Blind Lake (17 page)

“It’s all talk,” Ray said.

“So far, it’s all talk. In the long run—if this lockdown continues—who knows?”

“We should be seen to be doing something positive.”

“The appearance of action,” Shulgin said, any irony safely buried under his turgid accent, “would be helpful.”

“You know,” Ray said, “my desk was broken into recently.”

“Your desk?” Shulgin’s caterpillar eyebrows rose. “Broken into? This was vandalism, theft?”

Ray waved his hand in what he imagined was a magnanimous gesture. “It was trivial, office vandalism at most, but it got me thinking. What if we launched an investigation?”

“Into the vandalism of your desk?”

“No, for Christ’s sake, into the
siege
.”

“An investigation? How could we? All the evidence is on the other side of the fence.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Please explain.”

“There’s a theory we’re under lockdown because something happened at Crossbank, something dangerous, something connected with their O/BECs, something that might as easily happen here.”

“Yes, which is why there’s a growing movement to switch off our own processors, but—”

“Forget about the O/BECs for a minute. Think about Crossbank. If Crossbank had a problem, wouldn’t we have heard about it?”

Shulgin considered. He rubbed a finger against his nose. “Possibly, possibly not. All the senior administrators were in Cancun when the gates closed. They would have been the first to know.”

“Yes,” Ray said, gently urging the idea to its conclusion, “but messages might have stacked up on their personal servers before the quarantine went into effect.”

“Anything urgent would have been forwarded…”

“But copies would still reside in the Blind Lake servers, wouldn’t they?”

“Well… presumably. Unless someone took the trouble to erase them. But we can’t break into the personal servers of senior staff.”

“Can’t we?”

Shulgin shrugged. “I would have thought not.”

“In ordinary circumstances the question wouldn’t even arise. But circumstances are a long way from ordinary.”

“Crack the servers, read their mail. Yes, it’s interesting.”

“And if we find anything useful we should announce the results at a general meeting.”

“If there
are
any results. Apart from voicemail from wives and mistresses. Shall I talk to my people, find out how difficult it would be to break into our servers?”

“Yes, Dimi,” Ray said. “You do that.”

He liked this better the more he thought about it. He went to lunch a happier man.

Ray’s moods were mercurial, however, and by the time he left the Plaza at the end of the day he was feeling sour again. The DingDong thing. Sue had probably shared the story with her friends in the staff cafeteria. Every day, some fresh humiliation. He liked DingDongs for breakfast: was that so fucking funny, so laughably aberrant? People were assholes, Ray thought.

He drove carefully through flurries of hard snow, trying unsuccessfully to time the stoplights on the main street.

People were assholes, and that was what the exocultural theorists always missed, people like Marguerite, blind little featherweight optimists. One world full of assholes wasn’t enough for them. They wanted more. A whole living universe of assholery. A shiny pink organic cosmos, a magic mirror with a happy face beaming out of it.

Dusk closed around the car like a curtain. How much cleaner the world would be, Ray thought, if it contained nothing but gas and dust and the occasional flaring star—cold but pristine, like the snow enshrouding the few high towers of Blind Lake. The real lesson of Lobsterville was the politically incorrect one, the unspeakable but obvious fact that sentience (so-called) was nothing but a focused irrationality, a suite of behaviors designed by DNA to make more DNA, empty of any logic but the runaway mathematics of self-reproduction, Chaos with feedback,
z –> z
²
+ c
blindly repeated until the universe had eaten and excreted itself.

Including me, Ray thought. Better not to shy from that caustic truth. Everything he loved (his daughter) or thought he had loved (Marguerite) represented nothing more than his participation in that equation, was no more or less sane than the nocturnal bleeding of the aboriginals of UMa47/E. Marguerite, for instance: acting out flawed genetic scripts, the possessive if unfit mother, a walking womb claiming equality under the law. How quickly she still came to mind. Every insolence Ray suffered was a mirror of her hatred.

The garage door rolled open as it sensed the approach of the car. He parked under the glare of the overhead light.

He wondered what it would be like to break free of all these biological imperatives and see the world as it truly was. To our eyes horrible, Ray thought, bleak and unforgiving; but our eyes are liars, equally as enslaved to DNA as our hearts and our minds. Maybe that was what the O/BECs had become: an inhuman eye, revealing truths no one was prepared to accept.

Tess had come back to him this week. He called hello as he entered the house. She sat in the living room in the chair next to the artificial Christmas tree, hunched over her homework like a studious gnome. “Hi,” she said listlessly. Ray stood a moment, surprised by his love for her, admiring the way her dark hair curled tightly to her skull. She wrote on the screen of a lap pad, which translated her babyish scrawls into something legible.

He shed his coat and overshoes and drew the blinds against the snowy dark. “Have you called your birth mother yet?”

