Authority (12 page)

Only the assistant director had gotten a regular-size chair. That way she could hold
on to the illusion that she was in charge; or, rather, he hoped he could forestall
any complaint from her later that he was being petty. He had already ignored Grace’s
pointed “I am so thankful that this is correct on the schedule,” which meant she already
knew he’d moved up his interrogation of the biologist. She’d kept him waiting while
she joked with someone in the hall, which he took as a micro-retaliation.

They were huddled around the world’s smallest conference table/stool, on which Control
had placed the pot with the plant and mouse. Everything in its time and place, although
the director’s cell phone would not be part of the conversation—Grace had already
confiscated it.

“What is this,” he said, pointing to the wall of words, “in my office?” Not quite
willing to concede the unspoken point that continued to radiate from Grace like a
force field: It was still the former director’s office.

“This” included not just the words but the crude map of Area X drawn beneath the words,
in green, red, and black, showing the usual landmarks: lighthouse, topographical anomaly,
base camp … and also, farther up the coast, the island. A few stray words had been
scribbled with a ball-point pen out to the sides—incomprehensible—and there were two
rather daunting slash marks about half a foot above Control’s head, with dates about
three years apart. One red. One green. With the director’s initials beside them, too.
Had the director been
checking her height
? Of all of the strange things on the wall, that seemed the strangest.

“I thought you said you had read all the files,” Grace replied.

Nothing in the files had mentioned a door’s worth of peculiar text, but he wouldn’t
argue the point. He knew it was unlikely he had uncovered something unknown to them.

“Humor me.”

“The director wrote it,” Grace said. “These are words found written on the walls of
the tunnel.”

Control took a moment to digest that information.

“But why did you leave it there?” For an intense moment the words and the rotting
honey smell combined to make him feel physically ill.

“A memorial,” Whitby said quickly, as if to provide an excuse for the assistant director.
“It seemed too disrespectful to take it down.” Control had noticed Whitby kept giving
the mouse strange glances.

“Not a memorial,” Grace said. “It’s not a memorial because the director isn’t dead.
I don’t believe she’s dead.” She said this in a quiet but assured way, causing a hush
from Whitby and Hsyu, as if Grace had shared an opinion that was an embarrassment
to her. Control’s careful manipulation of the thermostat meant they were sweating
and squirming a bit anyway.

“What does it mean?” Control asked, to move past the moment. Beyond Grace’s obstructionism,
he could see a kind of pain growing in her that he had no wish to exploit.

“That’s why we brought the linguist,” Whitby said charitably, even though it was clear
that Hsyu’s presence had surprised the assistant director. But Hsyu had ever more
influence as the Southern Reach shrank; soon enough, they might have a situation where
subdepartments consisted of one person writing themselves up for offenses, giving
themselves raises and bonuses, celebrating their own birthdays with custom-made Southern
Reach–shaped carrot cakes.

Hsyu, a short, slender woman with long black hair, spoke.

“First of all, we are ninety-nine point nine percent certain that this text is by
the lighthouse keeper, Saul Evans.” A slight uprising inflection to her voice imbued
even the blandest or most serious statement with optimism.

“Saul Evans…”

“He’s right up there,” Whitby said, pointing to the wall of framed images. “In the
middle of that black-and-white photo.” The one in front of the lighthouse. So that
was Saul. He’d known that already, somewhere in the back of his mind.

“Because you found it printed somewhere else?” Control asked Hsyu. He hadn’t had time
to do more than glance at the file on Evans—he’d been too busy familiarizing himself
with the staff of the Southern Reach and the general outline of the situation in Area
X.

“Because it matches his syntax and word choice in a few of his sermons we have on
audiotape.”

“What was he doing preaching if he was a lighthouse keeper?”

“He was retired as a preacher, actually. He left his ministry up north very suddenly,
for no documented reason, then came south and took the lighthouse keeper position.
He’d been there for five years when the border came down.”

