Blind Lake

One

It could end at any time.

Chris Carmody rolled into a zone of warmth in an unfamiliar bed: a depression in the cotton sheets where someone had lately been. Someone: her name was elusive, still lost in layers of sleep. But he craved the warmth of her recent presence, the author of this lingering heat. He pictured a face, benevolent and smiling and a little bit walleyed. He wondered where she had gone.

It had been a while since he had shared anyone’s bed. Strange how what he relished, as much as anything, was the heat she left behind. This space he entered in her absence.

It could end at any time. Had he dreamed the words? No. He had written them in his notebook three weeks ago, transcribing a comment from a grad student he had met in the cafeteria at Crossbank half a continent away. We’re doing amazing work, and there’s a kind of rush, knowing it could end at any time…

Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. Across this small bedroom, the woman with whom he had slept was wrangling herself into a pair of pantyhose. She caught his glance and smiled cautiously. “Hey, baby,” she said. “Not to rush you, but didn’t you say you had an appointment somewhere?”

Memory caught up with him. Her name was Lacy. No surname offered. She was a waitress at the local Denny’s. Her hair was red and long in the current style and she was at least ten years younger than Chris. She had read his book. Or claimed to have read it. Or at least to have heard of it. She suffered from a lazy eye, which gave her a look of constant abstraction. While he blinked away sleep, she shrugged a sleeveless dress over freckled shoulders.

Lacy wasn’t much of a housekeeper. He noted a scattering of dead flies on the sunny windowsill. The makeup mirror on the side table, where, the night before, she had razored out skinny, precise lines of cocaine. A fifty-dollar bill lay on the carpet beside the bed, rolled so tightly it resembled a budding palm leaf or some bizarre stick-insect, a rust spot of dried blood on one end.

It was early fall, still warm in Constance, Minnesota. Balmy air turned gauzy curtains. Chris relished the sense of being in a place he had never been and to which he would in all likelihood never return.

“You’re actually going to the Lake today, huh?”

He reclaimed his watch from a stack of the print edition of People on the nightstand. He had an hour to make his connection. “Actually going there.” He wondered how much he had said to this woman last night.

“You want breakfast?”

“I don’t think I have time.”

She seemed relieved. “That’s okay. It was really exciting meeting you. I know lots of people who work at the Lake but they’re mostly support staff or retail. I never met anybody who was in on the big stuff.”

“I’m not in on the big stuff. I’m just a journalist.”

“Don’t undersell yourself.”

“I had a good time too.”

“You’re sweet,” she said. “You want to shower? I’m done in the bathroom.”

The water pressure was feeble and he spotted a dead cockroach in the soap dish, but the shower gave him time to adjust his expectations. To ramp up whatever was left of his professional pride. He borrowed one of her pink disposable leg razors and shaved the ghostly image of himself in the bathroom mirror. He was dressed and at the door by the time she was settling down to her own breakfast, eggs and juice in the apartment’s tiny kitchenette. She worked evenings; mornings and afternoons were her downtime. A tiny video panel on the kitchen table played an interminable daytime drama at half-volume. Lacy stood and hugged him. Her head came up as far as his breastbone. In the gentle embrace there was an acknowledgment that they meant essentially nothing to each other, nothing more than an evening’s whim recklessly indulged.

“Let me know how it goes,” she said. “If you’re back this way.”

He promised politely. But he wouldn’t be back this way.

He reclaimed his luggage from the Marriott, where Visions East had thoughtfully but needlessly booked him a room, and caught up to Elaine Coster and Sebastian Vogel in the lobby.

“You’re late,” Elaine told him.

He checked his watch. “Not by much.”

“Would it kill you to be punctual once in a while?”

“Punctuality is the thief of time, Elaine.”

“Who said that?”

“Oscar Wilde.”

“Oh, there’s a great role model for you.”

Elaine was forty-nine years old and immaculate in her safari clothes, a digital imager clipped to her breast pocket and a notebook microphone dangling from the left arm of her zirconium-encrusted sunglasses like a stray hair. Her expression was stern. Elaine was a working science journalist almost twenty years Chris’s elder, highly respected in a field where he himself was lately regarded with a certain disdain. He liked Elaine, and her work was top-notch, and so he forgave her tendency to address him the way a grade-school teacher might address the kid who planted the whoopee cushion.

Sebastian Vogel, the third member of the Visions East expeditionary force, stood silently a few feet away. Sebastian wasn’t really a journalist at all; he was a retired professor of theology from Wesleyan University who had written one of those books that becomes an inexplicable bestseller — God the Quantum Vacuum, it was called, and it was that ampersand in place of the conventional “and,” Chris suspected, that had made it acceptably fashionable, fashionably elliptical. The magazine had wanted a spiritual take on the New Astronomy, to complement Elaine’s rigorous science and Chris’s so-called “human angle.” But Sebastian, who might be brilliant, was also terminally soft-spoken. He wore a beard that obscured his mouth, which Chris took as emblematic: the words that found their way out were sparse and generally difficult to interpret.

“The van,” Elaine said, “has been waiting ten minutes.”

The van from Blind Lake, she meant, with a young DoE functionary at the wheel, one elbow out the open window and a restless expression on his face. Chris nodded and tossed his luggage in back and took a seat behind Elaine and Sebastian.

It was past one in the afternoon, but he felt a wave of exhaustion sweep over him. Something to do with the September sunlight. Or last night’s excesses. (The coke, although he had paid for it, had been Lacy’s idea, not his. He had shared a couple of lines for the sake of companionability — more than enough to keep him buzzed nearly until dawn.) He closed his eyes briefly but refused himself the indulgence of sleep. He wanted a glimpse of Constance by daylight. They had come in late yesterday and all he had seen of the town was the Denny’s, and later a bar where the local band played requests, and then the inside of Lacy’s apartment.

The town had done its best to reinvent itself as a tourist attraction. As famous as the Blind Lake campus had become, it was closed to casual visitors. The curious had to make do with this old grain-silo and rail-yard hamlet, Constance, which served as a staging base for Blind Lake’s civilian day employees, and where the new Marriott and the newer Hilton occasionally hosted scientific congresses or press conferences.

The main street had played up to the Blind Lake theme with more gusto than taste. The two-story brick commercial buildings appeared to date from the middle of the last century, yellow brick pressed from local river-bottom clay, and they might have been attractive if not for the wave of hucksterism that had overtaken them. The “lobster” theme was everywhere, inevitably. Lobster plush toys, holographic lobster window displays, lobster posters, lobster cocktail napkins, ceramic garden lobsters…

Elaine followed his gaze and guessed his thought. “You should have had dinner at the Mariott,” she said. “Lobster fucking bisque.”

He shrugged. “It’s only people trying to make a buck, support their families.”

“Cashing in on ignorance. I really don’t get this whole lobster thing. They don’t look anything at all like lobsters. They don’t have an exoskeleton and God knows they don’t have an ocean to swim around in.”

“People have to call them something.”

“People may have to call them something, but do they have to paint them onto neckties?”

The Blind Lake work had been massively vulgarized, undeniably so. But what bothered Elaine, Chris believed, was the suspicion that somewhere among the nearer stars some reciprocal act might be taking place. Plastic caricatures of human beings lolling behind glazed windows under an alien sun. Her own face, perhaps, imprinted on a souvenir mug from which unimaginable creatures sipped mysterious liquids.

The van was a dusty blue electric vehicle that had been sent from Blind Lake. The driver didn’t seem to want to talk but might be listening, Chris thought, trying to feel out their “positions” — the public relations office doing a little undercover work. Conversation was awkward, therefore. They rolled out of town along the interstate and turned off onto a two-lane road in silence. Already, despite the lack of obvious markers beyond the PRIVATE ROAD — U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY and DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY signs, they were in privileged territory. Any unregistered vehicle would have been stopped at the first (hidden) quarter-mile checkpoint. The road was under constant surveillance, visual and electronic. He recalled something Lacy had said: at the Lake, even the prairie dogs carry passes.

Chris turned his head to the window and watched the landscape scroll past. Dormant farmland gave way to open grassland and rolling meadows sprinkled with wildflowers. Dry country, but not desert. Last night a storm had rumbled through town while Chris sheltered with Lacy in her apartment. Rain had swept the streets clean of oil, filled the storm drains with soggy newsprint and rotting weeds, provoked a late blush of color from the prairie.

A couple of years ago lightning had ignited a brush fire that came within a quarter mile of Blind Lake. Firefighters had been shipped in from Montana, Idaho, Alberta. It had all looked very photogenic on the news feeds — and it emphasized the fragility of the fledgling New Astronomy — but the risk to the facility had never been great. It was just another case, the scientists at Crossbank had grumbled, of Blind Lake grabbing the headlines. Blind Lake was Crossbank’s glamorous younger sister, prone to fits of vanity, hypnotized by the paparazzi…

But any evidence of the fire had been erased by two summers and two winters. By wild grass and wild nettles and those little blue flowers Chris couldn’t name. By nature’s enviable talent for forgetting.

They had started at Crossbank because Crossbank should have been easier.

The Crossbank installation was focused on a biologically active world circling HR8832 — second planet from that sun, depending on how you tallied up the ring of planetesimals circling half an AU inward toward the star. The planet was an iron-cored, rocky body with 1.4 times the mass of the Earth and an atmosphere relatively rich in oxygen and nitrogen. Both poles were frigid agglutinations of water ice at temperatures occasionally cold enough to freeze out CO₂, but the equatorial regions were warm, shallow seas over continental plates and rich with life.

That life was simply not glamorous. It was multicellular but purely photosynthetic; evolution on HR8832/B seemed to have neglected to invent the mitochondria necessary for animal life. Which is not to say that the landscape was not often spectacular, particularly the huge stromatolite-like colonies of photosynthetic bacteria that rose, often two or three stories tall, from the green sea-surface mats; or the fivefold symmetry of the so-called coral stars, anchored to the sea-beds and floating half-immersed in open water.

It was an exquisitely beautiful world and it had captured a great deal of public attention back when Crossbank was the only installation of its kind. The equatorial seas yielded stunning sunsets every 47.4 terrestrial hours on average, often with stratocumulus clouds billowing far higher than any on Earth, cloud-castles extracted from a Victorian bicycle ad. Time-adjusted twenty-four-hour video loops of the equatorial seascape had been popular as faux windows for a few years.

A beautiful world, and it had yielded a host of insights into planetary and biological evolution. It continued to produce extraordinarily useful data. But it was static. Nothing much moved on the second world of HR8832. Only the wind, the water, and the rain.

Eventually it had been labeled “the planet where nothing happens,” a phrase coined by a Chicago Tribune columnist who considered the whole New Astronomy just one more federally funded font of gaudy but useless knowledge. Crossbank had learned to be wary of journalists. Visions East had negotiated at length to get Chris, Elaine, and Sebastian inside for a week. There had been no guarantee of cooperation, and it was probably only Elaine’s rep as a solid science journalist that had finally sold the public relations staff. (Or Chris’s reputation, perhaps, that had made them so difficult to convince.)

But the Crossbank visit had been generally successful. Both Elaine and Sebastian claimed to have done good work there.

For Chris it had been a little more problematic. The head of the Observation and Interpretation Department had flatly refused to speak to him. His best quote had come from the kid in the cafeteria. It could end at any time. And even the kid in the cafeteria had finally leaned forward to eyeball Chris’s name badge and said, “You’re the guy who wrote that book?”

Chris had confessed that he was, yes, the guy who wrote that book.

And the kid had nodded once and stood up and carried his half-eaten lunch to the recycling rack without saying another word.

Two surveillance aircraft passed overhead during the next ten minutes, and the van’s dashboard all-pass transponder began to blinking spastically. They had crossed any number of checkpoints already, well before they reached the steel and accordion-wire fence that snaked into the prairie in both directions, the steel and cinderblock guardhouse from which a uniformed officer stepped to wave them to a stop.

The guard examined the driver’s ID and then Elaine’s and Sebastian Vogel’s, finally Chris’s. He spoke into his personal microphone briefly, then supplied the three journalists with clip-on badges. At last he waved them through.

And they were inside. As simple as that, barring the weeks of negotiation between the magazine and the Department of Energy.

So far it was just one stretch of rolling wild grass separated from another by chain-link fence and barbed wire. But the entry was more than figurative; it carried, at least for Chris, a genuine sense of ceremony. This was Blind Lake.

This was practically another planet.

He looked back as the van gathered speed and saw the gate glide shut with what he would remember, much later, as a terrible finality.

Two

There really was a lake in Blind Lake, Tessa Hauser had learned. She thought about that as she walked home from school, following her own long shadow down the sparkling white sidewalk.

Blind Lake — the lake, not the town — was a muddy swamp between two low hills, full of cattails and wild frogs and snapping turtles, herons and Canada geese and stagnant green water. Mr. Fleischer had told the class about it. It was called a lake but it was actually a wetland, ancient water trapped in the stony, porous land.

So Blind Lake, the lake, wasn’t really a lake. Tess thought that made a certain kind of sense, because Blind-Lake-the-town wasn’t really a town, either. It was a National Laboratory, built here in its entirety, like a movie set, by the Department of Energy. That’s why the houses and shops and office buildings were so sparse and so new and why they began and ended so abruptly in a vast and empty land.

Tess walked by herself. She was eleven years old and she hadn’t made any friends at school yet, though Edie Jerundt (whom the other children called Edie Grunt) at least spoke to her once in a while. But Edie walked the other way home, toward the mallway and the administrative buildings; the tall cooling towers of Eyeball Alley, far away to the west, were Tessa’s landmark. Tess — when she was with her father, at least, which was one week out of four — lived in one of a row of pastel-colored town houses pressed up one against the next like soldiers at attention. Her mother’s house, though even farther west, was almost identical.

She had stayed twenty minutes late at school, helping Mr. Fleischer clean the boards. Mr. Fleischer, a man with a white-brown beard and a bald head, had asked her a lot of questions about herself — what she did when she was home, how she got along with her parents, whether she liked school. Tess had answered dutifully but unenthusiastically, and after a while Mr. Fleischer had frowned and stopped asking. Which was perfectly okay with her.

Did she like school? It was too early to tell. School had hardly started. The weather wasn’t even cool yet, though the wind that brushed the sidewalk and flapped her skirt had a touch of autumn in it. You couldn’t tell about school, Tess thought, until at least Halloween, and Halloween was still a couple of weeks away. By then you knew how it would be — for better or worse.

She didn’t even know if she liked Blind Lake, the town-not-a-town near the lake-not-a-lake. Crossbank had been better, in some ways. More trees. Autumn colors. Snow on the hills in winter. Her mother had said there would be snow here, too, and plenty of it, and maybe this time she would make friends to go sledding with. But the hills seemed too low and gentle for proper sledding. Trees were sparse here, mostly saplings planted around the science buildings and the shopping concourse. Like trees imperfectly wished-for, Tess thought. She passed some of these on the lawns of the town houses: trees so new they were still staked to the earth, still trying to take root.

She came to her father’s small house and saw that his car wasn’t in the driveway. He wasn’t home yet. That was unusual but not unheard-of. Tess used her own key to let herself inside. The house was ruthlessly tidy and the furniture still smelled new, welcoming but somehow unfamiliar. She went to the narrow, gleaming kitchen and poured herself a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator. Some of the juice spilled over the lip of the glass. Tess thought about her father, then took a paper towel and wiped the tiled counter clean. She deposited the balled-up evidence in the bin under the sink.

