Blind Lake

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The wind gusted and died, though the sense of unwanted presence remained.

  Tess turned away from the suddenly forbidding wetlands. When she faced west she found the sun peeking out from a rack of cloud almost level with the hilltop. She glanced at her watch. Four o’clock. The house key she kept on a chain around her neck felt like a ticket to paradise. She didn’t want to be out in this lonely wetness anymore. She wanted to be home, with this leaden knapsack off her back, curled into the sofa with something good on the video panel or a book in her hands. She felt suddenly doubtful and guilty, as if she had done something wrong just by coming here, though there were no rules against it (only Mr. Fleischer’s passing remark that it was possible to get lost in the marshes and that the shallow water wasn’t always as shallow as it looked).

  A huge blue heron rose into the air from the rushes only a few yards away, cracking the air with its wings. It carried something green and wiggling in the vise of its beak.

  Tess turned and ran to the top of the ridge, anxious for the reassuring sight of Blind Lake (the town). Wind whistled in her ears, and the shush-shush noise of her trouser legs brushing together sounded like urgent conversation.

  She was comforted by the towers of the Alley as she hurried past them, comforted by the smooth blackness of the asphalt road as it wound into the town houses, comforted by the nearness of the tall buildings of Hubble Plaza.

  But she didn’t care for the sound of police-car sirens down by the south gate. Sirens always sounded to Tess like wailing babies, hungry and lonely. They meant something bad was happening. She shivered and ran the rest of the way home.

  Seven

  Wednesday morning, Sebastian Vogel joined Chris at one of the tiny makeshift tables in the community center cafeteria.

  Breakfast consisted of croissants, watery scrambled eggs, orange juice, and coffee, free of charge to involuntary guests. Chris started with the coffee. He wanted a little neurochemical fortification before he even glanced at the steam table.

  Sebastian ambled up and dropped a copy of God & the Quantum Vacuum on the tabletop. “Elaine said you were curious. I inscribed it for you.”

  Chris tried to look grateful. The book was a premium edition, printed on real paper and bound in boards, sturdy as a brick and about as heavy. He imagined Elaine suppressing a smile when she told Sebastian how “anxious” Chris was to read it. Sebastian must have carried a suitcase full of these into Blind Lake, as if he were on a promotional tour.

  “Thanks,” Chris said. “I owe you one of mine.”

  “No need. I downloaded a copy of Weighted Answers before the links were cut. Elaine recommends it highly.”

  Chris wondered how he could repay Elaine for this. Strychnine in her breakfast cereal, perhaps.

  “She seems to think,” Sebastian went on, “this security crisis may work to our advantage.”

  Chris leafed through Vogel’s book, scanning the chapter heads. “Borrowing God,” he read. “Why Genes Make Minds & Where They Find Them.” The pernicious ampersand. “To our advantage how?”

  “We see the institution in crisis. Especially if the lockdown goes on much longer. She says we can get past Ari Weingart’s publicity machine and talk to some real people. See a side of Blind Lake that’s never been explored in the press.”

  Elaine was right, of course, and for once Chris was ahead of her. For a couple of days now he had been interviewing the stranded day workers, getting their take on the security shutdown.

  He hadn’t needed Elaine’s pep talk the other night. He knew this was in all likelihood his last chance to salvage his career as a journalist. The only question was whether he wanted to take it. As Elaine had also pointed out, there were other options. Chronic alcoholism or drug abuse, for instance, and he had come close enough to both of those to understand the attraction. Or he could take some inconspicuous job writing ad copy or tech manuals and slide into a sedate, respectable middle age. He wasn’t the first adult to face diminished expectations and he didn’t feel entitled to sympathy for it.

  The assignment to Crossbank and Blind Lake had come like a childhood dream too long deferred. A dream gone stale. He had grown up in love with space, had relished the images from the early NASA and EuroStar optical interferometers—tentative, crude pictures that had included the two gas giants of UMa47’s system (each with enormous, complex ring systems) and the tantalizing smudge that was a rocky planet inside the habitable zone of the star.

