Blind Lake

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Since the window episode Tess had come to him several times for Porry stories. Tess, an only child, seemed fascinated by the idea of Chris as an older brother—something less than a parent, more than a friend. She seemed to think Portia had led an enchanted existence. Not true. Portia was buried in a rainy Seattle cemetery, victim of the fatal disease of adulthood in its most acute form. He would not, of course, say that to Tess. “It didn’t snow much where we grew up. The closest thing to sledding we did was snow-tubing at a little resort up in the mountains.”

  “Did Portia like that?”

  “Not at first. At first she was pretty scared. But after a couple of runs she decided it was fun.”

  “I think she liked it,” Tess said, “except that she got cold.”

  “That’s right, she didn’t like the cold very much.”

  Elaine had accused him of “setting up housekeeping” at Marguerite’s. He wondered if that was true. Over the last several weeks he had become very much a part of Marguerite and Tessa Hauser’s universe, almost in spite of himself. No, that was wrong; not in spite of himself; he had taken every step willingly. But the steps had added up to an unplanned journey.

  He had yet to go to bed with Marguerite, but according to every signal he could read that was where this trip was taking him. And it wasn’t a neat little temporary bargain, a one-night stand or even an explicit lockdown romance, the exchange of warmth for warmth and no promises made or implied. The stakes were much, much higher.

  Did he want that?

  He liked Marguerite, he liked everything about Marguerite. Every late-night conversation—and lately there had been many—had drawn him closer to her. She was a generous storyteller. She talked freely about her childhood (she had lived with her father in a Presbyterian rectory in a little rail-stop bedroom suburb outside of Cincinnati, a seventy-year-old house with a wooden porch); about her work; about Tess; less often and more reluctantly, about her marriage. Nothing in her somewhat sheltered life had prepared her for Ray, who had professed to love her but had only wanted to furnish his life with a woman in the conventional manner and for whom cruelty was the fuck of last resort. Such men were abundant on the earth, but Marguerite had never run into one. What followed had been a nine-year nightmare of enlightenment.

  And what did she see in Chris? Not exactly the anti-Ray, but maybe a more benevolent vision of masculinity, someone she could confide in, someone she could lean against without fear of retribution; and he was flattered by that, but it was an uninformed opinion. Not that he was incapable of love. He had loved his work, he had loved his family, he had loved his sister Portia, but the things he loved tended to come to pieces in his hands, torn apart by his clumsy desire to protect them.

  He would never hurt her the way Ray had hurt her, but in the long term he might prove just as dangerous.

  Tess had told him where the best sledding was, along the low hills a quarter mile past Eyeball Alley, where the access road ended in a paved cul-de-sac. The Alley’s cooling towers came up on the left side of the road, dark sentinels in a white landscape. Tess broke the silence again: “Did Portia have problems at school?”

  “Sure she did. Everybody does, now and then.”

  “I hate Physical Education.”

  “I could never climb that rope,” Chris said.

  “We don’t do ropes yet. But we have to wear stupid gym clothes. Did Portia ever have nightmares?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What were her nightmares like?”

  “Well—she didn’t like to talk about them, Tess, and I promised not to tell.”

  Tess looked at him appraisingly. She was deciding whether to trust him, Chris thought. Tess dispensed her trust cautiously. Life had taught her that not every grown-up was trust-worthy—a hard lesson, but worth learning.

  But if he was still keeping Portia’s secrets, he might keep Tessa’s. “Did my mom tell you about Mirror Girl?”

  “Nope. Who’s Mirror Girl?”

  “That’s what’s wrong with me.” Another sidelong look. “You knew something was wrong with me, right?”

  “I did wonder a little, that night we had to go to the clinic.”

  “I see her in mirrors. That’s why I call her Mirror Girl.” She paused. “I saw her in the window that night. She took me by surprise. I guess I got angry.”

  Chris sensed the gravity of the confession. He was flattered Tess had raised the subject with him.

  He eased up on the accelerator, eking out a little more talk time.

  “She looks like me but she isn’t me. That’s what nobody understands. So what do you think? Am I crazy?”

