Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The piano playing became discordant, or was he just hearing it better … or worse? On his stool against the wall, beer in hand, he contemplated that. Contemplated the way people’s voices were getting confused, as if they’d become mixed up, and the thrum rising under his skin, the thrum and hum and the ringing in his ears. It felt like something was coming toward him from very far away—toward and into him. His throat was dry and chalky. His beer tasted funny. He put it down, looked around the room.

  Old Jim couldn’t stop playing the piano, although he did it so badly, fingers too hard against the keys, the keys smudged with his red blood as he now began to roar out a song Saul had never heard before, with lyrics that were incomprehensible. The other musicians, most of them seated around Old Jim, let their instruments fall from slack hands, and stared at one another as if shocked by something. What were they shocked by? Sadi was weeping and Brad was saying, “Why would you do that? Why in the hell would you be doing that?” But Brad’s voice was coming out of Sadi’s body, and blood was dripping out of Brad’s left ear, and the people slumped at the bar proper … had they been slumped that way a moment before? Were they drunk or dead?

  Old Jim erupted out of his seat to stand, still playing. He was reaching a chaotic crescendo on his shouting, shrieking, yowling song, his fingers destroyed joint by joint as blood smashed out from the piano onto his lap and down onto the floor.

  Something was hovering above Saul. Something was emanating out of him, was broadcasting through him, on frequencies too high to hear.

  “What are you doing to me?”

  “Why are you staring at me?”

  “Stop doing that.”

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  Someone was crawling across the floor, or pulling themselves across the floor because their legs didn’t work. Someone was bashing their head against the dark glass near the front door. Sadi spun and twitched and twisted on the floor, slamming into chairs and table legs, beginning to come to pieces.

  Outside, utter night reigned. There was no light. There was no light. Saul got up. Saul walked to the door, the spray of Old Jim’s incomprehensible song less a roar than a trickling scream.

  What lay beyond the door he did not know, mistrusted the utter darkness as much as what lay behind him, but he could not stay there in the bar, whether it was all real or something he was hallucinating. He had to leave.

  He turned the knob, went out into the cooling nighttime air of the parking lot.

  Everything was in its rightful place, as normal as it could be, with no one in sight. But everything behind him, in there, was awry, wrong, too irrevocable to be fixed by anyone. The din had become worse, and now others were screaming, too, making sounds not capable of being made by human mouths. He managed to find his pickup truck. He managed to get his key in the ignition, put it in reverse, then drive out of the parking lot. The sanctuary of the lighthouse was only half a mile away.

  He did not look in his rearview mirror, did not want to see anything that might spill out into the night. The stars were so distant and yet so close in the dark sky above.

  0022: GHOST BIRD

  During much of the descent, the strong feeling of a return to what was already known came to Ghost Bird, even if experienced by another—a memory of drowning, of endless drowning and, at the remove of those unreliable words from the biologist’s journal, the end of what she had encountered, what she had suffered, what she had recovered. And Ghost Bird wanted none of it—didn’t want Control, either, following behind. He wasn’t suited for this, had not been meant to experience this. You couldn’t martyr yourself to Area X; you could only disappear trying, and not even be sure of that.

  If the biologist had not leaned in to stare at those words so long ago, the doppelgänger might not exist in this way: full of memories and sneaking down into the depths. She might have returned with a mind wiped clean, her difference not expressed through her role as the mirror of the biologist but instead as a function of the right time or the wrong place, the right place or the wrong time.

  Such strange comfort: that the words on the wall were the same, the method of their expression the same, if now she might interpret it as a nostalgic hint of an alien ecosystem, an approach or stance that the Crawler and the tower, in concert, had failed to inflict upon Earth. Because it wasn’t viable? Because that was not its purpose—and thus giving them instead these slim signs of where it came from, what it stood for, what it thought?

  She had rejected a mask filter, and with it the idea that somehow Area X was only concentrated here, in this cramped space, on these stairs, in the phosphorescent words with which she had become too familiar. Area X was all around them; Area X was contained in no one place or figure. It was the dysfunction in the sky, it was the plant Control had spoken of. It was the heavens and earth. It could interrogate you from any position or no position at all, and you might not even recognize its actions as a form of questioning.

  Ghost Bird did not feel powerful as they descended through the luminescent light, hugging the right-hand wall, but she was unafraid.

  * * *

  There came the overlay, in memory and in the moment, of the harsh revolution of a mighty engine or heartbeat, and she knew even Control could hear it, could guess at its identity. From there, they moved swiftly to that point from which there was no real return: the moment when they would see the monster and take its measure. It lay, all too soon, right around the corner.

  “I want you to stay here,” she said to Control, to John.

  “No,” he said, as she’d know he would. “No, I won’t.” An unexpected sweetness in his expression. A kind of weary resolve in the words.

  “John Rodriguez, if you come with me, I won’t be able to spare you. You’ll have to see everything. Your eyes will have to be open.”

  She could not deny him his name, here, at the end of it all. She could not deny him the right to die if it came to that. There was nothing left to say.