She carried her drink and a napkin into the living room, stretched out on the sofa, and whispered “Video” to turn on the entertainment panel. But there was nothing except static on any of the cartoon channels. The house had saved a couple of programs for her from yesterday, but they were dull ones — King Koala, The Unbelievable Baxters — and she wasn’t in the mood. She guessed there must be something wrong with the satellite, because there was nothing else to see, either… only the closed-circuit feed from the downloads, Lobster City nighttime, the Subject motionless and probably asleep under a naked electric light.

Her phone buzzed deep in her schoolbag on the floor at her feet, and Tess sat up abruptly. A mouthful of orange juice went down the wrong way. She fumbled the phone out and answered, hoarsely.

“Tessa, is that you?”

Her father.

She nodded, which was useless, then said, “Yes.”

“Everything okay?”

She assured him she was fine. Daddy always wanted to know whether she was okay. Some days he asked more than once. To Tess it always sounded like: What’s the matter with you? Is something wrong? She never had an answer for that.

“I’m working late tonight,” he said. “I can’t take you to Mom’s. You’ll have to phone her and have her pick you up.”

Tonight was the night she changed over to her mother’s house. Tess had a room in each house. A small, neat one at Daddy’s. A big messy one at her mother’s. She would have to pack her school stuff for the change. “Can’t you call her?”

“It’s better if you do it, sweetie.”

She nodded again; then said, “All right.”

“Love you.”

“You too.”

“Keep your chin up.”

“What?”

“I’ll call you every day, Tess.”

“Okay,” Tess said.

“Don’t forget to call your mother.”

“I won’t.”

Dutiful, and undistracted by the blank video panel, Tess said good-bye, then whispered “Mom” at the phone. There was an interlude of insect sounds, then her mother picked up.

“Daddy says you have to come get me.”

“He does, huh? Well — are you at his place?”

Tess liked the sound of her mother’s voice even over the phone. If her father’s voice was distant thunder, her mother’s was summer rain — soothing, even when it was sad.

“He’s working late,” Tess explained.

“According to the agreement he’s supposed to bring you. I have work of my own to finish up.”

“I guess I can walk,” Tess said, though she made no effort to conceal her disappointment. It would take her a good half hour to walk to her mom’s place, past the coffee shop and the teenagers who gathered there and who had taken to calling her Spaz because of the way she jerked her head to avoid their eyes.

“No,” her mother said, “it’s getting late… Just have your stuff together. I’ll be there in, oh, I guess twenty minutes or so. ‘Kay?”

“Okay.”

“Maybe we’ll get takeout on the way home.”

“Great.”

After she deposited the phone back in her schoolbag, Tess made sure she had all the things she needed to bring to Mom’s: her notebooks and texts, of course, but also her favorite shirts and blouses, her plush monkey, her plug-in library, her personal night-light. That didn’t take long. Then, restless, she put her stuff in the foyer and went out back to watch the sunset.

The nice thing about her Dad’s place was the view from the yard. It wasn’t a spectacular view, no mountains or valleys or anything as dramatic as that, but it looked out over a long stretch of undeveloped meadowland sloping toward the road into Constance. The sky seemed immensely large from here, free of any borders except the fence that encircled Blind Lake. Birds lived in the high grass beyond the neatly trimmed lawn, and sometimes they rose up into the huge clean sky in flocks. Tess didn’t know what kind of birds they were — she didn’t have a name for them. They were many and small and brown, and when they folded their wings they flew like darts.

The only man-made things Tess could see from her father’s backyard (as long as she faced away from the mechanical line of the adjoining town houses) were the fence, the road that led across the rolling hills to Constance, and the guardhouse at the gate. She watched a bus driving away from Blind Lake, one of the buses that carried day workers home to their houses far away. In the fading dusk the windows of the bus were warm with yellow light.

Tess stood silently watching. If her father were here, he would have called her inside by now. Tess knew that she sometimes stared at things too long. At clouds or hills or, when she was in school, out the spotless window to the soccer field where white goalposts clocked the hours with their shadows. Until someone called her back to the world. Wake up, Tessa! Pay attention! As if she had been asleep. As if she had not been paying attention.

Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.

The yellow-windowed bus stopped at the distant guardhouse. A second bus pulled up behind it. Tess waited for the guard to wave the buses through. Almost a thousand people worked days at Blind Lake — clerks and support staff and the people who ran the stores — and the guard always waved the buses through.

Tonight, however, the buses stopped and stayed stopped.

Tess, the wind said. Which made Tess think about Mirror Girl and all the trouble that had caused her back at Crossbank…

“Tess!”

She jumped involuntarily. The voice had been real. Her mother’s.

“Sorry if I scared you—”

“It’s okay.” Tess turned and was pleased and reassured by the sight of her mother coming across the broad, neat lawn. Tessa’s mother was a tall woman, her long brown hair somewhat askew around her face, her ankle-length skirt flirting with the wind. The setting sun turned everything faintly red: the sky, the town houses, her mother’s face.

“You have your stuff?”

“At the front door.”

Tess saw her mother glance away toward the distant road. Another bus had come up behind the first two, and now all three were motionless at the gate.

Tess said, “Is something wrong with the fence?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure it’s nothing.” But she frowned and stood a moment, watching. Then she took Tessa’s hand. “Let’s go home, shall we?”

Tess nodded, suddenly eager for the warmth of her mother’s house, for the smell of fresh laundry and takeout food, for the reassurance of small enclosed spaces.

Three

The campus of the Blind Lake National Laboratory, its scientific and administrative offices and supply and retail outlets, had been constructed on the almost imperceptibly gentle slope of an ancient glacial moraine From the air it resembled any newly built suburban community, peculiar only in its isolation, served by a single two-lane road. At its center, adjacent to a partially enclosed retail strip called the mallway, was an O-shaped ring of ten-story concrete buildings, Hubble Plaza. This was where the interpretive work of the Blind Lake facility was done. The Plaza, with its narrow escutcheon windows and its grassy enclosed park, was the brain of the installation. The beating heart was a mile east of the inhabited town, in an underground structure from which two massive cooling towers rose into the brittle autumn air.

This building was officially the Blind Lake Computational Array, but it was commonly called Eyeball Alley, or the Alley, or simply the Eye.

Charlie Grogan had been chief engineer at the Alley since it had been powered up five years ago. Tonight he was working late, if you could call it “working late” when it was his regular custom to stick around well after the day shift had gone home. There was, of course, a night shift, and a supervising engineer to go with it (Anne Costigan, whose abilities he had come to respect). But it was precisely this relaxation of his official vigilance that made the after-hours shift rewarding. He could catch up on paperwork without risk of interruption. Better, he could go down into the hardware rooms or the O/BEC gallery and hang out with the hands-on guys in a non-official capacity. He enjoyed spending time in the works.

Tonight he finished filling out a requisition form and told his server to transmit it in the morning. He checked his watch. Ten to nine. The guys in the stacks were due for a break. Just a walk-through, Charlie promised himself. Then home to feed Boomer, his elderly hound, and maybe catch some downloads before bed. The eternal cycle.

He left his office and rode an elevator two levels deeper into the underground. The Alley was quiet at night. He passed no one in the sea-green lower-level hallways. There was only the sound of his footsteps and the chime of the transponder in his ID tag as he crossed into restricted areas. Mirrored doors offered him unwelcome reminders of his age — he had turned forty-eight last January — the creeping curvature of his spine, the paunch that ballooned over his belt buckle. A fringe of gray hair stood out against his dark skin. His father had been a light-skinned Englishman, taken by cancer twenty years ago; his mother, a Sudanese immigrant and Sufi scholar, had survived him by less than a year. Charlie resembled his father more than ever these days.

He detoured through the O/BEC gallery — though, like “staying late,” it was probably wrong to call it a “detour.” This was one of the stations of his habitual nightly walk.

The gallery was constructed like a surgical theater without the student seating, a ring-shaped tiled hallway fitted with sealed glass windows on its inner perimeter. The windows overlooked a circular chamber forty feet deep. At the bottom of the chamber, serviced by columns of supercooled gases and bundles of light pipes and monitoring devices, were the three huge O/BEC platens. Inside each tubular platen were rank upon rank of microscopically thin gallium arsenide wafers, bathed in helium at a temperature of -451° Fahrenheit.

Charlie was an engineer, not a physicist. He could maintain the machines that maintained the platens, but his understanding of the fundamental process at work was partial at best. A “Bose-Einstein Condensate” was a highly ordered state of matter, and the BECs created linked electron particles called “excitons,” and excitons functioned as quantum gates to form an absurdly fast and subtle computing device. Anything beyond that Reader’s Digest sketch he left to the intense and socially awkward young theorists and graduate students who cycled through Eyeball Alley as if it were a summer resort. Charlie’s job was more practical: he kept it all working, kept it cool, kept the I/O smooth, fixed little problems before they became big problems.

Tonight there were four maintenance guys in sterile suits down in the plumbing, probably Stitch and Chavez and the new hands cycling through from Berkeley Lab. More people than usual… he wondered if Anne Costigan had ordered some unscheduled work.

He walked the circumference of the gallery once, then followed another corridor past the solid-state physics labs to the data control room. Charlie knew as soon as he stepped inside that something was up.

Nobody was on break. The five night engineers were all at their posts, feverishly scrolling systems reports. Only Chip McCullough looked up as Charlie came through door, and all he got from Chip was a glum nod. All this, in the few hours since his shift had officially ended.

Anne Costigan was here, too. She glanced up from her handheld monitor and saw him standing by the door. She held up a finger to the junior supervisor — one second — and strode over. Charlie liked this about Anne, her economy of motion, every gesture purposeful. “Christ, Charlie,” she said, “don’t you ever sleep?”

“Just on my way out.”

“Through the stacks?”

“Came for coffee, actually. But you guys are busy.”

“We had a big spike through the I/O’s an hour ago.”

“Power spike?”

“No, an activity spike. The switchboard lit up, if you know what I mean. Like somebody fed the Eye a dose of amphetamine.”

“It happens,” Charlie said. “You remember last winter—”

“This one’s a little unusual. It settled down, but we’re doing a systems check.”

“Still making data?”

“Oh, yeah, nothing bad, just a blip, but… you know.”

He understood. The Eye and all its interrelated systems hovered perpetually on the brink of chaos. Like a harnessed wild animal, what the Eye needed was not maintenance so much as grooming and reassurance. In its complexity and unpredictability, it was very nearly a living thing. Those who understood that — and Anne was one of them — had learned to pay attention to the small things.

“You want to stick around, lend a hand?”

Yes, he did, but Anne didn’t need him; he would only get underfoot. He said, “I have a dog to feed.”

“Tell Boomer hello for me.” She was clearly anxious to get back to work.

“Will do. Anything I can get you?”

“Not unless you have a spare phone. Abe’s out on the coast again.” Abe was Anne’s husband, a financial consultant; he made it to Blind Lake maybe one month out of three. The marriage was troubled. “Local calls are okay, but I can’t get through to L.A. for some reason.”

“You want to borrow mine?”

“No, not really; I tried Tommy Gupta’s; his didn’t work either. Something wrong with the satellites, I guess.”

Strange, Charlie thought, how everything seemed to have gone just slightly askew tonight.

For the fifth time in the last hour, Sue Sampel told her boss she hadn’t been able to put his call through to the Department of Energy in Washington. Each time, Ray looked at her as if she had personally fucked up the system.

She was working way late, and so, it seemed, was everybody else in Hubble Plaza. Something was up. Sue couldn’t figure out what. She was Ray Scutter’s executive assistant, but Ray (typically) hadn’t shared any information with her. All she knew was that he wanted to talk to D.C., and the telecoms weren’t cooperating.

Obviously it wasn’t Sue’s fault — she knew how to punch a number, for God’s sake — but that didn’t prevent Ray from glaring at her every time he asked. And Ray Scutter packed a killer glare. Big eyes with pinpoint pupils, bushy eyebrows, flecks of gray in his goatee… she had once thought he might be handsome, if not for his receding chin and slightly pouchy cheeks. But she didn’t entertain that thought anymore. What was the expression? Handsome is as handsome does. Ray didn’t do handsome.

He turned away from her desk and stalked back to his inner office. “Naturally,” he growled over his shoulder, “I’ll be blamed for this somehow.”

Y³, Sue thought wearily. It had become her mantra in the months she’d been working for Ray Scutter. Y³: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ray was surrounded by incompetents. Ray was being ignored by the research staff. Ray was thwarted at every turn. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Once more, for good measure, she attempted the Washington connection. The phone popped up an error message: SERVER UNAVAILABLE. Same message came up for any phone, video, or net connection outside the local Blind Lake loop. The only call that had gone through was to Ray’s own house, here in town — letting his daughter know he’d be late. Everything else had been incoming: Security, Personnel, and the military liaison.

Sue might have been worried if she’d been a little less tired. But it was probably nothing. All she wanted to do right now was get back to her apartment and peel off her shoes. Microwave her dinner. Smoke a joint.

The terminal buzzed again — according to the screen announcement, a call from Ari Weingart over at Publicity and Public Relations. She picked up. “Ari,” she said, “what can I do for you?”

“Your boss around?”

“Present but not keen to be disturbed. Is this urgent?”

“Well, yeah, kind of. I’ve got three journalists here and nowhere to put them.”

“So book a motel.”

“Very funny. They’re on a three-week pass.”

“Nobody penciled this into your calendar?”

“Don’t be obtuse, Sue. Obviously, they ought to be sleeping in the guest quarters in the Visitor Center — but Personnel filled those beds with day workers.”

“Day workers?”

“Duh! Because the buses can’t get out to Constance.”

“The buses can’t get out?”

“Have you been in an isolation booth the last couple of hours? The road’s closed at the gatehouse. No traffic in or out. We’re in total lockdown.”

“Since when?”

“Roughly sunset.”

“How come?”

“Who knows? Either a plausible security threat or another drill. Everybody’s guessing it’ll be sorted out by morning. But in the meantime I have to billet these folks somewhere.”

Ray Scutter’s reaction to the problem would be more indignant fuming, certainly nothing helpful. Sue thought about it. “Maybe you could call Site Management and see if they’ll open up the gym in the rec center. Put in some cots for the night. How’s that sound?”

“Fucking brilliant,” Ari said. “Should have thought of it myself.”

“If you need authority, cite mine.”

“You’re a gem. Wish I could hire you away from Ray.”

So do I, Sue thought.

Sue stood and stretched. She walked to the window and parted the vertical blinds. Beyond the roofs of the worker housing and the darkness of the undeveloped grassland she could just make out the road to Constance, the lights of emergency vehicles pulsing eerily by the south gate.

Marguerite Hauser thanked whatever benevolent fate it was that had put her into a town house (even if it was one of the smaller, older units) on the northeastern side of the Blind Lake campus, as far as possible from her ex-husband Ray. There was something reassuring about that ten-minute drive as she took Tess home, closing space behind her like a drawbridge over a moat.

Tess, as usual, was quiet during the ride — maybe a little quieter than usual. When they picked up chicken sandwiches at the drive-through outlet in the commercial strip, Tess was indifferent to the menu. Back home, Marguerite carried the food and Tess hauled her tote bag inside. “Is the video working?” Tess asked listlessly.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Wasn’t working at Daddy’s house.”

