Blind Lake (37 page)

“Charlie, you need to double-check on that. I heard Shulgin’s men were detoured to the south gate.”

“What, this thing about the military coming in?”

“Call Shulgin. Ask him when you can expect to see a Security detail.”

Charlie sighed. “Look, I’ll talk to Tabby Menkowitz and see if she can get a volunteer from our own people to do a walk-through—”

“If Tess sees a stranger she’ll just hide. In an installation this big, I’m sure an eleven-year-old girl can avoid getting caught.”

“But she’ll come out for you?”

“I believe there’s a chance she will.”

“What do you mean to do, look inside every room in the building?”

“Last time you found her in the O/BEC gallery, right?”

“Yeah, but—”

“It’s the O/BECs she’s interested in.”

“I could lose my job,” Charlie said.

“Is that really an issue at this point?”

“
Jesus
, Chris.” Then: “If they end up pulling your body out of the rubble, what am I supposed to say?”

“Say you never saw me.”

“I wish it was true.” Charlie’s server buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it. “Tell you what. Take this.” He gave Chris his yellow-striped hard hat. “There’s a transponder in the crown. It’ll give you emergency all-pass privileges if any of the automated security is still up. Put it on. And if she’s not where you think she is, get the fuck out of there, all right?”

“Thank you.”

“Just bring back my goddamn hat,” Charlie said.

As soon as Marguerite identified the voice as Tessa’s, Tess herself stepped out from behind (or somehow
inside
) the nearest iridescent pillar.

But it wasn’t really Tess. Marguerite knew that instantly. It was the image of Tess, down to the denim overalls and yellow shirt in which Marguerite had hurriedly dressed her daughter for the trip to the Blind Lake clinic. But Tess had never looked so surrealistically flawless, so lit from within, so unblinkingly clear-eyed.

This was Mirror Girl.

“You don’t have to be scared,” Mirror Girl said.

Yes, Marguerite thought, I think I do, I do have to be scared. “You’re Mirror Girl,” she stammered.

“Tess calls me that.”

“What are you really, then?”

“There’s no simple word for it.”

“Did you bring me here?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because this is what you wanted.”

Was it? “What do you have to do with my daughter?”

“I learned a lot from Tess.”

“Have you hurt her?”

“I don’t hurt people.”

This creature, this thing that had appropriated Tessa’s appearance, had also mastered Tessa’s diction and Tessa’s oblique way with questions and answers. “Tess said you live in the Eye. In the O/BEC processors.”

“I have a sister at Crossbank,” Mirror Girl said proudly. “I have sisters in the stars. Almost too many to count. I have a sister here. We talk to each other.”

This conversation was too bizarre to be real, Marguerite decided. It had the trajectory and momentum of a dream and, like a dream, it would have to play itself out. Her participation was not only necessary but mandatory.

Ursa Majoris 47 had begun to settle toward the horizon, casting long and complex shadows into the maze of arches. “This planet is years and years away from Earth,” Marguerite said, thinking of time, the passage of time, the paradox of time. “I can’t really be here.”

“You’re not out
there
,” the image of Tess said, gesturing at the desert; “you’re in
here
. It’s different in here. More different the farther inside you go. It’s true, if you walked out of here you would die. Your body couldn’t breathe or go on living, and if you counted the hours they would be different hours than the Blind Lake hours.”

“How do you know about Blind Lake?”

“I was born there.”

“Why do you look like Tess?”

“I told you. I learned a lot from her.”

“But why
Tess
?”

Mirror Girl shrugged in a distressingly Tess-like fashion. “She knew my sister at Crossbank before I was born. It could have been someone else. But it had to be
someone
.”

Like the Subject, Marguerite thought. We could have picked any individual to follow. It just happened to be him.

The Subject regarded this exchange indifferently, if his motionlessness signified anything like indifference.

“Go on,” Mirror Girl said, “talk to him. Isn’t that what you want to do?”

Ultimately, yes, but it had never been more than a daydream. She didn’t know how to begin. She faced the Subject again.

“Hello,” she said, feeling idiotic, her voice cracking.

There was no response.

She looked back helplessly at Mirror Girl.

“Not like that. Tell him a story,” Mirror Girl suggested.

