Authority (15 page)

The final stretch to the border had Whitby circling ever lower until Control was certain
they were below sea level, before they came up again slightly to a low ridge upon
which sat a drab green barracks, a more official-looking brick building for army command
and control, and the local Southern Reach outpost.

According to a labyrinthine hierarchical chart that resembled several thick snakes
fucking one another, the Southern Reach was under the army’s jurisdiction here, which
might be why the Southern Reach facility, closed down between expeditions, looked
a bit like a row of large tents that had been made of lemon meringue. Which is to
say, it looked like any number of the churches Control had become familiar with in
his teenage years, usually because of whatever girl he was dating. The calcification
of revivalists and born-agains often took this form: as of something temporary that
had hardened and become permanent. And thus it was either a series of white permafrost
tents that greeted them or the white swell of huge waves, frozen forever. The sight
was as out of place and startling as if the facility had resembled a fossilized herd
of huge MoonPies, a delicacy of those youthful years.

Army HQ was in a dome-shaped section of the barracks after the final checkpoint, but
no one seemed to be around except a few privates standing in the churned mud bath
that was the unofficial parking lot. Loitering with no regard for the light rain falling
on them, talking in a bored but intense way while smoking cherry-scented filtered
cigarettes. “Whatever you want.” “Fuck off.” They had the look of men who had no idea
what they guarded, or knew but had been trying to forget.

Border commander Samantha Higgins—who occupied a room hardly larger than a storage
closet and just as depressing—was AWOL when they called on her. Higgins’s aide-de-camp—“add
the camp” as his punning father would’ve put it—relayed an apology that she’d had
to “step out” and couldn’t “receive you personally.” Almost as if he were a special-delivery
signature-required package.

Which was just as well. There had been awkwardness between the two entities after
the final eleventh expedition had turned up back home—procedures changed, the security
tapes scrutinized again and again. They had rechecked the border for other exit points,
looking for heat signals, fluctuations in air flow, anything. Found nothing.

So Control thought of “border commander” as a useless or misleading title and didn’t
really care that Higgins wasn’t there, no matter how Cheney seemed to take it as a
personal affront: “I told her this was important. She knew this was important.”

While Whitby took the opportunity to fondle a fern, revealing a hitherto unobserved
sensitivity to texture.

*   *   *

Control had felt foolish asking Whitby what he meant by saying “the terror,” but he
also couldn’t leave it alone. Especially after reading over the theories document
Whitby had handed him that morning, which he also wanted to talk about. Control thought
of the theories as “slow death by,” given the context: Slow death by aliens. Slow
death by parallel universe. Slow death by malign unknown time-traveling force. Slow
death by invasion from an alternate earth. Slow death by wildly divergent technology
or the shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology. Death by this and
by that. Death by indifference and inference. His favorite: “Surface-dwelling terrestrial
organism, previously unknown.” Hiding where all of these years? In a lake? On a farm?
At slots in a casino?

But he recognized his bottled-up laughter for the onset of hysteria, and his cynicism
for what it was: a defense mechanism so he wouldn’t have to think about any of it.

Death, too, by arched eyebrow: a fair amount of implied or outright “your theory is
ridiculous, unwarranted, useless.” Some of the ghosts of old interdepartmental rivalries
resurrected, and coming through in odd ways across sentences. He wondered how much
fraternization had taken place over the years—if an archaeologist’s written wince
at an environmental scientist’s seemingly reasonable assertion represented a fair
opinion or meant he was seeing an endgame playing out, the final consequence of an
affair that had occurred twenty years earlier.

So before the trip to the border, giving up his lunchtime, Control had summoned Whitby
to his office to have it out with him about “the terror” and talk about the theories.
Although as it turned out they barely touched on the theories.

Whitby had perched on the edge of the chair opposite Control and his huge desk, intent
and waiting. He was almost vibrating, like a tuning fork. Which made Control reluctant
to say what he had to say, even though he still said it: “Why did you say ‘the terror’
earlier? And then you repeated it.”