“Check and see. I’ll put the food on plates.”

Eating in front of the video panel was still a novelty for Tess. It was a habit Ray had not permitted. Ray had insisted on eating at the table: “family time,” inevitably dominated by Ray’s daily catalogue of complaints. Frankly, Marguerite thought, the downloads were better company. The old movies especially. Tess liked the black-and-white ones best; she was fascinated by the antique automobiles and peculiar clothing. She’s a xenophile, Marguerite thought. Takes after me.

But Marguerite’s video panel proved as useless as Ray’s had presumably been, and they had to make do with whatever was in the house’s resident memory. They settled on a hundred-year-old Bob Hope comedy, My Favorite Brunette. Tess, who would ordinarily have been full of questions about the twentieth century and why everything looked like that, simply picked at her food and gazed at the screen.

Marguerite put a hand on her daughter’s forehead. “How do you feel, kiddo?”

“I’m not sick.”

“Just not hungry?”

“I guess.” Tess scooted closer, and Marguerite put an arm around her.

After dinner Marguerite cleaned up, put fresh linen on the beds, helped Tess sort out her schoolbooks. Tess flicked through the blue-screen entertainment bands in a moment of misplaced optimism, then watched the Bob Hope movie a second time, finally announced she was ready for bed. Marguerite supervised her toothbrushing and tucked her in. Marguerite liked her daughter’s room, with its small west-facing window, the bed dressed in a pink fringed comforter, the watchful ranks of stuffed animals on the dresser. It reminded her of her own room back in Ohio many years ago, minus the well-meaning volumes of Bible Stories for Children her father had installed in the vain hope that they might provoke in her a piety she had conspicuously lacked. Tessa’s books were self-selected and tended toward popular fantasy and easy science. “You want to read a while?”

“Guess not,” Tess said.

“I hope you feel better in the morning.”

“I’m okay. Really.”

Marguerite looked back as she switched the light off. Tessa’s eyes were already closed. Tess was eleven but looked younger. She still had that baby-fat cushion under her chin, the full cheeks. Her hair was darkening but still a dirty blond. Marguerite supposed a young woman was emerging from this childhood cocoon, but her features were still indistinct, difficult to predict.

“Sleep well,” Marguerite whispered.

Tess curled into her comforter and arched her head against the pillow.

Marguerite closed the door. She crossed the hall to her office — a converted third bedroom — determined to get a little more work done before midnight. Each of her department heads had flagged video segments for her to review from the last twenty-four hours with the Subject. Marguerite dimmed the lights and queued the reports to her wall screen.

Physiology and Signalling was still obsessed with the Subject’s lung louvers. “Possible Louver Gesturing in Social Interaction,” the subhead proclaimed. There was a clip of the Subject in a food well conclave. Subject stood in the dim green light of the food well in apparent interaction with another individual. The Subject’s ventral louvers, pale whitish slits on each side of his thoracic chamber, quavered with each inhalation. That was standard, and Marguerite wasn’t sure what the Physiology people wanted her to notice until new text scrolled up. The louver frills palpate in a distinct vertical pattern of some complexity during social behavior. Ah. Yes, there it was in an enlarged subscreen. The louver frills were tiny pink hairs, barely visible, but yes, they were moving like a wheat field in the wind. For comparison there was an inset of Subject breathing in a non-social environment. The louver frills flexed inward with each breath but the vertical quaver was absent.

Potentially very interesting, Marguerite thought. She flagged the report with a priority notice, which meant Physiology and Signalling could send it up to the compilers for further analysis. She added some notes and queries of her own (Consistency? Other contexts?) and bumped it back to Hubble Plaza.

From the Culture and Technology group, screen shots of Subject’s latest addition to his chamber walls. Here was the Subject, stretched to full height, his squat lifting legs erect as he used a manipulating arm and something that looked like a crayon to add a fresh symbol (if it was a symbol) to the symbol-string that adorned the walls of the room. This one was part of a string of sixteen progressively larger snail-shell whorls; the new one terminated with a flourish. To Marguerite it looked like something a restless child might doodle in the margin of a notebook. The obvious inference was that the Subject was writing something, but it had been established early on that the strokes, lines, circles, crosses, dots, etc., never repeated. If they were pictographs, the Subject had never written the same word twice; if they were letters, he had yet to exhaust his alphabet. Did that mean they were art? Perhaps. Decoration? Possibly. But Culture and Technology thought this latest string suggested at least some linguistic content. Marguerite doubted it, and she flagged the report with a priority that would stack it up on the peer-review desk with a dozen similar documents.

The rest of the backlog consisted of progress reports from the active committees and a couple of brief segments the landmarks survey team thought she might like to see: balcony views, the city stretching away beyond the Subject in a pastel afternoon, sandstone-red, layer on layer, like an empire of rusty wedding cakes. She stored these images to look at later.

She was finished by midnight.

She switched off her office wall and walked through the house turning off other lights until the soft dark was complete. Tomorrow was Saturday. No school for Tess. Marguerite hoped the satellite interface would be back up by morning. She didn’t want Tess to be bored, her first day back home.

It was a clear night. Autumn was coming fast this year. Marguerite went to bed with the curtains parted. When she moved in last summer she had pushed her big, futile double bed close to the window. She liked to look at the stars before she fell asleep, but Ray had always insisted on keeping the blinds shut. Now she could indulge herself. The light of the crescent moon fell across a reef of blankets. She closed her eyes and felt weightless. Sighed once and was asleep.

Four

Ari Weingart, Blind Lake’s PR guy, carried a big digital clipboard. Chris Carmody worried a little bit about that. He’d seldom had good experiences with people who carried clipboards.

Clearly, things weren’t going too well for Weingart. He had met Vogel, Elaine, and Chris outside Hubble Plaza and escorted them to his small office overlooking the central plaza. They had been halfway through a tentative first-week itinerary when Weingart took a call. Chris and company retired to a vacant conference room, where they sat until well after sunset.

When Weingart returned he was still toting the dreaded clipboard. “There’s been a complication,” he said.

Elaine Coster had been simmering behind a months-old print edition of Current Events. She put the magazine down and gave Weingart a level stare. “If there’s a problem with the schedule, we can work it out tomorrow. All we need right now is a place to unpack. And a reliable server. I haven’t been able to get a link through to New York since this afternoon.”

“Well, that’s the problem. The facility is in lockdown. We have some nine hundred day workers with homes off-site, but they can’t get out and I’m afraid they have a prior claim on the guest quarters. The good news is—”

“Hang on,” Elaine said. “Lockdown? What are you talking about?”

“I guess you didn’t run into this problem at Crossbank, but it’s part of the security regs. If there’s any kind of threat against the facility, no traffic is allowed in or out until it’s cleared up.”

“There’s been a threat?”

“I’m assuming so. They don’t tell me these things. But I’m sure it’s nothing.”

He was probably right, Chris thought. Both Crossbank and Blind Lake were designated National Laboratories, operated under security protocols that dated back to the Terror Wars. Even idle threats were taken terribly seriously. One of the drawbacks of Blind Lake’s high media profile was that it had attracted the attention of a broad spectrum of lunatics and ideologues.

“Can you tell us the nature of the threat?”

“Honestly, I don’t know myself. But this isn’t the first time this has happened. If experience is any guide it will all be cleared up by morning.”

Sebastian Vogel stirred from the chair where he had been sitting in sphinxlike repose for the last hour. “And in the meantime,” he said, “where do we sleep?”

“Well, we’ve set up — cots.”

“Cots?”

“In the gymnasium at the recreation facility. I know. I’m terribly sorry. It’s the best we can do on short notice. As I said, I’m sure we’ll have it all sorted out by morning.”

Weingart frowned into his clipboard as if it might contain a last-minute reprieve. Elaine looked primed to explode, but Chris preempted her: “We’re journalists. I’m sure we’ve all slept rough one time or another.” Well, maybe not Vogel. “Right, Elaine?”

Weingart looked at her hopefully.

She bit back whatever she had been about to say. “I’ve slept in a tent on the Gobi Plateau. I suppose I can sleep in a fucking gym.”

There were ranks of cots in the gym, some already occupied by displaced day workers overflowing from guest housing. Chris, Elaine, and Vogel staked out three cots under the basketball hoop and claimed them with their luggage. The pillows on the beds looked like deflated marshmallows. The blankets were Red Cross surplus.

Vogel said to Elaine, “The Gobi Plateau?”

“When I was writing my biography of Roy Chapman Andrews. In the Footsteps of Time: Paleobiology Then and Now. Admittedly, I was twenty-five. You ever sleep in a tent, Sebastian?”

Vogel was sixty years old. He was pale except for the hectic red of his cheeks, and he wore shapeless sweaters to disguise the awkward generosity of his stomach and hips. Elaine disliked him — he was a parvenu, she had whispered to Chris, a fraud, practically a fucking spiritualist — and Vogel had compounded the sin with his unfailing politeness. “Algonquin Park,” he said. “Canada. A camping trip. Decades ago, of course.”

“Looking for God?”

“It was a coed trip. As I recall, I was looking to get laid.”

“You were what, a divinity student?”

“We didn’t take vows of chastity, Elaine.”

“Doesn’t God frown on things like that?”

“Things like what? Like sexual intercourse? Not so far as I have been able to discern, no. You should read my book.”

“Ah, but I did.” She turned to Chris. “Have you?”

“Not yet.”

“Sebastian is an old-fashioned mystic. God in all things.”

“In some things more than others,” Sebastian said, which struck Chris as both cryptic and typically Sebastian.

“Fascinating as this is,” Chris said, “I’m thinking we should get some dinner. The PR guy said there’s a place in the concourse that’s open till midnight.”

“I’m game,” Elaine said, “as long as you promise not to pick up the waitress.”

“I’m not hungry,” Vogel said. “Go on without me. I’ll guard the luggage.”

“Fast, St. Francis,” Elaine said, shrugging her jacket on.

Chris knew about Elaine’s Roy Chapman Andrews biography. He had read it as a freshman. Back then she had been an up-and-coming science journalist, shortlisted for an AAAS Westinghouse Award, charting a career path he hoped one day to follow.

Chris’s one and only book to date had also been a biography of a sort. The nice thing about Elaine was that she had not made an issue of the book’s stormy history and seemed to have no objection to working with him. Amazing, he thought, what you learn to settle for.

The restaurant Ari Weingart had recommended was tucked between an interface store and an office-supply shop in the open-air wing of the mallway. Most of these stores were closed for the evening, and the concourse had a vaguely derelict aspect in the cooling autumn air. But the diner, a franchise Sawyer’s Steak Seafood, was doing a brisk business. Big crowd, lots of talk in the air. They grabbed a vinyl booth by the wide concourse window. The decor was chrome and pastel and potted plants, very late-twentieth-century, the fake reassurance of a fake antiquity. The menus were shaped like T-bones.

Chris felt blissfully anonymous.

“Good God,” Elaine said. “Darkest suburbia.”

“What are you ordering?”

“Well, let’s see. The All-Day Breakfast? The Mom’s Comfort Meat Loaf?”

A waiter approached in time to hear her name these offerings in a tone of high irony. “The Atlantic Salmon is good,” he said.

“Good for what, exactly? No, never mind. The salmon will do. Chris?”

He ordered the same, embarrassed. The waiter shrugged and walked away.

“You can be an incredible snob, Elaine.”

“Think about where we are. At the cutting edge of human knowledge. Standing on the shoulders of Copernicus and Galileo. So where do we eat? A truck stop with a salad bar.”

Chris had never figured out how Elaine reconciled her close attention to food with her carefully suppressed middle-age spread. Rewarding herself with quality, he guessed. Sacrificing quantity. Balancing act. She was a Wallenda of the waistline.

“I mean, come on,” she said, “who exactly is being snobbish here? I’m fifty years old, I know what I like, I can endure a fast-food joint or a frozen dinner, but do I really have to pretend the apple-brown-betty is crème brulée? I spent my youth drinking sour coffee from paper cups. I graduated from that.” She added, “You will, too.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Confess. Crossbank was a washout for you.”

“I picked up some useful material.” Or at least one totemic quote. It could end at any time. Almost a Baptist piety.

“I have a theory about you,” Elaine said.

“Maybe we should just eat.”

“No, no, you don’t escape the obnoxious old harridan quite as easily as that.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Just be quiet. Have a breadstick or something. I told you I read Sebastian’s book. I read yours, too.”

“Maybe this sounds childish, but I’d really prefer not to talk about it.”

“All I want to say is, it’s a good book. You, Chris Carmody, wrote a good book. You did the legwork and you drew the necessary conclusions. Now you want to blame yourself for not flinching?”

“Elaine—”

“You want to flush your career away, pretending to work and not working and blowing deadlines and screwing waitresses with big tits and drinking yourself to sleep? Because you can totally do that. You wouldn’t be the first. Not by a country mile. Self-pity is such an absorbing hobby.”

“A man died, Elaine.”

“You didn’t kill him.”

“That’s debatable.”

“No, Chris, it’s not debatable. Galliano went over that hill either accidentally or as a willed act of self-destruction. Maybe he regretted his sins or maybe not, but they were his sins, not yours.”

“I exposed him to ridicule.”

“You exposed work that was dangerously shoddy and self-serving and a threat to innocent people. It happened to be Galliano’s work, and Galliano happened to drive his motorcycle into the Monongahela River, but that’s his choice, not yours. You wrote a good book—”

“Jesus, Elaine, how badly does the world need one more fucking good book?”

“ — and a true book, and you wrote it out of a sense of indignity that was not misplaced.”

“I appreciate you saying this, but—”

“And the thing is, you obviously got nothing useful from Crossbank, and what worries me is that you’ll get nothing here, and blame yourself for it, and you’ll blow off the deadline in order to conduct more efficiently this project of self-punishment you’ve embarked on. And that’s so goddamn unprofessional. I mean, Vogel is a crackpot, but at least he’ll produce copy.”

For a moment Chris entertained the idea of getting up and walking out of the restaurant. He could go back to the gym and interview some of the stranded day workers. They would talk to him, at least. All he was getting from Elaine was more guilt, and he’d had enough, thank you.

The salmon arrived, congealing in drizzled butter.

“What you have to do—” She paused. The waiter dangled an enormous wooden pepper mill over the table. “Take that away, thank you.”

The waiter fled.

“What you have to do, Chris, is stop acting like you have something to be ashamed of. The book you wrote, use it. If someone’s hostile about it, confront them. If they’re afraid of you because of it, use their fear. If you’re stonewalled, you can at least write the story of how you were stonewalled and how it felt to walk around Blind Lake as a pariah. But don’t blow this opportunity.” She leaned forward, her sleeves dangling perilously close to the butter sauce. “Because the thing is, Chris, this is Blind Lake. Maybe the great unwashed public has only a vague notion of what goes on here, but we know better, right? This is where all the textbooks get rewritten. This is where the human species begins to define its place in the universe. This is the fulcrum of who we are and what we’ll become.”

“You sound like a brochure.”

She drew back. “Why? You think I’m too wrinkled and cynical to recognize something genuinely awesome when I see it?”

“I didn’t mean that. I—”

“For what it’s worth, you caught me in a moment of sincerity.”

