Authority (8 page)

“Entity One or Entity Two?” he asked Cheney, wishing there were some way the biologist
could have sat in on this conversation, already thinking of new questions for her.

“What?”

“Which Event creator opened a door in the border, do you think?”

Cheney shrugged. “Well, that’s impossible to say, I’m afraid. Because we don’t know
if its main purpose was to let something in or to allow something out.”

Or both. Or Cheney didn’t know what he was talking about.

*   *   *

Control caught up with the assistant director while navigating his way through one
of the many corridors he hadn’t quite connected one to the other. He was trying to
find HR to file paperwork but still couldn’t see the map of the building entire in
his head and remained a little off-balance from the phone call with the Voice.

The scraps of overheard conversation in the hallways didn’t help, pointing as they
did to evidence for which he as yet had no context. “How deep do you think it goes
down?” “No, I don’t recognize it. But I’m not an expert.” “Believe me or don’t believe
me.” Grace didn’t help, either. As soon as he came up beside her, she began to crowd
him, perhaps to make the point that she was as strong and tall as him. She smelled
of some synthetic lavender perfume that made him stifle a sneeze.

After fielding an inquiry about the visit with the scientists, Control turned and
bore down on her before she could veer off. “Why didn’t you want the biologist on
the twelfth expedition?”

She stopped, put some space between them to look askance at him. Good—at least she
was willing to engage.

“What was on your mind back then? Why didn’t you want the biologist on that expedition?”

Personnel were passing by them on either side. Grace lowered her voice, said, “She
did not have the right qualifications. She had been fired from half a dozen jobs.
She had some raw talent, some kind of spark, yes, but she was not qualified. Her husband’s
position on the prior expedition—that compromised her, too.”

“The director didn’t agree.”

“How is Whitby working out, anyway?” she asked by way of reply, and he knew his expression
had confirmed his source. Forgive me, Whitby, for giving you up. Yet this also told
him Grace was concerned about Whitby talking to him. Did that mean Whitby was Cheney’s
creature?

He pressed forward: “But the director didn’t agree.”

“No,” she admitted. Control wondered what kind of betrayal that had been. “She did
not. She thought these were all
pluses
, that we were too concerned about the usual measurements of suitability. So we deferred
to her.”

“Even though she had the bodies of the prior expedition disinterred and reexamined?”

“Where did you hear that?” she asked, genuinely surprised.

“Wouldn’t that speak to the director’s own suitability?”

But Grace’s surprise had already ossified back into resistance, which meant she was
on the move again as she said curtly, “No. No, it would not.”

“She suspected something, didn’t she?” Control asked, catching up to her again. Central
thought the files suggested that even if the unique mind-wiped condition of the prior
expedition didn’t signal a kind of shift in the situation in Area X, it might have
signaled a shift in the director.

Grace sighed, as if tired of trying to shake him. “She suspected that they might have …
changed since the autopsies. But if you’re asking, you know already.”

“And had they? Had they changed?” Disappeared. Been resurrected. Flown off into the
sky.

“No. They had decomposed a little more rapidly than might be expected, but no, they
hadn’t changed.”

Control wondered how much that had cost the director in respect and in favors. He
wondered if by the time the director had told them she was attaching herself to the
twelfth expedition some of the staff might have felt not alarm or concern but a strange
sort of guilty relief.

He had another question, but Grace was done, had already pivoted to veer off down
a different corridor in the maze.

*   *   *

There followed some futile, halfhearted efforts to rearrange his office, along with
a review of some basic reports Grace had thrown at him, probably to slow his progress.
He learned that the Southern Reach had its own props design department, tasked with
creating equipment for the expeditions that didn’t violate protocols. In other words,
fabrication of antiquated technology. He learned that the security on the facilities
that housed returning expedition members was undergoing an upgrade; the outdated brand
of surveillance camera they’d been using had suffered a systemic meltdown. He’d even
thrown out a DVD given to him by a “lifecycle biologist” that showed a computer-generated
cross section of the forgotten coast’s ecosystem. The images had been created as a
series of topographical lines in a rainbow of colors. It was very pretty but the wrong
level of detail for him.

At day’s end, on his way out, he ran into Whitby again, in the cafeteria around which
the man seemed to hover, almost as if he didn’t want to be down in the dungeon with
the rest of the scientists. Or as if they sent him on perpetual errands to keep him
away. A little dark bird had become trapped inside, and Whitby was staring up at where
it flew among the skylights.

Control asked Whitby the question he’d wanted to ask Grace before her maze-pivot.

“Whitby, why are there so few returning journals from the expeditions?” Far, far fewer
than returnees.

Whitby was still mesmerized by the flight of the bird, his head turning the way a
cat’s does to follow every movement. There was an intensity to his gaze that Control
found disconcerting.

“Incomplete data,” Whitby said. “Too incomplete to be sure. But most returnees tell
us they just don’t think to bring them back. They don’t believe it’s important, or
don’t feel the need to. Feeling is the important part. You lose the need or impetus
to divulge, to communicate, a bit like astronauts lose muscle mass. Most of the journals
seem to turn up in the lighthouse anyway, though. It hasn’t been a priority for a
while, but when we did ask later expeditions to retrieve them, usually they didn’t
even try. You lose the impetus or something else intercedes, becomes more crucial
and you don’t even realize it. Until it’s too late.”

Which gave Control an uncomfortable image of someone or something in Area X entering
the lighthouse and sitting atop a pile of journals and reading them
for
the Southern Reach. Or writing them.

“I can show you something interesting in one of the rooms near the science division
that pertains to this,” Whitby said in a dreamy tone, still following the path of
the bird. “Would you like to see it?” His disconnected gaze clicked into hard focus
and settled on Control, who had a sudden jarring impression of there being two Whitbys,
one lurking inside the other. Or even three, nestled inside one another.

