Authority (20 page)

She laughed—chortled, actually, ending in a short coughing fit. “That’s not a hobby.”

“More like a vocation,” he admitted. “No, but—I jog. I like classical music. I play
chess sometimes. I watch TV sometimes. I read books—novels.”

“Nothing very distinctive there,” she said.

“I never claimed to be unique. What else do you remember from the expedition?”

She squinted, eyebrows applying pressure to the rest of her face as if that might
help her memory. “That’s a very broad question, Mr. Director. Very broad.”

“You can answer it however you like.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“I just mean that—”

“I know what you mean,” she said. “I almost always know what you mean.”

“Then answer the question.”

“It’s a voluntary game,” she explained. “We can stop at any time. Maybe I want to
stop now.” That recklessness again, or something else? She sighed, crossed her arms.
“Something bad happened at the top. I saw something bad. But I’m not quite sure what.
A green flame. A shoe. It’s confused, like it’s in a kaleidoscope. It comes and it
goes. It feels as if I’m receiving someone else’s memories. From the bottom of a well.
In a dream.”

“Someone else’s memories?”

“It’s my turn. What does your mother do?”

“That’s classified.”

“I bet it is,” she said, giving him an appraising look.

*   *   *

He ended the session soon thereafter. What was true empathy anyway but sometimes turning
away, leaving someone alone? Tired and in her room, she had become not so much less
sharp as almost too relaxed.

She was confusing him. He kept seeing sides of her that he had not known existed,
that had not existed in the biologist he had known from the files and transcripts.
He felt as if he’d been talking to someone younger today, someone more glib and also
more vulnerable, if he’d chosen to exploit that. Perhaps it
was
because he had invaded her territory, while she was sick—or perhaps she was, for
some reason, trying out personalities. Some part of him missed the more confrontational
Ghost Bird.

As he went back through the layers of security, passing the faked portraits and photos,
he acknowledged that at least she had admitted some of her memories of the expedition
were intact. That was a kind of progress. Although it still felt too slow, felt every
now and then as if everything was happening too slow, and that he was taking too long
to understand. A ticking clock he couldn’t see, that was beyond his power to truly
see.

One day her portrait would be up on the wall. When the subject was still alive, did
they have to sit for those, or were they created from existing photographs? Would
she have to recount some fiction about her experiences in Area X, without ever having
a complete memory of what had actually happened?

015: SEVENTH BREACH

Photographs had also been buried in the sedimentary layers of the director’s desk.
Many were of the lighthouse from different angles, a few from various expeditions
but also reproductions of ancient daguerreotypes taken soon after the lighthouse had
first been built, along with etchings and maps. The topographical anomaly as well,
although fewer of these. Among them was a second copy of one of the photographs that
hung on the wall opposite his desk—almost certainly the photograph the biologist had
seen. That black-and-white photograph of the last lighthouse keeper, Saul Evans, with
one of his assistants to his left, and on the right, hunched over as she clambered
up some rocks in the background, a girl whose face was half-obscured by the hood of
her jacket. Was her hair black, brown, or blond? Impossible to tell from the few strands
visible. She was dressed in a practical flannel shirt and jeans. The photo had a wintry
feel to it, the grass in the background faded and sparse, the waves visible beyond
the sand and rocks cresting in a cold kind of way. A local girl? As with so many others,
they might never know who she had been. The forgotten coast had not been the best
place to live if you cared about anyone finding you from census records.

The lighthouse keeper was in his late forties or early fifties, except Control knew
you could only serve until fifty, so he must have been in his forties. A weathered
face, bearded as you might expect. A sea captain’s hat, even though the man had never
been any kind of sailor. Control couldn’t intuit much from looking at Saul Evans.
He looked like a walking, talking cliché, as if he’d tried hard for years to mimic
first an eccentric lay preacher whose sermons referenced hellfire and then whatever
one might expect from a lighthouse keeper. You could become invisible that way, as
Control knew from his few operations in the field. Become a type, no one saw you.
Paranoid thought: What better disguise? But disguise for what?

