Authority (25 page)

“Go ahead and check the seats for change, John,” said Grandpa Jack. Control had been
twelve, visiting his mother up north for a rare trip that didn’t include going to
the cabin or fishing. They were still getting the balance right; the divorce was still
being finalized.

On a weekend afternoon, in the freezing cold, Jack had rolled up in what he called
a “muscle car.” He’d taken it out of hibernation because he had hatched a secret plan
to drive Control to a lingerie show at a local department store. Control only had
a vague idea of what that meant, but it sounded embarrassing. Mostly he didn’t want
to go because the next-door neighbor’s daughter was his age and he’d had a crush on
her since the summer. But it was hard to say no to Grandpa. Especially when Grandpa
had never taken him anywhere without his mother there.

So Control checked the seats for change while Grandpa fired up the bright blue muscle
car, which had sat cold for two hours while Grandpa talked to his mother inside. But
Control also thought Grandpa was reacquainting himself with the mysteries of its workings,
too. The heat was blasting away and Control was sweating in his coat. He checked the
seats eagerly, wondering if Grandpa had left some money there on purpose. With money,
he could buy the neighbor girl an ice cream. He was still in summer mode.

No money, just lint, paper clips, a scrap of paper or two, and something cold, smooth,
sticky, and shaped like a tiny brain from which he recoiled: old bubble gum. Disappointed,
he broadened his search from the long backseat to the dark cavern under the front
passenger side. He extended his arm awkwardly forward so his hand could curl around
to search, came up against something bulky yet soft taped there. No, not soft—whatever
it was had been wrapped in cloth. With a bit of coaxing, he managed to pull it free,
the awkward weight a muffled thud on the car floor. There was a dull metal-and-oil
smell. He picked it up, unwrapped it from the cloth, and sat back, the rough coldness
of it cupped in both hands … only to find his grandpa staring at him intently.

“What’ve you got there?” the old man asked. “Where’d you find that?” Which Control
thought were dumb questions and then, later, disingenuous questions. The eager look
on Grandpa Jack’s face as he turned to stare, one arm still on the steering wheel.

“A gun,” Control said, although Grandpa could see that. He remembered later mostly
the darkness of it, the darkness of its shape and the stillness it seemed to bring
with it.

“A Colt .45, it looks like. It’s heavy, isn’t it?”

Control nodded, a little afraid now. He was sweating from the heat. He’d already found
the gun, but his grandpa’s expression was that of someone waiting for the gift they’d
given to be unwrapped and held high—and him too young to sense the danger. But he’d
already made the wrong decision: He should never have gotten in the car.

What kind of psycho gave a kid a gun, even unloaded? This was the thought that occurred
now. Perhaps the kind of psycho who wouldn’t mind coming out of retirement at his
remote cabin to work for Central again as the Voice, to run his own grandson.

*   *   *

Midafternoon.
Try. Try again.

Control and the biologist stood together, leaning on the sturdy wooden fence that
separated them from the holding pond. The Southern Reach building lay at their backs,
a gravel path like a rough black river leading across the lawn. Just the two of them …
and the three members of security who had brought her. They had spread out at a distance
of about thirty feet and chosen angles that took into account all escape routes.

“Do they think I’ll run away?” Ghost Bird asked him.

“No,” Control said. If she did, Control would put the blame on them.

The holding pond was long and roughly rectangular. Inside the fence, on the far shore,
a rotting shed lay on the side nearest the swamp. A scrawny pine tree half-throttled
by rusted Christmas lights stood beside the shed. The water was choked with duckweed
and hydrangea and water lilies. Dragonflies patrolled ceaselessly over the gray, sometimes
black water. The frogs made such raucous forecasts of rain that they drowned out the
crickets and, from the fringe of grass and bushes on the opposite side of the pond,
came the chatter and bustle of wrens and warblers.

A lone great blue heron stood solemn and silent in the middle of the pond. Thunderclouds
continued to gather, its feathers dull in the fading light.

“Should I thank you for this?” Ghost Bird asked. They were leaning on the top of the
fence. Her left arm was too close to his right arm; he moved a little farther away.

