Blind Lake

by Robert Charles Wilson

  But what if the O/BECs had discovered a way to defend themselves?

  “Why do you want to do that?” Tess asked, as if he had spoken aloud. Maybe he had. He looked at his daughter critically.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

  She reached for his hand. Her small fingers were warmer than the air. “Come look,” Tess said. “Come on!”

  He followed her through a series of unmanned security barriers to the gallery, to the glass-walled platform overlooking the deep structure of the O/BEC devices, where Ray realized that his plan to shut down the machines had become unrealizable and that he would have to consider a different course of action.

  Inside the O/BEC platens, quasibiological networks inhabited an almost infinite phase-space, linked to the exterior world (at first) by the telemetry from TPF interferometers, running Fourier transforms on degraded signals fading into noise, then (mysteriously) deriving the desired information by what theorists chose to call “other means.” They had spoken to the universe, Ray thought, and the universe had spoken back. The O/BEC array knew things the human species could only guess at. And now it had taken that interaction with the physical world to a new level.

  The O/BEC chamber, three stories deep, had been a NASA-style clean room. Nothing (apart from the O/BECs) should have lived there. But it seemed to Ray, in this dim light, that the chamber had been overrun with something—if not life, at least something self-reproducing, a transparent growth that had partially filled the O/BEC enclosure and was rising up the walls like frost on a winter window. The bottom of the chamber, thirty feet down, was immersed in a gelatinous crystalline fluid that glinted and moved like sea foam on a beach.

  “It’s so the O/BECs can sustain themselves without exterior power,” Tess said. “The roots go down way underground. Tapping heat.”

  How deep did you have to go to “tap heat” from a snowbound prairie? A thousand feet, two thousand? All the way to molten magma? No wonder the earth had trembled.

  And how did Tess know this?

  Clearly Tess had developed some kind of empathy for the O/BECs. A contagious madness, Ray thought. Tess had always been unstable. Perhaps the O/BECs were exploiting that weakness.

  And there was nothing he could do about it. The platens were beyond his reach and his daughter had been hopelessly compromised. The knowledge struck him with the force of a physical blow. He backed against the wall and slid to a sitting position on the floor, the knife in his limp right hand.

  Tess knelt and looked into his eyes.

  “You’re tired,” she said.

  It was true. He had never felt so tired.

  “You know,” Tess said, “it wasn’t her fault. Or yours.”

  What wasn’t whose fault? Ray gave his daughter a despairing look.

  “When you got out of the car,” she said. “That you lived. You were just a child.”

  She was talking about his mother’s death. But Ray had never told Tess that story. He hadn’t told Marguerite, either, or anyone else in his adult life. Ray’s mother (her name was Bethany but Ray never called her anything but Mother) had driven him to school in the family’s big Ford, a kind of car you never saw anymore, powered by the combination of biodiesel fuel and rechargeable cells that had been commonplace after the Saudi conflict, a patriotic vehicle in which he had always been proud to be seen. The car was a vivid red, Ray remembered, red as some desirable new toy, Teflon-slick and enamel-bright. Ray was ten and keenly aware of colors and textures. His mother had driven him to school in the car, and he had hopped out and almost reached the schoolyard fence (snapshot: Baden Academy, a private junior school in a tree-lined Chicago suburb, a fashionably old-fashioned yellow-brick building slumbering in September-morning heat) when he turned to wave good-bye (hand upraised, listening to children’s voices and the high-voltage whine of cicadas) in time to see a Modesto and Fuchs Managed Care Mobile Health Maintenance truck—hijacked, he learned later, by an Oxycontin addict attempting to score narcotics from the vehicle’s onboard supply—as it careened from the wrong-way lane of Duchesne Street directly into the side of the bright red Ford.

  The patriotic Ford sustained the impact well, but Ray’s mother had seen the truck coming and had unwisely tried to exit the vehicle. The Modesto and Fuchs truck had crushed her between the door and the frame and had then bounced back several yards, leaving Bethany Scutter in the street with her abdomen opened like the middle pages of a blue and red book.