  “You don’t strike me as crazy.”

  “I don’t talk about it because people think I’m nuts. Maybe I am.”

  “Stuff happens we don’t understand. That doesn’t make you nuts.”

  “How come nobody else can see her?”

  “I don’t know. What does she want?”

  Tess shrugged her shoulders irritably. It was a question she must have been asked too often. “She doesn’t say.”

  “Does she talk?”

  “Not in words. I think she just wants me to pay attention to things. I think she can’t pay attention unless I’m paying attention—does that make any sense? But that’s just what I think. It’s only a theory.”

  “Portia talked to her toys sometimes.”

  “It’s not like that. That’s a kid thing.” She rolled her eyes. “Edie Jerundt talks to her toys.”

  Better not to press. It was enough that Tess had opened up to him. He drove in silence to the end of the road, to the turnaround where a half dozen other cars were parked.

  The steepest slope of the snow-white hill was speckled with sledders and boarders and indulgent parents.

  “Lot of airplanes around today,” Tess said, climbing out of the car.

  Chris glanced at the sky but saw nothing more than a silver speck on the far horizon. Another cryptic Tess remark. “Will you help me pull the sled up?” she asked.

  “Sure thing.”

  “Ride down with me?”

  “If you want. But I have to warn you, I haven’t been on a sled for years.”

  “You said you didn’t have a sled. You said you just snow-tubed.”

  “I mean, I haven’t slid down a hill for years.”

  “Since Portia was little?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, come on then,” Tess said.

  Tess was aware, all this time, of the growing and insistent presence of Mirror Girl.

  Mirror Girl slid through every reflective surface like a slippery ghost. Mirror Girl wavered across the windows and the shiny blue hood and side panels of the car. Tess was even aware of the sparse few snowflakes falling from a high gray sky. She had studied snowflakes in science class: they were an example of symmetry. Ice, she thought, like glass, folded in mirror angles. She imagined Mirror Girl in every invisible facet of the falling snow.

  In fact Tess felt a little ill. Mirror Girl pressed in on her like a heavy, airless fog, until she could hardly think of anything else. Maybe she’d said too much to Chris. Saying the name, Mirror Girl, was probably a bad idea. Maybe Mirror Girl didn’t like to be talked about.

  But Tess had been looking forward to this sledding expedition all week and she wasn’t about to let Mirror Girl screw it up.

  She allowed Chris to pull the sled to the top of the hill. There was a gentle path up the long part of the hill and then a steep slope for riding back down. Tess was a little breathless at the top, but she liked the view. Funny how such a little hill let you see so much more than you could from down below. Here were the dark towers of Eyeball Alley, there the white squares of Hubble Plaza and the stores and houses clustered around it. The roads looked like roads in a roadmap, sharp and precise. The road to Constance cut through the south gate and into the snow-flecked distance like a line etched in white metal. Wind plucked at Tessa’s hair, and she took her snow hat out of her jacket pocket and
pulled it over her head almost down to her eyes.

  She closed her eyes and saw airplanes. Why airplanes? Mirror Girl was very concerned about airplanes right now.

  About a little plane with propellors and a bigger jet dropping down toward it like a hunting bird. Where? The sky was too cloudy to reveal much, though the clouds themselves were thin and high. The buzz in her ears might be an airplane, Tess thought, or it might just be the wind fluttering the collar of her jacket or her own blood pulsing in her ears.

  Her fingers tingled but her body was warm under her clothes. I’m hot, I’m cold, she thought.

  “Tess?” Chris said. “You okay?”

  Usually when people asked her that question it meant she was doing something peculiar. Standing too still or staring too hard. But why did people care? What was so strange about just standing here thinking?

  Maybe this was what Mirror Girl was seeing or wanted Tess to see: the big plane and the little one. The little one was bright yellow and had numbers on its wings but no military markings. It was bigger than the kind of airplane that dusted crops, but not by much. It was very clear to her when she closed her eyes but confusing, too, as if she were looking at the airplane from too many angles at once. It was a faceted airplane, a kaleidoscope airplane, an airplane in a mirror of many angles.