“Don’t thank anyone for what you should already have,” he said, which brought a half
turn of her head toward him and the view of one upraised eyebrow above a thoughtful
eye and a noncommittal mouth. It was something his grandfather on his father’s side
had said, back when he was selling clothespins door-to-door. “I didn’t make the wood
storks disappear,” he added, because he had not meant to say the first thing.

“Raccoons are the worst predators of their nests,” she said. “Did you know that they
pre-date the last ice age? Farther south, they roost in colonies, but in this region
they’re endangered, so they’re more solitary.”

Control had looked it up and the wood storks should have returned by now if they were
going to. They tended to be creatures of habit.

“I can only give you thirty or forty minutes,” he said. Bringing her here felt now
like a terrible indulgence, possibly even a kind of danger, although he did not know
to whom. But he also knew he couldn’t have left things as they were after the morning
session.

“I hate it when they mow it and try to take out the duckweed,” she said, ignoring
him.

He wasn’t sure what to say to that. It was just a holding pond, like thousands of
others. It wasn’t meant to be a habitat. But, then, they’d found her in an empty lot.

“Look—there are still some tadpoles,” she said, pointing, something approaching contentment
on her face. He was beginning to understand that keeping her inside had been cruel.
Perhaps now she wouldn’t see the conversation between them solely as an interrogation.

“It is nice out here,” he said, just to say something, but it was nice. It felt even
better than he’d thought to get out of the building. He’d had some idea of questioning
her, but the strong smell of rain and the way that the distant sky formed dark curtains
of downpours fast approaching had defeated that impulse.

“Ask her about the director,” the Voice said. “Ask her if the director mentioned having
been across the border before.” Pushed that away. You’re a hologram. You’re a construct.
I’m going to throw chum overboard until you’re so blood-enraged you can’t swim properly.

Ghost Bird nudged a large black beetle with her shoe. It was frantic, ceaselessly
caroming through the links of the fence and back over. “You know why they do that?”

“No, I don’t,” Control said. Over the past four days, he had realized there were many
things he didn’t know.

“They just sprayed insecticide here. I can smell it. You can see the hint of foam
on its carapace. It disorients them as it kills them; they can’t breathe because of
it. They become what you might call panicked. They keep searching for a way to get
away from what’s already inside of them. Toward the end, they settle down, but that’s
only because they don’t have enough oxygen to move anymore.”

She waited until the beetle was over a piece of flat ground and then brought her shoe
down, hard and fast. There was a crunch. Control looked away. Forgiving a friend who
had done something to upset him, his father had once said that she heard a different
kind of music.

“Ask her about the empty lot,” the Voice said.

“Why do you think you ended up at the empty lot?” Control asked, mostly to placate
the audience. Any one of the three might report back to Grace.

“I ended up here, at the Southern Reach.” A guarded note had entered her voice.

“What does it mean to you, that place?” The same as this place, or more?

“I don’t think it was where I was meant to be,” she said after a pause. “Just a feeling.
I remember waking up and not recognizing it for a moment and then when I did, being
disappointed.”

“Disappointed how?”

Ghost Bird shrugged.

Lines of lightning created fantastical countries in the sky. Thunder came on like
an accusing voice.

Ask her if she left anything in the empty lot. Was it his question or the Voice’s?

“Did you leave anything there?”

“Not that I remember,” she said.

Control said something he had rehearsed beforehand. “Soon you’ll need to be candid
about what you remember and what you don’t remember. They’ll take you away from here
if I don’t get results. And I’ll have no say in where they send you if that happens.
It might be worse than here, a lot worse.”

“Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t the biologist?” She said it quietly, but with bite.

Ask her what she really is.

He couldn’t suppress a wince, even though he had meant it when he had said she didn’t
owe him anything for bringing her out to the pond.

“I’m trying to be honest. I’m not her … and there’s something inside of me I don’t
understand. There’s a kind of … brightness … inside.”

Nothing in the medical updates, except an elevated temperature.

“That’s called life,” Control said.

She didn’t laugh at that, but said, quietly, “I don’t think so.”

