Tess was soundly asleep. The empty pane in the window beside her bed was still protected by Chris’s plastic-and-veneer lash-up and the room was cozily warm. Darkness outside and in. Mirrors happily vacant. No sound but Tessa’s easy breathing.
And in the quiet of the house Marguerite realized who she was writing her narrative for. Not for herself. Certainly not for other scientists. And not for the general public.
She was writing it for Tess.
The realization was energizing; it chased away the possibility of sleep. She went back to her office, turned on the desk lamp, and brought out the notebook again. She opened it and wrote:
More than fifty years ago, on a planet so far away that no living human being can ever hope to travel there, there was a city of rock and sandstone. It was a city as large as any of our own great cities, and its towers rose high into that world’s thin, dry air. The city was built on a dusty plain, overlooked by tall mountains whose peaks were snowy even during the long summer. Someone lived there, someone who was not quite a human being, but who was a person in his own way, very different from us but in some ways much alike. The name we gave him was “Subject”…
Fifteen
Sue Sampel was beginning to enjoy her weekends again, despite the continuing lockdown.
For a while it had been a toss-up: weekdays busy but tarnished by the tantrums and weirdness of her boss; Saturday and Sunday slow and melancholy because she couldn’t hop in the car and drive into Constance for some R&R. At first she had spent her weekends restlessly stoned, until her personal stash began to run low. (Another item the black trucks weren’t delivering.) Then she borrowed a handful of Tiffany Arias novels from another support-staffer at the Plaza, five fat books about a wartime nurse in Shiugang torn between her love for an air force surveillance pilot and her secret affair with a harddrinking gunrunner. Sue liked the books okay but thought they were a poor substitute for Green Girl Canadian Label Cannabis (regularly but illegally imported from the Northern Economic Protectorate), a quarter-ounce of which she was conserving in a cookie tin in her sock drawer.
Then Sebastian Vogel showed up on her doorstep with a billet note from Ari Weingart and a battered brown suitcase.
At first sight he didn’t look promising. Cute, maybe, in a Christmas-elf kind of way, pushing sixty, a little overweight, fringe of gray hair framing his shiny bald head, a bushy red-gray beard. He was obviously shy—he stuttered when he introduced himself—and worse, Sue got the impression he was some kind of clergyman or retired priest. He promised to be “no trouble at all,” and she feared that was probably true.
She had asked Ari about him the next day. Ari said Sebastian was a retired academic, not a priest, one of the three-pack of journalists who were stranded in Blind Lake. Sebastian had written a book called God & the Quantum Vacuum—Ari lent her a copy. The book was a lot drier than a Tiffany Arias novel but considerably more substantial.
Still, Sebastian Vogel wasn’t much more than a silent partner in the household until the night he caught her rolling a joint on the kitchen table.
“Oh, my,” Sebastian said from the doorway.
It was too late to hide the cookie tin or the papers. Guiltily, Sue tried to make a joke of it. “Um,” she said, “care to join me?”
“Oh, no, I can’t—”
“No, I completely understand—”
“I can’t impose on your hospitality. But I have a half-ounce in my luggage, if you don’t mind sharing it with me.”
It got better after that.
He was fifteen years older than Sue and his birthday was January ninth. By the time that rolled around, she was sharing her bed with him. Sue liked him enormously—and he was a lot more fun than she ever would have guessed—but she also knew this was probably just a “lockdown romance,” a term she’d picked up in the staff cafeteria. Lockdown romances had sprung up all over town. The combination of cabin fever and constant anxiety turned out to be a real aphrodisiac.
His birthday fell on a Saturday, and Sue had been planning for it for weeks now. She had wanted to get him a birthday cake, but there were no boxed mixes in the store and she wasn’t about to attempt a cake from scratch. So she had done the next best thing. She had exercised her ingenuity.
She brought the cake into the dining room, a single candle planted in it. “Happy birthday,” she said.
It wasn’t really much of a cake. But it had symbolic value.
Sebastian’s small mouth curled into a smile only partially obscured by his mustache. “This is too kind! Sue, thank you!”
