Blind Lake (41 page)

He pulled his chair next to Marguerite’s. “How’s Tess dealing with the death of her father?”

“Well enough, given the circumstances and considering she just turned twelve. She still insists he might not be dead.”

“He vanished inside the starfish.”

Marguerite winced at that popular name for the O/BEC-generated structures. Like “Lobsters,” it was a gross misnomer. Why must every unfamiliar thing be compared to something washed up on a beach? “Lots of people vanished the same way.”

“Like those so-called pilgrims at Crossbank. But they don’t come back.”

“No,” Marguerite said, “they don’t come back.”

“Does Tess know that?”

“Yes.”

That, and perhaps more.

“There were times,” Chuck Hauser said, “when I despised that man for the way he treated you. I was more relieved than I let on when you divorced him. But I think he genuinely loved Tess, at least so far as he was able to love anyone.”

“Yes,” Marguerite said. “I think that’s true.”

He nodded. Then he cleared his throat, a phlegmy bark that reminded her just how old he had become.

“Looks like a clear night,” he said.

“Clear and cool. You’d hardly know it’s August.”

He smiled. “Come out into the backyard, Marguerite. There’s something I want to show you.”

Tess had already found something to watch on the video panel: one of those twentieth-century black-and-white movies she was so fond of. A comedy. The jokes were either bizarre or incomprehensible, it seemed to Chris, but Tess laughed obligingly, if only at the expressions on the actors’ faces.

Chris leafed through a stack of magazines Marguerite’s father had left in the rack beside the sofa. They were all news magazines, and the oldest dated back to September of last year.

It was a year’s history in miniature. The Burbank murders, military setbacks in Lesotho, the devaluation of the Continental dollar, the Pan-Arab Alliance—and of course, above all else, the screaming headlines about Crossbank/Blind Lake.

Everything he had missed during the lockdown, history from the outside looking in.

ASTRONOMICAL FACILITIES CLOSED IN UNEXPLAINED GOV’T MOVE

No real details, but much speculation about the O/BEC platens. There was a sidebar explaining how Crossbank’s processors differed from the usual quantum computers:
Qubits, Excitons, and Self-Evolving Code
.

Another issue, dated a week later:

STARFISH STRUCTURE RESEMBLES FINAL IMAGES CAPTURED BY CROSSBANK QUANTUM SCOPE

Crossbank had discovered an apparently artificial structure on the watery world of HR8832/B. The Crossbank processor had promptly generated a near-exact copy of the structure around itself, like a kind of spiky armor.

Was this contamination or procreation? Infection or reproduction?

Both Crossbank and Blind Lake had been immediately quarantined.

CONFUSION AT CROSSBANK: SOME RESEARCHERS DISAPPEARED INSIDE STRUCTURE SOURCES SAY

Automated probes revealed that the labyrinthine interior of the Crossbank “starfish” was a very strange place. Human volunteers retreated in confusion; robots vanished; remote telemetry quickly became unintelligible.

EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS OF CROSSBANK ANOMALY

The now-familiar image. From the air, the six radial arms; from ground level, the iridescent arches and spongiform caverns. In the text, a note that the material from which the anomaly was constructed was “scale invariant—under a microscope, any piece looks much like the whole thing does to the human eye.”

Chris leafed ahead:

SECOND “STARFISH” APPEARS HUNDREDS OF MILES FROM CROSSBANK, SPARKS PANIC

The second structure had manifested overnight in a soybean field south of Macon, Georgia. Apart from a few acres of fallow ground, it destroyed nothing and killed no one, though a curious farmhand disappeared inside it before local authorities could establish a cordon. Nevertheless, large numbers of residents had fled their homes and spread confusion across the Southeast.

(Since then five more “starfish” had appeared in isolated areas around the globe, apparently following force lines in the Earth’s magnetic field. None had proved dangerous to anyone prudent enough to avoid stepping inside.)

NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS CALL FOR CALM, CITE “NO EVIDENCE OF HOSTILE INTENT.”

These had been the weeks of greatest panic. The apocalyptic pronouncements and instant cults; the hawks and the pilgrims; the blockaded highways.

