Blind Lake (40 page)

But it’s not really Tess
, Chris thought, and he heard panicked footsteps behind him and a small voice screaming—no,
this
was Tess, running toward her father.

Chris turned in time to catch her by her shoulders and lift her off her feet.

She kicked and squirmed in his arms. “Let me
go
!”

The glass walls crumbled, opening the gallery to the O/BEC enclosure. Tendrils of a substance that looked like mother-of-pearl began to snake across the floor in lacy, symmetrical arrays. The air stank of ozone. Chris watched as Ray struggled to his feet and blinked like a man waking up from, or into, a nightmare.

Ray stumbled toward the O/BEC chamber, now an open pit.

Spikes of crystalline matter rose to the ceiling and pierced it, shaking loose a snow of plaster. The overhead fluorescent bars dimmed.

“Ray,” Chris said. “Hey, buddy. We’re not safe here. We need to get out. We need to get Tess up top.”

Tess yielded in his grip, waiting for her father to react. Chris kept a firm hand on her shoulder.

Ray Scutter gazed into the abyss in front of him. The O/BEC chamber was a well of crystalline growth three stories deep, a barrel full of glass. He gave Chris a quick, dismissive glance. “Obviously we’re not safe. That’s the fucking
point
.”

“Maybe you’re right. I don’t want to argue with you. We have to get Tess upstairs. We need to take care of your daughter, Ray.”

Ray seemed to be evaluating that option. But Ray wasn’t in a hurry anymore. He gave them both another long look. It seemed to Chris he had never seen such weariness in a human face.

Then his expression softened, as if he had solved a troublesome riddle. He smiled. “You do it,” he said.

Then he stepped over the edge.

Tess twisted herself out of his arms and ran headlong to the place where her father had been.

Subject vanished, and so did the cathedral arches of luminous stone and the arid highlands of UMa47/E. Marguerite blinked into a sudden disorienting darkness. The darkness became the outline of the windowless conference room on the second floor of the Blind Lake clinic. Her knees buckled. She grabbed a chair to hold herself upright. The wall screen was a flickering rectangle of meaningless noise. Loss of intelligibility, Marguerite thought.

How long had she been away? Assuming she had been gone at all. More likely she had never left this room, though every cell of her body proclaimed that she had been on the surface of UMa47/E, that she had touched the Subject’s leathery skin with her fingers.

This empty boardroom, the clinic, a snowy morning in Blind Lake, Ray’s madness: how to reinsert herself in that story? She thought of Tess. Tess, down in the reception room with Chris and Elaine and Sebastian. She took a calming breath and stepped out into the hallway.

But the hallway was busy with people in white protective suits, people carrying weapons. Marguerite stared uncomprehending until two of them approached her and took her arms.

“My daughter’s downstairs,” she managed to say.

“Ma’am, we’re evacuating this building and the rest of the buildings in the installation.” It was a woman’s voice, firm but not unfriendly. “We’ll get everyone sorted out once the premises are clear. Please come with us.”

Marguerite submitted to this indignity as far as the clinic lobby, where she was allowed to retrieve her winter coat from the back of a chair. Then she was escorted outside, into a razor-cold morning and a small crowd of clinic personnel. There was no sign of Tess or Chris, and her stomach sank.

She spotted Sebastian Vogel and Elaine Coster as they were herded into a personnel carrier with a dozen other people. She called out to them, called Tessa’s name, but Elaine was pulled inside by a helmeted man and Sebastian could only wave vaguely toward the west—toward the Alley, visible, as Marguerite craned her head, down the street opposite the mallway.

Marguerite gasped.

The concrete cooling towers were gone. No, not gone, but
encapsulated
, encased in a scaffolding of knotted silvery spines, crystalline minarets and arching buttresses. The encapsulating substance grew as she watched, sending out radial arms like an enormous starfish.

Tess
, she thought.
My baby. Don’t let my baby slip away
.

Tess stood at the rim of the abyss that had contained the O/BEC platens and which was now a seething pit of glassy coral growths. For a fraction of a second Chris appreciated the incongruity of it, Tess motionless in her dusty overalls and bright yellow shirt as the gallery evolved around her; Tess gazing into the chasm where her father had disappeared.

