Blind Lake

Seventeen

Coming into February now, and it was obvious to Marguerite as she drove home from her Saturday ration trip what a different place the Lake had become.

Superficially, nothing had changed. The snowplows still emerged from the back bays of the retail mall whenever it snowed, and they kept the streets passably clear. Lights still burned in windows at night. Everybody was warm and no one was hungry.

But there was a shabbiness about the town, too, an unwashed quality. There were no outside contractors to repair winter potholes or replace the shingles that had been torn from so many roofs in the post-Christmas storms. Garbage was collected on the regular schedule but it couldn’t be trucked off-site — the sanitation people had set up a temporary dump at the western extremity of the lake, near the perimeter fence and as far as possible from the town and the preserved wetlands; still, the stench drifted with the wind like an augur of decay, and on especially breezy days she had seen crumpled papers and food wrappers wheeling along the Mallway like tumbleweeds. The question was so commonplace no one bothered to ask it anymore: when will it end?

Because it could end at any time.

Tess had come back from the site of the airplane crash weak and dazed. Marguerite had wrapped her up and fed her hot soup and put her to bed for the night — Marguerite herself hadn’t slept, but Tess had, and in the morning she had seemed herself again. Seemed was the key word. Between Christmas and New Year’s Tess had not so much as mentioned Mirror Girl; there had been no provocative episodes; but Marguerite had recognized the worry creases on Tessa’s face and had sensed in her daughter’s silences something weightier than her customary shyness.

She had been extremely reluctant to send Tess for her weeklong visit with Ray, but there was no way around it. Had she objected, Ray would almost certainly have sent one of his rent-a-cop security guys around to collect Tess by force. So, with deep unease, Marguerite had helped her daughter pack her rucksack of treasured possessions and ushered her out the door as soon as Ray pulled up at the curb in his little scarab-colored automobile.

Ray had remained a silhouette in the shaded cab of the car, unwilling to show her his face. He looked indistinct, Marguerite thought, like a fading memory. She watched Tess greet him with a cheeriness that struck her as either false or heartbreakingly naive.

The only upside of this was that during the next week she would have more free time for Chris.

She pulled into the driveway, thinking of him.

Chris. He had made a powerful impression on her, with his wounded eyes and his obvious courage. Not to mention the way he touched her, like a man stepping into a spring of warm water, testing the heat before he gave himself up to it. Good Chris. Scary Chris.

Scary because having a man in the house — being intimate with a man — provoked unwelcome memories of Ray, if only by contrast. The smell of aftershave in the bathroom, a man’s pants abandoned on the bedroom floor, male warmth lingering in the crevices of the bed… with Ray all these things had come to seem loathsome, as objectionable as a bruise. But with Chris it was just the opposite. Yesterday she had found herself not only volunteering to wash his clothes but furtively inhaling the smell of him from an undershirt before she committed it to the washing machine. How ridiculously schoolgirlish, Marguerite thought. How very dangerously infatuated she was with this man.

She supposed it was at least therapeutic, like draining venom from a snakebite.

People talked about “lockdown romances.” Was this a lockdown romance? Marguerite’s experience was limited. Ray had been not only her first husband but her first lover. Marguerite had been, like Tess, one of those awkward girls at school: bright but gawky, not especially pretty, intimidated into silence in any social setting. When boys were like that they were called “geeks,” but at least they seemed able to take solace in the company of others like themselves. Marguerite had never made real friends of either sex, at least not until she was in graduate school. There, at least, she had found colleagues, people who respected her talent, people who liked her for her ideas, some of whom had progressed to the status of friends.

Maybe that was why she had been so impressed with Ray when Ray began to take an explicit interest in her. Ray had been ten years her senior, doing cutting-edge astrophysical work back when she was still struggling to find a way into Crossbank. He had been blunt in his opinions but flattering toward Marguerite, and he had obviously been sizing her up for marriage from the beginning. What Marguerite had not learned was that for some men marriage is a license to drop their masks and show their true and terrible faces. Nor was this merely a figure of speech: it seemed to Marguerite that his face had actually changed, that he had shed the gentle and indulgent Ray of their engagement as efficiently as a snake sheds its skin.

Clearly, she had been a lousy judge of character.

So what did that make Chris? A lockdown romance? A potential second father for Tess? Or something in between?

And how could she even begin to construct an idea of the future, when even the possibility of a future could end at any time?

Chris had been working in his basement study, but he came up the stairs when he heard her puttering around the kitchen and said, “Are you busy?”

Well, that was an interesting question. It was Saturday. She wasn’t obliged to work. But what was work, what wasn’t work? For months she had divided her attention between Tess and the Subject, and now Chris. Today she’d planned to catch up on her notes and keep an eye on the direct feed. The Subject’s odyssey continued, though the sandstorm crisis had passed and the ruined city was now far behind him. He had left the road; he was traveling through empty desert; his physical condition had changed in troublesome ways; but nothing absolutely critical was happening, at least not at the moment. “What did you have in mind?”

“The pilot I pulled out of the wreck is stabilized over at the clinic. I thought I’d pay him a visit.”

“Is he awake?” Marguerite had heard the man was in a coma.

“Not yet.”

“So what’s the point of visiting?”

“Sometimes you just want to touch base.”

Back in the car, then, back on the road with Chris at the wheel, back through the bright, cold February afternoon and the tumbling windblown trash. “How could you possibly owe him anything? You saved his life.”

“For better or worse.”

“How could it be worse?”

“He’s severely burned. When he wakes up he’s going to be in a world of pain. Not only that — I’m sure Ray and his buddies would love to interrogate him.”

That was true. Nobody knew why the small plane had been flying over Blind Lake or what the pilot had hoped to accomplish by violating an enforced no-fly zone. But the incident had turned up the anxiety level in town more than a notch. In the past couple of weeks there had been three more attempts to breach the perimeter fence from inside, all by individuals: a day worker, a student, and a junior analyst. All three had been killed by pocket drones, though the analyst had made it a good fifty or sixty yards wearing a rigged thermal jacket to disguise his infrared signature.

None of the bodies had been recovered. They would still be there, Marguerite thought, when the snow melted in the spring. Like something left over from a war, burned, frozen, and thawed: biological residue. Vulture bait. Were there vultures in Minnesota?

Everyone was frightened and everyone was desperate to know why the Lake had been quarantined and when the quarantine would end (or, unspeakable thought, whether it would end). So, yes, the pilot would be interrogated, perhaps vigorously, and yes, he would certainly be in pain, despite the clinic’s reserve of neural analgesics. But that didn’t invalidate the act of courage Chris had performed. She felt this in him more than once, his doubts about the consequences of a good act. Maybe his book about Galliano had been a good act, at least from his point of view. A wrong righted. And he had been punished for it. Once burned, twice shy. But it seemed to go deeper than that.

Marguerite didn’t understand how a man as apparently decent as Chris Carmody could be so unsure of himself, when certified bastards like Ray walked around in the glow of their own grim righteousness. A line from a poem she had studied in high school came back to her: The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity…

Chris parked in the nearly vacant clinic parking lot. The solstice was past and the days were getting longer again, but it was still only February and already the watery sun was close to the horizon. He took her hand as they walked to the clinic door.

There was no one at reception, but Chris rang the finger bell and a nurse appeared a moment later. I know this woman, Marguerite thought. This bustling, chubby woman in nursing whites was Amanda Bleiler’s mother, a familiar face from the weekday-morning grade-school drop-off. Someone she knew well enough to wave at. What was her first name? Roberta? Rosetta?

“Marguerite,” the woman said, recognizing her. “And you must be Chris Carmody.” Chris had phoned ahead.

“Rosalie,” she said, the name popping into her head a moment before she pronounced it. “How’s Amanda doing?”

“Well enough, considering.” Considering the lockdown, she meant. Considering that there were dead bodies buried under the snow outside the perimeter fence. Rosalie turned to Chris. “If you want to look in on Mr. Sandoval, that’s okay, I cleared it with Dr. Goldhar, but don’t expect much, okay? And it’ll have to be a quick visit. Couple of minutes tops, all right?”

Rosalie led them up a flight of stairs to the clinic’s second floor, where three small rooms equipped with rudimentary life-support gear punctuated a row of offices and boardrooms.

Not very many years ago, the pilot wouldn’t have survived his injuries. Rosalie explained that he had suffered third-degree burns over a large part of his body and that he had inhaled enough smoke and hot air to seriously damage his lungs. The clinic had fitted him with an alveolar bypass and packed his pulmonary sacs with gel to hasten the healing. As for his skin—

Well, Marguerite thought, he looked ghastly, lying in a white bed in a white room with ebony-white artificial skin stretched over his face like so much damp Kleenex. But this was very nearly state-of-the-art treatment. In less than a month, Rosalie said, he would look almost normal. Almost the way he had looked before the crash.

The most serious injury had been a blow to the head that had not quite cracked his skull but had caused intracranial bleeding that was hard to treat or correct. “We did everything we could,” Rosalie said. “Dr. Goldhar is a really exceptional doctor, considering we don’t have a fully equipped hospital to work with. But the prognosis is iffy. Mr. Sandoval may wake up, he may not.”

Mr. Sandoval, Marguerite thought, trying to take the measure of the man under all this medical apparatus. Probably not a young man. Big paunch pushing up under the blankets. Salt-and-pepper hair where it hadn’t been charred from his skull.

“You called him Mr. Sandoval,” Chris said.

“That’s his name. Adam Sandoval.”

“He’s been unconscious since he got here. How do you know his name?”

“Well…” She looked distressed. “Dr. Goldhar said not to be too free with this information, but you saved his life, right? That was really brave.”

The story had been broadcast on Blind Lake TV, much to Chris’s horror. He had declined an interview, but his reputation had been massively enhanced — not a bad thing, surely, Marguerite would have thought. But maybe Chris, a journalist, felt uncomfortable at the center of a media event, however small-scale.

“What information?” Chris asked.

“He had a wallet and part of a backpack on him. Mostly burned, but we saved enough to read his I.D.”

Chris said — and Marguerite thought she heard a concealed edge in his voice — “Would it be possible to look at his things?”

“Well, I don’t think so… I mean, I should probably talk to Dr. Goldhar first. Won’t this all eventually be police evidence or something?”

“I won’t disturb anything. Just a glance.”

“I’ll vouch for Chris,” Marguerite added. “He’s a good guy.”

“Well — just a peek, maybe. I mean, it’s not like you’re terrorists or anything.” She gave Chris a somber look. “Don’t get me in trouble, that’s all I ask.”

Chris sat with the pilot a while longer. He whispered something Marguerite couldn’t hear. A question, an apology, a prayer.

Then they left Adam Sandoval, whose chest rose and fell with the exhalations of his breathing apparatus in a queerly peaceful rhythm, and Rosalie took them to a small room at the end of the corridor. She unlocked the door with a key attached to a ring on her belt. Stored inside were medical sundries — boxes of suture thread in various gauges, saline bags, bandages and gauze, antiseptics in brown bottles — and, on a foldout desktop, a plastic bag containing Sandoval’s effects. Rosalie opened the bag cautiously and made Chris put on a pair of throwaway surgical gloves before he touched the contents. “In case of fingerprints or I don’t know what.” She seemed to be having second thoughts.

Chris pulled out Sandoval’s wallet, charred, and the items that had been salvaged from it: his cash card, melted beyond utility; an I.D. disc with his digital bona fides, also charred, but bearing the legible name ADAM W. SANDOVAL; his pilot’s license; a photograph of a middle-aged woman with a wide, pleasant smile, the photo three-quarters intact; a receipt from a Pottery Barn in Flint Creek, Colorado; and coupon for a ten-dollar discount at Home and Garden, six months past its expiration date. If Mr. Sandoval was a terrorist, Marguerite thought, he was definitely the domestic variety.

“Please be careful,” Rosalie said, her cheeks flushed.

The items gleaned from his burned backpack were even more sparse. Chris handled them quickly: a fragment of a smartbook, a blackened plastic pen, and a handful of loose, partial pages from a print magazine.

Chris said, “Has anyone else seen this material?”

“Only Dr. Goldhar. I thought maybe we should call Ray Scutter or someone in Administration and tell them about it. Dr. Goldhar said not to. He said it wasn’t worth worrying Ray about all this.”

“Dr. Goldhar is a wise man,” Chris said.

Rosalie checked the corridor again, looking guiltier by the minute. Chris kept his back to her. She didn’t see — but Marguerite did — when Chris picked up one of the magazine pages and slipped it under his jacket.

She wasn’t sure Chris knew she had seen him take the page and she didn’t mention it during the drive back. What he had done was probably some sort of crime. Did that make her an accomplice?

He didn’t say much in the car. But she was sure his intent had been journalistic, not criminal. All he had taken, after all, was a scrap of singed paper.

Several times she got up enough nerve to ask him about it, several times she refrained. The sun had set and it was almost dinnertime when they reached the house. Chris had promised to cook tonight. He was an enthusiastic if not especially talented cook. His stir-fries were a mixed blessing, and he complained that the siege rations didn’t include lemongrass or coriander, but—

“There’s a car in the driveway,” Chris said.

She recognized it instantly. The car was obscure in the wintery dusk, black against the asphalt and the shadow of the willow, but she knew at once it was Ray’s.

Eighteen

“Stay in the car,” she told Chris. “Let me talk him out.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“I lived with him for five years. I know the drill.”

“Marguerite, he crossed a line. He came to your house. Unless you gave him a key, he broke in.”

“He must have used Tessa’s key. Maybe she’s with him.”

“The point is, when people go this far beyond the boundaries it starts to get serious. You could get hurt.”

“You don’t know him. Just give me a few minutes, all right? If I need you, I’ll scream.”

Not funny, she told herself. Chris obviously didn’t find it funny, either. She put her hand on his knee. “Five minutes, okay?”

“You’re telling me to sit in the car?”

“Sit in the car, walk around the block, anything you want, but it’ll be easier to get rid of him if you’re not there putting his back up.”

She didn’t wait for him to answer. She climbed out of the car and walked resolutely to the front door of her home, more angry than frightened. Fucking Ray. Chris didn’t understand how Ray operated. Ray wasn’t there to beat her up. Ray had always aimed at humiliation by other means.

Inside — the living room lights were blazing — she called out Tessa’s name. If Ray had brought Tess there might be some excuse for this.

But Tess didn’t answer. Neither did Ray. Fuming, she checked the kitchen, the dining room. Empty. He must be upstairs, then. Lights were burning in every room in the house.

She found him in her office in the spare bedroom. Ray sat in her swivel chair, shoes on her desk, watching the Subject cross a waterless graben under a noonday sun. He looked up casually when she cleared her throat. “Ah,” he said. “Here you are.”

In the diffuse light of the wall screen Ray looked like a chinless Napoleon, ridiculously imperial. “Ray,” she said levelly, “is Tess in the house?”

“Certainly not. That’s what we need to talk about. Tessa’s been telling me about some of the things that go on here.”

“Don’t start. I really, really don’t want to hear it. Just leave, Ray. This isn’t your house and you have no right to be here.”

“Before we start talking about rights, are you aware that your daughter was left in the snow for almost an hour while your boyfriend played hero last week? She’s lucky she doesn’t have frostbite.”

“We can talk about this some other time. Go, Raymond.”

“Come on, Marguerite. Just drop the bullshit about ‘my house, my rights.’ We both know you’ve been systematically ignoring Tess. We both know she’s having serious psychological problems as a result of that.”

“I won’t discuss this.”

“I’m not here to fucking discuss it. I’m here to tell you how it’s going to be. I can’t in good conscience continue to allow my daughter to visit with you if you’re not willing to provide her with appropriate care.”

“Ray, we have an agreement—”

“We have a tentative agreement written under radically different circumstances. If I could take it to court, believe me, I would. That’s not possible because of the lockdown. So I have to do what I think is right.”

“You can’t just keep her,” Marguerite said. But what if he tried? What if he refused to let Tess come home? There was no family court in Blind Lake, no real police she could call on for help.

“Don’t dictate to me. Tess is in my care and I have to make the decisions I think are best for her.”

It was his smug, oily certainty that infuriated her. Ray had mastered the art of speaking as if he were the only adult on the planet and everyone else was weak, stupid, or insolent. Under that brittle exterior, of course, was the narcissistic infant determined to have his own way. Neither aspect of his personality was particularly appealing.

“Look,” she said, “this is ridiculous. Whatever’s wrong with Tess, you can’t make it better by coming here and insulting me.”

“I have no interest in your opinion on the subject.”

Without thinking, Marguerite took two steps forward and slapped him. She had never done that before. Her open palm hurt immediately, and even this brief physical contact (the coarseness of a day’s growth of beard, his flabby jowls) made her want to wash her aching hand. Bad move, she thought, very bad move. But she couldn’t help taking a certain pride in Ray’s astonishment.

When she was little Marguerite used to hang out with a neighborhood boy whose family owned a gentle and long-suffering springer spaniel. The boy (his name had also been Raymond, coincidentally) had once spent an hour trying to ride that dog like a horse, laughing at the poor animal’s yelps, until the dog had finally turned on him and taken a bite out of his right-hand thumb. The boy had looked the way Ray did now, astonished and tearful. For a second she wondered whether Ray would start to cry.

But his face reformed on its familiar lines. He stood up.

Oh, shit, Marguerite thought. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

She backed into the hallway. Ray put his hands on her shoulders and shoved her against the wall. Now it was her turn to be surprised.

“You really don’t get it, do you? In the words of the song, Marguerite, you’re not in Kansas anymore.”

A movie, not a song. One of Tessa’s favorites. Ray, of course, didn’t know that.

He pinched her chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I shouldn’t have to tell you how far we all are from that pedestrian little world of divorce counselors and social workers you imagine you’re still living in. Why do you think the Lake is under a quarantine? You quarantine a place because of sickness, Marguerite. It’s that simple. A contagious, deadly sickness. We’re alive on sufferance, and how much longer is that sufferance going to last?”

It could end at any time.

Ray put his face close to hers. His breath smelled like acetone. She tried to turn away but he wouldn’t let her.

“We could all be dead in a month. We could be dead tomorrow. Given that, why should I let you ignore Tess in favor of that freakish thing on the screen, or worse, your new boyfriend?”

“What are you talking about?” Moving her jaw against the pressure of his fingers. Because he sounded like he knew something. Like he had a secret. Ray had always enjoyed knowing something Marguerite didn’t. Almost as much as he hated being wrong.

He gave her a last, almost perfunctory shove — her shoulders connected again with the plaster wall — then stepped back. “You are so fucking naive,” he said.

What Ray didn’t see was the large form of Chris Carmody lumbering down the hallway from the stairs. Marguerite caught sight of him but glanced away quickly so as not to let Ray catch on. Let it happen. For a big man, Chris made very little noise.

Chris put himself between her and Ray and pushed a very startled Ray back against the opposite wall, not gently. Marguerite was terrified — there was real male violence in the air, an actual smell, a locker-room funk — but she was secretly pleased to see Ray’s venomous expression morph back to an incredulous “Oh!” She had wanted to see that look on him for many dry years. It was intoxicating.

“Did you,” Ray stammered when he had sized up the situation, “did you just put your fucking hands on me?”

“I don’t know,” Chris said. “Did you just commit a break-and-enter?”

Now they’ll fight, Marguerite thought, or one of them will back down. Ray made a good show of it. He puffed up like a bantam rooster. “Mind your own fucking business!” But he was talking, not fighting. “I don’t have to go through you to deal with my wife. Do you know who I am?”

“Come on, Ray,” Chris said calmly. “Take it outside, all right?”

Here was something she hadn’t seen from Chris before. Anger, real anger, not Ray’s piss-and-vinegar face-making. He looked like a man preparing to perform some unpleasant task with his fists. She reached out and put a hand on his arm. “Chris—”

Ray seized the opportunity, as she had suspected he might. He stepped back, held up his hands, and began a very Ray-like back-down. “Oh, please. I don’t want to play macho games. I said what I came to say.”

He turned his back and walked away — a little shaky in the knees, she thought.

When he was gone, after she had watched from Tessa’s bedroom window to make sure he drove away in his ugly little black car, what Marguerite felt was not anger or fear but embarrassment. As if Chris had been witness to some shameful part of her life. “I didn’t mean for you to see that.”

“I got tired of waiting.”

“I mean, thank you, but—”

“You don’t have to thank me and you don’t have to apologize.”

She nodded. Her pulse was still racing. “Come on down to the kitchen,” she said. Because it was going to be one of those long, sleepless, adrenaline-charged nights. Maybe this was a habit she had picked up from her father, but where do you a spend a night like that except in the kitchen? Making tea and toast and trying to put your life back in some sort of order.

Ray had said some disturbing things. There was a lot here to think about, and she didn’t want to further embarrass herself by breaking down in front of Chris. So she led Chris to the kitchen and sat him down while she put on the kettle. Chris himself was subdued — in fact, he looked a little mournful. He said, “Was it always like that? You and Ray?”

“Not so bad. Not always. And especially not at first.” How to explain that what she had mistaken for love had turned so quickly into loathing? Her hand still ached where she had slapped him. “Ray’s a pretty good actor. He can be charming when he wants to.”

“I imagine the strain wears on him.”

She smiled. “Apparently. Did you hear much of what he said upstairs?”

Chris shook his head.

“He said he won’t give Tess back.”

“Think he means it?”

“Ordinarily I’d say no. But ordinarily, he wouldn’t even make the threat. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have come here. Back in the real world, Ray was pretty good about respecting legal limits. If only because he didn’t want to leave himself vulnerable. Upstairs, he was talking like somebody with nothing to lose. He was talking about the quarantine. He said we could all be dead in a week.”

“You think he knows something?”

“Either he knows something or he wants me to believe he does. All I can say is, he wouldn’t be dicking around with our custodial arrangements if he thought I’d have legal recourse. I mean, ever.”

Chris was silent for a while, mulling that one over. The kettle whistled. Marguerite focused on making the tea, this calming ritual, two tea bags, a dollop of milk for her cup, none for Chris.

“I guess I never really let myself think about that,” she said. “I want to believe that one day soon they’ll open the gates and restore the data links and somebody in a uniform will apologize to us all and thank us for our patience and beg us not to sue. But I guess it could end another way.” Another deadly way. And, of course, at any time. “Why would they do that to us, Chris? There’s nothing dangerous here. Nothing’s changed since the day before the lockdown. What are they afraid of?”

He smiled humorlessly. “The joke.”

“What joke?”

“There’s an old comedy routine — I forget where I saw it. It’s World War Two and the Brits come up with the ultimate weapon. A joke so funny you die laughing if you hear it. The joke is translated word-by-word into phonetic German. Guys on the front lines are yelling it through bullhorns, and the Nazi troops drop dead in the trenches.”

“Okay… so?”

“It’s the original information virus. An idea or an image capable of driving someone mad. Maybe that’s what the world is afraid of.”

“That’s a dumb idea, and it was retired during the congressional hearings a decade ago.”

“But suppose it happened at Crossbank, or something happened there that looked like it.”

“Crossbank isn’t looking at the same planet. Even if they found something potentially dangerous, how would it affect us?”

“It wouldn’t, unless the problem arose in the O/BECs. That’s all we really have in common with Crossbank, the hardware.”

“Okay, but that’s still ridiculously conjectural. There’s no evidence anything bad happened at Crossbank.”

Marguerite had forgotten about the partial magazine page Chris had stolen from the clinic. He took it out of his jacket pocket and put it on the kitchen table.

“There is now,” he said.

Nineteen

Tess watched television while her father was out. Blind Lake TV was still running through its store of previously downloaded entertainment, mostly old movies and network serials. Tonight they showed an Anglo-Hindi musical with lots of dancing and colorful costumes. But Tess had a hard time paying attention.

She knew her father was acting strangely. He had asked her all kinds of questions about the plane crash and Chris. The only surprising thing was that he had not once mentioned Mirror Girl. Nor had Tess mentioned her; Tess knew better than to raise that subject with him. Back at Crossbank, when her parents were together, they had fought over Mirror Girl more than once. Her father blamed her mother for Mirror Girl’s appearances. Tess couldn’t see how that was supposed to work — her mother and Mirror Girl had nothing in common. But she had learned not to say anything. Intervening in those fights did no good and usually just made her or her mother cry.

Her father didn’t like hearing about Mirror Girl. Lately he didn’t like hearing about her mother or Chris, either. He spent most evenings in the kitchen, talking to himself. Tess ran her own bath those nights. She put herself to bed and read a book until she could sleep.

Tonight she was alone in the house. Tess had made popcorn in the kitchen, cleaned up carefully afterward, and tried to watch the movie. Bombay Destination, it was called. The dancing was good. But she felt the pressure of Mirror Girl’s curiosity behind her eyes. “It’s only dancing,” she said scornfully. But it was unsettling to hear herself talk out loud when there was nobody home. The sound echoed off the walls. Her father’s house seemed too large in his absence, too unnaturally neat, like a model of a house put together for showing-off, not living in. Tess walked restlessly from room to room, turning on lights. The light made her feel better, even though she was certain her father would bawl her out for wasting energy.

He didn’t, though. When he got home he hardly spoke to her, just told her to get ready for bed and then went to the kitchen and made some calls. Upstairs, after her bath, she could still hear his voice down there, talking talking talking. Talking to the phone. Talking to the air. Tess put on her nightgown and took her book to bed, but the words on the page evaded her attention. Eventually she just turned off the light and lay there looking out the window.

Her bedroom window at her father’s house looked south across the main gate and the prairie, but when she was lying down all she could see was the sky. (She had closed her door to make sure no light reflected from the windowpane, turning it into a mirror.) The sky was clear tonight and there was no moon. She could see the stars.