  Ray, seeing this from the Olympian mountaintop of incipient shock, made certain observations about the human condition that had stayed with him these many years. People, like their promises, were fragile and unreliable. People were bags of gas and fluid dressed up for masquerade roles (Parent, Teacher, Therapist, Wife), liable at any moment to collapse into their natural state. The natural state of biological matter was road-kill.

  Ray didn’t go back to Baden Academy for a year, during which time he received, courtesy of his father, every pharmaceutical and metaphysical medicine for melancholy offered at the better clinics. His recovery was swift. He had already shown a predilection for mathematics, and he immersed himself in the inorganic sciences—astronomy and, later, astrophysics, wherein the scales of time and space were large enough to lend a welcome perspective. He had been secretly pleased when Mars and Europa were proved devoid of life: how much more disturbing it would have been to find them shot through with biology, rotten as a crate of Christmas oranges gone green in the corner of the basement.

  Cascades of silvery-gray frost-fingers ran up the windows of the O/BEC gallery, dimming the light, arranging themselves into shapes reminiscent of columns and arches. Ray decided he shouldn’t have told Tess this story. If indeed he had told her. It seemed, in his confusion, that she had been telling it to him.

  “You’re wrong,” Tess said. “She didn’t die to make you hate her.”

  His eyes widened. Startled and angered by what his daughter had become, Ray took up the knife again.

  Thirty-Five

  She’s here, Chris thought. He ran down the emergency stairs toward the O/BEC gallery, consumed with a sense of urgency he couldn’t explain even to himself. His footsteps rattled up the hollow concrete column of the stairwell like the sound of gunfire.

  She was here. The knowledge was as inescapable as a headache. Tessa’s vanishing snow trail had been an ambiguous clue at best. But he knew she was in the O/BEC gallery just as surely as he had known where Porry had gone on the Night of the Tadpoles. It was more than intuition; it was as if the information had been delivered directly to his bloodstream.

  Maybe it had. If Tess could vanish from a snowbound parking lot, what else might be possible? What was happening here must be very like what had happened at Crossbank, something massive, apparently catastrophic, possibly contagious, and profoundly strange.

  And Tess was at the heart of it, and so, very nearly, was he. He arrived at a door marked GALLERY LEVEL (RESTRICTED). It unlocked itself at his touch, courtesy of Charlie Grogan’s transponder.

  The Alley groaned around him, shifting after this morning’s tremor, subject to stresses unknown. Chris knew the structure was potentially unsafe, but his concern for Tess overrode his considerable personal fear.

  Not that he had any business being here. Porry’s death had taught him that good intentions could be as lethal as malice, that love was a clumsy and unreliable tool. Or so he thought. Yet here he was, many long miles up Shit Creek, desperately trying to protect the daughter of a woman for whom he cared deeply. (And who had also vanished; but the dread he felt for Tess seemed not to extend to Marguerite. He believed Marguerite was safe. Again, this was a sourceless knowledge.)

  The building groaned again. The emergency Klaxons stuttered and went dead, and in the sudden silence he was able to hear voices from the gallery: a child’s voice, probably Tessa’s; and a man’s, perhaps Ray’s.

  The whole universe is telling a story, Mirror Girl explained.

  Tess crouched behind
a massive wheeled cart bearing an empty white helium cylinder twice the size of her body. Mirror Girl was not physically present, but Tess could hear her voice. Mirror Girl was answering questions Tess had hardly started to ask.

  The universe was a story like any other story, Mirror Girl said. The hero of the story was named “complexity.” Complexity was born on page one, a fluctuation in the primordial symmetry. Details of the gestation (the synthesis of quarks, their condensation into matter, photogenesis, the creation of hydrogen and helium) mattered less than the pattern: one thing became two, two became many, many combined in fundamentally unpredictable ways.

  Like a baby, Tess thought. She had learned this part in school. A fertilized cell made two cells, four cells, eight cells; and the cells became heart, lungs, brain, self. Was that “complexity”?