“Do you think he brought whatever caused Area X with him?” Control ventured, but no
one followed him into the hinterlands.

“It’s been checked out,” Whitby said. For the first time a sliver of condescension
had entered his tone when addressing Control.

“And these words were found within the topographical anomaly?”

“Yes,” Hsyu said. “Reconstructed from the reports of several expeditions, but we’ve
never gotten a useful sample of the material the words are made of.”

“Living material,” Control said. Now it was coming back to him, a bit. The words hadn’t
been part of the summary, but he’d seen reports of words written on the tower walls
in living tissue. “Why weren’t these words in the files?”

The linguist again, this time with some reluctance: “To be honest, we don’t like to
reproduce the words. So it might have been buried in the information, like in a summary
in the lighthouse keeper’s file.”

Grace had nothing to add, apparently, but Whitby chimed in: “We don’t like to reproduce
the words because we still don’t know exactly what triggered the creation of Area
X … or why.”

And yet they’d left the words up behind the door that led nowhere. Control was struggling
to see the logic there.

“That’s superstition,” Hsyu protested. “That’s complete and utter superstition. You
shouldn’t say that.” Control knew her parents were very traditional and came from
a culture in which spirits manifested and words had a different significance. Hsyu
did not share these beliefs—vehemently did not, practicing a lax sort of Christian
faith, which brought with it inexplicable elements and phantasmagoria all its own.
But he still agreed with her assessment, even if that antipathy might be leaking into
her analysis.

She would have continued with a full-blown excoriation of superstition, except that
Grace stopped her.

“It’s not superstition,” she said.

They all turned to her, swiveling on their stools.

“It is superstition,” she admitted. “But it might be true.”

*   *   *

How could a superstition be true? Control pondered that later, as he turned his attention
to his trip to the border along with a cursory look at a file Whitby had pulled for
him titled simply “Theories.” Maybe “superstition” was what snuck into the gaps, the
cracks, when you worked in a place with falling morale and depleted resources. Maybe
superstition was what happened when your director went missing in action and your
assistant director was still mourning the loss. Maybe that was when you fell back
on spells and rituals, the reptile brain saying to the rest of you, “I’ll take it
from here. You’ve had your shot.” It wasn’t even unreasonable, really. How many invisible,
abstract incantations ruled the world beyond the Southern Reach?

But not everyone believed in the same versions. The linguist still believed in the
superstition of logic, for example, perhaps because she had only been at the Southern
Reach for two years. If the statistics held true, she would burn out within the next
eighteen months; for some reason, Area X was very hard on linguists, almost as hard
as it was on priests, of which there were none now at the Southern Reach.

So perhaps she was only months removed from converting to the assistant director’s
belief system, or Whitby’s, whatever that might be. Because Control knew that belief
in a scientific process only took you so far. The ziggurats of illogic erected by
your average domestic terrorist as he or she bought the fertilizer or made a detonator
took on their own teetering momentum and power. When those towers crashed to the earth,
they still existed whole in the perpetrator’s mind, and everyone else’s too—just for
different reasons.

But Hsyu had been adamant, for reasons that didn’t make Control any more comfortable
about Area X.

Imagine, she had told Control next, that language is only part of a method of communication.
Imagine that it isn’t even the important part but more like the pipeline, the highway.
A conduit only.
Infrastructure
was the word Control would use with the Voice later.

The real core of the message, the meaning, would be conveyed by the combinations of
living matter that composed the words, as if the “ink” itself was the message.

“And if a message is half-physical, if a kind of coding is half-physical, then words
on a wall don’t mean that much at all, really, in my opinion. I could analyze those
words for years—which is, incidentally, what I understand the director may have done—and
it wouldn’t help me to understand anything. The type of conduit helps decide how fast
the message arrives, and perhaps some context, but that’s all. Further”—and here Control
recognized that Hsyu had slipped into the rote routine of a lecture given many times
before, possibly accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation—“if someone or something
is trying to jam information inside your head using words you understand but a meaning
you don’t, it’s not even that it’s not on a bandwidth you can receive, it’s much worse.
Like, if the message were a knife and it created its meaning by cutting into meat
and your head is the receiver and the tip of that knife is being shoved into your
ear over and over again…”

She didn’t need to say more for Control to think of the expeditions come to grief
before they had banned names and modern communication technology. What if the fate
of the first expedition in particular had been sealed by a kind of
interference
they had brought with them that had made them simply unable to listen, to perceive?

