Blind Lake (31 page)

“But she wouldn’t say why.”

“She wouldn’t say why.”

“And you never told.”

“Anyone. Until now.”

Tess smiled contentedly. “Yeah. Were the frogs okay?”

“Mostly. They headed into the hedges and gardens all up and down our street. It was a noisy summer that year, all that croaking.”

“Yes.” Tess closed her eyes. “Thank you, Chris.”

“You don’t have to thank me. Think you can sleep?”

“Yeah.”

“I hope the sound of the wind doesn’t keep you up.”

“Could be worse,” Tess said, smiling for the first time today. “Could be frogs.”

Marguerite listened from the doorway to the first part of the story, then retreated to her office and switched on the wall screen. Not to work. Just to watch.

It was near dusk on the Subject’s small patch of UMa47/E. Subject traversed a low canyon parallel to the setting sun. Maybe it was the long light, but he looked especially unwell, Marguerite thought. He had been scavenging for food for a long time now, subsisting on the mossy substance that grew wherever there was water and shade. Marguerite suspected the moss was not terribly nutritious, perhaps not even enough to sustain him. His skin was creased and shrunken. You didn’t have to be a physicist to parse that equation. Too many calories spent, too few ingested.

As the sky darkened a few stars emerged. The brightest was not a star at all but a planet: one of the system’s two gas giants, UMa47/A, almost three times the size of Jupiter and big enough to show a perceptible disc at its nearest approach. Subject stopped and swiveled his head from side to side. Taking his bearings, perhaps, or even performing some kind of celestial navigation.

She heard Chris closing Tessa’s bedroom door. He leaned into the office and said, “Mind if I join you?”

“Pull up a chair. I’m not really working.”

“Getting dark,” he said, gesturing at the wall screen.

“He’ll sleep soon. I know it sounds dumb, Chris, but I’m worried about him. He’s a long way from—well, anywhere. Nothing seems to live in this place, not even the parasites that feed on him at night.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“But, technically, they’re probably not parasites at all. There must be a benevolent symbiosis, or the cities wouldn’t be full of them.”

“New York is full of rats. That doesn’t mean they’re desirable.”

“It’s an open question. But he’s clearly not well.”

“He might not make it to Damascus.”

“Damascus?”

“I keep thinking he’s St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Waiting for a vision.”

“I suppose we’d never know if he found it. I was hoping for something more tangible.”

“Well, I’m no expert.”

“Who is?” She turned away from the display. “Thanks for helping Tess settle down. I hope you’re not sick of telling her stories.”

“Not at all.”

“She likes your—what does she call them? Porry stories. Actually, I’m a little jealous. You don’t talk much about your family.”

“Tessa’s an easy audience.”

“And I’m not?”

He smiled. “You’re not eleven.”

“Did Tess ever ask you what happened to Portia as a grown-up?”

“Thankfully, no.”

“How did she die?” Marguerite asked, then: “I’m sorry, Chris. I’m sure you don’t want to talk about it. Really, it’s none of my business.”

He was silent a moment. God, she thought, I’ve offended him.

Then he said, “Portia was always a little more headstrong than she was bright. She never had an easy time at school. She dropped out of college and got in with a bunch of people, part-time dopers…”

“Drugs,” Marguerite said.

“It wasn’t just the drugs. She could always handle the drugs, I guess because they didn’t appeal to her all that much. But she had bad judgment about people. She moved into a guy’s trailer outside of Seattle and we didn’t hear from her for a while. She claimed she loved him, but she wouldn’t even put him on the phone.”

“Not a good sign.”

“This happened when my book about Galliano had just been published. I was passing through Seattle on a tour, so I called Porry up and arranged to meet her. Not where she lived—she insisted on that. It had to be somewhere downtown. Just her, not her boyfriend. She was a little reluctant about the whole thing, but she named a restaurant and we got together there. She showed up in low-rent drag and a big pair of sunglasses. The kind you wear to hide a bruise or a black eye.”

“Oh, no.”

“Eventually she admitted things weren’t going too well between her and her friend. She’d just landed a job, she was saving money to get a place of her own. She said not to worry about her, she was sorting things out.”

