Blind Lake

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Once more, for good measure, she attempted the Washington connection. The phone popped up an error message: SERVER UNAVAILABLE. Same message came up for any phone, video, or net connection outside the local Blind Lake loop. The only call that had gone through was to Ray’s own house, here in town—letting his daughter know he’d be late. Everything else had been incoming: Security, Personnel, and the military liaison.

  Sue might have been worried if she’d been a little less tired. But it was probably nothing. All she wanted to do right now was get back to her apartment and peel off her shoes. Microwave her dinner. Smoke a joint.

  The terminal buzzed again—according to the screen announcement, a call from Ari Weingart over at Publicity and Public Relations. She picked up. “Ari,” she said, “what can I do for you?”

  “Your boss around?”

  “Present but not keen to be disturbed. Is this urgent?”

  “Well, yeah, kind of. I’ve got three journalists here and nowhere to put them.”

  “So book a motel.”

  “Very funny. They’re on a three-week pass.”

  “Nobody penciled this into your calendar?”

  “Don’t be obtuse, Sue. Obviously, they ought to be sleeping in the guest quarters in the Visitor Center—but Personnel filled those beds with day workers.”

  “Day workers?”

  “Duh! Because the buses can’t get out to Constance.”

  “The buses can’t get out?”

  “Have you been in an isolation booth the last couple of hours? The road’s closed at the gatehouse. No traffic in or out. We’re in total lockdown.”

  “Since when?”

  “Roughly sunset.”

  “How come?”

  “Who knows? Either a plausible security threat or another drill. Everybody’s guessing it’ll be sorted out by morning. But in the meantime I have to billet these folks somewhere.”

  Ray Scutter’s reaction to the problem would be more indignant fuming, certainly nothing helpful. Sue thought about it. “Maybe you could call Site Management and see if they’ll open up the gym in the rec center. Put in some cots for the night. How’s that sound?”

  “Fucking brilliant,” Ari said. “Should have thought of it myself.”

  “If you need authority, cite mine.”

  “You’re a gem. Wish I could hire you away from Ray.”

  So do I, Sue thought.

  Sue stood and stretched. She walked to the window and parted the vertical blinds. Beyond the roofs of the worker housing and the darkness of the undeveloped grassland she could just make out the road to Constance, the lights of emergency vehicles pulsing eerily by the south gate.

  Marguerite Hauser thanked whatever benevolent fate it was that had put her into a town house (even if it was one of the smaller, older units) on the northeastern side of the Blind Lake campus, as far as possible from her ex-husband Ray. There was something reassuring about that ten-minute drive as she took Tess home, closing space behind her like a drawbridge over a moat.

  Tess, as usual, was quiet during the ride—maybe a little quieter than usual. When they picked up chicken sandwiches at the drive-through outlet in the commercial strip, Tess was indifferent to the menu. Back home, Marguerite carried the food and Tess hauled her tote bag inside. “Is the video working?” Tess asked listlessly.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Wasn’t working at Daddy’s house.”

  “Check and see. I’ll put the food on plates.”

  Eating in front of the video panel was still a novelty for Tess. It was a habit Ray had not permitted. Ray had insisted on eating at the table: “family time,” inevitably dominated by Ray’s daily catalogue of complaints. Frankly, Marguerite thought, the downloads were better company. The old movies especially. Tess liked the black-and-white ones best; she was fascinated by the antique automobiles and peculiar clothing. She’s a xenophile, Marguerite thought. Takes after me.

  But Marguerite’s video panel proved as useless as Ray’s had presumably been, and they had to make do with whatever was in the house’s resident memory. They settled on a hundred-year-old Bob Hope comedy, My Favorite Brunette. Tess, who would ordinarily have been full of questions about the twentieth century and why everything looked like that, simply picked at her food and gazed at the screen.

  Marguerite put a hand on her daughter’s forehead. “How do you feel, kiddo?”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “Just not hungry?”

  “I guess.” Tess scooted closer, and Marguerite put an arm around her.