The photo had been taken by a member of the Séance & Science Brigade about a week
or two before the Event that had created Area X. The photographer had gone missing
when the border came down. It remained the only photo of Saul Evans they had, except
for some shots from twenty years earlier, well before he’d come to the coast.

*   *   *

By the late afternoon, Control felt as if he hadn’t gotten much further—just given
himself a respite from governance of the Southern Reach—although even that was interrupted
(again) by the sound of his reconstituted chair barricade being encountered by an
apparition who turned out to be Cheney ambitiously leaning forward across the clattery
chairs so he could peer around the corner.

“… Hello, Cheney.”

“Hello … Control.”

Perhaps because of his precarious position, Cheney seemed at a loss, even though he
was the intruder. Or as if he had thought the office might be empty, the chairs foreshadowing
some shift in hierarchy?

“Yes?” Control said, not wanting to invite Cheney all the way in.

The X of his face tightened, the lines unsuccessfully trying to break free and become
either parallel or one line. “Oh, yes, well, I guess I just wondered if you’d followed
up about, you know, the director’s
trip
.” This last bit delivered in a low voice backed up by a quick glance away down the
hall. Did Cheney have a faction, too? That would be tiresome. But no doubt he did:
He was the one true hope of the nervous scientists huddled in the basement, waiting
to be downsized, plucked one by one from their offices and cubicles by the giant,
invisible hand of Central and then tossed into a smoldering pit of indifference and
joblessness.

“Since I’ve got you here, Cheney, here’s a question for you: Anything out of the ordinary
about the second-to-last eleventh expedition?” Another thing Control hated about the
iterations: a metric mouthful to enunciate, harder still to remember the actual number.
“X.11.H, it was, right?”

Cheney, stabilized by some crude chair rearrangement, appeared in full, motorcycle
jacket and all, in the doorway. “X.11.J. I don’t think so. You have the files.”

But that was just it. Control had a fairly crude report, including the intel that
the director had conducted the exit interviews … which were astonishingly vague in
their happy-happy nothing-bad-happened message. “Well, it was the expedition before
the director’s
special trip
. I thought you might have some insight.”

Cheney shook his head, seemed now to very much regret his intrusion. “No, nothing
much. Nothing that comes to mind.” Did the director’s office somehow make him uncomfortable?
His gaze couldn’t seem to fix on one thing, ricocheted from the far wall to the ceiling
and then, ever so briefly, like the brush of a moth’s wings, touched upon the mounds
of unprofessional evidence circling Control. Did Cheney think of them as piles of
gold Control would steal or piles of shit sandwiches he was being forced to eat?

“Let me ask you about Lowry, then,” Control said, thinking about the ambiguous “L.”
notes he’d found and the video he’d be watching all too soon. “How did Lowry and the
director get along?”

Cheney seemed just as uncomfortable with this question but more willing to answer.
“How does anyone get along, when you think about it, really? Lowry didn’t like me
personally but we got along fine professionally. He had an appreciation for our role.
He knew the value of having good equipment.” Which probably meant Lowry had approved
every purchase order Cheney ever wrote.

“But what about him and the director?” Control asked. Again.

“Bluntly? Lowry admired her in his way, tried to make her his protégé, but she didn’t
want to be. She was very much her own person. And I think she thought he got too much
credit for just surviving.”

“Wasn’t he a hero?” A glorious hero of the revolution plastered on a wall, remade
in the image created by a camera lens and doctored documents. Rehabilitated from his
awful experiences. Made productive. Booted up to Central after a while.

“Sure, sure,” Cheney said. “Sure enough. But, you know, maybe overrated. He liked
to drink. He liked to throw his weight around. I remember the director once said something
unkind, compared him to a prisoner of war who thinks just because he suffered he knows
a lot. So, some friction. But they worked together, though. They did work together.
Respect in opposition.” Quick flash of a smile, as if to say, “We’re all comrades
here.”