“The guy was beating her?”

“Obviously. She begged me not to get involved. Not to pull any ‘big brother shit,’ as she put it. But I was busy saving the world from corruption. If I could expose Ted Galliano to public scrutiny, why should I put up with this kind of thing from some trailer-park cowboy? So I got Porry’s address out of the directory and drove out there while she was at work. The guy was home, of course. He really didn’t look like any kind of threat. He was five-nine, with a rose tattoo on his skinny right arm. Looked like he’d spent the day killing a six-pack and greasing an engine. He was belligerent, but I just braced him against the trailer with my forearm under his chin and told him if he touched Portia again he’d have me to answer to. He got very apologetic. He actually started to cry. He said he couldn’t help it, it was the bottle, hey buddy you know how it is. He said he’d get himself under control. And I went away thinking I’d done some good. On my way out of town I stopped by the office where Porry worked and left her a check, something to help her get independent. Two days later I got a call from a Seattle emergency ward. She’d been beaten badly and was hemorrhaging from a cranial artery. She died that night. Her boyfriend burned the trailer and left town on a stolen motorbike. Far as I know, the police are still looking for him.”

“God, Chris… I’m so sorry!”

“No. I’m sorry. It’s not a good story for a stormy night.” He touched her hand. “It doesn’t even have a moral, except ‘shit happens.’ But if I seemed a little reluctant to jump in between you and Ray…”

“I understand. And I do appreciate your help. But, Chris? I can handle Ray. With you or without you. Preferably
with
, but… you understand?”

“You’re telling me you’re not Portia.”

There was no light in the room now but the glow of the sunset on UMa47/E. Subject had reclined for the night. Above the canyon wall, stars shone in constellations no one had named. No one on Earth, at least.

“I’m telling you I’m not Portia. And I’m offering you a cup of tea. Interested?”

She took his hand and walked with him to the kitchen, where the window was blank with snow and the kettle sang counterpoint to the sound of the wind.

Sue Sampel was wide awake when the doorbell chimed, though it was well after midnight—almost three, according to her watch.

Between the storm outside and the nervous energy she had stoked up during her raid on Ray’s office, sleep was out of the question. Sebastian, bless him, had gone upstairs around midnight and fallen immediately and soundly asleep. She had curled up with his book as a sort of vicarious presence. His book, plus a big snifter of peach brandy.

But the book seemed less substantial on her second go-through. It was beautifully written and full of striking ideas, but the gaps and leaps of logic were more obvious now. She supposed this was what had put Elaine Coster’s back up, Sebastian’s cheerful love of outrageous hypotheses.

For instance, Sebastian explained in the book how what people called “the vacuum of space” was more than just an absence of matter: it was a complex brew of virtual particles popping in and out of existence too quickly to interact with the ordinary substance of things. That jibed with Sue’s memory of first-year physics. She suspected he was on less firm scientific ground when he said that localized irregularities in the quantum vacuum accounted for the presence of “dark matter” in the universe. And his fundamental idea—that dark matter represented a kind of ghostly neural network inhabiting the quantum vacuum—was taken seriously by almost no one apart from Sebastian himself.

But Sebastian wasn’t a scientist and had never claimed to be one. Pressed, he would say these ideas were “templates” or “suggestions,” perhaps not to be taken literally. Sue understood, but she wished it could be otherwise; she wished his theories were solid as houses, solid enough to shelter in.

Not that her own house seemed especially solid tonight. The wind was absolutely ferocious, the snow so dense that the view from the window was like an O/BEC image of some planet unsuitable for human life. She nestled a little deeper into the sofa, took another sip of brandy and read:

Life evolves by moving into preexisting domains and exploiting preexisting forces of nature. The laws of aerodynamics were latent in the natural universe before they were “discovered” by insects and birds. Similarly, human consciousness was not invented
de novo
but represents the adoption by biology of an implicit, universal mathematics…

This was the idea Sue liked best, that people were pieces of something larger, something that popped up in a shape called Sue Sampel here and in a shape called Sebastian Vogel over there, both unique but both connected, the way two distinctive mountain peaks were also pieces of the same planet. Otherwise, she thought, what are we but lost animals? Lost animals, exiled from the womb, ignorant and dying.

