Even to the Subject’s death, if it came to that. And it might.
Early on, she conceived the idea of writing the Subject’s odyssey, not analytically, but as what it had become: a story. Not for publication, of course. She’d be violating the protocols of objectivity, indulging all kinds of conscious and unconscious anthropocentrism. Anyway, she wasn’t a writer, or at least not that kind of writer. This was purely for her own satisfaction…and because she believed the Subject deserved it. After all, this was a real life they had invaded. In the privacy of her writing she could give him back his stolen dignity.
She began the project in a spiral-bound blue school notebook. Tess was asleep (she had come back from her father’s two days ago, after a disappointing Christmas) and Chris was downstairs messing up the kitchen or raiding her library. It was a precious moment, hallowed in silence. A time when she could practice the black art of empathy. When she could freely admit that she cared about the fate of this creature so unknowable and so intimately known.
Subject’s last days in the city [Marguerite wrote] were disturbed and episodic.
He manned his workstation at the usual time, but his food conclaves became briefer and more perfunctory. He descended the stairs into the food well slowly, and in the dim light of the evening conclaves he took less than the customary amount of cultivated crops. He spent more time scraping moldlike growths from the damp well walls, sucking the residue from his food claws.
Normally this was a time of intense social interaction; the wells were crowded; but the Subject kept his face to the stone wall, and his visible signaling motions (cilia-waving, head gestures) were minimal.
His sleep was disturbed, too, which in turn seemed to disturb the small creatures that fed on his blood nipples at night.
The place of these wall-dwelling animals in Subject’s culture or ecology is not well understood. They might have been parasites, but since they were universally tolerated they were more likely symbionts or even a stage in the reproductive cycle. Perhaps their feeding stimulated desirable immune responses—at least, that was one theory. Shortly before his departure, however, the feeders seemed repelled by the sleeping Subject. They tasted him, skittered away, then came back to try again with the same result. Meanwhile, Subject was restless and moved several times during the night in an uncharacteristic manner.
He spent his last night in the city in a sleepless vigil on a high exterior balcony of the communal tower in which he lived. It was tempting to read both loneliness and resolve into these behaviors. [Forbidden, but tempting, Marguerite thought.] Subject’s life had clearly changed, and perhaps not for the better.
Then he left the city.
It looked like a spontaneous decision. He left his warren, left his home tower, and walked directly through the eastern gate of the aboriginal city into a clear blue morning. In the sunlight his thick skin glittered like polished leather. Subject was a dusky shade of red over most of his body, a dark red merging into black at the major body joints, and his yellow dorsal crest stood up like a crown of flame as he walked.
The city was surrounded by an enormous acreage of agricultural land. Canals and aqueducts carried irrigation water from the snowy mountains in the north to these fields. The system lost enormous amounts of moisture to evaporation in the dry, thin air, but the trickle that remained was enough to nourish miles-long avenues of succulent plants. The plants were thick-skinned, olive-green, and consisted of a few basic and similar types. Their stems were sturdy, the leaves as broad as dinner plates and as thick as pancakes. Taller than the Subject, they cast variegated shadows over him as he walked.
Subject followed the dirt-pack road, a wide avenue lapped with drainage ditches and verdant midsummer crops. He displayed no social interaction with either the sap-stained laborers in the fields or the foot traffic along the way. Shortly after he left the city he detoured into a cultivated plot of ground, where he was ignored by farm laborers as he pulled several large leaves from a mature plant, wrapped them in a broader, flatter fan leaf, and tucked them into a pouch in his lower abdomen. A picnic lunch? Or provisions for a longer journey?
For much of the morning he was forced to walk along the less-busy margin of the road, out of the way of traffic. According to planetary maps prepared before the O/BECs focused on a single Subject, this road ran east into the drylands for almost a hundred kilometers, veered north through a line of low mountains (foothills of a taller range) and east again until, after a few hundred kilometers of sparsely vegetated high plains it reached another aboriginal city, the as-yet-unnamed 33° latitude, 42° longitude urban cluster. 33/42 was a smaller city than Subject’s own but an established trading partner.
Big trucks passed in both directions—huge platforms equipped with simple but refined and effective motors, riding on immense solid rollers rather than wheels. (This might have been an example of aboriginal efficiency. The trucks maintain the pressed-earth roads simply by driving on them.) And there was plenty of foot traffic, pairs and triads and larger clusters of waddling individuals. But no other solitaries. Did a unique journey imply a unique destination?
By midday Subject reached the end of the agricultural land. The road widened as the walls of succulent plants dropped behind. The horizon was flat dead ahead and mountainous to the north. The mountains shimmered in waves of rising heat. When the sun reached its apex Subject stopped for a meal. He left the road and walked a few hundred yards to a shady formation of tall basaltic stones, where he urinated copiously into the sandy soil, then climbed one of the rocky pedestals and stood facing north. The atmosphere between Subject and the mountains was white with suspended dust, and the snowy peaks seemed to hover over the desert basin.
He might have been resting, or he might have been sensing the air or planning the next stage of his journey. He was motionless for almost an hour. Then he walked back to the road and resumed his journey, pausing to drink from a roadside ditch.
