Blind Lake (36 page)

If I’m not here, Marguerite thought, where am I?

The ceiling of this structure screened the direct light of the sun. “Structure,” she thought, was one of those weasel-words so beloved of the people in Obs; but could she really call it a “building”?

There were no proper walls, only rank upon rank of pillars (abalone-white and coral-pink) arranged in a series of irregular arches that joined to form a roof. Farther in, the shadows deepened to impenetrability. The floor was simply blown and drifted sand. It resembled nothing in the Lobster city. It might have grown here, she thought, over the centuries. She touched the nearest pillar. It was cool and faintly iridescent, like mother-of-pearl.

Her hand began to tingle, and she pulled it away.

Of course it was all impossible, and not just because she was breathing normally on the surface of a planet unfit to support human life. The O/BEC images of UMa47/E had traveled across fifty-one light-years. What the monitors had displayed was almost literally ancient history. There was no such thing as simultaneity, not unless the O/BECs had learned to defy the fundamental laws of the universe.

Maybe it was better to think of this experience as deep VR. Immersive observation. A vivid dream.

Flimsy as that scaffolding was, it gave her the courage to look directly at the Subject.

The Subject was half-again taller than Marguerite. None of her observation had prepared her for the sheer animal bulk of him. She had felt the same the first time she went to a petting zoo back in grade eight. Animals that had looked innocent on television had turned out to be larger, dirtier, smellier, and far more unpredictable than she had imagined. They had been so disconcertingly
themselves
, so indifferent to her preconceptions.

The Subject was very much himself. Apart from his erect bipedal stance, there was nothing human about him. Nor did he resemble an insect or a crustacean, despite the ridiculous “lobster” tag that had been foisted on him.

His feet were broad, flat, leathery, and lacking toes or nails. Built for standing, not running. They were coated with the dust and grime of his long walk, and in some places the pebbly tegument had been eroded to a raw smoothness. Marguerite wondered if they hurt.

His legs were no longer than her own but nearly twice as thick. There was an implied muscularity about them, like two tree trunks wrapped in brick-red leather. His legs met seamlessly at his crotch, where there was none of the complex paraphernalia of human sexuality, perhaps not surprisingly: there might be better places to install one’s genitalia, not that anyone had ever demonstrated that the Subject or his kind even possessed genitalia of the conventional sort.

His thorax broadened to the shape of a fat disk, to which his arms were attached. His manipulating arms were slender, lithe, and equipped at their ends with what looked roughly like human hands—three fingers and an opposable digit—although the joints were all wrong. The stubby food-grasping arms, just long enough to reach from his shoulders to his mouth, were altogether stranger, as much an externalized jaw as an extra set of limbs. Instead of hands, these secondary arms possessed bony cup-and-blade structures for cutting and grinding vegetable material.

Subject’s head was a mobile dome with wattles of loose flesh where human anatomy would have put a neck. His mouth was a vertical pink slit that concealed a long, rasping, almost prehensile tongue. His eyes were set apart almost as widely as a bird’s, cosseted in bluish-purple gristle, the eyes themselves not purely white, Marguerite realized, but faintly yellow, the color of old piano keys. No interior structure of the eye was visible, no pupil, no cornea; his eyes might have been unorganized bundles of light-sensitive cells, or perhaps their structure was concealed under a partially opaque surface, like a permanent eyelid.

The orange coxcomb atop his head served no purpose anyone had been able to define. On Earth such features were usually sexual displays, but among the Subject’s people it could hardly be gendered, since every individual possessed one.

The most prominent—or most prominently strange—feature of the Subject was the dorsal cavity running down the center of his thorax. This was widely understood to be a breathing orifice. It was as long as Marguerite’s forearm, and it opened and closed periodically like a gasping, lipless mouth. (Ray, in one of his more classless moments, had told her it looked like “a diseased vagina.”) When it opened she could see porous honeycomb-like tissue beneath it, moist and yellow. Fine silver-gray cilia made a fringe surrounding the opening.