  Trailing memory, trailing Control, Ghost Bird descended toward the light.

  * * *

  The Crawler was huge, seemed to rise and keep rising, to spread to the sides until it filled Ghost Bird’s vision. There was none of the remembered distortion, no throwing back at her of her own fears or desires. It simply lay revealed before her, so immense, so shockingly concrete.

  The surface of its roughly bell-shaped body was translucent but with a strange texture, like ice when it has frozen from flowing water into fingerlike polyps. Underneath a second surface slowly revolved, and across this centrifuge she could see patterns floating along, as if it had an interior skin, and the material on top of that might be some kind of soft armor.

  There was a mesmerizing quality to that movement, distant cousin to the director’s hypnotism, and she didn’t dare let her gaze linger for long.

  The Crawler had no discernible features, no discernible face. It moved so slowly as it perfected the letters on the wall that there was a strange impression of the delicate, the mysteries of its locomotion hidden beneath the fringe of flesh that extended to the ground. The left arm, the only arm, located halfway up its body, moved with unfailing precision, constant blurred motion, to create the message on the wall, more like a wielder than a writer—with a crash of sparks she knew was stray tissue igniting. Its arm was the agent of the message, and from that instrument flowed the letters. Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead. If ever it had been human, then that thick-scrawling arm, obscured by loam or moss, was all that was left of its humanity.

  Three rings orbited the Crawler, circling clockwise, and at times waves and surges of energy discharged between them, rippled across the Crawler’s body. The first ring spun in drunken dreamlike revolutions just below the arm: an irregular row of half-moons. They resembled delicate jellyfish, with feathery white tendrils descending that continually writhed in a wandering search for something never found. The second ring, spinning fas
ter right above the writing arm, resembled a broad belt of tiny black stones grouped close together, but these stones, as they bumped into one another, gave with a sponginess that made her think of soft tadpoles and of the creatures that had rained from the sky on the way to the island. What function these entities performed, whether they were part of the Crawler’s anatomy or a symbiotic species, she could not fathom. All she knew was that both rings were in their way reassuringly corporeal.

  But the third ring, the halolike ring above the Crawler, did not reassure her at all. The swift-moving globes of gold numbered ten to twelve, appeared to be both lighter than air and yet heavier, too. They spun with a ferocious velocity, so that at first she almost could not tell what they were. But she knew that they were dangerous, that words like defense and aggression might apply.

  Perhaps the lighthouse keeper had always been a delusion, a lie written by Area X and conveyed back to the biologist. Yet she distrusted, too, this avatar, this monster costume, this rubber suit meant for a scientist’s consumption: so precise, so specific. Or perhaps the truth, for it did not fluctuate in its aspect, morph into other forms.

  “Nothing but a horror show,” Ghost Bird said to Control, so still and silent behind her, absorbing or being absorbed.

  What else was she to do? She stepped forward, into the gravitational field of its orbits. This close, the translucent layer was more like a microscope slide of certain kinds of long, irregularly shaped cells. The patterns beneath, on the second layer, she could almost read, but remained obscured, as if in shallows disturbed by wide ripples.

  She reached out a hand, felt a delicate fluttering against her fingers as though encountering a porous layer, a veil.

  Was this first contact, or last contact?

  Her touch triggered a response.

  The halo far above dissolved to allow one of its constituent parts to peel off like a drooping golden pearl as large as her head—and down it came to a halt in front of her, hovering there to assess her. Reading her, with a kind of warmth that felt like sunburn. Yet still she was not afraid. She would not be afraid. Area X had made her. Area X must have expected her.

  Ghost Bird reached out and plucked the golden pearl from the air, held it warm and tender in her hand.

  A brilliant gold-green light erupted from the globe and plunged into the heart of her and an icy calm came over her, and through the calm bled a kind of monumental light and in that light she could see all that could be revealed even as Area X peered in at her.

  She saw or felt, deep within, the cataclysm like a rain of comets that had annihilated an entire biosphere remote from Earth. Witnessed how one made organism had fragmented and dispersed, each minute part undertaking a long and perilous passage through spaces between, black and formless, punctuated by sudden light as they came to rest, scattered and lost—emerging only to be buried, inert, in the glass of a lighthouse lens. And how, when brought out of dormancy, the wire tripped, how it had, best as it could, regenerated, begun to perform a vast and preordained function, one compromised by time and context, by the terrible truth that the species that had given Area X its purpose was gone. She saw the membranes of Area X, this machine, this creature, saw the white rabbits leaping into the border, disappearing, and coming out into another place, the leviathans, the ghosts, watching from beyond. All of this in fragments through taste or smell or senses she didn’t entirely understand.

  While the Crawler continued in its writing as if she did not even exist, the words ablaze with a richer and more meaningful light than she had ever seen, and worlds shone out from them. So many worlds. So much light. That only she could see. Each word a world, a world bleeding through from some other place, a conduit and an entry point, if you only knew how to use them, the coordinates the biologist now used in her far journeying. Each sentence a merciless healing, a ruthless rebuilding that could not be denied.