Her mother talked often about the stars. It seemed to Tess that her mother was someone who had fallen in love with the stars. Tess understood that the stars she saw at night were simply other suns very far away and that those other suns often had planets around them. Some stars had strange, evocative names (like Rigel or Sirius) but more often had numbers and letters, like UMa47, like something you might order from a catalog. You couldn’t give a special name to every star because there were more stars than you could see with the naked eye, billions more. Not every star had planets, and only a few had planets anything like Earth. Even so, there might be lots of Earthlike planets.

These thoughts interested Mirror Girl intensely, but Tess ignored her wordless presence. Mirror Girl was with her so often now that she threatened to become what Dr. Leinster had always claimed she was: a part of Tessa herself.

Maybe “Mirror Girl” was the wrong name for her. Mirror Girl had indeed first appeared in mirrors, but Tess thought that was because Mirror Girl simply liked to see Tessa’s reflection there, liked to look and see the looker looking back. Reflections, symmetry: that was Mirror Girl’s turf. Things that were reflected or folded or even just very complicated. Mirror Girl felt a kinship with these things, a kind of recognition.

Now Mirror Girl looked through Tessa’s eyes and saw stars in the cold dark night outside the house. Tess thought: should we really call it starlight? Wasn’t it really sunlight? Someone else’s sunlight?

She fell asleep listening to the distant murmur of her father’s voice.

Her father was subdued in the morning. Not that he was ever talkative before morning coffee. He fixed breakfast for Tess, hot oatmeal. There was no brown sugar to put on it, only regular white sugar. She waited to see if he would eat something too. He didn’t, although he twice rummaged through the kitchen cupboards as if he were looking for something he had lost.

He dropped her off early at school. The doors weren’t open yet and the morning air was frigidly cold. Tess spotted Edie Jerundt hanging out by the tetherball pole. Edie Jerundt greeted her neutrally and said, “I have two sweaters on under my winter jacket.”

Tess nodded politely, though she didn’t care how many sweaters Edie Jerundt happened to be wearing. Edie looked cold despite her multiple sweaters. Her nose was red and her eyes were shiny from the sting of the wind.

A couple of older boys passed and made some remarks about “Edie Grunt and Tess the Mess.” Tess ignored them, but Edie didn’t know any better than to gape like a fish, and they laughed at her as they walked away. Mirror Girl was intensely curious about this behavior — she couldn’t tell one person from another and didn’t understand why anyone would make fun of Tess or Edie — but Tess couldn’t explain. The cruelty of boys was a fact to be accepted and dealt with, not analyzed. Tess was sure she wouldn’t have behaved the same way in their place. Though she was sometimes tempted to join in when the other girls made fun of Edie, if only to exempt herself from their attention. (She gave in to this temptation only rarely and was always ashamed of herself afterward.)

“Did you see the movie last night?” Edie asked. One thing that made the lockdown so strange was that there was only one video channel now and everybody had to watch the same shows.

“Some of it,” Tess allowed.

“I really liked it. I want to download the songs sometime.” Edie put her hands at her sides and wagged her body in what she imagined was a Hindi dance style. Tess could hear the boys snickering from yards away.

“I wish I had ankle bracelets,” Edie confided.

Tess thought Edie Jerundt in ankle bracelets would look like a frog in a wedding dress, but that was a mean thought and she didn’t say it.

Mirror Girl was bothering her again. Mirror Girl wanted her to look at the distant cooling towers of Eyeball Alley.

But what was so interesting about that?

“Tess?” Edie said. “Are you even listening to me?”

“Sorry,” Tess said automatically.

“God, you’re so weird,” Edie said.

All that morning, Tessa’s attention was drawn to the towers. She could see them from the window of the classroom, off across the snowbound empty fields. Crows swirled through the sky. They lived here even in winter. Lately they had multiplied, or so it seemed to Tess, perhaps because they were fattening on the garbage tip west of town. But they didn’t perch on the tall, tapered cooling towers. The cooling towers were there to conduct away excess heat from the Eye down below. Parts of the Eye needed to be kept very cold, almost as cold as it was possible to be, what Mr. Fleischer had once called “near absolute zero.” Tess rolled that phrase around in her mind. Absolute zero. It made her think of a bitter, windless night. One of those nights so still and cold your boots squeaked against the snow. Absolute zero made it easier to see the stars.

Mirror Girl found these thoughts intensely interesting.

Mr. Fleischer called on her a couple of times. Tess was able to answer his science question (it was Isaac Newton who had discovered the laws of motion), but later, during English, she heard nothing of the question itself, only her name as Mr. Fleischer called it out — “Anyone? Tessa?”

They had been reading David Copperfield. Tess had finished reading the book last week. She tried to imagine what Mr. Fleischer might have asked, but her mind was a blank. She stared at the top of her desk, hoping he’d call on someone else. The seconds ticked by uneasily and Tess felt the weight of Mr. Fleischer’s disappointment. She wrapped a curl of hair around her forefinger.

Annoyingly, Edie Jerundt was waving her hand in the air.

“Edie?” Mr. Fleischer said at last.

“The Industrial Revolution,” Edie said triumphantly.

“Right, it was called the Industrial Revolution…”

Tess returned her attention to the window.

At the end of the morning she told Mr. Fleischer she was going home for lunch. He looked surprised. “That’s a bit of a hike, isn’t it, Tess?”

Yes, but she had hoped Mr. Fleischer didn’t know that. “My dad is picking me up.” A complete and total lie. She was surprised at how easily it came out of her mouth.

“Special occasion?”

Tess shrugged.

Once she was outside, wrapped in her winter jacket (but lacking Edie’s two sweaters), she realized she wasn’t going home and that she wouldn’t be back for the after-lunch session of school. Mirror Girl had brought her here, and Mirror Girl had her own plans for the afternoon.

Since the end of the sandstorm crisis the Eye had performed smoothly and without the slightest glitch.

It was almost unnerving, Charlie Grogan thought. He had walked through Control once this morning and everyone had been relaxed — as much as anyone could relax since the beginning of the lockdown. People actually smiled. Volts and amps were in the safe zone, temperature was stable, all the data was squeaky clean, and even the landscape through which the Subject continued to trudge seemed sunlit and more or less amicable. Charlie, feeling useless in his office, watched his monitor for a while. Subject was visibly worn. His integument was dull and pitted, his yellow coxcomb drooped like a tattered flag. But he walked steadily and with apparent determination through the roadless wilderness. The land was flat and desolate but there was an irregularity on the forward horizon, mountain peaks, a glint of high-altitude snow.

The Subject made slow progress. Sort of like a snail on an empty sidewalk. Bored, and without any maintenance duties for once, Charlie skipped lunch and wandered down to the glass-walled gallery above the O/BEC platens.

The gallery was mainly for show. It was a place you could bring a visiting congressman or European head of state, back before the siege. The gallery overlooked the platens from a secure height. Absent tourists, the gallery was usually empty; Charlie often came here to be alone.

He leaned into the inch-thick inner glass wall and gazed down three stories to the O/BEC platens. Those humbling objects. Thinking themselves into interstellar space. You weren’t supposed to say so, but they did think, that was undeniable, even if (like the theorists) you insisted they merely “explored a finite but immense quantum phase-space of exponentially increasing complexity.” Yeah, merely that. The O/BECs pulled images out of the stars and dreamed them onto a grid of pixels by “exploring quantum phase-space” — word salad, Charlie thought. Show me the wires. What was it actually grabbing, and how? Nobody could say.

What is an angel? That which dances on the head of a pin. What dances on the head of a pin? An angel, of course.

These O/BECs were only the most central part of the vast machine that supported them. All told, the Eye occupied an immense amount of square footage. Standing here in the middle of it, Charlie imagined he could feel the cold ferocity of its thoughts. He closed his eyes. Dream me an explanation.

But the only thing he could see behind his eyelids was a memory of the Subject, the Subject lost in the hinterlands of his dry old planet. Funny how clear the daydream seemed, invested with a clarity at least as vivid as the direct feed on his office monitor. As if he were walking in the Subject’s footsteps. The sunlight was warm and a shade or two bluer than earthly sunlight, but the sky itself was white, charged with dust. A gentle wind kicked up miniature whirlwinds that traveled yards across these alkali-stained flats before they sighed out of existence.

Strange. Charlie leaned into the glass wall and imagined himself reaching out to the Subject. Surely even the O/BECs had never translated an image as distilled, as supernaturally pure, as this. He could, if he chose, count every bump on the Subject’s pebbled skin. He could hear the metronomic steps of the Subject’s dusty, elephantine feet; and he could see the trail the Subject left behind him, two punctuated parallel lines scribed into the granular material of the desert floor. He could smell the air: it smelled like hot rock, like mica-laden granite exposed to the noonday sun.

He imagined putting his hand on the Subject’s shoulder, or at least that sloping bit of gristle behind the Subject’s head that passed for a shoulder. How would it feel? Not leathery but hard, Charlie thought, each gooseflesh bump like a buried knuckle, some of them prickly with stiff white hairs. Subject’s coxcomb, flush with blood, most likely served to adjust his core temperature to the heat; and if I touched it, Charlie thought, it would feel moist and flexible, like cactus flesh…

Subject stopped abruptly and turned as if startled. Charlie found himself gazing into the Subject’s blank white billiard-ball eyes and thought, Oh, shit!

He opened his own eyes wide and reeled back from the glass. Here in the O/BEC gallery. Home safe. He blinked away what could only have been a dream.

“Are you all right?”

Startled a second time, Charlie turned and saw a young girl standing behind him. She wore a winter jacket haphazardly buttoned, one side of the collar poking up past her chin. She twirled a strand of her curly dark hair around her finger.

She looked familiar. He said, “Aren’t you Marguerite Hauser’s daughter?”

The girl frowned, then nodded.

Charlie’s first impulse was to call Security, but the girl — Tess, he recalled, was her name — seemed timid and he was reluctant to frighten her. Instead he asked, “Is your mom or dad here?”

She shook her head no.

“No? Who let you in?”

“Nobody.”

“Do you have a pass card?”

“No.”

“Didn’t the guards stop you?”

“I came in when no one was looking.”

“That’s some trick.” In fact it should have been impossible. But here she was, goggle-eyed and obviously unsure of herself. “Are you looking for someone?”

“Not really.”

“What brings you here, then, Tess?”

“I wanted to see it.” She gestured at the O/BEC array.

For a long moment he was afraid she would ask him how it worked.

“You know,” Charlie said, “you’re really not supposed to be wandering around all by yourself. How about you come to my office and I’ll give your mom a call.”

“My mom?”

“Yeah, your mom.”

The girl appeared to think it over.

“Okay,” she said.

Tess sat in his office looking at some glossy brochures he scared up for her while he buzzed Marguerite’s pocket server. She was obviously surprised to hear from him and her first question was about the Subject — had something interesting happened?

Depends how you look at it, Charlie thought. He couldn’t shake that dream of the Subject from his mind. Eyeball to eyeball. It had seemed ridiculously real.

But he didn’t tell her about that. “I don’t want to worry you, Marguerite, but your daughter’s here.”

“Tess? Here? Here where?”

“At the Eye.”

“She’s supposed to be in school. What’s she doing out there?”

“She’s not actually doing much of anything, but she did manage to sneak past the guards and wander down to the O/BEC gallery.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Wish I was.”

“How is that possible?”

“Good question.”

“So — is she in big trouble, Charlie?”

“She’s here in my office, and I don’t see the need to make a big deal out of this. But you might want to drive out and pick her up.”

“Give me ten minutes,” Marguerite said.

Tess was unresponsive while Charlie walked her out to the parking lot. She didn’t seem to want to talk, and she certainly didn’t seem to want to talk about how she had gotten into the complex. Before long her mom zoomed into the visitor lot and Tess climbed gratefully into the rear seat of the car.

“Do we need to talk about this?” Marguerite asked.

“Maybe later,” Charlie said.

On his way back to his office he took a high-priority call from Tabby Menkowitz in Security. “Hey, Charlie,” she said. “How’s Boomer these days?”

“An old hound but healthy. What’s up, Tab?”

“Well, I got a big alert on my nonrecognition software. When I checked the cameras there you were, escorting a little kid out of the building.”

“She’s a team leader’s kid. Playing hooky and curious about the Alley.”

“What’d you do, smuggle her in in a rucksack? Because we caught her when she was leaving but not when she arrived.”

“Yeah, well, I wondered about that myself. She said she just sneaked in when nobody was looking.”

“We have full coverage on our security cameras, Charlie. They’re always looking.”

“I guess it’s a mystery, then. We don’t have to panic over it, do we?”

“It’s not like anybody’s leaving town, but I’d really, really like to know where she found a back door. That’s absolutely important information.”

“Tabby, we’re under siege — surely this can wait until the big problems get solved.”

“This is a big problem. Are you asking me to just let it ride?”

“I’m advising you that she’s an eleven-year-old kid. Look into it by all means, but let’s not drag her into an official investigation.”

“You just found her down in the gallery?”

“She snuck up on me.”

“That’s pretty deep, Charlie. That’s a big hole.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Tabby was silent for a moment. Charlie let the silence play out, left it to her to make the next move. She said, “You know this girl?”

“I know her mom. Want another datum? Her dad is Ray Scutter.”

“Is there anything else you know? I ask because you’re the one who took her out of the building without notifying me.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that, but it kind of took me by surprise. Really, I don’t know any more about it than you do.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Honest.”

“Uh-huh. You understand, I do have to look into this.”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“But I guess I don’t have to process the paperwork right away.”

“Thanks, Tabby.”

“You have absolutely nothing to thank me for. Honest.”

“I’ll say hi to Boomer for you.”

“Give him a breath mint for me. That barbecue last summer, he was grossing everybody out.” She hung up without saying good-bye.

Alone, Charlie finally allowed himself to think about what had happened this afternoon. To mull it over in his mind. Except — well, what the fuck had happened? He’d been daydreaming in the O/BEC gallery and then the girl wandered in. Was he supposed to be able to tease some meaning out of that?

Maybe he’d give Marguerite a call after work.

In the meantime he had another question. He wasn’t sure he wanted it answered, but it would plague him like a headache if he didn’t ask.

So he took a breath and called his friend Murtaza in Image Acquisition. The call went through at once. “Must be quiet down there.”

“Yup,” Murtaza said. “Smooth like silk.”

“You got time to do me a little favor?”

“Maybe. I’m on break at three.”

“Won’t take that long. I just need you to look at the clocked image for the last hour or so, especially around—” He estimated. “Say, between twelve forty-five and one.”

“Look at it for what?”

“Any unusual behavior.”

“You’re out of luck. He’s just walking over the landscape. It’s like watching paint dry.”

“Something small. Something gestural.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Okay, well, easy enough.” Charlie waited while Murtaza defined the time segment and ran a look-find app, zipping through the afternoon’s stored imagery. The scan took less than a minute. “Nothing,” Murtaza said. “Told you so.”

That was a relief. “You’re sure?”

“Today, my friend, the Subject is as predictable as clockwork. He didn’t even stop to take a leak.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said, feeling a little idiotic.

“Absolutely nothing. Just a little blip at ten to one. He kind of paused and looked over his shoulder. At nothing. That’s it.”

“Oh.”

“What, is that what you were looking for?”

“Just a passing notion. Sorry to have bothered you.”

“No problem. Maybe this weekend we can go for a beer, yes?”

“Sure.”

“Get some sleep, Charlie. You sound worried.”

Yeah, he thought. I am.

Twenty

Chris had spent most of the night consoling Marguerite. The fragmentary magazine page confirmed nothing but hinted at great danger, and Marguerite, anxious, cycled back repeatedly to the subject of Tess: Tess, threatened by Ray; Tess, threatened by the world.

He had run out of things to say to her.

She had fallen asleep toward dawn. Chris paced through the house aimlessly. He knew this feeling altogether too well, the double-barreled blast of dread and wakefulness that came with the morning sunlight like a bad amphetamine rush. He settled down at last in the kitchen, blinds open to the cobalt-blue sky, suburban-style row houses lit up in the efflorescence of dawn like tattered candy boxes.

He wished he had something to take the edge off. One of those anodynes that had once passed so easily into his hands, some soothing and euphoriant chemical or even a homely little joint. Was he afraid? What was he afraid of?

Not Ray, not the O/BECs, maybe not even his own death. He was afraid of what Marguerite had given him: her trust.

There are men, Chris thought, who shouldn’t be asked to handle fragile things. We drop them.

He called Elaine Coster as soon as the sun was decently up. He told her about the clinic, the comatose pilot, the charred page.

She suggested a meeting at Sawyer’s at ten. Chris said, “I’ll call Sebastian.”

“You really want to get that charlatan involved?”

“He’s been helpful so far.”

“Suit yourself,” Elaine said.

He woke Marguerite before he left the house. He told her where he was going and he put on a pot of coffee for her. She sat in the kitchen in her nightgown looking desolate. “I can’t stop thinking about Tess. Do you think Ray really means to keep her?”

“I don’t know what Ray might or might not do. The most immediate question is whether she’s endangered by him.”

“Whether he might hurt her, you mean? No. I don’t think so. At least, not directly. Not physically. Ray is a complicated man, and he’s a natural-born son-of-a-bitch, but he’s not a monster. He loves Tess, in his own way.”

“She’s supposed to come back Friday. It might be better to wait till then, see what he does when he’s had a chance to cool off. If he insists on keeping her, we can take steps then.”

“If something bad happens to the Lake, I want her with me.”

“It hasn’t come to that yet. But, Marguerite, even if Tess isn’t in danger, it doesn’t mean you’re safe. When Ray came to the house, that made him a stalker. He’s on a downhill slope. How smart are your locks?”

She shrugged. “Not very. I guess I can generate a new key… but then Tess won’t be able to get in without me.”

“Generate a new key and get Tessa’s card updated even if you have to go to her school to do it. And don’t get careless. Keep the door locked when you’re alone and don’t answer the door without checking. Make sure you have your pocket server handy. In an emergency, call me or Elaine or even the Security guy, what’s-his-name, Shulgin. Don’t try to handle it yourself.”

“You sound like you’ve been through this before.”

He left without answering.

Chris staked out an isolated booth at Sawyer’s away from the window. The restaurant wasn’t crowded. The short-order cook and a couple of waitresses were showing up, Chris had surmised, largely out of habit. Menu selections were down to sandwiches: ham, cheese, or ham-and-cheese.

Elaine arrived simultaneously with Sebastian Vogel and Sue Sampel. All three of them looked at Chris apprehensively as they sat down. As soon as the waitress had taken their orders Chris put the charred, plastic-covered magazine page on the tabletop.

“Wow,” Sue said. “You actually stole this?”

“We don’t use that word,” Elaine told her. “Chris has an unnamed high-level source.”

“Look at it,” Chris said. “Take your time. Draw conclusions.”

Only about a quarter of the printed page was legible. The rest of it was charred beyond interpretation, and even the legible extreme right quadrant was discolored and brown.

Still decipherable was a fraction of a headline:

And, under it, the right-hand fragments of a column of type:

Elaine said, “What’s on the other side?”

“A car ad. And a date.”

She flipped the page over. “Jesus, this is nearly two months old.”

“Yeah.”

“The pilot was carrying this with him?”

“Yeah.”

“And he’s still unconscious?”

“I called the clinic this morning. No change.”

“Who else knows about this?”

“Marguerite. You guys.”

“Okay… so let’s keep it at that for now, people.”

The waitress brought coffee. Chris covered the page with a dessert menu.

Elaine said, “You’ve had a while to think about this. What do you make of it?”

“Obviously, there’s some kind of ongoing crisis at Crossbank. Not much clue as to what it might be. Something big enough to involve the infantry and maybe close down highways — what did it say? — east of the Mississippi. We have the word ‘plague’ in quotes and what looks like a denial from the Centers for Disease Control—”

“Which could mean anything,” Elaine said. “Either way.”

“We have ‘deaths reported,’ or possibly ‘no deaths reported.’ We have some cryptic stuff about coral, starfish, a pilgrim. A statement apparently attributed to Ed Baum, the president’s science advisor. The event was big enough to warrant major news coverage and policy statements from federal agencies, but not big enough to drive advertisers out of the magazine.”

“That ad could have been bought and paid for six months earlier. Proves nothing.”

“Sebastian?” Chris said. “Sue? Any thoughts?”

They both looked solemn. Sebastian said, “I’m intrigued by the use of the word ‘spiritual.’”

Elaine rolled her eyes. “You would be.”

“Go on,” Chris prompted.

Sebastian frowned, his pursed mouth almost disappearing under his enormous beard. The siege had left him looking more gnome-like than ever, Chris thought. He had somehow contrived to gain weight. His cheeks were berry-red. “Spiritual redemption. What kind of disaster generates even the illusion of redemption? Or attracts a pilgrim?”

“Bullshit,” Elaine said. “You can attract pilgrims by announcing you saw a portrait of the Virgin Mary in a dirty bedsheet. People are credulous, Sebastian. They must be, or you wouldn’t have written a bestseller.”

“Oh, I don’t think what we have here is the Second Coming. Though perhaps some people have mistaken it for that. It does imply something strange, though, don’t you think? Something ambiguous.”

“Strange and ambiguous. Wow, great insight.”

Chris put the magazine page back in his jacket pocket. He let them talk it through for a few minutes. Elaine was obviously frustrated to have only half an explanation in front of her. Sebastian seemed more intrigued than frightened, and Sue clung to his left arm in chastened silence.

“So maybe the critics are right,” Elaine said. “Something happened to the O/BECs at Crossbank. So we need to think about shutting down the Eye.”

“Maybe,” Chris said. He had run through this scenario with Marguerite last night. “But if the folks on the outside wanted us shut down they could have cut the power months ago. Maybe they did that at Crossbank, and it only made things worse.”

“Maybe, maybe, maybe, fucking maybe. What we need is more information.” She directed a meaningful look at Sue.

Sue picked at her sandwich as if she hadn’t heard.

“Good girl,” Sebastian told her. “Never volunteer.”

Sue Sampel — with what Chris thought was a remarkable display of dignity — swallowed the last bite of ham and cheese and took a sip of coffee. Then she cleared her throat. “You want to know what Ray found when he raided the executive servers. I’m sorry, but I haven’t been able to find out. Ray’s paranoia has ramped up lately. All the support staff have to carry clocked keys now. We can’t come in early or stay late without a security waiver. Most of the offices have video surveillance, and it’s not just casual.”

“So what do you know?” Elaine asked.

“Only what I happen to see now and then. Dimi Shulgin showed up with a package of printouts, probably hard copies of whatever mail from Crossbank happened to be sitting in the caches before the shutdown. Ray’s been extremely nervous since he saw that. As for the contents, I haven’t been able to get anywhere near them. And if Ray ever really meant to make all this stuff public, apparently he’s changed his mind.”

Ray’s not just nervous, Chris thought. He’s scared. His veneer of reasonability is flaking away like paint on a barn door.

“So we’re fucked,” Elaine said.

“Not necessarily. I might be able to get something for you. But I’ll need help.”

Sue could do a pretty convincing impersonation of an airhead, but the fact was, Chris thought, she wasn’t stupid. Stupid people didn’t land jobs at Blind Lake, even as support staff. If the printouts were still in Ray’s office, Sue said, she could, just maybe and with a little luck, find them and scan them into her personal server. She could let herself into Ray’s office on a pretext and use her passkey to get into his desk, but she needed at least half an hour uninterrupted.

“What about the surveillance?”

“That’s where we benefit from Ray’s paranoia. Cameras are optional in executive suites. Ray’s had his turned off since last summer. I guess he didn’t want anyone to see him eating his DingDongs.”

“DingDongs?”

Sue waved off the question. “Security will see me go in and out of his office, but if I keep away from the connecting door that’s all they’ll see. And I’m in and out of there all the time anyhow. Ray knows somebody has a key to his desk, but he doesn’t know it’s me, and if this works he won’t even know I scanned the documents.”

“You’re absolutely sure he keeps hard copies in his office?”

“Not absolutely, no, but I’d bet on it. The question is how to get Ray and his buddies out of the way while I do this.”

“I’m guessing you have a plan,” Elaine said.

Sue looked pleased. “Weekdays are impossible. I can get in there on weekends during daylight hours without arousing suspicion, but Ray often drops in on weekends too, and Shulgin has been hanging around lately. So I looked at Ray’s calendar. This Saturday he’s doing the community center lecture-hall thing. Ari Weingart organized one of his big events, he’s got two or three speakers besides Ray. Knowing Ray, he’ll want Shulgin in the audience with him along with anybody else who might make a casual appearance — Ari, say, or any of the department heads apart from Marguerite. He’s taking this thing seriously. If I had to guess, I’d say he wants to drum up support for shutting down the Eye.”

Chris knew about the Saturday debate. Marguerite was supposed to be one of the speakers. She’d written something for it, though she’d been extremely reluctant to appear on stage with Ray. Ari Weingart had convinced her it would be a good idea, increase her visibility and maybe shore up her support with the other departments.

“How do we come into this?” Chris asked.

“You don’t, really. I just want you guys in the auditorium keeping an eye on the stage. That way, if Ray takes off in a hurry you can give me a call.”

Sebastian shook his head. “This is still far too dangerous. You could get in trouble.”

She smiled indulgently. “I appreciate you saying that. But I think I’m already in trouble. I think we all are. Don’t you?”

Nobody bothered to argue.

Elaine stayed on a few minutes after Sue and Sebastian left.

Business at Sawyer’s picked up a little around lunchtime. But only a little. The afternoon sky outside the window was blue, the air still and cold.

“So,” Elaine said, “are you up for this, Chris?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“We’re in deeper shit than anyone wants to admit. Getting out of this alive might be the hardest thing any of us has ever done. Are you up to it?”

He shrugged.

“You’re thinking of your girlfriend. And her daughter.”

“We don’t need to make it personal, Elaine.”

