Blind Lake

Ten

“Chris Carmody? What’d you do, walk here? Brush off that snow and come in. I’m Charlie Grogan.”

Charlie Grogan, chief engineer at Eyeball Alley, was a big man, more robust than fat, and he put out a beefy hand for Chris to shake. Full head of hair, gone white at the temples. Confident but not aggressive. “Actually,” Chris said, “yeah, I did walk here.”

“No car?”

No car, and he had arrived in Blind Lake without winter clothes. Even this unlined jacket was borrowed. The snow tended to get down the collar.

“When you work in a building without windows,” Grogan said, “you learn to pick up clues about the weather outside. Are we still this side of a blizzard?”

“It’s coming down pretty good.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you know, December, you have to expect a little snow, this part of the country. We were lucky to get through Thanksgiving with only a couple of inches. Hang your coat over there. Take off those shoes, too. We got these little rubber slippers, grab a pair off the shelf. That thing you’re wearing, is that a voice recorder?”

“Yes, it is.”

“So the interview’s already started?”

“Unless you tell me to turn it off.”

“No, I guess that’s what we’re here for. I was afraid you wanted to talk about the quarantine — I don’t know any more about it than anyone else. But Ari Weingart tells me you’re working on a book.”

“A long magazine article. Maybe a book. Depending.”

“Depending on whether we’re ever allowed outside again?”

“That, and whether there’s still an audience to read it.”

“It’s like playing let’s-pretend, isn’t it? Pretend we still live in a sane world. Pretend we have useful jobs to do.”

“Call it an act of faith,” Chris said.

“What I’m prepared to do — my act of faith, I guess — is show you around the Alley and talk about its history. That’s what you want?”

“That’s what I want, Mr. Grogan.”

“Call me Charlie. You already wrote a book, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. Book about Ted Galliano, that biologist. Some people say it was character assassination.”

“Have you read it?”

“No, and no offense, but I don’t want to. I was introduced to Galliano at a conference on bioquantum computing. Maybe he was a genius with antivirals, but he was an asshole, too. Sometimes when people get famous they also get a little celebrity-happy. He wasn’t content unless he was talking to media or big investors.”

“I think he needed to feel like a hero, whether he deserved it or not. But I didn’t come here to talk about Galliano.”

“Just wanted to clear the air. I don’t hold your book against you. If Galliano decided to drive his motorcycle over that cliff, it surely wasn’t your fault.”

“Thank you. How about that tour?”

Eyeball Alley was a replica of the installation at Crossbank, which Chris had also visited. Structurally identical, at least. The differences were all in the details: names on doors, the color of the walls. Some halfhearted seasonal decor had lately been installed, a festoon of green and red crepe over the cafeteria entrance, a paper wreath and menorah in the staff library.

Charlie Grogan wore a pair of glasses that showed him things Chris couldn’t see, little local datafeeds telling him who was in which office, and as they passed a door marked ENDOSTATICS Charlie had a brief conversation (by throat microphone) with the person inside. “Hey there, Ellie… keeping busy… nah, Boomer’s fine, thanks for asking…”

“Boomer?” Chris asked.

“My hound,” Charlie said. “Boomer’s getting on in years.”

They took an elevator several stories down, deep into the controlled environment of the Alley’s core. “We’ll get you suited up and into the stacks,” Charlie said, but when they approached a wide door marked STERILE GEAR there was a flashing red light above it. “Unscheduled maintenance,” Charlie explained. “No tourists. Are you prepared to wait an hour or so?”

“If we can talk.”

Chris followed the chief engineer back to the cafeteria. Charlie had not had lunch; nor, for that matter, had Chris. The food on the steam tables was the same food they served back at the community center, the same prefabricated rice pilaf and chicken curry and wrapped sandwiches delivered by the same weekly black truck. The engineer grabbed a wedge of ham-on-rye. Chris, still a little chilled by his walk to the Alley, went for the hot food. The air in the cafeteria was pleasantly steamy and the smell from the kitchen rich and reassuring.

“I go a fairly long way back in this business,” Charlie said. “Not that there are any novices at the Lake, apart from the grad students we cycle through. Did Ari tell you I was at Berkeley Lab with Dr. Gupta?”

Tommy Gupta had done pioneering work on self-evolving neural-net architectures and quantum interfaces. “You must have been an undergraduate yourself.”

“Yup. And thank you for noticing. This was back when we were using Butov chips for logic elements. Interesting times, though nobody knew exactly how interesting it was going to get.”

“The astronomical application,” Chris said, “you were in on that, too?”

“A little bit. But it was all unexpected, obviously.”

In truth, Chris didn’t need this playback. The story was familiar and every general astronomy and pop-science journalist of the last several years had recounted some version of it. Really, he thought, it was only the latest chapter of mankind’s long ambition to see the unseeable, embellished with twenty-first-century technology. It had begun when NASA’s first generation of spaceborne planet-spotting observatories, the so-called Terrestrial Planet Finders, identified three arguably earthlike planets orbiting nearby sunlike stars. The TPFs begat the High Definition Interferometers, which begat the greatest of all the optical interferometer projects, the Galileo Array, six small but complex automated spacecraft all operating beyond the orbit of Jupiter, linked to create one virtual telescope of immense resolving power. The Galileo Array, it was said at the time, could map the shapes of continents on worlds hundreds of light years away.

And it had worked. For a while. Then the telemetry from the Array began to deteriorate.

The signal faded slowly but relentlessly over a period of months. After an intensive review NASA pinpointed the source of the failure as a few lines of bad code so deeply embedded in the onboard Galileo architecture that they couldn’t be overwritten. This was a risk NASA had assumed from the beginning. The Array was both complex and radically inaccessible. It couldn’t be repaired in place. A technological triumph was on the way to becoming an insanely expensive joke.

“NASA didn’t have an O/BEC processor back then,” Charlie said, “but Gencorp offered them time on their unit.”

“You worked at Gencorp?”

“I baby-sat their hardware, yeah. Gencorp was getting good results doing proteinomics. You could do the same stuff with a standard quantum array, of course. Engineers used to think of the O/BECs as unnecessarily complicated and unpredictable, a fancy kludge — like a vacuum cleaner with an appendix, people used to say. But you can’t argue with results. Gencorp got faster results with a O/BEC machine than MIT could coax out of a standard BEC device. Spooky ones, too.”

“Spooky?”

“Unexpected. Counterintuitive. Anybody who works with adaptive self-programming will tell you it’s not like running raw BECs, and BECs can be pretty strange all by themselves. What I can’t really say, because I’m supposed to be a levelheaded and factually oriented kind of guy, is that an O/BEC just plain thinks strange. But that’s as good an explanation as any, because nobody really knows why a BEC processor with an open-ended organic architecture can outthink a BEC processor alone. It’s the fucking ghost in the machine, pardon my French. And what we do in the pit, it isn’t just amps and volts. We’re tending something that’s very nearly alive. It has its good days and its bad days…”

Charlie trailed off, as if he realized he’d overstepped the bounds of engineering propriety. He doesn’t want me quoting this, Chris thought. “So you went to NASA with the O/BEC processor?”

“NASA ended up buying a few platens from Gencorp. I was part of the package. But that’s another story. See, basically, the problem was this: as the Galileo Array’s output got fainter, it was increasingly harder to separate the signal from the noise. Our job was to extract that signal, hunt it down, subtract it from all the rest of the random radio garbage the universe belches out. People ask me, ‘So how’d you do it?’ And I have to tell them, we didn’t do it, nobody did it, we just posed the problem to the O/BECs and let them generate tentative answers and bred them for success… hundreds of thousands of generations per second, like this big invisible Darwinian evolutionary race, survival of the fittest, where the definition of ‘fittest’ is success at extracting a signal from a noisy input. Code writing code writing code, and code withering and dying. More generations than all the people who ever lived on the earth, almost more generations than life on the earth. Numbers complexifying themselves like DNA. The beauty is the unpredictability of it, you understand?”

“I think so,” Chris said. He liked Charlie’s eloquence. He always liked it when an interviewee showed signs of passion.

“I mean, we made something that was beautiful and mysterious. Very beautiful. Very mysterious.”

“And it worked,” Chris said. “Signals out of noise.”

“Whole world knows it worked. Of course, we weren’t sure of that ourselves, not while it was happening. We had a few what we called threshold events. We’d almost lose everything. We’d have a good clean image, then we’d start to lose it, almost pixel by pixel. That was the noise winning out. Loss of intelligibility. But each time, the O/BECs pulled it back. Without our intervention, you understand. It drove the math guys nuts, because there’s obviously a level where you just can’t extract a meaningful signal, when there’s just too much lost, but the machines kept on pulling it out, rabbit out of a hat, presto. Until one day…”

“Until one day?”

“Until one day a man in a suit came into the lab and said, ‘Boys, we got confirmation from upstairs, the Array just stopped broadcasting altogether, shut down entirely, you can get ready to close up shop and go home.’ And my boss at the time — that was Kelly Fletcher, she’s at Crossbank now — she turned away from her monitor and said, ‘Well, that may be, but the fact is, we’re still making data.’”

Charlie finished his sandwich, wiped his mouth, pushed his chair away from the table. “We can probably get into the stacks now.”

Back at Crossbank, Chris had toured the O/BECs from the gallery level. He hadn’t been invited into the works.

The sterile suit was comfortable as such things went — cool air piped in, a wide and transparent visor — but Chris still felt a little claustrophobic inside it. Charlie led him through an access door into the eerily quiet O/BEC chamber. The platens were white enameled cylinders each the size of a small truck. They were suspended on isolation platforms that would filter out any groundborne vibration short of a major earthquake. Strange, delicate machines. “It could end at any time,” Chris murmured.

“What’s that?”

“Something an engineer at Crossbank told me. He said he liked the rush, working with a process that could end at any time.”

“That’s part of it, for sure. These are technologies of a whole new order.” He stepped over a bundle of Teflon-insulated wires. “These machines are looking at planets, but ten years after that first NASA connection we still don’t know how they’re doing it.”

Or if they’re doing it, Chris thought. There was a fringe of hard-core skeptics who believed there was no real data behind the images: that the O/BECs were simply… well, dreaming.

“So,” Charlie said, “we really have two research projects going on at once: guys at the Plaza trying to sort out the data, and people here trying to figure out how we get the data. But we can’t look too closely. We can’t take the O/BECs apart or dose them with X-rays or anything invasive like that. You measure it, you break it. Blind Lake didn’t just duplicate the Crossbank installation; we had to walk our machines through the same development process, except we used the old high-def interferometers instead of the Galileo Array, deliberately stepping down the signal strength until the machines learned the trick, whatever that trick is. There are only two installations like this in the world, and efforts to create a third have been consistently unsuccessful. We’re balanced on the head of a pin. That’s what your guy at Crossbank was talking about. Something absolutely strange and wonderful is happening here, and we don’t understand it. All we can do is nurse it along and hope it doesn’t get tired and turn itself off. It could end at any time. Sure it could. And for any reason.”

He led Chris past the last of the O/BEC platens, through a series of chambers to a room where they stripped off their sterile suits.

“What you have to remember,” Charlie said, “is that we didn’t design these machines to do what they do. There’s no linear process, no A then B then C. We just set them in motion. We defined the goals and we set them in motion, and what happened after that was an act of God.” He folded the sterile suit crisply and left it on a rack for cleaning.

Charlie walked him through the busiest sector of the Alley, two huge chambers wallpapered with video surfaces, rooms full of attentive men and women hovering over mutable desktops. Chris was reminded of the old NASA facilities at Houston. “Looks like Mission Control.”

“For good reason,” Charlie said. “NASA used to control the Galileo Array with interfaces like these. When the problems got unmanageably bad they routed this stuff through the O/BECs. This is where we talk to the platens about alignment, depth of field, magnification factors, things like that.”

Down to the finest detail. A monitor on the far wall showed raw video. Lobsterville. Except Elaine was right. It was a ridiculous misnomer. The aboriginals didn’t look remotely like lobsters, except perhaps for their roughly textured skin. In fact Chris had often thought there was something bovine about them, something about their slow-moving indifference, those big blank cueball eyes.

Subject was in a food conclave, deep inside a dimly lit food well. Mossy growth and vegetable husks everywhere, and grub-like things crawled through the moist refuse. Watching these guys eat, Chris thought, was a great appetite killer. He turned back to Charlie Grogan.

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “it could end at any time, that’s the truth. You’re staying at the community center, Ari tells me?”

“For now, anyway.”

“You want a ride back? I’m basically done here for the day.”

Chris checked his watch. Almost five o’clock. “Sounds better than walking.”

“Assuming they plowed the road.”

A good couple of inches of fresh snow had come down while Chris was inside the Alley, and the wind had picked up. Chris flinched from it as soon as he stepped outside. He had been born and raised in Southern California, and despite all the time he’d spent in the East, these harsh winter days still shocked him. It wasn’t just bad weather, it was weather that could kill you. Walk the wrong way, get lost, die of hypothermia before dawn.

“It’s bad this year,” Charlie admitted. “People say it’s the shrinking ice cap, all that cold water flowing into the Pacific. We get these supercharged Canadian fronts rolling through. You get used to it after a while.”

Maybe so, Chris thought. The way you get used to living under siege.

Charlie Grogan’s car was parked in the roofed lot, plugged into a charge socket. Chris slipped into the passenger seat gratefully. It was a bachelor’s car: the backseat was full of old QCES journals and dog toys. As soon as Charlie pulled out of the parking compound the tires slipped on compressed snow and the car fishtailed before it finally gripped the asphalt. Harsh sulfur-dot light columns marked the way to the main road, sentinals cloaked in vortices of falling snow.

“It could end at any time,” Chris said. “Kind of like the quarantine. It could end. But it doesn’t.”

“Have you turned off that little recorder yet?”

“Yes. You mean, is this for the record? No. It’s conversation.”

“Coming from a journalist…”

“I don’t work for the tabloids. Honest, I’m just mumbling. We can go on talking about the weather if you like.”

“No insult intended.”

“None taken.”

“You got a little burned on that Galliano thing, right?”

Now who’s pushing? But he felt he owed this man an honest response. “I don’t know if you can say that or not.”

“I guess if you say unflattering things about a national hero, you’re taking a certain risk.”

“I didn’t set out to tarnish his reputation. Much of it is deserved.” Ted Galliano had made national news twenty years ago by patenting a new family of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. He had also made a fortune founding a next-generation pharmaceutical trust to exploit those patents. Galliano was the prototype of the twenty-first century scientist-entrepreneur — like Edison or Marconi in the nineteenth, also products of the commercial environment of their day, also brilliant. Like Edison or Marconi, he had become a public hero. He had attracted the best genomic and proteinomic people to him. A child born today in the Continental Commonwealth could expect a lifetime of one hundred years or more, and no small part of that was due to Galliano’s antiviral and antigeriatric drugs.

What Chris had discovered was that Galliano was a ruthless and sometimes unscrupulous businessman — as Edison had been. He had lobbied Washington for extended patent protection; he had driven competitors out of the market or absorbed them through dubious mergers and leverage schemes; worse, Chris had uncovered several sources who were convinced Galliano had engaged in blatantly illegal stock manipulation. His last big commercial effort had been a genomic vaccine against artheriosclerotic plaque — never perfected but much discussed, and the prospect of it, however inflated, had driven Galtech stocks to dizzying heights. Ultimately the bubble had burst, but not before Galliano and friends cashed out.