“Elaine, I’m just not in the mood for a lecture.”

“Well, I didn’t really think you were in the mood for it. Okay, Chris. Do what you think is best.” She waved at his plate. “Eat that poor assaulted fish.”

“A tent,” he said. “The Gobi Plateau.”

“Well, sort of a tent. An inflatable habitat airdropped from Beijing. Rechargeable fuel cells, heat at night, all the satellite channels.”

“Just like Roy Chapman Andrews?”

“Hey,” she said. “I’m a journalist, not a martyr.”

Five

To Marguerite’s dismay, and Tessa’s grave disappointment, video and download reception did not improve over the weekend. Nor was it possible to put a call or net connection through beyond the fenced perimeter of Blind Lake.

Marguerite assumed this was some new incarnation of Blind Lake’s elaborate security protocols. There had been several such shutdowns back at Crossbank during the time Marguerite had worked there. Most had lasted only a few hours, though one such occasion (an unauthorized overflight that turned out to be nothing more than a private pilot who’d burned out both his nav chips and his transponders) had created a minor scandal and sealed the security perimeter for nearly a week.

Here at Blind Lake the shutdown was, at least for Marguerite, not much of an inconvenience, at least so far. She hadn’t planned to go anywhere, and there was nobody on the outside to whom she urgently needed to speak. Her father lived in Ohio and called her every Saturday, but he was savvy about security issues and wouldn’t worry unduly when he couldn’t get hold of her. It was a problem for Tessa, however.

Not that Tess was one of those kids who lived in front of the video panel. Tess liked to play outside, though she mostly played alone, and Blind Lake was one of the few places on Earth where a child could wander unaccompanied with negligible fear of drugs or crime. This weekend, though, the weather wasn’t cooperating. A crisp, sunlit Saturday morning gave way by noon to rolling asphalt-colored clouds and brief, violent squalls of rain. October sounding the horn of winter. The temperature dropped to a chilly ten degrees Centigrade, and although Tess ventured out once — to the garage, to root through a box of dolls not yet unpacked from the move — she was quickly back inside, shivering under her flannel jacket.

Sunday was the same, with wind gusting around the eaves troughs and piping through the bathroom ceiling vent. Marguerite asked Tess if there was anyone from school she’d like to play with. Tess was dubious at first but finally named a girl called Edie Jerundt. She wasn’t certain about the spelling, but there were, thank goodness, only a few J’s in the Blind Lake intramural access directory.

Connie Jerundt, Edie’s mother, turned out to be a sequence analyst from Imaging who promptly volunteered to bring Edie over for a play date. (Without even asking Edie, who was, Marguerite had to assume, just as bored as Tess.) They arrived within the hour. Mother and daughter looked so much alike they might have been Russian dolls, one nesting comfortably inside the other, distinct only in their dimensions. Both were mousy and wide-eyed and tousle-haired, features softened by Connie’s adulthood but concentrated, grotesquely, in Edie’s small face.

Edie Jerundt had brought along a handful of recent downloads, and the two girls settled down immediately in front of the video panel. Connie stayed a quarter of an hour, making nervous conversation about the lengthy security shutdown and how inconvenient it was proving — she had hoped to make a trip into Constance for some early Christmas shopping — then excused herself and promised to stop by and pick up Edie before five.

Marguerite watched the two girls as they sat in the living room staring at the video panel.

The downloads were a bit babyish for Tess, Panda Girl adventures, and Edie had brought along those image-synched glasses that were supposed to be bad for your eyes if you wore for them for more than a few hours. Both girls flinched from the enhanced 3-D action sequences.

Apart from that they might have been alone. They sat at opposite ends of the sofa, inclined at contrasting angles against plump pillows. Marguerite felt immediately and obscurely sorry for Edie Jerundt, one of those girls designed by nature to be picked on and ostracized, arms and legs awkward as stilts, her grasp approximate, her words halting, her embarrassment perpetual and profound.

It was nice, Marguerite reflected, that Tess had befriended a girl like Edie Jerundt.

Unless—

Unless it was Edie who had befriended Tess.

After the downloads the girls played with the dolls Tess had liberated from the garage. The dolls were a motley bunch, most collected by Tess at outdoor flea markets back when Ray used to make weekend drives from Crossbank into the New Hampshire countryside. Sun-paled fashion dolls with strangely twisted joints and mismatched clothes; oversized baby dolls, a majority of them naked; a scattering of action figures from forgotten movies, arms and legs frozen akimbo. Tess tried to enlist Edie in a scenario (this is the mother, this is the father; the baby is hungry but they have to go to work so this is the baby-sitter), but Edie quickly grew bored and was reduced to parading the dolls across the coffee table and giving them nonsense monologues (I’m a girl, I have a dog, I’m pretty, I hate you). Tess, as if gently nudged aside, retired to the sofa and watched. She began to bump her head rhythmically against the sofa cushion. About one beat per second, until Marguerite, passing, steadied her head with her hand.

This ryhthmic bumping, plus a worrisome speech-delay, had been Marguerite’s first clue that there was something different about Tessa. Not something wrong — Marguerite would not accede to that judgmental word. But, yes, Tess was different; Tess had some problems. Problems none of the well-intentioned therapists Marguerite had consulted were ever quite able to define. Most often they talked about idiosyncratic threshold-level autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. Which meant: we have a labelled bin in which to toss your daughter’s symptoms, but no real treatment.

Marguerite had taken Tess for physiotherapy aimed at correcting her clumsiness and “poor proprioception,” had tried her on courses of drugs designed to modify her supply of serotonin or dopamine or Factor Q, none of which had made any perceptible change in Tess’s condition. Which implied, perhaps, only that Tess had an unusual personality; that her skewed aloofness, her social isolation, were problems she would have to carry indefinitely or overcome as an act of personal will. Fooling with her neurochemical architecture was counterproductive, Marguerite had come to believe. Tess was a child; her personality was still a work-in-progress; she should not be drugged or bullied into someone else’s notion of maturity.

And that had seemed like a plausible compromise, at least until Marguerite left Ray, until the trouble back at Crossbank.

There had not even been a newspaper this weekend. Usually it was possible to e-print sections of the New York Times (or most any other urban paper), but even that meager connection to the outside world had been clipped. And if Marguerite missed the papers, how the news junkies must be suffering! Cut off from the great global soap opera, left to simmer in ignorance about the Belgian Accords or the latest Continental Court appointment. The silence of the video panel and the periodic sputtering of the rain gave the afternoon a yawning lassitude, made Marguerite content to sit in the kitchen and leaf through old issues of Astrobiology and Exozoology, her attention fluttering mothlike over the dense text, until Connie Jerundt returned for Edie.

Marguerite rooted the girls out of Tess’s room. Edie was sprawled on the bed, her feet against the wall, picking through Tess’s shoebox of faux jewelery, ornamental combs, and tortoiseshell barrettes. Tess sat at her dresser, in front of the mirror.

“Your mom’s here, Edie,” Marguerite said.

Edie blinked her froggishly large eyes, then scurried downstairs to hunt for her shoes.

Tess remained at the mirror, twining her hair around her right forefinger.

“Tess?”

The hair made a glossy curl from fingernail to knuckle, then fell away.

“Tess? Did you have a good time with Edie?”

“I guess.”

“Maybe you should tell her so.”

Tess shrugged.

“Maybe you should tell her now. She’s downstairs, getting ready to go.”

But by the time Tess had loped down to the front door, both Edie and her mother were already gone.

By Monday, what had begun as a tedious inconvenience began to feel more like a crisis.

Marguerite dropped Tess off at school on her way to Hubble Plaza. The crowd of parents in the parking lot — including Connie Jerundt, who waved at Marguerite from her car window — boiled with rumors. Since there was no local emergency to account for the shutdown, something must have happened outside, something big enough to create a security crisis; but what? And why hadn’t anyone been told?

Marguerite refused to take part in the speculation. Obviously (or at least it seemed obvious to Marguerite), the logical thing to do was to get on with the work at hand. It might not be possible to talk to the outside world, but the outside world was still providing Blind Lake’s power and presumably still expected Blind Lake’s people to go about their business. She kissed Tess good-bye, watched her daughter walk a long stochastic loop through the playground, and drove off when the bell sounded.

The rain had stopped but October had taken charge of the weather, a cold wind blowing out of a gem-blue sky. She was glad she had insisted on a sweater for Tess. For herself she had selected a vinyl windbreaker, which proved inadequate on the long hike from the Hubble Plaza parking facility to the lobby of the east wing. Snow before long, Marguerite thought, and Christmas coming, if you looked past the looming headland of Thanksgiving. The change in the weather made the quarantine that much more unsettling, as if isolation and anxiety had rolled in with the thin Canadian air.

As she waited for the elevator Marguerite caught a glimpse of Ray, her ex-husband, ducking into the lobby convenience shop, probably for his morning fix of DingDongs. Ray was a man of fiercely regular habits, one of them being DingDongs for breakfast. Ray used to go to amazing lengths to guarantee his supply, even during business trips or on vacation. He packed DingDongs in Tupperware in his carry-on luggage. A day without DingDongs brought out the worst in him: his petulance, his near-tantrums at the slightest frustration. She kept her eye on the shop entrance while the elevator inched down from the tenth floor. Just as the bell chimed, Ray emerged with a small bag in his hand. The DingDongs, for sure. Which he would devour, no doubt, behind the closed door of his office: Ray didn’t like to be seen eating sweets. Marguerite pictured him with a DingDong in each fist, nibbling at them like a mad squirrel, dribbling crumbs over his starched white shirt and funereal tie. She stepped into the elevator with three other people and punched her floor promptly, making sure the door closed before Ray could run for it.

Marguerite’s own work — though she loved it and had fought hard to get it — sometimes made her feel like a voyeur. A paid, dispassionate voyeur; but a voyeur nonetheless.

She hadn’t felt that way at Crossbank; but her talents had been wasted at Crossbank, where she had spent five years distilling botanical details from archival surveys, the kind of scut-work any bright postgraduate student could have done. She could still recite the tentative Latin binomials for eighteen varieties of bacterial mats. After a year there she had grown so accustomed to the sight of the ocean on HR8832/B that she had imagined she could smell it, smell the near-toxic levels of chlorine and ozone the photochromatic assays had detected, a sour and vaguely oily smell, like drain cleaner. She had been at Crossbank only because Ray had taken her there — Ray had worked administration at Crossbank — and she had turned down several offers to transfer to Blind Lake, mostly because Ray wouldn’t countenance the move.

Then she had sucked up her courage and initiated the divorce, after which she had accepted this Obs position, only to discover that Ray had also had himself seconded to Blind Lake. Not only that, but he moved west a month before Marguerite was scheduled to do so, establishing himself as a fixture at the Lake and probably sabotaging Marguerite’s reputation among the senior administrators.

Still, she was doing the work she had trained for, longed for: the closest thing to field astrozoology the world had ever seen.

She picked her way through the maze of support-staff desks, said hello to the clerks and secretaries and programmers, stopped by the staff kitchen to fill her souvenir Blind Lake lobster-motif cup with overcooked coffee and half-and-half, then closed herself into her office.

Paper covered her desk, e-paper littered her virtual desktop. This was work pending, most of it the kind of procedural checkmarking that was necessary but frustratingly tedious and time-consuming. But she could clean up some of that later, at home.

Today she wanted to spend time with the Subject. Raw time, realtime.

She closed the blinds over the window, dimmed the sulfur-dot ceiling lights, and illuminated the monitor that comprised the entire west wall of the office.

Good timing. UMa47/E’s seventeen-hour day had just begun.

Morning, and the Subject stirred from his pallet on the warren’s stone floor.

As usual, dozens of smaller creatures — parasites, symbiotes, or offspring — scuttled away from his body, where they had been nursing at the sleeping Subject’s exposed blood-nipples. These small animals, no larger than mice, many-legged and sinuously articulated, disappeared into gaps where the sandstone walls met the floor. Subject sat up, then stood to his full height.

Estimates put the Subject’s height at roughly seven feet. Certainly he was an impressive specimen. (Marguerite used the masculine pronoun privately. She would never dare commit an assumption of gender in her official writing. The gender and reproductive strategies of the aliens were still wholly unresolved.) Subject was bipedal and bilaterally symmetrical, and from a great distance, in silhouette, he might have been mistaken for a human being. But there the resemblance ended.

His skin — not an exoskeleton, as the ridiculous “lobster” nickname implied — was a tough, red-brown, pebble-textured integument. Because of this dense moisture-conserving skin, and because of the lung louvers exposed on his ventral surface and such details as the multiple jointing of his legs and arms and the tiny food-manipulating limbs that grew from the sides of his mandibles, some had speculated that Subject and his kindred might have evolved from an insect-like form. One scenario pictured a strain of invertebrates attaining the size and mobility of mammals by burying their notochord in a chitinous spinal column while losing their hard carapace in favor of a thick but lighter and more flexible skin. But little evidence had emerged for this or any other hypothesis. Exozoology was difficult enough; exopaleobiology was a daydream of a science.

Subject was clearly visible in the light cast by the string of incandescent bulbs suspended across the ceiling. The bulbs were small, more like Christmas lights than household lamps, but otherwise they seemed ridiculously familiar, were familiar: the filaments were of ordinary tungsten, spectroscopy had revealed. Dumb, rugged technology. At intervals, other aboriginals would arrive to replace exhausted bulbs and check the insulated copper wire for gaps or irregularities. The city boasted an elaborate, reliable maintenance infrastructure.

Subject did not dress nor did he eat; he had never been observed to eat in his sleeping quarters. He did pause to evacuate liquid waste over an open drain in the floor. The thick greenish liquid cascaded from a cloacal gap in his lower abdomen. There was, of course, no sound to accompany the image, but Marguerite’s imagination supplied the splash and gurgle.

She reminded herself that these events had happened half a century ago. It lessened her sense of invasion. She would never speak to this creature, never interact with him in any way; this image, however mysteriously it had traveled, was in all likelihood limited to the speed of light. The parent star 47 Ursa Majoris was fifty-one light years from Earth.

(And by the same token, if anyone elsewhere in the galaxy were watching her, she would be safely in her grave long before her observers could attempt to interpret her bathroom functions.)

Subject left his warren without preamble. His two-legged gait looked awkward by human standards, but it covered ground efficiently. This part of the day could be interesting. Subject did essentially the same thing every morning — walked to the factory where he assembled machine parts — but he seldom took the same route to work. Enough evidence had accumulated to suggest that this was a cultural or biological imperative (i.e., most others did the same thing), perhaps out of an atavistic instinct to avoid predation. Too bad; Marguerite would have preferred to think of it as Subject’s idiosyncrasy, an individual preference, a discernible choice.

In any case, the observation program tracked him precisely and predictably. When Subject moved, the apparent point of view (the “virtual camera,” folks in Image Acquisition called it) followed him at a constant distance. Subject was centered in the screen but his world was visible around him as he traveled. He strode with others of his kind through the incandescently lit corridors of his warren, everyone moving in the same direction, as if the passages were one-way streets, though their “wayness” varied day by day. In a crowd, she had learned to identify Subject not just by the centrality of his image (he was sometimes, briefly, obscured from view) but by the vivid orange-yellow of his dorsal-cranial crest and the rounded contour of his shoulders.