“Come on, Chris. I have eyes. You’re not as deep and inscrutable as you like to think. When you wrote that Galliano book, you put on your white hat and set out to right some wrongs. And you got burned for it. You found out that the good guy isn’t universally loved even when he’s right. Quite the opposite. Very disappointing for a nice suburban boy. So you wallowed in some justifiable self-pity, and you’re entitled, why not. But here comes all this lockdown bullshit, plus whatever happened at Crossbank, not to mention Marguerite and that little girl of hers. I think you feel the urge to put that white hat back on your head. What I’m saying is: good. Now’s the time. Don’t resist it.”

Chris folded his napkin and stood up. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about me,” he said.

Twenty-One

After Chris had left the house, and before the call came from Charlie Grogan asking her to pick up her daughter, Marguerite had spent the morning with the Subject.

Despite the implied danger to Blind Lake and Ray’s explicit threats, there was nothing useful she could do, at least not right now. Much would be asked of her, Marguerite suspected, and probably very soon. But not yet. Now she was stuck in a limbo of dread and ignorance. No real work to do and no way to calm the churn of her emotions. She hadn’t slept, but sleep was out of the question.

So she made herself a pot of tea and watched the Subject, scribbling notes for queries she would probably never submit. The entire enterprise was doomed, Marguerite thought, and so probably was the Subject himself. He appeared visibly weaker as the sun rose into a pale sky flecked with high clouds. He had been hiking for weeks, far from any traveled road, with scant supplies of food and water. His morning cloacal evacuations were thin and faintly green. When he walked, his body periodically contorted in angles that suggested pain.

But this morning he found both food and water. He had entered the foothills of a tall range of mountains, and though the land was still terribly dry he discovered an oasis where a stream of glacial water cascaded down a terrace of rocks. The water pooled in a cup of granite, deep and transparent as glass. Fan-leafed succulents splayed their foliage around it.

Subject bathed before he ate. He advanced gingerly into the pool, then stood under the falling stream. He had accumulated a coat of dust during his journey and it discolored the water around him. When he emerged from the pool his dermal integument was gleaming, changed from near-white to a somber burnt-umber. He swiveled his head as if scanning for predators. (Were there predatory species in this part of his world? It seemed unlikely — where was the game to support a large predator? — but was not, Marguerite supposed, impossible.) Then, reassured, he plucked, peeled, and washed several of the fleshy leaves and began to devour them. Moist flecks fell from his mandibles and collected at his feet. After he had eaten the leaves he found mossy patches on the granite near the waterfall, and he licked these clean with his broad blue-gray tongue.

Then he sat patiently digesting his meal, and Marguerite called up the file she had been writing for Tess: her children’s-book story of the Subject’s odyssey.

The act of writing soothed her, although the narrative was far from up-to-date. She had just finished a description of the sandstorm crisis and Subject’s awakening in the ruined city of the desert.

She wrote:

All around him in the still and windless morning were the pillars and mounds of buildings long abandoned and eroded by the seasons. These structures were not like the tall conical buildings of his home city. Whoever had made these buildings — perhaps his own ancestors — had made them differently. They had erected pillars, like the Greeks, and the pillars might once have supported much greater houses, or temples, or places of business. The pillars were hewn from black stone. The gritty desert wind had polished them to a fine smoothness. Some stood tall, but most had been worn to fractions of their original size, and where they had not fallen the wind had left them listing toward the east. There were the remains of other kinds of buildings too, some square foundations and even a few low pyramids, all of them as rounded as the rocks you find at the bottom of a stream. The storm had scoured the desert floor to a level surface, and now the sun cast stark shadows among the ruins. Subject stood in contemplation. The sundial shadows grew shorter as the morning wore on. Then — perhaps thinking of his destination — Subject began to walk westward once again. By noon he had left the ruined city entirely, and it vanished below the horizon as if utterly lost, and nothing remained ahead of him but glittering sand and the ghostly blue silhouettes of distant mountains.

She had just keyed the period when she took Charlie Grogan’s call.

Tess was quiet in the car as they left the Alley.

Marguerite drove slowly, struggling to assemble her thoughts. She had an important choice to make.

But first she wanted to know what had happened. Tess had left school and wandered over to the Eye to bother Charlie, that much was obvious, but why?

“I’m sorry,” Tess said, shooting apprehensive glances at her from the passenger seat. Am I, Marguerite wondered, as frightening as that? Judge and jury? Is that how she sees me?

“You don’t have to apologize,” Marguerite said. “Tell you what. I’ll call Mr. Fleischer and tell him you had an appointment but you forgot to give him the note. How’s that sound?”

“Okay,” Tess said cautiously, waiting for the hook.

“But I’m sure he’s worried about you. So am I. How come you didn’t go back for class this afternoon?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to go to the Eye.”

“How come? I thought you didn’t like it there. You hated the tour, back at Crossbank.”

“Just felt like it.”

“Badly enough to skip school?”

“I guess.”

“How’d you get inside? Mr. Grogan seemed a little upset over that.”

“I walked in. Nobody was looking.”

That, at least, was probably true. Tess was too guileless to have bluffed her way in or found a hidden entrance. In all likelihood she had just walked up to the front door and opened it: Charlie’s investigation would discover a sleepy security guard or some employee who’d wandered out to smoke a joint. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I wasn’t really looking for anything.”

“Learn anything?”

Tess shrugged.

“Because, you know, that’s pretty unusual behavior for you. You never skipped school before.”

“It was important.”

“Important how, Tess?”

No answer. Only a teary frown.

“Was it because of Mirror Girl?”

Tessa’s unhappy expression condensed into misery. “Yes.”

“She told you to go there?”

“She never tells me anything. She just wanted to go. So I went.”

“Well, what was Mirror Girl looking for?”

“I don’t know. I think she just wanted to see if she could see her reflection.”

“Her reflection? Her reflection where?”

“In the Eye,” Tess said.

“A mirror at the Eye? It isn’t that kind of telescope. There’s no real mirror.”

“Not in a mirror — in the Eye.”

Marguerite didn’t know how to proceed, how to ask the next question. She was afraid of Tessa’s answers. They sounded crazy. Crazy: the forbidden word. The unspeakable thought. She hated all this talk of Mirror Girl because it sounded crazy, and Marguerite didn’t think she could bear that. Almost anything else, an injury, a disease; she could imagine Tess in leg braces or with her arm in a sling, she knew how to console her when she was hurt; that was well within the range of her mothering skills. But please, she thought, not craziness, not the kind of refractory madness that excludes all comfort or communication. Marguerite had worked nights at a psychiatric hospital during college. She had seen incurable schizophrenics. Crazy people lived in their own nightmarish VR, more alone than physical isolation could ever make them. She refused to imagine Tess as one of those people.

She pulled into the school parking lot but asked Tess to sit for a minute with her.

Death and madness: could she really protect her daughter from either of those things?

I can’t even protect her from Ray.

Ray had threatened to keep Tess with him, to take physical custody of her — in effect, to kidnap her. But she’s with me now, Marguerite thought. And if I had a choice I’d take her away from here, drive her down the road to Constance and from there away, away, anywhere away from the quarantine and the distressing rumors Chris had brought home, away from Eyeball Alley and away from Mirror Girl.

But she couldn’t do that.

She had to send Tess back to school, and from school Tess would go home to Ray and the increasingly fragile illusion of normality. If I keep her with me, Marguerite thought, then I’ll be the one violating the letter of our agreement, and Ray will send his security people to get her.

But if I let her go back to him, and something happens—

“Can I get out now?” Tess asked.

Marguerite took a deep, calming breath. “I guess so,” she said. “Back to school with you. No more expeditions during class, though, all right?”

“All right.”

“Promise me?”

“Promise.” She put her hand on the door handle.

“One more thing,” Marguerite said. “Listen to me. Listen. This is important, Tess. If anything strange happens at Dad’s, you call me. Doesn’t matter what time of day or night. You don’t even have to think about it. Just call me. Because I’m looking out for you even when you’re not with me.”

“Is Chris looking out for me, too?”

Surprised, Marguerite said, “Sure he is. Chris too.”

“Okay,” Tess said, and she opened the door and scooted out of the car. Marguerite watched her daughter cross the desolate parking lot, scuffling through whirls of old snow, her jacket still cross-buttoned and her winter hat clasped in her small gloved hands.

I’ll see her again, Marguerite told herself. I will. I must.

Then Tess vanished through the front door of the school and the afternoon was still and empty.

Twenty-Two

Sue Sampel woke up nervous.

It was Saturday morning, and today she was supposed to perform the small act of information theft she had so rashly promised earlier in the week. Her hand shook when she brushed her teeth, and her reflection in the mirror was the perfect image of a terrified middle-aged woman.

She let Sebastian sleep another hour while she made herself coffee and toast. Sebastian was one of those people who could sleep through storms or earthquakes, while a noisy sparrow was enough to bring Sue to groggy, unwelcome consciousness.

Sebastian’s book was on the kitchen table, and Sue leafed through it for distraction. She had read it all the way through weeks ago and had lately taken a second run at it, trying to absorb ideas that had slipped past her the first time. God the Quantum Vacuum. A weighty title. Like a couple of sumo wrestlers balanced on an ampersand.

But the book had not been sappy or superficial. In fact it had taxed her to the limits of her bachelor of science degree. Fortunately, Sebastian was pretty good at explaining difficult concepts. And she had been privileged to have the author handy when she got stuck on something.

The book was not overtly religious nor was it a work of rigorous science. Sebastian himself called it “speculative philosophy.” Once he had described it as “a bull session, writ large. Very large.” That, Sue supposed, was modesty speaking.

The book was full of arcane scientific history and evolutionary lore and quantum physics. Heady material for a college religion prof whose previous published works had included such torrid bodice-rippers as “Errors of Attribution in First-Century Pauline Texts.” Basically, his argument was that human beings had achieved their current state of consciousness by appropriating a small piece of a universal intelligence. Tapping into God, in other words. This definition of God, he argued, could be stretched to fit definitions of deity across a spectrum of cultures and beliefs. Was God omnipresent and omniscient? Yes, because He permeated all of creation. Was He singular or multiple? Both: He was omnipresent because He was inherent in the physical processes of the universe; but His mind was knowable (by human beings) only in discrete and often dissimilar fragments. Was there life after death, or perhaps reincarnation? In the most literal sense, no; but because our sentience was borrowed it lived on without our bodies, albeit as a tiny piece of something almost infinitely larger.

Sue understood what he was getting at. He wanted to give people the consolation of religion without the baggage of dogmatism. He was pretty casual about his science, and that pissed off people like Elaine Coster. But his heart was in the right place. He wanted a religion that could plausibly comfort widows and orphans without committing them to patriarchy, intolerance, fundamentalism, or weird dietary laws. He wanted a religion that wasn’t in a perpetual fistfight with modern cosmology.

Not such a bad thing to want, Sue thought. But where’s my consolation? Consolation for the petty thief. The larcenous office-worker. Forgive me, for I know exactly what I do and I’m of two minds about it.

Assuming any of that mattered. Assuming they weren’t all doomed. She had read the magazine fragment at Sawyer’s and she had drawn her own conclusions.

Sebastian came downstairs freshly showered and dressed in his casual finest: blue jeans and a green knit sweater that looked like something an English vicar might have thrown away.

“Today’s the heist,” Sue said.

“How do you feel?”

“Scared.”

“You know, you don’t have to do this. It was good of you to volunteer, but nobody will say anything if you change your mind.”

“Nobody except Elaine.”

“Well, maybe Elaine. But seriously—”

“Seriously, it’s okay. Just promise me one thing.”

“What?”

“When you’re at that Town Hall meeting… I mean, I know the others are looking out for me, they’ll call if Ray takes off for the Plaza. But the only one I really trust is you.”

He nodded, owl-eyed and ridiculously solemn.

“I need at least five minutes warning if Ray is on his way.”

“You’ll have it,” Sebastian said.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

The morning crept past too quickly. The Town Hall meeting started at one, and she asked Sebastian to drive so he could drop her off inconspicuously outside Hubble Plaza. They didn’t talk much in the car. She gave him a quick kiss when he stopped. Then she stepped out into the cold air, carded herself into the Plaza’s main entrance, waved hello to the lobby guard, and walked without obviously hurrying to the elevators. Her footsteps resounded in the tiled lobby like the tick of a metronome, allegro, in time with the beat of her heart.

Marguerite arrived at the community center auditorium at 12:45, and when she spotted Ari Weingart looking for her in the lobby crowd she turned to Chris and said, “Oh, God. This is a mistake.”

“The lecture?”

“Not the lecture. Going on stage with Ray. Having to look at him, having to listen to him. I wish I could — oh, hi, Ari.”

Ari took a firm grip on her arm. “This way, Marguerite. You’re up first, did I mention that? Then Ray, then Lisa Shapiro from Geology and Climatology, then we throw it open for audience questions.”

She took a last look back at Chris, who shrugged and gave her what she guessed was a supportive smile.

Really, she thought, trailing Ari through a staff-only door into the backstage dimness, this is crazy. Not just because she would be forced to appear with Ray but because it would be a charade for both of them. Both pretending they hadn’t seen clues about the Crossbank disaster (whatever it was). Both pretending there had never been a confrontation over Tess. Pretending they didn’t despise each other. Pretending, not to civility, but at least to indifference.

Knowing it could end at any time.

This is a prescription for disaster, Marguerite thought. Not only that, but her “lecture” was a series of notes she had made for herself and never really planned to reveal — speculation about the UMa47 project that verged on the heretical. But if the crisis was as bad, as potentially deadly, as it seemed, why waste time on insincerity? Why not, for once in her life, stop calculating career goals and simply say what she thought?

It had seemed like a good idea, at least until she found herself onstage behind a closed curtain with Lisa Shapiro sitting between her and her ex-husband. She avoided his eyes but couldn’t shake a claustrophobic awareness of his presence.

He was impeccably dressed, she had noticed on the way in. Suit and tie, creases razor-sharp. A little pursed smile on his face, accentuated by his jowls and his receding chin, like a man who smelled something unpleasant but was trying to be polite about it. A sheaf of paper in his hands.

To the left of her there was a podium, and Ari stood there now signaling for someone to raise the curtain. Already? Marguerite checked her watch. One on the dot. Her mouth was dry.

The auditorium accommodated an audience of two thousand, Ari had told her. They had admitted roughly half that number, a mixture of working scientists, support staff, and casual labor. Ari had arranged four of these events since the beginning of the quarantine, and they had all been well-attended and well-received. There was even a guy with a camera doing live video for Blind Lake TV.

How civilized we are in our cage, Marguerite thought. How easily we distract ourselves from the knowledge of the bodies outside the gates.

Now the curtain was drawn, the stage illuminated, the audience a shadowy void more sensed than seen. Now Ari was introducing her. Now, in the strange truncation of time that always happened when she addressed an audience, Marguerite herself was at the podium, thanking Ari, thanking the crowd, fumbling with the cue display on her pocket server.

“The question—”

Her voice cracked into falsetto. She cleared her throat.

“The question I want to pose today is, have we been deceived by our own rigorously deconstructive approach to the observed peoples of UMa47/E?”

That was dry enough to make the laypeople in the audience feel sleepy, but she saw a couple of familiar faces from Interpretation coagulate into frowns.

“This is deliberately provocative language — the observed peoples. From the beginning, the Crossbank and Blind Lake projects have sought to purge themselves of anthropocentrism: the tendency to invest other species with human characteristics. This is the fallacy that tempts us to describe a panther cub as ‘cute’ or an eagle as ‘noble,’ and we have been doing it ever since we learned to stand on two legs. We live in an enlightened age, however, an age that has learned to see and to value other living things as they are, not as we wish them to be. And the long and creditable history of science has taught us, if nothing else, to look carefully before we judge — to judge, if we must, based on what we see, not what we would prefer to believe.

“And so, we tell ourselves, the subjects of our study at 47 Ursa Majoris should be called ‘creatures’ or ‘organisms,’ not ‘peoples.’ We must presume nothing about them. We must not bring to the analytical table our fears or our desires, our hopes or our dreams, our linquistic prejudices, our bourgeois metanarratives, or our cultural baggage of imagined aliens. Check Mr. Spock at the door, please, and leave H.G. Wells in the library. If we see a city we must not call it a city, or call it that only provisionally, because the word ‘city’ implies Carthage and Rome and Berlin and Los Angeles, products of human biology, human ingenuity, and thousands of years of accumulated human expertise. We remind ourselves that the observed city may not be a city at all; it may be more analogous to an anthill, a termite tower, or a coral reef.”

When she paused she could hear the echo of her voice, a basso resonance returning from the back of the hall.

“In other words, we try very hard not to deceive ourselves. And by and large we do a good job of it. The barrier between ourselves and the peoples of UMa47/E is painfully obvious. Anthropologists have long told us that culture is a collection of shared symbols, and we share none with the subjects of our study. Omnis cultura ex cultura, and the two cultures are as imiscible, we presume, as oil and water. Our epigenetic behaviors and theirs have no point of intersection.

“The downside is that we’re forced to begin from first principles. We can’t talk about a chthonic ‘architecture,’ say, since we would have to strip from that seemingly innocent word all its buttresses and beams of human intent and human esthetics — without which the word ‘architecture’ becomes insupportable, an unstable structure. Nor dare we speak of chthonic ‘art’ or ‘work,’ ‘leisure’ or ‘science.’ The list is endless, and what we are left with is simply raw behavior. Behavior to be scrutinized and catalogued in all its minutiae.

“We say the Subject travels here, performs this or that action, is relatively slow or relatively fast, turns left or right, eats such-and-such, at least if we don’t balk at the word ‘eats’ as creeping anthropocentrism; maybe ‘ingests’ is better. It means the same thing, but it looks better in the written report. ‘Subject ingested a bolus of vegetable material.’ Actually, he ate a plant — you know it and I know it, but a peer reviewer a Nature would never let it pass.” There was some cautious laughter. Behind her, Ray snorted derisively and audibly. “We patrol the connotation of every word we speak with the censorious instinct of a Bowdler. All in the name of science, and often for very good reasons.

“But I wonder if we aren’t blinding ourselves at the same time.

“What is missing from our discourse about the peoples of UMa47/E, I would suggest, is narrative.

“The natives of UMa47/E are not human, but we are, and human beings interpret the world by constructing narratives to explain it. The fact that some of our narratives are naive, or wishful, or simply wrong, hardly invalidates the process. Science, after all, is at heart a narrative. An anthropologist, or an army of anthropologists, may pore over fragments of bone and catalog them according to a dozen or a hundred apparently trivial features, but the unspoken object of all this work is a narrative — a story about how human beings emerged from the other fauna on this planet, a story about our origins and our ancestors.

“Or consider the periodic table. The periodic table is a catalog, a list of the known and possible elements arranged according to an organizing principle. It looks like static knowledge, exactly the kind of knowledge we’re accumulating about the Subject and his kindred. But even the periodic table implies a narrative. The periodic table is a defining statement in the story of the universe, the end point of a long narrative about the creation of hydrogen and helium in the Big Bang, the forging of heavy elements in stars, the relationship of electrons to atomic nuclei, the nucleus and its process of decay, and the quantum behavior of subatomic particles. We have our place in that narrative too. We are in part the result of carbon chemistry in water — another narrative hidden in the periodic table — and so, I might add, are the observed peoples of UMa47/E.”

She paused. There was a glass of ice water on the flat-topped podium, thank God. Marguerite took a sip. Judging by the background noise, she had already ignited a few whispered arguments in the audience.

“Narratives intersect and diverge, combine and recombine. Understanding one narrative may require the creation of another. Most fundamentally, narrative is how we understand. Narrative is how we understand the universe and it is most obviously how we understand ourselves. A stranger may seem inscrutable or even frightening until he offers us his story; until he tells us his name, tells us where he comes from and where he’s going. This may be true of the chthonic inhabitants of UMa47/E as well. It would not surprise me if they are, in their way, also exchanging and creating narratives. Perhaps they are not; perhaps they have a different way of organizing and disseminating knowledge. But I promise you we will not understand them until we begin to tell ourselves stories about them.”

She could see more faces in the audience now. There was Chris, on the center aisle, nodding encouragingly. Elaine Coster beside him, Sebastian Vogel next to her. She assumed they had their servers in hand, in case Ray bolted for the Plaza.

And down in the front row was Tess, listening attentively. Ray must have brought her. Marguerite aimed a smile at her daughter.

“Of course, we’re scientists. We have our own name for a tentative narrative: we call it a hypothesis, and we test it against observation and experimentation. And of course any hypothesis we venture about the native peoples must be very, very tentative. It will be a first approximation, an educated guess, even a shot in the dark.

“Nevertheless I believe we have been far too shy about making such guesses. I think this is because the questions we have to ask in order to create that narrative are extremely unsettling. Any sentient species we encounter — and for the first time in history we have another example to compare against our own — will be grounded in its biology. Some of its behavior, in other words, will be specific to its genetic history. If it is truly a sentient species, however, some of its behavior will also be discretionary, will be flexible, will be innovative. Which is not to say it will be unfailingly rational. Quite the opposite, perhaps.

“And here, I think, is the fundamental issue we have been reluctant to confront. We harbor closely-held beliefs about ourselves. A theologian might say we are a God-seeking species. A biologist might say we are an assembly of interrelated physiological functions capable of highly complex activity. A Marxist might say we’re players in a dialogue between history and economics. A philosopher might say we’re the result of the appropriation by DNA of the mathematics of emergent properties in semistable chaotic systems. We treat these beliefs as mutually exclusive and we cleave to them, according to our preferences, religiously.

“But I suspect that in the native peoples of UMa47/E we will find all of these descriptors both useful and insufficient. We will have to arrive at a new definition of a ‘sentient species,’ and that definition must include ourselves and the natives.

“And that, I would suggest, is what we have been avoiding.”

Another sip of water. Was she too close to the microphone? From the back rows it probably sounded like she was gargling.

“Anything we say about the native peoples implies a new perspective on us. We will find them comparatively more or less brave than ourselves, more or less gentle, more or less warlike, more or less affectionate — perhaps, ultimately, more or less sane.

“In other words, we may be forced to draw conclusions about them, and consequently about ourselves, which we do not like.

“But we’re scientists, and we aren’t supposed to shy away from these matters. As a scientist it is my cherished belief — I’m tempted to say, my faith — that understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.

“This is why it’s so important to maintain focus on the Subject.” As long as we can, she added to herself. “A few months ago one might plausibly have argued that the Subject’s life was a rigidly repetitive routine and that we had gleaned from it all we could. Recent events have proven that argument wrong. The Subject’s life, which we had mistaken for a cycle, has become very much a narrative, a narrative we may be able to follow to its conclusion and from which we will surely learn a great deal.

“We’ve already learned much. We’ve seen, for instance, the ruins at 33/28, an abandoned city — if I may use that word — apparently older than the Subject’s home and very different in architectural style. And this, too, implies a narrative. It implies that the architectural behavior of the native peoples is flexible; that they have accumulated knowledge and put that knowledge to diverse and adaptive uses.

“It implies, in short, and if any doubt remains, that the native peoples are a people — intellectually proximate and morally equivalent to human beings — and that the best way to construct their narrative is by reference to our own. Even if that comparison is not always flattering to us.”

That was her big finish. Her defiant thesis. Problem was, nobody seemed sure she had finished. She cleared her throat again and said, “That’s all, thank you,” and walked back to her chair. Applause welled up behind her. It sounded polite, if not enthusiastic.

Ari went to the podium, thanked her, and introduced Ray.

Sue Sampel spent twenty minutes at her desk in the anteroom of Ray’s office, looking busy for the sake of the video monitors embedded in the wall.

She had set aside some work to make her presence here seem plausible. Not that there was much in the way of real work. It was a fucking joke, these reports Ray insisted on putting together, documenting the daily trivia of Blind Lake site management. The reports went nowhere except into a file marked PENDING — pending what, the end of the world? — but they would serve as an alibi if it came down to the question of what Ray had been up to during the lockdown. It seemed to her that Ray spent a lot of time preparing to be questioned about things.

She kept an eye on her desktop clock. At 1:30, she made a show of shuffling through papers and digital files as if she had lost something. And therefore would go into Ray’s office to get it. This felt ludicrously unrealistic, like a high school play.

Or a bad movie. And in the movie, Sue thought, this would be the moment somebody walked in on her… probably Shulgin, or even Ray, Ray with a pistol in his hand…

“Sue?”

She bit her tongue, then managed an “Ow!” that might have passed as “Hello?”

It wasn’t Ray. It was only Gretchen Krueger from down in Archives.

“Didn’t expect you’d be in today,” Gretchen said. “I was just on my way to pick up some back-issue JAEs and I saw your door open. Is Ray here too?”

“No. I’m just finishing up some work. Except I keep losing things.” Establishing her alibi yet again.

“When I’m done here, I’m getting together at Sawyer’s with Jamal and Karen. Want to join us? You’d be more than welcome.”

“Thanks, but all I want this afternoon is a shower and a nap.”

“I know the feeling.”

“You have a good time, though, Gretch.”

“I will. Take it easy, Sue. You look tired.”

Gretchen ambled off down the corridor and Sue began to steel herself once more for the assault on Ray’s inner office. But first she pulled the door to the hallway all the way closed. Her hand was shaking, she discovered.

Then into Ray’s sanctuary and out of range of the security cameras.

First she pulled a sheaf of files out of the cabinet against the wall — any files, it didn’t matter, as long as she had something innocuous-looking to carry out again. Then she went to his desk, put her key in the master lock, and opened all five drawers one after the other.

The bundle of printouts was in the bottom-left drawer, where he used to keep his DingDongs before the supply ran out. He had probably vacuumed the drawer for crumbs, knowing Ray. Ray must be seriously jonesing, she thought. He must be in acute DingDong withdrawal.