“What story?”

“
Your
story.”

Absurd, Marguerite thought. She couldn’t just tell him a story. It was a childish idea, a Tess-like idea. She had been here too long already. She wasn’t like the Subject; she couldn’t stand in one place indefinitely. She was still a mortal human being.

But even as she had these thoughts she felt a wave of calm coming over her. It was like the feeling she had putting Tess to bed, tucking her in, reading (before Tess had become too sophisticated for this) something from the old, strange children’s books she had found so fascinating: Oz,
The Hobbit
, Harry Potter. Marguerite’s fatigue lifted (perhaps this was a spell cast by Mirror Girl), and she closed her eyes and found herself wondering what she could tell the Subject about the Earth, not its history or geography but her own experience of it. How frighteningly strange it would no doubt seem to him. Her story: born in the customary manner of human biology to human parents, her memory emerging diffusely from a haze of cradles and blankets; learning her name (she had been “Margie” for the first twelve years of her life); plunged into the tedium, terror, and rare joys of school (Miss Marmette, Mr. Foucek, Mrs. Bland, the stern deities of grades 1, 2, 3); the cycle of the seasons, naming the months, September and school, November and the first truly cold days, January dark and often painful, the storming and melting months before June, June hot and full of promise, the fleeting freedoms of August; childhood dramas: appendicitis, appendectomy, influenza, pneumonia; friendships begun, sustained, or aborted; a growing awareness of her parents as two real, separate people who did more than cater to her needs: her mother, who cooked and kept house and read large books and made charcoal sketches (of abstracted rural villages, notionally Spanish, drenched in clinical sunlight); her father, distant and equally bookish, a Presbyterian minister, sonorous lord of Sundays but gentle on the home front, who had often seemed to Marguerite a lonely man, lonely for God, lonely for the deep architecture of the cosmos, the scaffolding of meaning he imagined when he read the synoptic Gospels and in which, he confessed to her once, he had never really been able to believe; her own dawning curiosity about the world and its place in time and her place in nature, a curiosity strictly scientific, at least as she understood “science” from video shows and speculative novels: how good it felt to master what was generally known of planets, moons, stars, galaxies, and their beginnings and ultimate ends, relishing even the unanswered questions because they were shared, acknowledged, and systematically challenged, unlike her father’s fragile religiosity, which he had been reluctant even to discuss, faith, she surmised, being like an antique tea set, beautiful and ancient but not to be exposed to light or heat; knowing, too, the pride he took in her growing list of accomplishments (straight A’s in everything but music and physical education, where her clumsiness betrayed her; the math badges and science-fair awards; the scholarships); the sudden indecencies of adolescence, making sense of the female body that had begun to surprise her in so many ways, learning to equate the blood spots in her underwear with the biology of reproduction, eggs and seeds and ovaries and pollen and a chain of carnal acts connecting her to the common ancestor of everything alive on Earth; her own skirmishes with the erotic (a boy named Jeremy in the furnished basement of his house, while his mother hosted a party upstairs; an older boy named Elliot, in his bedroom on a winter night when his parents were stranded by monsoon weather in an airport somewhere in Thailand); her early fascination with the O/BEC images of HR8832/B, oceanscapes like Victorian color-plate illustrations of Mellville (
Typee, Oomoo
), a fascination that led her to astrobiology; the Princeton scholarship (at her graduation her mother had wept with pride but suffered, that night, the first of a series of ischemic attacks that would culminate in a killing stroke half a year later); standing with her father at the funeral, willing herself to stay upright when she wanted to lie down and make the world disappear; her first real long-term relationship, a university affair with a man named Mike Okuda who had also been obsessed with O/BEC images and who once admitted fantasizing, when they made love, that he was under invisible surveillance from other worlds; the pain of separation when he took a job designing Hall Effect engines somewhere on the West Coast, and her subsequent realization that she would never stumble into love but would have to construct it from its constituent parts, with the help of a willing partner; her apprenticeship at Crossbank, working out tentative classification systems for chthonic plant species based on images sequestered from Obs (the four-lobed peristem, the pale taproot exposed by a storm); her first encounter with Ray, when she had mistaken her admiration for him for the possibility of love, and their first physical intimacy, sensing in Ray a reluctance that bordered on distaste and for which she blamed herself; the erosion of their marriage (his relentless vigilance and suspicion, begrudging even visits to sick friends, his aloofness during her pregnancy) and the things that sustained her during that difficult time (her work, long walks away from the house, the weight of winter sunsets); her water breaking, and labor, and giving birth dazed and sedated in a hospital delivery room while Ray, in the hallway outside, conducted a loud argument with a nurse’s aide; the miracle and fascination of Tessa, sensing some divinity (her father might have said) in the exchange of roles, daughter become mother, witness to what she had once herself experienced; her increasing frustration when the Blind Lake installation began to derive images of a new inhabited world while she continued to catalogue seaweed and lagoon flowers; the divorce, the bitter custody dispute, an increasing physical fear of Ray which she dismissed as paranoia (but shouldn’t have: it was a
real
snake); the transfer to Blind Lake, fulfillment and loneliness, the lockdown, Chris…

