Blind Lake (29 page)

“But now we’ve done something new. We’ve built machines that dream. The pictures the O/BEC device generates are dreams. They are based, we tell ourselves, on the real world, but they aren’t telescopic images in any traditional sense. When we look through a telescope we see with the human eye and interpret with the human mind. When we look at an O/BEC image we see what a dreaming machine has learned to dream.

“Which is not to say that the images are valueless! Only that we cannot accept them at face value. And we have to ask ourselves another question. If our machine can dream more effectively than a human being, what else might it be able to do? What other dreams might it entertain, with or without our knowledge?

“The organisms we’re studying may not be the inhabitants of a rocky inner world circling the star Ursa Majoris 47. The alien species may be the O/BEC devices themselves. And the worst thing… the
worst
thing…”

He stopped, picked up his water glass, and drained it. His face was flushed.

“I mean, how do you wake from a dream that enables your consciousness? By dying. Only by dying. And if the O/BEC entity—let’s call it that—has become a danger to us, maybe we need to kill it.”

Near the front, a small voice shouted, “You can’t
do
that!”

A child’s voice. Chris recognized Tess, standing now near the foot of the stage.

Ray looked down in obvious bewilderment. He seemed not to recognize her. When he did, he motioned her to sit down and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I apologize for the interruption. But we can’t afford to be sentimental. Our lives are at stake. We may be—as a species, we may be—” He wiped his forehead with his hand. The real Ray had punched through, Chris thought, and the real Ray was not a pleasant thing to behold. “We may be ungoverned dream-machines, capable of wreaking immense havoc, but we owe our loyalty to our genome. Our genome is what makes a tolerable dream out of the valueless, the rigorously precise mathematics of the universe we inhabit… What would we see, if we were truly awake? A universe that loves death far more than it loves life. It would be foolish, truly foolish to yield our primacy to yet another set of numbers, another nonlinear dissipative system alien to our way of life…”

A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain, Shakespeare had said. Chris understood that. It was a lesson he should have learned a long time ago. If he had learned it soon enough, his sister Portia might still be alive.

“Stop
talking
like that!” Tess screeched.

At that moment Ray seemed to wake, seemed to realize he had done something peculiar, embarassed himself in public. His face was brick-red.

“What I mean to say—”

The silence dragged on. The audience murmured.

“What I mean—”

Ari Weingart took a half-step out from stage left.

“I’m sorry,” Ray said. “I apologize if I said something—if I misspoke. This meeting—”

He waved his hand, knocking the empty water glass onto the floor of the stage. It broke spectacularly.

“This meeting is over,” Ray growled into the barrel of the microphone. “You can all go home.”

He stalked into the wings. Sebastian Vogel began whispering frantically into his pocket server. Marguerite clambered down from the stage and ran to comfort her daughter.

Sue Sampel had just shuffled the printouts back into their original order when her server chimed.

The small noise seemed very large in the silence of Ray’s inner office. She jumped, and half the sheaf of papers fell out of her hand and scattered across the floor.

“Shit!” she said, then fumbled the phone wand out of her pocket. “
Yes
?”

It was Sebastian. Ray had left the stage, he said. Looking pissed. Could be headed anywhere.

“Thanks,” Sue said. “Meet me out front, five minutes.” She gathered the papers from the floor—they had scattered into a broad circle, and some had slipped under the desk—and shuffled them back into a crude semblance of order. No time to be more precise. Even if Ray didn’t come roaring through the door, her nerves were stretched to the breaking point. She locked the papers into Ray’s desk drawer, left his office, packed up the stuff she had left on her own desk, then hurried into the corridor and shut the door behind her.

The elevator ride took approximately forever, but the lobby was empty when she got there and Sebastian had already pulled up at to the front. She ducked into the car and said, “Go, go, go.”

The wind had kicked up since morning. Out in the wide meadows between the town of Blind Lake and the cooling towers of Eyeball Alley, fresh snow began to fall.

Ray Scutter left the auditorium without a destination in mind, sucking in gusts of bitterly cold air as the doors closed behind him. Trading pain for clarity.