I’m perfectly safe
, she thought, but in all honesty she was frightened of the Subject, frightened by the obvious weight and substance and implicit animal strength of him. Frightened even of the smell of him, a faint organic stink that was both sickly sweet and richly unpleasant, like the smell of a citrus rind gone green with mold.

Well, then, Marguerite thought, what now? Do we pretend this is a real meeting? Do we speak?

Could
she speak? Fear had dried her mouth. Her tongue felt numb as a wad of cotton.

“My name is Marguerite,” she whispered. “I know you don’t understand.”

He might not understand even the concept of a spoken language. She stood staring at him for a long moment. Maybe his silences spoke volumes. Maybe he spoke a language of immobility.

But he wasn’t totally immobile.

His breathing slit opened wider and emitted an almost inaudible wheezing sound. Could this be language? It sounded more like respiratory distress.

How fucking laughable, Marguerite thought, to be here—whatever this place was—and for whatever reason—only to be confronted once again with the impossibility of communication. I can’t even tell whether he’s talking or dying.

The Subject finished his discourse, if that was what it was, exhaling a gust of sour-milk air.

Apart from that, he still had not moved.

If this was an opportunity, Marguerite thought, and not just a hallucination, it was a wasted one. Her fear was laced with frustration. To be so incredibly, implausibly near to him. And still as far away as ever. Still mute, still dumb.

Outside, the shadows lengthened toward nightfall. The pale sky had turned a darker, bluer shade of white.

“I don’t understand what you said,” Marguerite confessed. “I don’t even know if you said anything.”

Subject exhaled and fluttered his cilia.

Yes, he spoke
, said a voice.

It wasn’t the Subject’s voice. The sound came from all around her. From the mother-of-pearl arches, or from the shadows farther in.

But that wasn’t the strangest thing.

The strangest thing was that the voice sounded exactly like Tessa’s.

Elaine Coster tagged Chris as he headed out the clinic door. “Whoa,” she said, “hang on—where are you going?”

She knew he was freaking out over the disappearance of Tess and Marguerite. The duty nurse had shared with Elaine the story about the girl’s footprints, how they had vanished in the snow. Elaine hated to think of Tess, who had seemed like nice enough kid, out in this bitter weather. But there was daylight coming fast, and the girl shouldn’t be that hard to find, Elaine thought, if only Chris would exercise reasonable patience. As for Marguerite—

“I’m driving out to the Eye,” Chris said.

“The Eye? I’m sorry, but what the hell for? Ari says it’s being evacuated.”

“I can’t explain.”

She grabbed his arm before he could open the door. “Come on, Chris, you can do better than that. You think Tess and Marguerite are at the
Eye
? How is that even possible?”

Please, Elaine thought, let this not be one more case of Blind Lake lunacy.

“Tess wasn’t just wandering around out there. Her footprints are straight as a ruler, and they’re pointed directly at the Eye.”

“But the footprints stop?”

“Yes.”

“So maybe she just came back to the clinic door. You know, stepping in her own tracks.”

“Walking backwards in the snow? In the dark?”

“Well, what do
you
think? If she’s at the Eye, how’d she get there? Did she sprout wings, Chris? Or maybe she beamed herself there. Maybe she traveled in her astral body.”

“I don’t pretend to understand it. But the last time she disappeared from school, that’s where she went.”

“You really think she walked that distance in this weather?”

“I don’t know about walked. But I think that’s where she is, I think she’s in trouble, and I think Marguerite would want me to go find her.”

“You can read minds too? Ari and Shulgin and a bunch of other people are already keeping their eyes out for Tess and Marguerite. Let them do their work. They’re better at it than you are. Chris, listen to me,
listen to me
. I got a call from one of my contacts on the Security force. A whole fucking battalion’s worth of military gear and personnel just showed up at the main gate, and they’re coming inside. You understand? The siege is over! I don’t know what comes next, but in all likelihood the Lake will be evacuated by nightfall—you, me, Tess, Marguerite,
everybody
. I’m heading down the main road, and I want you to come with me. We’re still journalists. We’ve got a story here.”

He smiled at her in a way Elaine didn’t like, rueful and sad. She decided she hated all tall young men with doleful eyes.