He walked at a steady pace through the afternoon. By nightfall he had passed the last evidence of cultivation—old fields gone fallow, irrigation canals filled and obscured with windblown sand—and entered the desert basin between the northern mountains and the far southern sea. Traffic on the road moved in diurnal surges, and he had fallen behind the last of the day’s vehicular traffic. He was alone, and his pace slowed with the approach of night. It was an unusually clear evening. A fast, small moon slid up from the eastern horizon, and Subject looked for a place to sleep.
He scouted for some minutes until he found a sandy depression sheltered in the lee of a rocky outcrop. He curled into an almost fetal posture there, his ventral surfaces protected from the cooling air. His body slowed to its usual nightly catatonia.
When the moon had crossed three-quarters of the sky a number of small insectile creatures emerged from a nest hidden in the sand. They were immediately attracted by the Subject, by his smell, perhaps, or the rhythm of his breathing.
They were smaller than the nocturnal symbionts of his native city. They carried distinct thoracic bulges and they moved on two extra sets of legs. But they fed in the same fashion, and without hesitation, from the Subject’s blood-nipples.
They were still there (sated, perhaps) when Subject woke to the first light of morning. Some of them still clung to his body as he stood up. Carefully, fastidiously, Subject picked them off and tossed them away. The discarded creatures lay motionless but uninjured until the sun warmed their bodies; then they burrowed back into the sand, pink fantails vanishing with a flourish.
Subject continued to follow the road.
When she looked at her first entry Marguerite was unhappy with what she had written.
Not because it was incorrect, though of course it was—it was outrageously, deliciously incorrect. Errors of attribution everywhere. The social scientists would be appalled. But she was tired of objectivity. Her own project, her private project, was to put herself in the Subject’s place. How else did human beings understand one another? “Look at it
from my point of view,” people said. Or, “If I were in your place…” It was an imaginative act so commonplace as to be invisible. People who couldn’t do it or refused to do it were called psychotics or sociopaths.
But when we look at the aboriginals, Marguerite thought, we’re supposed to pretend to indifference. To an aloofness almost Puritanical in its austerity. Am I tainted if I admit I care whether the Subject lives or dies?
Most of her colleagues would say yes. Marguerite entertained the heretical idea that they might be wrong.
Still, the narrative was missing something. It was hard to know what to say or, especially, how to say it. Who was she writing for? Herself alone, or did she have an audience in mind?
A couple of weeks had passed since the Subject left the city—the time when Tess had cut her hand so badly. If she carried on with this there would be a great deal more to write. Marguerite was alone in her study, bent over her notebook, but at the thought of Tess she raised her head, sampling the night sounds in the town house.
Chris was still awake downstairs. Chris had made his own space in the house. He slept in the basement, was gone most of the day, took his evening meals at Sawyer’s and used the kitchen and the living room mainly after Tessa’s bedtime. His presence was unobtrusive, sometimes even comforting. (There: the sound of the refrigerator door closing, the rattle of a dish.) Chris always looked distressed when he worked, like a man struggling desperately to recapture a lost train of thought. But he would often work unceasingly, long into the night.
And he had been a help with Tess. More than a help. Chris wasn’t one of those adults who condescend to children or try to impress them. He seemed comfortable with Tess, spoke freely to her, wasn’t offended by her occasional silences or sulks. He hadn’t made a big deal of Tessa’s problems.
Even Tess had seemed a little happier with Chris in the house.
But the accident with her hand had been troubling. At first Tess would only say that she had leaned too hard on the window, but Marguerite knew better: a window at night in a lighted room was as good as a mirror.
And it wasn’t the first mirror Tess had broken.
She had broken three back at Crossbank. The therapist had talked about “unexpressed rage,” but Tess never described Mirror Girl as hostile or frightening. She broke the mirrors, she said, because she was tired of Mirror Girl showing up unannounced—“I like to see myself when I look in the mirror.” Mirror Girl was intrusive, often unwelcome, frequently annoying, but something less than an outright nightmare.
It was the blood that had made this time seem so much scarier.
Marguerite had asked her about it the day after they came back from the clinic. The painkiller had left Tess a little sleepy and she spent all that afternoon in bed, occasionally glancing at a book but too scattered to read for long. Marguerite sat at her bedside. “I thought we were all done with that,” she said. “Breaking things.” Not accusatory. Just curious.
“I leaned on the window,” Tess repeated, but she must have sensed Marguerite’s skepticism, because she sighed and said in a smaller voice, “she just took me by surprise.”
“Mirror Girl?”
Nod.
“Has she been back lately?”
“No,” Tess said; then, “not very much. That’s why she took me by surprise.”
“Have you thought about what Dr. Leinster said back at Crossbank?”
“Mirror Girl’s not real. She’s like some part of me I don’t want to see.”
“You think that’s right?”
Tess shrugged.
“Well, what do you really think?”
“I think, if I don’t want to see her, why does she keep coming back?”
Good question, Marguerite thought. “Does she still look like you?”
“Exactly like.”