If she had a “brightness” inside of her, there was a corresponding darkness inside
of him. The rain approached. The humidity was driven away by a wild breeze. Ripples
spread across the pond, and the shed wheezed as the wind pushed against it. The little
Christmas pine whipped back and forth.

“You’re all alone out here, aren’t you, John?”

He didn’t have to answer because it had started to rain—hard. He wanted to hurry back
in so they wouldn’t get soaked, but Ghost Bird wouldn’t cooperate. She insisted on
taking slow, deliberate steps, let the water needle her face, run down her neck, and
soak her shirt.

The blue heron moved not at all, intent on some prey beneath the surface.

HAUNTINGS

000

In his dreams now, the sky is deep blue with just a twinge of light. He stares from
the water up at the cliff far above him. He can see the silhouette of someone peering
down at him from the top … can see the way the person leans far over the edge to stare—farther
than any human could, yet keeps leaning at a more severe angle, pebbles dislodged
and peppering the water around him. While he lies in wait, there, at the bottom of
the cliff, swimming vast and unknowable among the other monsters. Waiting in the darkness
for the soundless fall, without splash or ripple.

020: SECOND RECOVERY

Sunday. An ice pick lodged in a brain already suffused with the corona of a dull but
persistent headache that radiated forward from a throbbing bolus at the back of his
skull. A kind of pulsing satellite defense shield protecting against anything more
hostile that might sag into its decaying orbit.

A cup of coffee. A crumb-strewn Formica countertop with a view of the grimy street
through a clean window. A wobbly wooden stool to go with shaky hands trying to hold
it steady. The faint memory of a cheap disinfectant rising from the floor, tightening
his throat. A woman repeated orders behind him, while he tried to spread out across
the counter so none of the customers in line could join him. From the look of the
coatrack to his left, some people had come in during the winter and never left.

The Voice, a weak but persistent drumbeat, from centuries ago: “Is your house in order?
Is your house in order? Tell me, please, is your house in order?”

Was his house in order?

Control hadn’t changed his clothes or showered in two days. He could smell his own
rich stink like the musk rising off some animal prized by trappers. The sweat was
being drawn through his pores onto his forehead again, reaching out in supplication
to the ever-hotter Hedley sun through the window, the fans inside the coffee shop
not strong enough. It had rained from the previous afternoon until the middle of the
night, left large puddles full of tiny brown shrimp-like things that curled up and
died in rust-colored agonies as the water evaporated.

Control had come to a halt there at the end of Empire Street, where it crossed the
far end of Main Street. When he was a teenager, the coffee shop had been a retro soda
joint, which he missed. He’d sit at the air-conditioned window counter with a couple
of friends and be grateful for ice cream and root beer, while they talked a lot of
crap about girls and sports. It had been nice then, a kind of refuge. But over time
the straightlaced bohemian leanings of the so-called railroad district had been usurped
by hustlers, con artists, drug addicts, and homeless people with nowhere else to go.

Through the window, waiting for the phone call he knew would come, Control dissected
the daily terroir playing out across the street, in front of the discount liquor store.
Two skateboarders, so preternaturally lean they reminded him of malnourished greyhounds,
stood on that opposite corner in T-shirts and ragged jeans with five-year-old sneakers
on their feet but no socks. One of them had a brown mutt on a hemp leash meant for
a much larger dog. He’d seen two skateboarders while out jogging Tuesday night, hadn’t
he? It had been dark, couldn’t be sure this was them. But possibly.

Within minutes of Control watching, they’d been joined by a woman he definitely hadn’t
seen before. Tall, she wore a blue military cap over dyed-red short hair, and a long-sleeved
blue jacket with gold fringe at the shoulders and cuffs. The white tank top under
the jacket didn’t cover her bare midriff. The blue dress pants with a more muted gold
stripe on the side ended halfway down her calves and then in bare, dirty feet, with
the bright red dots of nail polish visible. It reminded Control of something a rock
star might have worn in the late 1980s. Or, idle strange thought: She was some decommissioned
officer of the S&S Brigade, missing, forgotten, memory shot, doomed to play out the
endgame far from anywhere conducive to either science or superstition.