It was in the agreement he had signed with Marguerite after arbitration, that Tess would phone the absent parent daily. Tess looked at him curiously. “My
birth
mother?”

Had he said that aloud? “I mean, your mother.”

“I called already.”

“Did she say anything disturbing? You know you can tell me if your mother causes problems for you.”

Tess shrugged uncomfortably.

“Was the stranger with her when you called? The man who lives in the basement?”

Tess shrugged again.

“Show me your hand,” Ray said.

It didn’t take a genius to know that Tessa’s problems back at Crossbank had been Marguerite’s fault, even if the divorce mediator had failed to figure it out. Marguerite had consistently ignored Tess, had focused exclusively on her beloved extraterrestrial seascapes, that Tess had made several desperate bids for attention, transparent in their motivation. The frightening stranger in the mirror might as well have been Marguerite’s Subject—oblique, demanding, and omnipresent.

Glumly, head lowered in embarrassment, Tess held out her right hand. The sutures had been removed last week. The scars would disappear with time, the clinic doctor had said, but now they looked ghastly, pink new skin between angry divots where the stitches had been. Ray had already taken a few photographs in case the issue ever arose in court. He held her small hand in his, making sure there was no sign of infection. No small life eating the life from his daughter’s flesh.

“What’s for dinner?” Tess asked.

“Chicken,” Ray said, leaving her to her books. Frozen chicken in the freezer. Subject removed from cold storage the butchered flesh of a ground-dwelling bird and began to sear it in a pan of extracted vegetable oil. Plus garlic and basil, salt and pepper. The smell of it flooded his mouth with saliva. Tess, drawn by the odor, wandered into the kitchen to watch him cook.

“Are you worried about going back to your mother tomorrow?”

Your birth mother. Half your genetic bag of tricks. The lesser half, Ray thought.

“No,” Tess said, then, almost defiantly, “why do you always keep
asking
me that?”

“Do I?”

“Yes! Sometimes.”

“Sometimes isn’t always, though, is it?”

“No, but—”

“I just want everything to be okay for you, Tess.”

“I know.” Defeated, she turned away.

“You’re happy here, aren’t you?”

“It’s okay here.”

“Because you never know with Mom, isn’t that right? You might have to come live here all the time, Tess, if anything happens to her.”

Tess narrowed her eyes. “What would happen to her?”

“You never know,” Ray said.

Before he left the city, Subject’s life had been a repetitive cycle of work, sleep, and food conclaves. It had reminded Marguerite dismayingly of the Hindu idea of the kalpas, the sacred circle, eternal return.

But that had changed.

That had changed, and the circle had become something different: it had become a narrative. A
story
, Marguerite thought, with a beginning and an end. That was why it was so important to keep the Eye focused on the Subject, despite what the more cynical people in Interpretation thought. “The Subject is no longer representative,” they said. But that was what made this so interesting. Subject had become an individual, something more than the sum of his functions in aboriginal society. This was clearly some kind of crisis in Subject’s life, and Marguerite couldn’t bear the idea of not seeing it through to its conclusion.

Even to the Subject’s death, if it came to that. And it might.

Early on, she conceived the idea of writing the Subject’s odyssey, not analytically, but as what it had become: a story. Not for publication, of course. She’d be violating the protocols of objectivity, indulging all kinds of conscious and unconscious anthropocentrism. Anyway, she wasn’t a writer, or at least not that kind of writer. This was purely for her own satisfaction… and because she believed the Subject deserved it. After all, this was a real life they had invaded. In the privacy of her writing she could give him back his stolen dignity.

She began the project in a spiral-bound blue school notebook. Tess was asleep (she had come back from her father’s two days ago, after a disappointing Christmas) and Chris was downstairs messing up the kitchen or raiding her library. It was a precious moment, hallowed in silence. A time when she could practice the black art of empathy. When she could freely admit that she cared about the fate of this creature so unknowable and so intimately known.

