pallet on the warren’s stone floor.
As usual, dozens of smaller creatures—parasites, symbiotes, or offspring—scuttled away from his body, where they had been nursing at the sleeping Subject’s exposed blood-nipples. These small animals, no larger than mice, many-legged and sinuously articulated, disappeared into gaps where the sandstone walls met the floor. Subject sat up, then stood to his full height.
Estimates put the Subject’s height at roughly seven feet. Certainly he was an impressive specimen. (Marguerite used the masculine pronoun privately. She would never dare commit an assumption of gender in her official writing. The gender and reproductive strategies of the aliens were still wholly unresolved.) Subject was bipedal and bilaterally symmetrical, and from a great distance, in silhouette, he might have been mistaken for a human being. But there the resemblance ended.
His skin—not an exoskeleton, as the ridiculous “lobster” nickname implied—was a tough, red-brown, pebble-textured integument. Because of this dense moisture-conserving skin, and because of the lung louvers exposed on his ventral surface and such details as the multiple jointing of his legs and arms and the tiny food-manipulating limbs that grew from the sides of his mandibles, some had speculated that Subject and his kindred might have evolved from an insect-like form. One scenario pictured a strain of invertebrates attaining the size and mobility of mammals by burying their notochord in a chitinous spinal column while losing their hard carapace in favor of a thick but lighter and more flexible skin. But little evidence had emerged for this or any other hypothesis. Exozoology was difficult enough; exopaleobiology was a daydream of a science.
Subject was clearly visible in the light cast by the string of incandescent bulbs suspended across the ceiling. The bulbs were small, more like Christmas lights than household lamps, but otherwise they seemed ridiculously familiar, were familiar: the filaments were of ordinary tungsten, spectroscopy had revealed. Dumb, rugged technology. At intervals, other aboriginals would arrive to replace exhausted bulbs and check the insulated copper wire for gaps or irregularities. The city boasted an elaborate, reliable maintenance infrastructure.