Blind Lake

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “I was at Crossbank,” Tess declared. “Last year. I don’t remember a starfish.”

  “Yeah, but that was before. Even at the time there weren’t a lot of pictures. At first they tried to keep it out of the press. But there was amateur video circulating, and then another one popped up in Georgia and suddenly the whole world knew it was happening, even if they didn’t know what was happening. There was a faction in congress wanted to nuke the starfish outright. Karen was horrified by that idea. So help me, she thought they were beautiful.”

  “Beautiful?”

  “The starfish. Especially the Crossbank starfish. The size of it, like the biggest and most perfect thing you ever saw, and all the spines and arches made of whatever they’re made of, like mother-of-pearl, with rainbows built in. You knew you were looking at something special, but some people thought it was holy and the rest of us figured it was 666 and the Four Horsemen put together. Karen fell into the first category and I fell into the second. Maybe if you’re depressed something like that begins to look like salvation. But if all you want is to hang on to your life and wrestle it back to normal, it’s just another threat and a distraction.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I guess you had to see it from the beginning. Especially the big starfish that grew at Crossbank where that peculiar telescope used to be. Karen got more and more agitated the more she watched it on the nets, the soldiers everywhere and the roads closed and all those foreign countries wanting to know what hellish thing we had cooked up, and was it dangerous, and of course nobody could answer either question. You know what surprised me about Karen? The energy she had all of a sudden—this woman who hadn’t climbed off the sofa for six months. She’d been getting pretty heavyset despite the bathroom calls and the pills, but she perked up fast. I’m not absolutely sure she wasn’t palming her medication. She seemed to think it didn’t matter anymore if she lived or died: it was trivial, what happened to her. She didn’t talk about these things, you understand, but she was obviously real interested when the government admitted it had lost several human beings and a shitload, pardon me, of robots inside the starfish at Crossbank. You could walk inside that thing or you could send a remote with a camera, but the cameras always died and the people who went inside too far just never came back.”

  Tess walked to the window, which was dark and obscure with snow. She could imagine Mr. Sandoval’s “starfish” surprisingly clearly. A cloistered maze, like a snowflake, she thought, unfolded in three dimensions. She could almost see it in the clouded window glass. She looked away hastily.

  “What happened to Mrs. Sandoval?” she asked.

  “Karen took off one day in our old Ford. No explanation, no note, nothing. Of course, I was frantic about it. I talked to the police several times, but I guess the police had their hands full what with all the people heading west before the Mississippi roadblocks came down. Eventually I got word she’d been arrested with a handful of so-called pilgrims trying to cross into the no-go zone around Crossbank. Then the police called back and said it was a mistake, she hadn’t been arrested, although she’d been with that group; she was one of a dozen or so who managed to get through the blockade on an old Ozark hiking trail. It’s strange to me, picturing Karen out in the woods climbing rocks and drinking out of streams. She never even liked a backyard barbecue, for Christ’s sake. Complained about the mosquitos. I swear I don’t know why she wanted to be out in the woods like that.”

  “Did she go inside the starfish?”

  “So they tell me. I wasn’t there.”

  “And she didn’t come out?”

  “She didn’t come out.” Mr. Sandoval’s voice had gone flat.

  Tess thought about this. “Did she die?”

  “Well, she didn’t come out. That’s all I know. That’s what made me a little crazy, I guess.”

  Tess was vaguely alarmed that he was still motionless in his bed. “Mr. Sandoval, if you can’t move, maybe I should call a doctor.”

  “I can’t move. Like I said, I’m not even sure I’m awake. But I’m pretty sure I don’t need a doctor.”

  “Honest?”

  “Honest.”

  “Why did you come to Blind Lake?”

  “To kill whatever’s growing here.”

  Tess was shocked. Like Dad, she thought. Mr. Sandoval had come here to kill Mirror Girl.

  She backed away a step.