“Could you prove any of this?”

“Ultimately, no. Anyhow, I didn’t think of it as a muckraking biography. He was a brilliant scientist. When the book came out it got a good initial reaction, some of it just schadenfreude — rich people have enemies — but some of it balanced. Then Galliano had his accident, or committed suicide, depending on who you listen to, and his family made an issue of the book. Yellow Journalism Drives Benefactor to His Death. That makes a nice story too.”

“You were in court, right?”

“I testified at a congressional inquiry.”

“Thought I read something about that.”

“They threatened to jail me for contempt. For not revealing my sources. Which wouldn’t have helped, anyway. My sources were all well-known public figures and by the time of the inquiry they had all issued statements siding with Galliano’s estate. By that time, in the public mind, Galliano was a dead saint. Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.”

“Bad luck,” Charlie said. “Or bad timing.”

Chris watched the curtains of snow beyond the passenger-side window, snow trapped on the car’s exposed surfaces, snow piling up behind the mirrors. “Or bad judgment. I took a tilt at one of the biggest windmills on the planet. I was naive about how things worked.”

“Uh-huh.” Charlie drove in silence for a while. “You got a good one this time, though. The story of the Blind Lake quarantine, told from the inside out.”

“Assuming any of us ever get to tell it.”

“You want me to drop you in front of the community center?”

“If it’s not too far out of your way.”

“I’m in no hurry. Though Boomer’s probably getting hungry. I thought they were getting all you stray day-timers billeted with locals.”

“I’m on the waiting list. Actually, I’ve got a meeting tomorrow.”

“Who’d they set you up with?”

“A Dr. Hauser.”

“Marguerite Hauser?” Charlie smiled inscrutably. “They must be putting all the pariahs in one place.”

“Pariahs?”

“Nah, forget it. I shouldn’t talk about Plaza politics. Hey, Chris, you know the nice thing about Boomer, my hound?”

“What’s that?”

“He doesn’t have a clue about the quarantine. He doesn’t know and he doesn’t care, as long as he gets fed on a regular schedule.”

Lucky Boomer, Chris thought.

Eleven

Tess woke at seven, her usual weekday morning time, but she knew even before she opened her eyes that there wouldn’t be school today.

It had snowed all day yesterday and it had been snowing when she went to bed. And now, this morning, even without pulling back the lacy blinds that covered her bedroom window, she could hear the snow. She heard it sifting against the glass, a sound as gentle and faint as mouse whispers, and she heard the silence that surrounded it. No shovels scraping driveways, no cars grinding their wheels, just a blanketing white nothing. Which meant a big snow.

She heard her mother bustling in the kitchen downstairs, humming to herself. No urgency there, either. If Tess went back to sleep her mother would probably let her stay in bed. It was like a weekend morning, Tess thought. No jolting awake but letting the world seep in slowly. Slowly, willfully, she opened her eyes. The daylight in her room was dim and almost liquid.

She sat up, yawned, adjusted her nightgown. The carpet was cold against her bare feet. She scooted down the bed closer to the window and drew back the curtain.

The windowpane was all white, opaque with whiteness. Snow had mounded impressively on the outside sill, and, inside, moisture had condensed into traceries of frost. Tess immediately put out her hand, not to touch the icy window but to hover her palm above it and feel the chill against her skin. It was almost as if the window were breathing coolness into the room. She was careful not to disturb the delicate lines of ice, the two-dimensional snowflake patterns like maps of elfin cities. The ice was on the inside of the window, not the outside. Winter had put its hand right through the glass, Tess thought. Winter had reached inside her bedroom.

She stared at the frost patterns for a long time. They were like written words that wouldn’t reveal their meanings. In class last week, Mr. Fleischer had talked about symmetry. He had talked about mirrors and snowflakes. He had showed the class how to fold a piece of paper and cut patterns into the fold with safety scissors. And when you opened the paper up, the random slashes became beautiful. Became enigmatic masks and butterflies. You could do the same thing with paint. Blot the paper, then fold it down the middle while the paint was still wet. Unfold it and the blots would be eyes or moths or arches or rainbow rays.

The frost patterns on the window were more like snowflakes, as if you had folded the paper not once but two times, three times, four… but no one had folded the glass. How did the ice know what shapes to make? Did the ice have mirrors built into it?

“Tess?”

Her mother, at the door.

“Tess, it’s after nine… There’s no school today, but don’t you want to get up?”

After nine? Tess looked at her bedside clock to confirm it. Nine oh eight. But hadn’t it been seven o’clock just moments ago?

She reached out impulsively and put a melting palm print on the window. “I’m coming!” Her hand was instantly cold.

“Cereal for breakfast?”

“Cornflakes!” She almost said, Snowflakes.

At breakfast Tessa’s mother reminded her that there was a boarder coming by today — “Assuming they clear the roads by noon.” This interested Tess immensely. Tessa’s mother was working from home today, which made it even more like a weekend, except for the possibility of this new person coming to the house. Her mother had explained that some of the day workers and visitors were still sleeping in the community center gym, which wasn’t very comfortable, and that people with room to spare in their homes had been asked to volunteer it. Tessa’s mother had moved her exercise equipment, a treadmill and a stationary bike, out of the small carpeted room in the basement next to the water heater. There was a folding bed in there now. Tess wondered what it would be like to have a stranger in the basement. A stranger sharing meals.

After breakfast Tessa’s mother went upstairs to work in her office. “Come and get me if you need me,” she said, but in fact Tess had seen less of her mother than usual the last few days. Something was happening with her work, something about the Subject. The Subject was behaving strangely. Some people thought the Subject might be sick. These concerns had absorbed her mother’s attention.

Tess, still in her nightgown, read for a while in the living room. The book was called Out of the Starry Sky. It was a children’s book about stars, how they first formed, how old stars made new stars, how planets and people condensed out of the dust of them. When her eyes got tired she put down the book and watched snow pile up against the plate-glass sliding door. Noon inched by, and the sky was still dark and obscure. She could have fixed herself a sandwich for lunch, but she decided she wasn’t hungry. She went upstairs and dressed herself and knocked at her mother’s door to tell her she was going outside for a while.

“Your shirt’s buttoned crooked,” her mother said, and came into the hallway to fuss it into place. She ruffled Tessa’s hair. “Don’t go too far from the house.”

“I won’t.”

“And shake off your boots before you come back in.”

“Yes.”

“Snow pants, not just the jacket.”

Tess nodded.

She was excited about going out, even though it meant struggling into her snowsuit in the warm, sweaty hallway. The snow was so deep, so prodigious, that she felt the need to see and feel it up close. Overnight, Tess thought, the world beyond the door had become a different and much stranger place. She finished lacing her boots and stepped out. The air itself wasn’t as cold as she had expected. It felt good when she drew it deep into her lungs and let it out again in smoky puffs. But the falling snow was small and hard this afternoon, not gentle at all. It bit against the skin of her face.

Rows of town houses stretched off to the right and left of her. Next door, Mrs. Colangelo was shoveling her driveway. Tess pretended not to see her, worried that Mrs. Colangelo would ask her to help. But Mrs. Colangelo paid no attention to Tess and seemed lost in her work, red-faced and squinty-eyed, as if the snow were her own personal enemy. White clouds leapt from the shovel blade and dispersed in the wind.

The undisturbed snow on the front lawn came up almost to Tessa’s shoulders. I’m small, she thought. Her head rose above the mounded dunes only a few feet, making her feel no taller than a dog. A dog’s-eye view. She restrained an urge to leap and bury herself in whiteness. She knew the snow would get down the collar of her jacket and she would have to go back inside that much sooner.

Instead she walked in big labored moonsteps to the sidewalk. The main road had been plowed, though fresh snow had already deposited a thin new blanket over the asphalt. The plows had pushed up windrows too tall to see over. The tree in the front yard was so freighted with snow that its limbs had drooped into cathedral arches. Tess pushed her way underneath and was delighted to find herself in a sort of perforated cavern of snow. It would have been a perfect hideout, except for the cold air that wormed its way under her snowsuit and made her shiver.

She was under the tree when she saw a man walking up the street — the sidewalks were impassable — toward the house.

Tess guessed at once that this was the boarder. He wasn’t dressed very warmly. He paused to check the snow-encrusted, semilegible numbers of the town houses. He walked until he was in front of Tessa’s house; then he took his hands out of his pockets, wallowed through the windrows, and made his way to the door. Tess shrank back in the tree shadow so he wouldn’t notice her. By the time he rang the bell there was snow up past the knees of his denim pants.

Tessa’s mother answered the door. She shook hands with the stranger. The man brushed off the snow and went inside. Tessa’s mother lingered on the doorstep a moment, tracing out Tessa’s footprints. Then she spotted Tess under the tree and aimed her finger at her, pistol-style. Gotcha, cowgirl, Tessa’s mother always said at times like this. This time she mouthed the words.

Tess stayed under the sheltering tree for a while. She watched Mrs. Colangelo finish shoveling her driveway. She watched a couple of cars come down the street at a careful, tentative speed. She decided she liked snowy winter days. Every surface, even the big front window of the house, was opaque and textured, not at all reflective. And in this dearth of mirror surfaces she was not afraid of suddenly seeing Mirror Girl.

Mirror Girl often posed as a reflection of Tess. Tess, caught unawares, would find Mirror Girl gazing back at her from the bathroom or bedroom mirror, indistinguishable from Tessa’s own reflection except in the eyes, which were questioning and urgent and intrusive. Mirror Girl asked questions no one else could hear. Idiotic questions, sometimes; sometimes adult questions Tess couldn’t answer; sometimes questions which left her feeling troubled and uneasy. Just yesterday Mirror Girl had asked her why the plants inside the house were green and alive while the ones outside were all brown and leafless. (“Because it’s winter,” Tess had said, exasperated. “Go away. I don’t believe in you.”)

Thinking about Mirror Girl made Tess uneasy.

She began to make her way back to the house. The front lawn was still full of unspoiled white expanses of snow. Tess paused and pulled off her gloves. Her hands were already cold, but since she was going inside it didn’t matter. She pushed both hands into the paper-white unbroken snow. The snow took the imprints impeccably, mirror images of her hands. Symmetrical, Tess thought.

When she got to the door she heard voices from inside. Raised voices. Her mother’s angry voice. Tess eased inside. She shut the door gently behind her. Her boots dropped clots of icy snow on the carpet runner. Her woolen cap was suddenly itchy and uncomfortable. She pulled it off and dropped it on the floor.

Her mother and the boarder were in the kitchen, invisible. Tess listened carefully. The boarder was saying, “Look, if it’s a problem for you—”

“It creates a problem for me.” Tessa’s mother sounded both outraged and defensive. “Fucking Ray — !”

“Ray? I’m sorry — who’s Ray?”

“My ex.”

“What does he have to do with this?”

“Ray Scutter. The name is familiar?”

“Obviously, but—”

“You think it was Ari Weingart who sent you here?”

“He gave me your name and address.”

“Ari means well, but he’s Ray’s puppet. Oh, fuck. Excuse me. No, I know you don’t understand what’s going on…”

“You could explain,” the boarder said.

Tess understood that her mother was talking about her father. Usually when that happened Tess didn’t pay attention. Like when they used to fight. She put it out of her mind. But this was interesting. This involved the boarder, who had taken on a new and intriguing status simply by being the object of her mother’s anger.

“It’s not you,” Tessa’s mother said. “I mean, look, I’m sorry, I don’t know you from Adam… it’s just that your name gets thrown around a lot.”

“Maybe I should leave.”

“Because of your book. That’s why Ray sent you here. I don’t have a lot of credibility in Blind Lake right now, Mr. Carmody, and Ray is doing his best to undermine what support I do have. If word gets around that you’re rooming here it just confirms a lot of misperceptions.”

“Putting all the pariahs in one place.”

“Kind of. Well, this is awkward. You understand, I’m not mad at you, it’s just…”

Tess imagined her mother waving her hands in her well-what-can-I-do? gesture.

“Dr. Hauser—”

“Please call me Marguerite.”

“Marguerite, all I’m really looking for are accommodations. I’ll talk to Ari and see if he can set up something else.”

There was the kind of long pause Tess also associated with her mother’s periodic unhappiness. Then she asked, “You’re still sleeping in the gym?”

“Yes.”

“Uh-huh. Well, sit down. At least get warm. I’m making coffee, if you like.”

The boarder hesitated. “If it isn’t too much trouble.”

Kitchen chairs scraped across the floor. Quietly, Tess stepped out of her boots and hung her snowsuit in the closet.

“Do you have a lot of luggage?” Tessa’s mother asked.

“I travel pretty light.”

“I’m sorry if I sounded hostile.”

“I’m used to it.”

“I didn’t read your book. But you hear things.”

“You hear a lot of things. You’re head of Observation and Interpretation, right?”

“The interdepartmental committee.”

“So what does Ray have against you?”

“Long story.”

“Sometimes things aren’t what they look like at first.”

“I’m not judging you, Mr. Carmody. Really.”

“And I’m not here to put you in a difficult position.”

There was another silence. Spoons clicking in cups. Then Tessa’s mother said, “It’s a basement room. Nothing fancy. Better than the gym, though, I guess. Maybe you can stay there while Ari makes other arrangements.”

“Is that a real offer or a pity offer?”

Tessa’s mother, no longer angry, gave a little laugh. “A guilt offer, maybe. But sincere.”

Another silence.

“Then I accept,” the stranger said. “Thank you.”

Tess went into the kitchen to be introduced. Secretly, she was excited. A boarder! And one who had written a book.

It was more than she had hoped for.

Tess shook hands with the boarder, a very tall man who had curly dark hair and was gravely courteous. The boarder stayed drinking coffee and chatting with Tessa’s mother until almost sunset, when he left to get his things. “I guess we have company at least for a little while,” Tessa’s mother told her. “I don’t think Mr. Carmody will bother us much. He might not be here for too long, anyway.”

Tess said that was all right.

She played in her room until dinner. Dinner was spaghetti with canned tomato sauce. The black truck delivered food every week, and the food was distributed according to ration points through the supermarket where people used to shop before the quarantine. That meant you couldn’t pick and choose your favorites. Everybody got the same weekly allotment of fruits and vegetables and canned and frozen food.

But Tess didn’t mind spaghetti. And there was buttered bread and cheese to go with it, and pears for dessert.

After dinner, Tessa’s father called. Since the quarantine it was impossible to phone or e-mail outside the fence, but there was still basic communication through Blind Lake’s central server. Tess took the call on her own phone, a pink plastic Mattel phone without a screen or much memory. Her father’s voice over the toy phone sounded small and far away. The first thing he said was, “Are you all right?”

He asked the same thing every time he called. Tess answered as she always did: “Yes.”

“Are you sure, Tessa?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do today?”

“Played,” she said.

“In the snow?”

“Yes.”

“Were you careful?”

“Yes,” Tess said, though she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be careful about.

“I hear you had a visitor today.”

“The boarder,” Tess said. She wondered how her father had heard about it so quickly.

“That’s right. How do you feel about having a visitor?”

“It’s okay. I don’t know.”

“Is your mother looking after you all right?”

Another familiar question. “Yes.”

“I hope so. You know, if there’s ever a problem over there, you just have to call me. I can come pick you up.”

“I know.”

