Blind Lake

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “According to her file, she was diagnosed with—”

  “Asperger’s Syndrome, yes, but that’s not a terribly uncommon condition. She has a few tics, she was language-delayed, and she’s not very good at making friends, but we’ve known that for some years now. She’s lonely, yes, and I believe her loneliness contributed to the problem at Crossbank.”

  “I think she’s lonely here, too.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. Yes, she’s lonely and disoriented. Wouldn’t you be? Parents divorced, a new place to live, plus all the usual cruelties a child her age endures. You don’t have to tell me about it. I see it every day. In her body language, in her eyes.”

  “And you don’t think therapy would help her deal with that?”

  “I don’t mean to be dismissive, but therapy hasn’t been a huge success. Tessa’s been on and off Ritalin and a host of other drugs, and none of them has done her any good. Quite the opposite. That should be in the file too.”

  “Therapy needn’t involve medication. Sometimes just the talking helps.”

  “But it didn’t help Tess. If anything it made her feel more unique, more alone, more oppressed.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “She didn’t have to.” Marguerite discovered her palms were sweating. Her voice had tightened up, too. That defensive whine of yours, Ray used to call it. “What’s the point, Mr. Fleischer?”

  “Again, I’m sorry if this seems intrusive. I like to have some background on my students, especially if they’re having trouble. I think it makes me a better teacher. I guess it also makes me sound like an interrogator. I apologize.”

  “I know Tess has been slow with her written work, but—”

  “She comes to class, but there are days when she’s, I don’t know how to describe it—emotionally absent. She stares out the window. Sometimes I call her name and she doesn’t respond. She whispers to herself. That doesn’t make her unique, much less disturbed, but it does make her difficult to teach. All I’m saying is, maybe we can help.”

  “Ray’s been here, hasn’t he?”

  Mr. Fleischer blinked. “I’ve talked to your husband—your ex-husband—on a couple of occasions, but that’s not unusual.”

  “What did he tell you? That I’m neglecting her? That she complains about being lonely when she’s with me?”

  Fleischer didn’t respond, but his wide-eyed look gave him away. Direct hit. Fucking Ray!

  “Look,” Marguerite said, “I appreciate your concern, and I share it, but you should also know that Ray isn’t happy with the custody arrangements and this isn’t the first time he’s tried to set me up, make me look like a bad parent. So let me guess: he came in here and told you how reluctant he was to raise the issue, but he was worried about Tess, what with all the problems back at Crossbank, and maybe she wasn’t getting the kind of parental attention she deserves, in fact she’d said a thing or two to him…is that the gist?”

  Fleischer held up his hands. “I can’t get involved in this kind of discussion. I told Tessa’s father the same things I’m telling you.”

  “Ray has an agenda of his own, Mr. Fleischer.”

  “My concern is with Tess.”

  “Well, I—” Marguerite restrained an urge to bite her lip. How had this gone so badly wrong? Fleischer was looking at her now with patient concern, patronizing concern, but he was a grade eight teacher, after all, and maybe that big-eyed frown was just a defensive reflex, a mask that slid into place whenever he was confronted with an hysterical child. Or parent. “You know, I, obviously, I’m willing to do whatever will help Tess, help her focus on her schoolwork…”

  “Basically,” Fleischer said, “I think we’re on the same wavelength here. Tess missed a good deal of school at Crossbank—we don’t want to repeat that.”

  “No. We don’t. Honestly, I don’t think it will happen again.” She added, hoping it didn’t sound too obviously desperate, “I can sit down with her, talk to her about being more thorough with her work, if you think that would be a good idea.”

  “It might help.” Fleischer hesitated, then: “All I’m saying, Marguerite, is that we both need to keep our eyes open where Tess is concerned. Stop trouble before it happens.”

  “My eyes are all the way open, Mr. Fleischer.”

  “Well, that’s good. That’s the important thing. If I think we need to touch base again, can I call you?”