  Chris handed her the rope of the sled. Tess grasped the rope in her hand and tried to focus on the task of sledding—it suddenly seemed more like a chore than fun. Snow crunched and complained under the weight of the wooden runners. Somewhere down the slope, people laughed. Then the airplanes distracted her again. Not just the little airplane but the bigger one too, the jet, which was still far away but stalked the small plane doggedly, and then—

  Tess dropped the rope. The sled skittered away down the hill, vacant, before Chris could catch it.

  Chris knelt in front of her. “Tess, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  She saw his big worried eyes but couldn’t answer. The jet had come miles closer in just a few seconds. And now something flew away from the jet—it was a missile, Tess supposed—and it flashed between the two aircraft like a reflection in a fractured crystal.

  Why couldn’t anyone else see it? Why were the people on the hill still laughing and sliding? Were they confused by the snow, by its millions-upon-millions of mirrors? “Maybe we’d better get you home,” Chris said, obviously not seeing it either. Tess wanted to point. She raised her arm; she extended her finger; her finger followed the invisible arc of the missile, a line like an infinitely thin pencil stroke drawn across the white paper of the sky; she said, “There—”

  But then everybody heard the explosion.

  Charlie Grogan met Marguerite outside his office at the Alley. “Come on down to Control,” he said tersely. “It’s only getting freakier.”

  Charlie was obviously tense as they rode the elevator. The Eye was deep in the earth, an irony Marguerite had once appreciated. The jewel is in the lotus; the Eye is in the earth. The better to see you with, my dear. It didn’t seem particularly funny right now. “I can handle any call from the Plaza,” she said, “unless it’s Ray himself. If Ray calls and pulls rank, all I can do is pretend the phone is broken.”

  “Frankly, the Plaza’s not our biggest problem right now. We had to call in both tech shifts. They yanked and replaced a couple of the interface units. Worse,” Charlie said, “and I know you don’t want to hear this, we’re having big trouble with the O/BECs.”

  The O/BECs. Even Charlie had been known to call them “a keep-your-fingers-crossed technology.” Marguerite had very little background in quantum computing; she didn’t pretend to understand the intricacies of the O/BEC platens.

  Hooking up a collection of O/BECs in a self-evolving “organic” array was an experiment that should never have worked, in her opinion. The results were unpredictable and spooky, and she remembered what Chris had said (or quoted): It could end at any time. It could, yes it could. And maybe this was the time.

  But, God, no, she thought, not now, not when they were on the brink of a profounder knowledge, not when the Subject was in mortal danger.

  The control-and-interface room was more crowded than Marguerite had ever seen it. Tech people clustered around the system monitors, a few of them arguing heatedly. She was dismayed to see that the big main screen, the live feed, was utterly blank. “Charlie, what happened?”

  He shrugged. “Loss of intelligibility. Temporary, we think. It’s an I/O hang-up, not a complete system failure.”

  “We lost the Subject?”

  “No, like I said, it’s an interface thing. The Eye is still watching him, but we’re having trouble talking to the Eye.” And he gave a half-shrug that meant, At least that’s what we think.

  “Has this happened before?”

  “Not like this, no.”

  “But you can fix it?”

  He hesitated. “Probably,” he said at last.

  “There was still an image twenty minutes ago. What was he doing when you lost him?”

  “The Subject? He was hunkered down behind some kind of obstruction when everything grayed out.”

  “You think the storm is causing this?”

  “Marguerite, nobody knows. We don’t understand a fraction of what the O/BECs do. They can look through stone walls; a sandstorm shouldn’t be a problem. But visibility is severely compromised, so maybe the Eye has to work harder to keep a fix on a moving target, maybe that’s what we’re dealing with here. All we can do is treat the peripheral problems as they come up. Keep the temperature in spec, keep the quantum wells stable.” He closed his eyes and ran a hand over his stubbled scalp.

