Blind Lake

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He said, “I wonder how the Subject is doing. Sleepless in Lobsterville.”

  “I left everything running, didn’t I?” She stood up. “Want to have a look?”

  He followed her upstairs to her office. They tiptoed past the room where Tess was sleeping.

  Marguerite’s office was exactly as they had left it, lights burning, interfaces lit, the big wall screen still dutifully following the Subject. But Marguerite gasped when she saw the image.

  It was morning again on Subject’s patch of UMa47/E. Subject had left the high balcony and made his way to a surface-level street. Last night’s winds had given every exposed surface a coating of fine white grit, fresh texture under the raking light of the sun.

  Subject approached a stone arch five times his height, walking into the sunrise. Chris said, “Where’s he going?”

  “I don’t know,” Marguerite said. “But unless he turns around, he’s leaving the city.”

  Thirteen

  “Charlie Grogan called,” Sue Sampel said as Ray passed through the outer office. “Also Dajit Gill, Julie Sook, and two other department heads. Oh, and you have Ari Weingart at ten and Shulgin at eleven, plus—”

  “Forward the agenda to my desktop,” Ray said. “And any urgent messages. Hold calls.” He disappeared into his sanctum sanctorum and closed the door.

  Bless silence, Sue thought. It beat the sound of Ray Scutter’s voice.

  Sue had left a cup of hot coffee on his desk, a tribute to his punctuality. Very good, Ray thought. But he was facing a difficult day. Since the Subject had set out on his pilgrimage last week, the interpretive committees had been in a state of hysteria. Even the astrozoologists were divided: some of them wanted to keep the focus in Lobsterville and tag a new and more representative Subject; others (and Marguerite was one of these) were convinced the Subject’s behavior was significant and ought to be followed to its conclusion. The Technology and Artifacts people dreaded losing their urban context, but the astrogeologists and climatologists welcomed the prospect of a long detour into the deserts and mountains. The committees were squabbling like fishwives, and absent Blind Lake’s senior scientists or a line to Washington there was no obvious way to resolve the conflict.

  Ultimately, these people would look to Ray for guidance. But he didn’t want to assume that responsibility without a great deal of consultation. Whatever decision he made, sooner or later he’d be forced to defend it. He wanted that defense to be airtight. He needed to be able to cite names and documents, and if some of the more hotheaded committee partisans thought he was “dodging the issue”—and he had heard those words bandied about—too bad. He had asked them all to prepare position papers.

  Best to start the day in a positive mood. Ray unfolded a paper napkin and used his key to open the bottom drawer of the desk.

  Since the lockdown began Ray had been keeping a stash of DingDongs locked in his desk drawer. It was embarrassing to acknowledge, but he happened to like baked goods and he especially liked DingDongs with his breakfast coffee, and he could live without the inevitable smart-ass commentary about Polysorbate 80 and “empty calories,” thank you very much. He liked peeling back the brittle wrapper; he liked the sugar-and-cornstarch smell that came wafting out; he liked the glutinous texture of the pastry and the way hot coffee flensed the slightly chemical aftertaste from his palate.

  But DingDongs weren’t included in the weekly black truck deliveries. Ray had been canny enough to buy up the remaining inventory from the local grocer and the convenience shop in the Plaza lobby. He had started with a couple of cartons, but they’d be gone before long. The last six DingDongs in the entire quarantined community of Blind Lake, as far as Ray could determine, were currently residing in his desk drawer. After that, nothing. Cold turkey. Obviously, it wouldn’t kill him to do without. But he resented being forced into it by this ongoing bureaucratic fuck-up, this endless mute lockdown.

  He pulled a DingDong out of the drawer. Take one away: that left five, a business-week’s-worth.

  But all he could see were four packages lingering in the shadows.

  Four. He counted again. Four. He searched the drawer with his hand. Four.

  There should have been five. Had he miscalculated?

  Impossible. He had recorded the count in his nightly journal.