She glimpsed daylight as he passed balconies and rotundas that opened to the air. The sky today was powdery blue. Lobsterville got most of its rain during the mild winter season, and it was high summer now, the very middle of the southern latitude’s long dalliance with the sun. The planet possessed a gentle axial tilt but a very lengthy orbit around its star: it would be summer in the Subject’s city for another two terrestrial years.

In summer it was more often dust than rain clouds that darkened the sky. UMa47/E was drier than the Earth; like Mars, it could generate vast electrically charged dust storms. There was always fine dust suspended in the atmosphere, and the skies were never as clear as a terrestrial sky. But today was calm, Marguerite surmised. Warm, judging by the flourish of the Subject’s cooling cilia. The colored-chalk blue of the sky was as good as it got. (Marguerite blinked and imagined Arizona or New Mexico, cliffside pueblos in a still noon.)

At last the Subject emerged onto one of the broad exterior ways that wound down to the floor of the city.

The original high-altitude survey had identified no less than forty of these large stone cities, and twice as many significantly smaller ones, scattered across the surface of UMa47/E. Marguerite kept a globe of Subject’s planet on her desk, the cities marked and named only by their latitude and longitude. (No one wanted to give them proper names for fear of seeming arrogant or anthropocentric — “Lobsterville” was only a nickname, and you learned not to use it in front of administrators or the press.)

Maybe it was even an error of attribution to call this community a “city.” But it looked like a city to Marguerite, and she loved the sight of it.

There were over a thousand sandstone ziggurats in the city, and each one was enormous. As the Subject wound his way downward — his sleeping chamber was high up this particular structure — Marguerite’s view was panoramic. The towers were all very similar, nautilus-shell spires coiling upward from red tiled plazas, the industrial structures distinguished by the smokestacks erupting from their peaks and the streams of light or dark smoke dispersing in the still air. All over the city, freshly wakened natives filled the external ways and crowded the open spaces. The sun, rapidly rising, sent fingers of yellow light down the east-facing canyons. Beyond the city Marguerite glimpsed irrigated agricultural lands; beyond that, brown scrubland and a horizon jagged with distant mountains. (And if she closed her eyes she could see the afterimage lingering in contrary colors as if unmediated by a billion dollars’ worth of incomprehensible technology, as if she were actually there, breathing the thin atmosphere, fine dust burning her nostrils.)

Subject reached ground level, walked on through parallel bands of light and shadow to the industrial tower where he spent his days.

Marguerite watched, ignoring her desk work. She was not a primary viewer nor was it likely she would notice anything pertinent that the five focal committees had missed. Her job was to integrate their observations, not to make her own. But that could wait at least until after lunch. The security shutdown meant that exterior agencies couldn’t read her reports in any case. She was free to watch.

Free, if she wanted, to dream.

She grabbed lunch at the Plaza’s west-wing staff cafeteria. Ray wasn’t there, but she caught a glimpse of his assistant Sue Sampel picking up coffee at the checkout. Marguerite had met Sue only once or twice but felt genuinely sorry for her. She knew how Ray treated his employees. Even back at Crossbank, Ray’s staff had cycled pretty quickly. Sue had probably already applied for a transfer. Or soon would. Marguerite waved; Sue absently nodded back.

After lunch Marguerite buckled down to her paperwork. She vetted a particularly interesting report from a Physiology team leader who had put a thousand hours of video through a graphics processor, marking the motile parts of Subject’s body and correlating its changes with time of day and situation. This approach had yielded surprising amounts of hard data, which would need to go out to all the other divisions in a high-priority FYI bulletin. She’d have to compose it herself, with input from Bob Corso and Felice Kawakami of Physiology whenever they got back from the Cancun conference… a bullet-point summary, she supposed, with hints for follow-up, keeping it as succinct as possible so the various team bosses wouldn’t bitch about the added infoload.

She kept Subject on the wall panel so she could look up from her work and see the Subject doing his. Subject worked in what was almost certainly a factory. He stood at a pedestal in a vast enclosed space under a spotlight that illuminated his station. Similar beams of light demarked similar aboriginals, hundreds of them, arrayed behind him like phosphorescent pillars in a gloomy cavern. Subject took modular parts (cylindrical devices as yet unidentified) from a bin at the side of the pillar and inserted them into prepunched disks. The disks rose from a chamber in his pedestal on an elevated platform and subsided again once he had completed them. The cycle repeated every ten minutes or so. To call it monotonous, Marguerite thought, was pushing the limits of understatement.

But something had caught her attention.

Because the Subject was more or less stationary, the virtual camera had rotated to image him head-on. She could see Subject’s face, stark in the overhead light. If you could call it a face. People had called it “horrifying,” but it wasn’t, of course; only intensely unfamiliar. Shocking at first because one recognized some of the component parts (the eyes, for instance, which sat in cups of bone like human eyes, though they were white through and through) while other features (the feeding arms, the mandibles) were insectile or otherwise unfamiliar. But you learned to transcend those distressing first impressions. More disturbing was the inability to see past them. To see meaning. Humans were wired to recognize human emotion reflected in human faces, and with some skill a researcher could learn to understand the expressions of apes or wolves. But Subject’s face defied interpretation.

His hands, though—

They were hands, disturbingly humanlike. The long, flexible fingers numbered three, and the “thumb” was a fixed bony protruberance erupting from the wrist. But all the parts made instant sense. You could imagine grasping something with those hands. They moved in a fast, familiar fashion.

Marguerite watched them work.

Were they trembling?

It seemed to Marguerite that the Subject’s hands were trembling.

She forwarded a quick note to the Physiology team:

Tremor in Subject’s hands? Looked like it (3:30 this P.M. on direct feeds). Let me know. M.

Then she went back to her own work. It was pleasant, somehow, tapping at her keyboard with the image of the Subject over her shoulder. As if they were working together. As if she had company. As if she had a friend.

She picked up Tess on the way home.

It was a gym day, and on gym days Tess inevitably left school with her blouse buttoned off-kilter or her shoes untied. Today was no exception. But Tess was subdued, huddling against the autumn chill in the passenger seat, and Marguerite said nothing about her clothes. “Everything okay?”

“I guess,” Tess said.

“From what I hear, the data pipes are still shut down. No video tonight.”

“We watch Sunshine City on Mondays.”

“Yeah, but not tonight, sweetie.”

“I have a book to read,” Tess volunteered.

“That’s good. What are you reading?”

“A thing about astronomy.”

Home, Marguerite fixed dinner while Tess played in her room. Dinner was a frozen chicken entree from the Blind Lake grocery store. Dull but expedient and within the range of Marguerite’s limited culinary skills. The chicken was rotating in the microsteamer when her phone buzzed.

Marguerite dug the talkpiece out of her shirt pocket. “Yes?”

“Ms. Hauser?”

“Speaking.”

“Sorry to bother you so close to dinnertime. This is Bernie Fleischer — Tessa’s homeroom teacher.”

“Right.” Marguerite disguised the sudden queasiness she felt. “We met in September.”

“I was wondering whether you might be able to stop by and have a talk sometime this week.”

“Is there a problem with Tess?”

“Not a problem as such. I just thought we should touch base. We can talk about it in more detail when we get together.”

Marguerite set a date and replaced the phone in her pocket.

Please, she thought. Please, don’t let it be happening again.

Six

School ended early on Wednesday.

The final bell rang at 1:30, so that the teachers could hold some kind of meeting. It had been homeroom all morning, Mr. Fleischer talking about wetlands and geography and the different kinds of birds and animals that lived around here; and Tess, although she had stared out the window most of the time, had been listening closely. Blind Lake (the lake, not the town) sounded fascinating, at least the way Mr. Fleischer described it. He had talked about the sheet of ice that had covered this part of the world, thousands upon thousands of years ago. That in itself had been intriguing. Tess had heard of the Ice Age, of course, but she had not quite grasped that it had happened here, that the land right under the school’s foundations had once been buried in an unbearable weight of ice; that the glaciers, advancing, had pushed rocks and soil before them like vast plows, and, retreating, had filled the land’s declivities and depressions with ancient water.

Today was cloudy and cool but not rainy or unpleasant. Tess, with the afternoon before her like an unopened gift, decided to visit the wetlands, the original Blind Lake. She came across Edie Jerundt in the playground and asked whether she’d like to go too. Edie, punching a tetherball, frowned and said, “Unh-uh.” The tetherball chimed dully against its metal post. Tess shrugged and walked away.

The ice had been here ten thousand years ago, Mr. Fleischer had said. Ten thousand summers, growing cooler if you imagined travelling backward toward the glaciers. Ten thousand winters merging into winter uninterrupted. She wondered what it had been like when the world had just begun to warm, glaciers retreating to reveal the land underneath (“ground moraine,” Mr. Fleischer had said; “washboard moraine,” whatever that meant), far-carried soil dropped from the ice to block bedrock valleys and muddy the new rivers and make fresh sod for the grasslands. Maybe everything had smelled like spring back then, Tess thought. Maybe it had smelled that way for years at a time, smelled like muck and rot and new things growing.

And long before that, before the Ice Age, had there been a global autumn? There must have been. Tess was sure of it. A whole world made like right now, she thought, with patches of frost in the morning and being able to see your breath when you walked to school.

She knew the wetlands lay beyond the paved spaces of town and at least a mile east, past the cooling towers of Eyeball Alley, and farther on beyond the low hill where (Edie Jerundt had told her) there was sledding in winter but the older kids were mean and would crash into you unless you came with an adult.

It was a long walk. She followed the sidewalkless access road that led east from the town houses toward the Alley, turning aside when she reached the perimeter of that cluster of buildings. Tess had never been inside Eyeball Alley, though she had been on a school tour of the similar building back at Crossbank. To be honest, she was a little scared of the Alley. Her mother said it was just like the one at Crossbank — a duplicate of it, in fact — and Tess had not liked those deep enclosed corridors or the huge racks of O/BEC platens or the loud cryopumps that kept them cold. All these things frightened her, more so because her then-teacher Mrs. Flewelling kept saying that these machines and processes were “not well understood.”

She understood, at least, that images of the ocean planet at Crossbank and Lobsterville here at the Lake were generated at these places, at Eyeball Alley or what they had called at Crossbank the Big Eye. From these structures arose great mysteries. Tess had never been much impressed with the images themselves, the Subject’s static life or the even more static ocean views — they made boring video — but when she was in the mood she could stare at them the way she might stare out a window, feeling the exquisite strangeness of daylight on another planet.

The cooling towers at Eyeball Alley emitted faint trails of steam into the afternoon air. Clouds moved above them like nervous herd animals. Tess skirted the building, keeping well clear of its perimeter fences. She cut west along a trail through the wild grass, one of the innumerable trails that had been scythed into the prairie by Blind Lake’s children. She buttoned the collar of her jacket against a rising wind.

By the time she reached the top of the sledding hill she was already footsore and ready to turn back, but her first view of the wetlands fascinated her.

Beyond the hill and past a grassy perimeter lay Blind Lake, a “semipermanent wetland,” Mr. Fleischer had said, a square mile of watery meadow and shallow marshes. The land was overgrown with humps of grass and broad stands of cattails, and in the patches of open water she could see resting Canada geese like the ones that had passed overhead in noisy V-formation all this autumn.

Beyond that was another fence, or rather the same fence that surrounded all of the Blind Lake National Laboratory and the wetlands too. This land was enclosed, but it was also wild. It lay within the so-called perimeter of security. Tess, if she wandered into these marshes, would be safe from terrorist attack or espionage agents, though perhaps not from snapping turtles or muskrats. (She didn’t know what a muskrat looked like, but Mr. Fleischer had said they lived here and Tess disliked the sound of the name.)

She walked downhill a little way farther, until the ground oozed under the pressure of her feet and the cattails loomed before her like brown sentinels with woolly heads. In a pool of still water to the left of her she could see her own reflection.

Unless it was Mirror Girl looking back at her.

Tess was barely willing to entertain that possibility even in the privacy of her own mind. There had been so much trouble back at Crossbank. Counselors, psychiatrists, all those endless and maddeningly patient questions she had been asked. The way people had looked at her; the way even her father and mother had looked at her, as if she had done something shameful without being aware of it. No, not that. Not again.

Mirror Girl had only been a game.

The problem was, the game had seemed real.

Not real real, the way a rock or a tree was real and substantial. But more real than a dream. More real than a wish. Mirror Girl looked just like Tess and had inhabited not only mirrors (where she had first appeared) but also empty air. Mirror Girl whispered questions Tess would never have thought to ask, questions she couldn’t always answer. Mirror Girl, the therapist had said, was Tessa’s own invention; but Tess didn’t believe she could invent a personality as persistent and frequently annoying as Mirror Girl had been.

She risked another glance at the reflective water at her feet. Water full of clouds and sky. Water where her own face looked back at an oblique angle and seemed to smile in recognition.

Tess, said the wind, and her reflection vanished in a corrugation of ripples.

She thought of the astronomy book she had been reading. Of the deepness of time and space in which even an Ice Age was only a moment.

Tess, the cattails and the rushes whispered.

“Go away,” Tess said angrily. “I don’t want any more trouble with you.”

The wind gusted and died, though the sense of unwanted presence remained.

Tess turned away from the suddenly forbidding wetlands. When she faced west she found the sun peeking out from a rack of cloud almost level with the hilltop. She glanced at her watch. Four o’clock. The house key she kept on a chain around her neck felt like a ticket to paradise. She didn’t want to be out in this lonely wetness anymore. She wanted to be home, with this leaden knapsack off her back, curled into the sofa with something good on the video panel or a book in her hands. She felt suddenly doubtful and guilty, as if she had done something wrong just by coming here, though there were no rules against it (only Mr. Fleischer’s passing remark that it was possible to get lost in the marshes and that the shallow water wasn’t always as shallow as it looked).

A huge blue heron rose into the air from the rushes only a few yards away, cracking the air with its wings. It carried something green and wiggling in the vise of its beak.

Tess turned and ran to the top of the ridge, anxious for the reassuring sight of Blind Lake (the town). Wind whistled in her ears, and the shush-shush noise of her trouser legs brushing together sounded like urgent conversation.

She was comforted by the towers of the Alley as she hurried past them, comforted by the smooth blackness of the asphalt road as it wound into the town houses, comforted by the nearness of the tall buildings of Hubble Plaza.

But she didn’t care for the sound of police-car sirens down by the south gate. Sirens always sounded to Tess like wailing babies, hungry and lonely. They meant something bad was happening. She shivered and ran the rest of the way home.

Seven

Wednesday morning, Sebastian Vogel joined Chris at one of the tiny makeshift tables in the community center cafeteria.

Breakfast consisted of croissants, watery scrambled eggs, orange juice, and coffee, free of charge to involuntary guests. Chris started with the coffee. He wanted a little neurochemical fortification before he even glanced at the steam table.

Sebastian ambled up and dropped a copy of God the Quantum Vacuum on the tabletop. “Elaine said you were curious. I inscribed it for you.”

Chris tried to look grateful. The book was a premium edition, printed on real paper and bound in boards, sturdy as a brick and about as heavy. He imagined Elaine suppressing a smile when she told Sebastian how “anxious” Chris was to read it. Sebastian must have carried a suitcase full of these into Blind Lake, as if he were on a promotional tour.