  After dinner Marguerite cleaned up, put fresh linen on the beds, helped Tess sort out her schoolbooks. Tess flicked through the blue-screen entertainment bands in a moment of misplaced optimism, then watched the Bob Hope movie a second time, finally announced she was ready for bed. Marguerite supervised her toothbrushing and tucked her in. Marguerite liked her daughter’s room, with its small west-facing window, the bed dressed in a pink fringed comforter, the watchful ranks of stuffed animals on the dresser. It reminded her of her own room back in Ohio many years ago, minus the well-meaning volumes of Bible Stories for Children her father had installed in the vain hope that they might provoke in her a piety she had conspicuously lacked. Tessa’s books were self-selected and tended toward popular fantasy and easy science. “You want to read a while?”

  “Guess not,” Tess said.

  “I hope you feel better in the morning.”

  “I’m okay. Really.”

  Marguerite looked back as she switched the light off. Tessa’s eyes were already closed. Tess was eleven but looked younger. She still had that baby-fat cushion under her chin, the full cheeks. Her hair was darkening but still a dirty blond. Marguerite supposed a young woman was emerging from this childhood cocoon, but her features were still indistinct, difficult to predict.

  “Sleep well,” Marguerite whispered.

  Tess curled into her comforter and arched her head against the pillow.

  Marguerite closed the door. She crossed the hall to her office—a converted third bedroom—determined to get a little more work done before midnight. Each of her department heads had flagged video segments for her to review from the last twenty-four hours with the Subject. Marguerite dimmed the lights and queued the reports to her wall screen.

  Physiology and Signalling was still obsessed with the Subject’s lung louvers. “Possible Louver Gesturing in Social Interaction,” the subhead proclaimed. There was a clip of the Subject in a food well conclave. Subject stood in the dim green light of the food well in apparent interaction with another individual. The Subject’s ventral louvers, pale whitish slits on each side of his thoracic chamber, quavered with each inhalation. That was standard, and Marguerite wasn’t sure what the Physiology people wanted her to notice until new text scrolled up. The louver frills palpate in a distinct vertical pattern of some complexity during social behavior. Ah. Yes, there it was in an enlarged subscreen. The louver frills were tiny pink hairs, barely visible, but yes, they were moving like a wheat field in the wind. For comparison there was an inset of Subject breathing in a non-social environment. The louver frills flexed inward with each breath but the vertical quaver was absent.

  Potentially very interesting, Marguerite thought. She flagged the report with a priority notice, which meant Physiology and Signalling could send it up to the compilers for further analysis. She added some notes and queries of her own (Consistency? Other contexts?) and bumped it back to Hubble Plaza.

  From the Culture and Technology group, screen shots of Subject’s latest addition to his chamber walls. Here was the Subject, stretched to full height, his squat lifting legs erect as he used a manipulating arm and something that looked like a crayon to add a fresh symbol (if it was a symbol) to the symbol-string that adorned the walls of the room. This one was part of a string of sixteen progressively larger snail-shell whorls; the new one terminated with a flourish. To Marguerite it looked like something a restless child might doodle in the margin
of a notebook. The obvious inference was that the Subject was writing something, but it had been established early on that the strokes, lines, circles, crosses, dots, etc., never repeated. If they were pictographs, the Subject had never written the same word twice; if they were letters, he had yet to exhaust his alphabet. Did that mean they were art? Perhaps. Decoration? Possibly. But Culture and Technology thought this latest string suggested at least some linguistic content. Marguerite doubted it, and she flagged the report with a priority that would stack it up on the peer-review desk with a dozen similar documents.

  The rest of the backlog consisted of progress reports from the active committees and a couple of brief segments the landmarks survey team thought she might like to see: balcony views, the city stretching away beyond the Subject in a pastel afternoon, sandstone-red, layer on layer, like an empire of rusty wedding cakes. She stored these images to look at later.

  She was finished by midnight.