“Why don’t you just tell me about it?”

“No. I have to show you. It’s a little strange. You have to see it to understand it.”
Whitby now gave the impression of not caring if Control saw the odd room, and yet
caring entirely too much at the same time.

Control laughed. Various people had been showing him bat-shit crazy things since his
days working in domestic terrorism. People had said bat-shit crazy things to him today.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll see it tomorrow.” Or not. No surprises. No satisfaction
for the keepers of strange secrets. No strangeness before its time. He had truly had
enough for one day, would gird his loins overnight for a return encounter. The thing
about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting
you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the
Look or the Reaction, and they didn’t care what it was so long as it inflicted some
kind of discomfort. He wondered if Grace had put Whitby up to this after their conversation,
whether it was some odd practical joke and he’d been meant to stick his hand into
a space only to find his hand covered in earthworms, or open a box only for a plastic
snake to spring out.

The bird now swooped down in an erratic way, hard to make out in the late-afternoon
light.

“You should see it now,” Whitby said, in a kind of wistfully hurt tone. “Better late
than never.”

But Control had already turned his back on Whitby and was headed for the entrance
and then the (blessed) parking lot.

Late? Just how late did Whitby think he was?

004: REENTRY

The car offered a little breathing room, a chance to decompress and transform from
one thing to another. The town of Hedley was a forty-minute drive from the Southern
Reach. It lay against the banks of a river that, just twenty miles later, fed into
the ocean. Hedley was large enough to have some character and culture without being
a tourist trap. People moved there even though it fell just short of being “a good
town to raise a family in.” Between the sputtering shops huddled at one end of the
short river walk and the canopy roads, there were hints of a certain quality of life
obscured in part by the strip malls that radiated outward from the edges of the city.
It had a small private college, with a performing arts center. You could jog along
the river or hike greenways. Still, though, Hedley also partook of a certain languor
that, especially in the summers, could turn from charming to tepid overnight. A stillness
when the breeze off the river died signaled a shift in mood, and some of the bars
just off the waterfront had long been notorious for sudden, senseless violence—places
you didn’t go unless you could pass for white, or maybe not even then. A town that
seemed trapped in time, not much different from when Control had been a teenager.

Hedley’s location worked for Control. He wanted to be close to the sea but not on
the coast. Something about the uncertainty of Area X had created an insistence inside
of him on that point. His dream in a way forbid it. His dream told him he needed to
be at a remove. On the plane down to his new assignment, he’d had strange thoughts
about the inhabitants of those coastal towns to either side of Area X being somehow
mutated under the skin. Whole communities no longer what they once were, even though
no one could tell this by looking. These were the kinds of thoughts you had to both
keep at bay and fuel, if you could manage that trick. You couldn’t become devoured
by them, but you had to heed them. Because in Control’s experience they reflected
something from the subconscious, some instinct you didn’t want to go against. The
fact was, the Southern Reach knew so little about Area X, even after three decades,
that an irrational precaution might not be unreasonable.

And Hedley was familiar to him. This was the city to which he and his friends had
come for fun on weekends once some of them could drive, even knowing it was kind of
a shithole, too, just not as small a shithole as where they lived. Landlocked and
forlorn. His mother had even alluded to it the last time he’d seen her. She’d flown
in at his old job up north, which had been gradually reduced from analysis and management
to a more reactive and administrative role. Due to his own baggage, he guessed. Due
to the fact it always started out well, but then, if he stayed too long … sometimes
something happened, something he couldn’t quite define. He became too invested. He
became too empathic, or less so. It confused him when it all went to shit because
he couldn’t remember the point at which it had started to go bad—was still convinced
he could get the formula right.

But his mother had come from Central and they’d met in a conference room he knew was
probably bugged. Had the Voice traveled with her, been set up in a saltwater tank
in the adjoining room?

It was cold outside and she wore a coat, an overcoat, and a scarf over a professional
business suit and black high heels. She took off the overcoat and held it in her lap.
But she didn’t take off the scarf. She looked as if she could surge from her chair
at any moment and be out the door before he could snap his fingers. It had been five
years since he’d seen her—predictably unreachable when he’d tried to get a message
to her about her ex-husband’s funeral—but she had aged only a little bit, her brown
hair just as fashion-model huge as ever and eyes a kind of calculating blue peering
out from a face on which wrinkles had encroached only around the corners of the eyes
and, hidden by the hair, across her forehead.

She said, “It will be like coming home, John, won’t it?” Nudging him, wanting him
to say it, as if he were a barnacle clinging to a rock and she were a seagull trying
to convince him to release his grip. “You’ll be comfortable with the setting. You’ll
be comfortable with the people.”

He’d had to suppress anger mixed with ambivalence. How would she know whether she
was right or wrong? She’d rarely been there, even though she’d had visitation rights.
Just him and his father, Dad beginning to fall apart by then, to eat too much, to
drink a little too much, during a succession of flings once the divorce was final …
then redirecting himself to art no one wanted. Getting his house in order and going
off to college had been a guilty relief, to not live in that atmosphere anymore.

“And, comfortably situated in this world I know so well, what would I do?”

She smiled at him. A genuine smile. He could tell the difference, having suffered
so many times under the dull yellow glow of a fake one that tried to reheat his love
for her. When she really smiled, when she meant it, his mother’s face took on a kind
of beauty that surprised anyone who saw it, as if she’d been hiding her true self
behind a mask. While people who were always sincere rarely got credit for that quality.

“It’s a chance to do better,” she said. “It’s a chance to erase the past.”

The past. Which part of the past? The job up north had been his tenth posting in about
fifteen years, which made the Southern Reach his eleventh. There were a number of
reasons, there were always reasons. Or one reason, in his case.