Whitby wore an expression of utter blankness, then lit up to the extent that he seemed
to levitate for a moment. He had the busy look of a hummingbird in the act of pollination
as he said, “Not ‘terror.’ Not ‘terror’ at all.
Terroir
.” And this time he drew out and corrected the pronunciation of the word, so Control
could tell it was not “terror.”

“What is … terroir then?”

“A wine term,” Whitby said, with such enthusiasm that it made Control wonder if the
man had a second job as a sommelier at some upscale Hedley restaurant along the river
walk.

Somehow, though, the man’s sudden animation animated Control, too. There was so much
obfuscation and so much rote recital at the Southern Reach that to see Whitby excited
by an idea lifted him up.

“What does it mean?” he asked, although still unsure whether it was a good idea to
encourage Whitby.

“What doesn’t it mean?” Whitby said. “It means the specific characteristics of a place—the
geography, geology, and climate that, in concert with the vine’s own genetic propensities,
can create a startling, deep, original vintage.”

Now Control was both confused and amused. “How does this apply to our work?”

“In all ways,” Whitby said, his enthusiasm doubled, if anything. “Terroir’s direct
translation is ‘a sense of place,’ and what it means is the sum of the effects of
a localized environment, inasmuch as they impact the qualities of a particular product.
Yes, that can mean wine, but what if you applied these criteria to thinking about
Area X?”

On the cusp of catching Whitby’s excitement, Control said, “So you mean you would
study everything about the history—natural and human—of that stretch of coast, in
addition to all other elements? And that you might—you just might—find an answer in
that confluence?” Next to the idea of terroir, the theories that had been presented
to Control seemed garish and blunt.

“Exactly. The point of terroir is that no two areas are the same. That no two wines
can be exactly the same because no combination of elements can be exactly the same.
That certain varietals cannot occur in certain places. But it requires a deep understanding
of a region to reach conclusions.”

“And this isn’t being done already?”

Whitby shrugged. “Some of it. Some of it. Just not all of it considered together,
in my opinion. I feel there is an overemphasis on the lighthouse, the tower, base
camp—those discrete elements that could be said to jut out of the landscape—while
the landscape itself is largely ignored. As is the idea that Area X could have formed
nowhere else … although that theory would be highly speculative and perhaps based
mostly on my own observations.”

Control nodded, unable now to shake a sturdy skepticism. Would terroir really be more
useful than another approach? If something far beyond the experience of human beings
had decided to embark upon a purpose that it did not intend to allow humans to recognize
or understand, then terroir would simply be a kind of autopsy, a kind of admission
of the limitations of human systems. You could map the entirety of a process—or, say,
a beachhead or an invasion—only after it had happened, and still not know the
who
or the
why
. He wanted to say to Whitby, “Growing grapes is simpler than Area X,” but refrained.

“I can provide you with some of my personal findings,” Whitby said. “I can show you
the start of things.”

“Great,” Control said, nodding with exaggerated cheeriness, and was relieved that
Whitby took that single word as closure to the conversation and made a fairly rapid
exit, less relieved that he seemed to take it as undiluted affirmation.

Grand unified theories could backfire—for example, Central’s overemphasis on trying
to force connections between unconnected right-wing militia groups. Recalled that
his father had made up stories about how one piece in his ragtag sculpture garden
commented on that one, and how they were all part of a larger narrative. They had
all occupied the same space, were by the same creator, but they had never been meant
to communicate, one to another. Just as they had never been meant to molder and rust
in the backyard. But that way at least his father could rationalize them remaining
out there together, under the hot sun and in the rain, even if protected by tarps.

The border had come down in the early morning, on a day, a date, that no one outside
of the Southern Reach remembered or commemorated. Just that one inexplicable event
had killed an estimated fifteen hundred people. How did you factor ghosts into any
terroir? Did they deepen the flavor, or did they make things dry, chalky, irreconcilable?
The taste in Control’s mouth was bitter.