“Anyway, next week you’re back home again with me. Can you wait another week?”

“Yes,” Tess said.

“Be a good girl till then?”

“I will.”

“Call me if there’s any problem with your mother.”

“I will.”

“Love you, Tessa.”

“I know.”

Tess put the pink phone back in her pocket.

The boarder came back that evening with a duffel bag. He said he’d already had dinner. He went to the basement to do some work. Tess went to her room.

The embroidery of ice had melted from the windowpane during the day but had reformed after sunset, new and different symmetries growing like a private garden. Tess imagined crystal roads and crystal houses and crystalline creatures inhabiting them: ice cities, ice worlds.

Outside, the snow had stopped falling and the temperature had dropped. The sky was very clear, and when she rubbed away the ice Tess could see a great many winter stars beyond the snow-bent tree limbs and the towers of Hubble Plaza.

Twelve

Chris met Elaine for dinner at the Sawyer’s restaurant in the mallway. Despite the rationing, Ari Weingart had lobbied to keep the local restaurants open as meeting places and for the sake of the town’s morale. Hot meals strictly at lunch, just sandwiches after 3 P.M., no alcoholic drinks, no seconds, but no bill, either: since no one was getting paid it would have been futile to try to keep the local economy running on a cash basis. Staff had been told their wages would be totalled and paid at the end of the quarantine, and customers with pocket change were encouraged to tip whatever they deemed appropriate.

This evening Chris and Elaine were the only customers — yesterday’s snowfall was keeping people at home. The single waitress who had shown up was a teenage part-timer, Laurel Brank, who spent most of her time in the far corner of the room reading Bleak House from a pocket display and picking at a bowl of Fritos.

“Heard you got billetted,” Elaine said.

A cold front had followed the storm. The air was clear and bitter and the wind had picked up, rearranging yesterday’s snowfall and rattling the restaurant windows. “I’m in the middle of something I don’t entirely understand. Weingart signed me up with a woman named Marguerite Hauser who lives with her daughter in the housing west of town.”

“I know the name. She’s a recent arrival from Crossbank, heads up Observation and Interpretation.” Elaine had been interviewing all the important Blind Lake committee people — the kind of interviews Chris tended not to get, given his reputation. “I haven’t talked to her directly, but she doesn’t seem to have many friends.”

“Enemies?”

“Not enemies exactly. She’s just a newbie. Still kind of an outsider. The big deal with her is—”

“Her ex-husband.”

“Right. Ray Scutter. I gather it was an acrimonious divorce. Scutter’s been talking her down. He doesn’t think she’s qualified to head a committee.”

“You think he’s right?”

“I wouldn’t know, but her career record’s impeccable. She was never a big hitter like Ray and she doesn’t have the same academic credentials, but she hasn’t been as spectacularly wrong as Ray’s been either. You know the debate over cultural inteligibility?”

“Some people think we’ll eventually understand the Lobsters. Some don’t.”

“If the Lobsters were looking at us, how much of what we do could they figure out? Pessimists say, nothing — or very little. They might work out our system of economic exchange and some of our biology and technology, but how could they possibly interpret Picasso, or Christianity, or the Boer War, or The Brothers Karamazov, or even the emotional content of a smile? We aim all our signalling at each other, and our signals are predicated on all kinds of human idiosyncracies, from our external physiology down to our brain structure. That’s why the research people talk about the Lobsters in weird behavioral categories — food-sharing, economic exchanges, symbol-making. It’s like a nineteenth-century European trying to work out Kwakiutl kinship systems, without learning the language or being able to communicate… except that the European shares fundamental needs and urges with the Indian, and we share nothing at all with the Lobsters.”

“So it’s futile to try?”

“A pessimist would say yes — would say, let’s collect and collate our information and learn from it, but forget the idea of ultimate comprehension. Ray Scutter is one of those guys. In a lecture, he once called the idea of exocultural understanding ‘a romantic delusion comparable to the Victorian fad for table-rapping and spirit chambers.’ Sees himself as a hard-core materialist.”

“Not everybody in Blind Lake takes that point of view,” Chris said.

“Obviously not. There’s another school of thought. Of which Ray’s ex happens to be a charter member.”

“Optimists.”

“You could say. They argue that, while the Lobsters have unique physiological constraints on their behavior, those are observable and can be understood. And culture is simply learned behavior modified by physiology and environment — learnable, hence comprehensible. They think if we know enough about the daily life of the Lobsters, understanding will inevitably follow. They say all living things share certain common goals, like the need to reproduce, the need to feed and excrete, and so forth — and that’s enough commonality to make the Lobsters more like distant cousins than ultimate aliens.”

“Interesting. What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Elaine seemed startled by the question. “I’m an agnostic.” She canted her head. “Let’s say it’s 1944. Let’s say some E.T. is examining the Earth, and let’s suppose he happens to drop in on an extermination camp in Poland. He’s watching Nazis extract the gold from the teeth of dead Jews, and he’s asking himself, is this economic behavior or is it part of the food chain or what? He’s trying to make sense of it, but he never will. Never. Because some things just don’t make sense. Some things make no fucking sense at all.”

“This is what’s between Ray and Marguerite, this philosophical debate?”

“It’s far from just philosophical, at least as far as Blind Lake politics go. Careers are made and broken. The big thing about UMa47 was the discovery of a living, sentient culture, and that’s where most of the time and attention gets lavished. But if Lobster culture is static and ultimately incomprehensible, maybe that’s wrong. There are planetologists who’d rather be studying the geology and the climate, there are even exozoologists who’d like to get a closer look at some of the other local fauna. We’re ignoring a lot in order to stare at these bugs — the five other planets in the system, for instance. None of them is habitable but they’re all novel. Astronomers and cosmologists have been demanding diversification for years.”

“You’re saying Marguerite’s in a minority?”

“No… the plurality of opinion has been on the side of studying Lobsterville, at least so far, but support isn’t nearly as strong as it used to be. What Ray Scutter’s been doing is trying to swing support for diversification. He doesn’t like being locked onto a single subject, which has been Marguerite’s pet policy.”

“All that’s beside the point, isn’t it — since the siege, I mean?”

“It just takes a different form. Some people are starting to argue for shutting down the Eye altogether.”

“You shut it down, there’s no guarantee it’ll ever function again. Even Ray must know that.”

“So far these are just whispers. But the logic is, we’re under siege because of the Eye, because of what somebody is afraid we’ll see. Shut down the Eye and the problem disappears.”

“If the people outside wanted us shut down they could turn off the power supply. A word to Minnesota Edison is all it would take.”

“Maybe they’re willing to keep us up and running just to see what happens. We don’t know the logic of it. The argument goes, maybe we’re guinea pigs. Maybe we should pull the plug on the Eye and see if that makes them open the cage.”

“It would be an incredible loss to science.”

“But the day workers and the civil staff don’t necessarily care about that. They just want to see their kids or their dying parents or their fiancées. Even among the research staff, people are starting to talk about ‘options’.”

“Including Ray?”

“Ray keeps his opinions to himself. But he was a late convert to the cause of astrobiology. Ray used to believe in an uninhabited, sterile universe. He jumped on the bandwagon when it made career sense, but I suspect some part of him still dislikes all this messy organic stuff. According to my sources he hasn’t breathed a word of support for switching off the Eye. But he hasn’t said anything against it, either. He’s a consummate politician. He’s probably waiting to see which way the wind blows.”

Wind rattled the window. Elaine smiled.

“From the north,” Chris said. “Briskly. I’d better get back.”

“Which reminds me. I got you something.” She reached into the bag at her feet. “I raided the community center lost-and-found.”

She pulled out a brown knit scarf. Chris accepted it gratefully.

“To keep the wind out of your collar,” Elaine said. “I hear you trekked out to the Alley and talked to Charlie Grogan.”

“Yes.”

“So you’re working again?”

“After a fashion.”

“Good. You’re too talented to hang it up.”

“Elaine—”

“No, don’t worry. I’m finished. Stay warm, Chris.”

He tipped for both of them and stepped out into the night.

Marguerite hadn’t given him a key. He rang the bell at the door of the town house after his walk from Sawyer’s. He appreciated the scarf Elaine had given him, but the wind was almost surgical, knifing from a dozen angles. Stars rippled in the brutally clear night sky.

He had to ring twice, and it wasn’t Marguerite who finally answered, it was Tessa. The girl looked up at him solemnly.

He said, “Can I come in?”

“I guess so.” She held the inner door ajar.

He shut it hastily behind him. His fingers burned in the warm air. He stripped off his jacket, his snow-encrusted shoes. Too bad Elaine hadn’t scavenged a pair of boots for him, too. “Your mom’s not home?”

“She’s upstairs,” Tess said. “Working.”

The girl was cute but uncommunicative, a little chubby and owl-eyed. She reminded Chris of his younger sister Portia — except that Portia had been a nonstop talker. She watched closely as Chris hung his jacket in the closet. “It’s cold out,” she said.

“That it is.”

“You should get warmer clothes.”

“Good idea. You think it would be all right with your mom if I made coffee?”

Tess shrugged and followed Chris to the kitchen. He counted teaspoons into the filter basket, then sat at the small table while the coffee brewed, warmth seeping back into his extremities. Tess pulled up a chair opposite him.

“Did they open the school today?” Chris asked.

“Only in the afternoon.” The girl put her elbows on the table, hands under her chin. “Are you a writer?”

“Yes,” Chris said. Probably. Maybe.

“Did you write a book?”

The question was guileless. “Mostly I write for magazines. But I wrote a book once.”

“Can I see it?”

“I didn’t bring a copy with me.”

Tess was clearly disappointed. She rocked in the chair and nodded her head rhythmically. Chris said, “Maybe you should tell your mom I’m here.”

“She doesn’t like to be bothered when she’s working.”

“Does she always work this late?”

“No.”

“Maybe I should say hello.”

“She doesn’t like to be bothered,” Tess repeated.

“I’ll just tap at the door. See if she wants coffee.”

Tess shrugged and stayed in the kitchen.

Marguerite had given him a tour of the house yesterday. The door to her home office was ajar, and Chris cleared his throat to announce himself. Marguerite sat at a cluttered desk. She was scribbling notes on a handpad, but her attention was focused on the screen on the far wall. “Didn’t hear you come in,” she said without looking up.

“Sorry to interrupt your work.”

“I’m not working. Not officially, anyhow. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on.” She turned to face him. “Take a look.”

On the screen, the so-called Subject was climbing an upward-sloping ramp by the light of a few tungsten bulbs. The virtual viewpoint floated behind him, keeping his upper half-torso centered. From behind, Chris thought, the Subject looked like a wrestler in a red leather burka. “Where’s he going?”

“I have no idea.”

“I thought he had pretty regular habits.”

“We’re not supposed to use gendered pronouns, but just between us, yes, he’s a creature of very regular habits. By his clock he ought to be sleeping — if ‘sleeping’ is what they’re doing when they lie motionless in the dark.”

This was the kind of carefully hedged clinical talk Chris had come to expect from Blind Lake staff.

“We’ve been following him for more than a year,” Marguerite said, “and he hasn’t varied from his schedule by more than a few minutes. Until lately. A few days ago he spent two hours in a food conclave that should have lasted half that time. His diet has changed. His social interactions are declining. And tonight he seems to have a case of insomnia. Sit down and watch, if you’re interested, Mr. Carmody.”

“Chris,” he said. He cleared a stack of Astrobiological Review off a chair.

Marguerite went to the door and shouted, “Tess!”

From below: “Yeah?”

“Time for your bath!”

Footsteps pattered up the stairs. “I don’t think I need a bath.”

“You do, though. Can you run it yourself? I’m still kind of busy.”

“I guess so.”

“Call me when it’s ready.”

Moments later, the distant rush of running water.

Chris watched the Subject climb another spiral walkway. The Subject was entirely alone, which was unusual in itself. The aboriginals tended to do things in crowds, though they never shared sleeping chambers.

“These guys are pretty regularly diurnal, too,” Marguerite said. “Another anomaly. As for where he’s going — hey, look.”

Subject reached an open archway and stepped out into the starry alien night.

“He’s never been here before.”

“Here where?”

“A balcony platform, way up on top of his home tower. My God, the view!”

Subject walked to the low barricade at the edge of the balcony. The virtual viewpoint drifted behind him, and Chris could see the Lobster city spread out beyond the Subject’s grainy torso. The elongated pyramidal towers were illuminated at their portals and balconies by lights in the public walkways. Anthills and cowrie shells, Chris thought, threaded with gold. When Chris was little his parents used to cruise up along Mulholland Drive one or two evenings a year to see the lights of Los Angeles spread out below. It had looked kind of like this. Almost this vast. Almost this lonely.

The planet’s small, quick moon was full, and he could make out something of the dry lands beyond the limits of the city, the low mountains far to the west and a reef of high cloud rolling on a quick wind. Spirals of electrostatically charged dust rolled across the irrigated fields, quickly formed and quickly dissipated, like immense ghosts.

He saw Marguerite give a little shiver, watching.

Subject approached the balcony’s eroded barricade. He stood as if hesitating. Chris said, “Is he suicidal?”

“I hope not.” She was tense. “We’ve never seen self-destructive behavior, but we’re new here. God, I hope not!”

But the Subject stood motionless, as if intent.

“He’s looking at the view,” Chris said.

“Could be.”

“What else?”

“We don’t know. That’s why we don’t attribute motivation. If I were there, I’d be looking at the view; but maybe he’s enjoying the air pressure, or maybe he was hoping to meet somebody, or maybe he’s lost or confused. These are complex sentient creatures with life histories and biological imperatives no one even pretends to understand. We don’t even know for sure how good their vision is — he may not see what we’re seeing.”

“Still,” Chris said. “If I had to lay a bet, I’d say he’s admiring the view.”

That won him a brief smile. “We may think such things,” Marguerite admitted. “But we must not say them.”

“Mom!” From the bathroom.

“I’ll be there in a second. Dry yourself off!” She stood. “Time to put Tess to bed, I’m afraid.”

“You mind if I watch this a little longer?”

“I guess not. Call me if it gets exciting. All this is being recorded, of course, but there’s nothing like a live feed. But he may not do anything at all. When they stand still they often stay that way for hours at a time.”

“Not a great party planet,” Chris said.

“It would be nice if we could take advantage of his static time and look around the city. But training the Eye to follow a single individual was a minor miracle in itself. If we looked away we might lose him. Just don’t expect much.”

She was right about the Subject: he stood absolutely motionless before the long vista of the night. Chris watched distant dust-devils, immense and immaterial, ride the moonlit plains. He wondered if they made a sound in the relatively thin atmosphere of that world. He wondered if the air was warm or cool, whether the Subject was sensitive to the temperature. All this anomalous behavior and no way to divine the thoughts circulating in that perfectly imaged but perfectly inscrutable head. What did loneliness mean to creatures who were never alone except at night?

He heard the pleasant sound of Marguerite and Tessa talking in low voices, Marguerite tucking her daughter into bed. A flurry of laughter. Eventually Marguerite appeared in the doorway once more.

“Has he moved?”

The moon had moved. The stars had moved. Not the Subject. “No.”

“I’m making tea, if you feel like a cup.”

“Thanks,” Chris said. “I’d like that. I—”

But then there was the unmistakable sound of breaking glass, followed by Tessa’s high, shrill scream.

Chris came into the girl’s bedroom behind Marguerite.