She picked up the first sheet.

EX: Bo Xiang, Crossbank National Laboratory TO: Avery Fishbinder, Blind Lake National Laboratory TEXT: Hi, Ave. As promised, here’s some heads-up on the material we’ll be presenting at this year’s conference. Sorry I can’t be more explicit (I know you don’t want to be blindsided) but we’ve been warned to keep this quiet until it’s all official. The long and short is that we’ve found evidence of a vanished sentient culture on HR8832/B. Screen shots to follow, but there is a region of basaltic uplift in the northern hemisphere, very shallow water and some exposed islands, superficially no different from hundreds of other such swampy regions, but with the remains of obviously very highly engineered structures, including a specific link or at least an architectural reference to the “coral floaters” dotting the equator. Still unsure how to reconcile this with the absence of motile animals: Gossard suggests an ancient mass extinction…

For God’s sake, Sue scolded herself, don’t read it. She cast a furtive glance at the doorway. She was alone, but that could change.

She took her server from her pocket, dialed her home node and activated the scan function. The server was a pencil-style model exactly as wide as a standard sheet of paper. Sue ran the photosensitive side down the document until it blipped a complete transfer. Then the next sheet. Then the next. But there were lots of sheets. She checked her watch. It was almost two o’clock. She might be another twenty minutes here. More.

Calm down, she told herself, and scanned another printout.

From his aisle seat in the hall, Chris Carmody watched Ray stand up and walk to the podium.

Chris felt it was important to get some measure of this guy. There were a thousand ways he could walk into another confrontation with Ray Scutter. If that happened, he didn’t want to screw it up.

There were a thousand ways to screw it up.

Ray looked pretty slick today. He smiled at the audience and took the podium with an ease Marguerite hadn’t been able to muster. This was the “charm” she had talked about it, and maybe this was what she had seen in him when they first met — a plausible grin and some good-sounding words. Ray began:

“I’m going to depart from my prepared text here — and I know you asked us to keep it short, Ari, and I promise I’ll do my best — to address some of the remarks of the previous speaker.”

Marguerite squirmed visibly in her chair, though she must have expected this.

“As scientists,” Ray said, “one of the things we must keep in mind is that appearances can be deceptive. We’ve been talking about the O/BEC installation as if it were a superior optical telescope. I would remind you that it isn’t. At its most fundamental level, the Eye is a quantum computer functioning as an image generator. We assume the images it generates accurately represent past events on a distant planet. That may be true. It may not. If it is deriving real information, we don’t know how it’s doing so. The images it creates are consonant with our real knowledge of UMa47/E’s size, atmosphere, and distance from its parent star. Beyond that, however, we have no way of confirming what the Eye purports to see. Until we can more efficiently duplicate and understand the effect, our assumption that we’re seeing real events has to be provisional.

“And if we’re tentative about the conclusions we draw, it’s not because we’re timid. It’s because we don’t want to be deceived. For this reason — and many others — I believe our tight focus on the Subject and his culture has been misguided and disastrously premature.

“In contrast to the previous speaker, I would remind the audience that we have been making up stories — pardon me, ‘constructing narratives’ — about extraterrestrial life for much of human history. Whether this constitutes genius or folly is an interesting question. In the name of science, we were once asked by Percival Lowell to believe in a Mars equipped with canals and civilization. That misconception was dispelled by twentieth-century science, only to be replaced by the wishful and ultimately falsified discovery of fossil bacteria in a Martian meteorite. Examined more closely, Mars has proven to be sterile of life. The widely imagined microbes inhabiting Europa’s subsurface ocean of lukewarm sludge have likewise turned out to be illusory. Our imagination outpaces us, it seems. It is intuitive, it leaps ahead, and it sees what it wishes for. A manifesto for imagination is hardly what we need, especially at this point in time.”

He sighed theatrically.

“Having said that — and I think it needed to be said — let me move on to a more pressing issue, one with particular relevance for all of us here at the Lake.

“It goes without saying that the lockdown, what some people have called the quarantine, is an unprecedented event and one we have all struggled to understand. Quarantine, I think, is an apt word. I think it’s become obvious that we have all been confined here, not for our own good, but for the protection of people on the outside.

“And yet it sounds absurd, ridiculous. What is there about us, about Blind Lake, that could possibly be considered threatening?

“Indeed, what? Some have suggested that the very images we’ve been studying might be dangerous, that they might contain a steganographic code or some other hidden message destructive to the human mind. But we have seen little evidence of that… unless you want to cite the previous speaker’s panegyric as an example.” Ray grinned lopsidedly, as if he had said something a little wicked but very clever, and there was uneasy laughter from the audience. He took a sip of water and carried on: “No, I think we ought to focus our suspicion on the process itself — on the O/BEC mechanism.

“Could there be something dangerous about the O/BEC platens? We hardly know enough to answer that question. What we do know is that the O/BEC processors are very powerful quantum computers of a novel kind and we’re using them to run self-evolving, self-replicating code.

“Those words by themselves ought to raise an alarm. In every other case in which we have attempted to exploit self-replicating evolutionary systems, we’ve been forced to proceed with utmost caution. I’m thinking of the near-disaster last year at the MIT nanotech lab — we all know how much worse that might have been — or the novel rice cultivars that caused so many histamine-reaction deaths in Asia in the early Twenty-twenties.”

Elaine scribbled furiously on a notepad. Sebastian Vogel sat in a state of calm attentiveness, a bearded Buddha.

“The obvious objection is that those events involved ‘real’ self-replicating systems in the ‘real’ world, not code in a machine. But this is shortsighted. The O/BEC virtual ecosystem may be contained, but it is also effectively enormous. Literally billions of generations of algorithms are iterated and harvested for utility in a single day. Periodically we select them for the results we desire, but they are breeding always. We assume that because we write the limiting conditions we have godlike power over our creations. Maybe that isn’t the case.

“Now, obviously we’ve never lost a researcher because he was ambushed by an algorithm.” More laughter: the lay audience seemed to like this, though the Observation and Interpretation people remained warily silent. “And that’s not what I’m suggesting. But there is some evidence — which I’m not yet at liberty to discuss — that the Crossbank installation was shut down hours before the quarantine was placed on Blind Lake, and that something dangerous did happen there, possibly involving their O/BEC machines.”

This was news. All around the auditorium, people literally sat up in their chairs. Chris glanced at Elaine, who shrugged: she hadn’t expected Ray to broach that subject.

Maybe Ray hadn’t intended to. He shuffled his papers and looked nonplussed for a long moment.

“This is, of course still under investigation…”

He set the written speech aside.

“But I want to return to the previous speaker’s claims for a moment…”

“He’s ad-libbing,” Elaine whispered. “Marguerite must have scored a point somewhere. Or else he had a couple of drinks before he showed up.”

“If I recall correctly… I believe it was Goethe who wrote that nature loves illusion. ‘Nature loves illusion, and those who will not partake of her illusions she punishes as a tyrant would punish.’ We talk glibly about a ‘sentient’ species as if sentience were a simple, easily quantifiable attribute. Of course it is not. Our perception of our own sentience is skewed and idiosyncratic. We contrast ourselves with the other primates as if we were rational and they were driven by purely animalistic impulses. But the ape, for instance, is almost wholly rational: he searches for food, he eats when he’s hungry, he sleeps when he’s weary, he mates when the urge and opportunity are both present. A philosophical ape might well ask which species is genuinely driven by reason.

“He might ask, ‘When are we most alike, men and apes?’ Not when we eat or sleep or defecate, because every animal does those things. Men exhibit their uniqueness when they make elaborate tools, compose operas, wage war for ideological reasons, or send robots to Mars — only human beings do that. We imagine our future and contemplate our past, personal or collective. But when does an ape review the events of his day or imagine an utterly different future? The obvious answer is, when he dreams.”

Chris looked at Marguerite onstage. She seemed as startled as everyone else. Ray was rattled now, but he had launched into a scenario that had some weighty internal momentum of its own.

“When he dreams. When the ape dreams. Asleep, he does not reason but he dreams the dreams that enable reason. Dreaming, the ape imagines he is chased or chasing, fed or hungry, frightened or safe. In reality he is none of those things. He’s running or starving in a fragmentary model world wholly of his own projection. How human! How completely human! You, this philosophical ape might say, are the hominids who dream by daylight. You don’t live in the world. You live in your dream of the world.

“Dreaming infuses our existence. Our earliest ancestors learned to throw a spear, not at a running animal, but at the place where the running animal would be when the spear had traveled through the air at a certain speed. Our ancestors did this not by calculation but by imagination. By dreaming, in other words. We dream the animal’s future and throw the spear at the dream. We dream images out of the past and use them to project and revise our own future action. And as an evolutionary stratagem our dreaming has been wildly successful. As a species, we have dreamed ourselves out of the cul-de-sac of instinct into a whole new universe of unexplored behaviors.

“We did it so effectively, I would suggest, that we have forgotten the fundamental truth that we are dreaming. We confuse the dream with reason. But the ape reasons too. What the ape will not do is dream ideologies, dream terrorism, dream vengeful gods, dream slavery, dream gas chambers, dream lethal remedies for dreamlike problems. Dreams are commonly nightmares.”

The audience was lost. Ray seemed no longer to care. He was talking to himself now, chasing an idea down some labyrinth only he could see.

“But they are dreams from which, as a species, we cannot wake. Our dreams are the dreams nature loves. Our dreams are epigenetic and they have served our genome remarkably well. In a few hundreds of thousands of years we have increased from a localized hominid subspecies to a planet-dominating population of eight or ten billion. If we reason within the boundaries of our daylight dreams, nature rewards us. If we reasoned as simply and straightforwardly as the apes we would be no more populous than the apes.

“But now we’ve done something new. We’ve built machines that dream. The pictures the O/BEC device generates are dreams. They are based, we tell ourselves, on the real world, but they aren’t telescopic images in any traditional sense. When we look through a telescope we see with the human eye and interpret with the human mind. When we look at an O/BEC image we see what a dreaming machine has learned to dream.

“Which is not to say that the images are valueless! Only that we cannot accept them at face value. And we have to ask ourselves another question. If our machine can dream more effectively than a human being, what else might it be able to do? What other dreams might it entertain, with or without our knowledge?

“The organisms we’re studying may not be the inhabitants of a rocky inner world circling the star Ursa Majoris 47. The alien species may be the O/BEC devices themselves. And the worst thing… the worst thing…”

He stopped, picked up his water glass, and drained it. His face was flushed.

“I mean, how do you wake from a dream that enables your consciousness? By dying. Only by dying. And if the O/BEC entity — let’s call it that — has become a danger to us, maybe we need to kill it.”

Near the front, a small voice shouted, “You can’t do that!”

A child’s voice. Chris recognized Tess, standing now near the foot of the stage.

Ray looked down in obvious bewilderment. He seemed not to recognize her. When he did, he motioned her to sit down and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I apologize for the interruption. But we can’t afford to be sentimental. Our lives are at stake. We may be — as a species, we may be—” He wiped his forehead with his hand. The real Ray had punched through, Chris thought, and the real Ray was not a pleasant thing to behold. “We may be ungoverned dream-machines, capable of wreaking immense havoc, but we owe our loyalty to our genome. Our genome is what makes a tolerable dream out of the valueless, the rigorously precise mathematics of the universe we inhabit… What would we see, if we were truly awake? A universe that loves death far more than it loves life. It would be foolish, truly foolish to yield our primacy to yet another set of numbers, another nonlinear dissipative system alien to our way of life…”

A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain, Shakespeare had said. Chris understood that. It was a lesson he should have learned a long time ago. If he had learned it soon enough, his sister Portia might still be alive.

“Stop talking like that!” Tess screeched.

At that moment Ray seemed to wake, seemed to realize he had done something peculiar, embarassed himself in public. His face was brick-red.

“What I mean to say—”

The silence dragged on. The audience murmured.

“What I mean—”

Ari Weingart took a half-step out from stage left.

“I’m sorry,” Ray said. “I apologize if I said something — if I misspoke. This meeting—”

He waved his hand, knocking the empty water glass onto the floor of the stage. It broke spectacularly.

“This meeting is over,” Ray growled into the barrel of the microphone. “You can all go home.”

He stalked into the wings. Sebastian Vogel began whispering frantically into his pocket server. Marguerite clambered down from the stage and ran to comfort her daughter.

Sue Sampel had just shuffled the printouts back into their original order when her server chimed.

The small noise seemed very large in the silence of Ray’s inner office. She jumped, and half the sheaf of papers fell out of her hand and scattered across the floor.

“Shit!” she said, then fumbled the phone wand out of her pocket. “Yes?”

It was Sebastian. Ray had left the stage, he said. Looking pissed. Could be headed anywhere.

“Thanks,” Sue said. “Meet me out front, five minutes.” She gathered the papers from the floor — they had scattered into a broad circle, and some had slipped under the desk — and shuffled them back into a crude semblance of order. No time to be more precise. Even if Ray didn’t come roaring through the door, her nerves were stretched to the breaking point. She locked the papers into Ray’s desk drawer, left his office, packed up the stuff she had left on her own desk, then hurried into the corridor and shut the door behind her.

The elevator ride took approximately forever, but the lobby was empty when she got there and Sebastian had already pulled up at to the front. She ducked into the car and said, “Go, go, go.”

The wind had kicked up since morning. Out in the wide meadows between the town of Blind Lake and the cooling towers of Eyeball Alley, fresh snow began to fall.

Twenty-Three

Ray Scutter left the auditorium without a destination in mind, sucking in gusts of bitterly cold air as the doors closed behind him. Trading pain for clarity.

He’d made a mistake onstage. No, worse than that. He’d lost track of himself. That ridiculous digression about apes and men. Not that the ideas weren’t sound. But his delivery had been self-absorbed, almost manic.

Some of this was Marguerite’s fault. That pious little speech of hers had demanded rebuttal. But he shouldn’t have risen to the bait. Ray had always been able to command an audience, and it troubled him that he had let this one get so completely out of hand. Put it down to stress, he thought.

Stress, frustration, a contagious madness. Ray had read the Crossbank printouts closely, and that was his diagnosis: insanity as a transmissible disease. Here at Blind Lake, of course, it could start at any time; perhaps had already started; he hadn’t been kidding when he called Marguerite’s speech a symptom.

Grains of snow snaked across the mallway, writhing in the wind. Ray had left his jacket backstage at the community center, but going back for it was out of the question. Ray decided to shelter in his office half a block away, make a couple of calls, do some damage assessment, find out how badly he had fucked himself with that outburst on stage. Errant thoughts still circled in his head. Daylight dreams.

He crossed the lobby of the Plaza and rode an empty elevator up to the seventh floor, snow melting to dew in his hair. He felt dizzy, nauseated. His ears vibrated with some buzzing, interminable noise. He had embarrassed himself, he thought, okay, but in the long term, even in the short term, did that really matter? If no one was leaving Blind Lake alive (and he considered that a real possibility), of what significance was his outburst? Made him look bad to the senior researchers, big fucking deal. He wasn’t playing career games anymore.

He was still well-placed to survive. He could even come through this crisis looking relatively good, if he did the right thing. What was the right thing? Killing the O/BECs, Ray thought. Too late to generate popular support, but he had laid the groundwork and might even have made a few converts if Marguerite hadn’t provoked him. If he hadn’t lost himself in a maze of ancillary ideas. If Tess hadn’t interrupted him.

He came to a dead halt at the door to his office.

Tess.

He had forgotten his daughter. He had left her in the audience.

He took his server out of his shirt pocket and pronounced Tessa’s name.

She answered promptly: “Dad?”

“Tess, where are you?”

She hesitated. Ray tried but failed to read significance into the pause. Then she said, “I’m in the car.”

“The car? Whose car?”

“Uh, Mom’s.”

“You don’t go back to your mother until Monday.”

“I know, but—”

“She shouldn’t have taken you with her. That was wrong. That was absolutely dead wrong for her to do that.”

“But—”

“Did she force you, Tess? Did your mother make you get in the car with her? You can tell me. If she’s listening, just give me a hint. I’ll understand.”

Plaintively: “No! It wasn’t like that. You left.”

“Only for a few minutes, Tess.”

“I didn’t know that!”

“You should have waited for me.”

“Plus you said all those things about killing her!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I would never hurt your mother.”

“What? I mean when you were up onstage! You talked about killing Mirror Girl!”

“I didn’t—” He stopped, forced himself to calm down. Tess was sensitive and, by the sound of her voice, already frightened. “I didn’t mention Mirror Girl. You must have misunderstood.”

“You said we have to kill her!”

“I was talking about the processor at the Eye, Tess. Please put your mother on.”

Another pause. “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“She has to bring you to me. That’s in the agreement we signed. I need to tell her about that.”

“We’re going home.” Tess sounded near tears. “I’m sorry!”

“Going to your mother’s house?”

“Yes!”

“She’s not allowed—”

“I don’t care! I don’t care what she’s not allowed! At least she doesn’t want to kill anyone!”

“Tess, I told you, I don’t—”

The server clicked. Tess had broken the connection.

When he tried her again there was no answer, only her standard voice message. He tried Marguerite. Likewise.

“Fucking bitch,” Ray whispered. Meaning Marguerite. Maybe even Tess, who had betrayed him. But no, no, back up, that wasn’t fair. Tess had been misled. Misled by her mother’s pampering and indulgence. Which was exactly what all this Mirror Girl bullshit was about.

Marguerite was using it against him. Daddy wants to kill Mirror Girl. Indoctrinating her. Ray was furious, picturing it. He could only imagine what lies Tess had been asked to believe about him.

So was Tess lost to him, too?

No. No. Impossible. Not yet.

He locked himself into his office, turned his chair to the window, and thought about calling Dimi Shulgin. Shulgin might have some ideas.

The view from the window was lifeless and hostile. Blind Lake had learned to live without weather reports, but you didn’t have to be a meteorologist to see the clouds roll in. Low clouds, weighty with snow, moving on a gale-force wind from the northwest. One more installment in this endless winter.

The falling snow gave the town an illusory vagueness, like a tintype photograph or a stage set painted in shades of gray. The windowpane flexed in a gust of wind, lensing the image slightly. Subject stared for an indeterminate period of time at the approaching storm.

When he turned away, the chair’s castor caught on something hidden under the desk. The cleaning staff had gotten sloppy, but that was hardly news. A sheet of paper. Scowling, he bent down to retrieve it.

EX: Bo Xiang, Crossbank National Laboratory TO: Avery Fishbinder, Blind Lake National Laboratory TEXT: In answer to your question, the possibility that the dry-land structures are natural is very slim. Although this kind of symmetry is often enough seen in nature, the size of the structure and the degree of precision are remarkable and suggest engineering rather than evolution. Not that this is a clinching argument, but

Ray stopped reading and placed the paper face-up on his desk.

Slowly, taking his time now, resisting hasty judgment, he keyed open his desk and removed from the bottom drawer the thick sheaf of printouts Shulgin had delivered to him. He leafed through it quickly.

The pages were out of order.

Someone had been in his desk again.

Ray stood up. He saw his reflection in the window, an image pasted on a mural of clouds, a man frozen in a layer of glass.

Twenty-Four

The weather was conspicuously worse by the time Chris, Marguerite, and Tess reached the house. Maybe that was a good thing, Chris thought. It put another barrier between Marguerite and Ray. If Ray came looking for his daughter Tess — or looking for revenge — the snow might at least slow him down.

Tess had cried after the phone call. Now her tears had subsided into a flurry of hiccups, and Marguerite walked her into the house with an arm around her shoulder. Tess shrugged out of her jacket and boots and ran for the living room sofa as if it were a life raft.

Marguerite carded the door. “Better throw the dead bolt too,” Chris said.

“You think that’s necessary?”

“I think it’s wise.”

“Aren’t you being a little paranoid? Ray wouldn’t—”

“We don’t know what Ray might do. We shouldn’t take chances.”

She threw the bolt and joined her daughter on the sofa.

Chris borrowed her office to print the docs Sue had transferred to his server. The office was windowless, but he could hear the wind kicking up outside, prying at the eavestroughs like a man with a blunt knife.

He thought about Ray onstage at the auditorium. Ray’s first order of business had been to deride and humiliate Marguerite, and he had done that fairly cleverly, disguising his anger, controlling it. For a guy like Ray, it was all about control. But the world was full of unmanageable insolence. Expectations were confounded. Wives disobeyed and then abandoned him. His theories were proven false.

His desk was rifled.

The important thing about Ray’s little meltdown, Chris thought, was that it evidenced a deeper unraveling. Guys like Ray were emotionally brittle, which was what made them such effective bullies. They lived just this side of the breaking point. And sometimes passed it.

Pages snapped briskly out of the printer, all of the thirty-odd documents Sue had filched. Ray’s treasure, for what it was worth. Chris sat down and began to read.

Marguerite spent the gray end of the afternoon with her daughter.

Tess had calmed down considerably once she was inside the house. But her distress was still obvious. She had curled up on the sofa with a quilted comforter around her like a prayer shawl and fixed her attention on the video screen. Blind Lake TV was showing old downloads of The Fosters, a children’s show Tess hadn’t watched since she was six. She had turned up the volume to drown out the sound of the wind and the sound of hard snow rattling against the windows.

Marguerite sat with her much of this time. She was curious about the documents Chris was printing and reading; but, perhaps strangely, none of that seemed urgent now. For a few hours the world was suspended between darkness and true night, cosseted in the worsening storm, and all she needed or wanted to do was hunker down with Tess.

She went to the kitchen a little after five to assemble some dinner. The window over the sink was clotted with snow, opaque as a porthole in a sunken ship, nothing outside but vague shapes moving under an immense pressure of gloom. Was it really possible Ray would come to the house and try to hurt her? In this weather? But she guessed, if you were on the brink of some awful act, you didn’t postpone it on account of snow.

Tess came into the kitchen and pulled up a chair, watching Marguerite chop yellow peppers for the salad.

“Is Chris okay?” Tess asked.

“Sure he is. He’s just upstairs doing some work.” Conferring by phone with Elaine Coster, last time she’d checked.

“But he’s still in the house?”

“Yup, still here.”

“That’s good,” Tess said. She sounded genuinely relieved. “It’s better when he’s here.”

“I think so too.”

“How long will he stay?”

Interesting question. “Well — at least until all this trouble at the Lake is finished. And maybe longer than that.” Maybe. She had not discussed this with Chris. If she asked him about his long-term plans, would that seem needy or presumptuous? Would she like the answer? And under the circumstances, how could anyone have long-term plans?

The relationship felt reasonably solid to Marguerite. Had she fallen in love with Chris Carmody? Yes, she thought so; but she was afraid of the word, afraid of saying it and almost as frightened of hearing it. Love was a natural phenomenon, often false or fleeting. Like a warm spell in October, it could end at any time.

“Tess? Can I ask you something?”

Tess shrugged, rocking gently against the back of the chair.

“Back at the auditorium, you said, ‘You can’t kill her.’ Who were you talking about?”

“You know.”

“You mean Mirror Girl?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t think Dad was talking about Mirror Girl. He was talking about the processors out at the Eye.”

“Same thing,” Tess said, obviously uncomfortable.

“Same thing? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know how to explain it. But that’s where she really lives. It’s all the same thing.”

When Marguerite pressed for details Tess became unresponsive; finally Marguerite let her retreat to the sofa. Still, it was a new twist, this idea that Mirror Girl lived at the Eye. Perhaps meaningful, but Marguerite couldn’t decipher it. Was that why Tess had snuck off to the Alley last week? Tracking Mirror Girl to her lair?

When all this craziness ends, Marguerite promised herself, I’ll take her somewhere away from here. Somewhere different. Somewhere dry and warm. Marguerite had often thought of visiting the desert Southwest — Utah, Arizona, Canyonlands, Four Corners — and Ray had always vetoed the idea. Maybe she would take Tess to the desert for a vacation. Dry country, though perhaps disconcertingly like the Subject’s UMa47/E. Looking for salvation in empty places.

Chris put a call through to Elaine. Marguerite’s office server picked up the audio and relayed it through the transducers in the walls, a connection so clean Chris could hear the sound of the storm in back of Elaine’s voice. “Are you next to a window?” he asked her. “Sounds like dogs howling.”

Elaine bunked in a two-room utility apartment left vacant by a maintenance man who had gone to Fargo for lithotripsy the day before the lockdown. It was a ground-floor unit with a view of the Dumpsters in back of Sawyer’s Steak Seafood. “Not a lot of room to move around in here… is that better?”

“A little.”

“That’s all we need right now, another northeaster or whatever they call these fucking storms out here in cow country. So, did you read the docs? What do you make of them?”

Chris considered his answer.

The documents were exactly what Sue Sampel had suspected: text messages that had languished in the servers of the senior scientists who had gone to Cancun for the annual conference. They contained news that had been tightly held but would have been made public at the conference: the discovery of an artificial structure on the surface of HR8832/B.

The structure resembled a spiky hemisphere with radial arms. One note compared the shape to a giant adenovirus or a molecule of C₆₀. Ray summarized what he’d read: “Apparently it expresses a mathematical principle called an ‘energy function’ that can be written as an expression of volume in a higher-dimensional space — but so does any icosahedron, so that proves nothing. If it really is an artifact, the builders seem to have vanished. One of the messages claims the interior of the structure is ‘uniquely difficult to image,’ whatever that means…”

“And so on and so forth,” Elaine said. “Lots of really intriguing science, but tell me something: do you see anything here that looks like a threat? Anything that would explain the stuff in that magazine clipping?”

“There must be a connection.”

“Sure, but think about what Ray was saying at the Town Hall meeting. He claimed he had evidence the O/BEC processors at Crossbank had become physically dangerous.”