PRIVATE PLANE REPORTED SHOT DOWN OVER BLIND LAKE NO-FLY ZONE.

Introducing Adam Sandoval, 65, owner of a Loveland, Colorado, hardware store, who had since admitted his intention of flying his aircraft directly into the Blind Lake O/BEC installation (a.k.a. the Alley), in order to prevent another manifestation of the kind that had lured his wife away from him. (Sandoval’s wife had been a pilgrim, vanished and presumed dead in a group penetration of the Crossbank artifact.)

Chris had gotten to know Adam Sandoval during the post-lockdown confinement in Provo. Sandoval had recovered from his coma and his burns, though his skin was still shockingly pink where it had been restored. He had been contrite about his aborted suicide attempt, but remained bellicose on the subject of his wife’s disappearance.

Introduced to Sebastian Vogel in the Provo provision line one evening, Sandoval had refused to shake Sebastian’s hand. “My wife read your book,” he said, “shortly before she decided to run off looking for transcendence, whatever that fucking word means. Don’t you ever think about the people you peddle your bullshit to?”

Last week Sebastian and Sue had left Provo to set up housekeeping in Carmel, where a friend had offered Sue a job at a real-estate firm. Sebastian was refusing interviews and had announced that there would be no sequel to
God & the Quantum Vacuum
.

BLIND LAKE EVENT PROMPTS MILITARY

INCURSION AND RESCUE

BLIND LAKE DETAINEES REMOVED TO UNDISCLOSED LOCATION FOR QUARANTINE, DEBRIEFING

“Rescue” meant a terrifying roundup initiated as soon as the Blind Lake Eye began to transform itself into the familiar symmetric starfish structure. “Quarantine” meant six more months of detention under the newly enacted Public Safety Protocols. “Debriefing” meant a series of interviews with well-dressed and well-meaning government personnel who recorded everything and often asked the same questions twice.

Most of the population of Blind Lake had cooperated willingly. Everyone who had lived through the lockdown had a story to tell.

The last and most recent issue of Chuck Hauser’s newsmagazines contained no screaming headlines, only a guest editorial in the back pages:

What We Know and What We Don’t: A Survivor’s Perspective.
…
and as the fear subsides, we can begin to take account of what we’ve learned and what we have yet to understand
.
Something momentous has happened, something that still defies easy comprehension. We’re told that we created, in our most complex computers, what is essentially a new form of life
—
or else we have assisted into existence a new generation of a very old form of life, a form of life perhaps older than the Earth itself. We have evidence from the now-defunct facilities at Crossbank and Blind Lake that this process has already happened on two life-bearing worlds elsewhere in the local neighborhood and perhaps across the galaxy
.
But the “starfish
”—
and can’t we come up with a more elegant name for these really quite beautiful structures?
—
seem little interested in contacting us, much less intervening in our affairs. We have the example on UMa47/E of a sentient culture that has coexisted with the starfish for (probably) centuries, without any meaningful interaction at all
.
This lends credence to those who suggest the starfish represent not only a wholly new form of life but a wholly new form of consciousness, which overlaps only minimally with our own. We have looked deep into the sky, in other words, and met at last the limits of intelligibility
.
But there is the counterexample of HR8832/B, a planet on which those who constructed the quantum nuclei of the starfish have disappeared altogether. Perhaps naturally, in an extinction event, or perhaps not. Perhaps we are being offered a choice. Perhaps a species that pursues a genuine understanding of the starfish can reach that goal only by becoming something other than itself. Perhaps, to truly understand the mystery, we will have to embrace it and become it. Wasn’t it Heisenberg who observed that the seer and the seen become inextricably interlinked?

It ran to a page and a half, and it was a good piece. Thoughtful and carefully reasoned. The byline belonged to Elaine Coster, “a respected science journalist only recently released from the quarantine camp in Utah.”

Chris glanced at Tess, who was yawning, sprawled across the upholstered cushions of her grandfather’s sofa.

Tess hadn’t mentioned Mirror Girl to the authorities. Nor had Marguerite, nor had Chris.