Tess was still shrieking, a high, sustained sob. She sat at the edge of her bed, her right hand pressed into the waist of her flannel nightgown. There were spatters of blood on the bedspread.

The bottom pane of the bedroom window was broken. Shards of glass stood jagged in the frame and bitterly cold air gusted inside. Marguerite knelt on the bed, lifting Tessa away from the litter of glass. “Show me your hand,” she said.

“No!”

“Yes. It’ll be all right. Show me.”

Tess turned her head away, squeezed her eyes shut and extended her clenched fist. Blood seeped between her fingers and ran down her knuckles. Her nightgown was stained with fresh red blood. Marguerite’s eyes went wide, but she resolutely peeled back Tessa’s fingers from the wound. “Tess, what happened?”

Tess sucked in enough breath to answer. “I leaned on the window.”

“You leaned on it?”

“Yes!”

Chris understood that this was a lie and that Marguerite acquiesced to it, as if they both understood what had really happened. Which was more than he understood. He balled up a blanket and stuffed it into the gap in the window.

More blood welled from the exposed palm of Tessa’s right hand — a small lake of it. This time Marguerite couldn’t conceal a gasp.

Chris said, “Is there glass in the wound?”

“I can’t tell… no, I don’t think so.”

“We need to put pressure on it. She’ll need to be stitched, too.” Tess wailed in fresh alarm. “It’s okay,” Chris told her. “This happened to my little sister once. She fell down with a glass in her hand and cut herself up — worse than you did. She bragged about it later. Said she was the only one who wasn’t scared. The doctor fixed it up for her.”

“How old was she?”

“Thirteen.”

“I’m eleven,” Tess said, gauging her courage against this new standard.

“There’s gauze in the bathroom cupboard,” Marguerite said. “Will you get it, Chris?”

He fetched the gauze and a brown elastic bandage. Marguerite’s hands were shaking, so Chris pressed the gauze into Tessa’s palm and told her to clench her fist over it. The gauze immediately turned bright red. “We have to drive her to the clinic,” he said. “Why don’t you give me your keys; I’ll start the car while you bundle her up.”

“All right. Keys are in my purse, in the kitchen. Tess, can you walk with me? Watch out for the glass on the floor.”

She left blood spots on the carpet all the way down the stairs.

The Blind Lake Medical Center, a suite of offices just east of Hubble Plaza, kept its walk-in clinic open at all hours. The nurse on desk duty looked briefly at Tess, then hustled her and Marguerite off to a treatment room. Chris sat in reception, leafing through six-month-old print editions of travel magazines while gentle pop songs whispered from the ceiling.

From what he had seen, Tessa’s injury was minor and the clinic was equipped to handle it. Better not to think what might have happened if she had been more seriously hurt. The clinic was well-equipped, but it wasn’t a hospital.

She had “leaned on” the window. But you don’t break a window like that by leaning on it. Tess had lied, and Marguerite had recognized the lie for what it was. Something she hadn’t wanted to talk about in front of a stranger. Some ongoing problem with her daughter, Chris supposed. Anger, depression, post-divorce trauma. But the girl hadn’t seemed angry or depressed when he spoke to her in the kitchen. And he remembered the sound of her easy laughter from the bedroom just moments before the accident.

It’s none of my business, he told himself. Tess reminded him a little of his sister Portia — there was some of the same guileless amiability about her — but that didn’t make it any concern of his. He had given up comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. He wasn’t good at it. All his crusades had ended badly.

Marguerite came out of the treatment room shaken and spotted with her daughter’s blood, but obviously reassured. “They’ve got her cleaned up and sutured,” she told Chris. “She was actually very brave, once we saw the doctor. That story about your sister helped, I think.”

“I’m glad.”

“Thank you for your help. I could have driven her myself, but it would have been much trickier. Scarier for Tess, too.”

“You’re welcome.”

“They gave her a painkiller. The doctor said we can go home when it takes effect. She’ll have to keep the hand immobilized for a few days, though.”

“Have you called her father?”

Marguerite was instantly downcast. “No, but I guess I ought to. I just hope he doesn’t go ballistic. Ray is—” She stopped. “You don’t want to know my problems.”

Frankly, no, he didn’t. She said, “Excuse me,” and took her phone to a distant corner of the waiting room.

Despite his best intentions Chris overheard a little of the conversation. The way she talked to her ex-husband was instructive. Carefully casual at first. Explaining the accident gently, understating it, then cringing from his response. “At the clinic,” she said finally. “I—” A pause. “No. No.” Pause. “It isn’t necessary, Ray. No. You’re blowing this way out of proportion.” Long pause. “That isn’t true. You know that isn’t true.”

She clipped off without saying good-bye and took a moment to steady herself. Then she came across the waiting room between the rows of generic hospital furniture, her lips compressed, her hair askew, her clothing bloodstained. There was a stiff dignity in the way she carried herself, an implicit rejection of whatever it was Ray Scutter had said to her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but would you please go out and start the car? I’ll fetch Tess. I think she’ll be better off at home.”

Another polite lie, but with an unspoken urgency under it. He nodded.

The walkway between the clinic and the parking lot was cold and windswept. He was glad enough to climb inside Marguerite’s little car and start the motor. Heat wafted up from the floor ducts. The street was empty, swept with sinuous lines of blowing snow. He looked at the lights of the Plaza, the shopping concourse. The stars were still bright, and on the southern horizon he could see the running lights of a distant jet. Somewhere planes were still flying; somewhere the world was still conducting its business.

Marguerite came out of the clinic with Tess some ten minutes later, but she had not reached the car when another vehicle roared into the lot and screeched to a stop.

Ray Scutter’s car. Marguerite watched with obvious apprehension as her ex-husband left the vehicle and came toward her with a rapid, aggressive stride.

Chris made sure the passenger door was unlocked. Better to avoid a confrontation. Ray had that mad-bull look about him. But Marguerite didn’t make it to the car before Ray got a hand on her shoulder.

Marguerite kept her eyes on her ex-husband but pushed Tess behind her, protecting her. Tess cradled her injured hand under her snow jacket. Chris couldn’t make out what Ray was saying. All he could hear over the whine of the motor was a few barked consonants.

Time to be brave. He hated being brave. That was what people used to say about his book, at least before Galliano’s suicide. How brave of you to write it. Bravery had never gotten him anywhere.

He stepped out of the car and opened the rear door for Tess to climb in.

Ray gave him a startled look. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Chris Carmody.”

“He helped drive Tess here,” Marguerite said hurriedly.

“Right now she needs to get back home,” Chris said. Tess had already scooted into the backseat, quick despite the clumsiness of her bandaged hand.

“Clearly,” Scutter said, his eyes narrow and fixed on Chris, “she’s not safe there.”

“Ray,” Marguerite said, “we have an agreement—”

“We have an agreement written before the siege by a divorce counselor I can’t contact.” Ray had mastered the vocal tones of bull-male impatience, equal parts whining and imperious. “There’s no way I can trust you with my daughter when you permit things like this to happen.”

“It was an accident. Accidents happen.”

“Accidents happen when children aren’t supervised. What were you doing, staring at the fucking Subject?”

Marguerite stumbled over an answer. Chris said, “It happened after Tess went to bed.” He motioned discreetly for Marguerite to get into the car.

“You’re that tabloid journalist — what do you know about it?”

“I was there.”

Marguerite took the hint and climbed in. Ray looked frustrated and doubly angry when he heard the door slam. “I’m taking my daughter with me,” he said.

“No, sir,” Chris said. “Not tonight, I’m afraid.”

He maintained eye contact with Ray as he slid behind the wheel. Tess began quietly crying in the backseat. Ray leaned against the car door, but whatever he was shouting was inaudible. Chris put the vehicle in drive and pulled away, not before Scutter aimed a kick at the rear bumper.

Marguerite soothed her daughter. Chris drove cautiously out of the clinic lot, wary of ice. Ray could have jumped in his own car and followed but apparently chose not to; last he saw of him in the rearview mirror, he was still standing in impotent rage.

“He hates for anyone to see him like that,” Marguerite said. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid you made an enemy tonight.”

No doubt. Chris understood the alchemy by which a man might be charming in public and brutal behind closed doors. Cruelty as the intimacy of last resort. Men generally didn’t like to be witnessed in the act.

She added, “I have to thank you again. I’m truly sorry about all this.”

“Not your fault.”

“If you want to find a new place to room, I understand.”

“The basement’s still warmer than the gym. If that’s okay with you.”

Tess snorted and coughed. Marguerite helped her blow her nose.

“I keep thinking,” Marguerite said, “what if it had been worse? What if we’d needed a real hospital? I’m so tired of this lockdown.”

Chris pulled into the driveway of the town house. “I expect we’ll survive,” he said. Clearly, Marguerite was a survivor.

Tess, exhausted, went to sleep on Marguerite’s bed. The house was cold, icy air rivering in through the broken window in Tessa’s room, the furnace struggling to keep up. Chris rummaged in the basement until he found a heavy plastic drop cloth and a wide piece of maplewood veneer. He duct-taped the plastic over the empty window frame in Tessa’s bedroom, then tacked up the veneer for good measure.

Marguerite was in the kitchen when he went downstairs. “Nightcap?” she said.

“Sure.”

She poured him fresh coffee laced with brandy. Chris checked his watch. After midnight. He didn’t feel remotely like sleeping.

“I guess you’re tired of hearing me apologize.”

“I grew up with a younger sister,” Chris said. “Things happen with kids. I know that.”

“Your sister. You mentioned Portia.”

“We all call her Porry.”

“Do you still see her? Before the siege, I mean.”

“Porry died a while back.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Now you do have to stop apologizing.”

“I’m — oh.”

“How much trouble do you expect Ray to make over this?”

She shrugged. “That’s a question and a half. As much as he can.”

“It’s none of my business. I’d just like some warning if you expect him to show up at the door with a shotgun.”

“It’s not like that. Ray is just… well, what can I say about Ray? He likes to be right. He hates to be contradicted. He’s eager to pick fights but he hates to lose them, and he’s been losing them most of his life. He doesn’t like sharing custody with me — he wouldn’t have signed the agreement, except his lawyer told him it was the best deal he was going to get — and he’s always threatening some new legal action to take Tess away. He’ll see tonight as more evidence that I’m an unfit parent. More ammunition.”

“Tonight wasn’t your fault.”

“It doesn’t matter to Ray what really happened. He’ll convince himself I was either responsible for it or at least grossly negligent.”

“How long were you married?”

“Nine years.”

“Was he abusive?”

“Not physically. Not quite. He’d shake his fist, but he never threw it. That wasn’t Ray’s style. But he made it clear he didn’t trust me and he sure as hell didn’t approve of me. I used to get calls from him every fifteen minutes, where was I and what was I doing and when would I be home and I’d better not be late. He didn’t like me, but he didn’t want my attention focused on anyone but him. At first I told myself it was just a quirk, a character flaw, something he’d get over.”

“You had friends, family?”

“My parents are charitable people. They accommodated Ray until it became obvious he didn’t want to be accommodated. He didn’t like me seeing them. Didn’t like me seeing friends, either. It was supposed to be just the two of us. No countervailing forces.”

“Good marriage to get out of,” Chris said.

“I’m not sure he believes it’s over.”

“People can get hurt in situations like that.”

“I know,” Marguerite said. “I’ve heard the stories. But Ray would never get physical.”

Chris let that pass. “How was Tess doing when you said good night?”

“She looked pretty sleepy. Worn out, poor thing.”

“How do you suppose she happened to break that window?”

Marguerite took a long sip of her coffee and seemed to inspect the tabletop. “I honestly don’t know. But Tess has had some problems in the past. She has a thing about shiny surfaces, mirrors and things like that. She must have seen something she didn’t like.”

And put her hand through the glass? Chris didn’t understand, but Marguerite was obviously uncomfortable talking about it and he didn’t want to press her. She’d been through enough tonight.

He said, “I wonder how the Subject is doing. Sleepless in Lobsterville.”

“I left everything running, didn’t I?” She stood up. “Want to have a look?”

He followed her upstairs to her office. They tiptoed past the room where Tess was sleeping.

Marguerite’s office was exactly as they had left it, lights burning, interfaces lit, the big wall screen still dutifully following the Subject. But Marguerite gasped when she saw the image.

It was morning again on Subject’s patch of UMa47/E. Subject had left the high balcony and made his way to a surface-level street. Last night’s winds had given every exposed surface a coating of fine white grit, fresh texture under the raking light of the sun.

Subject approached a stone arch five times his height, walking into the sunrise. Chris said, “Where’s he going?”

“I don’t know,” Marguerite said. “But unless he turns around, he’s leaving the city.”

Thirteen

“Charlie Grogan called,” Sue Sampel said as Ray passed through the outer office. “Also Dajit Gill, Julie Sook, and two other department heads. Oh, and you have Ari Weingart at ten and Shulgin at eleven, plus—”

“Forward the agenda to my desktop,” Ray said. “And any urgent messages. Hold calls.” He disappeared into his sanctum sanctorum and closed the door.

Bless silence, Sue thought. It beat the sound of Ray Scutter’s voice.

Sue had left a cup of hot coffee on his desk, a tribute to his punctuality. Very good, Ray thought. But he was facing a difficult day. Since the Subject had set out on his pilgrimage last week, the interpretive committees had been in a state of hysteria. Even the astrozoologists were divided: some of them wanted to keep the focus in Lobsterville and tag a new and more representative Subject; others (and Marguerite was one of these) were convinced the Subject’s behavior was significant and ought to be followed to its conclusion. The Technology and Artifacts people dreaded losing their urban context, but the astrogeologists and climatologists welcomed the prospect of a long detour into the deserts and mountains. The committees were squabbling like fishwives, and absent Blind Lake’s senior scientists or a line to Washington there was no obvious way to resolve the conflict.

Ultimately, these people would look to Ray for guidance. But he didn’t want to assume that responsibility without a great deal of consultation. Whatever decision he made, sooner or later he’d be forced to defend it. He wanted that defense to be airtight. He needed to be able to cite names and documents, and if some of the more hotheaded committee partisans thought he was “dodging the issue” — and he had heard those words bandied about — too bad. He had asked them all to prepare position papers.

Best to start the day in a positive mood. Ray unfolded a paper napkin and used his key to open the bottom drawer of the desk.

Since the lockdown began Ray had been keeping a stash of DingDongs locked in his desk drawer. It was embarrassing to acknowledge, but he happened to like baked goods and he especially liked DingDongs with his breakfast coffee, and he could live without the inevitable smart-ass commentary about Polysorbate 80 and “empty calories,” thank you very much. He liked peeling back the brittle wrapper; he liked the sugar-and-cornstarch smell that came wafting out; he liked the glutinous texture of the pastry and the way hot coffee flensed the slightly chemical aftertaste from his palate.

But DingDongs weren’t included in the weekly black truck deliveries. Ray had been canny enough to buy up the remaining inventory from the local grocer and the convenience shop in the Plaza lobby. He had started with a couple of cartons, but they’d be gone before long. The last six DingDongs in the entire quarantined community of Blind Lake, as far as Ray could determine, were currently residing in his desk drawer. After that, nothing. Cold turkey. Obviously, it wouldn’t kill him to do without. But he resented being forced into it by this ongoing bureaucratic fuck-up, this endless mute lockdown.

He pulled a DingDong out of the drawer. Take one away: that left five, a business-week’s-worth.