  He sat immobile for a moment, processing this unwelcome information, working up a solid righteous anger. Then he buzzed Sue Sampel and asked her to step inside.

  “Sue,” he said when she appeared in the doorway. “Do you happen to have a key to my desk?”

  “To your desk?” She was either surprised by the question or faking it very plausibly. “No, I don’t.”

  “Because when I came here the support people told me I’d have the only key.”

  “Did you lose it? They must have a master somewhere. Or they can replace the locks, I guess.”

  “No, I didn’t lose it.” She flinched from his voice. “I have the key right here. Something’s been stolen.”

  “Stolen? What was stolen?”

  “It doesn’t matter what was stolen. As it happens, it was nothing very important. What matters is that somebody gained access to my desk without my knowledge. Surely even you can grasp the significance of that.”

  She glanced at the desktop. Ray realized, too late, that he had left this morning’s DingDong lying unopened next to his coffee cup. She looked at it, then at Ray, with a you-must-be-kidding expression on her face. He felt blood rush to his cheeks.

  “Maybe you could talk to the cleaning staff,” Sue said.

  Now all he wanted was for her to disappear. “Well, all right, I suppose it doesn’t matter…I shouldn’t have mentioned it…”

  “Or Security. You have Shulgin coming in later.”

  Was she concealing a smile? Was she actually laughing at him? “Thank you,” he said tightly.

  “Anything else?”

  “No.” Get the fuck out. “Please close the door.”

  She closed it gently. Ray imagined he could hear her laughter floating behind her like a bright red ribbon.

  Ray considered himself a realist. He knew some of his behavior could be labeled misogynistic by anyone who wanted to smear him (and his enemies were legion). But he didn’t hate women. Quite the opposite: he gave them every opportunity to redeem themselves. The problem was not that he hated women but that he was so consistently disappointed by them. For instance, Marguerite. (Always Marguerite, forever Marguerite…)

  Ari Weingart came in at ten with a series of morale-enhancing proposals. Cayti Lane from the PR department wanted to put together a local video ring for news and social updates—Blind Lake TV, in effect—which she would host. “I think it’s a good idea,” Ari said. “Cayti’s bright and photogenic. What I also want to do is pool the individual downloads people have residing in their house servers so we can rebroadcast them. No-choice scheduled television, very twentieth century, but it might help hold things together. Or at least give people something to talk about at the water cooler.”

  Fine, all this was fine. Ari went on to propose a series of live debates and lectures Saturday nights at the community center. Also fine. Ari was trying to reconfigure the siege as a church social. Let him, Ray thought. Let him distract the whining inmates with dog-and-pony shows. But all this boosterism was ultimately tiresome, and it was a relief when Ari finally packed up his grin and left the room.

  Ray counted his DingDongs again.

  Of course, it could have been Sue who had broken into his desk. There was no sign that the mechanism had been tampered with—maybe he’d been careless about locking the drawer and she had taken advantage of his lapse of attention. Sue often worked later than Ray, especially when Tess was in his care; unlike Marguerite, he didn’t like leaving his daughter alone in the house after school. Sue was the prime suspect, Ray decided, though the cleaning staff weren’t entirely above suspicion.

  Men were easier to deal with than women. With men it was a matter of
barking loud enough to command attention. Women were slyer, Ray thought, overtly yielding but easily subverted. Their loyalties were tentative and too quickly revoked. (Marguerite, for instance…)

  At least Tess wouldn’t grow up to be one of those kind of women.

  Dimi Shulgin showed up at eleven, crisp in a gray tailored suit, a welcome distraction even though he was full of ominous news. Shulgin had mastered the art of Baltic inscrutability, his doughy face impassive as he described the mood prevailing among the day workers and salaried staff. “They’ve endured the siege this long,” Shulgin said, “with minimal problems, probably because of what happened to unfortunate Mr. Krafft when he tried to run the fence. That was a blessing in disguise, I think. It frightened people into acceptance. But discontent is growing. Casual and support staff outnumber the scientific and management people by five to one, you know. Many of them are demanding a voice in decision-making, and not a few of them would like to shut down the Eye and see what happens.”