How could she put any of this into words? The story wasn’t one story. It was fractal, stories within stories; unpack one and you unpacked them all,
quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius…
And, of course, the Subject wouldn’t understand.

“But he does,” Mirror Girl said.

“Does what?”

“He understands. Some of it, anyway.”

“But I didn’t say anything.”

“Yes. You did. We translated for you.”

Interesting, this royal “we”—Mirror Girl and her sisters among the stars, Marguerite presumed… But the Subject was still motionless.

“No,” Mirror Girl said in Tessa’s voice. “He’s talking.”

Was he? His ventral orifice flexed, his cilia made wind-on-a-wheatfield motions. The air smelled suddenly of hot tar, licorice, stale milk.

“He may well be talking. I still don’t understand.”

“Close your eyes and listen.”

“I can’t hear anything.”

“Just
listen
.”

Mirror Girl took her hand, and knowledge flooded into her: too much knowledge, a tsunami of it, far too much to organize or understand.

(“It’s a story,” Mirror Girl whispered. “It’s just a story.”)

A story, but how could she tell it when she couldn’t understand it herself? There was a storm raging in her mind. Ideas, impressions, words as evanescent as dreams, liable to vanish if she didn’t fix them at once in memory. Desperate, she thought of Tess: if this was a story, how would she tell it to Tess?

The organizing impulse helped. She imagined herself at Tessa’s bedside, telling her a story about the Subject.
He was born
—but that wasn’t the right word; better to say “quickened”—
he was quickened
—no.

Start again.

The Subject—

The person we
call
the Subject—

The person we call the Subject was alive (Marguerite imagined herself saying) long before he was anything like what he became, long before he was capable of thought or memory. There are creatures—
you remember this, Tess
—who live in the walls of the great stone ziggurats of the City, in hidden warrens. Small animals, smaller than kittens, and a great many of them, with their nests like tiny cities inside the City itself. These small animals are born alive and unprotected, like mammals or marsupials; they emerge from their homes at night and feed at the blood nipples of the Subject and his kind, and they return, before dawn, to the walls. They live and die and breed amongst themselves, and that’s that, usually. Usually. But once every thirteen years, as UMa47/E calculates years, the Subject’s people produce in their bodies a kind of genetic virus, which infects some of the creatures that feed from them, and the infected creatures change in dramatic ways. This is how the Subject’s people begin life: as a viral infection in another species. (Not really an infection: a symbiosis—
do you know that word, Tess
?—initiated millions of years ago; or sexual dimorphism taken to a freakish extreme; the Subject’s people had debated this question without resolving it.) Subject began his life this way. One of several thousand yearling creatures suddenly too large and awkward to return to their warrens, he was captured and educated into sentience at a lyceum deep beneath the City, a place of which he retained fond memories: warmth and the humidity of seepwater and sweet binges in the food wells; the evolution of his body into something new and strong and large; the knowledge that grew unforced into his brain and the knowledge he learned from tutors, entering a fresh chamber of mind every morning. His gradual integration into the City’s daily life, replacing workers who had died or lost their faculties. Coming to understand that the City was a great machine and that he worked for the comfort of the City just as the City worked untiringly for him.