  Should she now say, “Stop!” Should she now plead for people she had never met who lived in her head, who the biologist had known? Should she somehow think that what came next would destroy the planet or save it? In its recognition of her, Ghost Bird knew that something would survive, that she would survive.

  What could she do? Nothing. Nor did she want to. There was a choice in not making a choice. She released the sphere, let it hover there in the air.

  She sensed Grace on the stairs behind them, sensed that Grace meant harm, and didn’t care. It wasn’t Grace’s fault. Grace could not possibly understand what she was seeing, was seeing something else—something from back at the lighthouse or the island or her life before.

  Grace shot Ghost Bird through the back. The bullet came out of her chest, lodged in the wall. The halo above the Crawler spun more furiously. Ghost Bird turned, shouted at her with the full force of the brightness. For she was not injured, had felt nothing, did not want Grace hurt.

  Grace frozen there in the half-light, rifle poised, and now in her eyes the knowledge that this was futile, that this had always been futile, that there was no turning back, that there could be no return.

  “Go back, Grace,” Ghost Bird said, and Grace disappeared up the steps, as if she’d never been there.

  Then Ghost Bird realized, too late, that Control was no longer there, had either gone back up or had snuck past, down the stairs, headed for the blinding white light far below.

  0023: THE DIRECTOR

  You return to what you knew, or thought you knew: the lighthouse and the Séance & Science Brigade, reinvigorated due to the line item linking the S&SB and Jack Severance. You comb through every file three or four times, force yourself to once again review the history of the lighthouse and its ruined sister on the island.

  At odd moments, you see Henry’s face, a pale circle from a great distance, moving closer and closer until you can catalog every unsavory detail. You don’t know what he means, know only that Henry is not someone to be cast aside too quickly. He nags at you like an unopened letter that everyone has, with overconfidence, predicted will contain something banal.

  Your antipathy toward them made you dismissive as a child. You hadn’t been looking for ways to emblazon them in your memory, to capture details, but instead to banish them, edit them out, make them go away. This annoyance, this presence that you could tell made Saul uncomfortable, even uneasy. But what about them had made Saul feel that way?

  No Henry, no Suzanne that looked like them appeared on the lists of the S&SB members, no stray photos with members unidentified leaped out to reveal either of them. Prior investigations had tracked down the names and addresses of any member assigned to the forgotten coast, and exhaustive interviews had been conducted. The answers were the same: S&SB had been conducting standard research—the usual mix of the scientific and the preternatural. Anyone who knew anything else had been trapped inside and disappeared long before the first expedition stumbled through the corridor into Area X.

  Worse, no further hint of Severance, Jack or Jackie, the latter also making herself scarce in the flesh, as if something new has caught her attention or she knows you want to question her, with each phone call fading into the backdrop, further subsumed by Central. So that you redouble your efforts to find her influence in the files, but if Lowry haunts you, Severance is the kind of ghost that’s too smart to materialize.

  Once again you watch the video from the first expedition, again study the background, the things out of focus, at the lighthouse. Through a flickering time lapse and sequencing, you review a kind of evolution and devolution of the lighthouse from inception through the last photograph taken by an expedition.

  To the point that Grace takes you aside one day and says, “This is enough. You need to run this agency. Other people can review these files.”

  “What other people? What other people are you talking about?” you snap at her, and then instantly regret it.

  But there are no “other people,” and time is running out. You have to remember that, on some level, the entire Southern Reach has become a long con, and
if you forget that you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

  “Maybe you need time off, some rest,” Grace tells you. “Maybe you need to get some perspective.”

  “You can’t have my job.”

  “I do not want your fucking job.” She’s simmering, she’s about to boil over, and some part of you wants to see that, wants to know what Grace is like when she’s totally lost it. But if you push her to that, she’ll have lost you, too.

  Later you go up to the rooftop with a bottle of bourbon, and Grace is already there, in one of the deck chairs. The Southern Reach building is nothing but a big, ponderous ship, and you don’t know where the helm has gotten to, can’t even lash yourself to the wheel.

  “I don’t mean anything I’m saying most of the time,” you tell her. “Just remember I don’t mean anything I say.”

  A dismissive sound, but also arms unfolding, grim frown loosening up. “This place is a fucking nuthouse.” Grace rarely swears anywhere but on the roof.

  “A nut job.” Paraphrasing Cheney’s latest puzzled, hurt soliloquy about lack of good data: “Even a falling acorn tells us something about where it fell from, Newton would tell us, wouldn’t you say. There’d be a trajectory, for heck’s sake, and then you’d backtrack, even if theoretical, find some point on the tree that acorn came from, or near enough.” You can’t say you’ve ever understood more than a third of his ellipticals.

  “A White Tits nut job,” Grace says, referring to the frozen white tents of the Southern Reach border command and control.

  “Our White Tits nut job,” you say sternly, wagging a finger. “But at least not nut jobs like the water-feature crew.”