  This is what we don’t like to acknowledge, Marguerite thought: that we’re using a technology we don’t understand. A “dissipative structure” capable of growing its own complexity—capable of growing well beyond our intellectual grasp of it. Not really a machine but a process inside a machine, evolution in miniature, in its way a new form of life. All we ever did was trigger it. Trigger it, and bend it to our purposes.

  Made ourselves the only species with an eye more complex than our own brains.

  The overhead lights flickered and dimmed. Voltage-bus monitors bleated shrill alarms.

  “Please, Charlie,” Marguerite said. “Don’t let him slip away.”

  Chris was following Tessa’s abrupt gesture when he heard the explosion.

  It wasn’t an especially loud sound, not much louder than the sound of a slammed tailgate, but weightier, full of rolling undertones like thunder. He straightened up and searched the sky. So did the other sledders, anyone who wasn’t already skimming down the slope.

  At first he saw an expanding ring of smoke, faint against a background of high cloud and patchwork blue sky…then the airplane itself, distant and falling in a skewed curve toward the earth.

  Falling, but not helplessly. The pilot seemed to be struggling for control. It was a small plane, a private plane, canary yellow, nothing military; Chris saw it in silhouette as it flew briefly level, parallel to the road from Blind Lake and maybe a couple hundred feet off the ground. Coming closer, he realized. Maybe trying to use the road as a landing strip.

  Then the aircraft faltered again, veering wildly and ejecting a gout of black smoke.

  Coming in badly, and coming in close. “Get down,” he told Tess. “Down on the ground. Now.”

  The girl remained rigid, motionless, staring. Chris pushed her back into the snow and covered her with his body. Some of the sledders began to scream. Apart from that, the silence of the afternoon had become eerie: the plane’s engines had cut out. It should make more noise, Chris thought. All that falling metal.

  It touched ground at the north end of the parking circle, nosing up at the last minute before it collided with a bright red Ford van, translating all that kinetic energy into a fan of red and yellow debris that cut trails and craters into the fallen snow. Tessa’s body trembled at the sound. The shrapnel traveled east and away from the sledding hill, and i
t was still coming down in a patter of snow-muted thunks when the wreckage burst into flame.

  Chris pulled Tess into a sitting position.

  She sat up as if catatonic, arms rigid at her sides. She stared but didn’t blink.

  “Tess,” he said, “listen to me. I have to help, but I want you to stay here. Button up if you get cold, look for another adult if you need help, otherwise wait for me, okay?”

  “I guess.”

  “Wait for me.”

  “Wait for you,” she said dully.

  He didn’t like the way she looked or sounded, but she wasn’t physically injured and there might be survivors in the burning wreckage. Chris gave her what he hoped was a reassuring hug and then bounded down the slope, his feet gouging imperfections into snow compressed and made slick by the sledders.

  He reached the burning airplane along with three other adults, two men and a woman, presumably all parents who had come sledding with their children. He advanced as close to the fire as he dared, the heat of it prickling the skin of his face and boiling snow into the air. The paved lot showed through the snow in watery black patches. He could see enough of the van—its roof had been sheared off—to know there was no one inside. The small plane was another matter. Behind its furiously cooking engine a human shape struggled against the clouded glass of the cabin door.

  Chris peeled off his cloth jacket and wrapped it around his right hand.

  Later, Marguerite would tell him he acted “heroically.” Maybe so. It didn’t feel that way. What it felt like was the obvious next thing to do. He might not have attempted it if the fire had not been relatively contained, if the plane had been heavier with fuel. But he didn’t recall doing any risk-benefit calculation. There was only the job at hand.

  He felt the heat on his face, prickling his skin, gusts of cold air behind him angling toward the flames. The figure faintly visible in the crumpled cabin twitched, then stopped moving altogether. The door was hot even through the folds of his jacket. It was slightly ajar but stuck in its frame. Chris fumbled at it futilely, backed away to catch a breath of cooler air, then kicked hard at the accordioned aluminum. Once, twice, three times, until it bent far enough that he was able to brace himself, grasp the door in the folds of his now-smoldering jacket, and apply some leverage.