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“No, it’s fine!” He admired the cake. “I haven’t seen luxury food in weeks. Where did you get this?”
It wasn’t really a cake. It was a DingDong with a birthday candle stuck in it. “You don’t want to know,” Sue said.
Saturday, Sebastian had agreed to meet his friends for lunch at Sawyer’s. He asked Sue to come along.
She agreed, but not without doubts. Sue had earned a B.Sc. some twenty years ago, but all it had gotten her was a glorified clerical job at Blind Lake. She had been frozen out of too many technical discussions to relish an afternoon of science-journalist peer-talk. Sebastian assured her it wouldn’t be like that. His friends were writers, not scientists. “Outspoken but not snobbish.”
Maybe so, maybe not.
Sue drove Sebastian, who had no car of his own, to Sawyer’s, where they parked in a flurry of light snow. The wind was brisk, the sun peeking out now and again between canyons of cloud. The air inside the restaurant was sleepily warm and moist.
Sebastian introduced her to Elaine Coster, a skinny, sour-looking woman not much older than Sue herself, and Chris Carmody, considerably younger, tall and slightly grim but handsome in a ruffled way. Chris was friendly, but Elaine, after a limp handshake, said, “Well, Sebastian, there’s more to you than we suspected.”
Sue was surprised by the animosity in the woman’s voice, almost a sneer, and by Sebastian’s obvious indifference to it.
Lunch was soup and sandwiches, the post-lockdown inevitable. Sue made gracious noises but mostly listened to the others talk. They talked Blind Lake politics, including some speculation about Ray Scutter, and they worried over the perennial question of the siege. They reminisced about people she’d never heard of until Sue began to feel ignored, though Sebastian kept a hand on her thigh under the table and gave her a reassuring squeeze from time to time.
Finally there was a piece of gossip to which she felt connected. Turned out Chris was rooming with Ray Scutter’s ex, and Ray had done some macho grandstanding outside the Blind Lake clinic a couple of weeks back. It was typical Ray Scutter assholery, and Sue said so.
Elaine gave her a long, unnerving glare. “What do you know about Ray Scutter?”
“I run his office for him.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re his secretary?”
“Executive assistant. Well, yeah, secretary, basically.”
“Pretty and talented,” Elaine said to Sebastian, who merely smiled his inscrutable smile. She refocused on Sue, who resisted the urge to shrink away from the woman’s laser stare. “How much do you actually know about Ray Scutter?”
“His private life, nothing. His work, pretty much everything.”
“He talks to you about it?”
“God, no. Ray plays his cards close to his chest, mainly because he’s holding the ace of incompetency. You know how people who are out of their depth like to do all kinds of busy-work, make themselves at least look useful? That’s Ray. He doesn’t tell me anything, but half the time I have to explain his job to him.”
“You know,” Elaine said, “there are rumors about Ray.”
Or maybe, Sue thought, I’m out of my depth. “What kind of rumors?”
“That Ray wants to break into the executive servers and read people’s mail.”
“Oh. Well, that’s—”
There was a buzzing. Chris Carmody took his phone out of his poc
ket, turned away and whispered into it. Elaine gave him a poisonous look.
When he turned back to the table he said, “Sorry, people. Marguerite needs me to look after her daughter.”
“Jesus,” Elaine said, “is everybody setting up housekeeping in this fucking place? What are you now, a baby-sitter?”
“Some kind of emergency, Marguerite says.” He stood up.
“Go, go.” She rolled her eyes. Sebastian nodded amiably.
“Pleasure meeting you,” Chris said to Sue.
“You, too.” He seemed nice enough, if a little distracted. He was certainly better company than Elaine with the X-ray vision.
Which Elaine focused on her as soon as Chris walked away from the table. “So it’s true? Ray’s doing some illicit hacking?”
“I don’t know about illicit. He’s planning to make it public. The idea is, pre-lockdown messages on the senior servers might give us a clue to what caused all this.”
“If some kind of message went out before the lockdown, how come Ray didn’t get one?”