  “Anytime,” Marguerite said, ridiculously grateful that the interview seemed to be drawing to a close.

  Fleischer stood up. “Thank you for your time, and I hope I didn’t alarm you.”

  “Not at all.” An outrageous lie.

  “My door is always open if you have any concerns of your own.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  She hurried down the corridor to the school door as if she were leaving the scene of a crime. Mistake to mention Ray, she thought, but his fingerprints were all over this encounter, and what a slick setup it had been—and how like Ray to use Tessa’s problems as a weapon.

  Unless, Marguerite thought, I’m kidding myself. Unless Tessa’s problems went deeper than a mild personality disorder; unless the whole Crossbank circus was about to repeat itself…She would do anything to help Tess through this difficult passage, if only she knew how to help, but Tessa’s own refractory indifference was almost impossible to breach…especially with Ray running interference, playing mind games, trying to position himself for some hypothetical custody battle.

  Ray, seeing every conflict as a war and driven by his own dread of losing.

  Marguerite pushed through the doors into autumn air. The afternoon had cooled dramatically, and the clouds overhead were closer, or seemed so in the long light of the sun. The breeze was frigid but welcome after the claustrophobic warmth of the schoolroom.

  As she let herself into her car she heard the wail of sirens. She drove cautiously to the exit and stopped long enough to let a Blind Lake Security vehicle roar past. It looked like it was heading for the south gate.

  Nine

  Sue Sampel, Ray Scutter’s executive assistant, tapped on his door and reminded him that Ari Weingart was scheduled for a meeting in twenty minutes. Ray looked up from a stack of printed papers and pursed his lips. “Thank you, I’m aware of that.”

  “Plus the guy from Civilian Security at four o’clock.”

  “I can read my own day planner, thanks.”

  “Okay, then,” Sue said. Screw you, too. Ray was in a dark mood this Wednesday, not that he was ever sweetness-and-light. She supposed he was chafing under the lockdown like everybody else. She understood the need for security, and she could even imagine that it might be necessary (though God knows why) to make it impossible to place so much as a phone call outside the perimeter. But if this went on much longer people were going to get seriously PO’d. Many already were. The day workers, for sure, who had lives (spouses, children) outside the Blind Lake campus. But the permanent residents, too. Sue herself, for example. She lived in the Lake but she dated off-campus, and she had been anxious to get that all-important second phone call from a man she’d met at a Secular Singles group in Constance, a man her age, mid-forties, a veterinarian, with thinning hair and gentle eyes. She imagined him with a phone in his hand, gazing sadly at all those NO SIGNAL or SERVER UNAVAILABLE tags and eventually giving up on her. Another lost opportunity. At least this time it wouldn’t be her fault.

  Ari Weingart popped into the office at the appointed hour. Good old Ari: polite, funny, even prompt. A saint.

  “The boss is in?” Ari asked.

  “As luck would have it. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  Ray Scutter’s window looked south from the sixth floor of Hubble Plaza, and he was often distracted by the view. Usually there was a constant stream of traffic in and out of the Lake. Lately there had been none, and the lockdown had made his window view static, rendered the land beyond the perimeter fence as blank as brown paper, no motion but gliding cloud-
shadows and the occasional darting flock of birds. If you stared long enough it began to look as inhuman as the landscape of UMa47/E. Just another imported image. It was all surface, wasn’t it? All two-dimensional.

  The lockdown had created a number of irritating problems. Not the least of which was that he appeared to be the senior civilian authority on campus.

  His status in the Administration hierarchy was relatively junior. But the annual NSI Conference on Astrobiology and Exocultural Science had been held in Cancun this weekend past. A huge delegation of academic staff and senior administrators had packed their swimsuits and left Blind Lake a day before the lockdown. Pull those names out of the flow chart and what remained was Ray Scutter floating over the various department heads like a loose balloon.