The doorbell startled her. Her house server was kind enough to ring it quietly, but when she asked who was there the server said, “Not recognized.” Her stomach clenched. Someone not in her catalogue of regular visitors.

Ray Scutter, she thought. Who else? Elaine had warned her that something like this might happen. Ray was impulsive, more impulsive than ever since the lockdown, maybe impulsive enough to brave the storm and show up on her doorstep at three in the morning. By now he might have seen Elaine’s massive mailing. He would know (though he might not be able to prove it) that Sue had duped the copies from his desk. He would be furious. Worse, enraged. Dangerous. Yes, but
how
dangerous? Just how crazy
was
Ray Scutter?

She wished she’d had a little less to drink. But she had thought it would help her sleep, and she’d run out of pot a month ago. In Sue’s experience drugs and alcohol were like men, and pot was the best date. Cocaine liked to get dressed up and go out, very elegant, but coke would abandon you at the party or hector you into the small hours of the morning. Alcohol promised to be fun but ended up as an embarrassment; alcohol was a guy in a loud shirt, a guy with bad breath and too many opinions. Pot, however… pot liked to cuddle and make love. Pot liked to eat ice cream and watch the late show. She missed pot.

The doorbell rang again. Sue peeked out the side window. Sure enough, that was Ray’s little midnight-blue car parked against the drifts at the curb, and it must have a pretty good drive system, she thought, to have made it this far through the deepening snow.

There was another round of ringing, which the server muted disdainfully.

She could, of course, ignore him. But that struck her as cowardly. Really, there was nothing to be afraid of. What was he going to do? Yell at her? I’m a grown-up, she thought. I can deal with that. Better to get it over with.

She thought about waking up Sebastian and decided against it. Sebastian was many things, but he wasn’t a fighter. She could handle this herself. See what Ray wanted, if necessary tell him to bugger off.

But she went to the kitchen and took a carving knife out of the knife rack just in case. She felt idiotic doing it—the knife was really just a kind of emotional insurance, something to make her feel brave—and she kept it hidden behind her back as she approached the door. Opening the door because, after all, this was Blind Lake, the safest community on the surface of the Earth, even if your employer happened to be seriously pissed at you.

Her heart was beating double-time.

Ray stood under the yellow porch light in a long black jacket. The wind had tousled his hair and adorned it with snow stars. His lips were pursed and his eyes were bright. Sue kept herself squarely in the doorway, ready to slam the door should the necessity arise. Bitter air gusted into the house. She said, “Ray—”

“You’re fired,” he said.

She blinked at him. “What?”

His voice was flat and level, his lips fixed in what looked like a permanent sneer. “I know what you did. I came to tell you you’re fired.”

“I’m fired? You drove out here to tell me I’m
fired
?”

This was too much. The tension of the day had accumulated inside her like an electric charge, and this was so ludicrously anticlimactic—Ray firing her from a job that had long ago become redundant and unimportant—that she had to struggle to keep a straight face.

What would he do next, kick her out of Blind Lake?

But she sensed it was absolutely necessary to conceal the amusement she felt. “Ray,” she said, “look, I’m sorry, but it’s late—”

“Shut up. Shut the fuck up. You’re nothing but a thief. I know about the documents you stole. And I know about the other thing too.”

“The other thing?”

“Do I have to draw you a diagram? The pastry!”

The DingDong.

That did it. She laughed in spite of herself—a choked giggle that turned into a helpless, full-throated roar. God, the DingDong—Sebastian’s ersatz birthday cake—the fucking
DingDong
!

She was still laughing when Ray reached for her throat.

Sebastian had always been a sound sleeper.

He was quick to nod off, slow to wake. Morning classes had been the bane of his academic career. He would have made a lousy monk, he had often thought. Incapable of celibacy and always late for matins.

He slept through the distant sound of the doorbell and through the considerable noise that followed. He woke to the sound of someone whispering his name.