“You take it, Elaine,” he said. “It’s your story. You’re the one to tell it.”

Elaine watched him angle his big body into the car, watched as he drove off through the still-falling snow at a reckless speed.

Sebastian Vogel, crammed into his lobby chair like a Buddha into an airline seat, said, “I think I finally figured it out.”

Elaine sat next to him wearily. “Please. No more metaphysical bullshit.” There were things she needed to do. Pack up her server and her written notes and keep them with her, even if some armed bureaucrat wanted to confiscate them. Consider facing the exterior world, whatever the exterior world had become, with its pilgrims and falling airplanes and roadblocks east of the Mississippi.

“Ever since Crossbank,” Sebastian said, “I’ve been wondering why you agreed to take this assignment. A veteran scientific journalist, hired by a frankly second-rate New York magazine to address a subject that’s been done to death, sharing the spotlight with a crank theologist and a discredited scandalmonger. That never made any sense to me. But I think I figured it out. It’s because of Chris, isn’t it?”

“Oh, fuck
off
Sebastian.”

“You read his book, followed his story in the press, watched his congressional testimony. Maybe you’d already picked up hints about Galliano’s ethical problems. You saw Chris being pilloried, and you knew he was right in spite of all the outrage and bad press. You were curious about him. Maybe he reminded you of yourself at that age. You took the job because you wanted to meet him.”

This would have been less annoying had it been untrue. Elaine mustered her fiercest go-to-hell stare.

“Was he a disappointment?” Sebastian said. “As a personal project?”

I don’t have time for this, Elaine thought. She felt dizzy with lack of sleep. Maybe she could just sit here until the soldiers came for her. All the really important work she’d done was stored in her pocket server, after all, and they would take her server from her only when they pried it out of her cold, dead hands. “When I met Chris I thought they’d beaten him down. He was obviously unhappy, he wasn’t writing, he was a little too free with the recreational chemicals, and he was carrying a load of guilt that was way too big for him.”

“I’m not sure that’s all because of his experience with Galliano.”

“Probably not. I just thought…”

“You wanted to help,” Sebastian said gently.

“Yes. I’m a fucking saint. Now shut
up
.”

“You wanted to lend him some of your cynicism.”

“He’d be a better journalist if he learned not to care.”

“Though perhaps not a better human being.”

“I’m not discussing this.”

“What he needed, Elaine, and I don’t mean this badly, but what he needed, it wasn’t in your power to give it to him.”

“Speaks the guru.” She bit her lip. “So what do you think? You think he found it? Whatever it is he needs?”

“I think he’s looking for it right now,” Sebastian said.

Chris ran into outbound traffic on the road to the Eye. Night staff leaving the facility, he guessed, as rumors circulated that the siege was coming to an end.

Even in this wan daylight the road was treacherous driving. He saw more than one car abandoned in the drifts, workers in burly winter coats flagging rides from colleagues.

He drove past an untenanted guardpost directly to the entrance to the Eye, where he found Charlie Grogan herding stragglers out of the lobby into the cold morning air. The sound of Klaxons beat against the raging wind.

“Not even remotely possible,” Charlie said when Chris explained what he wanted to do. “The building suffered a tremor of some kind early this morning and all kinds of electrical and communications problems since then. We’ve got strict protocols about this. I can’t let anyone in until the building is declared structurally sound. Even after we get inspectors inside, we still have to worry about containment on the cryogenics.” He looked mournful. “The O/BECs are probably dead already.”

“Tessa’s inside.”

“So you said, but I doubt that a whole lot, Mr. Carmody. Our Security people conducted a very orderly evacuation. What would Tessa be doing here at five in the morning, anyway?”

Looking for Mirror Girl, Chris thought. “It wouldn’t be the first time she got inside without being seen.”

“You really have a solid reason to believe Tess is in this building?”

“Yes.”

“You want to share that information with me?”

“I’m sorry. You’ll have to trust me.”

“I’m sorry too. Look, even if she is inside, we’ve got the Lake’s Security people headed in. Maybe they can give you some advice.”