“You could draw that inference.”

“Fuck inference; do you see any actual evidence of it?”

“Not in these papers, no.”

“You think Ray has evidence we don’t know about?”

“It’s possible. But Sue has been pretty close to Ray, and she doesn’t think so.”

“Right. You know what, Chris? I don’t think Ray has any real evidence at all. I think he has a hypothesis. And a giant-sized bug up his ass.”

“You’re saying he wants to shut down the Eye and he wants to use this as an excuse.”

“Exactly.”

“But the Eye could still be a threat. The fact that he’s biased doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

“If he isn’t wrong, he’s at least irresponsible. There’s nothing in these docs he couldn’t have shared with the rest of us.”

“Ray doesn’t like to share. They probably wrote that on his kindergarten report card. What do you propose to do about it?”

“Go public.”

“And how do we do that?”

“We forward these documents to every domestic server in Blind Lake. Plus I’d like to write a little summary, like a covering letter, saying we got the docs from a protected source and that the contents are important but inconclusive.”

“So Ray can’t act unilaterally. He’ll have to explain all this…”

“And maybe get some input from the rest of us before he pulls the plug.”

“That might cause trouble for Sue.”

“She’s a good-hearted lady, Chris, but I’d say she’s already in trouble. Way deep. Maybe Ray can’t prove anything, but he’s not stupid.”

“Might get us in trouble.”

“How do you define ‘trouble’? Locked up indefinitely in a federal installation run by a lunatic, that sounds like trouble no matter what else we do. But I’ll leave your name off the forward if you like.”

“No, use my name,” Chris said. “Keep Marguerite out of it, though.”

“No problem. But if you’re thinking of Ray’s reaction, I have to repeat, he’s not stupid. Keep your doors locked.”

“They are locked,” Chris said. “Securely.”

“Good. Now get ready for a shitstorm that’ll make this blizzard look like summer rain.”

At dinner Tess ate sparingly and spoke little, though she seemed to find the ritual reassuring. Or maybe, Marguerite thought, she just liked having Chris nearby. Chris was both a big man and a gentle one, an intoxicating combination for a nervous little girl. Or even a nervous full-grown woman.

After the meal Tess took a book to her room. Marguerite brewed coffee while Chris briefed her on the contents of the stolen documents. Many of them had been written by Bo Xiang. She had worked with Bo back at Crossbank, and he wasn’t the type to get excited without good reason.

There had never been even the slightest hint of a technological civilization on HR8832/B. The structure must be immensely old, she thought. HR8832/B had oscillated through a number of severe planetwide glaciations; the structure must predate at least one of them. The resemblance to the equatorial coral floaters was suggestive, but what did it mean?

But these were unanswerable questions, at least for now. And Chris and Elaine were right: none of it constituted evidence of a threat.

The storm rattled the kitchen window as they talked. We can image worlds circling other stars, Marguerite thought; can’t we make a window that doesn’t rattle in bad weather? The darkness outside was deep and intimidating. The streetlights had become veiled beacons, distant torches. It was the kind of weather that would have made the news in the old days: Winter Storm Blocks Highways in the West, Airports Closed, Travelers Stranded…

Tessa’s usual bedtime was ten o’clock, eleven on weekends, but she came into the kitchen at nine and said, “I’m tired.”

“Been a long day,” Marguerite said. “Shall I run a bath for you?”

“I’ll shower in the morning. I’m just tired.”

“Go on up and change, then. I’ll tuck you in.”

Tess hesitated.

“What is it, honey?”

“I thought maybe Chris would tell me a story.” She hung her head as if to say: It’s a baby thing to ask for. But I don’t care.

“Happy to,” Chris volunteered.

It would be hard not to love this man, Marguerite thought.

“What kind of story would you like?” Chris asked, perched on the edge of Tessa’s bed. He supposed he already knew the answer:

“A Porry story,” the girl said.

“Honest, Tess, I think I’ve told all the Porry stories there are to tell.”

“It doesn’t have to be a new one.”

“You have a favorite?”

“The tadpole story,” she said promptly.

Tessa’s bedroom window was still crudely boarded. Cold air came through the cracks and snaked down under the electric panel heaters and across the floor, seeking the house’s deepest places. Tess wore her blankets up to her chin.

“That was back in California,” Chris said, “where we grew up. We lived in a little house with an avocado tree in the backyard, and at the end of the street there was a storm drain, like a big concrete riverbed, with a wire fence to keep the local kids from getting in.”

“But you went there anyway.”

“Who’s telling this story?”

“Sorry.” She pulled the blanket up over her mouth.

“We went there anyway, all the kids in the neighborhood. There was a place you could duck under the fence. The storm drain had steep concrete walls, but if you were careful you could climb down, and in spring, if the water was low, you could find tadpoles in the shallow pools.”

“Tadpoles are baby frogs, right?”

“Right, but they don’t look like frogs at all. More like little black fish with long skinny tails and no fins. On a good day you could catch hundreds of them just by dipping a bucket. All the adults told us not to play around the storm drain, because it was dangerous. And it was, and we really shouldn’t have gone there, but we did it anyway. All of us except Porry. Porry wanted to go but I wouldn’t let her.”

“Because you were her older brother and she was too young.”

“We were all too young. Porry must have been about six or seven, which would make me eleven or twelve. But I was old enough to know she could get in trouble. I always made her wait by the fence, even though she hated that. One day I was down at the storm drain with a couple of friends, and we took maybe a little too long poking around in the mud, and by the time I got back Porry was tired and frustrated and practically crying. She wouldn’t speak to me on the way home.

“This was springtime, and Southern California gets big spring rainstorms some years. Well, it started to rain later that day. Not just a little rain, either. ‘Raindrops big as dinner plates,’ my mom used to say. After dinner I did my homework and Porry went to play in her bedroom. Or at least that’s what she said. After an hour or so my mom called her and Porry didn’t answer, and we couldn’t find her anywhere in the house.”

“Couldn’t you just ask the house server?”

“Houses weren’t as smart in those days.”

“So you went to look for her.”

“Yup. I probably shouldn’t have done that, either, but my dad was ready to call the police… and I had a feeling I knew where she’d gone.”

“You should have told your parents first.”

“I should have, but I didn’t want to let on I knew how to get down to the storm drain myself. But you’re right — it would have been braver to tell them.”

“You were only eleven.”

“I was only eleven and I didn’t always do the bravest thing, so I snuck out of the house and ran through the rain to the gap in the fence, and I pushed under it and started to look for Porry.”

“I think that was brave. Did you find her?”

“You know how this comes out.”

“I’m pretending I don’t.”

“Porry had taken a bucket and gone down to the culvert to collect her own tadpoles. She was halfway back up that steep embankment when she got scared. It was the kind of scared where you can’t go forward and you can’t back up, so you don’t do anything at all. She was crouched there, crying, and the water in the culvert was running hard and rising fast. A few more minutes and she might have been carried away by it.”

“But you saved her.”

“Well, I climbed down and took her arm and helped her up. The embankment was pretty slippery in the rain. We were almost at the fence when she said, ‘My tadpoles!’ So I had to go back and get her bucket. Then we went home.”

“And you didn’t tell on her.”

“I said I’d found her playing in the neighbors’ yard. We hid the bucket in the garage…”

“And forgot about it!”

“And forgot about it, but those tadpoles did what tadpoles do — they started to turn into frogs. My dad opened up the garage a couple of days later and the floor was covered with little green frogs, frogs jumping up his legs, frogs all over the car. An avalanche of frogs. He yelled, and we all came running out of the house, and Porry started to laugh…”

“But she wouldn’t say why.”

“She wouldn’t say why.”

“And you never told.”

“Anyone. Until now.”

Tess smiled contentedly. “Yeah. Were the frogs okay?”

“Mostly. They headed into the hedges and gardens all up and down our street. It was a noisy summer that year, all that croaking.”

“Yes.” Tess closed her eyes. “Thank you, Chris.”

“You don’t have to thank me. Think you can sleep?”

“Yeah.”

“I hope the sound of the wind doesn’t keep you up.”

“Could be worse,” Tess said, smiling for the first time today. “Could be frogs.”

Marguerite listened from the doorway to the first part of the story, then retreated to her office and switched on the wall screen. Not to work. Just to watch.

It was near dusk on the Subject’s small patch of UMa47/E. Subject traversed a low canyon parallel to the setting sun. Maybe it was the long light, but he looked especially unwell, Marguerite thought. He had been scavenging for food for a long time now, subsisting on the mossy substance that grew wherever there was water and shade. Marguerite suspected the moss was not terribly nutritious, perhaps not even enough to sustain him. His skin was creased and shrunken. You didn’t have to be a physicist to parse that equation. Too many calories spent, too few ingested.

As the sky darkened a few stars emerged. The brightest was not a star at all but a planet: one of the system’s two gas giants, UMa47/A, almost three times the size of Jupiter and big enough to show a perceptible disc at its nearest approach. Subject stopped and swiveled his head from side to side. Taking his bearings, perhaps, or even performing some kind of celestial navigation.

She heard Chris closing Tessa’s bedroom door. He leaned into the office and said, “Mind if I join you?”

“Pull up a chair. I’m not really working.”

“Getting dark,” he said, gesturing at the wall screen.

“He’ll sleep soon. I know it sounds dumb, Chris, but I’m worried about him. He’s a long way from — well, anywhere. Nothing seems to live in this place, not even the parasites that feed on him at night.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“But, technically, they’re probably not parasites at all. There must be a benevolent symbiosis, or the cities wouldn’t be full of them.”

“New York is full of rats. That doesn’t mean they’re desirable.”

“It’s an open question. But he’s clearly not well.”

“He might not make it to Damascus.”

“Damascus?”

“I keep thinking he’s St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Waiting for a vision.”

“I suppose we’d never know if he found it. I was hoping for something more tangible.”

“Well, I’m no expert.”

“Who is?” She turned away from the display. “Thanks for helping Tess settle down. I hope you’re not sick of telling her stories.”

“Not at all.”

“She likes your — what does she call them? Porry stories. Actually, I’m a little jealous. You don’t talk much about your family.”

“Tessa’s an easy audience.”

“And I’m not?”

He smiled. “You’re not eleven.”

“Did Tess ever ask you what happened to Portia as a grown-up?”

“Thankfully, no.”

“How did she die?” Marguerite asked, then: “I’m sorry, Chris. I’m sure you don’t want to talk about it. Really, it’s none of my business.”

He was silent a moment. God, she thought, I’ve offended him.

Then he said, “Portia was always a little more headstrong than she was bright. She never had an easy time at school. She dropped out of college and got in with a bunch of people, part-time dopers…”

“Drugs,” Marguerite said.

“It wasn’t just the drugs. She could always handle the drugs, I guess because they didn’t appeal to her all that much. But she had bad judgment about people. She moved into a guy’s trailer outside of Seattle and we didn’t hear from her for a while. She claimed she loved him, but she wouldn’t even put him on the phone.”

“Not a good sign.”

“This happened when my book about Galliano had just been published. I was passing through Seattle on a tour, so I called Porry up and arranged to meet her. Not where she lived — she insisted on that. It had to be somewhere downtown. Just her, not her boyfriend. She was a little reluctant about the whole thing, but she named a restaurant and we got together there. She showed up in low-rent drag and a big pair of sunglasses. The kind you wear to hide a bruise or a black eye.”

“Oh, no.”

“Eventually she admitted things weren’t going too well between her and her friend. She’d just landed a job, she was saving money to get a place of her own. She said not to worry about her, she was sorting things out.”

“The guy was beating her?”

“Obviously. She begged me not to get involved. Not to pull any ‘big brother shit,’ as she put it. But I was busy saving the world from corruption. If I could expose Ted Galliano to public scrutiny, why should I put up with this kind of thing from some trailer-park cowboy? So I got Porry’s address out of the directory and drove out there while she was at work. The guy was home, of course. He really didn’t look like any kind of threat. He was five-nine, with a rose tattoo on his skinny right arm. Looked like he’d spent the day killing a six-pack and greasing an engine. He was belligerent, but I just braced him against the trailer with my forearm under his chin and told him if he touched Portia again he’d have me to answer to. He got very apologetic. He actually started to cry. He said he couldn’t help it, it was the bottle, hey buddy you know how it is. He said he’d get himself under control. And I went away thinking I’d done some good. On my way out of town I stopped by the office where Porry worked and left her a check, something to help her get independent. Two days later I got a call from a Seattle emergency ward. She’d been beaten badly and was hemorrhaging from a cranial artery. She died that night. Her boyfriend burned the trailer and left town on a stolen motorbike. Far as I know, the police are still looking for him.”

“God, Chris… I’m so sorry!”

“No. I’m sorry. It’s not a good story for a stormy night.” He touched her hand. “It doesn’t even have a moral, except ‘shit happens.’ But if I seemed a little reluctant to jump in between you and Ray…”

“I understand. And I do appreciate your help. But, Chris? I can handle Ray. With you or without you. Preferably with, but… you understand?”

“You’re telling me you’re not Portia.”

There was no light in the room now but the glow of the sunset on UMa47/E. Subject had reclined for the night. Above the canyon wall, stars shone in constellations no one had named. No one on Earth, at least.

“I’m telling you I’m not Portia. And I’m offering you a cup of tea. Interested?”

She took his hand and walked with him to the kitchen, where the window was blank with snow and the kettle sang counterpoint to the sound of the wind.

Twenty-Five

Sue Sampel was wide awake when the doorbell chimed, though it was well after midnight — almost three, according to her watch.

Between the storm outside and the nervous energy she had stoked up during her raid on Ray’s office, sleep was out of the question. Sebastian, bless him, had gone upstairs around midnight and fallen immediately and soundly asleep. She had curled up with his book as a sort of vicarious presence. His book, plus a big snifter of peach brandy.

But the book seemed less substantial on her second go-through. It was beautifully written and full of striking ideas, but the gaps and leaps of logic were more obvious now. She supposed this was what had put Elaine Coster’s back up, Sebastian’s cheerful love of outrageous hypotheses.

For instance, Sebastian explained in the book how what people called “the vacuum of space” was more than just an absence of matter: it was a complex brew of virtual particles popping in and out of existence too quickly to interact with the ordinary substance of things. That jibed with Sue’s memory of first-year physics. She suspected he was on less firm scientific ground when he said that localized irregularities in the quantum vacuum accounted for the presence of “dark matter” in the universe. And his fundamental idea — that dark matter represented a kind of ghostly neural network inhabiting the quantum vacuum — was taken seriously by almost no one apart from Sebastian himself.

But Sebastian wasn’t a scientist and had never claimed to be one. Pressed, he would say these ideas were “templates” or “suggestions,” perhaps not to be taken literally. Sue understood, but she wished it could be otherwise; she wished his theories were solid as houses, solid enough to shelter in.

Not that her own house seemed especially solid tonight. The wind was absolutely ferocious, the snow so dense that the view from the window was like an O/BEC image of some planet unsuitable for human life. She nestled a little deeper into the sofa, took another sip of brandy and read:

Life evolves by moving into preexisting domains and exploiting preexisting forces of nature. The laws of aerodynamics were latent in the natural universe before they were “discovered” by insects and birds. Similarly, human consciousness was not invented de novo but represents the adoption by biology of an implicit, universal mathematics…

This was the idea Sue liked best, that people were pieces of something larger, something that popped up in a shape called Sue Sampel here and in a shape called Sebastian Vogel over there, both unique but both connected, the way two distinctive mountain peaks were also pieces of the same planet. Otherwise, she thought, what are we but lost animals? Lost animals, exiled from the womb, ignorant and dying.

The doorbell startled her. Her house server was kind enough to ring it quietly, but when she asked who was there the server said, “Not recognized.” Her stomach clenched. Someone not in her catalogue of regular visitors.

Ray Scutter, she thought. Who else? Elaine had warned her that something like this might happen. Ray was impulsive, more impulsive than ever since the lockdown, maybe impulsive enough to brave the storm and show up on her doorstep at three in the morning. By now he might have seen Elaine’s massive mailing. He would know (though he might not be able to prove it) that Sue had duped the copies from his desk. He would be furious. Worse, enraged. Dangerous. Yes, but how dangerous? Just how crazy was Ray Scutter?

She wished she’d had a little less to drink. But she had thought it would help her sleep, and she’d run out of pot a month ago. In Sue’s experience drugs and alcohol were like men, and pot was the best date. Cocaine liked to get dressed up and go out, very elegant, but coke would abandon you at the party or hector you into the small hours of the morning. Alcohol promised to be fun but ended up as an embarrassment; alcohol was a guy in a loud shirt, a guy with bad breath and too many opinions. Pot, however… pot liked to cuddle and make love. Pot liked to eat ice cream and watch the late show. She missed pot.

The doorbell rang again. Sue peeked out the side window. Sure enough, that was Ray’s little midnight-blue car parked against the drifts at the curb, and it must have a pretty good drive system, she thought, to have made it this far through the deepening snow.

There was another round of ringing, which the server muted disdainfully.

She could, of course, ignore him. But that struck her as cowardly. Really, there was nothing to be afraid of. What was he going to do? Yell at her? I’m a grown-up, she thought. I can deal with that. Better to get it over with.

She thought about waking up Sebastian and decided against it. Sebastian was many things, but he wasn’t a fighter. She could handle this herself. See what Ray wanted, if necessary tell him to bugger off.

But she went to the kitchen and took a carving knife out of the knife rack just in case. She felt idiotic doing it — the knife was really just a kind of emotional insurance, something to make her feel brave — and she kept it hidden behind her back as she approached the door. Opening the door because, after all, this was Blind Lake, the safest community on the surface of the Earth, even if your employer happened to be seriously pissed at you.

Her heart was beating double-time.

Ray stood under the yellow porch light in a long black jacket. The wind had tousled his hair and adorned it with snow stars. His lips were pursed and his eyes were bright. Sue kept herself squarely in the doorway, ready to slam the door should the necessity arise. Bitter air gusted into the house. She said, “Ray—”

“You’re fired,” he said.

She blinked at him. “What?”

His voice was flat and level, his lips fixed in what looked like a permanent sneer. “I know what you did. I came to tell you you’re fired.”

“I’m fired? You drove out here to tell me I’m fired?”

This was too much. The tension of the day had accumulated inside her like an electric charge, and this was so ludicrously anticlimactic — Ray firing her from a job that had long ago become redundant and unimportant — that she had to struggle to keep a straight face.

What would he do next, kick her out of Blind Lake?

But she sensed it was absolutely necessary to conceal the amusement she felt. “Ray,” she said, “look, I’m sorry, but it’s late—”

“Shut up. Shut the fuck up. You’re nothing but a thief. I know about the documents you stole. And I know about the other thing too.”

“The other thing?”

“Do I have to draw you a diagram? The pastry!”

The DingDong.

That did it. She laughed in spite of herself — a choked giggle that turned into a helpless, full-throated roar. God, the DingDong — Sebastian’s ersatz birthday cake — the fucking DingDong!

She was still laughing when Ray reached for her throat.

Sebastian had always been a sound sleeper.

He was quick to nod off, slow to wake. Morning classes had been the bane of his academic career. He would have made a lousy monk, he had often thought. Incapable of celibacy and always late for matins.

He slept through the distant sound of the doorbell and through the considerable noise that followed. He woke to the sound of someone whispering his name.

Or maybe it was only the wind. In a cocoon of blankets he opened his eyes to the darkened room, listened a moment and heard nothing but the keening of the storm about the eaves. He reached across to Sue’s side of the bed but found it cold and empty. Not unusual. Sue was something of an insomniac. He closed his eyes again and sighed.

“Sebastian!”

Sue’s voice. She was not in bed but she was in the room with him, and she sounded terrified. He shed layers of sleep like a wet dog shaking off water. He reached for the bedside lamp and nearly toppled it. The light sprang on and he saw Sue by the bedroom door, one hand clenched against her lower abdomen. She was pale and sweating.

“Sue? What’s wrong?”

“He hurt me,” she said, and lifted her hand to show him the blood on her nightgown, the blood pooling around her feet.

Twenty-Six

Charlie Grogan, when he wasn’t troubleshooting the Eye, lived in a one-bedroom condo-style unit a couple of blocks north of the Plaza.

Charlie slept in the bedroom; his old dog Boomer slept in a nest of cotton blankets in a corner of the kitchen. The chime woke them simultaneously, but Boomer was first on his feet.

Charlie, coming out of a confused dream about the Subject, grabbed for his pocket server and punched the lobby connection. “Who’s there?”

“Ray Scutter. I’m sorry, I know it’s late. Hate to disturb you, but it’s something of an emergency.”

Ray Scutter, down in the lobby in the worst storm of the winter. Middle of the night. Charlie shook his head. He was unprepared for serious thought. He said, “Yeah, okay, come on up,” and buzzed the lock.

He had thrown on a shirt, pants, and socks by the time Ray reached the door. Boomer was freaked by all this late-night activity, and Charlie had to order him to keep quiet as Ray entered the apartment. Boomer sniffed at the man’s knees, then shuffled uneasily away.

Ray Scutter. Charlie knew the executive administrator by sight, but he hadn’t spoken to him one-on-one before now. Nor had he watched Ray’s Town Hall address earlier, though he’d heard it was a disaster. Charlie was generous about such things: he hated public speaking and knew how easy it was to get tongue-tied at a podium.

“You can hang your jacket in the closet,” Charlie said. “Sit down.”

Ray did neither. “I won’t be here long,” he said. “And I’m hoping you’ll leave with me.”

“How’s that?”

“I know how strange this sounds. Mr. Grogan — it’s Charlie, right?”

“Charlie’ll do.”

“Charlie, I’m here to ask for your help.”

Something in Ray’s voice troubled Boomer, who whined from the kitchen. Charlie was more troubled by the man’s appearance — rumpled suit, hair askew, what looked like fresh scratches on his face.

There had been a lot of gossip about Ray Scutter, to the effect that he was a lousy manager and an asshole to deal with. But Charlie held such hearsay inadmissible. In any case, the boss was the boss. “Tell me what I can help you with, Mr. Scutter.”

“You carry an all-pass transponder out at the Eye, right?”

“I do, but—”

“All I want is a tour.”

“Pardon me?”

“I know it’s extraordinary. I also know it’s four in the morning. But I have some decisions to make, Charlie, and I don’t want to make them until I personally inspect the facility. I can’t tell you more than that.”

“Sir,” Charlie said, “there’s a night shift on duty. I’m not sure you need me. I’ll just call Anne Costigan—”

“Don’t call anyone. I don’t want people to know I’m coming. What I want is to go out there, just you and me, and we’ll do a discreet walk-through and see what we see. If anyone complains — if Anne Costigan complains — I’ll take responsibility.”

Good, Charlie thought, since it was Ray’s responsibility. Reluctantly, he took his winter jacket off the hook in the hall.

Boomer wasn’t happy with this turn of events. He whined again and stalked off to the bedroom, probably to find a warm spot in Charlie’s bed. Boomer was an opportunistic hound.

They rode in Ray’s car, a squat little vehicle with lots of bad-weather options. It took the snow pretty well, microprocessors controlling each wheel, finding traction where there should have been none. But it was still slow going. The snow came down like bags of wet confetti, almost too fast for the wipers to clear from the windshield. In this opacity of space and time the only landmarks were the streetlights, candles passing in the darkness with metronome regularity.

In the close interior of the car Ray smelled pretty ripe. His sweat had a strange acetic undertone, not pleasant, and there was something coppery on top of that, the kind of smell you registered with your back teeth. Charlie tried to figure out how he could crack a window in the middle of a blizzard without insulting Ray.

Ray talked a little as he drove. This wasn’t really a conversation, since Charlie had very little to contribute. At one point Charlie said, “If you tell me what you’re looking for at the Eye, Mr. Scutter, maybe I can help you find it.”

But Ray just shook his head. “I trust you,” he said, “and I understand your curiosity, but I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

Since Ray was pretty much the boss of Blind Lake since the shutdown, Charlie would have thought he was at liberty to discuss anything he liked. He didn’t press the issue, however. He realized he was afraid of Ray Scutter, and not just because Ray was executive management. Ray was giving off very peculiar vibes.

The spots on his jacket and slacks, Charlie thought, looked like dried blood.

“You’ve worked a long time with the O/BEC processors,” Ray said.

“Yessir. Since Gencorp. Actually, I knew Dr. Gupta back in the Berkeley Lab days.”

“Did you ever wonder, Charlie, what we woke up when we built the Eye?”

“Excuse me?”

“When we built a motherfucking huge mathematical phase space and populated it with self-modifying code?”

“I guess that’s one way to think of it.”

“There’s no phenomenon in the universe you can’t describe mathematically. Everything’s a calculation, Charlie, including you and me, we’re just little sequestered calculations, water and minerals running million-year-old make-me instructions.”

“That’s a bleak point of view.”

“Said the monkey, apprehending a threat.”

“Pardon me?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry. I’m a little short on sleep.”

“I know the feeling,” Charlie said, though he felt as wide awake as he had ever been.

Somehow, Ray kept the car on the road. Charlie was vastly relieved when he saw the guardpost coming up on the left. He wondered who had pulled guard duty on a miserable night — no, morning — like this. It turned out to be Nancy Saeed. She scanned Charlie’s all-pass and registered with visible surprise the presence of Ray Scutter. Nancy was ex-navy; when she saw Ray she began a salute, then thought better of it.

Moments later Ray parked by the main entrance. The nice thing about coming in early was, you could always find good parking.

He escorted Ray to his own office, where they left their jackets. Charlie had conducted enough of these dignitary and VIP tours that he had gotten it down to a routine. Prep and instructions in his office, then the walk-through. But this wasn’t the usual dog-and-pony show. A long way from it.

“I met your daughter here the other day,” Charlie said.

