Authority (7 page)

His second-in-command, Deborah Davidson, was also a physicist: A skinny jogger type
who had actually smoked her way to weight loss. She creaked along in a short-sleeved
red plaid shirt and tight brown corduroy pants cinched with a thick, overlarge leather
belt. Most of this hidden by a worn black business jacket whose huge shoulder pads
revealed its age. She had a handshake like a cold, dead fish, from which Control could
not at first extricate himself.

Control’s ability to absorb new names, though, had ended with Davidson. He gave vague
nods to the research chemist, as well as the staff epidemiologist, psychologist, and
anthropologist who had also been stuffed into the tiny conference room for the meeting.
At first Control felt disrespected by that space, but halfway through he realized
he’d gotten it wrong. No, they were like a cat confronted by a predator—just trying
to make themselves look bigger to him, in this case by scaling down their surroundings.

None of the extras had much to add, although he had the sense they might be more forthcoming
one-on-one. Otherwise, it was the Cheney and Davidson show, with a few annotations
from the anthropologist. From the way they spoke, if their degrees had been medals,
they would all have had them pinned to some kind of quasi-military scientist uniform—like,
say, the lab coats they all lacked. But he understood the impulse, understood that
this was just part of the ongoing narrative: What once had been a wide territory for
the science division had, bit by bit, been taken away from them.

Grace had apparently told them—ordered them?—to give Control the usual spiel, which
he took as a form of subterfuge or, at best, a possible waste of time. But they didn’t
seem to mind this rehash. Instead, they relished it, like overeager magicians in search
of an audience. Control could tell that Whitby was embarrassed by the way he made
himself small and insignificant in a far corner of the room.

The “piece of resistance,” as his father used to joke, was a video of white rabbits
disappearing across the invisible border: something they must have shown many times,
from their running commentary.

The event had occurred in the mid-1990s, and Control had come across it in the data
pertaining to the invisible border between Area X and the world. As if in a reflexive
act of frustration at the lack of progress, the scientists had let loose two thousand
white rabbits about fifty feet from the border, in a clear-cut area, and herded them
right into the border. In addition to the value of observing the rabbits’ transition
from here to there, the science division had had some hope that the simultaneous or
near-simultaneous breaching of the border by so many “living bodies” might “overload”
the “mechanism” behind the border, causing it to short-circuit, even if “just locally.”
This supposed that the border
could
be overloaded, like a power grid.

They had documented the rabbits’ transition not only with standard video but also
with tiny cameras strapped to some of the rabbits’ heads. The resulting montage that
had been edited together used split screen for maximum dramatic effect, along with
slow motion and fast-forward in ways that conveyed an oddly flippant quality when
taken in aggregate. As if even the video editor had wanted to make light of the event,
to somehow, through an embedded irreverence, find a way to unsee it. In all, Control
knew, the video and digital library contained more than forty thousand video segments
of rabbits vanishing. Jumping. Squirming atop one another as they formed sloppy rabbit
pyramids in their efforts not to be pushed into the border.

The main video sequence, whether shown at regular speed or in slow motion, had a matter-of-fact
and abrupt quality to it. The rabbits were zigging and zagging ahead of humans in
baggy contamination suits, who had corralled them in a semicircle. The humans looked
weirdly like anonymous white-clad riot police, holding long white shields linked together
to form a wall to hem in and herd the rabbits. A neon red line across the ground delineated
the fifteen-foot transition zone between the world and Area X.

A few rabbits fled around the lip of the semicircle or in crazed jumps found trajectories
that brought them over the riot wall as they were pushed forward. But most could not
escape. Most hurtled forward and, either running or in mid-jump, disappeared as they
hit the edge of the border. There was no ripple, no explosion of blood and organs.
They just disappeared. Close-up slow motion revealed a microsecond of transition in
which a half or quarter of a rabbit might appear on the screen, but only a captured
frame could really chart the moment between
there
and not-there. In one still, this translated into staring at the hindquarters of
about four dozen jostling rabbits, most in mid-leap, disembodied from their heads
and torsos.

The video the scientists showed him had no sound, just a voice-over, but Control knew
from the records that an awful screaming had risen from the herded rabbits once the
first few had been driven across the border. A kind of keening and a mass panic. If
the video had continued, Control would have seen the last of the rabbits rebel so
utterly against being herded that they turned on the herders and fought, leaping to
bite and scratch … would have seen the white of the shields stained red, the researchers
so surprised that they mostly broke ranks and a good two hundred rabbits went missing.

The cameras were perhaps even less revealing. As if the abandoned rushes from an intense
movie battle scene, they simply showed the haunches and the underside of the hind
paws of desperately running rabbits and some herky-jerky landscape before everything
went dark. There were no video reports from rabbits that had crossed over the border,
although the escapees muddied the issue, the swamps on either side looking very similar.
The Southern Reach had spent a good amount of time in the aftermath tracking down
escapees to rule out that they were receiving footage from across the border.

Nor had the next expedition to Area X, sent in a week after the rabbit experiment,
found any evidence of white rabbits, dead or alive. Nor had any similar experiments,
on a far smaller scale, produced any results whatsoever. Nor had Control missed a
finicky note in one file by an ecologist about the event that read, “What the hell?
This is an invasive species. They would have
contaminated
Area X.” Would they have? Would whatever had created Area X have allowed that? Control
tried to push away a ridiculous image of Area X, years later, sending back a human-size
rabbit that could not remember anything but its function. Most of the magicians were
all snickering at inappropriate places anyway, as if showing him how they’d done their
most notorious trick. But he’d heard nervous laughter before; he was sure that, even
at such a remove, the video disturbed many of them.