But all he could see were four packages lingering in the shadows.

Four. He counted again. Four. He searched the drawer with his hand. Four.

There should have been five. Had he miscalculated?

Impossible. He had recorded the count in his nightly journal.

He sat immobile for a moment, processing this unwelcome information, working up a solid righteous anger. Then he buzzed Sue Sampel and asked her to step inside.

“Sue,” he said when she appeared in the doorway. “Do you happen to have a key to my desk?”

“To your desk?” She was either surprised by the question or faking it very plausibly. “No, I don’t.”

“Because when I came here the support people told me I’d have the only key.”

“Did you lose it? They must have a master somewhere. Or they can replace the locks, I guess.”

“No, I didn’t lose it.” She flinched from his voice. “I have the key right here. Something’s been stolen.”

“Stolen? What was stolen?”

“It doesn’t matter what was stolen. As it happens, it was nothing very important. What matters is that somebody gained access to my desk without my knowledge. Surely even you can grasp the significance of that.”

She glanced at the desktop. Ray realized, too late, that he had left this morning’s DingDong lying unopened next to his coffee cup. She looked at it, then at Ray, with a you-must-be-kidding expression on her face. He felt blood rush to his cheeks.

“Maybe you could talk to the cleaning staff,” Sue said.

Now all he wanted was for her to disappear. “Well, all right, I suppose it doesn’t matter… I shouldn’t have mentioned it…”

“Or Security. You have Shulgin coming in later.”

Was she concealing a smile? Was she actually laughing at him? “Thank you,” he said tightly.

“Anything else?”

“No.” Get the fuck out. “Please close the door.”

She closed it gently. Ray imagined he could hear her laughter floating behind her like a bright red ribbon.

Ray considered himself a realist. He knew some of his behavior could be labeled misogynistic by anyone who wanted to smear him (and his enemies were legion). But he didn’t hate women. Quite the opposite: he gave them every opportunity to redeem themselves. The problem was not that he hated women but that he was so consistently disappointed by them. For instance, Marguerite. (Always Marguerite, forever Marguerite… )

Ari Weingart came in at ten with a series of morale-enhancing proposals. Cayti Lane from the PR department wanted to put together a local video ring for news and social updates — Blind Lake TV, in effect — which she would host. “I think it’s a good idea,” Ari said. “Cayti’s bright and photogenic. What I also want to do is pool the individual downloads people have residing in their house servers so we can rebroadcast them. No-choice scheduled television, very twentieth century, but it might help hold things together. Or at least give people something to talk about at the water cooler.”

Fine, all this was fine. Ari went on to propose a series of live debates and lectures Saturday nights at the community center. Also fine. Ari was trying to reconfigure the siege as a church social. Let him, Ray thought. Let him distract the whining inmates with dog-and-pony shows. But all this boosterism was ultimately tiresome, and it was a relief when Ari finally packed up his grin and left the room.

Ray counted his DingDongs again.

Of course, it could have been Sue who had broken into his desk. There was no sign that the mechanism had been tampered with — maybe he’d been careless about locking the drawer and she had taken advantage of his lapse of attention. Sue often worked later than Ray, especially when Tess was in his care; unlike Marguerite, he didn’t like leaving his daughter alone in the house after school. Sue was the prime suspect, Ray decided, though the cleaning staff weren’t entirely above suspicion.

Men were easier to deal with than women. With men it was a matter of barking loud enough to command attention. Women were slyer, Ray thought, overtly yielding but easily subverted. Their loyalties were tentative and too quickly revoked. (Marguerite, for instance… )

At least Tess wouldn’t grow up to be one of those kind of women.

Dimi Shulgin showed up at eleven, crisp in a gray tailored suit, a welcome distraction even though he was full of ominous news. Shulgin had mastered the art of Baltic inscrutability, his doughy face impassive as he described the mood prevailing among the day workers and salaried staff. “They’ve endured the siege this long,” Shulgin said, “with minimal problems, probably because of what happened to unfortunate Mr. Krafft when he tried to run the fence. That was a blessing in disguise, I think. It frightened people into acceptance. But discontent is growing. Casual and support staff outnumber the scientific and management people by five to one, you know. Many of them are demanding a voice in decision-making, and not a few of them would like to shut down the Eye and see what happens.”

“It’s all talk,” Ray said.

“So far, it’s all talk. In the long run — if this lockdown continues — who knows?”

“We should be seen to be doing something positive.”

“The appearance of action,” Shulgin said, any irony safely buried under his turgid accent, “would be helpful.”

“You know,” Ray said, “my desk was broken into recently.”

“Your desk?” Shulgin’s caterpillar eyebrows rose. “Broken into? This was vandalism, theft?”

Ray waved his hand in what he imagined was a magnanimous gesture. “It was trivial, office vandalism at most, but it got me thinking. What if we launched an investigation?”

“Into the vandalism of your desk?”

“No, for Christ’s sake, into the siege.”

“An investigation? How could we? All the evidence is on the other side of the fence.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Please explain.”

“There’s a theory we’re under lockdown because something happened at Crossbank, something dangerous, something connected with their O/BECs, something that might as easily happen here.”

“Yes, which is why there’s a growing movement to switch off our own processors, but—”

“Forget about the O/BECs for a minute. Think about Crossbank. If Crossbank had a problem, wouldn’t we have heard about it?”

Shulgin considered. He rubbed a finger against his nose. “Possibly, possibly not. All the senior administrators were in Cancun when the gates closed. They would have been the first to know.”

“Yes,” Ray said, gently urging the idea to its conclusion, “but messages might have stacked up on their personal servers before the quarantine went into effect.”

“Anything urgent would have been forwarded…”

“But copies would still reside in the Blind Lake servers, wouldn’t they?”

“Well… presumably. Unless someone took the trouble to erase them. But we can’t break into the personal servers of senior staff.”

“Can’t we?”

Shulgin shrugged. “I would have thought not.”

“In ordinary circumstances the question wouldn’t even arise. But circumstances are a long way from ordinary.”

“Crack the servers, read their mail. Yes, it’s interesting.”

“And if we find anything useful we should announce the results at a general meeting.”

“If there are any results. Apart from voicemail from wives and mistresses. Shall I talk to my people, find out how difficult it would be to break into our servers?”

“Yes, Dimi,” Ray said. “You do that.”

He liked this better the more he thought about it. He went to lunch a happier man.

Ray’s moods were mercurial, however, and by the time he left the Plaza at the end of the day he was feeling sour again. The DingDong thing. Sue had probably shared the story with her friends in the staff cafeteria. Every day, some fresh humiliation. He liked DingDongs for breakfast: was that so fucking funny, so laughably aberrant? People were assholes, Ray thought.

He drove carefully through flurries of hard snow, trying unsuccessfully to time the stoplights on the main street.

People were assholes, and that was what the exocultural theorists always missed, people like Marguerite, blind little featherweight optimists. One world full of assholes wasn’t enough for them. They wanted more. A whole living universe of assholery. A shiny pink organic cosmos, a magic mirror with a happy face beaming out of it.

Dusk closed around the car like a curtain. How much cleaner the world would be, Ray thought, if it contained nothing but gas and dust and the occasional flaring star — cold but pristine, like the snow enshrouding the few high towers of Blind Lake. The real lesson of Lobsterville was the politically incorrect one, the unspeakable but obvious fact that sentience (so-called) was nothing but a focused irrationality, a suite of behaviors designed by DNA to make more DNA, empty of any logic but the runaway mathematics of self-reproduction, Chaos with feedback, z -› z² + c blindly repeated until the universe had eaten and excreted itself.

Including me, Ray thought. Better not to shy from that caustic truth. Everything he loved (his daughter) or thought he had loved (Marguerite) represented nothing more than his participation in that equation, was no more or less sane than the nocturnal bleeding of the aboriginals of UMa47/E. Marguerite, for instance: acting out flawed genetic scripts, the possessive if unfit mother, a walking womb claiming equality under the law. How quickly she still came to mind. Every insolence Ray suffered was a mirror of her hatred.

The garage door rolled open as it sensed the approach of the car. He parked under the glare of the overhead light.

He wondered what it would be like to break free of all these biological imperatives and see the world as it truly was. To our eyes horrible, Ray thought, bleak and unforgiving; but our eyes are liars, equally as enslaved to DNA as our hearts and our minds. Maybe that was what the O/BECs had become: an inhuman eye, revealing truths no one was prepared to accept.

Tess had come back to him this week. He called hello as he entered the house. She sat in the living room in the chair next to the artificial Christmas tree, hunched over her homework like a studious gnome. “Hi,” she said listlessly. Ray stood a moment, surprised by his love for her, admiring the way her dark hair curled tightly to her skull. She wrote on the screen of a lap pad, which translated her babyish scrawls into something legible.

He shed his coat and overshoes and drew the blinds against the snowy dark. “Have you called your birth mother yet?”

It was in the agreement he had signed with Marguerite after arbitration, that Tess would phone the absent parent daily. Tess looked at him curiously. “My birth mother?”

Had he said that aloud? “I mean, your mother.”

“I called already.”

“Did she say anything disturbing? You know you can tell me if your mother causes problems for you.”

Tess shrugged uncomfortably.

“Was the stranger with her when you called? The man who lives in the basement?”

Tess shrugged again.

“Show me your hand,” Ray said.

It didn’t take a genius to know that Tessa’s problems back at Crossbank had been Marguerite’s fault, even if the divorce mediator had failed to figure it out. Marguerite had consistently ignored Tess, had focused exclusively on her beloved extraterrestrial seascapes, that Tess had made several desperate bids for attention, transparent in their motivation. The frightening stranger in the mirror might as well have been Marguerite’s Subject — oblique, demanding, and omnipresent.

Glumly, head lowered in embarrassment, Tess held out her right hand. The sutures had been removed last week. The scars would disappear with time, the clinic doctor had said, but now they looked ghastly, pink new skin between angry divots where the stitches had been. Ray had already taken a few photographs in case the issue ever arose in court. He held her small hand in his, making sure there was no sign of infection. No small life eating the life from his daughter’s flesh.

“What’s for dinner?” Tess asked.

“Chicken,” Ray said, leaving her to her books. Frozen chicken in the freezer. Subject removed from cold storage the butchered flesh of a ground-dwelling bird and began to sear it in a pan of extracted vegetable oil. Plus garlic and basil, salt and pepper. The smell of it flooded his mouth with saliva. Tess, drawn by the odor, wandered into the kitchen to watch him cook.

“Are you worried about going back to your mother tomorrow?”

Your birth mother. Half your genetic bag of tricks. The lesser half, Ray thought.

“No,” Tess said, then, almost defiantly, “why do you always keep asking me that?”

“Do I?”

“Yes! Sometimes.”

“Sometimes isn’t always, though, is it?”

“No, but—”

“I just want everything to be okay for you, Tess.”

“I know.” Defeated, she turned away.

“You’re happy here, aren’t you?”

“It’s okay here.”

“Because you never know with Mom, isn’t that right? You might have to come live here all the time, Tess, if anything happens to her.”

Tess narrowed her eyes. “What would happen to her?”

“You never know,” Ray said.

Fourteen

Before he left the city, Subject’s life had been a repetitive cycle of work, sleep, and food conclaves. It had reminded Marguerite dismayingly of the Hindu idea of the kalpas, the sacred circle, eternal return.

But that had changed.

That had changed, and the circle had become something different: it had become a narrative. A story, Marguerite thought, with a beginning and an end. That was why it was so important to keep the Eye focused on the Subject, despite what the more cynical people in Interpretation thought. “The Subject is no longer representative,” they said. But that was what made this so interesting. Subject had become an individual, something more than the sum of his functions in aboriginal society. This was clearly some kind of crisis in Subject’s life, and Marguerite couldn’t bear the idea of not seeing it through to its conclusion.

Even to the Subject’s death, if it came to that. And it might.

Early on, she conceived the idea of writing the Subject’s odyssey, not analytically, but as what it had become: a story. Not for publication, of course. She’d be violating the protocols of objectivity, indulging all kinds of conscious and unconscious anthropocentrism. Anyway, she wasn’t a writer, or at least not that kind of writer. This was purely for her own satisfaction… and because she believed the Subject deserved it. After all, this was a real life they had invaded. In the privacy of her writing she could give him back his stolen dignity.

She began the project in a spiral-bound blue school notebook. Tess was asleep (she had come back from her father’s two days ago, after a disappointing Christmas) and Chris was downstairs messing up the kitchen or raiding her library. It was a precious moment, hallowed in silence. A time when she could practice the black art of empathy. When she could freely admit that she cared about the fate of this creature so unknowable and so intimately known.