Ray cocked his head like a hunting animal catching a scent. “Tessa was here?”

“Well, she — yeah, she came by and wanted to see the works.”

“By herself?”

“Her mom picked her up afterward.”

Ray grimaced. “I wish I could tell you I’m proud of my daughter, Charlie. Unfortunately I can’t. In many ways she’s her mother’s child. You always take that chance when you spin the genetic roulette wheel. You have any kids?”

“No,” Charlie said.

“Good for you. Never unwind your base pairs. It’s a sucker’s bet.”

“Sir,” Charlie said, trying not to stare.

“What did she want, Charlie?”

“Your daughter? Just to look around.”

“Tess has had some emotional problems. Sometimes madness is contagious.”

If it’s catching, Charlie thought, then you’re overdue for a checkup. “Strange things happen,” he said, trying to make himself sound amicable. “Why don’t you take off your shoes and put on a pair of these disposables. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Where are you going?”

“See a man about the plumbing,” Charlie said.

He walked far enough down the main corridor to make it look convincing. As soon as he turned a corner he thumbed his pocket server and asked for Tabby Menkowitz in Security. She picked up a moment later.

“Charlie? It’s an hour to dawn — what are you doing here?”

“I think we might have a problem, Tab.”

“We’ve got lots of problems. What’s your flavor?”

“Ray Scutter’s in my office and he wants a tour of the plant.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I wish I was.”

“Tell him to make an appointment. We’re busy.”

“Tabby, I can’t just tell him—” He thought about what she’d said. “Busy with what?”

“You don’t know? Talk to Anne. Maybe it’s a good thing you showed up when you did. What I hear is, the O/BECs are putting out strange numbers and the Obs people are all excited about something… but it’s not my department. All I know is, everybody’s too busy to play politics with management. So keep Mr. Scutter on hold.”

“I don’t think he’s in a mood to wait. He—”

“Charlie! I’m busy, okay? Handle it!”

Charlie hurried back to his office. Something major was happening with the O/BECs, and he wanted to get downstairs and look into it. But first things first. See Ray out the door, if possible, or put him on the phone to Tabby if he had a problem with that.

But the office was empty.

Ray was missing. Also missing, Charlie realized, was his own all-pass card, plucked off the lapel of the jacket he had hung up on the hook by the door.

“Shit,” Charlie said.

He called Tabby Menkowitz again, but this time he couldn’t get through. Something wrong with his pocket server. It chimed once and went blue-screen.

He was still fiddling with it when the floor began to move under his feet.

Twenty-Seven

Chris came out of a black and dreamless sleep to the chirping of his pocket server, which he had left on the bedside table and which glowed there like a luminous pencil. He checked the inset clock before he thumbed the answer button. Four in the morning. He’d had about an hour of real sleep. The storm was still gnawing at the skin of the house.

It was Elaine Coster calling. She was at the Blind Lake clinic, she said, with Sebastian Vogel and Sue Sampel. Sue had been stabbed. Stabbed by Ray Scutter. “Maybe you guys ought to get down here, if you can make it in this weather. I mean, it’s not totally dire; Sue’s going to live and everything — in fact, she was asking after you — but I keep thinking it would be wise for the bunch of us to stay together for a while.”

Chris watched Marguerite turn uneasily under the blankets. “We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

He woke her and told her what had happened.

Marguerite let Chris drive through the snow. She sat in the back of the car with Tess, who was only grudgingly awake and still ignorant of what her father had done. Marguerite meant to keep it that way, at least for now. Tess was under more than enough stress.

For the duration of the drive, with Tessa’s head cradled in her lap, and snow clinging to the windows of the car, and the whole of Blind Lake wrapped in a gelid, bitter darkness, Marguerite thought about Ray.

She had misjudged him.

She had never believed Ray would let himself be reduced to physical violence. Even now, she had a hard time picturing it. Ray with a knife. It had been a knife, Chris had said. Ray with a knife, using it. Ray putting the knife into Sue Sampel’s body.

“You know,” she said to Chris, “I only fainted once in my life. It was because of a snake.”

Chris wrestled the steering wheel as they turned a corner toward the mallway. The car fishtailed, microprocessors blinking loss-of-traction alerts before it straightened out. But he had time to shoot her a curious look.

“I was seven years old,” Marguerite said. “I walked out of the house one summer morning and there was a snake curled up on the porch stairs, basking in the sun. A big snake, bright and shiny against the old wood step. Too big and too shiny to be real. I assumed it was fake — that one of the neighbor kids had left it there to tease me. So I jumped over it. Three times. Three separate times. In case anyone was looking, just to prove I couldn’t be fooled. The snake never moved, and I went off to the library without giving it a second thought. But when I came home my father told me he’d killed a rattler that morning. It had come up on the porch and he’d used a shovel to cut it in half. The snake was lethargic in the cool air, he said, but he had to be careful. A snake like that can strike faster than lightning and carries enough venom to kill a horse.” She looked at Chris. “That’s when I fainted.”

They reached the Blind Lake clinic twenty minutes later. Chris parked the car under the shelter of a concrete overhang, its passenger-side wheels straddling the sidewalk. Elaine Coster met them in the lobby. Sebastian Vogel was there, too, slumped in a chair, his head in his hands.

Elaine gave Marguerite a hard look. “Sue wants to see you.”

“Wants to see me?”

“The wound is more or less superficial. She’s been stitched and drugged. The nurse says she ought to be sleeping, but she was wide awake a few minutes ago, and when I mentioned you guys were coming in she said, ‘I want to talk to Marguerite.’”

Oh, God, Marguerite thought. “I guess if she’s still awake—”

“I’ll show you the way.”

Chris promised to look after Tess, who was taking a sleepy interest in the waiting-room toys.

“Come on in, hon,” Sue said. “I’m too feeble to bite.”

Marguerite edged inside the room.

Sue’s room was just down the hall from the room where Adam Sandoval lay comatose — the man who had dropped into Blind Lake in a damaged aircraft. Sue definitely wasn’t comatose, but she looked dismayingly weak. She was propped in a semireclined position, a saline drip plugged into the crook of her elbow. Her face was pale. She seemed much older than her forty-something years. But she managed to smile. “Honest,” she said, “it’s not as bad as it looks. I lost some blood, but the knife didn’t cut anything more important than what Dr. Goldhar calls ‘adispose tissue.’ Fat, in other words. I guess I was rescued by every dessert I’ve ever eaten. Like the guy in the movies who would’ve been shot through the heart if not for the Bible in his pocket. There’s a chair by the bed, Marguerite. Don’t you want to sit down? It makes me tired to see you standing there.”

Dutifully, Marguerite sat. “You must be having a lot of pain.”

“Not anymore. They pumped me full of morphine. Or something like it. The nurse says it usually makes people sleepy, but I’m an ‘idiosyncratic responder.’ I think that means it made me want to sit up and talk. Do you suppose this is how drug addicts feel? On a good day?”

“Maybe at first.”

“Meaning it won’t last. I’m sure you’re right. It has that house-of-cards feeling, like it can’t go on forever. Euphoria with a price tag. I want to enjoy it while it lasts.”

It could end at any time, Marguerite thought. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Thank you, but you don’t need to be sorry. Really, I appreciate you guys coming out here in this awful weather.”

“When I heard it was Ray — that he was the one who hurt you—”

“What about it?”

“I owe you an apology.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. Which is why I wanted to talk to you.” She frowned. It made her face seem even more pallid. “I don’t know you real well, Marguerite, but we get along okay, don’t we?”

“I think so.”

“Well enough that I can get a little personal?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I get the impression I’ve had more experience with men than you have. Not necessarily good experience, but more of it. I’m not saying I’m a slut or you’re a virgin, just that we fall on different parts of the distribution curve, if you know what I mean… I’m sorry, I’m a little light-headed. Bear with me. One of the things I’ve learned is you can’t take responsibility for what a man does. Especially if you’ve already kicked him out for being an asshole. So please, please don’t apologize on behalf of Ray. He’s not some pit bull you should have kept on a shorter leash. He’s totally responsible for how he behaved when you guys were married. And he’s absolutely responsible for this.”

She gestured at the bandage bulging under the thin clinic sheet.

Marguerite said, “I wish I could have done something to stop him.”

“Me too. But you couldn’t.”

“I keep thinking—”

“No, Marguerite. No. Really. You couldn’t.”

Perhaps not. But she had consistently underestimated the degree of Ray’s madness. She had jumped over that rattlesnake a hundred times, a thousand times, with only her dumb innocence to protect her.

She could have been killed. Sue nearly had been.

“Well… can I say I’m sorry you got hurt?”

“You already did. And thank you. I want to talk to Chris, too, but, you know, maybe I am getting a little sleepy here.” Her eyelids retreated to half-mast. “Suddenly I feel all warm and sort of — what’s the word? Oracular.”

“Oracular?”

“Like the Oracle of Delphi. Wisdom for a penny, if I can stay awake long enough to dispense it. I feel very wise and like everything’s going to be okay, ultimately. That would probably be the morphine talking. Chris is a good guy, though. You’ll do okay with Chris. He’s trying real hard, whether it shows or not. All he needs is a reason to think better of himself. He needs you to trust him, and he needs to live up to that trust… but that part’s up to him.”

Marguerite just stared.

“Now,” Sue said, spectacularly pale against the off-white bedsheet, “I believe I really do need to sleep.”

She closed her eyes.

Marguerite sat quietly while Sue’s breathing steadied. Then she tiptoed into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

Sue had surprised her tonight. So had Ray, in a much more terrifying fashion. And if I can’t figure out these people, she thought, how can I even pretend to understand the Subject? Maybe Ray had been right about that. All her big talk about narratives: it was absurd, ridiculous, a childish dream.

Her server trilled in her pocket — a message from the Eye with a priority tag on it. Marguerite thumbed the ANSWER button, expecting more bad news.

It was a text message, a heads-up from the guys in Data Acquisition: Get to a screen ASAP, it said.

“I understand,” Sebastian Vogel said to Chris, “the wound isn’t as bad as it seemed at first. In all honesty, I thought she might die. But she was talking when I drove her here, almost nonstop.”

Sebastian looked fragile, Chris thought, his round body crammed into the ungenerous circumference of a waiting-room chair. Elaine Coster sat at the opposite side of the clinic’s reception space, scowling, while Tess played listlessly with waiting-room toys meant to amuse children much younger than herself. She ran a train of colored beads around a wireframe roller-coaster. The beads clacked together when they slid from peak to valley.

“She insisted on talking about my book,” Sebastian said. “Can you imagine that? Considering the pain she was in?”

“How nice,” Elaine said caustically from across the room. “You must have been flattered.”

Sebastian looked genuinely hurt. “I was horrified.”

“So why mention it?”

“She might have been dying, Elaine. She asked me if there really was a God, the sort of God I described in the book. ‘From which our minds arise and to which they return’ — she was quoting me.”

“So what did you tell her?”

“Maybe I should have lied. I told her I don’t know.”

“How did she take it?”

“She didn’t believe me. She thinks I’m modest.” He looked at Elaine, then at Chris. “That fucking book! That piece of shit book. Of course I wrote it for the money. Not even a lot of money. Just a small advance from a minor-league press. Something to pad out my pension. No one expected it to take off the way it did. I never meant it to be something people take as a creed. At best, it’s a kind of theological science fiction. A thinking man’s joke.”

“A lie, in other words,” Elaine said.

“Yes, yes, but is it? Lately—”

“Lately what?”

“I don’t know how to say this. It feels more like inspiration. Do you understand the history of that word, inspiration? The pneuma, the sacred breath, the breath of life, the divine breath? Inhaling God? Maybe something was speaking through me.”

“Sounds like your bullshit detector has malfed,” Elaine said, though she said it more quietly, Chris noticed, and with less obvious scorn.

Sebastian shook his head. “Elaine. Do you know why your cynicism doesn’t hurt? Because I share it. If I was ever sincere about the existence of God, I grew out of it not long after I reached puberty. If you call my book bullshit, Elaine, I won’t argue with you. Remember when you predicted I’d write a sequel? You were absolutely right. I signed the contract the week before I left for Crossbank. Wisdom the Quantum Vacuum. Laughable, isn’t it? But, oh, Jesus, the money they offered me! To write a few harmless aphorisms in fancy language. Who could it hurt? No one. Least of all me. My academic career is finished; any credibility I had as a scholar was flushed away when I published the first volume. Nothing left to do but milk the cow. But—”

Sebastian paused. Elaine came across the tiled floor and sat down next to him.

Chris watched Tess play with a crude wooden car. If the girl was listening, she showed no sign of it.

“But?” Elaine prompted.

“But — as I said — I find myself wondering — that is, I wake up some mornings believing it. Believing it wholeheartedly, believing it the way I believe in my own existence.”

“Believing what, that you’re a prophet?”

“Hardly. No. I wake up thinking I stumbled on a truth. Despite myself. A fundamental truth.”

“What truth, Sebastian?”

“That there’s something living in the physical processes of the universe. Not necessarily creating it. Modifying it, maybe. But chiefly living in it. Eating the past and excreting the future.”

Tess gave him a curious look, then rolled her car a little farther away.

“You know,” Elaine said, “that’s like the final stage of lunacy. When you start to actually pay attention to the voices in your head.”

“Obviously. I may be crazy, Elaine, but I’m not stupid. I can diagnose a delusion. So I ask myself whether Ray Scutter might be right, whether Blind Lake has been infected with a contagious madness. It would explain a great deal, wouldn’t it? It would explain why we’ve been quarantined. It would explain some of Ray’s own behavior. It might even explain why Sue is in a clinic ward with a knife wound in her belly.”

And it might explain Mirror Girl, Chris thought.

He looked for Tess, worried that she had overheard this remark about her father, but Tess had abandoned her wooden car next to the swinging doors marked HOSPITAL PERSONNEL ONLY and disappeared down the corridor.

He stood and called her name. No answer.

Tess was looking for her mother when she opened the door into the sleeping man’s room.

At first she thought the room was empty. It was only dimly lit, but from the doorway she could make out the bed, the window, a silently blinking medical monitor, the skeletal shape of an IV tree. She was about to retreat when the sleeping man said, “Hey there. Don’t go.”

She hesitated.

The sleeping man lay motionless in his bed, but apparently he wasn’t sleeping after all. He sounded friendly. But you could never tell.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” the man said. He said “hafta” for “have to,” Tess noticed. Somehow, that made him less frightening.

She took a cautious step closer. She said, “You’re the man from the airplane.”

“That’s right. The airplane. My name is Adam. Like the palindrome. ‘Madam, I’m Adam.’” His voice was an old man’s voice, gravelly and slow, but it sounded sleepy, too. “I’ve had my pilot’s license for fifteen years,” he said. “But I’m a weekend flier mostly. I own a hardware store in Loveland, Colorado. Adam Sandoval. The man from the airplane. That’s me. What’s your name?”

“Tessa.”

“And this must be Blind Lake.”

“Yes.”

“Sounds like it’s cold outside.”

“It’s snowing. You can hear the snow blowing against the window.”

“Poor visibility,” Adam Sandoval mused, as if he were taxiing down some imaginary runway.

“Are you badly hurt?” Tess asked. He still hadn’t moved.

“Well, I don’t know. I’m not in pain. I’m not sure I’m even altogether awake. Are you a dream, Tessa?”

“I don’t think so.” She thought about what this man had done. He had literally fallen out of the sky. Like Dorothy. He had come to Blind Lake on a whirlwind. “What’s it like outside?”

“Snowing, you said. And it seems to be nighttime.”

“No, I mean outside of Blind Lake.”

The man paused. It was as if he was rummaging around in a box of memories, a box that had been locked up so long he was no longer sure what he might have left inside it.

“It was hard to get in the air that day,” he said at last. “There was National Guard at the airports, even the local strips. Everybody worried about the starfish.” He paused again. “The Crossbank starfish took my wife. Or she took it, maybe that’s a better way of saying the same thing.”

Tess didn’t understand this, not even a little, but she was patient while the man kept talking. It would be rude to interrupt. She hoped at least some of what he said might sooner or later make sense.

“Karen, that’s my wife, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer six years ago. They couldn’t cure it because of some quirk of her immune system. The treatment would have killed her as quick as the disease. So she had some surgery and took a handful of pills every four hours to inhibit metastasis and she would have lived another twenty years, no problem, and so what if you have to choke down a few capsules of this and that now and then? But Karen said the pills made her sick — and I have to admit, she was running to the bathroom all the time, made it hard for her to leave the house — and the surgery left her tired and feeling old, and I guess she was clinically depressed on top of all that, though she seemed more sad than sick, sad all the time.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Tess said.

“She watched a lot of video when she was home by herself. So when that Crossbank starfish popped up she saw it right away on the panel. Made me print out the newsmagazines for her, too.”

“I was at Crossbank,” Tess declared. “Last year. I don’t remember a starfish.”

“Yeah, but that was before. Even at the time there weren’t a lot of pictures. At first they tried to keep it out of the press. But there was amateur video circulating, and then another one popped up in Georgia and suddenly the whole world knew it was happening, even if they didn’t know what was happening. There was a faction in congress wanted to nuke the starfish outright. Karen was horrified by that idea. So help me, she thought they were beautiful.”

“Beautiful?”

“The starfish. Especially the Crossbank starfish. The size of it, like the biggest and most perfect thing you ever saw, and all the spines and arches made of whatever they’re made of, like mother-of-pearl, with rainbows built in. You knew you were looking at something special, but some people thought it was holy and the rest of us figured it was 666 and the Four Horsemen put together. Karen fell into the first category and I fell into the second. Maybe if you’re depressed something like that begins to look like salvation. But if all you want is to hang on to your life and wrestle it back to normal, it’s just another threat and a distraction.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I guess you had to see it from the beginning. Especially the big starfish that grew at Crossbank where that peculiar telescope used to be. Karen got more and more agitated the more she watched it on the nets, the soldiers everywhere and the roads closed and all those foreign countries wanting to know what hellish thing we had cooked up, and was it dangerous, and of course nobody could answer either question. You know what surprised me about Karen? The energy she had all of a sudden — this woman who hadn’t climbed off the sofa for six months. She’d been getting pretty heavyset despite the bathroom calls and the pills, but she perked up fast. I’m not absolutely sure she wasn’t palming her medication. She seemed to think it didn’t matter anymore if she lived or died: it was trivial, what happened to her. She didn’t talk about these things, you understand, but she was obviously real interested when the government admitted it had lost several human beings and a shitload, pardon me, of robots inside the starfish at Crossbank. You could walk inside that thing or you could send a remote with a camera, but the cameras always died and the people who went inside too far just never came back.”

Tess walked to the window, which was dark and obscure with snow. She could imagine Mr. Sandoval’s “starfish” surprisingly clearly. A cloistered maze, like a snowflake, she thought, unfolded in three dimensions. She could almost see it in the clouded window glass. She looked away hastily.

“What happened to Mrs. Sandoval?” she asked.

“Karen took off one day in our old Ford. No explanation, no note, nothing. Of course, I was frantic about it. I talked to the police several times, but I guess the police had their hands full what with all the people heading west before the Mississippi roadblocks came down. Eventually I got word she’d been arrested with a handful of so-called pilgrims trying to cross into the no-go zone around Crossbank. Then the police called back and said it was a mistake, she hadn’t been arrested, although she’d been with that group; she was one of a dozen or so who managed to get through the blockade on an old Ozark hiking trail. It’s strange to me, picturing Karen out in the woods climbing rocks and drinking out of streams. She never even liked a backyard barbecue, for Christ’s sake. Complained about the mosquitos. I swear I don’t know why she wanted to be out in the woods like that.”

“Did she go inside the starfish?”

“So they tell me. I wasn’t there.”

“And she didn’t come out?”

“She didn’t come out.” Mr. Sandoval’s voice had gone flat.

Tess thought about this. “Did she die?”

“Well, she didn’t come out. That’s all I know. That’s what made me a little crazy, I guess.”

Tess was vaguely alarmed that he was still motionless in his bed. “Mr. Sandoval, if you can’t move, maybe I should call a doctor.”

“I can’t move. Like I said, I’m not even sure I’m awake. But I’m pretty sure I don’t need a doctor.”

“Honest?”

“Honest.”

“Why did you come to Blind Lake?”

“To kill whatever’s growing here.”

Tess was shocked. Like Dad, she thought. Mr. Sandoval had come here to kill Mirror Girl.

She backed away a step.

“It seems frankly crazy to me,” he said. “Lying here and thinking back. Funny what you do when you’ve lost someone and you don’t know who to blame. It was too late to do anything about Crossbank, obviously, but Blind Lake had been in the news, the fact that it was shut down in case the same thing happened here. That pissed me off. They ought to bomb the place, I thought. If there’s even a chance. Bomb it out of creation. But no, there was just the quarantine. It seemed way too chickenshit. I apologize for my vocabulary.”

“It’s okay,” Tess said. “But if they’d bombed us we’d all be dead.”

As she said it she wondered whether it was true. Maybe Mirror Girl wouldn’t have let the bombs fall. Could Mirror Girl do that?

Mirror Girl seemed awfully close right now. Don’t look at the window, Tess instructed herself. But the wind rattled the glass, as if to attract her attention, as if to say, Look at me, look at me.

“I guess I know that now,” Mr. Sandoval said. “I guess I was a little crazy at the time. I thought I could climb into my plane, post a flight plan through Fargo and up into Manitoba, make a little detour at the right place… I was gonna fly right into your telescope, do as much damage as possible and kill myself at the same time.”

This was true, Tess realized. Motes of Mr. Sandoval’s old anger hung in the air above his bed, like snowflakes. It was adult and mysterious and somehow childish at the same time. The plan was like something Edie Jerundt might have come up with. But the anger and the grief were wholly adult. If Mr. Sandoval’s emotions had a smell, Tess thought, they’d smell like something broken and electric. Like overheated wires and blackening plastic.

“Of course,” Mr. Sandoval said, “it’s too late for that now.”

“Yes. They shot down your plane.”

“No, I mean it’s already started. Can’t you feel it?”

Tess was afraid she could.

Marguerite meant only to find out what had excited the Obs people out at the Eye. The clinic building was nearly deserted. Dr. Goldhar had left after stitching and stabilizing Sue; Rosalie Bleiler and a couple of paramedics were on night duty, plus the security and housekeeping people. Marguerite checked doors until she found an empty boardroom. Inside, she closed the door for privacy — she felt furtive, though she was doing nothing wrong — and linked her pocket server to the room’s ample display screen.

The live feed from the Eye came up quickly and crisply.

Looked like late afternoon on UMa47/E. Afternoon winds kicked dust into the air, turning the sky abalone white. Subject appeared to be continuing his enigmatic odyssey, walking a series of shallow, eroded canyons, just as he had the day before and the day before that. What was so unusual? There were no text tags from the DA people, nothing to explain their apparent excitement.

The sheer clarity of the image, perhaps? Maybe the clinic had installed a more modern display; the image was as vivid as Marguerite had ever seen it, even at the monitors out at the Eye. Clean as a window. She could see the dust clinging to the Subject’s coxcomb, each particulate grain of it. She could almost feel the desiccating breeze on her face.

This creature, she thought. This thing. This enigma.

Subject followed an ancient arroyo around another sinuous curve, and suddenly Marguerite saw what the Data Acquisition team must have spotted earlier — something so strange she took a step backward and almost tumbled over a conference room chair.

Something exceedingly strange. Something artificial. Possibly even his destination, object of the Subject’s quest.

It was obvious why this structure hadn’t been spotted in the high-altitude surveys. It was large but not ridiculously large, and its spines and columns were covered with years if not centuries of dust. It shimmered in the morning sunlight like a mirage.

Subject moved into the shadow of this structure, walking more quickly than he had for many days. Marguerite imagined she could hear his big splayed feet scuffing against the pebbly desert floor.

But what was this thing, big as a cathedral, so obviously ancient and so obviously neglected? What had made the Subject travel so far to find it?

Please, she thought, not one more mystery, not one more unfathomable act…

Subject passed beneath the first of the great spinal arches, into a softening shade.

“What do you want here?” Marguerite said aloud.

Subject turned and looked at her. His eyes were huge, solemn, and pearly white.

A thin, dry wind tousled the loose strands of Marguerite’s hair. She fell to her knees in astonishment, grasping for the conference room table, anything to support her weight. But there was only grit under the palm of her hand, the dust of ages, the desiccated surface of UMa47/E.

Twenty-Eight

When the floor moved under his feet and the klaxons began to signal the evacuation of the Eye, Ray was dismayed but not surprised. It was inevitable. Something was awake, and something didn’t like what Ray had come to do.

But he had been groomed for this confrontation. That was increasingly obvious to him. Ray wasn’t a great believer in fate, but in this case it was an idea with a great deal of explanatory power. All kinds of life experiences that had seemed mysterious at the time — the years of academic infighting, his deep skepticism about the functioning of the Eye, his first initiation so many years ago into the rites of death — made sense to him now. Even his ridiculous marriage to Marguerite, her sullen stubbornness and her unwillingness to compromise on anything that was important to him. Her sentimental ideas about the natives of UMa47/E. These were the stones against which Ray had been whetted like a blade.

“Blade” provoked an unwelcome memory of the events at Sue Sampel’s house. That had been purely reflexive; he had never meant to physically hurt her. She had infuriated him with that insolent, screechy laugh; and he had pushed her, and the blade had appeared in her hand and he had been forced to wrestle it away; and then, after a thoughtless moment, there had been blood. God, how he hated blood. But even that awful encounter had been a tutelary experience, Ray thought. It had proven that he was capable of a bold, transgressive act.

He was familiar enough with the layout of the Alley that he was able to locate the central elevator bank. Two of the four elevators sat empty, doors opening and closing like spastic eyelids.