“Thanks,” Chris said. “I owe you one of mine.”

“No need. I downloaded a copy of Weighted Answers before the links were cut. Elaine recommends it highly.”

Chris wondered how he could repay Elaine for this. Strychnine in her breakfast cereal, perhaps.

“She seems to think,” Sebastian went on, “this security crisis may work to our advantage.”

Chris leafed through Vogel’s book, scanning the chapter heads. “Borrowing God,” he read. “Why Genes Make Minds Where They Find Them.” The pernicious ampersand. “To our advantage how?”

“We see the institution in crisis. Especially if the lockdown goes on much longer. She says we can get past Ari Weingart’s publicity machine and talk to some real people. See a side of Blind Lake that’s never been explored in the press.”

Elaine was right, of course, and for once Chris was ahead of her. For a couple of days now he had been interviewing the stranded day workers, getting their take on the security shutdown.

He hadn’t needed Elaine’s pep talk the other night. He knew this was in all likelihood his last chance to salvage his career as a journalist. The only question was whether he wanted to take it. As Elaine had also pointed out, there were other options. Chronic alcoholism or drug abuse, for instance, and he had come close enough to both of those to understand the attraction. Or he could take some inconspicuous job writing ad copy or tech manuals and slide into a sedate, respectable middle age. He wasn’t the first adult to face diminished expectations and he didn’t feel entitled to sympathy for it.

The assignment to Crossbank and Blind Lake had come like a childhood dream too long deferred. A dream gone stale. He had grown up in love with space, had relished the images from the early NASA and EuroStar optical interferometers — tentative, crude pictures that had included the two gas giants of UMa47’s system (each with enormous, complex ring systems) and the tantalizing smudge that was a rocky planet inside the habitable zone of the star.

His parents had indulged his enthusiasm but never really understood it. Only his younger sister Portia had been willing to listen to him talk about it, and she treated these discussions as bedtime stories. Everything was a story, as far as Portia was concerned. She liked to hear him talk about these distant and freshly envisioned worlds but always wanted him to go beyond the established facts. Were there people on these planets? What did they look like?

“We don’t know,” he used to tell her. “They haven’t discovered that yet.” Portia would pout in disappointment — couldn’t he have made something up? — but Chris had acquired what he would later think of as a journalistic respect for the truth. If you understood the facts they needed no embroidery: all the wonder was already there, the more spellbinding because it was true.

Then the NASA interferometer had begun to lose signal strength, and the newly designed O/BEC devices, quantum computers running adaptive neural nets in an open-ended organic architecture, were enlisted to strain the final dregs of signal from noise. They had done more than that, of course. Out of their increasingly deep and recursive Fourier analysis they had somehow derived an optical image even after the interferometers themselves ceased to function. The analytic device had replaced the telescope it was meant to augment.

Chris was spending his last year at home when the first images of HR8832/B were released to the media. His family hadn’t paid much attention. Portia by that time was a bright teenager who had discovered politics and was frustrated that she hadn’t been allowed to go to Chicago to protest the inauguration of the Continental Commonwealth. His parents had withdrawn from one another into their own pocket universes — his father into woodworking and the Presbyterian church, his mother into a late-blooming bohemianism marked by Mensa meetings and Madras blouses, psychic fairs and Afghan scarves.

And although they had marveled at the images of HR8832/B they hadn’t truly understood them. Like most people, they couldn’t say how far away the planet was, what it meant that it orbited “another star,” why its seascapes were more than abstractly pretty, or why there was so much fuss over a place no one could actually visit.

Chris had wanted desperately to explain. Another nascent journalistic impulse. The beauty and significance of these images were transcendent. Ten thousand years of humanity’s struggle with ignorance had culminated in this achievement. It redeemed Galileo from his inquisitors and Giordano Bruno from the flames. It was a pearl salvaged from the rubble of slavery and war.

It was also a nine-day-wonder, a media bubble, a briefly lucrative source of income for the novelty industry. Ten years had passed, the O/BEC effect had proven difficult to understand or reproduce, Portia was gone, and Chris’s first attempt at book-length journalism had been a disaster. Truth was a hard commodity to market. Even at Crossbank, even at Blind Lake, internecine squabbling over target images and interpretation had almost engulfed the scientific discourse.

And yet, here he was. Disillusioned, disoriented, fucked-over and fucked-up, but with a last chance to dig out that pearl and share it. A chance to relocate the beauty and significance that had once moved him nearly to tears.

He looked at Sebastian Vogel over the breakfast-stained plastic tabletop. “What does this place mean to you?”

Sebastian shrugged amiably. “I came here the same way you did. I got the call from Visions East, I talked to my agent, I signed the contract.”

“Yeah, but is that all it is — a publishing opportunity?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I may not be as sentimental about it as Elaine, but I recognize the significance of the work that goes on here. Every astronomical advance since Copernicus has changed mankind’s view of itself and its place in the universe.”

“It’s not just the results, though. It’s the process. Galileo could have explained the principle behind the telescope to almost anyone, given a little patience. But even the people who run the O/BECs can’t tell you how they do what they do.”

“You’re asking which is the bigger story,” Sebastian said, “what we see or how we see it. It’s an interesting angle. Maybe you should talk to the engineers at the Alley. They’re probably more approachable than the theorists.”

Because they don’t care what I told the world about Galliano, Chris thought. Because they don’t consider me a Judas.

Still, it was a good idea. After breakfast he called Ari Weingart and asked him for a contact at the Alley.

“Chief engineer out there is Charlie Grogan. If you like, I’ll get ahold of him and try to set up a meet.”

“I’d appreciate it,” Chris said. “Any new word on the lockdown?”

“Sorry, no.”

“No explanation?”

“It’s unusual, obviously, but no. And you don’t have to tell me how pissed-off people are. We’ve got a guy in Personnel whose wife went into labor just before the gates closed Friday. You can imagine how happy he is about all this.”

His situation wasn’t unique. That afternoon Chris interviewed three more day workers at the Blind Lake gym, but they were reluctant to talk about anything except the shutdown — families they couldn’t reach, pets abandoned, appointments missed. “The least they could do is give us a fucking audio line out,” an electrician told him. “I mean, what could happen? Somebody’s going to bomb us by phone? Plus there are rumors starting to go around, which is natural when you can’t get any real news. There could be a war on for all we know.”

He could only agree. A temporary security block was one thing. Going most of a week without information exchange in either direction bordered on lunacy. Much longer and it would look like something truly radical must have happened outside.

And maybe it had. But that wasn’t an explanation. Even in times of war, what threat could a web or video connection pose? Why quarantine not only the population of Blind Lake, but all their data conduits?

Who was hiding what, and from whom?

He intended to spend the hour before dinner putting his notes in some kind of order. He was beginning to imagine the possibility of a finished article, maybe not the twenty thousand words VE had asked for but not far short of it. He even had a thesis: miracles buried under the human capacity for indifference. The somnolent culture of UMa47/E as a distant mirror.

A project like this would be good for him, maybe restore some of his faith in himself.

Or he could wake up tomorrow in the usual emasculating fog of self-revulsion, the knowledge that he was kidding absolutely nobody with his handful of half-transcribed interviews and fragile ambitions. That was possible too. Maybe even likely.

He looked up from the screen of his pocket server in time to see Elaine bearing down on him. “Chris!”

“I’m busy.”

“There’s something happening at the south gate. Thought you might want to see.”

“What is it?”

“Do I know? Something big coming down the road at slow speed. Looks like an unmanned vehicle. You can see it from the hill past the Plaza. Can that little gizmo of yours capture video?”

“Sure, but—”

“So bring it. Come on!”

It was a short walk from the community center to the crest of the hill. Whatever was happening was unusual enough that a small group of people had gathered to watch, and Chris could see more faces leaning into the windows of the south tower of Hubble Plaza. “Did you tell Sebastian about this?”

Elaine rolled her eyes. “I don’t keep track of him and I doubt he’s interested. Unless that’s the Holy Ghost rolling down the road.”

Chris squinted into the distance.

The sinuous road away from Blind Lake was easily visible under a ceiling of close, tumbling clouds. And yes, something was approaching the locked gate from outside. Chris thought Elaine was probably right: it looked like a big eighteen-wheel driverless freight truck, the kind of drone vehicle the military had used in the Turkish crisis five years ago. It was painted flat black and was unmarked, at least as far as Chris could tell from here. It moved at a speed that couldn’t have been more than fifteen miles per hour — still ten minutes or so away from the gate.

Chris shot a few seconds of video. Elaine said, “You in good shape? Because I mean to jog down there, see what happens when that thing arrives.”

“Could be dangerous,” Chris said. Not to mention cold. The temperature had dropped a good few degrees in the last hour. He didn’t have a jacket.

“Grow some balls,” Elaine scolded him. “The truck doesn’t look armed.”

“It may not be armed, but it’s armored. Somebody’s anticipating trouble.”

“All the more reason. Listen!”

The sound of sirens. Two Blind Lake Security vans sped past, headed south.

Elaine was spry for a woman of her age. Chris found himself hurrying to keep up.

Eight

Marguerite left work early Wednesday and drove to the school for her interview with Mr. Fleischer, Tessa’s homeroom teacher.

Blind Lake’s single school building was a long, low two-story structure not far from the Plaza, surrounded by playgrounds, an athletic field, and a generous parking lot. Like all of the buildings in Blind Lake, the school was cleanly designed but essentially anonymous — it might have been any school, anywhere. It looked much like the school at Crossbank, and the smell that greeted Marguerite when she stepped through the big front door was the smell of every school she had ever been inside: a combination of sour milk, wood shavings, disinfectant, adolescent musk, and warm electronics.

She followed the corridor into the west wing. Tess had entered grade eight this year, a step away from the hopscotch and Barbie crowd, tottering on the brink of adolescence. Marguerite had suffered through her own high school years, and still felt a conditioned wave of apprehension amidst these rows of salmon-colored lockers, though the school was largely empty — the students had been sent home early to allow for this round of parent-teacher interviews. She imagined Tess already at the house, maybe reading and listening to the hum of the floorboard heaters. Home safe, Marguerite thought a little enviously.

She knocked at the half-open door of Room 130, Mr. Fleischer’s room. He waved her in and rose to shake her hand.

She didn’t doubt Mr. Fleischer was an excellent teacher. Blind Lake was a flagship federal institution, and a key part of its employment package was the availability of a first-class school system. Marguerite was sure Mr. Fleischer’s credentials were impeccable. He even looked like a good teacher, or at least the kind of teacher you could safely confide in: tall, somewhat doe-eyed, well but not intimidatingly dressed, with a trim beard and a generous smile. His grip was firm but gentle.

“Welcome,” he said. The room was equipped with child-sized desks, but he had imported a pair of parent-friendly chairs. “Have a seat.”

Funny, Marguerite thought, how awkward all this made her feel.

Fleischer glanced at a sheet of notes. “Good to meet you. Meet you again, I should say, since we were introduced at Tessa’s orientation. You work in Observation and Interpretation?”

“Actually, I’m the department head.”

Fleischer’s eyebrows levitated briefly. “Here since August?”

“Tess and I moved here in August, yes.”

“Tessa’s father was here a little earlier, though, wasn’t he?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re separated?”

“Divorced,” Marguerite said promptly. Was it paranoia, or had Ray already discussed this with Fleischer? Ray always said “separated,” as if the divorce were a temporary misunderstanding. And it would be just like Ray to describe Marguerite as “working in Interpretation” rather than admit she was heading the department. “We have joint legal custody, but Tess is in my care the majority of time.”

“I see.”

Maybe Ray had failed to mentioned that, too. Fleischer paused and added a note to his files. “I’m sorry if this is intrusive. I just want to get a sense of Tessa’s situation at home. She’s been having some trouble here at school, as I’m sure you’re aware. Nothing serious, but her marks aren’t where we’d like them to be, and she seems a little, I don’t know how to say it, a little vague in class.”

“The move—” Marguerite began.

“No doubt that’s a factor. It’s like an army base here. Families move in and out all the time, and it’s hard on the kids. The kids can be hard on newcomers, too. I’ve seen it far too often. But my concerns about Tess go a little bit beyond that. I had a look at her records from Crossbank.”

Ah, Marguerite thought. Well, that was inevitable. Raking these old coals again. “Tess had some problems last spring. But that’s all over now.”

“This was during the process of the divorce?”

“Yes.”

“She was seeing a therapist at that time, right?”

“Dr. Leinster, at Crossbank. Yes.”

“Is she seeing anyone now?”

“Here at Blind Lake?” Marguerite shook her head decisively. “No.”

“Have you thought about it? We’ve got people on staff who can provide absolutely first-rate counseling.”

“I’m sure you do. I don’t feel it’s necessary.”

Fleischer paused. He tapped a pencil against his desk. “Back at Crossbank, Tess had some kind of hallucinatory episode, is that correct?”

“No, Mr. Fleischer, that’s not correct. Tess was lonely and she talked to herself. She had a made-up friend she called Mirror Girl, and there were times when it was a little hard for her to distinguish between reality and imagination. That’s a problem, but it’s not a hallucination. She was tested for temporal-lobe epilepsy and a dozen other neurological conditions. The tests were uniformly negative.”

“According to her file, she was diagnosed with—”

“Asperger’s Syndrome, yes, but that’s not a terribly uncommon condition. She has a few tics, she was language-delayed, and she’s not very good at making friends, but we’ve known that for some years now. She’s lonely, yes, and I believe her loneliness contributed to the problem at Crossbank.”

“I think she’s lonely here, too.”

“I’m sure you’re right. Yes, she’s lonely and disoriented. Wouldn’t you be? Parents divorced, a new place to live, plus all the usual cruelties a child her age endures. You don’t have to tell me about it. I see it every day. In her body language, in her eyes.”

“And you don’t think therapy would help her deal with that?”

“I don’t mean to be dismissive, but therapy hasn’t been a huge success. Tessa’s been on and off Ritalin and a host of other drugs, and none of them has done her any good. Quite the opposite. That should be in the file too.”

“Therapy needn’t involve medication. Sometimes just the talking helps.”

“But it didn’t help Tess. If anything it made her feel more unique, more alone, more oppressed.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“She didn’t have to.” Marguerite discovered her palms were sweating. Her voice had tightened up, too. That defensive whine of yours, Ray used to call it. “What’s the point, Mr. Fleischer?”

“Again, I’m sorry if this seems intrusive. I like to have some background on my students, especially if they’re having trouble. I think it makes me a better teacher. I guess it also makes me sound like an interrogator. I apologize.”

“I know Tess has been slow with her written work, but—”

“She comes to class, but there are days when she’s, I don’t know how to describe it — emotionally absent. She stares out the window. Sometimes I call her name and she doesn’t respond. She whispers to herself. That doesn’t make her unique, much less disturbed, but it does make her difficult to teach. All I’m saying is, maybe we can help.”

“Ray’s been here, hasn’t he?”

Mr. Fleischer blinked. “I’ve talked to your husband — your ex-husband — on a couple of occasions, but that’s not unusual.”

“What did he tell you? That I’m neglecting her? That she complains about being lonely when she’s with me?”

Fleischer didn’t respond, but his wide-eyed look gave him away. Direct hit. Fucking Ray!