He returned to the lighthouse keeper. “So we think that Saul Evans wrote all of this
long ago, right? He can’t possibly be writing anything now, though. He’d be ancient
at this point.”

“We don’t know. We just don’t know.”

This, unhelpfully, from Whitby, while they all gave him a look like animals caught
in the middle of the road late at night with a car coming fast.

008: THE TERROR

An hour or so later, it was time to visit the border, Grace telling him that Cheney
would take him on the tour. “He wants to, for some reason.” And Grace didn’t, clearly.
Down the corridor again to those huge double doors, led by Whitby, as if Control had
no memory—only to be greeted by a cheerful Cheney, whose brown leather jacket seemed
not so much ubiquitous or wedded to him as a part of him: a beetle’s carapace. Whitby
faded into the background, disappearing through the doors with a conspicuous and sharp
intake of breath as if about to dive into a lake.

“I thought I’d come up and spare you the dread gloves,” Cheney exclaimed as he shook
Control’s hand. Control wondered if there was some cunning to his affability, or if
that was just paranoia spilling over from his interactions with Grace.

“Why keep them there?” Control asked as Cheney led him via a circuitous “shortcut”
past security and out to the parking lot.

“Budget, I’m afraid. Always the answer around here,” Cheney said. “Too expensive to
remove them. And then it became a joke. Or, we made it into a joke.”

“A joke?” He’d had enough of jokes today.

At the entrance, Whitby miraculously awaited them at the wheel of an idling army jeep
with the top down. He looked like a silent-movie star, the person meant to take the
pratfalls, and his pantomimed unfurling of his hand to indicate they should get on
board only intensified the impression. Control gave Whitby an eye roll and Whitby
winked at him. Had Whitby been a member of the drama club in college? Was he a thwarted
thespian?

“Yes, a joke,” Cheney continued, agreeable, as they jumped into the back; Whitby or
someone had conspicuously put a huge file box in the front passenger seat so no one
could sit there. “As if whatever’s strange and needs to be analyzed comes to us from
inside the building, not from Area X. Have you
met
those people? We’re a bunch of lunatics.” A bullfrog-like smile—another joke. “Whitby—take
the scenic route.”

But Control was hardly listening; he was wrinkling his nose at the unwelcome fact
that the rotting honey smell had followed them into the jeep.

*   *   *

For a long time, Whitby spoke not at all and Cheney said things Control already knew,
playing tour guide and apparently forgetting he was repeating things from the bunny
briefing just the day before. So Control focused most of his attention on his surroundings.
The “scenic route” took them the usual way Control had seen on maps: the winding road,
the roadblocks, the trenches like remnants from an ancient war. Where possible, the
swamp and forest had been retained as natural cover or barriers. But odd bald patches
of drained swamp and clear-cut forest appeared at intervals, sometimes with guard
stations or barracks placed there but often just turned into meadows of yellowing
grass. Control got a prickling on his neck that made him think of snipers and remote
watchers. Maybe it helped flush out intruders for the drones. Most army personnel
they passed were in camouflage, and it was hard for him to judge their numbers. But
he knew everyone they passed outside the last checkpoint thought what lay beyond was
an area rendered hazardous due to environmental contamination.

In “cooperation with” the Southern Reach, the army had been tasked with finding new
entry points into Area X, and relentlessly—or, perhaps, with growing boredom—monitored
the edges for breaches. The army also still tested the border with projectiles from
time to time. He knew, too, that nukes were locked in on Area X from the nearest silos,
military satellites keeping watch from above.