Where she was plainly tempted to follow.

Chris walked toward her until she turned her head and gave him a warning look that was unmistakable in its intent.

He said, “Tess—”

“He jumped,” she said.

There was noise in the air now, a glassy tinkling and grinding. Chris strained to hear her. Yes, Ray had jumped. Should he acknowledge that?

Ten more steps, he thought. Ten steps and I’ll be close enough to pick her up and carry her away from here. But ten steps was a long way.

The toes of her shoes tested the abyss.

“Is he dead?” Tess asked.

Every instinct told him she would not be easily reassured. She wanted the truth.

The truth: “I don’t know. I can’t see him, Tess.”

“Come closer,” she said. Another step. “No! Not to me. To the
edge
.”

He moved slowly and obliquely, trying to narrow the space between them without alarming her. When he reached the pit he looked down.

Pale crystals crawled up the rim of the chamber, but the O/BEC platens were lost in a pearlescent fog. No sign of Ray.

“She’s only protecting herself,” Tess said.

“She?”

“Mirror Girl. Or whatever you want to call her. She couldn’t depend on the machines to keep her safe anymore. So she made her own.”

Was Tess talking about the O/BECs? Had they contrived to regulate their own environment and eliminate their dependency on human beings?

“I can’t see him,” Tess mourned. “Can you see him?”

“No.” Ray was gone.

“Is he dead?”

Tess wasn’t crying, but her grief was etched into her voice. A wrong word could fuel her despair and send her toppling over the edge. An obvious lie could have the same effect.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t see him either.”

That was at least some of the truth, but it was also an evasion, and Tess gave him a scornful glare. “I think he died.”

“Well,” Chris said breathlessly, “it looks that way.”

She nodded solemnly, swaying.

Chris took another small step closer. How many more of these incremental movements before he could grab her and pull her back from the edge? Six? Seven?

“He didn’t like the story he was living in,” Tess said. She caught Chris in motion and shot him another warning glance. “I’m not Porry, you know. You don’t have to save me.”

“Step back from the edge, then,” Chris said.

“I haven’t decided. Maybe if you die here you don’t really die. This is turning into a special place. It isn’t Eyeball Alley anymore.”

No, Chris thought, it isn’t.

“Mirror Girl would catch me,” Tess said. “And take me away.”

“Even so, there’d be no coming back.”

“No… no coming back.”

“Porry wouldn’t jump,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Porry
died
,” Tess said.

“She’s—” He was about to deny it but stopped himself in time. Tess watched his face closely. “How did you know that?”

“I heard you talking to my mom.” The ultimate Porry story. “How did she die?” Tess asked.

The truth. Whatever that meant. Where did “truth” live, and why was it so alluring and so evasive? “I don’t like to talk about it, Tess.”

She shifted her weight deliberately, one foot to another. “Was it an accident?”

“No.”

She looked back into the pit. “Was it your fault?”

Another infinitesimal step closer. “She—I could have done better. I should have saved her.”

“But was it your
fault
?”

Those memories lived in a dark place. Porry’s murderous boyfriend. Porry’s boyfriend, weeping.
I swear to God, I won’t touch her. It’s the fucking bottle, man, not me
. Porry’s boyfriend, on the last day of Porry’s life, stinking of drunk sweat and promising redemption.

And I believed the son of a bitch. So was it my fault?

How to unravel this monument of pain he’d built? Mourning his sister with every self-inflicted wound.

Tess wanted the truth.

“No,” he said. “No. It wasn’t my fault.”

“But the story doesn’t have a happy ending.”

A step. Another. “Some stories don’t.”

Her eyes glistened. “I wish she hadn’t died, Chris.”

“I wish that too.”

“Does my story have a happy ending?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows. I can try to help give it one.”

Tears rolled from her eyes. “But you can’t promise.”

“I can promise to try.”

“Is that the truth?”

“The truth,” Chris said. “Now give me your hand.”

He swept her into his arms and ran from the gallery, ran toward the stairwell, ran against the beating of his heart until he could taste the edge of winter and see at least a little of the sun.