  She switched off her office wall and walked through the house turning off other lights until the soft dark was complete. Tomorrow was Saturday. No school for Tess. Marguerite hoped the satellite interface would be back up by morning. She didn’t want Tess to be bored, her first day back home.

  It was a clear night. Autumn was coming fast this year. Marguerite went to bed with the curtains parted. When she moved in last summer she had pushed her big, futile double bed close to the window. She liked to look at the stars before she fell asleep, but Ray had always insisted on keeping the blinds shut. Now she could indulge herself. The light of the crescent moon fell across a reef of blankets. She closed her eyes and felt weightless. Sighed once and was asleep.

  Four

  Ari Weingart, Blind Lake’s PR guy, carried a big digital clipboard. Chris Carmody worried a little bit about that. He’d seldom had good experiences with people who carried clipboards.

  Clearly, things weren’t going too well for Weingart. He had met Vogel, Elaine, and Chris outside Hubble Plaza and escorted them to his small office overlooking the central plaza. They had been halfway through a tentative first-week itinerary when Weingart took a call. Chris and company retired to a vacant conference room, where they sat until well after sunset.

  When Weingart returned he was still toting the dreaded clipboard. “There’s been a complication,” he said.

  Elaine Coster had been simmering behind a months-old print edition of Current Events. She put the magazine down and gave Weingart a level stare. “If there’s a problem with the schedule, we can work it out tomorrow. All we need right now is a place to unpack. And a reliable server. I haven’t been able to get a link through to New York since this afternoon.”

  “Well, that’s the problem. The facility is in lockdown. We have some nine hundred day workers with homes off-site, but they can’t get out and I’m afraid they have a prior claim on the guest quarters. The good news is—”

  “Hang on,” Elaine said. “Lockdown? What are you talking about?”

  “I guess you didn’t run into this problem at Crossbank, but it’s part of the security regs. If there’s any kind of threat against the facility, no traffic is allowed in or out until it’s cleared up.”

  “There’s been a threat?”

  “I’m assuming so. They don’t tell me these things. But I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  He was probably right, Chris thought. Both Crossbank and Blind Lake were designated National Laboratories, operated under security protocols that dated back to the Terror Wars. Even idle threats were taken terribly seriously. One of the drawbacks of Blind Lake’s high media profile was that it had attracted the attention of a broad spectrum of lunatics and ideologues.

  “Can you tell us the nature of the threat?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know myself. But this isn’t the first time this has happened. If experience is any guide it will all be cleared up by morning.”

  Sebastian Vogel stirred from the chair where he had been sitting in sphinxlike repose for the last hour. “And in the meantime,” he said, “where do we sleep?”

  “Well, we’ve set up—cots.”

  “Cots?”

  “In the gymnasium at the recreation facility. I know. I’m terribly sorry. It’s the best we can do on short notice. As I said, I’m sure we’ll have it all sorted out by morning.”

  Weingart frowned into his clipboard as if it might contain a last-minute reprieve. Elaine looked primed to explode, but Chris preempted her: “We’re journalists. I’m sure we’ve all slept rough one time or another.” Well, maybe not Vogel. “Right, Elaine?”

  Weingart looked at her hopefully.

  She bit back whatever she had been about to say. “I’ve slept in a tent on the Gobi Plateau. I suppose I can sleep in a fucking gym.”

  There were ranks of cots in the gym, some already occupied by displaced day workers overflowing from guest housing. Chris, Elaine, and Vogel staked out three cots under the basketball hoop and claimed them with their luggage. The pillows on the beds looked like deflated marshmallows. The blankets were Red Cross surplus.

  Vogel said to Elaine, “The Gobi Plateau?”

  “When I was writing my biography of Roy Chapman Andrews. In the Footsteps of Time: Paleobiology Then and Now. Admittedly, I was twenty-five. You ever sleep in a tent, Sebastian?”

  Vogel was sixty years old. He was pale except for the hectic red of his cheeks, and he wore shapeless sweaters to disguise the awkward generosity of his stomach and hips. Elaine disliked him—he was a parvenu, she had whispered to Chris, a fraud, practically a fucking spiritualist—and Vogel had compounded the sin with his unfailing politeness. “Algonquin Park,” he said. “Canada. A camping trip. Decades ago, of course.”