“Interesting.” Although not really. Another tactical discovery: Evidence of infighting
in the Southern Reach, a breakdown in organizational harmony because people weren’t
robots, couldn’t be made to act like robots. Or could they?

“Yes, if you say so,” Cheney said, and trailed off.

“Is there anything else?” Control asked, a pointed stare beneath a frozen smile daring
Cheney to ask again about his investigation into the director’s trip.

“No, I guess not. Nope. Not that I can think of,” Cheney said, clearly relieved. He
tossed his goodbyes in classic convoluted Cheneyesque fashion as he backed out, amble-stumbling
over the chairs and out of sight down the corridor.

After that, Control concentrated on nothing but basic sorting, until all the bits
of paper had been accounted for and the piles safely stored in separate filing boxes
for further categorizing. Although Control had noticed numerous references to the
Séance & Science Brigade, he had found only three brief mentions of Saul Evans to
go with the photo. As if the director’s interests had led her elsewhere.

He had, however, uncovered and set aside a sheet handwritten by the director, of seemingly
random words and phrases, which he eventually realized, by taking a cross-referencing
peek at Grace’s DMP file, had been used as hypnotic commands on the twelfth expedition.
Now
that
was interesting. He almost buzzed Cheney to ask him about it, but something made
him put the phone receiver down before punching in the extension.

*   *   *

At a quarter past six, Control felt a compulsion to wander out into the corridor for
a good stretch. Everything lay under a hush and even a distant radio sounded like
a garbled lullaby. Roaming farther afield, he was crossing the end of the now-empty
cafeteria when he heard sounds coming from a storage room close to the corridor that
led to the science division. Almost everyone had left, and he’d planned to leave soon
himself, but the sounds distracted him. Who was in there? The elusive janitor, he
hoped. The horrible cleaning product needed to be switched out. He was convinced it
was a health hazard.

So he grasped the knob, receiving a little electric shock as he turned it, and then
wrenched outward with all of his strength.

The door flew open, knocking Control back.

A pale creature was crouched in front of shelves of supplies, revealed under the sharp
light of a single low-swinging lightbulb.

An unbearable yet beatific agony deformed its features.

Whitby.

*   *   *

Breathing heavily, Whitby stared up at Control. The look of agony had begun to evaporate,
leaving behind an expression of combined cunning and caution.

Clearly Whitby had just suffered some kind of trauma. Clearly Whitby had just heard
that a family member or close friend had died. Even though it was Control who had
received the shock.

Control said, idiotically, “I’ll come back later,” as if they’d had a meeting scheduled
in the storage room.

Whitby jumped up like a trap-door spider, and Control flinched and took a step back,
certain Whitby was attacking him. Instead Whitby pulled him into the storage room,
shutting the door behind them. Whitby had a surprisingly strong grip for such a slight
man.

“No, no, please come in,” he was saying to Control, as if he hadn’t been able to speak
and guide his boss inside at the same time, so that now there was a lip-synch issue.

“I really can come back later,” Control said, still rattled, preserving the illusion
that he hadn’t just seen Whitby in extreme distress … and also the illusion that this
was Whitby’s office and not a storage space.

Whitby stared at him in the dull light of the low-hung single bulb, standing close
because it was crowded with the two of them in there, narrow with a high ceiling that
could not be seen through the darkness above the bulb, a shield directing its light
downward only. The shelves to either side of the central space displayed several rows
of a lemon-zest cleaning product, along with stacked cans of soup, extra mop heads,
garbage bags, and a few digital clocks with a heavy layer of dust on them. A long
silver ladder led up into darkness.

Whitby was
still
composing his expression, Control realized, having to consciously wrench his frown
toward a smile, wring the last clenched fear from his features.

“I was just getting some peace and quiet,” Whitby said. “It can be hard to find.”

“You looked like you were having a breakdown, to be honest,” Control said, not sure
he wanted to continue playing pretend. “Are you okay?” He felt more comfortable saying
this now that Whitby clearly wasn’t going to have a psychotic break. But he was also
embarrassed that Whitby had managed to so easily trap him in here.