  “It’s all talk,” Ray said.

  “So far, it’s all talk. In the long run—if this lockdown continues—who knows?”

  “We should be seen to be doing something positive.”

  “The appearance of action,” Shulgin said, any irony safely buried under his turgid accent, “would be helpful.”

  “You know,” Ray said, “my desk was broken into recently.”

  “Your desk?” Shulgin’s caterpillar eyebrows rose. “Broken into? This was vandalism, theft?”

  Ray waved his hand in what he imagined was a magnanimous gesture. “It was trivial, office vandalism at most, but it got me thinking. What if we launched an investigation?”

  “Into the vandalism of your desk?”

  “No, for Christ’s sake, into the siege.”

  “An investigation? How could we? All the evidence is on the other side of the fence.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Please explain.”

  “There’s a theory we’re under lockdown because something happened at Crossbank, something dangerous, something connected with their O/BECs, something that might as easily happen here.”

  “Yes, which is why there’s a growing movement to switch off our own processors, but—”

  “Forget about the O/BECs for a minute. Think about Crossbank. If Crossbank had a problem, wouldn’t we have heard about it?”

  Shulgin considered. He rubbed a finger against his nose. “Possibly, possibly not. All the senior administrators were in Cancun when the gates closed. They would have been the first to know.”

  “Yes,” Ray said, gently urging the idea to its conclusion, “but messages might have stacked up on their personal servers before the quarantine went into effect.”

  “Anything urgent would have been forwarded…”

  “But copies would still reside in the Blind Lake servers, wouldn’t they?”

  “Well…presumably. Unless someone took the trouble to erase them. But we can’t break into the personal servers of senior staff.”

  “Can’t we?”

  Shulgin shrugged. “I would have thought not.”

  “In ordinary circumstances the question wouldn’t even arise. But circumstances are a long way from ordinary.”

  “Crack the servers, read their mail. Yes, it’s interesting.”

  “And if we find anything useful we should announce the results at a general meeting.”

  “If there are any results. Apart from voicemail from wives and mistresses. Shall I talk to my people, find out how difficult it would be to break into our servers?”

  “Yes, Dimi,” Ray said. “You do that.”

  He liked this better the more he thought about it. He went to lunch a happier man.

  Ray’s moods were mercurial, however, and by the time he left the Plaza at the end of the day he was feeling sour again. The DingDong thing. Sue had probably shared the story with her friends in the staff cafeteria. Every day, some fresh humiliation. He liked DingDongs for breakfast: was that so fucking funny, so laughably aberrant? People were assholes, Ray thought.

  He drove carefully through flurries of hard snow, trying unsuccessfully to time the stoplights on the main street.

  People were assholes, and that was what the exocultural theorists always missed, people like Marguerite, blind little featherweight optimists. One world full of assholes wasn’t enough for them. They wanted more. A whole living universe of assholery. A shiny pink organic cosmos, a magic mirror with a happy face beaming out of it.

  Dusk closed around the car like a curtain. How much cleaner the world would be, Ray thought, if it contained nothing but gas and dust and the occasional flaring star—cold but pristine, like the snow enshrouding the few high towers of Blind Lake. The real lesson of Lobsterville was the politically incorrect one, the unspeakable but obvious fact that sentience (so-called) was nothing but a focused irrationality, a suite of behaviors designed by DNA to make more DNA, empty of any logic but the runaway mathematics of self-reproduction. Chaos with feedback, z z2 + c blindly repeated until the universe had eaten and excreted itself.

  Including me, Ray thought. Better not to shy from that caustic truth. Everything he loved (his daughter) or thought he had loved (Marguerite) represented nothing more than his participation in that equation, was no more or less sane than the nocturnal bleeding of the aboriginals of UMa47/E. Marguerite, for instance: acting out flawed genetic scripts, the possessive if unfit mother, a walking womb claiming equality under the law. How quickly she still came to mind. Every insolence Ray suffered was a mirror of her hatred.