*   *   *

If terroir meant a confluence, then the entrance through the border into Area X was
the ultimate confluence. It was also the ultimate secret, in that there were no visual
records of that entry point available to anyone. Unless you were there, looking across
at it, you could never experience it. Nor did it help if you were peering at it through
a raging thunderstorm, shoes filling up with mud, with only one umbrella between the
three of you.

They stood, soaked and cold, near the end of a path that wound from the barracks across
the ridge above the giant sinkhole and then on to more stable land. They were looking
at the right side of a tall, sturdy, red wooden frame that delineated the location,
the width and height, of the entrance beyond. The path ran parallel to a paint line
perpetually refreshed to let you know the border lay fifteen feet beyond. If you went
ten feet beyond the line, the lasers from a hidden security system would activate
and turn you into cooked meat. But otherwise, the army had left as small a footprint
as possible; no one knew what might change the terroir. Here the toxicity levels almost
matched those inside of Area X, which was to say: nil, nada, nothing.

As for terror, his personal level had been intensified by deltas of lightning that
cracked open the sky and thunder that sounded like a giant in a bad mood ripping apart
trees. Yet they had persevered, Cheney holding the blue-and-white-striped umbrella
aloft, arm fully extended toward the sky, and Control and Whitby huddled around him,
trying to shuffle in a synchronized way along the narrow path without tripping. All
of it useless against the slanted rain.

“The entrance isn’t visible from the side,” Cheney said in a loud voice, his forehead
flecked with bits of leaf and dirt. “But you’ll see it soon. The path circles around
to meet it head-on.”

“Doesn’t it project light?” Control smacked away something red with six legs that
had been crawling up his pants.

“Yes, but you can’t see it from the side. From the side it doesn’t appear to be there
at all.”

“It is twenty feet high and twelve feet wide,” Whitby added.

“Or, as I say, sixty rabbits high and thirty-six rabbits wide,” Cheney said.

Control, struck by a sudden generosity, laughed at that one, which he imagined brought
a flush of happiness to Cheney’s features although they could barely recognize each
other in the slop and mire.

The area had the aspect of a shrine, even with the downpour. Especially because the
downpour cut off abruptly at the border even though the landscape continued uninterrupted.
Somehow Control had expected the equivalent of the disconnect when a two-page spread
didn’t quite line up in a coffee-table book. But instead it just looked like they
were slogging through a huge terrarium or greenhouse with invisible glass revealing
a sunny day on the grounds beyond.

They continued to the end amid a profusion of lush plant life and an alarmingly crowded
landscape of birdlife and insects, with deer visible in the middle distance through
the veil of rain. Hsyu had said something during their meeting about making assumptions
about terminology, and he had replied, to a roaring silence, “You mean like calling
something a ‘border’?” Tracking back from stripping names from expedition members:
What if when you accreted personality and other details around mere function, a different
picture emerged?

After a few minutes of sloshing through mud, they curved around to come to a halt
in front of the wooden structure.

He had not expected any of it to be beautiful, but it was beautiful.

*   *   *

Beyond the red wooden frame, Control could see a roughly rectangular space forming
an arch at the top, through which swirled a scintillating, questing white light, a
light that fizzed and flickered and seemed always on the point of being snuffed out
but never was … there was a kind of spiraling effect to it, as it continually circled
back in on itself. If you blinked quickly it almost looked as if the light consisted
of eight or ten swiftly rotating spokes, but this was an illusion.

The light was like nothing he had ever seen. It was neither harsh nor soft. It was
not twee, like faery lite from bad movies. It was not the darkish light of hucksters
and magicians or anyone else looking to define light by use of shadows. It lacked
the clarity of the all-revealing light of the storage cathedral, but it wasn’t murky
or buttery or any other descriptor he could think of right then. He imagined trying
to tell his father about it, but, really, it was his father who could have described
the quality of that light to him.