  “It seems frankly crazy to me,” he said. “Lying here and thinking back. Funny what you do when you’ve lost someone and you don’t know who to blame. It was too late to do anything about Crossbank, obviously, but Blind Lake had been in the news, the fact that it was shut down in case the same thing happened here. That pissed me off. They ought to bomb the place, I thought. If there’s even a chance. Bomb it out of creation. But no, there was just the quarantine. It seemed way too chickenshit. I apologize for my vocabulary.”

  “It’s okay,” Tess said. “But if they’d bombed us we’d all be dead.”

  As she said it she wondered whether it was true. Maybe Mirror Girl wouldn’t have let the bombs fall. Could Mirror Girl do that?

  Mirror Girl seemed awfully close right now. Don’t look at the window, Tess instructed herself. But the wind rattled the glass, as if to attract her attention, as if to say, Look at me, look at me.

  “I guess I know that now,” Mr. Sandoval said. “I guess I was a little crazy at the time. I thought I could climb into my plane, post a flight plan through Fargo and up into Manitoba, make a little detour at the right place…I was gonna fly right into your telescope, do as much damage as possible and kill myself at the same time.”

  This was true, Tess realized. Motes of Mr. Sandoval’s old anger hung in the air above his bed, like snowflakes. It was adult and mysterious and somehow childish at the same time. The plan was like something Edie Jerundt might have come up with. But the anger and the grief were wholly adult. If Mr. Sandoval’s emotions had a smell, Tess thought, they’d smell like something broken and electric. Like overheated wires and blackening plastic.

  “Of course,” Mr. Sandoval said, “it’s too late for that now.”

  “Yes. They shot down your plane.”

  “No, I mean it’s already started. Can’t you feel it?”

  Tess was afraid she could.

  Marguerite meant only to find out what had excited the Obs people out at the Eye. The clinic building was nearly deserted. Dr. Goldhar had left after stitching and stabilizing Sue; Rosalie Bleiler and a couple of paramedics were on night duty, plus the security and housekeeping people. Marguerite checked doors until she found an empty boardroom. Inside, she closed the door for privacy—she felt furtive, though she was doing nothing wrong—and linked her pocket server to the room’s ample display screen.

  The live feed from the Eye came up quickly and crisply.

  Looked like late afternoon on UMa47/E. Afternoon winds kicked dust into the air, turning the sky abalone white. Subject appeared to be continuing his enigmatic odyssey, walking a series of shallow, eroded canyons, just as he had the day before and the day before that. What was so unusual? There were no text tags from the DA people, nothing to explain their apparent excitement.

  The sheer clarity of the image, perhaps? Maybe the clinic had installed a more modern display; the image was as vivid as Marguerite had ever seen it, even at the monitors out at the Eye. Clean as a window. She could see the dust clinging to the Subject’s coxcomb, each particulate grain of it. She could almost feel the desiccating breeze on her face.

  This creature, she thought. This thing. This enigma.

  Subject followed an ancient arroyo around another sinuous curve, and suddenly Marguerite saw what the Data Acquisition team must have spotted earlier—something so strange she took a step backward and almost tumbled over a conference room chair.

  Something exceedingly strange. Something artificial. Possibly even his destination, object of the Subject’s quest.

  It was obvious why this structur
e hadn’t been spotted in the high-altitude surveys. It was large but not ridiculously large, and its spines and columns were covered with years if not centuries of dust. It shimmered in the morning sunlight like a mirage.

  Subject moved into the shadow of this structure, walking more quickly than he had for many days. Marguerite imagined she could hear his big splayed feet scuffing against the pebbly desert floor.

  But what was this thing, big as a cathedral, so obviously ancient and so obviously neglected? What had made the Subject travel so far to find it?

  Please, she thought, not one more mystery, not one more unfathomable act….

  Subject passed beneath the first of the great spinal arches, into a softening shade.

  “What do you want here?” Marguerite said aloud.

  Subject turned and looked at her. His eyes were huge, solemn, and pearly white.