  His parents had indulged his enthusiasm but never really understood it. Only his younger sister Portia had been willing to listen to him talk about it, and she treated these discussions as bedtime stories. Everything was a story, as far as Portia was concerned. She liked to hear him talk about these distant and freshly envisioned worlds but always wanted him to go beyond the established facts. Were there people on these planets? What did they look like?

  “We don’t know,” he used to tell her. “They haven’t discovered that yet.” Portia would pout in disappointment—couldn’t he have made something up?—but Chris had acquired what he would later think of as a journalistic respect for the truth. If you understood the facts they needed no embroidery: all the wonder was already there, the more spellbinding because it was true.

  Then the NASA interferometer had begun to lose signal strength, and the newly designed O/BEC devices, quantum computers running adaptive neural nets in an open-ended organic architecture, were enlisted to strain the final dregs of signal from noise. They had done more than that, of course. Out of their increasingly deep and recursive Fourier analysis they had somehow derived an optical image even after the interferometers themselves ceased to function. The analytic device had replaced the telescope it was meant to augment.

  Chris was spending his last year at home when the first images of HR8832/B were released to the media. His family hadn’t paid much attention. Portia by that time was a bright teenager who had discovered politics and was frustrated that she hadn’t been allowed to go to Chicago to protest the inauguration of the Continental Commonwealth. His parents had withdrawn from one another into their own pocket universes—his father into woodworking and the Presbyterian church, his mother into a late-blooming bohemianism marked by Mensa meetings and Madras blouses, psychic fairs and Afghan scarves.

  And although they had marveled at the images of HR8832/B they hadn’t truly understood them. Like most people, they couldn’t say how far away the planet was, what it meant that it orbited “another star,” why its seascapes were more than abstractly pretty, or why there was so much fuss over a place no one could actually visit.

  Chris had wanted desperately to explain. Another nascent journalistic impulse. The beauty and significance of these images were transcendent. Ten thousand years of humanity’s struggle with ignorance had culminated in this achievement. It redeemed Galileo from his inquisitors and Giordano Bruno from the flames. It was a pearl salvaged from the rubble of slavery and war.

  It was also a nine-day-wonder, a media bubble, a briefly lucrative source of income for the novelty industry. Ten years had passed, the O/BEC effect had proven difficult to understand or reproduce, Portia was gone, and Chris’s first attempt at book-length journalism had been a disaster. Truth was a hard commodity to market. Even at Crossbank, even at Blind Lake, internecine squabbling over target images and interpretation had almost engulfed the scientific discourse.

  And yet, here he was. Disillusioned, disoriented, fucked-over and fucked-up, but with a last chance to dig out that pearl and share it. A chance to relocate the beauty and significance that had once moved him nearly to tears.

  He looked at Sebastian Vogel over the breakfast-stained plastic tabletop. “What does this place mean to you?”

  Sebastian shrugged amiably. “I came here the same way you did. I got the call from Visions East, I talked to my agent, I signed the contract.”

  “Yeah, but is that all it is—a publishing opportunity?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I may not be as sentime
ntal about it as Elaine, but I recognize the significance of the work that goes on here. Every astronomical advance since Copernicus has changed mankind’s view of itself and its place in the universe.”

  “It’s not just the results, though. It’s the process. Galileo could have explained the principle behind the telescope to almost anyone, given a little patience. But even the people who run the O/BECs can’t tell you how they do what they do.”

  “You’re asking which is the bigger story,” Sebastian said, “what we see or how we see it. It’s an interesting angle. Maybe you should talk to the engineers at the Alley. They’re probably more approachable than the theorists.”

  Because they don’t care what I told the world about Galliano, Chris thought. Because they don’t consider me a Judas.

  Still, it was a good idea. After breakfast he called Ari Weingart and asked him for a contact at the Alley.

  “Chief engineer out there is Charlie Grogan. If you like, I’ll get ahold of him and try to set up a meet.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Chris said. “Any new word on the lockdown?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “No explanation?”