“Look,” Marguerite said, “I appreciate your concern, and I share it, but you should also know that Ray isn’t happy with the custody arrangements and this isn’t the first time he’s tried to set me up, make me look like a bad parent. So let me guess: he came in here and told you how reluctant he was to raise the issue, but he was worried about Tess, what with all the problems back at Crossbank, and maybe she wasn’t getting the kind of parental attention she deserves, in fact she’d said a thing or two to him… is that the gist?”

Fleischer held up his hands. “I can’t get involved in this kind of discussion. I told Tessa’s father the same things I’m telling you.”

“Ray has an agenda of his own, Mr. Fleischer.”

“My concern is with Tess.”

“Well, I—” Marguerite restrained an urge to bite her lip. How had this gone so badly wrong? Fleischer was looking at her now with patient concern, patronizing concern, but he was a grade eight teacher, after all, and maybe that big-eyed frown was just a defensive reflex, a mask that slid into place whenever he was confronted with an hysterical child. Or parent. “You know, I, obviously, I’m willing to do whatever will help Tess, help her focus on her schoolwork…”

“Basically,” Fleischer said, “I think we’re on the same wavelength here. Tess missed a good deal of school at Crossbank — we don’t want to repeat that.”

“No. We don’t. Honestly, I don’t think it will happen again.” She added, hoping it didn’t sound too obviously desperate, “I can sit down with her, talk to her about being more thorough with her work, if you think that would be a good idea.”

“It might help.” Fleischer hesitated, then: “All I’m saying, Marguerite, is that we both need to keep our eyes open where Tess is concerned. Stop trouble before it happens.”

“My eyes are all the way open, Mr. Fleischer.”

“Well, that’s good. That’s the important thing. If I think we need to touch base again, can I call you?”

“Anytime,” Marguerite said, ridiculously grateful that the interview seemed to be drawing to a close.

Fleischer stood up. “Thank you for your time, and I hope I didn’t alarm you.”

“Not at all.” An outrageous lie.

“My door is always open if you have any concerns of your own.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that.”

She hurried down the corridor to the school door as if she were leaving the scene of a crime. Mistake to mention Ray, she thought, but his fingerprints were all over this encounter, and what a slick setup it had been — and how like Ray to use Tessa’s problems as a weapon.

Unless, Marguerite thought, I’m kidding myself. Unless Tessa’s problems went deeper than a mild personality disorder; unless the whole Crossbank circus was about to repeat itself… She would do anything to help Tess through this difficult passage, if only she knew how to help, but Tessa’s own refractory indifference was almost impossible to breach… especially with Ray running interference, playing mind games, trying to position himself for some hypothetical custody battle.

Ray, seeing every conflict as a war and driven by his own dread of losing.

Marguerite pushed through the doors into autumn air. The afternoon had cooled dramatically, and the clouds overhead were closer, or seemed so in the long light of the sun. The breeze was frigid but welcome after the claustrophobic warmth of the schoolroom.

As she let herself into her car she heard the wail of sirens. She drove cautiously to the exit and stopped long enough to let a Blind Lake Security vehicle roar past. It looked like it was heading for the south gate.

Nine

Sue Sampel, Ray Scutter’s executive assistant, tapped on his door and reminded him that Ari Weingart was scheduled for a meeting in twenty minutes. Ray looked up from a stack of printed papers and pursed his lips. “Thank you, I’m aware of that.”

“Plus the guy from Civilian Security at four o’clock.”

“I can read my own day planner, thanks.”

“Okay, then,” Sue said. Screw you, too. Ray was in a dark mood this Wednesday, not that he was ever sweetness-and-light. She supposed he was chafing under the lockdown like everybody else. She understood the need for security, and she could even imagine that it might be necessary (though God knows why) to make it impossible to place so much as a phone call outside the perimeter. But if this went on much longer people were going to get seriously PO’d. Many already were. The day workers, for sure, who had lives (spouses, children) outside the Blind Lake campus. But the permanent residents, too. Sue herself, for example. She lived in the Lake but she dated off-campus, and she had been anxious to get that all-important second phone call from a man she’d met at a Secular Singles group in Constance, a man her age, mid-forties, a veterinarian, with thinning hair and gentle eyes. She imagined him with a phone in his hand, gazing sadly at all those NO SIGNAL or SERVER UNAVAILABLE tags and eventually giving up on her. Another lost opportunity. At least this time it wouldn’t be her fault.

Ari Weingart popped into the office at the appointed hour. Good old Ari: polite, funny, even prompt. A saint.

“The boss is in?” Ari asked.

“As luck would have it. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

Ray Scutter’s window looked south from the sixth floor of Hubble Plaza, and he was often distracted by the view. Usually there was a constant stream of traffic in and out of the Lake. Lately there had been none, and the lockdown had made his window view static, rendered the land beyond the perimeter fence as blank as brown paper, no motion but gliding cloud-shadows and the occasional darting flock of birds. If you stared long enough it began to look as inhuman as the landscape of UMa47/E. Just another imported image. It was all surface, wasn’t it? All two-dimensional.

The lockdown had created a number of irritating problems. Not the least of which was that he appeared to be the senior civilian authority on campus.

His status in the Administration hierarchy was relatively junior. But the annual NSI Conference on Astrobiology and Exocultural Science had been held in Cancun this weekend past. A huge delegation of academic staff and senior administrators had packed their swimsuits and left Blind Lake a day before the lockdown. Pull those names out of the flow chart and what remained was Ray Scutter floating over the various department heads like a loose balloon.

It meant that people were coming to him with problems he wasn’t empowered to resolve. Demanding things he couldn’t give them, like a coherent explanation of the lockdown or a special exemption from it. He had to tell them he was in the dark too. All he could do was carry on under the standing protocols and wait for instructions from outside. Wait, in other words, for the whole shitting mess to reach a conclusion. But it had already gone on for an uncomfortably long time.

He looked away from the window as Ari Weingart knocked and entered.

Ray disliked Weingart’s cheery optimism. He suspected it disguised a secret contempt, suspected that under his hale-fellow exterior Weingart was peddling influence as enthusiastically as every other department head. But at least Weingart understood Ray’s position and seemed more interested in coping than complaining.

If he could only suppress that smile. The smile bore down on Ray like a klieg light, teeth so white and regular they looked like luminous mahjong tiles. “Sit,” Ray said.

Weingart pulled up a chair and opened his pocket desktop. Down to business. Ray liked that.

“You wanted a list of situations we’ll have to address if the quarantine goes on much longer. I drew up some notes.”

“Quarantine?” Ray said. “Is that what people are calling it?”

“As opposed to a standard six-hour lockdown, yeah.”

“Why would we be quarantined? No one’s sick.”

“Talk to Dimi.” Dimitry Shulgin was the Civilian Security chief, due here at four. “The lockdown follows an obscure set of regs in the military manual. He says it’s what they call a ‘data quarantine,’ but nobody ever really expected it to come into effect.”

“He hasn’t mentioned this to me. I swear to God, he’s like some fucking Slavic clam. What exactly is a ‘data quarantine’ meant to accomplish?”

“The regs were written back when Crossbank was just beginning to pull images. It’s one of those paranoid scenarios from the congressional hearings. The idea was that Crossbank or Blind Lake might download something dangerous, obviously nothing physical, but a virus or a worm of some kind… you know what steganography is?”

“Data encrypted into photographs or images.” He didn’t remind Weingart that he, Ray, had testified at those hearings. Information warfare had been a hot topic at the time. The Luddite lobby had feared that Blind Lake might import some pernicious alien self-replicating digital program or, for God’s sake, a deadly meme, which would then spread through terrestrial data routes wreaking unknowable havoc.

Wary as he often was of Blind Lake’s groping into the unknown, the idea was preposterous. The aboriginals of UMa47/E could hardly know they were being spied on… and even if they did, images processed at the Lake had traveled, however mysteriously, at the conventional speed of light. It would need both an impossible perceptivity and a ridiculously patient desire for revenge for them to react in any hostile way. Still, he had been forced to admit, dangerous steganography was not an absolute impossibility, at least in the abstract. So a series of contingency plans had been written into the already immense web of security plans surrounding the Lake. Even though, in Ray’s opinion, it was the biggest crock of astronomical shit since Girolamo Fracastoro’s theory that syphilis was caused by the conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars.

Had those bullshit edicts actually been called into effect? “One problem with that idea,” he told Weingart. “No provocation. We haven’t downloaded anything suspicious.”

“Not yet, anyway,” Weingart said.

“You know something I don’t?”

“Hardly. But let’s say if there was a problem at Crossbank—”

“Come on. Crossbank is looking at oceans and bacteria.”

“I know, but if—”

“And we’re imaging completely different targets in any case. Their work doesn’t reflect on ours.”

“No, but if there was a problem with the process somehow—”

“Something endemic to the Eye, you mean?”

“If there was some kind of problem with the O/BECs at Crossbank, DoE or the military might have decided to put us under a precautionary quarantine.”

“They could at least have warned us.”

“Information jamming is two-way. No in, no out. We have to assume they don’t want so much as a carrier wave getting through.”

“That doesn’t preclude a warning.”

“Unless they were in a hurry.”

“This is ridiculously speculative, and I hope you and Shulgin haven’t been spreading it around. Rumors can cause panic.”

Weingart looked like he wanted to say something, but bit it back.

“Anyway,” Ray said, “it’s out of our hands. The pressing question is what we can do for ourselves until somebody unbuttons the fence.”

Weingart nodded and began to read from his list. “Supplies. We pipe in our drinking water, and that hasn’t been interrupted, but without intervention we’ll run short of some foodstuffs before the end of the week and face a starvation-level crisis by the end of November. I’m assuming we’ll be resupplied, but it might be a good idea to segregate our surplus and maybe even post guards over it in the meantime.”

“I can’t imagine this… siege… going on until Thanksgiving.”

“Well, but we’re talking ‘what-if’ here—”

“All right, all right. What else?”

“Medical supplies, same deal, and the on-campus clinic isn’t set up to deal with serious or widespread illness or injuries. If we had a fire we’d have to ship burn victims to a major hospital or suffer needless fatalities. Not much we can do about that, either, except ask the medical staff to make contingency plans. Plus, if the quarantine is prolonged, people are going to need emotional counselling. We already have some folks with urgent family matters on the outside.”

“They’ll live.”

“Lodging. There are a couple hundred day workers sleeping in the gym, not to mention visiting journalists, a handful of contractors, and anybody who happened to be here on a day pass. Long-term, if this is a long-term quarantine, it might be better to see if we can billet those people out. There are people living on-campus who have spare rooms or guest quarters available, and it wouldn’t be hard to round up volunteers. With a little luck we could have everybody sleeping on a bed, or at least a pullout sofa. Sharing bathrooms instead of fighting over the showers at the community center and lining up for the jakes.”

“Look into it,” Ray said. After a moment’s thought he added, “Put together a list of volunteers, but bring it to me before you talk to them. And we’ll have to compile an inventory of day workers and guests to go with it.”

There was more of this — minutiae that could be easily delegated, for the most part, all predicated on a prolonged lockdown Ray couldn’t seriously envision. A month of this? Three months? It was unimaginable. His certainty was tempered only by the nagging fact that the lockdown had already gone on an unreasonably long time.

Sue Sampel tapped at the door while Weingart was summing up. “We’re not finished,” Ray called out.

She leaned into the room. “I know, but—”

“If Shulgin is here, he can wait a few minutes.”

“He’s not here, but he called to cancel. He’s headed down to the south gate.”

“The south gate? What’s so fucking important about the south gate?”

She smiled infuriatingly. “He said you’d understand if you took a look out your window.”

The huge eighteen-wheeled vehicle — powder-black and heavily armored — crawled along the road toward Blind Lake like an immense pill bug, timid for all its layered defenses. Where the driver’s cab should have been there was only a blunt cone fitted with sensors. The truck was reading the road, gauging its location according to buried transponders and GPS numbers. There was no human driver. The truck was driving itself.

By the time Chris and Elaine neared the south gate the road was already mobbed with off-duty day workers and office staff and a gaggle of high school kids. A pair of Civilian Security vans pulled up and discharged a dozen men in gray uniforms, who began waving the crowd back to what they deemed a safe distance.

The fence surrounding Blind Lake’s innermost perimeter was a state-of-the-art “containment device,” Elaine had told Chris. Its posts were reinforced alloy cores sunk deep into the earth; its chains and links were carbon composites stronger than steel, their exposed surfaces slicker than Teflon and studded with sensors; atop all this was a double concertina of razor wire inclined at ninety degrees. The whole thing could be electrified to a lethal voltage.

The gate that barred the road was hinged to swing open on a signal from the guardhouse or from a coded transponder. The guardhouse itself was a concrete bunker with slit windows, sturdy as bedrock but currently vacant; the resident guard had been pulled out when the lockdown went into effect.

Chris wormed his way to the front of the crowd, Elaine following with her hands on his shoulders. At last they came up against the highway barriers the security men were muscling into place. Elaine pointed out a car just arriving: “Isn’t that Ari Weingart? And I think the guy with him is Raymond Scutter.”

Chris took note of the face. Ray Scutter was an interesting story. Fifteen years ago he had been a prominent critic of astrobiology, “the science of wishful thinking.” The Martian disappointment had lent Ray’s point of view a great deal of credibility, at least until the Terrestrial Planet Finders began to yield interesting results. The Crossbank/Blind Lake breakthroughs had made his pessimism look shortsighted and mean-spirited, but Ray Scutter had survived through a combination of graceful backpedalling and a convert’s enthusiasm. The genuinely solid contributions he made to the first wave of geological and atmospheric surveys had not only rescued his career but allowed him to move up through the bureaucracy to important administrative positions at Crossbank and now the Lake. Ray Scutter would have made an interesting subject, Chris thought, but he was supposed to be hard to approach, and his public pronouncements were so predictably banal that better journalists than Chris had written him off as a lost cause.

Right now he was scowling, butting heads with the Security chief. Chris couldn’t hear the conversation but he zoomed in his pocket recorder and archived a few seconds of video. Just a few, though. He was saving the bulk of the memory for the apparently inevitable collision of the robotic truck with the gate.

The truck had crept to within a hundred yards of the guardhouse. It looked unstoppably massive.

Elaine shaded her eyes and stared intently along the line of the fence. The setting sun had come under a rack of cloud and spilled a raking light across the prairie. She put her mouth against Chris’s ear: “Am I seeing things, or are there pocket drones out there?”

Startled, Chris followed her line of sight.

Bob Krafft, a contractor who had come into Blind Lake with a team of engineers to survey the high ground east of the Alley for the construction of new housing, had spotted the truck shortly after noon, when it was still a pea-sized dot on the wide southern horizon.

He had done some time in the Turkish wars and he recognized it as the kind of driverless resupply vehicle more commonly found in a combat zone. But the truck didn’t alarm him. Quite the opposite. Incongruous as it might be, the truck was still inbound traffic. Which meant the south gate would have to swing open to admit it. And that was a golden opportunity. He knew immediately what he had to do.

He found his wife Courtney among the cots set up in the Blind Lake gymnasium where they had languished for most of a week. He told her to wait right here but be ready to travel. She looked at him nervously — Courtney was nervous at the best of times — but kept her mouth shut and gave him a terse nod.