  It meant that people were coming to him with problems he wasn’t empowered to resolve. Demanding things he couldn’t give them, like a coherent explanation of the lockdown or a special exemption from it. He had to tell them he was in the dark too. All he could do was carry on under the standing protocols and wait for instructions from outside. Wait, in other words, for the whole shitting mess to reach a conclusion. But it had already gone on for an uncomfortably long time.

  He looked away from the window as Ari Weingart knocked and entered.

  Ray disliked Weingart’s cheery optimism. He suspected it disguised a secret contempt, suspected that under his hale-fellow exterior Weingart was peddling influence as enthusiastically as every other department head. But at least Weingart understood Ray’s position and seemed more interested in coping than complaining.

  If he could only suppress that smile. The smile bore down on Ray like a klieg light, teeth so white and regular they looked like luminous mahjong tiles. “Sit,” Ray said.

  Weingart pulled up a chair and opened his pocket desktop. Down to business. Ray liked that.

  “You wanted a list of situations we’ll have to address if the quarantine goes on much longer. I drew up some notes.”

  “Quarantine?” Ray said. “Is that what people are calling it?”

  “As opposed to a standard six-hour lockdown, yeah.”

  “Why would we be quarantined? No one’s sick.”

  “Talk to Dimi.” Dimitry Shulgin was the Civilian Security chief, due here at four. “The lockdown follows an obscure set of regs in the military manual. He says it’s what they call a ‘data quarantine,’ but nobody ever really expected it to come into effect.”

  “He hasn’t mentioned this to me. I swear to God, he’s like some fucking Slavic clam. What exactly is a ‘data quarantine’ meant to accomplish?”

  “The regs were written back when Crossbank was just beginning to pull images. It’s one of those paranoid scenarios from the congressional hearings. The idea was that Crossbank or Blind Lake might download something dangerous, obviously nothing physical, but a virus or a worm of some kind…you know what steganography is?”

  “Data encrypted into photographs or images.” He didn’t remind Weingart that he, Ray, had testified at those hearings. Information warfare had been a hot topic at the time. The Luddite lobby had feared that Blind Lake might import some pernicious alien self-replicating digital program or, for God’s sake, a deadly meme, which would then spread through terrestrial data routes wreaking unknowable havoc.

  Wary as he often was of Blind Lake’s groping into the unknown, the idea was preposterous. The aboriginals of UMa47/E could hardly know they were being spied on…and even if they did, images processed at the Lake had traveled, however mysteriously, at the conventional speed of light. It would need both an impossible perceptivity and a ridiculously patient desire for revenge for them to react in any hostile way. Still, he had been forced to admit, dangerous steganography was not an absolute impossibility, at least in the abstract. So a series of contingency plans had been written into the already immense web of security plans surrounding the Lake. Even though, in Ray’s opinion, it was the biggest crock of astronomical shit since Girolamo Fracastoro’s theory that syphilis was caused by the conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars.

  Had those bullshit edicts actually been called into effect? “One problem with that idea,” he told Weingart. “No provocation. We haven’t downloaded anything suspicious.”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Weingart said.

  “You know something I don’t?”

  “Hardly. But let’s say if there was a problem at Crossbank—”

  “Come on. Crossbank is looking at oceans and bacteria.”

  “I know, but if—”

  “And we’re imaging completely different targets in any case. Their work doesn’t reflect on ours.”

  “No, but if there was a problem with the process somehow—”

  “Something endemic to the Eye, you mean?”

  “If there was some kind of problem with the O/BECs at Crossbank, DoE or the military might have decided to put us under a precautionary quarantine.”

  “They could at least have warned us.”

  “Information jamming is two-way. No in, no out. We have to assume they don’t want so much as a carrier wave getting through.”

  “That doesn’t preclude a warning.”

  “Unless they were in a hurry.”

  “This is ridiculously speculative, and I hope you and Shulgin haven’t been spreading it around. Rumors can cause panic.”

  Weingart looked like he wanted to say something, but bit it back.