  A thin, dry wind tousled the loose strands of Marguerite’s hair. She fell to her knees in astonishment, grasping for the conference room table, anything to support her weight. But there was only grit under the palm of her hand, the dust of ages, the desiccated surface of UMa47/E.

  Twenty-Eight

  When the floor moved under his feet and the klaxons began to signal the evacuation of the Eye, Ray was dismayed but not surprised. It was inevitable. Something was awake, and something didn’t like what Ray had come to do.

  But he had been groomed for this confrontation. That was increasingly obvious to him. Ray wasn’t a great believer in fate, but in this case it was an idea with a great deal of explanatory power. All kinds of life experiences that had seemed mysterious at the time—the years of academic infighting, his deep skepticism about the functioning of the Eye, his first initiation so many years ago into the rites of death—made sense to him now. Even his ridiculous marriage to Marguerite, her sullen stubbornness and her unwillingness to compromise on anything that was important to him. Her sentimental ideas about the natives of UMa47/E. These were the stones against which Ray had been whetted like a blade.

  “Blade” provoked an unwelcome memory of the events at Sue Sampel’s house. That had been purely reflexive; he had never meant to physically hurt her. She had infuriated him with that insolent, screechy laugh; and he had pushed her, and the blade had appeared in her hand and he had been forced to wrestle it away; and then, after a thoughtless moment, there had been blood. God, how he hated blood. But even that awful encounter had been a tutelary experience, Ray thought. It had proven that he was capable of a bold, transgressive act.

  He was familiar enough with the layout of the Alley that he was able to locate the central elevator bank. Two of the four elevators sat empty, doors opening and closing like spastic eyelids.

  The tremor that had shaken the floor had subsided now. An earthquake in this part of the country was unlikely but not impossible. But Ray doubted the tremor had been caused by an earthquake. Something was happening down below, down in the deeps of the Eye.

  The night staff had obviously been well-rehearsed for an emergency evacuation. Staff poured out of the stairwells two-by-two, seeming alarmed but basically calm, probably telling themselves the tremor had stopped and the evac was a formality. One gimlet-eyed woman spotted Ray where he stood by the elevators, approached him, and said, “We’re supposed to go directly to the exit, not back down into the works. And we’re definitely not supposed to use the elevators.”

  Fucking hall monitor, Ray thought. He flashed the stolen all-pass card and said, “Just leave the building as quickly as possible.”

  “But we were told—”

  “Unless you want to lose your job, run along. Otherwise give me your name and badge number.”

  The voice of authority. She winced and departed with a wounded look. Ray stepped into the nearest elevator and pushed the sublevel-five button, the closest approach to the O/BEC gallery. He assumed he had a certain margin of time in which to work. Once the civilian staff had left the building Shulgin would dispatch a crew of inspectors, but the storm would slow that process to a crawl.

  Klaxons reverberated deep in the courses in which the elevators rose and fell. He was four stories under the Minnesota prairie when the sirens fell silent, the elevator stalled in its shaft, and the lights winked off.

  Power failure. In a few seconds the backup systems would kick in.

  Even now, Ray thought, shouldn’t there be emergency lights?

  Apparently not. The darkness was absolute.

  He took his server out of his pocket, but even that device had ceased to glow. He might as well have been blind.

  Ray had never liked dark, enclosed spaces.

  He put his hands out to orient himself. He backed into a corner of the elevator, adjoining walls to his left and right. The burnished aluminum surfaces were cold and inert to the touch.

  This won’t last, he told himself. And if the power failure did continue, it could only be bad news for the O/BECs. The pumps would fail, the liquid helium would stop flowing, the temperature in the platens would rise above the critical –451 Fahrenheit. But a dissenting voice inside him said, The fucking thing’s got you now.

  Hang on, he told himself. He had arrived at the Eye full of certainty and with a sense of his own power: he had come here by a series of irrevocable steps, fueled by his conviction that the O/BECs were source of everything that had gone wrong at Blind Lake. But the building had stolen his momentum. He was locked in a box, and his confidence began to seep away into the darkness.