  “Looking for God?”

  “It was a coed trip. As I recall, I was looking to get laid.”

  “You were what, a divinity student?”

  “We didn’t take vows of chastity, Elaine.”

  “Doesn’t God frown on things like that?”

  “Things like what? Like sexual intercourse? Not so far as I have been able to discern, no. You should read my book.”

  “Ah, but I did.” She turned to Chris. “Have you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Sebastian is an old-fashioned mystic. God in all things.”

  “In some things more than others,” Sebastian said, which struck Chris as both cryptic and typically Sebastian.

  “Fascinating as this is,” Chris said, “I’m thinking we should get some dinner. The PR guy said there’s a place in the concourse that’s open till midnight.”

  “I’m game,” Elaine said, “as long as you promise not to pick up the waitress.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Vogel said. “Go on without me. I’ll guard the luggage.”

  “Fast, St. Francis,” Elaine said, shrugging her jacket on.

  Chris knew about Elaine’s Roy Chapman Andrews biography. He had read it as a freshman. Back then she had been an up-and-coming science journalist, shortlisted for an AAAS Westinghouse Award, charting a career path he hoped one day to follow.

  Chris’s one and only book to date had also been a biography of a sort. The nice thing about Elaine was that she had not made an issue of the book’s stormy history and seemed to have no objection to working with him. Amazing, he thought, what you learn to settle for.

  The restaurant Ari Weingart had recommended was tucked between an interface store and an office-supply shop in the open-air wing of the mallway. Most of these stores were closed for the evening, and the concourse had a vaguely derelict aspect in the cooling autumn air. But the diner, a franchise Sawyer’s Steak & Seafood, was doing a brisk business. Big crowd, lots of talk in the air. They grabbed a vinyl booth by the wide concourse window. The decor was chrome and pastel and potted plants, very late-twentieth-century, the fake reassurance of a fake antiquity. The menus were shaped like T-bones.

  Chris felt blissfully anonymous.

  “Good God,” Elaine said. “Darkest suburbia.”

  “What are
you ordering?”

  “Well, let’s see. The All-Day Breakfast? The Mom’s Comfort Meat Loaf?”

  A waiter approached in time to hear her name these offerings in a tone of high irony. “The Atlantic Salmon is good,” he said.

  “Good for what, exactly? No, never mind. The salmon will do. Chris?”

  He ordered the same, embarrassed. The waiter shrugged and walked away.

  “You can be an incredible snob, Elaine.”

  “Think about where we are. At the cutting edge of human knowledge. Standing on the shoulders of Copernicus and Galileo. So where do we eat? A truck stop with a salad bar.”

  Chris had never figured out how Elaine reconciled her close attention to food with her carefully suppressed middle-age spread. Rewarding herself with quality, he guessed. Sacrificing quantity. Balancing act. She was a Wallenda of the waistline.

  “I mean, come on,” she said, “who exactly is being snobbish here? I’m fifty years old, I know what I like, I can endure a fast-food joint or a frozen dinner, but do I really have to pretend the apple-brown-betty is crème brulée? I spent my youth drinking sour coffee from paper cups. I graduated from that.” She added, “You will, too.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “Confess. Crossbank was a washout for you.”

  “I picked up some useful material.” Or at least one totemic quote. It could end at any time. Almost a Baptist piety.

  “I have a theory about you,” Elaine said.

  “Maybe we should just eat.”

  “No, no, you don’t escape the obnoxious old harridan quite as easily as that.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Just be quiet. Have a breadstick or something. I told you I read Sebastian’s book. I read yours, too.”

  “Maybe this sounds childish, but I’d really prefer not to talk about it.”

  “All I want to say is, it’s a good book. You, Chris Carmody, wrote a good book. You did the legwork and you drew the necessary conclusions. Now you want to blame yourself for not flinching?”