  An important part of it, yes, Mirror Girl said. Part of a long, long chain of births. Stars formed in the cooling, expanding universe; old stellar cores enriched galactic clouds with calcium, nitrogen, oxygen, metals; newer stars precipitated these elements as rocky planets; rocky planets, bombarded by ice from their star’s accretion disk, formed oceans; life arose, and another story began: single cells joined in strange collectives, became multicellular creatures and then thinking beings, beings complex enough to hold the history of the universe inside their calcified skulls…

  Tess wondered if that was the end of the story.

  Not nearly, Mirror Girl said. Not by a long shot. Thinking creatures make machines, Mirror Girl said, and their machines grow more complex, and eventually they build machines that think and do more than think: machines that invest their complexity into the structure of potential quantum states. Cultures of thinking organisms generate these nodes of profoundly dense complexity in the same way massive stars collapse into singularities.

  Tess asked if that was what was happening now, here in the dim corridors of Eyeball Alley.

  Yes.

  “What happens next?”

  It surpasses understanding.

  “How does the story end?”

  No one can say.

  “Is that my father’s voice?” It was a voice that seemed to come from the observation level of the O/BEC gallery, where Tess wanted to go but where she was deeply afraid of going.

  Yes.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  Thinking about dying, Mirror Girl said.

  The O/BEC observation gallery was circular, in the style of a surgical theater, and Chris entered it on the side opposite Ray. He could see Ray and Tess only as blurred shapes distorted by the panels of glass that enclosed the yards-wide O/BEC chamber.

  The glass should have been clear. Instead it was obscured by what looked like ropes and columns of frost. Something catastrophically strange was happening down in the core platens.

  He crouched and began to move slowly around the perimeter of the gallery. He could hear Ray’s voice, soft and uninflected, couched in echoes from the rounded walls:

  “I don’t hate her. What would be the point? She taught me a lesson. Something most people never learn. We live in a dream. A dream about surfaces. We love our skins so much we can’t see under them. But it’s only a story.”

  Tessa’s voice was unnaturally calm: “What else could it be?”

  Now Chris could see them both around the curvature of the glass wall. He crouched motionless, watching.

  Ray sat on the floor, legs splayed, staring straight ahead. Tess sat on his lap. She caught sight of Chris and smiled. Her eyes were luminous.

  Ray had a knife in his right hand. The knife was poised at Tessa’s throat.

  But, of course, it wasn’t Tess.

  Ray felt as if he had fallen off a cliff, each impact on the way down doing him an irreparable injury, but this was the final blow, the hard landing, the awareness that this thing he had mistaken for his daughter was not Tess but the symptom of her sickness. Of all their sicknesses, perhaps.

  This was Mirror Girl.

  “You came to kill me,” Mirror Girl said.

  He held the knife against her throat. She had Tessa’s voice and Tessa’s body, but her eyes betrayed her. Her eyes and their intimate knowledge of him.

  “You think the only true thing is pain,” she whispered. “But you’re wrong.”

  This was too much. He pressed the knife into the hollow of her throat, impossible as this act was, a murder that couldn’t succeed, the execution of a primordial force in the shape of his only child, and pulled it hard across her pale skin.

  Expecting blood. But there was no blood. The knife met no resistance.

  She vanished like a broken bubble.

  There was another tremor deep in the earth, and the opaque glass walls of the O/BEC gallery began to crumble into dust.

  But it’s not really Tess, Chris thought, and he heard panicked footsteps behind him and a small voice screaming—no, this was Tess, running toward her father.

  Chris turned in time to catch her by her shoulders and lift her off her feet.

  She kicked and squirmed in his arms. “Let me go!”

  The glass walls crumbled, opening the gallery to the O/BEC enclosure. Tendrils of a substance that looked like mother-of-pearl began to snake across the floor in lacy, symmetrical arrays. The air stank of ozone. Chris watched as Ray struggled to his feet and blinked like a man waking up from, or into, a nightmare.