  “It’s unusual, obviously, but no. And you don’t have to tell me how pissed-off people are. We’ve got a guy in Personnel whose wife went into labor just before the gates closed Friday. You can imagine how happy he is about all this.”

  His situation wasn’t unique. That afternoon Chris interviewed three more day workers at the Blind Lake gym, but they were reluctant to talk about anything except the shutdown—families they couldn’t reach, pets abandoned, appointments missed. “The least they could do is give us a fucking audio line out,” an electrician told him. “I mean, what could happen? Somebody’s going to bomb us by phone? Plus there are rumors starting to go around, which is natural when you can’t get any real news. There could be a war on for all we know.”

  He could only agree. A temporary security block was one thing. Going most of a week without information exchange in either direction bordered on lunacy. Much longer and it would look like something truly radical must have happened outside.

  And maybe it had. But that wasn’t an explanation. Even in times of war, what threat could a web or video connection pose? Why quarantine not only the population of Blind Lake, but all their data conduits?

  Who was hiding what, and from whom?

  He intended to spend the hour before dinner putting his notes in some kind of order. He was beginning to imagine the possibility of a finished article, maybe not the twenty thousand words VE had asked for but not far short of it. He even had a thesis: miracles buried under the human capacity for indifference. The somnolent culture of UMa47/E as a distant mirror.

  A project like this would be good for him, maybe restore some of his faith in himself.

  Or he could wake up tomorrow in the usual emasculating fog of self-revulsion, the knowledge that he was kidding absolutely nobody with his handful of half-transcribed interviews and fragile ambitions. That was possible too. Maybe even likely.

  He looked up from the screen of his pocket server in time to see Elaine bearing down on him. “Chris!”

  “I’m busy.”

  “There’s something happening at the south gate. Thought you might want to see.”

  “What is it?”

  “Do I know? Something big coming down the road at slow speed. Looks like an unmanned vehicle. You can see it from the hill past the Plaza. Can that little gizmo of yours capture video?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “So bring it. Come on!”

  It was a short walk from the community center to the crest of the hill. Whatever was happening was unusual enough that a small group of people had gathered to watch, and Chris could see more faces leaning into the windows of the south tower of Hubble Plaza. “Did you tell Sebastian about this?”

  Elaine rolled her eyes. “I don’t keep track of him and I doubt he’s interested. Unless that’s the Holy Ghost rolling down the road.”

  Chris squinted into the distance.

  The sinuous road away from Blind Lake was easily visible under a ceiling of close, tumbling clouds. And yes, something was approaching the locked gate from outside. Chris thought Elaine was probably right: it looked like a big eighteen-wheel driverless freight truck, the kind of drone vehicle the military had used in the Turkish crisis five years ago. It was painted flat black and was unmarked, at least as far as Chris could tell from here. It moved at a speed that couldn’t have been more than fifteen miles per hour—still ten minutes or so away from the gate.

  Chris shot a few seconds of video. Elaine said, “You in good shape? Because I mean to jog down there, see what happens when that thing arrives.”

  “Could be dangerous,” Chris said. Not to mention cold. The temperature had dropped a good few degrees in the last hour. He didn’t have a jacket.

  “Grow some balls,” Elaine scolded him. “The truck doesn’t look armed.”

  “It may not be armed, but it’s armored. Somebody’s anticipating trouble.”

  “All the more reason. Listen!”

  The sound of sirens. Two Blind Lake Security vans sped past, headed south.

  Elaine was spry for a woman of her age. Chris found himself hurrying to keep up.

  Eight

  Marguerite left work early Wednesday and drove to the school for her interview with Mr. Fleischer, Tessa’s homeroom teacher.

