Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)

by Jeff VanderMeer

  They broke camp, used a stand of swamp trees as initial cover and surveyed the marsh, stared across the water of the estuaries. The smoke now billowed up at a sharp sixty-degree angle to add its own ash-silver roiling to the fog and form a heavier, weighted blankness. This alliance obscured the last of the blue sky and accentuated the crackling line of fire at the horizon parallel to them: waves of orange thrust upward from golden centers.

  The pewter stillness of the channel of water in the foreground reflected the lines of the flames and the billowing of the smoke—reflected the nearest reeds, too, and doubled by reflection also the island that at its highest point showcased island oaks and palmetto trees, their trunks white lines lost in patches of fog.

  There came shouting and screaming and gunfire—all too near, all from the island of trees, or, perhaps, something Lowry had placed in his head. Something that had happened here long ago only now coming to the surface. Control kept his eyes on the reflection, where men and women in military uniforms attacked one another while some impossible thing watched from the watery sky. At such a remove, distorted, it did not seem so harsh, so visceral.

  “They are already somewhere else,” Control said, although he knew Grace and Ghost Bird wouldn’t understand. They were already in the reflection, through which an alligator now swam. Where swooped through the trees, oblivious, a flicker.

  So they continued on, him with his sickness that he no longer wanted diagnosed, Grace with her limp, and Ghost Bird keeping her own counsel.

  There was nothing to be done, and no reason to: their path would skirt the fire.

  * * *

  In Control’s imagination, the entrance to the topographical anomaly was enormous, mixed with the biologist’s vast bulk in his thoughts so that he had expected a kind of immense ziggurat upside down in the earth. But no, it was what it had always been: a little over sixty feet in diameter, circular, located in the middle of a small clearing. The entrance lay there open for them, as it had for so many others. No soldiers here, nothing more unusual than the thing itself.

  On the threshold, he told them what would happen next. There was in his voice only the shadow of the authority of a director of the Southern Reach, but within that shadow a kind of resistance.

  “Grace, you will stay here at the top, standing guard with the rifles. There are any number of dangers, and we do not want to be trapped down there. Ghost Bird, you will come with me, and you will lead the way. I’ll follow at a little distance behind you. Grace, if we are down there longer than three hours”—the maximum time recorded by prior expeditions—“you are released of any responsibility for us.” Because if there were a world to return to, the person to survive should be someone with something to return to.

  They stared at him. They stared, and he thought they would object, would override him, and then he would be lost. Would be left out here, at the top.

  But that moment never came and an almost debilitating relief settled over him as Grace nodded and said to be careful, rattled off advice he barely heard.

  Ghost Bird stood off to the side, a curious expression on her face. Down there, she would experience the ultimate doubling of experience with the biologist, and he couldn’t protect her from that.

  “Whatever you have in your head now, hold on to it,” Grace said. “Because there may be nothing left of it when you go down below.”

  What was coiled within his head, and how would it affect the outcome? Because his goal was not to reach the Crawler. Because he wondered what else might lie within the brightness that had come with him.

  They descended into the tower.

  0020: THE DIRECTOR

  Whitby’s worthless report on the blossom is on your desk by the time you go off to another pre-expedition interview of the biologist, the possible candidates for the twelfth whittled down to ten, and you and Grace, you and Lowry, pushing for your favorites, with members of the science department shadowboxing in the background as they whisper their own choices at you. Severance seems terminally uninterested in the question.

  It’s not a good time to interview anyone but you don’t have a choice. The plant is blossoming again in your mind as you conduct the interview in a cramped little office in the biologist’s town—a place you’ve borrowed and can pretend is your own, with all of the appropriate psychological and psychiatric texts on the bookshelves. The diplomas and family pictures of the room’s true occupant have been removed. In a concession to Lowry, for his studies, you’ve allowed his people to swap out chairs, light fixtures, and other elements of the room, as if in redecorating and changing the color scheme from placid blues and greens to red, orange, and gray or silver there’s some answer to a larger question.

