Authority
Authors: Jeff VanderMeer
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For Ann
CONTENTS
014: Heroic Heroes of the Revolution
INCANTATIONS
000
In Control’s dreams it is early morning, the sky deep blue with just a twinge of light.
He is staring from a cliff down into an abyss, a bay, a cove. It always changes. He
can see for miles into the still water. He can see ocean behemoths gliding there,
like submarines or bell-shaped orchids or the wide hulls of ships, silent, ever moving,
the size of them conveying such a sense of power that he can feel the havoc of their
passage even from so far above. He stares for hours at the shapes, the movements,
listening to the whispers echoing up to him … and then he falls. Slowly, too slowly,
he falls soundless into the dark water, without splash or ripple. And keeps falling.
Sometimes this happens while he is awake, as if he hasn’t been paying enough attention,
and then he silently recites his own name until the real world returns to him.
001: FALLING
First day. The beginning of his last chance.
“These are the survivors?”
Control stood beside the assistant director of the Southern Reach, behind smudged
one-way glass, staring at the three individuals sitting in the interrogation room.
Returnees from the twelfth expedition into Area X.
The assistant director, a tall, thin black woman in her forties, said nothing back,
which didn’t surprise Control. She hadn’t wasted an extra word on him since he’d arrived
that morning after taking Monday to get settled. She hadn’t spared him an extra look,
either, except when he’d told her and the rest of the staff to call him “Control,”
not “John” or “Rodriguez.” She had paused a beat, then replied, “In that case, call
me Patience, not Grace,” much to the stifled amusement of those present. The deflection
away from her real name to one that also meant something else interested him. “That’s
okay,” he’d said, “I can just call you Grace,” certain this would not please her.
She parried by continually referring to him as the “acting” director. Which was true:
There lay between her stewardship and his ascension a gap, a valley of time and forms
to be filled out, procedures to be followed, the rooting out and hiring of staff.
Until then, the issue of authority might be murky.
But Control preferred to think of her as neither patience nor grace. He preferred
to think of her as an abstraction if not an obstruction. She had made him sit through
an old orientation video about Area X, must have known it would be basic and out of
date. She had already made clear that theirs would be a relationship based on animosity.
From her side, at least.
“Where were they found?” he asked her now, when what he wanted to ask was why they
hadn’t been kept separate from one another. Because you lack the discipline, because
your department has been going to the rats for a long time now? The rats are down
there in the basement now, gnawing away.
“Read the files,” she said, making it clear he should have read them already.
Then she walked out of the room.
Leaving Control alone to contemplate the files on the table in front him—and the three
women behind the glass. Of course he had read the files, but he had hoped to duck
past the assistant director’s high guard, perhaps get her own thoughts. He’d read
parts of her file, too, but still didn’t have a sense of her except in terms of her
reactions to him.
His first full day was only four hours old and he already felt contaminated by the
dingy, bizarre building with its worn green carpet and the antiquated opinions of
the other personnel he had met. A sense of diminishment suffused everything, even
the sunlight that halfheartedly pushed through the high, rectangular windows. He was
wearing his usual black blazer and dress slacks, a white shirt with a light blue tie,
black shoes he’d shined that morning. Now he wondered why he’d bothered. He disliked
having such thoughts because he wasn’t above it all—he was
in
it—but they were hard to suppress.
Control took his time staring at the women, although their appearance told him little.
They had all been given the same generic uniforms, vaguely army-issue but also vaguely
janitorial. Their heads had all been shaved, as if they had suffered from some infestation,
like lice, rather than something more inexplicable. Their faces all retained the same
expression, or could be said not to retain any expression. Don’t think of them by
their names, he’d told himself on the plane. Let them carry only the weight of their
functions at first. Then fill in the rest. But Control had never been good at remaining
aloof. He liked to burrow in, try to find a level where the details illuminated without
overwhelming him.
The surveyor had been found at her house, sitting in a chair on the back patio.
The anthropologist had been found by her husband, knocking on the back door of his
medical practice.
The biologist had been found in an overgrown lot several blocks from her house, staring
at a crumbling brick wall.
Just like the members of the prior expedition, none of them had any recollection of
how they had made their way back across the invisible border, out of Area X. None
of them knew how they had evaded the blockades and fences and other impediments the
military had thrown up around the border. None of them knew what had happened to the
fourth member of their expedition—the psychologist, who had, in fact, also been the
director of the Southern Reach and overridden all objections to lead them, incognito.
None of them seemed to have much recollection of anything at all.
* * *
In the cafeteria that morning for breakfast, Control had looked out through the wall-to-wall
paneled window into the courtyard with its profusion of stone tables, and then at
the people shuffling through the line—too few, it seemed, for such a large building—and
asked Grace, “Why isn’t everyone more excited to have the expedition back?”
She had given him a long-suffering look, as if he were a particularly slow student
in a remedial class. “Why do you think, Control?” She’d already managed to attach
an ironic weight to his name, so he felt as if he were the sinker on one of his grandpa’s
fly rods, destined for the silt near the bottom of dozens of lakes. “We went through
all this with the last expedition. They endured nine months of questions, and yet
we never found out anything. And the whole time they were dying. How would that make
you feel?” Long months of disorientation, and then their deaths from a particularly
malign form of cancer.
He’d nodded slowly in response. Of course, she was right. His father had died of cancer.
He hadn’t thought of how that might have affected the staff. To him, it was still
an abstraction, just words in a report, read on the plane down.
Here, in the cafeteria, the carpet turned dark green, against which a stylized arrow
pattern stood out in a light green, all of the arrows pointing toward the courtyard.
“Why isn’t there more light in here?” he asked. “Where does all the light go?”
But Grace was done answering his questions for the moment.
* * *
When one of the three—the biologist—turned her head a fraction, looking into the glass
as if she could see him, Control evaded that stare with a kind of late-blooming embarrassment.
Scrutiny such as his was impersonal, professional, but it probably didn’t feel that
way, even though they knew they were being watched.
He hadn’t been told he would spend his first day questioning disoriented returnees
from Area X, and yet Central must have known when he’d been offered the position.
The expedition members had been picked up almost six weeks ago, been subjected to
a month of tests at a processing station up north before being sent to the Southern
Reach. Just as he’d been sent to Central first to endure two weeks of briefings, including
gaps, whole days that slid into oblivion without much of anything happening, as if
they’d always meant to time it this way. Then everything had sped up, and he had been
given the impression of urgency.
These were among the details that had caused a kind of futile exasperation to wash
over him ever since his arrival. The Voice, his primary contact in the upper echelons,
had implied in an initial briefing that this was an easy assignment, given his past
history. The Southern Reach had become a backward, backwater agency, guarding a dormant
secret that no one seemed to care much about anymore, given the focus on terrorism
and ecological collapse. The Voice had, in its gruff way, typified his mission “to
start” as being brought in to “acclimate, assess, analyze, and then dig in deep,”
which wasn’t his usual brief these days.
During an admittedly up-and-down career, Control had started as an operative in the
field: surveillance on domestic terror cells. Then he’d been bumped up to data synthesis
and organizational analysis—two dozen or more cases banal in their similarities and
about which he was forbidden to talk. Cases invisible to the public: the secret history
of nothing. But more and more he had become the fixer, mostly because he seemed better
at identifying other people’s specific problems than at managing his own general ones.
At thirty-eight, that was what he had become known for, if he was known for anything.
It meant you didn’t have to be there for the duration, even though by now that’s exactly
what he wanted: to see something through. Problem was, no one really liked a fixer—“Hey,
let me show you what you’re doing wrong”—especially if they thought the fixer needed
fixing from way back.