  “Anyway,” Ray said, “it’s out of our hands. The pressing question is what we can do for ourselves until somebody unbuttons the fence.”

  Weingart nodded and began to read from his list. “Supplies. We pipe in our drinking water, and that hasn’t been interrupted, but without intervention we’ll run short of some foodstuffs before the end of the week and face a starvation-level crisis by the end of November. I’m assuming we’ll be resupplied, but it might be a good idea to segregate our surplus and maybe even post guards over it in the meantime.”

  “I can’t imagine this…siege…going on until Thanksgiving.”

  “Well, but we’re talking ‘what-if’ here—”

  “All right, all right. What else?”

  “Medical supplies, same deal, and the on-campus clinic isn’t set up to deal with serious or widespread illness or injuries. If we had a fire we’d have to ship burn victims to a major hospital or suffer needless fatalities. Not much we can do about that, either, except ask the medical staff to make contingency plans. Plus, if the quarantine is prolonged, people are going to need emotional counselling. We already have some folks with urgent family matters on the outside.”

  “They’ll live.”

  “Lodging. There are a couple hundred day workers sleeping in the gym, not to mention visiting journalists, a handful of contractors, and anybody who happened to be here on a day pass. Long-term, if this is a long-term quarantine, it might be better to see if we can billet those people out. There are people living on-campus who have spare rooms or guest quarters available, and it wouldn’t be hard to round up volunteers. With a little luck we could have everybody sleeping on a bed, or at least a pullout sofa. Sharing bathrooms instead of fighting over the showers at the community center and lining up for the jakes.”

  “Look into it,” Ray said. After a moment’s thought he added, “Put together a list of volunteers, but bring it to me before you talk to them. And we’ll have to compile an inventory of day workers and guests to go with it.”

  There was more of this—minutiae that could be easily delegated, for the most part, all predicated on a prolonged lockdown Ray couldn’t seriously envision. A month of this? Three months? It was unimaginable. His certainty was tempered only by the nagging fact that the lockdown had already gone on an unreasonably long time.

  Sue Sampel tapped at the door while Weingart was summing up. “We’re not finished,” Ray called out.

  She leaned into the room. “I know, but—”

  “If Shulgin is here, he can wait a few minutes.”

  “He�
��s not here, but he called to cancel. He’s headed down to the south gate.”

  “The south gate? What’s so fucking important about the south gate?”

  She smiled infuriatingly. “He said you’d understand if you took a look out your window.”

  The huge eighteen-wheeled vehicle—powder-black and heavily armored—crawled along the road toward Blind Lake like an immense pill bug, timid for all its layered defenses. Where the driver’s cab should have been there was only a blunt cone fitted with sensors. The truck was reading the road, gauging its location according to buried transponders and GPS numbers. There was no human driver. The truck was driving itself.

  By the time Chris and Elaine neared the south gate the road was already mobbed with off-duty day workers and office staff and a gaggle of high school kids. A pair of Civilian Security vans pulled up and discharged a dozen men in gray uniforms, who began waving the crowd back to what they deemed a safe distance.

  The fence surrounding Blind Lake’s innermost perimeter was a state-of-the-art “containment device,” Elaine had told Chris. Its posts were reinforced alloy cores sunk deep into the earth; its chains and links were carbon composites stronger than steel, their exposed surfaces slicker than Teflon and studded with sensors; atop all this was a double concertina of razor wire inclined at ninety degrees. The whole thing could be electrified to a lethal voltage.

  The gate that barred the road was hinged to swing open on a signal from the guardhouse or from a coded transponder. The guardhouse itself was a concrete bunker with slit windows, sturdy as bedrock but currently vacant; the resident guard had been pulled out when the lockdown went into effect.

  Chris wormed his way to the front of the crowd, Elaine following with her hands on his shoulders. At last they came up against the highway barriers the security men were muscling into place. Elaine pointed out a car just arriving: “Isn’t that Ari Weingart? And I think the guy with him is Raymond Scutter.”