  Lowry claims his arrangements and recombinations can have a “subliminal or instinctual” effect on the candidates.

  “To make them feel secure and at ease?” you asked, a rare moment of poking the beast with a stick, but he ignored you, and in your head he was saying, “To make them do what we want.”

  There’s the smell of water damage still, from a burst pipe in the basement. There’s a water stain in the corner, hidden by a little table, as if you need to cover up some crime. The only giveaway that it’s not your office: you’re cramped, stuffed into your chair.

  The plant is blossoming in your mind, and each time it does there’s less time to work with, less you can do. Is the plant a challenge or an invitation or a worthless distraction? A message? And if so, what did it mean, assuming Whitby didn’t imagine it? The light at the bottom of a topographical anomaly, from a door into Area X, on the tarot card used by the Séance & Science Brigade. The blossoming light of an MRI body scan, the one you endured last week.

  In the middle of all that blossoming in your brain, the kind of thing that would elicit a joke from Grace if only you could tell her, there, bestriding the world: the biologist, a talisman arriving just as everything is closing in again and your time has become more limited.

  “State your name for the record.”

  “I did that last time.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  The biologist looks at you like you’re an opponent, not the person who can send her where she so obviously wants to go. You note again not just the musculature of this woman but the fact that she’s willing to complicate even the simple business of stating her name. That she has a kind of self-possession that comes not just from knowing who she is but from knowing that, if it comes down to it, she needs no one. Some professionals might diagnose that as a disorder, but in the biologist it comes across as an absolute and unbending clarity.

  “Tell me about your parents.”

  “What are your earliest memories?”

  “Did you have a happy childhood?”

  All of the usual, boring questions, and her terse answers boring, too, in a way. But, after that, the more interesting ones.

  “Do you ever have violent thoughts or tendencies?” you ask.

  “What do you consider a violent act?” she replies. An attempt to evade, or genuine interest? You’d bet on the former.

  “Harm toward other people or animals. Extreme property damage, like arson.” The Realtor at Star Lanes has dozens of stories about violence against houses, relates them all with an edge to her voice. The biologist would probably classify the Realtor as an alien species.

  “People are animals.”

  “Harm toward animals, then?”

  “Only toward human animals.”

  She’s trying to entangle you or provoke you, but the usual cross-referencing and analysis of intel turned up something interesting, something you can’t confirm. While a grad student on the West Coast, she had worked as an intern at a forest ranger station in a national park. Her two years there had roughly coincided with a series of what some might call “tree-hugger terrorism.” In the worst case, three men had been badly beaten by “an assailant wearing a mask.” The motive, according to the police: “The victims had been tormenting an injured owl by poking at it w
ith a stick and trying to light its wing on fire.” No suspect had ever been identified, no arrest made.

  “What would you do if your fellow expedition members exhibited violent tendencies?”

  “Whatever I had to.”

  “Would that include killing someone?”

  “If it came down to that, I would have to.”

  “Even if it was me?”

  “Especially if it was you. Because these questions are so tedious.”

  “More tedious than your job working with plastics?”

  That sobers her up. “I don’t plan on killing anyone. I’ve never killed anyone. I plan on taking samples. I plan on learning as much as I can and circumventing anyone who doesn’t follow the mission parameters.” That hard edge again, the shoulder turned in toward you, to block you out. If this were a boxing match, the shoulder would be followed by an uppercut or body shot.

  “And what if you turn out to be the threat?”

  The biologist laughs at that question, and gives you a stare so direct you have to look away.

  “If I’m the threat, then I won’t be able to stop myself, will I? If I’m the threat, then I guess Area X has won.”

  “What about your husband?”

  “What about my husband? He’s dead.”

  “Do you hope to find out what happened to him in Area X?”

  “I hope to find Area X in Area X. I hope to be of use.”