“He was low man on the management totem pole before everybody left for the Cancun conference. Plus he’s new here. He had contacts at Crossbank, but not what you’d call friends. Ray doesn’t make friends.”
“This gives him the right to break into secure servers?”
“He thinks so.”
“He thinks so, but has he actually done anything about it?”
Sue considered her position. Talking to the press would be a great way to get herself fired. No doubt Elaine would promise total anonymity. (Or money, if she asked for it. Or the moon.) But promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash. I may be stupid, Sue thought, but I’m not nearly as stupid as this woman seems to think.
She considered Sebastian. Did Sebastian want her to talk about this?
She gave him a questioning look. Sebastian sat back in his chair with his hands clasped over his stomach, a spot of mustard adorning his beard. Enigmatic as a stuffed owl. But he nodded at her.
Okay.
Okay. She’d do it for him, not this Elaine.
She licked her lips. “Shulgin was in the building yesterday with a computer guy.”
“Cracking servers?”
“What do you think? But it’s not like I caught them in the act.”
“What kind of results did they get?”
“None, as far as I know. They were still there after I went home Friday.” They might still be there, Sue thought. Sifting silicon for gold.
“If they find something interesting, will that information pass over your desk?”
“No.” She smiled. “But it’ll pass over Ray’s.”
Sebastian looked suddenly troubled. “This is all very interesting,” he said, “but don’t let Elaine talk you into anything dangerous.” His hand was on her thigh again, communicating some message she couldn’t decipher. “Elaine has her own best interests at heart.”
“Fuck off, Sebastian,” Elaine said.
Sue was mildly scandalized. More so because Sebastian just nodded and put that Buddha-like smile back on his face.
“I might see something like that,” Sue said. “Or I might not.”
“If you do—”
“Elaine, Elaine,” Sebastian said. “Don’t push your luck.”
“I’ll think about it,” Sue said. “Okay? Good enough? Can we talk about something else now?”
They had drained their carafe of coffee and the waitress hadn’t come around with more. Elaine began shrugging her shoulders into her jacket. Sebastian said, “By the way, I was asked to give a little presentation at the community center for one of Ari’s social nights.”
“Hawking your book?” Elaine asked.
“In a way. Ari’s having a hard time filling up those Saturday slots. He’ll probably ask you next.”
Sue enjoyed seeing Elaine flinch from this proposition. “Thanks, but I have better things to do.”
“I’ll let you tell Ari that yourself.”
“I’ll put it in writing if he likes.”
Sebastian excused himself and wandered off to the men’s room. After an awkward silence Sue, still miffed, said, “Maybe you don’t like Sebastian’s writing, but he deserves a little respect.”
“Have you read his book?”
“Yes.”
“Have you really? What’s it about?”
Sue found herself blushing. “It’s about the quantum vacuum. The quantum vacuum as a medium for, uh, a kind of intelligence…” And how what we call human consciousness is actually our ability to tap a little tiny bit of that universal mind. But she couldn’t begin to say that to Elaine. She already felt painfully foolish.
“No,” Elaine said. “Sorry, wrong. It’s about telling people something simplistic and reassuring, dressed up in pseudoscientific bullshit. It’s about a semiretired academic making pots of money and doing it in the most cynical way possible. Oh—”
Sebastian had crept up behind her, and judging by his expression he had heard every word. “Honestly, Elaine, that’s too much.”
“Don’t get all huffy, Sebastian. Have your publishers tapped you for a sequel yet? What are you calling it? The Quantum Vacuum Twelve-Step Program? Financial Security the Quantum Vacuum Way?”
Sebastian opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. He didn’t look angry, Sue thought. He looked hurt.
“Honestly,” he repeated.
Elaine stood up, buttoning her jacket. “You kids have fun.” She hesitated, then turned back and put a hand on Sue’s shoulder. “Okay, I know I’m an awful bitch. I’m sorry. Thank you for putting up with me. I do appreciate what you said about Ray.”
Sue shrugged—she couldn’t think of an answer.