Some of the individuals responsible had been fired and others reassigned. But apparently
adding the passage of time to a farce left you with an iconic image, because here
was the noble remnant of the science division, showing him with marked enthusiasm
what had been deemed an utter failure. They had more to show him—data and samples
from Area X under glass—but it all amounted to nothing more than what was already
in the files, information he could check later at his leisure.

In a way, Control didn’t mind seeing this video. It was a relief considering what
awaited him. The videos from the first expedition, the members of which had died,
save one survivor, would have to be reviewed later in the week as primary evidence.
But he also couldn’t shake the echo of a kind of frat-boy sensibility to the current
presentation, the underlying howl of “Look at this shit we sent out into the border!
Look at this stunt we pulled!” Pass the cheap beer. Do a shot every time you see a
white rabbit.

When Control left, they had all stood there in an awkward line, as if he were about
to take a photograph, and shook his hand, one by one. Only after he and Whitby were
back on the stairs, past the horrible black gloves, did he realize what was peculiar
about that. They had all stood so straight, and their expressions had been so serious.
They must have thought he was there to cull yet more from their department. That he
was there to judge them. Later still, scooping up some of the bugs from his desk on
his way to carry out a bad deed before calling the Voice, he wondered if instead they
were afraid of something else entirely.

*   *   *

Most of this Control told the Voice with a mounting sense of futility. Not a lot of
it made much sense or would be news; he was just pushing words around to have something
to say. He didn’t tell the Voice that some of the scientists had used the words
environmental boon
to describe Area X, with a disturbing and demoralizing subtext of “Should we be fighting
this?” It was “pristine wilderness,” after all, human-made toxins now absent.

“GODDAMMIT!” the Voice screamed near the end of Control’s science report, interrupting
the Voice’s own persistent mutter in the background … and Control held the cell phone
away from his ear for a moment, unsure of what had set that off, until he heard, “Sorry.
I spilled coffee on myself. Continue.” Coffee somewhat spoiled the image of the megalodon
in Control’s head, and it took him a moment to pick up the thread.

When he was done, the Voice just dove forward, as if they were starting over: “What
is your mental state at this moment? Is your house in order? What do you think it
will take?”

Which question to answer? “Optimistic? But until they have more direction, structure,
and resources, I won’t know.”

“What is your impression of the prior director?”

A hoarder. An eccentric. An enigma. “It’s a complicated situation here and only my
first full da—”

“WHAT IS YOUR IMPRESSION OF THE PRIOR DIRECTOR?” A howl of a shout, as if the gravel
had been lifted up into a storm raining down.

Control felt his heart rate increase. He’d had bosses before who had anger-management
issues, and the fact that this one was on the other end of a cell phone didn’t make
it any better.

It all spilled out, his nascent opinions. “She had lost all perspective. She had lost
the thread. Her methods were eccentric toward the end, and it will take a while to
unravel—”

“ENOUGH!”

“But, I—”

“Don’t disparage the dead.” This time a pebbled whisper. Even with the filter, a sense
of mourning came through, or perhaps Control was just projecting.

“Yes, sorry, it’s just that—”

“Next time,” the Voice said, “I expect you to have something more interesting to tell
me. Something I don’t know. Ask the assistant director about the biologist. For example.
The director’s plan for the biologist.”

“Yes, that makes sense,” Control agreed, but really just hoping to get off the line
soon. Then a thought occurred. “Oh—speaking of the assistant director…” He outlined
the issue that morning with sending the anthropologist and surveyor away, the problem
of Grace seeming to have contacts at Central that could cause trouble.

The Voice said, “I’ll look into it. I’ll handle it,” and then launched into something
that sounded prerecorded because it was faintly repetitious: “And remember, I am always
watching. So really
think
about what it might be that I don’t know.”

Click.

*   *   *

One thing the scientists told him had been useful and unexpected, but he hadn’t told
the Voice because it seemed to qualify as Common Secret Knowledge.

In trying to redirect away from the failed white rabbits experiment, Control had asked
for their current theories about the border, no matter how outrageous.

Cheney had coughed once or twice, looked around, and then spoken up. “I wish I could
be more definite about this, but, you know, we argue about it a lot, because there
are so many unknowns … but, well, I personally don’t believe that the border necessarily
comes from the same source as whatever is transforming Area X.”

“What?”

Cheney grimaced. “A common response, I don’t blame you. But what I mean is—there’s
no evidence that the … presence … in Area X also generated the border.”

“I understood that, but…”

Davidson had spoken up then: “We haven’t been able to test the border in the same
way as the samples taken from inside Area X. But we have been able to take readings,
and without boring you with the data, the border is different enough in composition
to support that theory. It may be that one Event occurred to create Area X and then
a second Event occurred to create the invisible border, but that—”

“They aren’t related?” Control interrupted, incredulous.

Cheney shook his head. “Well, only in that Event Two is almost certainly a reaction
to Event One. But maybe someone else”—Control noted, once again, the reluctance to
say “alien” or “some
thing
”—“created the border.”

“Which means,” Control said, “that it’s possible this second entity was trying to
contain the fallout from Event One?”

“Exactly,” Cheney said.

Control again suppressed a strong impulse to just get up and leave, to walk out through
the front doors and never come back.

“And,” he said, drawing out the word, working through it, “what about the way into
Area X, through the border? How did you create that?”

Cheney frowned, gave his colleagues a helpless glance, then retreated into the X of
his own face when none of them stepped into the breach. “We didn’t create that. We
found it. One day, it was just … there.”

An anger rose in Control then. In part because Grace’s initial briefing had been too
vague, or he’d made too many assumptions. But mostly because the Southern Reach had
sent expedition after expedition in through a door they hadn’t created, into God knew
what—hoping that everything would be all right, that they would come home, that those
white rabbits hadn’t just evaporated into their constituent atoms, possibly returned
to their most primeval state in agonizing pain.