  “Isn’t that heartless?”

  She leans forward, fixes you again with that gaze, and it’s a struggle to maintain your composure. But that’s okay—antagonism is okay. In fact, anything helps you that helps her reject whatever traces of corruption you might have picked up, that might have adhered to you all unknowing.

  She says, “It’s a fallacy for you, a total stranger, to project onto me the motives and emotions you think are appropriate. To think you can get inside my head.”

  You can’t share with her that the other candidates have been easy to read. The surveyor will be the meat-and-potatoes backbone of the expedition, without a trace of passive-aggressiveness. The anthropologist will provide empathy and nuance, although you’re not sure whether her need to prove herself is a plus or a minus. She’ll push herself further, harder because of that, but what will Area X think of that? The linguist talks too much, has too little introspection, but is a recruit from within the Southern Reach and has demonstrated absolute loyalty on more than occasion. Lowry’s favorite, with all that entails.

  Before the interview, you met with Whitby, who had rallied for this discussion, in your office, amid the increasing clutter. It was the biologist you talked about the most, the importance of keeping her paranoid and isolated and antisocial, how there’s a shift in the biochemistry of the brain, naturally arrived at, that might be what Lowry’s secret experiments are trying to induce artificially—and since her husband has already gone to Area X, “been read by it,” this represents a unique opportunity “metrics-wise” because of “that connection,” because “it’s never happened before.” That, in a sense, the biologist had forged a relationship with Area X before ever setting foot there. It might lead to what Whitby calls “a terroir precognition.”

  An expedition into Area X with the biologist would be different than with Whitby. You wouldn’t lead, except in the way at the store as a teenager you sometimes walked ahead of your dad so you wouldn’t seem to be with him, but always with a look back at him, to see where he was going.

  As the questioning continues, you’re more and more certain of what you feel in your gut. You are reminded of Area X somehow. The biologist reminds you of being in Area X.

  * * *

  The rest of the biologist’s file is breathtaking in its focus, its narrowness, and yet fecund despite that. You’re driving across the desert with her, in a tiny car, to check out the holes made by burrowing owls. You’re lost on a plateau above an untouched coastline, stalked by a cougar, a place where the grass is the color of gold and reaches up to your knees and the trees are blackened by fire, silver-gray with ash. You’re hiking up a mountain in scrubland, up huge blocks of stone, every muscle in your legs protesting even as you’re possessed by a wild giddiness that keeps you moving past exhaustion. You’re back with her during her first year of college, when she made a rare confession to a roommate that she wanted isolation and moved out the next day to her own apartment and walked the five miles from campus home in utter silence, receiving the world through a hole in her shoe.

  You’re certain you’ll have to give up something to Lowry to keep him away from the biologist, but whatever the price you’ll pay it, you decide as you order a whiskey for a change at the bar at Chipper’s—order a whiskey for everyone at the bar, for a change, all four of them. Because it’s late, because it’s a weekday, because Chipper’s is getting long in the tooth and the clientele is getting older and older. Like you. The doctor’s told you cancer has blossomed in your ovaries and it’s going to spread to your liver before you can even blink, even get used to the idea. Another thing no one needs to know.

  “And before we could even think about selling that house,” the Realtor’s telling you, “we had to pull ten layers of wallpaper off. All this woman had done for a decade was keep re-wallpapering her house. It was a hell of a lot of wallpaper, and garish, like she was putting up warning signals. Wrapping her house from the inside out. I tell you, I’ve never seen that before.”

  You nod, smiling, with nothing to add, nothing to say, but happy to listen. Terminally interested.

  It’s plain old normal cancer, nothing like the accelerated all-out assault experienced by the last eleventh. It’s just plain old life catching up with you, trying to kill you, and you can either take the aggressive chemo and leave the Southern Reach and die anyway, or you can hang on long enough to join the twelfth expedition and, with the biologist by your side, go across the border one last time. You’ve kept secrets before. What’s one final one?

