Authority

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “I was confused yesterday,” she said. “It wasn’t in Area X. It was my memory from when I was five, of almost drowning in a public fountain. I hit my head. I had stitches. I don’t know why, but that’s what came back to me, in pieces, when you asked that question.”

  He almost wanted to clap. He almost wanted to stand up, clap, and hand over her file.

  She had sat in her room last night, bored out of her mind from lack of stimuli, and she had anticipated this question. Not only had she anticipated it, Ghost Bird had decided to turn it into an egg laid by Control. Give away a less personal detail to protect something more important. The fountain incident was a well-documented part of her file, since she’d had to go to the hospital for stitches. It might confirm for him that she remembered something of her childhood, but nothing more.

  It occurred to him that perhaps he wasn’t entitled to her memories. Perhaps no one was. But he pushed himself away from that thought, like an astronaut pushing off from the side of a space capsule. Where he’d end up was anyone’s guess.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said flatly.

  “I don’t care,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “When do I get out of here?”

  “Oh, you know the drill—you’ve got to take one for the team,” he said, using clichés to breeze past her question, trying to sound ignorant or dumb. Not so much a strategy as to punish himself for not bringing his A game. “You signed the agreement; you knew the debriefing might take a while.” You knew, too, that you might come back with cancer or not come back at all.

  “I don’t have a computer,” she said. “I don’t have any of the books I requested. I’m being kept in a cell that has a tiny window high up on the wall. It only shows the sky. If I’m lucky, I see a hawk wheel by every few hours.”

  “It’s a room, not a cell.” It was both.

  “I can’t leave, so it’s a cell. Give me books at least.”

  But he couldn’t give her the books she wanted on memory loss. Not until he knew more about the nature of her memory loss. She had also asked for all kinds of texts about mimicry and camouflage—he’d have to question her about that at some point.

  “Does this mean anything to you?” he asked to deflect her attention, pushing the potted plant–mouse across the table to her.

  She sat straight in her chair, seemed to become not just taller but wider, more imposing, as she leaned in toward him.

  “A plant and a dead mouse? It’s a sign you should give me my fucking books and a computer.” Perhaps it wasn’t amusement that made her different today. Maybe it was a sense of recklessness.

  “I can’t.”

  “Then you know what you can do with your plant and your mouse.”

  “All right then.”

  Her contemptuous laughter followed him out into the hall. She had a nice laugh, even when she was using it as a weapon against him.

  007: SUPERSTITION

  Twenty minutes later, Control had contrived to cram Whitby, Grace, and the staff linguist, Jessica Hsyu, into cramped quarters in front of the revealed section of wall with the director’s peculiar handwritten words scrawled across it. Control hadn’t bothered to move books or much of anything else. He wanted them to have to sit in close, uncomfortable proximity—let us bond in this phone booth, with our knees shoved up against one another’s. Little fabric sounds, mouth-breathing, shoe-squeaks, unexpected smells, all would be magnified. He thought of it as a bonding experience. Perhaps.

  Only the assistant director had gotten a regular-size chair. That way she could hold on to the illusion that she was in charge; or, rather, he hoped he could forestall any complaint from her later that he was being petty. He had already ignored Grace’s pointed “I am so thankful that this is correct on the schedule,” which meant she already knew he’d moved up his interrogation of the biologist. She’d kept him waiting while she joked with someone in the hall, which he took as a micro-retaliation.

  They were huddled around the world’s smallest conference table/stool, on which Control had placed the pot with the plant and mouse. Everything in its time and place, although the director’s cell phone would not be part of the conversation—Grace had already confiscated it.

  “What is this,” he said, pointing to the wall of words, “in my office?” Not quite willing to concede the unspoken point that continued to radiate from Grace like a force field: It was still the former director’s office.

  “This” included not just the words but the crude map of Area X drawn beneath the words, in green, red, and black, showing the usual landmarks: lighthouse, topographical anomaly, base camp … and also, farther up the coast, the island. A few stray words had been scribbled with a ball-point pen out to the sides—incomprehensible—and there were two rather daunting slash marks about half a foot above Control’s head, with dates about three years apart. One red. One green. With the director’s initials beside them, too. Had the director been checking her height? Of all of the strange things on the wall, that seemed the strangest.

  “I thought you said you had read all the files,” Grace replied.

  Nothing in the files had mentioned a door’s worth of peculiar text, but he wouldn’t argue the point. He knew it was unlikely he had uncovered something unknown to them.

  “Humor me.”

  “The director wrote it,” Grace said. “These are words found written on the walls of the tunnel.”

  Control took a moment to digest that information.

  “But why did you leave it there?” For an intense moment the words and the rotting honey smell combined to make him feel physically ill.

  “A memorial,” Whitby said quickly, as if to provide an excuse for the assistant director. “It seemed too disrespectful to take it down.” Control had noticed Whitby kept giving the mouse strange glances.

  “Not a memorial,” Grace said. “It’s not a memorial because the director isn’t dead. I don’t believe she’s dead.” She said this in a quiet but assured way, causing a hush from Whitby and Hsyu, as if Grace had shared an opinion that was an embarrassment to her. Control’s careful manipulation of the thermostat meant they were sweating and squirming a bit anyway.