They had not agreed in advance to a conspiracy of silence. It was a decision each had reached singly, arising, at least on Chris’s part, from a reluctance to report events that could only be misunderstood.

An untellable tale. Should a journalist really believe in such a thing? But what he had felt was more than just fear of ridicule. Things had happened that he couldn’t explain satisfactorily even to himself. Things that would never be set in banner headlines.

Tess said, without taking her eyes off the video panel, “I’m kind of tired.”

“Getting on toward bedtime,” Chris said.

He walked her up to the small spare bedroom of her grandfather’s house. She said she might read until Marguerite came to tuck her in. Chris said that would be okay.

She sprawled across the comforter on the bed. “This is the same room I stayed in last time we visited,” Tess said. “Three years ago. When my father was with us.”

Chris nodded.

The window was open an inch or so, spilling late-summer perfumes into the room. Tess left the window ajar but pulled the yellowing blind all the way down to the sill, hiding the glass.

“You haven’t seen her since the Lake, have you?” Chris said.

Her
. Mirror Girl.

“No,” Tess said.

“You think she’s still around?”

Tess shrugged.

“You think about her much, Tess? Do you ever wonder who she was?”

“I know who she was. She was—” But the words seemed to tangle her tongue, and she stopped and frowned for a moment.

Back in Blind Lake, Tess had identified Mirror Girl with the O/BEC processors. As if the O/BECs, aroused to a dawning consciousness, had wanted a window onto the human world into which they had been born.

And at both Crossbank and Blind Lake they had chosen Tess. Why Tess? Maybe there was no real answer, Chris thought, any more than the Blind Lake researchers could say why they had chosen the Subject out of countless nearly identical individuals. It could have been anyone. It had to be someone.

Tess found the thought she had been struggling for: “She was the Eye,” Tess said solemnly. “And I was the telescope.”

Marguerite followed her father into the cool summer night, the backyard of the house on Butternut Street. Only the garden lights were lit, luminescent rods planted among the coleus, and she paused to let her eyes adjust to the darkness.

“I assume you know what
this
is,” Chuck Hauser said. He stood aside and grinned.

Marguerite’s breath caught in her throat. “A telescope! My God, it’s
beautiful
! Where did you get it?”

Optical telescopes for amateur stargazing hadn’t been commercially manufactured for years. These days, if you wanted to look at the night sky, you hooked a photomultiplier lens into your domestic server; or better, linked yourself to one of the public celestial surveys. Old Dobsonian scopes like this sold for high prices on the antique market.

And this one was genuinely old, Marguerite realized as she examined it: in lovely condition, but definitely pre-millennial. No attachments for digital tracking; only manual orbits and worm-drives, lovingly oiled.

“The works have been restored and refitted,” her father said. “New optics ground to the original specs. Otherwise it’s totally vintage.”

“It must have cost a fortune!”

“Not a fortune.” He smiled ruefully. “Not quite.”

“When did you take up an interest in astronomy?”

“Don’t be dense, Margie. I didn’t buy it for myself. It’s a gift. You like it?”

She liked it very much indeed. She hugged her father. He couldn’t possibly have afforded it. He must have taken out a second mortgage, Marguerite thought.

“When you were young,” Chuck Hauser said, “all this stuff was a mystery to me.”

“All what stuff?”

“You know. Stars and planets. Everything you cared about so much. It seems to me now I should have stopped and looked a little closer. This is my way of saying I admire what you’ve accomplished. Maybe I’m even beginning to understand it. So—think you can get this thing packed up tight enough to fit it in that little car of yours?”

“We’ll find a way.”

“I notice you put your luggage in the same room with Chris.”

She blushed. “Did I? I wasn’t thinking—really, it’s just habit—”

Making it worse.

He smiled. “Come on, Marguerite. I’m not some hard-shell Baptist. From what you’ve said and from what I’ve seen, Chris is a good man. You’re obviously in love. Have you talked about marriage?”

Her blush deepened; she hoped he couldn’t see it in the dim light. “No immediate plans. But don’t be surprised.”

“He’s good to Tess?”

“Very good.”

“She likes him?”

“Better. She feels safe with him.”