  Ray stumbled toward the O/BEC chamber, now an open pit.

  Spikes of crystalline matter rose to the ceiling and pierced it, shaking loose a snow of plaster. The overhead fluorescent bars dimmed.

  “Ray,” Chris said. “Hey, buddy. We’re not safe here. We need to get out. We need to get Tess up top.”

  Tess yielded in his grip, waiting for her father to react. Chris kept a firm hand on her shoulder.

  Ray Scutter gazed into the abyss in front of him. The O/BEC chamber was a well of crystalline growth three stories deep, a barrel full of glass. He gave Chris a quick, dismissive glance. “Obviously we’re not safe. That’s the fucking point.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I don’t want to argue with you. We have to get Tess upstairs. We need to take care of your daughter, Ray.”

  Ray seemed to be evaluating that option. But Ray wasn’t in a hurry anymore. He gave them both another long look. It seemed to Chris he had never seen such weariness in a human face.

  Then his expression softened, as if he had solved a troublesome riddle. He smiled. “You do it,” he said.

  Then he stepped over the edge.

  Tess twisted herself out of his arms and ran headlong to the place where her father had been.

  Thirty-Six

  Subject vanished, and so did the cathedral arches of luminous stone and the arid highlands of UMa47/E. Marguerite blinked into a sudden disorienting darkness. The darkness became the outline of the windowless conference room on the second floor of the Blind Lake clinic. Her knees buckled. She grabbed a chair to hold herself upright. The wall screen was a flickering rectangle of meaningless noise. Loss of intelligibility, Marguerite thought.

  How long had she been away? Assuming she had been gone at all. More likely she had never left this room, though every cell of her body proclaimed that she had been on the surface of UMa47/E, that she had touched the Subject’s leathery skin with her fingers.

  This empty boardroom, the clinic, a snowy morning in Blind Lake, Ray’s madness: how to reinsert herself in that story? She thought of Tess. Tess, down in the reception room with Chris and Elaine and Sebastian. She took a calming breath and stepped out into the hallway.

  But the hallway was busy with people in white protective suits, people carrying weapons. Marguerite stared uncomprehending until two of them approached her and took her arms.

  “My daughter’s downstairs,” she managed to say.

  “Ma’am, we’re evacuating this building and the rest of the buildings in the installation.” It was a woman’s voice, firm but not unfriendly. “We’ll get everyone sorted out once the premises are clear.
Please come with us.”

  Marguerite submitted to this indignity as far as the clinic lobby, where she was allowed to retrieve her winter coat from the back of a chair. Then she was escorted outside, into a razor-cold morning and a small crowd of clinic personnel. There was no sign of Tess or Chris, and her stomach sank.

  She spotted Sebastian Vogel and Elaine Coster as they were herded into a personnel carrier with a dozen other people. She called out to them, called Tessa’s name, but Elaine was pulled inside by a helmeted man and Sebastian could only wave vaguely toward the west—toward the Alley, visible, as Marguerite craned her head, down the street opposite the mallway.

  Marguerite gasped.

  The concrete cooling towers were gone. No, not gone, but encapsulated, encased in a scaffolding of knotted silvery spines, crystalline minarets and arching buttresses. The encapsulating substance grew as she watched, sending out radial arms like an enormous starfish.

  Tess, she thought. My baby. Don’t let my baby slip away.

  Thirty-Seven

  Tess stood at the rim of the abyss that had contained the O/BEC platens and which was now a seething pit of glassy coral growths. For a fraction of a second Chris appreciated the incongruity of it, Tess motionless in her dusty overalls and bright yellow shirt as the gallery evolved around her; Tess gazing into the chasm where her father had disappeared.

  Where she was plainly tempted to follow.

  Chris walked toward her until she turned her head and gave him a warning look that was unmistakable in its intent.

  He said, “Tess—”

  “He jumped,” she said.

  There was noise in the air now, a glassy tinkling and grinding. Chris strained to hear her. Yes, Ray had jumped. Should he acknowledge that?