Subject’s last days in the city [Marguerite wrote] were disturbed and episodic.
He manned his workstation at the usual time, but his food conclaves became briefer and more perfunctory. He descended the stairs into the food well slowly, and in the dim light of the evening conclaves he took less than the customary amount of cultivated crops. He spent more time scraping moldlike growths from the damp well walls, sucking the residue from his food claws.
Normally this was a time of intense social interaction; the wells were crowded; but the Subject kept his face to the stone wall, and his visible signaling motions (cilia-waving, head gestures) were minimal.
His sleep was disturbed, too, which in turn seemed to disturb the small creatures that fed on his blood nipples at night.
The place of these wall-dwelling animals in Subject’s culture or ecology is not well understood. They might have been parasites, but since they were universally tolerated they were more likely symbionts or even a stage in the reproductive cycle. Perhaps their feeding stimulated desirable immune responses—at least, that was one theory. Shortly before his departure, however, the feeders seemed repelled by the sleeping Subject. They tasted him, skittered away, then came back to try again with the same result. Meanwhile, Subject was restless and moved several times during the night in an uncharacteristic manner.
He spent his last night in the city in a sleepless vigil on a high exterior balcony of the communal tower in which he lived. It was tempting to read both loneliness and resolve into these behaviors. [
Forbidden, but tempting
, Marguerite thought.] Subject’s life had clearly changed, and perhaps not for the better.
Then he left the city.
It looked like a spontaneous decision. He left his warren, left his home tower, and walked directly through the eastern gate of the aboriginal city into a clear blue morning. In the sunlight his thick skin glittered like polished leather. Subject was a dusky shade of red over most of his body, a dark red merging into black at the major body joints, and his yellow dorsal crest stood up like a crown of flame as he walked.
The city was surrounded by an enormous acreage of agricultural land. Canals and aqueducts carried irrigation water from the snowy mountains in the north to these fields. The system lost enormous amounts of moisture to evaporation in the dry, thin air, but the trickle that remained was enough to nourish miles-long avenues of succulent plants. The plants were thick-skinned, olive-green, and consisted of a few basic and similar types. Their stems were sturdy, the leaves as broad as dinner plates and as thick as pancakes. Taller than the Subject, they cast variegated shadows over him as he walked.
Subject followed the dirt-pack road, a wide avenue lapped with drainage ditches and verdant midsummer crops. He displayed no social interaction with either the sap-stained laborers in the fields or the foot traffic along the way. Shortly after he left the city he detoured into a cultivated plot of ground, where he was ignored by farm laborers as he pulled several large leaves from a mature plant, wrapped them in a broader, flatter fan leaf, and tucked them into a pouch in his lower abdomen. A picnic lunch? Or provisions for a longer journey?
For much of the morning he was forced to walk along the less-busy margin of the road, out of the way of traffic. According to planetary maps prepared before the O/BECs focused on a single Subject, this road ran east into the drylands for almost a hundred kilometers, veered north through a line of low mountains (foothills of a taller range) and east again until, after a few hundred kilometers of sparsely vegetated high plains it reached another aboriginal city, the as-yet-unnamed 33 latitude, 42 longitude urban cluster. 33/42 was a smaller city than Subject’s own but an established trading partner.
Big trucks passed in both directions—huge platforms equipped with simple but refined and effective motors, riding on immense solid rollers rather than wheels. (This might have been an example of aboriginal efficiency. The trucks maintain the pressed-earth roads simply by driving on them.) And there was plenty of foot traffic, pairs and triads and larger clusters of waddling individuals. But no other solitaries. Did a unique journey imply a unique destination?
By midday Subject reached the end of the agricultural land. The road widened as the walls of succulent plants dropped behind. The horizon was flat dead ahead and mountainous to the north. The mountains shimmered in waves of rising heat. When the sun reached its apex Subject stopped for a meal. He left the road and walked a few hundred yards to a shady formation of tall basaltic stones, where he urinated copiously into the sandy soil, then climbed one of the rocky pedestals and stood facing north. The atmosphere between Subject and the mountains was white with suspended dust, and the snowy peaks seemed to hover over the desert basin.
He might have been resting, or he might have been sensing the air or planning the next stage of his journey. He was motionless for almost an hour. Then he walked back to the road and resumed his journey, pausing to drink from a roadside ditch.
He walked at a steady pace through the afternoon. By nightfall he had passed the last evidence of cultivation—old fields gone fallow, irrigation canals filled and obscured with windblown sand—and entered the desert basin between the northern mountains and the far southern sea. Traffic on the road moved in diurnal surges, and he had fallen behind the last of the day’s vehicular traffic. He was alone, and his pace slowed with the approach of night. It was an unusually clear evening. A fast, small moon slid up from the eastern horizon, and Subject looked for a place to sleep.
He scouted for some minutes until he found a sandy depression sheltered in the lee of a rocky outcrop. He curled into an almost fetal posture there, his ventral surfaces protected from the cooling air. His body slowed to its usual nightly catatonia.
When the moon had crossed three-quarters of the sky a number of small insectile creatures emerged from a nest hidden in the sand. They were immediately attracted by the Subject, by his smell, perhaps, or the rhythm of his breathing. They were smaller than the nocturnal symbionts of his native city. They carried distinct thoracic bulges and they moved on two extra sets of legs. But they fed in the same fashion, and without hesitation, from the Subject’s blood-nipples.
They were still there (sated, perhaps) when Subject woke to the first light of morning. Some of them still clung to his body as he stood up. Carefully, fastidiously, Subject picked them off and tossed them away. The discarded creatures lay motionless but uninjured until the sun warmed their bodies; then they burrowed back into the sand, pink fantails vanishing with a flourish.
Subject continued to follow the road.