“So how do you know it’s her?”
Tess shrugged. “Her eyes.”
“What about her eyes?”
“Too big.”
“What does she want, Tess?” Hoping her daughter didn’t hear the edge of anxiety in her voice. The catch in her throat. Something is wrong with my girl. My baby.
“I think she just wants me to pay attention.”
“To what, Tess? To her?”
“No, not just to her. To everything. Everything, all the time.”
“You remember what Dr. Leinster taught you?”
“Calm down and wait for her to go away.”
“Does that still work?”
“I guess. Sometimes I forget.”
Dr. Leinster had told Marguerite that Tessa’s symptoms were unusual but stopped well short of the kind of systematic delusion that might point to schizophrenia. No drastic mood swings, no aggressive behavior, good orientation to time and place, emotional affect a little muted but not off the scale, reasonable insight into her problem, no obvious neurochemical imbalance. All that psychiatric bullshit, which boiled down to Dr. Leinster’s last banal verdict: most likely she’ll grow out of it.
But Dr. Leinster hadn’t had to wash Tessa’s blood-soaked pajamas.
Marguerite looked back at her journal. Her act of illicit storytelling. Still not up to date: there was nothing about the East Road Ruins, for instance…but enough for tonight.
Downstairs, she found the lights still burning. Chris was in the kitchen eating rye toast and leafing through last September’s copy of Astrogeological Review, leaning back in one chair and resting his feet on another. “I’m just down for a nightcap,” Marguerite said. “Don’t mind me.”
Orange juice and a dab of vodka, which she resorted to when she felt too restless to sleep. Like tonight. She pulled out a third chair from the kitchen table and put her slippered feet up next to Chris’s. “Long day?” she asked.
“I had another meeting with Charlie Grogan out at the Eye,” Chris said.
“So how’s Charlie taking all this?”
“The siege? He doesn’t care too much about that, though he says he’s feeding Boomer ground beef these days. No dog food coming in on the trucks. Mostly he’s worried about the Eye.”
“What about the Eye?”
“They had another little cascade of technical glitches while I was out there.”
“Really? I didn’t get a memo about it.”
“Charlie says it’s just the usual blinks and nods, but it’s been happening more often lately—power surges and some ragged I/O. I think what’s really bothering him is the possibility somebody might pull the plug. He’s nursed those O/BECs so long they’re like children to him.”
“It’s just BS,” Marguerite said, “all this talk about shutting down the Eye,” but she didn’t sound convincing even to herself. She made an awkward attempt to change the subject: “You don’t usually talk about your work much.”
She had already finished half the drink and she felt the alcohol working through her body ridiculously quickly, making her sleepy, making her reckless.
“I try to keep it away from you and Tess,” Chris said. “I’m grateful to be here at all. I don’t want to spread my troubles around.”
“It’s all right. We’ve known each other what, more than a month now? But I’m pretty sure whatever people say about your book isn’t true. You don’t strike me as dishonest or vicious.”
“Dishonest and vicious? Is that what people say?”
Margaret blushed.
But Chris was smiling. “I’ve heard it all before, Marguerite.”
“I’d like to read the book sometime.”
“Nobody can download it since the lockup. Maybe that works to my advantage.” His smile became less convincing. “I can give you a copy.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“And I appreciate the vote of confidence. Marguerite?”
“What?”
“How would you feel about giving me an interview? About Blind Lake, the siege, how you fit in?”
“Oh, God.” It wasn’t what she had expected him to say. But what had she expected him to sa
y? “Well, not tonight.”
“No, not tonight.”
“The last time anyone interviewed me it was the high school paper. About my science project.”
“Good project?”
“Blue ribbon. Scholarship prize. All about mitochondrial DNA, back when I thought I wanted to be a geneticist. Pretty heavy stuff for a clergyman’s daughter.” She yawned. “I really do have to sleep.”
Impulsively—or maybe drunkenly—Marguerite put her hand on the table, palm up. It was a gesture he could reasonably ignore. And no harm done if he did ignore it.
Chris looked at her hand, maybe a few seconds too long. Then he covered it with his own. Willingly? Grudgingly?
She liked the way his palm felt on hers. No adult male had held her hand since she left Ray, not that Ray had been much of a hand-holder. She discovered she couldn’t look Chris in the eye. She let the moment linger; then she pulled back, grinning sheepishly. “Gotta go,” she said.
“Sleep well,” Chris Carmody said.
“You too,” she told him, wondering what she was getting herself into.
Before she turned in she gave the direct feed from the Eye a last look.
Nothing much was doing. Subject continued his two-week-old odyssey. He was far along the eastern road, walking steadily into another morning. His skin looked increasingly dull as the days passed, but that was probably just ambient dust. There had been no rain for months now, but that was typical of a summer in these latitudes.
Even the sun seemed dimmer, until Margaret realized that the haze was unusually thick today, and particularly thick to the northeast, almost like an approaching squall line. She could ask Meteorology about it, she guessed. Tomorrow.
Finally, before she took herself to bed, Marguerite peeked into Tessa’s room.
Blind Lake Page 14