  Besides, other, more interesting, secrets are opening up, because Grace has finally found something on Jackie Severance. There’s been plenty of dirt, including the scandal involving her son—a blown assignment that resulted in a woman’s death—but nothing until now that made any real difference. On a top-secret list, not of Jackie’s open case files but Jack’s closed ones, which makes sense because Jack is a little easier: He’s retired, in his early seventies, and some of what he worked on exists only in paper form.

  “Look at the fifth line item,” Grace says, up on the rooftop, after a quick sweep for bugs. You’ve never found any there, but it’s worth being cautious.

  The line reads:

  Payment request—SB, Project Serum Bliss

  “Is there more?” It’s not quite what you expected, but you think you know what it is.

  “No, that’s the only one. There might be more, but the rest of the files from the period are missing. This page wasn’t even supposed to be there.”

  “What do you think ‘Serum Bliss’ means?”

  “Protocol back then would’ve meant it wasn’t supposed to mean anything. Probably generated at random.”

  “It’s flimsy,” you say. “That’s not even ‘S&SB.’”

  “It’s fucking rice paper,” Grace says. “It might mean nothing, but…”

  But if, somehow, the S&SB was on Central’s payroll—even just a little bit, a side project—and Jack ran the operation, and Jackie knew about it, and the S&SB had anything at all to do with the creation of Area X …

  A lot of ifs. A lot of leaps. A lot more research on Grace’s plate.

  Yet it’s enough for you to begin to have an idea of why Lowry’s new ally is Jackie Severance.

  0021: THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER

  … went back to the garden, [illegible], and kept the ax with me just in case. Unlikely, with black bears, but not unknown. Scrub jay, catbird, house sparrow, most humble of God’s creatures. I sat there and fed it bread crumbs, for it was a scrawny thing and in need. I shall bring them forth, they sai
d …

  Saul stayed on to the bitter end at the village bar, not sure if it was because he wanted to test Brad’s resolve or because he didn’t want to walk outside only to encounter Henry. Or because he was sad Charlie’d had to leave.

  So he knocked back a couple more beers, put down the way the room swayed to the booze, and ordered some oysters and fish-and-chips. He had a hunger in him that was rare. Food didn’t interest him that much, but tonight he felt ravenous. The oysters were served in their own salt water, newly shucked and steamed, and he didn’t bother dipping them in sauce but just gulped them down. Then he tore into the fish, which came away in thick flakes in his hands, the heat rising along with the saliva-inducing smell of the grease. The wedge fries he drowned in ketchup and they soon joined the fish. He was frantic at his feast, aware he was gobbling, stuffing his face, his hands moving at a frenzied, unnatural pace, but he couldn’t stop.

  He ordered another fish-and-chips. He ordered another round of oysters. Another beer.

  After the last set, the musicians stuck around, but most of the others left, including Trudi. The black sea and sky outside the window peered in against the glass, smudged faces and the bottles of booze behind the bar reflected back at Saul. Now that it was just Old Jim at the piano, with the other musicians goofing around, and so few people he could just about hear the pulse of the sea again, could recognize it as a subtle message in the background. Or something was pulsing in his head. His sense of smell had intensified, the rotting sweetness that must be coming from the kitchen was like a perfume being sprayed in clouds throughout the room. A stitching beat beneath the striking of the piano keys twinned itself to the pulse.

  Mundane details struck him as momentous. The worm of gray-white ash curling out of an ashtray on the table next to him, the individual flakes still fluming, fluttering, and at the buried core a pinprick of throbbing red that pulsed at him like a brake light. Beside the ash, the smudge of an old greasy thumbprint, immortalized by the gunk that had collected on the ashtray from hundreds of cigarette immolations. Beside the thumbprint, an attempt to etch something into the side of the ashtray, an effort that had ended after J and A.