He’d made a mistake onstage. No, worse than that. He’d lost track of himself. That ridiculous digression about apes and men. Not that the ideas weren’t sound. But his delivery had been self-absorbed, almost manic.

Some of this was Marguerite’s fault. That pious little speech of hers had demanded rebuttal. But he shouldn’t have risen to the bait. Ray had always been able to command an audience, and it troubled him that he had let this one get so completely out of hand. Put it down to stress, he thought.

Stress, frustration, a contagious madness. Ray had read the Crossbank printouts closely, and that was his diagnosis: insanity as a transmissible disease. Here at Blind Lake, of course, it could start at any time; perhaps had already started; he hadn’t been kidding when he called Marguerite’s speech a symptom.

Grains of snow snaked across the mallway, writhing in the wind. Ray had left his jacket backstage at the community center, but going back for it was out of the question. Ray decided to shelter in his office half a block away, make a couple of calls, do some damage assessment, find out how badly he had fucked himself with that outburst on stage. Errant thoughts still circled in his head. Daylight dreams.

He crossed the lobby of the Plaza and rode an empty elevator up to the seventh floor, snow melting to dew in his hair. He felt dizzy, nauseated. His ears vibrated with some buzzing, interminable noise. He had embarrassed himself, he thought, okay, but in the long term, even in the short term, did that really matter? If no one was leaving Blind Lake alive (and he considered that a real possibility), of what significance was his outburst? Made him look bad to the senior researchers, big fucking deal. He wasn’t playing career games anymore.

He was still well-placed to survive. He could even come through this crisis looking relatively good, if he did the right thing. What was the right thing? Killing the O/BECs, Ray thought. Too late to generate popular support, but he had laid the groundwork and might even have made a few converts if Marguerite hadn’t provoked him. If he hadn’t lost himself in a maze of ancillary ideas. If Tess hadn’t interrupted him.

He came to a dead halt at the door to his office.

Tess
.

He had forgotten his daughter. He had left her in the audience.

He took his server out of his shirt pocket and pronounced Tessa’s name.

She answered promptly: “Dad?”

“Tess, where are you?”

She hesitated. Ray tried but failed to read significance into the pause. Then she said, “I’m in the car.”

“The car?
Whose
car?”

“Uh, Mom’s.”

“You don’t go back to your mother until Monday.”

“I know, but—”

“She shouldn’t have taken you with her. That was wrong. That was absolutely dead wrong for her to do that.”

“But—”

“Did she force you, Tess? Did your mother make you get in the car with her? You can tell me. If she’s listening, just give me a hint. I’ll understand.”

Plaintively: “
No
! It wasn’t like that. You
left
.”

“Only for a few minutes, Tess.”

“I didn’t know that!”

“You should have waited for me.”

“Plus you said all those things about killing her!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I would never hurt your mother.”

“What? I mean when you were up onstage! You talked about killing Mirror Girl!”

“I didn’t—” He stopped, forced himself to calm down. Tess was sensitive and, by the sound of her voice, already frightened. “I didn’t mention Mirror Girl. You must have misunderstood.”

“You said we have to kill her!”

“I was talking about the processor at the Eye, Tess. Please put your mother on.”

Another pause. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“She has to bring you to me. That’s in the agreement we signed. I need to tell her about that.”

“We’re going home.” Tess sounded near tears. “I’m sorry!”

“Going to your mother’s house?”

“Yes!”

“She’s not allowed—”

“I don’t
care
! I don’t
care
what she’s not allowed! At least she doesn’t want to
kill
anyone!”

“Tess, I told you, I don’t—”

The server clicked. Tess had broken the connection.

When he tried her again there was no answer, only her standard voice message. He tried Marguerite. Likewise.

“Fucking bitch,” Ray whispered. Meaning Marguerite. Maybe even Tess, who had betrayed him. But no, no, back up, that wasn’t fair. Tess had been misled. Misled by her mother’s pampering and indulgence. Which was exactly what all this Mirror Girl bullshit was about.