Subject’s last days in the city [Marguerite wrote] were disturbed and episodic. He manned his workstation at the usual time, but his food conclaves became briefer and more perfunctory. He descended the stairs into the food well slowly, and in the dim light of the evening conclaves he took less than the customary amount of cultivated crops. He spent more time scraping moldlike growths from the damp well walls, sucking the residue from his food claws. Normally this was a time of intense social interaction; the wells were crowded; but the Subject kept his face to the stone wall, and his visible signaling motions (cilia-waving, head gestures) were minimal. His sleep was disturbed, too, which in turn seemed to disturb the small creatures that fed on his blood nipples at night. The place of these wall-dwelling animals in Subject’s culture or ecology is not well understood. They might have been parasites, but since they were universally tolerated they were more likely symbionts or even a stage in the reproductive cycle. Perhaps their feeding stimulated desirable immune responses — at least, that was one theory. Shortly before his departure, however, the feeders seemed repelled by the sleeping Subject. They tasted him, skittered away, then came back to try again with the same result. Meanwhile, Subject was restless and moved several times during the night in an uncharacteristic manner. He spent his last night in the city in a sleepless vigil on a high exterior balcony of the communal tower in which he lived. It was tempting to read both loneliness and resolve into these behaviors. [Forbidden, but tempting, Marguerite thought.] Subject’s life had clearly changed, and perhaps not for the better. Then he left the city. It looked like a spontaneous decision. He left his warren, left his home tower, and walked directly through the eastern gate of the aboriginal city into a clear blue morning. In the sunlight his thick skin glittered like polished leather. Subject was a dusky shade of red over most of his body, a dark red merging into black at the major body joints, and his yellow dorsal crest stood up like a crown of flame as he walked. The city was surrounded by an enormous acreage of agricultural land. Canals and aqueducts carried irrigation water from the snowy mountains in the north to these fields. The system lost enormous amounts of moisture to evaporation in the dry, thin air, but the trickle that remained was enough to nourish miles-long avenues of succulent plants. The plants were thick-skinned, olive-green, and consisted of a few basic and similar types. Their stems were sturdy, the leaves as broad as dinner plates and as thick as pancakes. Taller than the Subject, they cast variegated shadows over him as he walked. Subject followed the dirt-pack road, a wide avenue lapped with drainage ditches and verdant midsummer crops. He displayed no social interaction with either the sap-stained laborers in the fields or the foot traffic along the way. Shortly after he left the city he detoured into a cultivated plot of ground, where he was ignored by farm laborers as he pulled several large leaves from a mature plant, wrapped them in a broader, flatter fan leaf, and tucked them into a pouch in his lower abdomen. A picnic lunch? Or provisions for a longer journey? For much of the morning he was forced to walk along the less-busy margin of the road, out of the way of traffic. According to planetary maps prepared before the O/BECs focused on a single Subject, this road ran east into the drylands for almost a hundred kilometers, veered north through a line of low mountains (foothills of a taller range) and east again until, after a few hundred kilometers of sparsely vegetated high plains it reached another aboriginal city, the as-yet-unnamed 33 latitude, 42 longitude urban cluster. 33/42 was a smaller city than Subject’s own but an established trading partner. Big trucks passed in both directions — huge platforms equipped with simple but refined and effective motors, riding on immense solid rollers rather than wheels. (This might have been an example of aboriginal efficiency. The trucks maintain the pressed-earth roads simply by driving on them.) And there was plenty of foot traffic, pairs and triads and larger clusters of waddling individuals. But no other solitaries. Did a unique journey imply a unique destination? By midday Subject reached the end of the agricultural land. The road widened as the walls of succulent plants dropped behind. The horizon was flat dead ahead and mountainous to the north. The mountains shimmered in waves of rising heat. When the sun reached its apex Subject stopped for a meal. He left the road and walked a few hundred yards to a shady formation of tall basaltic stones, where he urinated copiously into the sandy soil, then climbed one of the rocky pedestals and stood facing north. The atmosphere between Subject and the mountains was white with suspended dust, and the snowy peaks seemed to hover over the desert basin. He might have been resting, or he might have been sensing the air or planning the next stage of his journey. He was motionless for almost an hour. Then he walked back to the road and resumed his journey, pausing to drink from a roadside ditch. He walked at a steady pace through the afternoon. By nightfall he had passed the last evidence of cultivation — old fields gone fallow, irrigation canals filled and obscured with windblown sand — and entered the desert basin between the northern mountains and the far southern sea. Traffic on the road moved in diurnal surges, and he had fallen behind the last of the day’s vehicular traffic. He was alone, and his pace slowed with the approach of night. It was an unusually clear evening. A fast, small moon slid up from the eastern horizon, and Subject looked for a place to sleep. He scouted for some minutes until he found a sandy depression sheltered in the lee of a rocky outcrop. He curled into an almost fetal posture there, his ventral surfaces protected from the cooling air. His body slowed to its usual nightly catatonia. When the moon had crossed three-quarters of the sky a number of small insectile creatures emerged from a nest hidden in the sand. They were immediately attracted by the Subject, by his smell, perhaps, or the rhythm of his breathing. They were smaller than the nocturnal symbionts of his native city. They carried distinct thoracic bulges and they moved on two extra sets of legs. But they fed in the same fashion, and without hesitation, from the Subject’s blood-nipples. They were still there (sated, perhaps) when Subject woke to the first light of morning. Some of them still clung to his body as he stood up. Carefully, fastidiously, Subject picked them off and tossed them away. The discarded creatures lay motionless but uninjured until the sun warmed their bodies; then they burrowed back into the sand, pink fantails vanishing with a flourish. Subject continued to follow the road.

When she looked at her first entry Marguerite was unhappy with what she had written.

Not because it was incorrect, though of course it was — it was outrageously, deliciously incorrect. Errors of attribution everywhere. The social scientists would be appalled. But she was tired of objectivity. Her own project, her private project, was to put herself in the Subject’s place. How else did human beings understand one another? “Look at it from my point of view,” people said. Or, “If I were in your place…” It was an imaginative act so commonplace as to be invisible. People who couldn’t do it or refused to do it were called psychotics or sociopaths.

But when we look at the aboriginals, Marguerite thought, we’re supposed to pretend to indifference. To an aloofness almost Puritanical in its austerity. Am I tainted if I admit I care whether the Subject lives or dies?

Most of her colleagues would say yes. Marguerite entertained the heretical idea that they might be wrong.

Still, the narrative was missing something. It was hard to know what to say or, especially, how to say it. Who was she writing for? Herself alone, or did she have an audience in mind?

A couple of weeks had passed since the Subject left the city — the time when Tess had cut her hand so badly. If she carried on with this there would be a great deal more to write. Marguerite was alone in her study, bent over her notebook, but at the thought of Tess she raised her head, sampling the night sounds in the town house.

Chris was still awake downstairs. Chris had made his own space in the house. He slept in the basement, was gone most of the day, took his evening meals at Sawyer’s and used the kitchen and the living room mainly after Tessa’s bedtime. His presence was unobtrusive, sometimes even comforting. (There: the sound of the refrigerator door closing, the rattle of a dish.) Chris always looked distressed when he worked, like a man struggling desperately to recapture a lost train of thought. But he would often work unceasingly, long into the night.

And he had been a help with Tess. More than a help. Chris wasn’t one of those adults who condescend to children or try to impress them. He seemed comfortable with Tess, spoke freely to her, wasn’t offended by her occasional silences or sulks. He hadn’t made a big deal of Tessa’s problems.

Even Tess had seemed a little happier with Chris in the house.

But the accident with her hand had been troubling. At first Tess would only say that she had leaned too hard on the window, but Marguerite knew better: a window at night in a lighted room was as good as a mirror.

And it wasn’t the first mirror Tess had broken.

She had broken three back at Crossbank. The therapist had talked about “unexpressed rage,” but Tess never described Mirror Girl as hostile or frightening. She broke the mirrors, she said, because she was tired of Mirror Girl showing up unannounced — “I like to see myself when I look in the mirror.” Mirror Girl was intrusive, often unwelcome, frequently annoying, but something less than an outright nightmare.

It was the blood that had made this time seem so much scarier.

Marguerite had asked her about it the day after they came back from the clinic. The painkiller had left Tess a little sleepy and she spent all that afternoon in bed, occasionally glancing at a book but too scattered to read for long. Marguerite sat at her bedside. “I thought we were all done with that,” she said. “Breaking things.” Not accusatory. Just curious.

“I leaned on the window,” Tess repeated, but she must have sensed Marguerite’s skepticism, because she sighed and said in a smaller voice, “she just took me by surprise.”

“Mirror Girl?”

Nod.

“Has she been back lately?”

“No,” Tess said; then, “not very much. That’s why she took me by surprise.”

“Have you thought about what Dr. Leinster said back at Crossbank?”

“Mirror Girl’s not real. She’s like some part of me I don’t want to see.”

“You think that’s right?”

Tess shrugged.

“Well, what do you really think?”

“I think, if I don’t want to see her, why does she keep coming back?”

Good question, Marguerite thought. “Does she still look like you?”

“Exactly like.”

“So how do you know it’s her?”

Tess shrugged. “Her eyes.”

“What about her eyes?”

“Too big.”

“What does she want, Tess?” Hoping her daughter didn’t hear the edge of anxiety in her voice. The catch in her throat. Something is wrong with my girl. My baby.

“I think she just wants me to pay attention.”

“To what, Tess? To her?”

“No, not just to her. To everything. Everything, all the time.”

“You remember what Dr. Leinster taught you?”

“Calm down and wait for her to go away.”

“Does that still work?”

“I guess. Sometimes I forget.”

Dr. Leinster had told Marguerite that Tessa’s symptoms were unusual but stopped well short of the kind of systematic delusion that might point to schizophrenia. No drastic mood swings, no aggressive behavior, good orientation to time and place, emotional affect a little muted but not off the scale, reasonable insight into her problem, no obvious neurochemical imbalance. All that psychiatric bullshit, which boiled down to Dr. Leinster’s last banal verdict: most likely she’ll grow out of it.

But Dr. Leinster hadn’t had to wash Tessa’s blood-soaked pajamas.

Marguerite looked back at her journal. Her act of illicit storytelling. Still not up to date: there was nothing about the East Road Ruins, for instance… but enough for tonight.

Downstairs, she found the lights still burning. Chris was in the kitchen eating rye toast and leafing through last September’s copy of Astrogeological Review, leaning back in one chair and resting his feet on another. “I’m just down for a nightcap,” Marguerite said. “Don’t mind me.”

Orange juice and a dab of vodka, which she resorted to when she felt too restless to sleep. Like tonight. She pulled out a third chair from the kitchen table and put her slippered feet up next to Chris’s. “Long day?” she asked.

“I had another meeting with Charlie Grogan out at the Eye,” Chris said.

“So how’s Charlie taking all this?”

“The siege? He doesn’t care too much about that, though he says he’s feeding Boomer ground beef these days. No dog food coming in on the trucks. Mostly he’s worried about the Eye.”

“What about the Eye?”

“They had another little cascade of technical glitches while I was out there.”

“Really? I didn’t get a memo about it.”

“Charlie says it’s just the usual blinks and nods, but it’s been happening more often lately — power surges and some ragged I/O. I think what’s really bothering him is the possibility somebody might pull the plug. He’s nursed those O/BECs so long they’re like children to him.”

“It’s just BS,” Marguerite said, “all this talk about shutting down the Eye,” but she didn’t sound convincing even to herself. She made an awkward attempt to change the subject: “You don’t usually talk about your work much.”

She had already finished half the drink and she felt the alcohol working through her body ridiculously quickly, making her sleepy, making her reckless.

“I try to keep it away from you and Tess,” Chris said. “I’m grateful to be here at all. I don’t want to spread my troubles around.”

“It’s all right. We’ve known each other what, more than a month now? But I’m pretty sure whatever people say about your book isn’t true. You don’t strike me as dishonest or vicious.”

“Dishonest and vicious? Is that what people say?”

Margaret blushed.

But Chris was smiling. “I’ve heard it all before, Marguerite.”

“I’d like to read the book sometime.”

“Nobody can download it since the lockup. Maybe that works to my advantage.” His smile became less convincing. “I can give you a copy.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“And I appreciate the vote of confidence. Marguerite?”

“What?”

“How would you feel about giving me an interview? About Blind Lake, the siege, how you fit in?”

“Oh, God.” It wasn’t what she had expected him to say. But what had she expected him to say? “Well, not tonight.”

“No, not tonight.”

“The last time anyone interviewed me it was the high school paper. About my science project.”

“Good project?”

“Blue ribbon. Scholarship prize. All about mitochondrial DNA, back when I thought I wanted to be a geneticist. Pretty heavy stuff for a clergyman’s daughter.” She yawned. “I really do have to sleep.”

Impulsively — or maybe drunkenly — Marguerite put her hand on the table, palm up. It was a gesture he could reasonably ignore. And no harm done if he did ignore it.

Chris looked at her hand, maybe a few seconds too long. Then he covered it with his own. Willingly? Grudgingly?

She liked the way his palm felt on hers. No adult male had held her hand since she left Ray, not that Ray had been much of a hand-holder. She discovered she couldn’t look Chris in the eye. She let the moment linger; then she pulled back, grinning sheepishly. “Gotta go,” she said.

“Sleep well,” Chris Carmody said.

“You too,” she told him, wondering what she was getting herself into.

Before she turned in she gave the direct feed from the Eye a last look.

Nothing much was doing. Subject continued his two-week-old odyssey. He was far along the eastern road, walking steadily into another morning. His skin looked increasingly dull as the days passed, but that was probably just ambient dust. There had been no rain for months now, but that was typical of a summer in these latitudes.

Even the sun seemed dimmer, until Margaret realized that the haze was unusually thick today, and particularly thick to the northeast, almost like an approaching squall line. She could ask Meteorology about it, she guessed. Tomorrow.

Finally, before she took herself to bed, Marguerite peeked into Tessa’s room.

Tess was soundly asleep. The empty pane in the window beside her bed was still protected by Chris’s plastic-and-veneer lash-up and the room was cozily warm. Darkness outside and in. Mirrors happily vacant. No sound but Tessa’s easy breathing.

And in the quiet of the house Marguerite realized who she was writing her narrative for. Not for herself. Certainly not for other scientists. And not for the general public.

She was writing it for Tess.

The realization was energizing; it chased away the possibility of sleep. She went back to her office, turned on the desk lamp, and brought out the notebook again. She opened it and wrote:

More than fifty years ago, on a planet so far away that no living human being can ever hope to travel there, there was a city of rock and sandstone. It was a city as large as any of our own great cities, and its towers rose high into that world’s thin, dry air. The city was built on a dusty plain, overlooked by tall mountains whose peaks were snowy even during the long summer. Someone lived there, someone who was not quite a human being, but who was a person in his own way, very different from us but in some ways much alike. The name we gave him was “Subject”…

Fifteen

Sue Sampel was beginning to enjoy her weekends again, despite the continuing lockdown.

For a while it had been a toss-up: weekdays busy but tarnished by the tantrums and weirdness of her boss; Saturday and Sunday slow and melancholy because she couldn’t hop in the car and drive into Constance for some R R. At first she had spent her weekends restlessly stoned, until her personal stash began to run low. (Another item the black trucks weren’t delivering.) Then she borrowed a handful of Tiffany Arias novels from another support-staffer at the Plaza, five fat books about a wartime nurse in Shiugang torn between her love for an air force surveillance pilot and her secret affair with a hard-drinking gunrunner. Sue liked the books okay but thought they were a poor substitute for Green Girl Canadian Label Cannabis (regularly but illegally imported from the Northern Economic Protectorate), a quarter-ounce of which she was conserving in a cookie tin in her sock drawer.

Then Sebastian Vogel showed up on her doorstep with a billet note from Ari Weingart and a battered brown suitcase.

At first sight he didn’t look promising. Cute, maybe, in a Christmas-elf kind of way, pushing sixty, a little overweight, fringe of gray hair framing his shiny bald head, a bushy red-gray beard. He was obviously shy — he stuttered when he introduced himself — and worse, Sue got the impression he was some kind of clergyman or retired priest. He promised to be “no trouble at all,” and she feared that was probably true.

She had asked Ari about him the next day. Ari said Sebastian was a retired academic, not a priest, one of the three-pack of journalists who were stranded in Blind Lake. Sebastian had written a book called God the Quantum Vacuum — Ari lent her a copy. The book was a lot drier than a Tiffany Arias novel but considerably more substantial.

Still, Sebastian Vogel wasn’t much more than a silent partner in the household until the night he caught her rolling a joint on the kitchen table.

“Oh, my,” Sebastian said from the doorway.

It was too late to hide the cookie tin or the papers. Guiltily, Sue tried to make a joke of it. “Um,” she said, “care to join me?”

“Oh, no, I can’t—”

“No, I completely understand—”

“I can’t impose on your hospitality. But I have a half-ounce in my luggage, if you don’t mind sharing it with me.”

It got better after that.

He was fifteen years older than Sue and his birthday was January ninth. By the time that rolled around, she was sharing her bed with him. Sue liked him enormously — and he was a lot more fun than she ever would have guessed — but she also knew this was probably just a “lockdown romance,” a term she’d picked up in the staff cafeteria. Lockdown romances had sprung up all over town. The combination of cabin fever and constant anxiety turned out to be a real aphrodisiac.

His birthday fell on a Saturday, and Sue had been planning for it for weeks now. She had wanted to get him a birthday cake, but there were no boxed mixes in the store and she wasn’t about to attempt a cake from scratch. So she had done the next best thing. She had exercised her ingenuity.

She brought the cake into the dining room, a single candle planted in it. “Happy birthday,” she said.

It wasn’t really much of a cake. But it had symbolic value.

Sebastian’s small mouth curled into a smile only partially obscured by his mustache. “This is too kind! Sue, thank you!”

“It’s nothing,” she said.

“No, it’s fine!” He admired the cake. “I haven’t seen luxury food in weeks. Where did you get this?”