Sebastian was quiet during the drive back. Almost sulking. She couldn’t wait to get home and roll him a joint.
Sixteen
Chris found Marguerite in her upstairs office, shouting into her pocket phone. The direct feed from the Eye filled the wall monitor.
The image looked bad to Chris. It looked degraded—streaked with spurious lines and fleeting white pin-pricks. Worse, the Subject was struggling through some intensely bad weather, ribbons of ochre and rust, a dust storm so fierce it threatened to obscure him altogether.
“No,” Marguerite was saying. “I don’t care what they’re saying at the Plaza. Come on, Charlie, you know what this means! No! I’ll be there. Soon.” She saw Chris and added, “Fifteen minutes.”
The original high-altitude mapping of UMa47/E had shown seasonal dust storms of almost Martian intensity, primarily in the southern hemisphere. This one must be anomalous, Chris thought, since Subject had not journeyed more than a hundred miles from Lobsterville, and Lobsterville was well north of the equator. Or maybe it was perfectly natural, part of some long-term cycle early surveillance had missed.
Subject pushed into the opaque air, torso bent forward. His image faded, clarified, faded again. “Charlie’s afraid they’ll lose him altogether,” Marguerite said. “I’m going out to the Eye.”
Chris followed her downstairs. Tess was in the living room watching Blind Lake TV’s Saturday matinee. An animated feature: rabbits with huge eyeglasses growing carrots in medieval beakers and alembics. Her head bounced gently and rhythmically against the sofa.
“You said we could go sledding,” Tess called out.
“Honey, it’s a work emergency. I told you. Chris will look after you, ’kay?”
“I suppose I could take her sledding,” Chris said. “It’s a long walk, though.”
“Really?” Tess asked. “Can we?”
Marguerite pursed her lips. “I guess, but I don’t want you hiking there and back. Mrs. Colangelo said we could borrow her car if we needed it—Chris can look into that.”
He promised he’d ask. Tess was mollified, and Marguerite shrugged into her winter jacket. “If I’m not back by dinner there’s food in the freezer. Be creative.”
“How serious is the problem?”
&nb
sp; “It took a lot of delicate work training the O/BECs to fix on a single individual. If we lose him in the storm we might not get him back. Worse, there’s a lot of signal degradation happening, and Charlie doesn’t know what’s causing it.”
“You think you can help?”
“Not with the engineering. But there are people in the Plaza who’d love to use this as an opportunity to pull back from the Subject. I don’t want that to happen. I’m running interference.”
“Good luck.”
“Thank you. And thanks for keeping Tess company. One way or another, I’ll be back before her bedtime.”
She hurried out the door.
In the interest of journalistic brotherhood, Chris called Elaine and told her about the developing crisis at the Eye. She said she’d find out what she could. “Things are getting strange,” she said. “I’m getting that batten-down-the-hatches feeling.”
He had to admit he was a little skittish himself. Almost four months of quarantine now, and no matter how you tried to ignore it or rationalize it, that meant something monumentally bad was happening—maybe outside, maybe inside. Something bad, something dangerous, something hidden that would eventually come screaming into the light.
Mrs. Colangelo managed the clothing store in the Blind Lake retail mall and she had been effectively retired since the lockdown. She let him borrow her little lime-green Marconi roadster, and Tess loaded her old-fashioned wooden sled into the back. Most kids used inner tubes or plastic skids, Tess explained, but she’d spotted this sled (actually a toboggan, she insisted) in a thrift shop and begged her mother to buy it. This was back at Crossbank, which was hillier than Blind Lake but heavily wooded—at least out here she wouldn’t run into any trees.
Tess was still something of a cipher to Chris. She reminded him of his sister Portia in many (maybe too many) ways—her willfulness, her unpredictability, her spiky moods. But Porry had been a great talker, especially when she picked up some new enthusiasm. Tess spoke only sporadically.
Tess was silent for the first five minutes of the ride, but apparently she had also been thinking of Portia: “Did your sister ever go sledding?” she asked.
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