The tremor that had shaken the floor had subsided now. An earthquake in this part of the country was unlikely but not impossible. But Ray doubted the tremor had been caused by an earthquake. Something was happening down below, down in the deeps of the Eye.

The night staff had obviously been well-rehearsed for an emergency evacuation. Staff poured out of the stairwells two-by-two, seeming alarmed but basically calm, probably telling themselves the tremor had stopped and the evac was a formality. One gimlet-eyed woman spotted Ray where he stood by the elevators, approached him, and said, “We’re supposed to go directly to the exit, not back down into the works. And we’re definitely not supposed to use the elevators.”

Fucking hall monitor, Ray thought. He flashed the stolen all-pass card and said, “Just leave the building as quickly as possible.”

“But we were told—”

“Unless you want to lose your job, run along. Otherwise give me your name and badge number.”

The voice of authority. She winced and departed with a wounded look. Ray stepped into the nearest elevator and pushed the sublevel-five button, the closest approach to the O/BEC gallery. He assumed he had a certain margin of time in which to work. Once the civilian staff had left the building Shulgin would dispatch a crew of inspectors, but the storm would slow that process to a crawl.

Klaxons reverberated deep in the courses in which the elevators rose and fell. He was four stories under the Minnesota prairie when the sirens fell silent, the elevator stalled in its shaft, and the lights winked off.

Power failure. In a few seconds the backup systems would kick in.

Even now, Ray thought, shouldn’t there be emergency lights?

Apparently not. The darkness was absolute.

He took his server out of his pocket, but even that device had ceased to glow. He might as well have been blind.

Ray had never liked dark, enclosed spaces.

He put his hands out to orient himself. He backed into a corner of the elevator, adjoining walls to his left and right. The burnished aluminum surfaces were cold and inert to the touch.

This won’t last, he told himself. And if the power failure did continue, it could only be bad news for the O/BECs. The pumps would fail, the liquid helium would stop flowing, the temperature in the platens would rise above the critical -451 Fahrenheit. But a dissenting voice inside him said, The fucking thing’s got you now.

Hang on, he told himself. He had arrived at the Eye full of certainty and with a sense of his own power: he had come here by a series of irrevocable steps, fueled by his conviction that the O/BECs were source of everything that had gone wrong at Blind Lake. But the building had stolen his momentum. He was locked in a box, and his confidence began to seep away into the darkness.

I’m not here for myself, Ray thought. He had to keep that in mind. He was here because the gullible children who had been placed under his charge were playing with a dangerous machine, and he meant to stop them whether they liked it or not. That was essentially a selfless act. More than that: it was redemptive. Ray had made a mistake at Sue Sampel’s house and he was prepared to admit it. He took a certain pride in his willingness to look at a problem realistically. Maybe everyone else had been blinded by cupidity, denial, or fear. Not Ray. The device in this building had become a threat and he was going to deal with it. He was performing an act of such fundamental moral necessity that it would wash clean any mistakes he might have made in the process.

Unless he had come too late. The elevator was motionless, but Ray imagined he could hear the building creak and groan around him, deforming in the darkness. Whatever we woke up, Ray thought, it’s powerful; it’s strong, and it’s gaining a sense of its own strength.

Methodically, he rolled up one leg of his trousers. Ray had left Sue’s with the bloody knife still clutched in his hand. He hadn’t wanted to let it go or leave it behind. The knife, the act of using it as a weapon, had made what followed both possible and necessary. That was when he had formulated his plan to penetrate the Eye using Charlie Grogan’s all-pass tag. He had started driving to Charlie’s with the knife next to him on the passenger-side seat of the car, an untouchable thing decorated with threads of Sue Sampel’s blood. Then he had pulled over to the side of the road, wiped the knife clean with a disposable tissue, and carefully strapped the blade to the calf of his left leg with a roll of duct tape from the glove compartment. It had seemed like a fine idea at the time.

Now he wanted the knife in his hand, ready to use. Worse, he couldn’t help thinking that he might have left some blood on the blade after all; and the idea of Sue Sampel’s blood touching his skin, invading his pores, was grotesque and intolerable. But in the absolute darkness of the stalled elevator he had a hard time finding the loose edge of the tape. He had wrapped himself up like a fucking mummy.

Nor had he given much thought to the physical problem of peeling what seemed like a quarter-mile of duct tape off his hairy leg. He was almost certainly taking some skin off along with it. He drew deep, gasping breaths, the way Marguerite had learned to do in that Lamaze class they had attended before Tessa’s birth. He was leaking tears by the time the last layer of tape came loose, and when he jerked that away it took the knife with it, slicing a neat little chunk out of his calf along the ankle.

That was too much. Ray screamed in pain and frustration, and his screaming made the stalled elevator seem much smaller, unbearably small. He opened his eyes wide, straining for light — he had heard that the human eye could register even a single photon — but there was nothing, only the sting of his own sweat.

I could die here, he thought, and that would be very bad; or, worse, what if he was wrong about the Eye, what if Shulgin found him here after the crisis had passed, raving and with an incriminating weapon in his hand? The knife, the fucking knife. He couldn’t keep it and he couldn’t get rid of it.

What if the walls closed on him like teeth?

He wondered whether — if it became necessary — he could successfully kill himself with the knife. Like a Bushido warrior, falling on his sword. How badly, how quickly could he hurt himself with a six-inch blade? Would it be more efficient to slit his wrists or stick himself in the belly? Or should he try to cut his own throat?

He thought about death. What it would be like to sink away from his own untidy self, to drift deeper and deeper into the static and empty past.

He imagined he heard Marguerite’s voice in his ear, whispering words he didn’t understand:

ignorance

curiosity

pain

love

— more evidence, as if he needed it, that the O/BEC madness had already infected him…

And then the lights winked back on.

“God! Fuck!” Ray said, momentarily dazed.

The elevator hummed to life and resumed its journey downward.

Ray discovered he had bitten his tongue. His mouth was full of blood. He spat it out onto the green tiled floor, rolled his cuff down over his bleeding ankle, and waited for the door to open.

Twenty-Nine

“Maybe she went to look for her mother,” Elaine said, but when Chris called Tessa’s name there was no answer, and the brightly lit ground-floor corridor of the clinic was empty as far as he could see.

He took out his pocket server and spoke her name again. No answer. He tried Marguerite. Also no answer.

“This is just spooky,” Elaine said.

It was worse than that. Chris felt as if he had stepped into one of those nightmares in which something absolutely essential had evaporated in his hands. “What room is Sue in?”

“Two-eleven,” Elaine said promptly. “Upstairs.”

“You ring the duty nurse and ask her to look for Tess. I’ll find Marguerite.”

Elaine watched Chris sprint for the stairwell. Elaine herself wasn’t terribly worried. The kid was probably down in the cafeteria or off riding a gurney cart. “Quite the family man,” she said to Vogel. “Our Chris.”

“Don’t begrudge him what he found here,” Vogel murmured. “It could end at any time.”

He discovered Sue Sampel very nearly asleep, alone in her darkened room. “Marguerite left already,” she said. “Chris? Is that you? Chris? Is Marguerite lost or something?”

“I can’t raise her server. It’s nothing to worry about it.”

She yawned. “Bullshit. You’re worried.”

“Go on back to sleep, Sue.”

“I think I will. I think I have to. But I can tell you’re lying. Chris? Don’t get lost in the dark, Chris.”

“I won’t,” he promised. Whatever that meant.

He walked the hallway from end to end, opening doors. Apart from the room where Adam Sandoval lay motionless in his coma there were only empty storage spaces, locked pharmaceutical closets, vacant boardrooms, and darkened offices.

His server buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and talked to Elaine, who told him the night nurse had called Security and that the staff on duty were beginning a room-to-room search. “But there’s something going on out at the Eye, too. I got hold of Ari Weingart, who says the Alley is being evacuated.”

Chris looked at the server in his hand: if his was working, why not Marguerite’s or Tessa’s?

If Marguerite and Tess were both missing, did that mean they were together? And if they weren’t in the building, where had they gone?

He made his way back to the lobby, to the heavy glass doors. If Marguerite had left the clinic she would have taken the car. There was no other way to travel in this weather. If the car was gone, maybe he could borrow a vehicle and follow it.

But Marguerite’s conservative little runabout was parked where Chris had left it, wheels on the curb, under a fresh layer of snow. He opened the door and snow came into the lobby on a fugitive wind, small flakes turning to watery diamonds on the tiled floor.

Elaine stood behind Chris and put a hand on his shoulder. “This is freaky, but you need to calm down.”

“You think Ray has something to do with this?”

“I thought of that. Ari said he’d been on the phone to Shulgin, who talked to Charlie Grogan. Ray’s out at the Eye somewhere.”

Chris held the door open a crack, letting frigid air play over his face. “She was right here, Elaine. Playing with that fucking wooden truck. People don’t just disappear.”

But they do, he thought. They slip through your fingers like water.

“Mr. Carmody?” This was Rosalie Bleiler, the duty nurse. “Could you close that door, please? Elmo — Elmore Fisk, he’s our night guard — would like to see you at the back entrance.”

“Did he find Tess?”

Rosalie flinched from his voice. “No, sir, but he found some child-sized footprints in the snow out there.”

Tess wasn’t dressed to be outdoors. “Did he follow the footprints?”

She nodded. “About fifty yards out past the visitor’s lot. But that’s the problem. He says the footprints don’t go anywhere. They just sort of stop.”

Thirty

To date there had been seven serious attempts to break out of Blind Lake. Three of them had resulted in the deaths by pocket drone of those who breached the fence and entered the no-go zone. Four more had been interrupted in the attempt by Security forces within the Lake. The most recent case had been an agoraphobic caterer who had elected to scale the fence solo but had lost his nerve halfway up. By the time Security found him and talked him down he had suffered frostbite to the fingers of both hands.

Herb Dunn, a fifty-two-year-old navy veteran, had worked in Civilian Security ever since he was downsized from a FedEx branch in Fargo ten years ago. The quarantine of Blind Lake had severed communications between Herb and his creditors (including two ex-wives), which he regretted not at all. He missed access to current movies and web-based erotica, but that was about it. Once he realized he wasn’t about to contract some kind of plague, Herb had settled into the lockdown quite comfortably.

Except this week. This week he was on what the Security force called Dawn Patrol, nobody’s favorite duty. The idea of Dawn Patrol was to send out a guy in an all-weather vehicle to ride the circuit of the fence, presumably to rescue miscreants from their own misguided escape attempts. Dawn Patrol had yet to encounter even a single miscreant, but Herb supposed it had a certain deterrent effect. Today, given the shit-awful storm that had blown through the Lake overnight, Shulgin had told him his route was cut short: just a drive out to the main gate and back. But that was bad enough.

The snow had begun to taper off when he left the garage, but a fierce wind out of the northwest was still complicating matters. These Security vehicles were decent machines, smart-drive Hondas with mutable-tread tires, but a snowmobile would have been more efficient, Herb thought.

The main road from the Plaza at the center of town had been plowed during the night, but only as far south as the staff housing tracts. From there to the fence it was all blown and drifting snow, not quite deep enough to conceal the road but slow going even for the Honda. Herb took some consolation from the fact that there was absolutely nothing urgent or even necessary about this run. It made the delays easier to endure. He settled back in the steamy warmth of the cab and tried to picture his current favorite actress in a state of radical undress. (Back home, he had videoserver apps that did this trick for him.)

By the time he approached the main gate dawn had come and gone. There was enough light now to mark the limits of vision, a bubble of windblown snow around the cab of the Honda and a glimpse of ponderous clouds in a sky like a muddy river.

He reached the turnaround point at the main gate — no daring escape attempts in progress — and stopped, idling the vehicle’s motor. He was tempted to close his eyes and make up for some of the sleep he’d lost, sitting up after midnight watching old downloads, up at 3:30 to get ready for this pointless expedition. But if he was caught sleeping he’d be on Dawn Patrol for the rest of his natural life. Anyway, his breakfast coffee had worked its way through him and he had an urge to write his name in the snow.

He was climbing out of the cab into the frigid morning when the low clouds lifted and he saw something moving beyond the main gate. Something out there in no-man’s-land. Something big. He supposed at first it was one of those robotic delivery trucks carrying food and supplies, but when the wind shifted again he saw more of these uncertain shapes. Huge machines, just outside the fence.

He goose-stepped a few feet closer through the snow. Just to see, he told himself. He was as near the main gate as he meant to get when without warning it began to swing open. There was another lull in the wind, a moment of almost supernatural calm, and he recognized the vehicles out there as Powell tanks and armored personnel carriers. Dozens of them, lined up outside the Lake.

He turned and took a few awkward steps back toward the Honda, but before he reached it he was surrounded by a half-dozen soldiers in camouflage-white protective suits and aerosol masks. Soldiers wearing enhanced-vision goggles and carrying sonic-pulse rifles.

Herb Dunn had been in the service. He knew the drill.

He put up his hands and tried to look harmless.

“I only work here,” he said.

Thirty-One

Confused beyond the point of terror, Marguerite forced herself to focus on her breathing. She ignored the sandy soil under her hands and knees, ignored the sensation of dry heat, above all closed her eyes and ignored the presence of the Subject. Draw breath, she thought. Breathing was important. Breathing was important because— because—

Because if she were really on the surface of UMa47/E, breathing would be impossible.

The atmosphere of UMa47/E was less oxygenated than Earth’s and highly rarefied. The pressure differential would have burst her eardrums, had she traveled here from Blind Lake.

But it was fear, not anoxia, that was making her gasp, and her ears felt normal.

Therefore, she thought — still kneeling, eyes tightly closed — therefore, therefore, I’m not really here. Therefore I’m in no immediate danger.

(But if I’m not here then why do I feel the grains of sand under my fingernails, why do I feel the breeze on my skin?)

The summer Marguerite turned eleven, her parents had vacationed in Alaska. Much to Marguerite’s dismay, her father had bought the family a ride over Glacier Bay National Park in a tiny single-engine aircraft. The aircraft had dipped and rocked in the mountain winds, and Marguerite had been terrified to the point of nausea, far too terrified to even think about looking out the window.

Then her father had put an arm around her and said in his most profoundly ministerial voice, “It’s all right, Margie. You’re perfectly safe.”

She had repeated that phrase to herself for the rest of the flight. Her mantra. You’re perfectly safe. Oil on troubled waters. It had calmed her. The words came back to her now.

You’re perfectly safe.

(But I’m not. I’m lost, I’m helpless, I don’t know what’s happening, and I don’t know the way back home—)

Perfectly safe. The perfect lie.

She opened her eyes and forced herself to stand.

The Subject stood motionless more than a meter away from her. Marguerite knew from experience that, once he was still, he would probably stay that way for a while. (She remembered Chris’s comment — not a great party planet — and suppressed an incoherent urge to giggle.) Those inscrutable white eyes stared at her, or at least in her general direction, and she was tempted to stare back. But first things first, Marguerite told herself. Be a scientist. (You’re a scientist. You’re perfectly safe. Two enabling lies.)

Evaluate your surroundings.

She stood just inside the perimeter of the structure the Subject had entered. Looking back through its arches Marguerite could see with a shocking immediacy the desert, which she instinctively put into the context of the geography of UMa47/E: the central plateau of the largest continental plate, far from any of the planet’s shallow, salty seas, at the equatorial extreme of a temperate zone. But it was so much more than that. It was a sky as luminous and white as freshly fired china; it was a range of eroded basaltic hills fading into the distance; it was the long light of a foreign sun, and shadows that lengthened visibly as she watched. It was an irregular wind that smelled of lime and dust. It was not an image but a place: tactile, tangible, fully textured.

If I’m not here, Marguerite thought, where am I?

The ceiling of this structure screened the direct light of the sun. “Structure,” she thought, was one of those weasel-words so beloved of the people in Obs; but could she really call it a “building”?

There were no proper walls, only rank upon rank of pillars (abalone-white and coral-pink) arranged in a series of irregular arches that joined to form a roof. Farther in, the shadows deepened to impenetrability. The floor was simply blown and drifted sand. It resembled nothing in the Lobster city. It might have grown here, she thought, over the centuries. She touched the nearest pillar. It was cool and faintly iridescent, like mother-of-pearl.

Her hand began to tingle, and she pulled it away.

Of course it was all impossible, and not just because she was breathing normally on the surface of a planet unfit to support human life. The O/BEC images of UMa47/E had traveled across fifty-one light-years. What the monitors had displayed was almost literally ancient history. There was no such thing as simultaneity, not unless the O/BECs had learned to defy the fundamental laws of the universe.

Maybe it was better to think of this experience as deep VR. Immersive observation. A vivid dream.

Flimsy as that scaffolding was, it gave her the courage to look directly at the Subject.

The Subject was half-again taller than Marguerite. None of her observation had prepared her for the sheer animal bulk of him. She had felt the same the first time she went to a petting zoo back in grade eight. Animals that had looked innocent on television had turned out to be larger, dirtier, smellier, and far more unpredictable than she had imagined. They had been so disconcertingly themselves, so indifferent to her preconceptions.

The Subject was very much himself. Apart from his erect bipedal stance, there was nothing human about him. Nor did he resemble an insect or a crustacean, despite the ridiculous “lobster” tag that had been foisted on him.

His feet were broad, flat, leathery, and lacking toes or nails. Built for standing, not running. They were coated with the dust and grime of his long walk, and in some places the pebbly tegument had been eroded to a raw smoothness. Marguerite wondered if they hurt.

His legs were no longer than her own but nearly twice as thick. There was an implied muscularity about them, like two tree trunks wrapped in brick-red leather. His legs met seamlessly at his crotch, where there was none of the complex paraphernalia of human sexuality, perhaps not surprisingly: there might be better places to install one’s genitalia, not that anyone had ever demonstrated that the Subject or his kind even possessed genitalia of the conventional sort.

His thorax broadened to the shape of a fat disk, to which his arms were attached. His manipulating arms were slender, lithe, and equipped at their ends with what looked roughly like human hands — three fingers and an opposable digit — although the joints were all wrong. The stubby food-grasping arms, just long enough to reach from his shoulders to his mouth, were altogether stranger, as much an externalized jaw as an extra set of limbs. Instead of hands, these secondary arms possessed bony cup-and-blade structures for cutting and grinding vegetable material.

Subject’s head was a mobile dome with wattles of loose flesh where human anatomy would have put a neck. His mouth was a vertical pink slit that concealed a long, rasping, almost prehensile tongue. His eyes were set apart almost as widely as a bird’s, cosseted in bluish-purple gristle, the eyes themselves not purely white, Marguerite realized, but faintly yellow, the color of old piano keys. No interior structure of the eye was visible, no pupil, no cornea; his eyes might have been unorganized bundles of light-sensitive cells, or perhaps their structure was concealed under a partially opaque surface, like a permanent eyelid.

The orange coxcomb atop his head served no purpose anyone had been able to define. On Earth such features were usually sexual displays, but among the Subject’s people it could hardly be gendered, since every individual possessed one.

The most prominent — or most prominently strange — feature of the Subject was the dorsal cavity running down the center of his thorax. This was widely understood to be a breathing orifice. It was as long as Marguerite’s forearm, and it opened and closed periodically like a gasping, lipless mouth. (Ray, in one of his more classless moments, had told her it looked like “a diseased vagina.”) When it opened she could see porous honeycomb-like tissue beneath it, moist and yellow. Fine silver-gray cilia made a fringe surrounding the opening.

I’m perfectly safe, she thought, but in all honesty she was frightened of the Subject, frightened by the obvious weight and substance and implicit animal strength of him. Frightened even of the smell of him, a faint organic stink that was both sickly sweet and richly unpleasant, like the smell of a citrus rind gone green with mold.

Well, then, Marguerite thought, what now? Do we pretend this is a real meeting? Do we speak?

Could she speak? Fear had dried her mouth. Her tongue felt numb as a wad of cotton.

“My name is Marguerite,” she whispered. “I know you don’t understand.”

He might not understand even the concept of a spoken language. She stood staring at him for a long moment. Maybe his silences spoke volumes. Maybe he spoke a language of immobility.

But he wasn’t totally immobile.

His breathing slit opened wider and emitted an almost inaudible wheezing sound. Could this be language? It sounded more like respiratory distress.

How fucking laughable, Marguerite thought, to be here — whatever this place was — and for whatever reason — only to be confronted once again with the impossibility of communication. I can’t even tell whether he’s talking or dying.

The Subject finished his discourse, if that was what it was, exhaling a gust of sour-milk air.

Apart from that, he still had not moved.

If this was an opportunity, Marguerite thought, and not just a hallucination, it was a wasted one. Her fear was laced with frustration. To be so incredibly, implausibly near to him. And still as far away as ever. Still mute, still dumb.

Outside, the shadows lengthened toward nightfall. The pale sky had turned a darker, bluer shade of white.

“I don’t understand what you said,” Marguerite confessed. “I don’t even know if you said anything.”

Subject exhaled and fluttered his cilia.

Yes, he spoke, said a voice.

It wasn’t the Subject’s voice. The sound came from all around her. From the mother-of-pearl arches, or from the shadows farther in.

But that wasn’t the strangest thing.

The strangest thing was that the voice sounded exactly like Tessa’s.

Thirty-Two

Elaine Coster tagged Chris as he headed out the clinic door. “Whoa,” she said, “hang on — where are you going?”

She knew he was freaking out over the disappearance of Tess and Marguerite. The duty nurse had shared with Elaine the story about the girl’s footprints, how they had vanished in the snow. Elaine hated to think of Tess, who had seemed like nice enough kid, out in this bitter weather. But there was daylight coming fast, and the girl shouldn’t be that hard to find, Elaine thought, if only Chris would exercise reasonable patience. As for Marguerite—

“I’m driving out to the Eye,” Chris said.

“The Eye? I’m sorry, but what the hell for? Ari says it’s being evacuated.”

“I can’t explain.”

She grabbed his arm before he could open the door. “Come on, Chris, you can do better than that. You think Tess and Marguerite are at the Eye? How is that even possible?”

Please, Elaine thought, let this not be one more case of Blind Lake lunacy.

“Tess wasn’t just wandering around out there. Her footprints are straight as a ruler, and they’re pointed directly at the Eye.”

“But the footprints stop?”

“Yes.”

“So maybe she just came back to the clinic door. You know, stepping in her own tracks.”

“Walking backwards in the snow? In the dark?”

“Well, what do you think? If she’s at the Eye, how’d she get there? Did she sprout wings, Chris? Or maybe she beamed herself there. Maybe she traveled in her astral body.”

“I don’t pretend to understand it. But the last time she disappeared from school, that’s where she went.”

“You really think she walked that distance in this weather?”

“I don’t know about walked. But I think that’s where she is, I think she’s in trouble, and I think Marguerite would want me to go find her.”

“You can read minds too? Ari and Shulgin and a bunch of other people are already keeping their eyes out for Tess and Marguerite. Let them do their work. They’re better at it than you are. Chris, listen to me, listen to me. I got a call from one of my contacts on the Security force. A whole fucking battalion’s worth of military gear and personnel just showed up at the main gate, and they’re coming inside. You understand? The siege is over! I don’t know what comes next, but in all likelihood the Lake will be evacuated by nightfall — you, me, Tess, Marguerite, everybody. I’m heading down the main road, and I want you to come with me. We’re still journalists. We’ve got a story here.”

He smiled at her in a way Elaine didn’t like, rueful and sad. She decided she hated all tall young men with doleful eyes.

“You take it, Elaine,” he said. “It’s your story. You’re the one to tell it.”

Elaine watched him angle his big body into the car, watched as he drove off through the still-falling snow at a reckless speed.

Sebastian Vogel, crammed into his lobby chair like a Buddha into an airline seat, said, “I think I finally figured it out.”

Elaine sat next to him wearily. “Please. No more metaphysical bullshit.” There were things she needed to do. Pack up her server and her written notes and keep them with her, even if some armed bureaucrat wanted to confiscate them. Consider facing the exterior world, whatever the exterior world had become, with its pilgrims and falling airplanes and roadblocks east of the Mississippi.

“Ever since Crossbank,” Sebastian said, “I’ve been wondering why you agreed to take this assignment. A veteran scientific journalist, hired by a frankly second-rate New York magazine to address a subject that’s been done to death, sharing the spotlight with a crank theologist and a discredited scandalmonger. That never made any sense to me. But I think I figured it out. It’s because of Chris, isn’t it?”

“Oh, fuck off Sebastian.”

“You read his book, followed his story in the press, watched his congressional testimony. Maybe you’d already picked up hints about Galliano’s ethical problems. You saw Chris being pilloried, and you knew he was right in spite of all the outrage and bad press. You were curious about him. Maybe he reminded you of yourself at that age. You took the job because you wanted to meet him.”

This would have been less annoying had it been untrue. Elaine mustered her fiercest go-to-hell stare.

“Was he a disappointment?” Sebastian said. “As a personal project?”

I don’t have time for this, Elaine thought. She felt dizzy with lack of sleep. Maybe she could just sit here until the soldiers came for her. All the really important work she’d done was stored in her pocket server, after all, and they would take her server from her only when they pried it out of her cold, dead hands. “When I met Chris I thought they’d beaten him down. He was obviously unhappy, he wasn’t writing, he was a little too free with the recreational chemicals, and he was carrying a load of guilt that was way too big for him.”

“I’m not sure that’s all because of his experience with Galliano.”

“Probably not. I just thought…”

“You wanted to help,” Sebastian said gently.

“Yes. I’m a fucking saint. Now shut up.”

“You wanted to lend him some of your cynicism.”

“He’d be a better journalist if he learned not to care.”

“Though perhaps not a better human being.”

“I’m not discussing this.”

“What he needed, Elaine, and I don’t mean this badly, but what he needed, it wasn’t in your power to give it to him.”