It wasn’t really a cake. It was a DingDong with a birthday candle stuck in it. “You don’t want to know,” Sue said.

Saturday, Sebastian had agreed to meet his friends for lunch at Sawyer’s. He asked Sue to come along.

She agreed, but not without doubts. Sue had earned a B.Sc. some twenty years ago, but all it had gotten her was a glorified clerical job at Blind Lake. She had been frozen out of too many technical discussions to relish an afternoon of science-journalist peer-talk. Sebastian assured her it wouldn’t be like that. His friends were writers, not scientists. “Outspoken but not snobbish.”

Maybe so, maybe not.

Sue drove Sebastian, who had no car of his own, to Sawyer’s, where they parked in a flurry of light snow. The wind was brisk, the sun peeking out now and again between canyons of cloud. The air inside the restaurant was sleepily warm and moist.

Sebastian introduced her to Elaine Coster, a skinny, sour-looking woman not much older than Sue herself, and Chris Carmody, considerably younger, tall and slightly grim but handsome in a ruffled way. Chris was friendly, but Elaine, after a limp handshake, said, “Well, Sebastian, there’s more to you than we suspected.”

Sue was surprised by the animosity in the woman’s voice, almost a sneer, and by Sebastian’s obvious indifference to it.

Lunch was soup and sandwiches, the post-lockdown inevitable. Sue made gracious noises but mostly listened to the others talk. They talked Blind Lake politics, including some speculation about Ray Scutter, and they worried over the perennial question of the siege. They reminisced about people she’d never heard of until Sue began to feel ignored, though Sebastian kept a hand on her thigh under the table and gave her a reassuring squeeze from time to time.

Finally there was a piece of gossip to which she felt connected. Turned out Chris was rooming with Ray Scutter’s ex, and Ray had done some macho grandstanding outside the Blind Lake clinic a couple of weeks back. It was typical Ray Scutter assholery, and Sue said so.

Elaine gave her a long, unnerving glare. “What do you know about Ray Scutter?”

“I run his office for him.”

Her eyes widened. “You’re his secretary?”

“Executive assistant. Well, yeah, secretary, basically.”

“Pretty and talented,” Elaine said to Sebastian, who merely smiled his inscrutable smile. She refocused on Sue, who resisted the urge to shrink away from the woman’s laser stare. “How much do you actually know about Ray Scutter?”

“His private life, nothing. His work, pretty much everything.”

“He talks to you about it?”

“God, no. Ray plays his cards close to his chest, mainly because he’s holding the ace of incompetency. You know how people who are out of their depth like to do all kinds of busy-work, make themselves at least look useful? That’s Ray. He doesn’t tell me anything, but half the time I have to explain his job to him.”

“You know,” Elaine said, “there are rumors about Ray.”

Or maybe, Sue thought, I’m out of my depth. “What kind of rumors?”

“That Ray wants to break into the executive servers and read people’s mail.”

“Oh. Well, that’s—”

There was a buzzing. Chris Carmody took his phone out of his pocket, turned away and whispered into it. Elaine gave him a poisonous look.

When he turned back to the table he said, “Sorry, people. Marguerite needs me to look after her daughter.”

“Jesus,” Elaine said, “is everybody setting up housekeeping in this fucking place? What are you now, a baby-sitter?”

“Some kind of emergency, Marguerite says.” He stood up.

“Go, go.” She rolled her eyes. Sebastian nodded amiably.

“Pleasure meeting you,” Chris said to Sue.

“You, too.” He seemed nice enough, if a little distracted. He was certainly better company than Elaine with the X-ray vision.

Which Elaine focused on her as soon as Chris walked away from the table. “So it’s true? Ray’s doing some illicit hacking?”

“I don’t know about illicit. He’s planning to make it public. The idea is, pre-lockdown messages on the senior servers might give us a clue to what caused all this.”

“If some kind of message went out before the lockdown, how come Ray didn’t get one?”

“He was low man on the management totem pole before everybody left for the Cancun conference. Plus he’s new here. He had contacts at Crossbank, but not what you’d call friends. Ray doesn’t make friends.”

“This gives him the right to break into secure servers?”

“He thinks so.”

“He thinks so, but has he actually done anything about it?”

Sue considered her position. Talking to the press would be a great way to get herself fired. No doubt Elaine would promise total anonymity. (Or money, if she asked for it. Or the moon.) But promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash. I may be stupid, Sue thought, but I’m not nearly as stupid as this woman seems to think.

She considered Sebastian. Did Sebastian want her to talk about this?

She gave him a questioning look. Sebastian sat back in his chair with his hands clasped over his stomach, a spot of mustard adorning his beard. Enigmatic as a stuffed owl. But he nodded at her.

Okay.

Okay. She’d do it for him, not this Elaine.

She licked her lips. “Shulgin was in the building yesterday with a computer guy.”

“Cracking servers?”

“What do you think? But it’s not like I caught them in the act.”

“What kind of results did they get?”

“None, as far as I know. They were still there after I went home Friday.” They might still be there, Sue thought. Sifting silicon for gold.

“If they find something interesting, will that information pass over your desk?”

“No.” She smiled. “But it’ll pass over Ray’s.”

Sebastian looked suddenly troubled. “This is all very interesting,” he said, “but don’t let Elaine talk you into anything dangerous.” His hand was on her thigh again, communicating some message she couldn’t decipher. “Elaine has her own best interests at heart.”

“Fuck off, Sebastian,” Elaine said.

Sue was mildly scandalized. More so because Sebastian just nodded and put that Buddha-like smile back on his face.

“I might see something like that,” Sue said. “Or I might not.”

“If you do—”

“Elaine, Elaine,” Sebastian said. “Don’t push your luck.”

“I’ll think about it,” Sue said. “Okay? Good enough? Can we talk about something else now?”

They had drained their carafe of coffee and the waitress hadn’t come around with more. Elaine began shrugging her shoulders into her jacket. Sebastian said, “By the way, I was asked to give a little presentation at the community center for one of Ari’s social nights.”

“Hawking your book?” Elaine asked.

“In a way. Ari’s having a hard time filling up those Saturday slots. He’ll probably ask you next.”

Sue enjoyed seeing Elaine flinch from this proposition. “Thanks, but I have better things to do.”

“I’ll let you tell Ari that yourself.”

“I’ll put it in writing if he likes.”

Sebastian excused himself and wandered off to the men’s room. After an awkward silence Sue, still miffed, said, “Maybe you don’t like Sebastian’s writing, but he deserves a little respect.”

“Have you read his book?”

“Yes.”

“Have you really? What’s it about?”

Sue found herself blushing. “It’s about the quantum vacuum. The quantum vacuum as a medium for, uh, a kind of intelligence…” And how what we call human consciousness is actually our ability to tap a little tiny bit of that universal mind. But she couldn’t begin to say that to Elaine. She already felt painfully foolish.

“No,” Elaine said. “Sorry, wrong. It’s about telling people something simplistic and reassuring, dressed up in pseudoscientific bullshit. It’s about a semiretired academic making pots of money and doing it in the most cynical way possible. Oh—”

Sebastian had crept up behind her, and judging by his expression he had heard every word. “Honestly, Elaine, that’s too much.”

“Don’t get all huffy, Sebastian. Have your publishers tapped you for a sequel yet? What are you calling it? The Quantum Vacuum Twelve-Step Program? Financial Security the Quantum Vacuum Way?”

Sebastian opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. He didn’t look angry, Sue thought. He looked hurt.

“Honestly,” he repeated.

Elaine stood up, buttoning her jacket. “You kids have fun.” She hesitated, then turned back and put a hand on Sue’s shoulder. “Okay, I know I’m an awful bitch. I’m sorry. Thank you for putting up with me. I do appreciate what you said about Ray.”

Sue shrugged — she couldn’t think of an answer.

Sebastian was quiet during the drive back. Almost sulking. She couldn’t wait to get home and roll him a joint.

Sixteen

Chris found Marguerite in her upstairs office, shouting into her pocket phone. The direct feed from the Eye filled the wall monitor.

The image looked bad to Chris. It looked degraded — streaked with spurious lines and fleeting white pinpricks. Worse, the Subject was struggling through some intensely bad weather, ribbons of ochre and rust, a dust storm so fierce it threatened to obscure him altogether.

“No,” Marguerite was saying. “I don’t care what they’re saying at the Plaza. Come on, Charlie, you know what this means! No! I’ll be there. Soon.” She saw Chris and added, “Fifteen minutes.”

The original high-altitude mapping of UMa47/E had shown seasonal dust storms of almost Martian intensity, primarily in the southern hemisphere. This one must be anomalous, Chris thought, since Subject had not journeyed more than a hundred miles from Lobsterville, and Lobsterville was well north of the equator. Or maybe it was perfectly natural, part of some long-term cycle early surveillance had missed.

Subject pushed into the opaque air, torso bent forward. His image faded, clarified, faded again. “Charlie’s afraid they’ll lose him altogether,” Marguerite said. “I’m going out to the Eye.”

Chris followed her downstairs. Tess was in the living room watching Blind Lake TV’s Saturday matinee. An animated feature: rabbits with huge eyeglasses growing carrots in medieval beakers and alembics. Her head bounced gently and rhythmically against the sofa.

“You said we could go sledding,” Tess called out.

“Honey, it’s a work emergency. I told you. Chris will look after you, ‘kay?”

“I suppose I could take her sledding,” Chris said. “It’s a long walk, though.”

“Really?” Tess asked. “Can we?”

Marguerite pursed her lips. “I guess, but I don’t want you hiking there and back. Mrs. Colangelo said we could borrow her car if we needed it — Chris can look into that.”

He promised he’d ask. Tess was mollified, and Marguerite shrugged into her winter jacket. “If I’m not back by dinner there’s food in the freezer. Be creative.”

“How serious is the problem?”

“It took a lot of delicate work training the O/BECs to fix on a single individual. If we lose him in the storm we might not get him back. Worse, there’s a lot of signal degradation happening, and Charlie doesn’t know what’s causing it.”

“You think you can help?”

“Not with the engineering. But there are people in the Plaza who’d love to use this as an opportunity to pull back from the Subject. I don’t want that to happen. I’m running interference.”

“Good luck.”

“Thank you. And thanks for keeping Tess company. One way or another, I’ll be back before her bedtime.”

She hurried out the door.

In the interest of journalistic brotherhood, Chris called Elaine and told her about the developing crisis at the Eye. She said she’d find out what she could. “Things are getting strange,” she said. “I’m getting that batten-down-the-hatches feeling.”

He had to admit he was a little skittish himself. Almost four months of quarantine now, and no matter how you tried to ignore it or rationalize it, that meant something monumentally bad was happening — maybe outside, maybe inside. Something bad, something dangerous, something hidden that would eventually come screaming into the light.

Mrs. Colangelo managed the clothing store in the Blind Lake retail mall and she had been effectively retired since the lockdown. She let him borrow her little lime-green Marconi roadster, and Tess loaded her old-fashioned wooden sled into the back. Most kids used inner tubes or plastic skids, Tess explained, but she’d spotted this sled (actually a toboggan, she insisted) in a thrift shop and begged her mother to buy it. This was back at Crossbank, which was hillier than Blind Lake but heavily wooded — at least out here she wouldn’t run into any trees.

Tess was still something of a cipher to Chris. She reminded him of his sister Portia in many (maybe too many) ways — her willfulness, her unpredictability, her spiky moods. But Porry had been a great talker, especially when she picked up some new enthusiasm. Tess spoke only sporadically.

Tess was silent for the first five minutes of the ride, but apparently she had also been thinking of Portia: “Did your sister ever go sledding?” she asked.

Since the window episode Tess had come to him several times for Porry stories. Tess, an only child, seemed fascinated by the idea of Chris as an older brother — something less than a parent, more than a friend. She seemed to think Portia had led an enchanted existence. Not true. Portia was buried in a rainy Seattle cemetery, victim of the fatal disease of adulthood in its most acute form. He would not, of course, say that to Tess. “It didn’t snow much where we grew up. The closest thing to sledding we did was snow-tubing at a little resort up in the mountains.”

“Did Portia like that?”

“Not at first. At first she was pretty scared. But after a couple of runs she decided it was fun.”

“I think she liked it,” Tess said, “except that she got cold.”

“That’s right, she didn’t like the cold very much.”

Elaine had accused him of “setting up housekeeping” at Marguerite’s. He wondered if that was true. Over the last several weeks he had become very much a part of Marguerite and Tessa Hauser’s universe, almost in spite of himself. No, that was wrong; not in spite of himself; he had taken every step willingly. But the steps had added up to an unplanned journey.

He had yet to go to bed with Marguerite, but according to every signal he could read that was where this trip was taking him. And it wasn’t a neat little temporary bargain, a one-night stand or even an explicit lockdown romance, the exchange of warmth for warmth and no promises made or implied. The stakes were much, much higher.

Did he want that?

He liked Marguerite, he liked everything about Marguerite. Every late-night conversation — and lately there had been many — had drawn him closer to her. She was a generous storyteller. She talked freely about her childhood (she had lived with her father in a Presbyterian rectory in a little rail-stop bedroom suburb outside of Cincinnati, a seventy-year-old house with a wooden porch); about her work; about Tess; less often and more reluctantly, about her marriage. Nothing in her somewhat sheltered life had prepared her for Ray, who had professed to love her but had only wanted to furnish his life with a woman in the conventional manner and for whom cruelty was the fuck of last resort. Such men were abundant on the earth, but Marguerite had never run into one. What followed had been a nine-year nightmare of enlightenment.

And what did she see in Chris? Not exactly the anti-Ray, but maybe a more benevolent vision of masculinity, someone she could confide in, someone she could lean against without fear of retribution; and he was flattered by that, but it was an uninformed opinion. Not that he was incapable of love. He had loved his work, he had loved his family, he had loved his sister Portia, but the things he loved tended to come to pieces in his hands, torn apart by his clumsy desire to protect them.

He would never hurt her the way Ray had hurt her, but in the long term he might prove just as dangerous.

Tess had told him where the best sledding was, along the low hills a quarter mile past Eyeball Alley, where the access road ended in a paved cul-de-sac. The Alley’s cooling towers came up on the left side of the road, dark sentinels in a white landscape. Tess broke the silence again: “Did Portia have problems at school?”

“Sure she did. Everybody does, now and then.”

“I hate Physical Education.”

“I could never climb that rope,” Chris said.

“We don’t do ropes yet. But we have to wear stupid gym clothes. Did Portia ever have nightmares?”

“Sometimes.”

“What were her nightmares like?”

“Well — she didn’t like to talk about them, Tess, and I promised not to tell.”

Tess looked at him appraisingly. She was deciding whether to trust him, Chris thought. Tess dispensed her trust cautiously. Life had taught her that not every grown-up was trustworthy — a hard lesson, but worth learning.

But if he was still keeping Portia’s secrets, he might keep Tessa’s. “Did my mom tell you about Mirror Girl?”

“Nope. Who’s Mirror Girl?”

“That’s what’s wrong with me.” Another sidelong look. “You knew something was wrong with me, right?”

“I did wonder a little, that night we had to go to the clinic.”

“I see her in mirrors. That’s why I call her Mirror Girl.” She paused. “I saw her in the window that night. She took me by surprise. I guess I got angry.”

Chris sensed the gravity of the confession. He was flattered Tess had raised the subject with him.