Marvel not, my comrade, if I appear talking to you on super-terrestrial and aerial topics. The long and the short of the matter is that I am running over the order of a Journey I have lately made.

—Lucian of Samosata,
Icaromenippus
,c. 150 AD

They crossed the Ohio border at the end of a languorous August afternoon.

Chris drove the last leg of the trip while Maguerite listened to music and Tess dozed in the back of the car. They were ultimately bound for New York, where Chris was scheduled for a series of meetings with his publisher, but Marguerite had lobbied for a weekend at her father’s house, a couple of days of gentle decompression before they were borne back into the world.

It was reassuring, Chris thought, to see how little this part of the country had changed since the events of last year. A National Guard checkpoint stood abandoned at the Indiana border, mute testimony both to the crisis and its passing; otherwise it was cows and combines, truckstops and county lines. Many of these roads had never been automated, and it was a pleasure to drive for hours at a time with no hands on the wheel but his own—no proxalerts, overrides, or congestion-avoidance protocols; just man and machine, the way God intended.

He nudged Marguerite as they approached the county limits.

She took off her headphones and watched the road. She had been away too long, she told Chris; she was distressed by the shabby mallways, drug bars, and cordiality palaces that had sprung up along the old highway.

But the heart of the town was just as she had described it: the century-old police station, the commons lined with chestnut trees, the more modern trefoil windmills riding the crest of a distant ridge. The several churches, including the Presbyterian church where her father used to preside.

Her father was retired now. He had moved from the rectory to a frame house on Butternut Street south of the business district. Chris followed her directions and parked at the curb-side out front.

“Wake up, Tess,” Marguerite said. “We’re here.”

Tess climbed out of the car smiling groggily at her grandfather, who came down the porch steps beaming.

Marguerite had worried that the meeting between Chris and her father might be awkward. That fear proved baseless. She watched in mild surprise as her father shook Chris’s hand warmly and ushered him into the house.

Chuck Hauser had changed very little in the three years since her last visit. He was one of those men who reach a physical plateau at middle-age and glide into their seventies only lightly touched by time—same salt-and-pepper beard, stubble-cut scalp, respectably small paunch. Still wearing the monochrome cotton shirts he had always favored, in and out of fashion. Same blue eyes, despite a recent keriotomy.

He had prepared a meal of meat loaf, peas, corn, and mashed potatoes, served on the big dining room table where (he informed Tess) Marguerite used to do her homework when she was a girl. That had been at the rectory on Glendavid Avenue. She had worked out math problems every evening after dinner, sitting next to a big fake-Tiffany lamp that cast a light she remembered as buttery yellow, almost warm enough to taste.

Her father’s dinner table conversation made no reference to Crossbank, Blind Lake, Ray Scutter, or the global events of the previous year. He encouraged Chris to call him “Chuck”; he reminisced at length with Marguerite; and when Tess grew obviously restless he let her take her dessert into the living room, where she turned on the quaintly rounded old video panel and began to search for cartoons.

He came back to the table with a pot of coffee and three mugs. “Until the day I got that call from Provo last February I didn’t know whether you were alive or dead.”

Provo, Utah, was where the people of Blind Lake had been held after the end of the lockdown—six more months of medical and psychological quarantine, living like refugees on a decommissioned Continental Defense Force base. Six months waiting to be declared sane, uncontaminated, and not a threat to the general population. “It must have been awful,” Marguerite said, “not knowing.”

“More awful for you than me, I imagine. I had a feeling you’d come through okay.”

The sky outside had grown dark. Chris finished his coffee and volunteered to keep Tess company. Her father switched on a floor lamp, illuminating the oaken bookcase behind the table. As a bookish child Marguerite had been both drawn and repelled by these shelves: so many intriguing buff or amber-colored volumes, which turned out on closer inspection to be marrowless church-related or “inspirational” works. (Although she had swiped the Kipling
Just So Stories
.) She noticed some books he had lately added—astronomy and cosmology titles, most published within the last couple of years. There was even a copy of Sebastian Vogel’s god-and-science doorstop.