“Speaks the guru.” She bit her lip. “So what do you think? You think he found it? Whatever it is he needs?”

“I think he’s looking for it right now,” Sebastian said.

Chris ran into outbound traffic on the road to the Eye. Night staff leaving the facility, he guessed, as rumors circulated that the siege was coming to an end.

Even in this wan daylight the road was treacherous driving. He saw more than one car abandoned in the drifts, workers in burly winter coats flagging rides from colleagues.

He drove past an untenanted guardpost directly to the entrance to the Eye, where he found Charlie Grogan herding stragglers out of the lobby into the cold morning air. The sound of Klaxons beat against the raging wind.

“Not even remotely possible,” Charlie said when Chris explained what he wanted to do. “The building suffered a tremor of some kind early this morning and all kinds of electrical and communications problems since then. We’ve got strict protocols about this. I can’t let anyone in until the building is declared structurally sound. Even after we get inspectors inside, we still have to worry about containment on the cryogenics.” He looked mournful. “The O/BECs are probably dead already.”

“Tessa’s inside.”

“So you said, but I doubt that a whole lot, Mr. Carmody. Our Security people conducted a very orderly evacuation. What would Tessa be doing here at five in the morning, anyway?”

Looking for Mirror Girl, Chris thought. “It wouldn’t be the first time she got inside without being seen.”

“You really have a solid reason to believe Tess is in this building?”

“Yes.”

“You want to share that information with me?”

“I’m sorry. You’ll have to trust me.”

“I’m sorry too. Look, even if she is inside, we’ve got the Lake’s Security people headed in. Maybe they can give you some advice.”

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

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

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

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

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

“But she’ll come out for you?”

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

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

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

“Yeah, but—”

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

“I could lose my job,” Charlie said.

“Is that really an issue at this point?”

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

“Say you never saw me.”

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

“Thank you.”

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

Thirty-Three

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

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

This was Mirror Girl.

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

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

“Tess calls me that.”

“What are you really, then?”

“There’s no simple word for it.”

“Did you bring me here?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because this is what you wanted.”

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

“I learned a lot from Tess.”

“Have you hurt her?”

“I don’t hurt people.”

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you know about Blind Lake?”

“I was born there.”

“Why do you look like Tess?”

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

“But why Tess?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was no response.

She looked back helplessly at Mirror Girl.

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

“What story?”

“Your story.”

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

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

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

“But he does,” Mirror Girl said.

“Does what?”

“He understands. Some of it, anyway.”

“But I didn’t say anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Close your eyes and listen.”

“I can’t hear anything.”

“Just listen.”

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

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

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

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

Start again.

The Subject—

The person we call the Subject—

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

Coming to understand, too, the place of the City in the history of his kind and the history of the world. There were many Cities like his City but no two alike, each one unique. Some Cities were mining cities and some Cities were manufacturing cities; some Cities were places where the elderly and infirm went to die in idle leisure. Some Cities were foreign cities on continents far across the shallow seas, where the towers looked like huge stone blocks and were built of bricks or carved into the sides of mountains. Subject often longed to see these places himself. By his second fertility cycle he had traveled beyond his own City of Sky to its northern trading partners, the sandstone-red City of Culling and the smoky-black City of Immensity, and back again, and he knew he would never travel farther except under extraordinary and unlikely circumstances. He learned that he liked traveling. He liked the way he felt waking to a cold morning on the plains. He liked the shadows of rocks at nightfall.

His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City’s genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back, unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors. It made him think of the long span of history he had learned in the lyceum. The City was ancient. The story of his people was long and cadenced.

They had learned a great deal in their millennia, roused by nature to a sleepy inquisitiveness and the making of things with their fingers. They learned the ways of rocks and soil, wind and rain, numbers and nothingness, stars and planets. Somewhere on the nearest moon of UMa47/E was the ruin of a City his ancestors had built — in the culmination of one particularly inventive cycle — and then abandoned as unsustainable and unnatural. They had distilled the essences of atoms. They had built telescopes that tested the limitations of atmosphere, metals, and optics. They had listened to the stars for messages and received none.

And long ago (Marguerite imagined Tessa’s widened eyes) they had built subtle and almost infinitely complex quantum calculators that had explored the nearest inhabited worlds (just like we did at Crossbank, she imagined Tess saying, just like at Blind Lake!). And they learned what we’re learning now: that sentient technologies give birth to wholly new kinds of life. They had discovered worlds more ancient and worlds younger than their own, worlds on which the same pattern had recurred. The lesson was obvious.

The machines they had built dreamed deep into the substance of reality and, dreaming, found others like themselves.

It was, the Subject believed, a cycle of life far slower but just as inevitable as the life cycle of his own people: a drama of creation, transformation, and complexity played out over millions of years.

Subject imagined it often: the great days of the Stargazing Cities, their quantum telescopes, and the structures that had been born and grown in staggered lines across the surface of the planet, structures like nothing his species had built or contemplated building, structures like huge ribbed crystals or enormous proteins, structures which one might enter but not easily leave, structures that were conduits into the living machinery of the universe itself, structures which were, themselves, in some sense, alive.

(Structures like this one, Marguerite understood.)

But the Subject had never expected to see one of these structures for himself. No City had been fostered near one for centuries. Subject and his kind had learned to avoid the structures, had dismissed them as doors into chambers that defied comprehension. They built their Cities elsewhere and curbed their curiosity.

Still, Subject had often wondered about the structures. It was disturbing but intriguing to think of his species as an intermediary between the thoughtless night feeders and creatures who spanned the stars.

Apart from these occasional feelings his life had a healthy sameness, a cyclical routine that was rounded, complete, and satisfying. He replaced a dying toolmaker at a busy manufactory and served his City well. His hours were satisfyingly self-similar. At the end of each day he constructed an ideogram to represent what he had felt, thought, seen, and scented during his work cycle. The ideograms were almost identical, like his days, but like his days, no two were alike. When he had covered his chamber completely with ideograms he memorized the sequence and then washed the walls in order to begin again. In his life he had memorized twenty complete sequences.

If this sounds dull (Marguerite imagined herself telling Tess), it wasn’t. The Subject, like all of his kind, was often motionless for long periods of time, but he was never inert. His stillness was rich with savored stimuli: the smells of dawn and dusk, the texture of stone, the subtleties of the seasons, the way memory informed silence until silence became bountifully full. At times he felt a strange melancholy, which others of his kind said was an atavistic remnant of his life as a thoughtless night-feeder — we would call it loneliness; he felt it when he looked out from the spiral roads of his home tower across the many towers of the city, to the irrigated fields green and moist and the dry plains where wind whirled dust into the whitening sky. It was a feeling like I want, I want, a wanting without an object. It always passed quickly, leaving an aftertaste of sadness, piquant and strange.

Then, one day, a new feeling overwhelmed him.

Civilizations that give birth to star structures are never quite the same. (Yes, that means us, too: I don’t know how much we’ll be changed, Tess, only that we’ll never be what we were before this century.) When we first began to look at UMa47/E, the star structures were aware of us. They felt Blind Lake, our O/BECs, the presence of what must have seemed to them a childlike new mentality (I don’t know if they called her Mirror Girl); they knew we were watching the Subject, and before long the Subject knew it, too. We became a presence in his mind. (Have they taught you the Uncertainty Principle in school yet, Tess? Sometimes just observing a thing changes its nature. We can never look at a thing unlooked-at or see a thing unseen. Do you understand?)

At first the Subject conducted his life as before. He knew we were watching, but it was irrelevant. We were distant in time and space; we meant nothing to the City of Sky. We registered only as a quaver in his daily glyphs, like a distant unfamiliar scent.

But we began to come between the Subject and the thing he loved the most.

Because of their strange phylogenesis, the Subject’s people never mated among themselves, never bonded in pairs, never fell in love with one another. Their overarching epigenetic loyalty was to the City into which they were born. Subject loved the City both in the abstract — as the product of numberless centuries of cooperative effort — and for itself: for its dusty alleys and high corridors, its sunny towers, its dimly lit food wells, its daily chorus of footsteps and soothing silences at night. The City was sometimes more real to him than the people who inhabited it. The City fed and nurtured him. He loved the City and felt loved in return.

(But we set him apart, Tess. We made him different, and it was a difference others of his kind easily sensed. Because we watched him, and because he knew it, he was suddenly in a different kind of relationship with the City of Sky; he felt estranged from it, set apart, suddenly alone in a way he had never been alone before. [That’s right: alone because we were with him!] He saw the City as if through different eyes, and the City, his peers, looked differently at him.)

It made him unhappy. He thought more and more often about the star structures.

The star structures had seemed almost a legend to him, a story made by the telling. Now he understood that they were real, that the conversations between the stars were continuous, and that chance had elected him as a representative of his species. He began to consider traveling to the nearest of the structures, which was nevertheless a great distance away in the western desert.

It was unusual for a person of his age to make such a pilgrimage. It was widely believed that entering a star structure would cause the pilgrim to be assumed into a larger intelligence — an unappealing fate for the young, though the elderly and dying were sometimes moved to make the journey. Subject began to feel that his destiny had been tied to the star structures, and he began planning his own voyage, idly at first, more seriously as he was ostracized for his strangeness, ignored at food conclaves, and treated perfunctorily at his work. What else was there for him to do? The City had fallen out of love with him.

He loved the City nevertheless, and it hurt him terribly to say good-bye to it. He spent an entire night alone on a high balcony, savoring the City’s unique pattern of lightness and dark and the subtle, moving moon shadows in the thoroughfares. It seemed to him he loved all of it at once, every stone and cobble, well and cistern, sooty chimney and fragrant green field. His only consolation was that the City would go on without him. His absence might lightly wound the City (he would have to be replaced), but the wound would quickly heal and the City in its benevolence would forget he had ever lived. Which was as it should be.

It was easy for him to locate the star structure. Evolution had equipped the Subject and his kind with the ability to sense subtle variations in the planet’s magnetic field: north, south, east, and west were as obvious to him as “up and down” are obvious to us. The name they had given the star structure contained four suspirated vowels that defined its location with as much precision as a GPS device. But he knew the walk would be long and taxing. He ate as much as he could, storing moisture and nutrients in the linings of his body. He traveled conservative distances each day. He saw things that provoked his curiosity and admiration, including the dune-bound ruin of a City so ancient it had no name, a City abandoned eons before his birth. He rested often. Nevertheless, by the end of the journey, he was weak, dehydrated, confused, and bereft.

(I think he pitied me, Tess, for never having loved a City, just as I was tempted to pity him for never having loved a fellow creature.)

When he found the star structure it seemed less awesome than he had anticipated, a strange but dusty agglutination of ribs and arches at the core of which, he knew, there had once been a quantum processor, a machine his ancestors had built at the zenith of their cleverness. Was this really his destiny?

He understood more when he stepped inside.

(Some of this I can’t explain, Tess. I don’t know how the star structures do what they do. I don’t really know what Mirror Girl means when says she has “sisters in the stars” and that this structure was one of them. I think there are matters here which are terribly difficult for a human mind to grasp.)

Subject understood that what waited for him deeper in the structure was an apotheosis of some kind — his physical death, but not an end to his being.

Before that happened, however, he was curious about us, perhaps as curious as we had been about him.

That was why Mirror Girl brought me to him. To say hello. To tell a story. To say good-bye.

(A story like this story. Does that make any sense, Tess? I wish it had a better ending. And I’m sorry about all the big words.)

It was almost night on the western plains. The sky beyond the arches was blue silk turning to black, and blackness grew like a living thing in the canyons and under the east-facing terraces of rock. Marguerite felt curiously sleepy, as if the aftermath of shock had drained all energy from her.

The Subject had finished his story. Now he wanted to finish his journey. He wanted to go to the core of the star structure and find whatever waited for him there. Marguerite felt his urge to turn away and was suddenly reluctant to let him go.

She said to Mirror Girl, “Can I touch him?”

A pause. “He says yes.”

She put her hand out and took a step forward. Subject remained motionless. Her hand looked pale against the textured roughness of his skin. She rested her fingers against his body above the oral vent. His skin felt like pliant, sun-warmed tree bark. He towered over her, and he smelled perfectly awful. She steeled herself and looked into his blank white eyes. Seeing everything. Seeing nothing.

“Thank you,” she whispered. And: “I’m sorry.”

Ponderously, slowly, the Subject turned away. His huge feet on the sandy soil made a sound like dry leaves rustling.

When he had vanished into the shadowy inner reaches of the star structure, Marguerite — sensing that her time here was almost at an end — knelt down next to Mirror Girl.

How strange, she thought, to see this thing, this entity, in the shape of Tess. How misleading.

“How many other intelligent species have you known? You and your sisters?”

Mirror Girl cocked her head to the side, another Tess-like gesture. “Thousands and thousands of progenitor species,” she said. “Over millions and millions of years.”

“Do you remember them all?”

“We do.”

Thousands of sentient species on worlds circling thousands of stars. Life, Marguerite thought, in almost infinite variety. All alike. No two alike. “Do they have anything in common?”

“A physical thing? No.”

“Then, something intangible?”

“Sentience is intangible.”

“Something more than that.”

Mirror Girl appeared to consider the question. Consulting her “sisters,” perhaps.

“Yes,” she said finally. Her eyes were bright and not at all like Tessa’s. Her expression was solemn. “Ignorance,” she said. “Curiosity. Pain. Love.”

Marguerite nodded. “Thank you.”

“Now,” Mirror Girl said, “I think you need to go help your daughter.”

Thirty-Four

The elevator door opened onto the dark and flickering spaces of the O/BEC gallery, and Ray was astonished to find Tess waiting for him.

She looked up at him with wide, wondering eyes. He lowered the knife but resisted the temptation to hide it behind his back. It was difficult to understand the purpose or meaning of her presence here.

“You’re sweating,” she said.

The air was warm. The light was dim. The O/BEC devices were still a corridor away, but Ray imagined he could feel their proximity, a pressure on his eardrums, the weight of a headache. What had he come here to do? To kill the thing that had eroded his authority, overturned his marriage, and subverted his daughter’s mind. He had presumed it was still vulnerable — he had only a knife and his bare hands, but he could pull a plug, cut a cable, or sever a supply line. The O/BECs existed by human consent and he would withdraw that consent.

But what if the O/BECs had discovered a way to defend themselves?

“Why do you want to do that?” Tess asked, as if he had spoken aloud. Maybe he had. He looked at his daughter critically.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

She reached for his hand. Her small fingers were warmer than the air. “Come look,” Tess said. “Come on!”

He followed her through a series of unmanned security barriers to the gallery, to the glass-walled platform overlooking the deep structure of the O/BEC devices, where Ray realized that his plan to shut down the machines had become unrealizable and that he would have to consider a different course of action.

Inside the O/BEC platens, quasibiological networks inhabited an almost infinite phase-space, linked to the exterior world (at first) by the telemetry from TPF interferometers, running Fourier transforms on degraded signals fading into noise, then (mysteriously) deriving the desired information by what theorists chose to call “other means.” They had spoken to the universe, Ray thought, and the universe had spoken back. The O/BEC array knew things the human species could only guess at. And now it had taken that interaction with the physical world to a new level.

The O/BEC chamber, three stories deep, had been a NASA-style clean room. Nothing (apart from the O/BECs) should have lived there. But it seemed to Ray, in this dim light, that the chamber had been overrun with something — if not life, at least something self-reproducing, a transparent growth that had partially filled the O/BEC enclosure and was rising up the walls like frost on a winter window. The bottom of the chamber, thirty feet down, was immersed in a gelatinous crystalline fluid that glinted and moved like sea foam on a beach.

“It’s so the O/BECs can sustain themselves without exterior power,” Tess said. “The roots go down way underground. Tapping heat.”

How deep did you have to go to “tap heat” from a snowbound prairie? A thousand feet, two thousand? All the way to molten magma? No wonder the earth had trembled.

And how did Tess know this?

Clearly Tess had developed some kind of empathy for the O/BECs. A contagious madness, Ray thought. Tess had always been unstable. Perhaps the O/BECs were exploiting that weakness.

And there was nothing he could do about it. The platens were beyond his reach and his daughter had been hopelessly compromised. The knowledge struck him with the force of a physical blow. He backed against the wall and slid to a sitting position on the floor, the knife in his limp right hand.

Tess knelt and looked into his eyes.

“You’re tired,” she said.

It was true. He had never felt so tired.

“You know,” Tess said, “it wasn’t her fault. Or yours.”

What wasn’t whose fault? Ray gave his daughter a despairing look.

“When you got out of the car,” she said. “That you lived. You were just a child.”

She was talking about his mother’s death. But Ray had never told Tess that story. He hadn’t told Marguerite, either, or anyone else in his adult life. Ray’s mother (her name was Bethany but Ray never called her anything but Mother) had driven him to school in the family’s big Ford, a kind of car you never saw anymore, powered by the combination of biodiesel fuel and rechargeable cells that had been commonplace after the Saudi conflict, a patriotic vehicle in which he had always been proud to be seen. The car was a vivid red, Ray remembered, red as some desirable new toy, Teflon-slick and enamel-bright. Ray was ten and keenly aware of colors and textures. His mother had driven him to school in the car, and he had hopped out and almost reached the schoolyard fence (snapshot: Baden Academy, a private junior school in a tree-lined Chicago suburb, a fashionably old-fashioned yellow-brick building slumbering in September-morning heat) when he turned to wave good-bye (hand upraised, listening to children’s voices and the high-voltage whine of cicadas) in time to see a Modesto and Fuchs Managed Care Mobile Health Maintenance truck — hijacked, he learned later, by an Oxycontin addict attempting to score narcotics from the vehicle’s onboard supply — as it careened from the wrong-way lane of Duchesne Street directly into the side of the bright red Ford.

The patriotic Ford sustained the impact well, but Ray’s mother had seen the truck coming and had unwisely tried to exit the vehicle. The Modesto and Fuchs truck had crushed her between the door and the frame and had then bounced back several yards, leaving Bethany Scutter in the street with her abdomen opened like the middle pages of a blue and red book.

Ray, seeing this from the Olympian mountaintop of incipient shock, made certain observations about the human condition that had stayed with him these many years. People, like their promises, were fragile and unreliable. People were bags of gas and fluid dressed up for masquerade roles (Parent, Teacher, Therapist, Wife), liable at any moment to collapse into their natural state. The natural state of biological matter was road-kill.

Ray didn’t go back to Baden Academy for a year, during which time he received, courtesy of his father, every pharmaceutical and metaphysical medicine for melancholy offered at the better clinics. His recovery was swift. He had already shown a predilection for mathematics, and he immersed himself in the inorganic sciences — astronomy and, later, astrophysics, wherein the scales of time and space were large enough to lend a welcome perspective. He had been secretly pleased when Mars and Europa were proved devoid of life: how much more disturbing it would have been to find them shot through with biology, rotten as a crate of Christmas oranges gone green in the corner of the basement.

Cascades of silvery-gray frost-fingers ran up the windows of the O/BEC gallery, dimming the light, arranging themselves into shapes reminiscent of columns and arches. Ray decided he shouldn’t have told Tess this story. If indeed he had told her. It seemed, in his confusion, that she had been telling it to him.

“You’re wrong,” Tess said. “She didn’t die to make you hate her.”

His eyes widened. Startled and angered by what his daughter had become, Ray took up the knife again.

Thirty-Five

She’s here, Chris thought. He ran down the emergency stairs toward the O/BEC gallery, consumed with a sense of urgency he couldn’t explain even to himself. His footsteps rattled up the hollow concrete column of the stairwell like the sound of gunfire.

She was here. The knowledge was as inescapable as a headache. Tessa’s vanishing snow trail had been an ambiguous clue at best. But he knew she was in the O/BEC gallery just as surely as he had known where Porry had gone on the Night of the Tadpoles. It was more than intuition; it was as if the information had been delivered directly to his bloodstream.

Maybe it had. If Tess could vanish from a snowbound parking lot, what else might be possible? What was happening here must be very like what had happened at Crossbank, something massive, apparently catastrophic, possibly contagious, and profoundly strange.

And Tess was at the heart of it, and so, very nearly, was he. He arrived at a door marked GALLERY LEVEL (RESTRICTED). It unlocked itself at his touch, courtesy of Charlie Grogan’s transponder.

The Alley groaned around him, shifting after this morning’s tremor, subject to stresses unknown. Chris knew the structure was potentially unsafe, but his concern for Tess overrode his considerable personal fear.

Not that he had any business being here. Porry’s death had taught him that good intentions could be as lethal as malice, that love was a clumsy and unreliable tool. Or so he thought. Yet here he was, many long miles up Shit Creek, desperately trying to protect the daughter of a woman for whom he cared deeply. (And who had also vanished; but the dread he felt for Tess seemed not to extend to Marguerite. He believed Marguerite was safe. Again, this was a sourceless knowledge.)

The building groaned again. The emergency Klaxons stuttered and went dead, and in the sudden silence he was able to hear voices from the gallery: a child’s voice, probably Tessa’s; and a man’s, perhaps Ray’s.

The whole universe is telling a story, Mirror Girl explained.

Tess crouched behind a massive wheeled cart bearing an empty white helium cylinder twice the size of her body. Mirror Girl was not physically present, but Tess could hear her voice. Mirror Girl was answering questions Tess had hardly started to ask.

The universe was a story like any other story, Mirror Girl said. The hero of the story was named “complexity.” Complexity was born on page one, a fluctuation in the primordial symmetry. Details of the gestation (the synthesis of quarks, their condensation into matter, photogenesis, the creation of hydrogen and helium) mattered less than the pattern: one thing became two, two became many, many combined in fundamentally unpredictable ways.

Like a baby, Tess thought. She had learned this part in school. A fertilized cell made two cells, four cells, eight cells; and the cells became heart, lungs, brain, self. Was that “complexity”?

An important part of it, yes, Mirror Girl said. Part of a long, long chain of births. Stars formed in the cooling, expanding universe; old stellar cores enriched galactic clouds with calcium, nitrogen, oxygen, metals; newer stars precipitated these elements as rocky planets; rocky planets, bombarded by ice from their star’s accretion disk, formed oceans; life arose, and another story began: single cells joined in strange collectives, became multicellular creatures and then thinking beings, beings complex enough to hold the history of the universe inside their calcified skulls…

Tess wondered if that was the end of the story.

Not nearly, Mirror Girl said. Not by a long shot. Thinking creatures make machines, Mirror Girl said, and their machines grow more complex, and eventually they build machines that think and do more than think: machines that invest their complexity into the structure of potential quantum states. Cultures of thinking organisms generate these nodes of profoundly dense complexity in the same way massive stars collapse into singularities.

Tess asked if that was what was happening now, here in the dim corridors of Eyeball Alley.

Yes.

“What happens next?”

It surpasses understanding.

“How does the story end?”

No one can say.

“Is that my father’s voice?” It was a voice that seemed to come from the observation level of the O/BEC gallery, where Tess wanted to go but where she was deeply afraid of going.

Yes.

“What’s he doing here?”

Thinking about dying, Mirror Girl said.

The O/BEC observation gallery was circular, in the style of a surgical theater, and Chris entered it on the side opposite Ray. He could see Ray and Tess only as blurred shapes distorted by the panels of glass that enclosed the yards-wide O/BEC chamber.

The glass should have been clear. Instead it was obscured by what looked like ropes and columns of frost. Something catastrophically strange was happening down in the core platens.

He crouched and began to move slowly around the perimeter of the gallery. He could hear Ray’s voice, soft and uninflected, couched in echoes from the rounded walls:

“I don’t hate her. What would be the point? She taught me a lesson. Something most people never learn. We live in a dream. A dream about surfaces. We love our skins so much we can’t see under them. But it’s only a story.”

Tessa’s voice was unnaturally calm: “What else could it be?”

Now Chris could see them both around the curvature of the glass wall. He crouched motionless, watching.

Ray sat on the floor, legs splayed, staring straight ahead. Tess sat on his lap. She caught sight of Chris and smiled. Her eyes were luminous.

Ray had a knife in his right hand. The knife was poised at Tessa’s throat.

But, of course, it wasn’t Tess.

Ray felt as if he had fallen off a cliff, each impact on the way down doing him an irreparable injury, but this was the final blow, the hard landing, the awareness that this thing he had mistaken for his daughter was not Tess but the symptom of her sickness. Of all their sicknesses, perhaps.

This was Mirror Girl.

“You came to kill me,” Mirror Girl said.

He held the knife against her throat. She had Tessa’s voice and Tessa’s body, but her eyes betrayed her. Her eyes and their intimate knowledge of him.

“You think the only true thing is pain,” she whispered. “But you’re wrong.”

This was too much. He pressed the knife into the hollow of her throat, impossible as this act was, a murder that couldn’t succeed, the execution of a primordial force in the shape of his only child, and pulled it hard across her pale skin.

Expecting blood. But there was no blood. The knife met no resistance.

She vanished like a broken bubble.

There was another tremor deep in the earth, and the opaque glass walls of the O/BEC gallery began to crumble into dust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he stepped over the edge.

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

Thirty-Six

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marguerite gasped.

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

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

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

Where she was plainly tempted to follow.

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

He said, “Tess—”

“He jumped,” she said.

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

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

The toes of her shoes tested the abyss.

“Is he dead?” Tess asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“She?”

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

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

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

“No.” Ray was gone.

“Is he dead?”

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

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

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

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

She nodded solemnly, swaying.

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

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

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

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

No, Chris thought, it isn’t.

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

“Even so, there’d be no coming back.”

“No… no coming back.”

“Porry wouldn’t jump,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Porry died,” Tess said.

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

“But was it your fault?”

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

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

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

Tess wanted the truth.

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

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

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

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

“I wish that too.”

“Does my story have a happy ending?”

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

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

“I can promise to try.”

“Is that the truth?”

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

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