  The garage door rolled open as it sensed the approach of the car. He parked under the glare of the overhead light.

  He wondered what it would be like to break free of all these biological imperatives and see the world as it truly was. To our eyes horrible, Ray thought, bleak and unforgiving; but our eyes are liars, equally as enslaved to DNA as our hearts and our minds. Maybe that was what the O/BECs had become: an inhuman eye, revealing truths no one was prepared to accept.

  Tess had come back to him this week. He called hello as he entered the house. She sat in the living room in the chair next to the artificial Christmas tree, hunched over her homework like a studious gnome. “Hi,” she said listlessly. Ray stood a moment, surprised by his love for her, admiring the way her dark hair curled tightly to her skull. She wrote on the screen of a lap pad, which translated her babyish scrawls into something legible.

  He shed his coat and overshoes and drew the blinds against the snowy dark. “Have you called your birth mother yet?”

  It was in the agreement he had signed with Marguerite after arbitration, that Tess would phone the absent parent daily. Tess looked at him curiously. “My birth mother?”

  Had he said that aloud? “I mean, your mother.”

  “I called already.”

  “Did she say anything disturbing? You know you can tell me if your mother causes problems for you.”

  Tess shrugged uncomfortably.

  “Was the stranger with her when you called? The man who lives in the basement?”

  Tess shrugged again.

  “Show me your hand,” Ray said.

  It didn’t take a genius to know that Tessa’s problems back at Crossbank had been Marguerite’s fault, even if the divorce mediator had failed to figure it out. Marguerite had consistently ignored Tess, had focused exclusively on her beloved extraterrestrial seascapes, that Tess had made several desperate bids for attention, transparent in their motivation. The frightening stranger in the mirror might as well have been Marguerite’s Subject—oblique, demanding, and omnipresent.

  Glumly, head lowered in embarrassment, Tess held out her right hand. The sutures had been removed last week. The scars would disappear with time, the clinic doctor had said, but now they looked ghastly, pink new skin between angry divots where the stitches had been. Ray had already taken a few photographs in case the issue ever arose in court. He held her small hand in his, making sure there was no sign of in
fection. No small life eating the life from his daughter’s flesh.

  “What’s for dinner?” Tess asked.

  “Chicken,” Ray said, leaving her to her books. Frozen chicken in the freezer. Subject removed from cold storage the butchered flesh of a ground-dwelling bird and began to sear it in a pan of extracted vegetable oil. Plus garlic and basil, salt and pepper. The smell of it flooded his mouth with saliva. Tess, drawn by the odor, wandered into the kitchen to watch him cook.

  “Are you worried about going back to your mother tomorrow?”

  Your birth mother. Half your genetic bag of tricks. The lesser half, Ray thought.

  “No,” Tess said, then, almost defiantly, “why do you always keep asking me that?”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes! Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes isn’t always, though, is it?”

  “No, but—”

  “I just want everything to be okay for you, Tess.”

  “I know.” Defeated, she turned away.

  “You’re happy here, aren’t you?”

  “It’s okay here.”

  “Because you never know with Mom, isn’t that right? You might have to come live here all the time, Tess, if anything happens to her.”

  Tess narrowed her eyes. “What would happen to her?”

  “You never know,” Ray said.

  Fourteen

  Before he left the city, Subject’s life had been a repetitive cycle of work, sleep, and food conclaves. It had reminded Marguerite dismayingly of the Hindu idea of the kalpas, the sacred circle, eternal return.

  But that had changed.

  That had changed, and the circle had become something different: it had become a narrative. A story, Marguerite thought, with a beginning and an end. That was why it was so important to keep the Eye focused on the Subject, despite what the more cynical people in Interpretation thought. “The Subject is no longer representative,” they said. But that was what made this so interesting. Subject had become an individual, something more than the sum of his functions in aboriginal society. This was clearly some kind of crisis in Subject’s life, and Marguerite couldn’t bear the idea of not seeing it through to its conclusion.