Marguerite was using it against him.
Daddy wants to kill Mirror Girl
. Indoctrinating her. Ray was furious, picturing it. He could only imagine what lies Tess had been asked to believe about him.

So was Tess lost to him, too?

No. No. Impossible. Not yet.

He locked himself into his office, turned his chair to the window, and thought about calling Dimi Shulgin. Shulgin might have some ideas.

The view from the window was lifeless and hostile. Blind Lake had learned to live without weather reports, but you didn’t have to be a meteorologist to see the clouds roll in. Low clouds, weighty with snow, moving on a gale-force wind from the northwest. One more installment in this endless winter.

The falling snow gave the town an illusory vagueness, like a tintype photograph or a stage set painted in shades of gray. The windowpane flexed in a gust of wind, lensing the image slightly. Subject stared for an indeterminate period of time at the approaching storm.

When he turned away, the chair’s castor caught on something hidden under the desk. The cleaning staff had gotten sloppy, but that was hardly news. A sheet of paper. Scowling, he bent down to retrieve it.

EX: Bo Xiang,
Crossbank National Laboratory
TO: Avery Fishbinder,
Blind Lake National Laboratory
TEXT:
In answer to your question, the possibility that the dry-land structures are natural is very slim. Although this kind of symmetry is often enough seen in nature, the size of the structure and the degree of precision are remarkable and suggest engineering rather than evolution. Not that this is a clinching argument, but

Ray stopped reading and placed the paper face-up on his desk.

Slowly, taking his time now, resisting hasty judgment, he keyed open his desk and removed from the bottom drawer the thick sheaf of printouts Shulgin had delivered to him. He leafed through it quickly.

The pages were out of order.

Someone had been in his desk again.

Ray stood up. He saw his reflection in the window, an image pasted on a mural of clouds, a man frozen in a layer of glass.

The weather was conspicuously worse by the time Chris, Marguerite, and Tess reached the house. Maybe that was a good thing, Chris thought. It put another barrier between Marguerite and Ray. If Ray came looking for his daughter Tess—or looking for revenge—the snow might at least slow him down.

Tess had cried after the phone call. Now her tears had subsided into a flurry of hiccups, and Marguerite walked her into the house with an arm around her shoulder. Tess shrugged out of her jacket and boots and ran for the living room sofa as if it were a life raft.

Marguerite carded the door. “Better throw the dead bolt too,” Chris said.

“You think that’s necessary?”

“I think it’s wise.”

“Aren’t you being a little paranoid? Ray wouldn’t—”

“We don’t know what Ray might do. We shouldn’t take chances.”

She threw the bolt and joined her daughter on the sofa.

Chris borrowed her office to print the docs Sue had transferred to his server. The office was windowless, but he could hear the wind kicking up outside, prying at the eavestroughs like a man with a blunt knife.

He thought about Ray onstage at the auditorium. Ray’s first order of business had been to deride and humiliate Marguerite, and he had done that fairly cleverly, disguising his anger, controlling it. For a guy like Ray, it was all about control. But the world was full of unmanageable insolence. Expectations were confounded. Wives disobeyed and then abandoned him. His theories were proven false.

His desk was rifled.

The important thing about Ray’s little meltdown, Chris thought, was that it evidenced a deeper unraveling. Guys like Ray were emotionally brittle, which was what made them such effective bullies. They lived just this side of the breaking point. And sometimes passed it.

Pages snapped briskly out of the printer, all of the thirty-odd documents Sue had filched. Ray’s treasure, for what it was worth. Chris sat down and began to read.

Marguerite spent the gray end of the afternoon with her daughter.

Tess had calmed down considerably once she was inside the house. But her distress was still obvious. She had curled up on the sofa with a quilted comforter around her like a prayer shawl and fixed her attention on the video screen. Blind Lake TV was showing old downloads of
The Fosters
, a children’s show Tess hadn’t watched since she was six. She had turned up the volume to drown out the sound of the wind and the sound of hard snow rattling against the windows.