He eased up on the accelerator, eking out a little more talk time.

“She looks like me but she isn’t me. That’s what nobody understands. So what do you think? Am I crazy?”

“You don’t strike me as crazy.”

“I don’t talk about it because people think I’m nuts. Maybe I am.”

“Stuff happens we don’t understand. That doesn’t make you nuts.”

“How come nobody else can see her?”

“I don’t know. What does she want?”

Tess shrugged her shoulders irritably. It was a question she must have been asked too often. “She doesn’t say.”

“Does she talk?”

“Not in words. I think she just wants me to pay attention to things. I think she can’t pay attention unless I’m paying attention — does that make any sense? But that’s just what I think. It’s only a theory.”

“Portia talked to her toys sometimes.”

“It’s not like that. That’s a kid thing.” She rolled her eyes. “Edie Jerundt talks to her toys.”

Better not to press. It was enough that Tess had opened up to him. He drove in silence to the end of the road, to the turnaround where a half dozen other cars were parked.

The steepest slope of the snow-white hill was speckled with sledders and boarders and indulgent parents.

“Lot of airplanes around today,” Tess said, climbing out of the car.

Chris glanced at the sky but saw nothing more than a silver speck on the far horizon. Another cryptic Tess remark. “Will you help me pull the sled up?” she asked.

“Sure thing.”

“Ride down with me?”

“If you want. But I have to warn you, I haven’t been on a sled for years.”

“You said you didn’t have a sled. You said you just snow-tubed.”

“I mean, I haven’t slid down a hill for years.”

“Since Portia was little?”

“Right.”

“Well, come on then,” Tess said.

Tess was aware, all this time, of the growing and insistent presence of Mirror Girl.

Mirror Girl slid through every reflective surface like a slippery ghost. Mirror Girl wavered across the windows and the shiny blue hood and side panels of the car. Tess was even aware of the sparse few snowflakes falling from a high gray sky. She had studied snowflakes in science class: they were an example of symmetry. Ice, she thought, like glass, folded in mirror angles. She imagined Mirror Girl in every invisible facet of the falling snow.

In fact Tess felt a little ill. Mirror Girl pressed in on her like a heavy, airless fog, until she could hardly think of anything else. Maybe she’d said too much to Chris. Saying the name, Mirror Girl, was probably a bad idea. Maybe Mirror Girl didn’t like to be talked about.

But Tess had been looking forward to this sledding expedition all week and she wasn’t about to let Mirror Girl screw it up.

She allowed Chris to pull the sled to the top of the hill. There was a gentle path up the long part of the hill and then a steep slope for riding back down. Tess was a little breathless at the top, but she liked the view. Funny how such a little hill let you see so much more than you could from down below. Here were the dark towers of Eyeball Alley, there the white squares of Hubble Plaza and the stores and houses clustered around it. The roads looked like roads in a roadmap, sharp and precise. The road to Constance cut through the south gate and into the snow-flecked distance like a line etched in white metal. Wind plucked at Tessa’s hair, and she took her snow hat out of her jacket pocket and pulled it over her head almost down to her eyes.

She closed her eyes and saw airplanes. Why airplanes? Mirror Girl was very concerned about airplanes right now.

About a little plane with propellors and a bigger jet dropping down toward it like a hunting bird. Where? The sky was too cloudy to reveal much, though the clouds themselves were thin and high. The buzz in her ears might be an airplane, Tess thought, or it might just be the wind fluttering the collar of her jacket or her own blood pulsing in her ears.

Her fingers tingled but her body was warm under her clothes. I’m hot, I’m cold, she thought.

“Tess?” Chris said. “You okay?”

Usually when people asked her that question it meant she was doing something peculiar. Standing too still or staring too hard. But why did people care? What was so strange about just standing here thinking?

Maybe this was what Mirror Girl was seeing or wanted Tess to see: the big plane and the little one. The little one was bright yellow and had numbers on its wings but no military markings. It was bigger than the kind of airplane that dusted crops, but not by much. It was very clear to her when she closed her eyes but confusing, too, as if she were looking at the airplane from too many angles at once. It was a faceted airplane, a kaleidoscope airplane, an airplane in a mirror of many angles.

Chris handed her the rope of the sled. Tess grasped the rope in her hand and tried to focus on the task of sledding — it suddenly seemed more like a chore than fun. Snow crunched and complained under the weight of the wooden runners. Somewhere down the slope, people laughed. Then the airplanes distracted her again. Not just the little airplane but the bigger one too, the jet, which was still far away but stalked the small plane doggedly, and then—

Tess dropped the rope. The sled skittered away down the hill, vacant, before Chris could catch it.

Chris knelt in front of her. “Tess, what is it? What’s wrong?”

She saw his big worried eyes but couldn’t answer. The jet had come miles closer in just a few seconds. And now something flew away from the jet — it was a missile, Tess supposed — and it flashed between the two aircraft like a reflection in a fractured crystal.

Why couldn’t anyone else see it? Why were the people on the hill still laughing and sliding? Were they confused by the snow, by its millions-upon-millions of mirrors? “Maybe we’d better get you home,” Chris said, obviously not seeing it either. Tess wanted to point. She raised her arm; she extended her finger; her finger followed the invisible arc of the missile, a line like an infinitely thin pencil stroke drawn across the white paper of the sky; she said, “There—”

But then everybody heard the explosion.

Charlie Grogan met Marguerite outside his office at the Alley. “Come on down to Control,” he said tersely. “It’s only getting freakier.”

Charlie was obviously tense as they rode the elevator. The Eye was deep in the earth, an irony Marguerite had once appreciated. The jewel is in the lotus; the Eye is in the earth. The better to see you with, my dear. It didn’t seem particularly funny right now. “I can handle any call from the Plaza,” she said, “unless it’s Ray himself. If Ray calls and pulls rank, all I can do is pretend the phone is broken.”

“Frankly, the Plaza’s not our biggest problem right now. We had to call in both tech shifts. They yanked and replaced a couple of the interface units. Worse,” Charlie said, “and I know you don’t want to hear this, we’re having big trouble with the O/BECs.”

The O/BECs. Even Charlie had been known to call them “a keep-your-fingers-crossed technology.” Marguerite had very little background in quantum computing; she didn’t pretend to understand the intricacies of the O/BEC platens.

Hooking up a collection of O/BECs in a self-evolving “organic” array was an experiment that should never have worked, in her opinion. The results were unpredictable and spooky, and she remembered what Chris had said (or quoted): It could end at any time. It could, yes it could. And maybe this was the time.

But, God, no, she thought, not now, not when they were on the brink of a profounder knowledge, not when the Subject was in mortal danger.

The control-and-interface room was more crowded than Marguerite had ever seen it. Tech people clustered around the system monitors, a few of them arguing heatedly. She was dismayed to see that the big main screen, the live feed, was utterly blank. “Charlie, what happened?”

He shrugged. “Loss of intelligibility. Temporary, we think. It’s an I/O hang-up, not a complete system failure.”

“We lost the Subject?”

“No, like I said, it’s an interface thing. The Eye is still watching him, but we’re having trouble talking to the Eye.” And he gave a half-shrug that meant, At least that’s what we think.

“Has this happened before?”

“Not like this, no.”

“But you can fix it?”

He hesitated. “Probably,” he said at last.

“There was still an image twenty minutes ago. What was he doing when you lost him?”

“The Subject? He was hunkered down behind some kind of obstruction when everything grayed out.”

“You think the storm is causing this?”

“Marguerite, nobody knows. We don’t understand a fraction of what the O/BECs do. They can look through stone walls; a sandstorm shouldn’t be a problem. But visibility is severely compromised, so maybe the Eye has to work harder to keep a fix on a moving target, maybe that’s what we’re dealing with here. All we can do is treat the peripheral problems as they come up. Keep the temperature in spec, keep the quantum wells stable.” He closed his eyes and ran a hand over his stub-bled scalp.

This is what we don’t like to acknowledge, Marguerite thought: that we’re using a technology we don’t understand. A “dissipative structure” capable of growing its own complexity — capable of growing well beyond our intellectual grasp of it. Not really a machine but a process inside a machine, evolution in miniature, in its way a new form of life. All we ever did was trigger it. Trigger it, and bend it to our purposes.

Made ourselves the only species with an eye more complex than our own brains.

The overhead lights flickered and dimmed. Voltage-bus monitors bleated shrill alarms.

“Please, Charlie,” Marguerite said. “Don’t let him slip away.”

Chris was following Tessa’s abrupt gesture when he heard the explosion.

It wasn’t an especially loud sound, not much louder than the sound of a slammed tailgate, but weightier, full of rolling undertones like thunder. He straightened up and searched the sky. So did the other sledders, anyone who wasn’t already skimming down the slope.

At first he saw an expanding ring of smoke, faint against a background of high cloud and patchwork blue sky… then the airplane itself, distant and falling in a skewed curve toward the earth.

Falling, but not helplessly. The pilot seemed to be struggling for control. It was a small plane, a private plane, canary yellow, nothing military; Chris saw it in silhouette as it flew briefly level, parallel to the road from Blind Lake and maybe a couple hundred feet off the ground. Coming closer, he realized. Maybe trying to use the road as a landing strip.

Then the aircraft faltered again, veering wildly and ejecting a gout of black smoke.

Coming in badly, and coming in close. “Get down,” he told Tess. “Down on the ground. Now.”

The girl remained rigid, motionless, staring. Chris pushed her back into the snow and covered her with his body. Some of the sledders began to scream. Apart from that, the silence of the afternoon had become eerie: the plane’s engines had cut out. It should make more noise, Chris thought. All that falling metal.

It touched ground at the north end of the parking circle, nosing up at the last minute before it collided with a bright red Ford van, translating all that kinetic energy into a fan of red and yellow debris that cut trails and craters into the fallen snow. Tessa’s body trembled at the sound. The shrapnel traveled east and away from the sledding hill, and it was still coming down in a patter of snow-muted thunks when the wreckage burst into flame.

Chris pulled Tess into a sitting position.

She sat up as if catatonic, arms rigid at her sides. She stared but didn’t blink.

“Tess,” he said, “listen to me. I have to help, but I want you to stay here. Button up if you get cold, look for another adult if you need help, otherwise wait for me, okay?”

“I guess.”

“Wait for me.”

“Wait for you,” she said dully.

He didn’t like the way she looked or sounded, but she wasn’t physically injured and there might be survivors in the burning wreckage. Chris gave her what he hoped was a reassuring hug and then bounded down the slope, his feet gouging imperfections into snow compressed and made slick by the sledders.

He reached the burning airplane along with three other adults, two men and a woman, presumably all parents who had come sledding with their children. He advanced as close to the fire as he dared, the heat of it prickling the skin of his face and boiling snow into the air. The paved lot showed through the snow in watery black patches. He could see enough of the van — its roof had been sheared off — to know there was no one inside. The small plane was another matter. Behind its furiously cooking engine a human shape struggled against the clouded glass of the cabin door.

Chris peeled off his cloth jacket and wrapped it around his right hand.

Later, Marguerite would tell him he acted “heroically.” Maybe so. It didn’t feel that way. What it felt like was the obvious next thing to do. He might not have attempted it if the fire had not been relatively contained, if the plane had been heavier with fuel. But he didn’t recall doing any risk-benefit calculation. There was only the job at hand.

He felt the heat on his face, prickling his skin, gusts of cold air behind him angling toward the flames. The figure faintly visible in the crumpled cabin twitched, then stopped moving altogether. The door was hot even through the folds of his jacket. It was slightly ajar but stuck in its frame. Chris fumbled at it futilely, backed away to catch a breath of cooler air, then kicked hard at the accordioned aluminum. Once, twice, three times, until it bent far enough that he was able to brace himself, grasp the door in the folds of his now-smoldering jacket, and apply some leverage.

The pilot spilled onto the damp ground like a bag of meat. His face was hairless and blackened where it wasn’t a shocking, charred red. He wore a pair of aviator glasses, one lens missing and the other lens crazed. But he was breathing. His chest lifted and fell in cresting waves.

The men behind him dashed close enough to pull the pilot away from the wreckage. Chris found himself hesitating pointlessly. Was there something more he was supposed to do? The heat had made him dizzy.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, felt himself tugged away from the flames. Just a few feet away the air seemed dramatically colder, far colder than it had been on the hillside with Tess. He staggered away, then sat on the hood of an undamaged automobile and let his head droop. Someone brought him a bottle of water. He drained it almost at once, though that made him feel sicker. He heard an ambulance screaming down the road from Blind Lake.

Tess, he thought. Tess on the hillside.

How much time had passed? He looked for her on the slope. Everyone had come down, they had all gathered in the parking lot a safe distance from the burning plane. Everyone but Tess. He’d told her to stay put, and she had taken him literally. He called to her, but she was too far away to hear.

Wearily, he hiked back up the slope. Tess was standing immobile, staring at the wreckage. She didn’t acknowledge him when he called to her. Not good. She was in some kind of shock, Chris supposed.

He knelt in front of her, put his face in her line of vision and his hands on her small shoulders. “Tess,” he said. “Tess, are you all right?”

At first she didn’t react. Then she trembled. Her body shook. She blinked and opened her mouth soundlessly.

“We need to get you someplace warm,” he said.

She leaned into him and started to cry.

Marguerite lost track of Charlie in the noisy chaos of the control room.

For a fraction of a second there was utter blackness — complete electrical failure. Then the lights flickered back and the room was full of voices. Marguerite found an unoccupied corner and stayed out of the way. There was nothing she could do to help and she knew better than to interfere.

Something bad had happened, something she didn’t understand, something that had driven the engineers into a frenzy of activity. She focused on the big wall screen, the direct feed from the Eye, still alarmingly blank. It could end at any time.

Her phone buzzed. She ignored it. She caught sight of Charlie and watched him orbit the room, coordinating activity. Since she was helpless — or at least unable to help — she began to feel a presentiment of loss. Loss of intelligibility. Loss of orientation. Loss of vision. Loss of the Subject, with whom she had struggled across a desert to the heart of a sandstorm. Periodically, the wall screen erupted into stochastic cascades of color. Marguerite stared, trying but failing to extract an image. No signal, just noise. Only noise.

A few more green lights, she heard someone say. Was that good? Apparently so. Here came Charlie, and he wasn’t smiling, but the expression on his face wasn’t as grave as it had been — how long ago? An hour?

“We’re getting a little something back,” he said.

“An image?”

“Maybe.”

“We’re still fixed on the Subject?”

“Just watch, Marguerite.”

She focused again on the screen, which had begun to fill with new light. Tiny digital mosaics, assembled in the unfathomable depths of the O/BEC platens. White faded to tawny brown. The desert. We’re back, Marguerite thought, and a tingle of relief flowed up her spine — but where was the Subject, and what was this blank emptiness?

“Sand,” she murmured. Fine silicate grains undisturbed by wind. The storm must have passed. But the sand wasn’t still. The sand mounded and slid this way and that.

Subject lifted himself out of a cloak of sand. He had been buried by the wind, but he was alive. He pulled himself up by his manipulating arms, then stood, unsteadily, in the startling sunlight. The virtual camera rose with him. Behind him Marguerite saw the sand squall where it had retreated to the horizon, trailing black vortices like mares’ tails.

All around the Subject were lines and angles of stone. Old stone columns and pyramidal structures and sand-scoured foundations. The ruins of a city.