  Blind Lake’s single school building was a long, low two-story structure not far from the Plaza, surrounded by playgrounds, an athletic field, and a generous parking lot. Like all of the buildings in Blind Lake, the school was cleanly designed but essentially anonymous—it might have been any school, anywhere. It looked much like the school at Crossbank, and the smell that greeted Marguerite when she stepped through the big front door was the smell of every school she had ever been inside: a combination of sour milk, wood shavings, disinfectant, adolescent musk, and warm electronics.

  She followed the corridor into the west wing. Tess had entered grade eight this year, a step away from the hopscotch and Barbie crowd, tottering on the brink of adolescence. Marguerite had suffered through her own high school years, and still felt a conditioned wave of apprehension amidst these rows of salmon-colored lockers, though the school was largely empty—the students had been sent home early to allow for this round of parent-teacher interviews. She imagined Tess already at the house, maybe reading and listening to the hum of the floorboard heaters. Home safe, Marguerite thought a little enviously.

  She knocked at the half-open door of Room 130, Mr. Fleischer’s room. He waved her in and rose to shake her hand.

  She didn’t doubt Mr. Fleischer was an excellent teacher. Blind Lake was a flagship federal institution, and a key part of its employment package was the availability of a first-class school system. Marguerite was sure Mr. Fleischer’s credentials were impeccable. He even looked like a good teacher, or at least the kind of teacher you could safely confide in: tall, somewhat doe-eyed, well but not intimidatingly dressed, with a trim beard and a generous smile. His grip was firm but gentle.

  “Welcome,” he said. The room was equipped with child-sized desks, but he had imported a pair of parent-friendly chairs. “Have a seat.”

  Funny, Marguerite thought, how awkward all this made her feel.

  Fleischer glanced at a sheet of notes. “Good to meet you. Meet you again, I should say, since we were introduced at Tessa’s orientation. You work in Observation and Interpretation?”

  “Actually, I’m the department head.”

  Fleischer’s eyebrows levitated briefly. “Here since August?”

  “Tess and I moved here in August, yes.”

  “Tessa’s father was here a little earlier, though, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re separated?”

  “Divorced,” Marguerite said promptly. Was it paranoia, or had Ray already discussed this with Fleischer? Ray always said “separated,�
� as if the divorce were a temporary misunderstanding. And it would be just like Ray to describe Marguerite as “working in Interpretation” rather than admit she was heading the department. “We have joint legal custody, but Tess is in my care the majority of time.”

  “I see.”

  Maybe Ray had failed to mentioned that, too. Fleischer paused and added a note to his files. “I’m sorry if this is intrusive. I just want to get a sense of Tessa’s situation at home. She’s been having some trouble here at school, as I’m sure you’re aware. Nothing serious, but her marks aren’t where we’d like them to be, and she seems a little, I don’t know how to say it, a little vague in class.”

  “The move—” Marguerite began.

  “No doubt that’s a factor. It’s like an army base here. Families move in and out all the time, and it’s hard on the kids. The kids can be hard on newcomers, too. I’ve seen it far too often. But my concerns about Tess go a little bit beyond that. I had a look at her records from Crossbank.”

  Ah, Marguerite thought. Well, that was inevitable. Raking these old coals again. “Tess had some problems last spring. But that’s all over now.”

  “This was during the process of the divorce?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was seeing a therapist at that time, right?”

  “Dr. Leinster, at Crossbank. Yes.”

  “Is she seeing anyone now?”

  “Here at Blind Lake?” Marguerite shook her head decisively. “No.”

  “Have you thought about it? We’ve got people on staff who can provide absolutely first-rate counseling.”

  “I’m sure you do. I don’t feel it’s necessary.”

  Fleischer paused. He tapped a pencil against his desk. “Back at Crossbank, Tess had some kind of hallucinatory episode, is that correct?”

  “No, Mr. Fleischer, that’s not correct. Tess was lonely and she talked to herself. She had a made-up friend she called Mirror Girl, and there were times when it was a little hard for her to distinguish between reality and imagination. That’s a problem, but it’s not a hallucination. She was tested for temporal-lobe epilepsy and a dozen other neurological conditions. The tests were uniformly negative.”