  I’m not here for myself, Ray thought. He had to keep that in mind. He was here because the gullible children who had been placed under his charge were playing with a dangerous machine, and he meant to stop them whether they liked it or not. That was essentially a selfless act. More than that: it was redemptive. Ray had made a mistake at Sue Sampel’s house and he was prepared to admit it. He took a certain pride in his willingness to look at a problem realistically. Maybe everyone else had been blinded by cupidity, denial, or fear. Not Ray. The device in this building had become a threat and he was going to deal with it. He was performing an act of such fundamental moral necessity that it would wash clean any mistakes he might have made in the process.

  Unless he had come too late. The elevator was motionless, but Ray imagined he could hear the building creak and groan around him, deforming in the darkness. Whatever we woke up, Ray thought, it’s powerful; it’s strong, and it’s gaining a sense of its own strength.

  Methodically, he rolled up one leg of his trousers. Ray had left Sue’s with the bloody knife still clutched in his hand. He hadn’t wanted to let it go or leave it behind. The knife, the act of using it as a weapon, had made what followed both possible and necessary. That was when he had formulated his plan to penetrate the Eye using Charlie Grogan’s all-pass tag. He had started driving to Charlie’s with the knife next to him on the passenger-side seat of the car, an untouchable thing decorated with threads of Sue Sampel’s blood. Then he had pulled over to the side of the road, wiped the knife clean with a disposable tissue, and carefully strapped the blade to the calf of his left leg with a roll of duct tape from the glove compartment. It had seemed like a fine idea at the time.

  Now he wanted the knife in his hand, ready to use. Worse, he couldn’t help thinking that he might have left some blood on the blade after all; and the idea of Sue Sampel’s blood touching his skin, invading his pores, was grotesque and intolerable. But in the absolute darkness of the stalled elevator he had a hard time finding the loose edge of the tape. He had wrapped himself up like a fucking mummy.

  Nor had he given much thought to the physical problem of peeling what seemed like a quarter-mile of duct tape off his hairy leg. He was almost certainly taking some skin off along with it. He drew deep, gasping breaths, the way Marguerite had learned to do in that Lamaze class they had attended before Tessa’s birth. He was leaking tears by the time the last layer of tape came loose, and when he jerked that away it took the knife with it, slicing a neat little chunk out of his calf along the ank
le.

  That was too much. Ray screamed in pain and frustration, and his screaming made the stalled elevator seem much smaller, unbearably small. He opened his eyes wide, straining for light—he had heard that the human eye could register even a single photon—but there was nothing, only the sting of his own sweat.

  I could die here, he thought, and that would be very bad; or, worse, what if he was wrong about the Eye, what if Shulgin found him here after the crisis had passed, raving and with an incriminating weapon in his hand? The knife, the fucking knife. He couldn’t keep it and he couldn’t get rid of it.

  What if the walls closed on him like teeth?

  He wondered whether—if it became necessary—he could successfully kill himself with the knife. Like a Bushido warrior, falling on his sword. How badly, how quickly could he hurt himself with a six-inch blade? Would it be more efficient to slit his wrists or stick himself in the belly? Or should he try to cut his own throat?

  He thought about death. What it would be like to sink away from his own untidy self, to drift deeper and deeper into the static and empty past.

  He imagined he heard Marguerite’s voice in his ear, whispering words he didn’t understand:

  ignorance

  curiosity

  pain

  love

  —more evidence, as if he needed it, that the O/BEC madness had already infected him…

  And then the lights winked back on.

  “God! Fuck!” Ray said, momentarily dazed.

  The elevator hummed to life and resumed its journey downward.

  Ray discovered he had bitten his tongue. His mouth was full of blood. He spat it out onto the green tiled floor, rolled his cuff down over his bleeding ankle, and waited for the door to open.

  Twenty-Nine

  “Maybe she went to look for her mother,” Elaine said, but when Chris called Tessa’s name there was no answer, and the brightly lit ground-floor corridor of the clinic was empty as far as he could see.