Bob walked two blocks (quickly, but not quickly enough to attract attention) to his car in the visitors’ lot under Hubble Plaza. He got in, double-checked the charge gauge, sparked the motor, and drove at a deliberate speed back to the rec center. His pulse was up but his palms were dry. Courtney, wandering through the big front doors even though he had told her stay put, spotted him and climbed into the passenger seat. “Are we going somewheres?” she asked.

He had always hated this about her, her Missouri trailer-park grammar. There were days when he loved Courtney more than anything in the world, but there were also days when he wondered what had possessed him to marry a woman with no more culture than the raccoons who used to raid her trash. “I don’t think we have a choice, Court.”

“Well, I don’t see what the hurry is.”

With any luck she never would. Bob was quarter-owner of a respectably successful landscaping and foundation business operating out of Constance. Thursday morning — tomorrow morning — he was supposed to meet Ella Raeburn, a nineteen-year-old high school dropout who worked in reception, and drive her to the Women’s Clinic in Bixby for a D C. Although it was not Bob’s fault that the vacuous Ella had neglected to use any form of birth-control or morning-after pill — unless you considered his predilection for brick-stupid women a fault — he did have to own up to responsibility for the condition she was in. So Thursday morning he would drive her to Bixby, buy her a few days in a motel to recuperate, write her a check for five thousand dollars, and that would be the end of it.

If he refused — or if this government-inspired Blind Lake fuck-up kept him confined here another day — Ella Raeburn would FedEx a certain video recording to Bob’s wife Courtney. He doubted Courtney would divorce him over it — the marriage wasn’t a bad deal for her, all in all — but she would hold it over his head for the rest of his life, the fact that she’d been treated to the sight of her own husband with his face buried between Ella Raeburn’s generous young thighs. The video had been his own half-baked idea. He hadn’t realized Ella would burn a copy for herself.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. Not by half. If Bob failed to arrange for an abortion, Ella would be forced to throw herself on the mercy of her father. Her father was Toby Raeburn, a hardware salesman, a deacon at the Lutheran church, and a part-time basketball coach. His nickname was “Teeth,” because he had once knocked out the left bicuspid of a would-be car thief and then had the souvenir embedded in Lucite so he could carry it around as a good-luck charm. Toby “Teeth” Raeburn might be willing to extend Christian forgiveness to his daughter, but surely not to a middle-aged contractor who (as Ella would mention) had introduced her to the barbiturates that always put her in a cooperative mood.

He didn’t bear Ella Raeburn any particular grudge over the matter. He was more than willing to pay for her D C. She was dumb as a bag of hammers, but she knew how to look out for herself. He kind of admired that.

Courtney had been one of those before he married her. She had dulled down into a perpetual sullen snit, though, and that wasn’t the same.

“Did they call off the siege or something?” Courtney asked.

“Not exactly.” He headed toward the south gate, reminding himself to maintain an inconspicuous speed. Certainly the black transport was in no hurry. It hadn’t crept more than a quarter of a mile since he’d first spotted it, judging by the view from the rise past the Plaza.

“Well, what, then? We can’t just leave.”

“Technically, no, but—”

“Technically?”

“You want to let me finish a thought? They shut down places like this for security reasons, Court. They don’t want the bad guys getting in. People aren’t allowed to just come and go because that would make it hard to enforce. But basically they don’t care about us. All we want to do is go home, right? If we break the rules we get, what, a lecture?” More likely a fine, and probably an expensive one, but he couldn’t tell Courtney why it was worth taking that risk. “They don’t care about us,” he repeated.

“The gate’s locked, dummy.”

“Won’t be in a little while.”

“Who says?”

“I say.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m psychic. I have psychic powers of prediction.”

There was already a crowd gathering. Bob drove off the road onto the trimmed grass of the verge and parked as close as possible to the right side of the gate. He turned the motor off. Suddenly he could hear the wind whistling through gaps in the bodywork. The wind was getting colder — winter cold — and Courtney shivered pointedly. She hadn’t brought winter clothes to Blind Lake. Bob had, and he was punished for that foresight: he had to lend his jacket to whining Courtney and sit behind the wheel in a short-sleeve cotton shirt. The sun dropped down below a big raft of turbulent gray clouds, casting a sickly light over everything. A couple of months and all this prairie would be balls-deep in snow. It was melancholy weather. This kind of weather always made him feel sad and somehow bereft, as if something he loved had been carried away by the wind.

“Are we just going to sit here?”

“Till the gate opens,” he said.

“What makes you think they’ll let us through?”

“You’ll see.”

“See what?”

“You’ll see.”

“Huh,” Courtney said.

She had dozed off — warm, he guessed, with her arms lost in his oversized leather jacket and her chin tucked down into the collar — when the immense black truck paused in its crawl not more than ten yard from the gate. It was past dusk now, and the truck’s headlights pivoted to sweep the ground ahead of it in restless arcs.

The crowd had grown considerably. Just before Courtney fell asleep a couple of on-campus Security vehicles had come from town with their sirens howling. Now guys in what looked like rent-a-cop uniforms were waving the crowd back. Courtney was motionless and Bob hunkered down in the driver’s seat, and in all the commotion and darkness the car passed for an empty vehicle someone had parked and left. Within moments, Bob was delighted to see, the bulk of the crowd was actually behind him.

And the gate began to open. On some command from the truck, he guessed. But it was a beautiful sight. That nine-foot-tall reinforced barrier began to swing outward with an oiled ease so smooth it looked digitally rendered. Jackpot, Bob thought. “Buckle your seat belt,” he told Courtney.

Her eyes blinked open. “What?”

He made a mental estimate of the clearance ahead of him. “Nothing.” He sparked the engine and stepped hard on the accelerator.

Pocket drones, Elaine explained, were self-guided flying weapons about the size of a Florida grapefruit. She had seen them in use during the Turkish crisis, where they had patrolled no-go lines and contested borders. But she had never heard of them being deployed outside of a war zone.

“They’re simple and pretty dumb,” she told Chris, “but they’re cheap and you can use lots of them and they don’t sit in the ground forever like land mines, blowing legs off kids.”

“What do they do?”

“Mostly they just lie there conserving energy. They’re motion-sensitive and they have a few logic templates to identify likely targets. Walk into a no-go zone and they’ll fly up like locusts, target you, spit out small but lethal explosives.”

Chris looked where Elaine had pointed, but in the gathering dusk he could see nothing suspicious. You had to be quick to catch them, Elaine said. They were camouflaged, and if they hopped up without finding an allowed target — disturbed, say, by the rumbling of that huge automated truck on the pavement — they went dormant again very quickly.

Chris thought about that as the truck approached and the increasingly nervous security men shooed gawkers farther back from the road. Made no sense, he decided. The innermost fence around Blind Lake was only one of dozens of security measures already in place. What threat was so formidable that it would require wartime ordnance to keep it out?

Unless the idea was to keep people in.

But that made no sense either.

Which didn’t mean the pocket drones hadn’t been deployed. Only that he couldn’t figure out why.

The crowd grew quieter as darkness fell and the truck crawled up within range of the gate and idled for a moment. Some few began to drift away, apparently feeling more vulnerable, or cold, than curious. But a number remained, pressed against the rope restraints the Security people had thrown up. They seemed not to mind the increasingly cutting wind or the unseasonable snowflakes that began to swirl into the truck’s high beams. But they gasped and withdrew a few feet when the gate itself began to swing silently open.

Chris looked behind him at Elaine and caught a passing glimpse of Blind Lake beginning to light up in a mist of flurries, the concentric slabs of Hubble Plaza, the blinking navigation lights on the towers of Eyeball Alley, the warmer light of resident housing in neat, logical rows.

He turned back at the sudden sound of an electric motor much closer than the rumble of the idling truck.

“Video,” Elaine barked. “Chris!”

He fumbled with the little personal-server accessory. His fingers were cold and the controls were the size of flyspecks and fleabites. He had only ever really used the thing for dictation. At last he managed to trigger the RECORD VID function and point the device approximately toward the gate.

A car sprang forward onto the tarmac from somewhere down by the guardhouse. Its lights were out, its occupants invisible. But the intention was clear. The vehicle was making a run for the half-opened gate.

“Somebody wants to go home and feed the dog,” Elaine said, and then her eyes went wide. “Oh, Jesus, this is bad.”

The drones, Chris thought.

It seemed that the vehicle might not make it past the guardhouse, but the driver had estimated the widening gap pretty well. The car — it looked to Chris like a late-model Ford or Tesla — squeezed through the space with millimeters of clearance and swerved hard left to avoid the grille of the robotic truck. The car’s headlights came on as it bounced onto the margin of the road and began to pick up serious speed.

“Are you getting this?” Elaine demanded.

“Yes.” At least, he hoped so. It was too late to check. Too late to look away.

“Home free!” Bob Krafft yelled as his rear bumper swung past the bulk of the black truck. It wasn’t true, of course. Probably they’d be intercepted by a military vehicle, maybe even spend the night getting lectured and threatened and charged with violating small-print regulations, but he wasn’t an enlisted man and he’d never signed an agreement to spend a fucking eternity in Blind Lake. Anyway, the open land rolling out beyond his headlights was a welcome sight. “Home free,” he said again, mostly to drown out the sound of Courtney’s breathless screeches of fear.

She sucked in enough air to call him an asshole. He said, “We’re out of there, aren’t we?”

“Jesus, yeah, but—”

Something out the side window caught her eye. Bob caught a glimpse of it, too. Some small thing leaping out of the tall grass.

Probably a bird, he thought, but suddenly the car was full of cold air and hard little flakes of snow, and his ears hurt, and there was window glass everywhere, and it seemed like Courtney was bleeding: he saw blood on the dashboard, blood all over his good leather jacket…

“Court?” he said. His own voice sounded strange and underwatery.

His foot stabbed the brake, but the road was slippery and the Tesla began to swerve despite the best efforts of its overworked servos. Something caused the engine to explode in a gout of blue fire. The body of the car rose from the road. Bob was pressed against his seat, watching the tarmac and the tall grass and the dark sky revolve around him, and for a fraction of a second he thought, Why, we’re flying! Then the car came down on its right front fender and he was thrown into Courtney. Into the sticky ruin of her, at least: into Courtney gone all red and licked with flames.

“The fuck?” Ray Scutter asked when he saw the fireball. Dimitry Shulgin, the Civilian Security chief, could only mumble something about “ordnance.” Ordnance! Ray tried to grasp the significance of that. A car had run the fence. The car had caught fire and rolled over. It came to a stop, top-down. Then everything was still. Even the crowd at the gate was momentarily silent. It was like a photograph. A frozen image. Halted time. He blinked. Pellet snow blew into his face, stinging.

“Drones,” Shulgin pronounced. It was as if he had broken the crust of the silence. Several people in the crowd began to scream.

Drones: those objects hovering over the burning automobile? Winged softballs? “What does that mean?” Ray asked. He had to shout the question twice. Spectators began to dash for their cars. Headlights sprang on, raking the prairie. Suddenly everybody wanted to go home.

Heedless as a bad dream, the gate continued gliding open until it was parallel to the road.

The black robotic truck inched forward again, past the barrier and into the Lake.

“Nothing good,” Shulgin replied — Ray, by this time, had forgotten the question. The Security chief edged away from the tarmac, seeming to fight his own urge to run. “Look.”

Out beyond the gate, in the hostile emptiness, the driver’s-side door of the burning car groaned open.

Now that the car had come to rest Bob registered little more than the need to escape from it — to escape the flames and the bloody, blackened object Courtney had somehow become. At the back of his mind was the need to get help, but there was also, dwelling in the same place, the unwelcome knowledge that Court was beyond all human help. He loved Courtney, or at least he liked to tell himself so, and he often felt a genuine affection for her, but what he needed now more than anything else in the world was to put some distance between himself and her ravaged body, between himself and the burning car. There was no gasoline in the motor, but there were other flammable fluids, and something had ignited all of them at once.

He scrambled away from Courtney to the driver’s-side door. The door was crumpled and didn’t want to open; the latch-handle came off in his hand. He braced himself against the steering wheel and the seatback and kicked outward, and though it hurt his feet hellishly, the door did at last creak and groan a little way open on its damaged hinges. Bob forced it wider and then tumbled out, gasping at the cold air. He rose to his knees. Then, shaking, he stood upright.

This time he saw quite clearly the device that popped out of the tall grass at the verge of the road. He happened to be looking in the right direction, happened to catch sight of it in a moment of frozen hyperclarity, this small, incongruous object that was in all likelihood the last thing he would ever see. It was round and camouflage-brown and it flew on buzzing pinwheel wings. It hovered at a height of about six feet — level with Bob’s head. He looked at it, eyeball to eyeball, assuming some of those small dents or divots were equivalent to eyes. He recognized it as a piece of military equipment, though it was like nothing he had ever encountered in his weekends with the Reserves. He didn’t even think about running from it. One doesn’t run from such things. He stiffened his spine and began, but had no time to finish, the act of closing his eyes. He felt the sting of snow against his skin. Then a brief, fiery weight on his chest, then nothing at all.

This final act of bloody interdiction was more than enough for the crowd. They watched the dead man, if you could call that headless bundle of exposed body parts a man, crumple to the ground. There was an absolute silence. Then screams, then sobs; then car doors slamming and kids wheeling their bikes around for a panicked trip back through the snowy dusk toward the lights of Blind Lake.

Once the spectators had cleared out, it was easier for Shulgin to organize his security people. They weren’t trained for anything like this. They were bonded nightwatchmen, mostly, hired to keep drunks and juveniles out of delicate places. Some were retired veterans; most had no military experience. And to be honest, Ray thought, there was nothing much for them to do here, only establish a mobile cordon around the slowly-moving truck and prevent the few remaining civilians from getting in the way. But they did a presentable job of it.

Within fifteen minutes of the events beyond the gate the black transport truck came to a stop inside the perimeter of Blind Lake.

“It’s a delivery vehicle,” Elaine said to Chris. “It was designed to drop cargo and go home. See? The cab’s disengaging from the flat.”

Chris watched almost indifferently. It was as if the attack on the fleeing automobile had been burned into his eyes. Out in the darkness the fire had already been reduced to smoldering embers in the wet snow. A couple of people had died here, and they had died, it seemed to Chris, in order to communicate a message to Blind Lake in the bluntest possible way. You may not pass. Your community has become a cage.

The truck cab reversed direction, pulling itself and its sheath of armor away from the conventional aluminum cargo container shielded within. The cab kept moving, more quickly than it had arrived, back through the open gate along the road to Constance. When it reached the smoldering ruins of the automobile it pushed them out of its way, shoveled them onto the verge of the road like idle garbage.

The gate began to swing closed.

Smooth as silk, Chris thought. Except for the deaths.

The cargo container remained behind. The overworked security detail hurried to surround it… not that anyone seemed anxious to get close.

Chris and Elaine circled back for a better view. The rear of the container was held closed by a simple lever. There was some dialogue between Ray Scutter and the man Elaine had identified as the Lake’s security chief. At last the security man stepped through the cordon and pulled down the lever decisively. The container’s door swung open.

A half-dozen of his men played flashlight over the contents. The container was stacked high with cardboard boxes. Chris was able to read some of the printing on the boxes.

Kellogg’s. Seabury Farm. Lombardi Produce.

“Groceries!” Elaine said.

We’re going to be here awhile, Chris thought.