  “What does it mean?” Control asked, to move past the moment. Beyond Grace’s obstructionism, he could see a kind of pain growing in her that he had no wish to exploit.

  “That’s why we brought the linguist,” Whitby said charitably, even though it was clear that Hsyu’s presence had surprised the assistant director. But Hsyu had ever more influence as the Southern Reach shrank; soon enough, they might have a situation where subdepartments consisted of one person writing themselves up for offenses, giving themselves raises and bonuses, celebrating their own birthdays with custom-made Southern Reach–shaped carrot cakes.

  Hsyu, a short, slender woman with long black hair, spoke.

  “First of all, we are ninety-nine point nine percent certain that this text is by the lighthouse keeper, Saul Evans.” A slight uprising inflection to her voice imbued even the blandest or most serious statement with optimism.

  “Saul Evans…”

  “He’s right up there,” Whitby said, pointing to the wall of framed images. “In the middle of that black-and-white photo.” The one in front of the lighthouse. So that was Saul. He’d known that already, somewhere in the back of his mind.

  “Because you found it printed somewhere else?” Control asked Hsyu. He hadn’t had time to do more than glance at the file on Evans—he’d been too busy familiarizing himself with the staff of the Southern Reach and the general outline of the situation in Area X.

  “Because it matches his syntax and word choice in a few of his sermons we have on audiotape.”

  “What was he doing preaching if he was a lighthouse keeper?”

  “He was retired as a preacher, actually. He left his ministry up north very suddenly, for no documented reason, then came south and took the lighthouse keeper position. He’d been there for five years when the border came down.”

>   “Do you think he brought whatever caused Area X with him?” Control ventured, but no one followed him into the hinterlands.

  “It’s been checked out,” Whitby said. For the first time a sliver of condescension had entered his tone when addressing Control.

  “And these words were found within the topographical anomaly?”

  “Yes,” Hsyu said. “Reconstructed from the reports of several expeditions, but we’ve never gotten a useful sample of the material the words are made of.”

  “Living material,” Control said. Now it was coming back to him, a bit. The words hadn’t been part of the summary, but he’d seen reports of words written on the tower walls in living tissue. “Why weren’t these words in the files?”

  The linguist again, this time with some reluctance: “To be honest, we don’t like to reproduce the words. So it might have been buried in the information, like in a summary in the lighthouse keeper’s file.”

  Grace had nothing to add, apparently, but Whitby chimed in: “We don’t like to reproduce the words because we still don’t know exactly what triggered the creation of Area X … or why.”

  And yet they’d left the words up behind the door that led nowhere. Control was struggling to see the logic there.

  “That’s superstition,” Hsyu protested. “That’s complete and utter superstition. You shouldn’t say that.” Control knew her parents were very traditional and came from a culture in which spirits manifested and words had a different significance. Hsyu did not share these beliefs—vehemently did not, practicing a lax sort of Christian faith, which brought with it inexplicable elements and phantasmagoria all its own. But he still agreed with her assessment, even if that antipathy might be leaking into her analysis.

  She would have continued with a full-blown excoriation of superstition, except that Grace stopped her.

  “It’s not superstition,” she said.

  They all turned to her, swiveling on their stools.

  “It is superstition,” she admitted. “But it might be true.”

  * * *

  How could a superstition be true? Control pondered that later, as he turned his attention to his trip to the border along with a cursory look at a file Whitby had pulled for him titled simply “Theories.” Maybe “superstition” was what snuck into the gaps, the cracks, when you worked in a place with falling morale and depleted resources. Maybe superstition was what happened when your director went missing in action and your assistant director was still mourning the loss. Maybe that was when you fell back on spells and rituals, the reptile brain saying to the rest of you, “I’ll take it from here. You’ve had your shot.” It wasn’t even unreasonable, really. How many invisible, abstract incantations ruled the world beyond the Southern Reach?

  But not everyone believed in the same versions. The linguist still believed in the superstition of logic, for example, perhaps because she had only been at the Southern Reach for two years. If the statistics held true, she would burn out within the next eighteen months; for some reason, Area X was very hard on linguists, almost as hard as it was on priests, of which there were none now at the Southern Reach.

  So perhaps she was only months removed from converting to the assistant director’s belief system, or Whitby’s, whatever that might be. Because Control knew that belief in a scientific process only took you so far. The ziggurats of illogic erected by your average domestic terrorist as he or she bought the fertilizer or made a detonator took on their own teetering momentum and power. When those towers crashed to the earth, they still existed whole in the perpetrator’s mind, and everyone else’s too—just for different reasons.

  But Hsyu had been adamant, for reasons that didn’t make Control any more comfortable about Area X.

  Imagine, she had told Control next, that language is only part of a method of communication. Imagine that it isn’t even the important part but more like the pipeline, the highway. A conduit only. Infrastructure was the word Control would use with the Voice later.

  The real core of the message, the meaning, would be conveyed by the combinations of living matter that composed the words, as if the “ink” itself was the message.

  “And if a message is half-physical, if a kind of coding is half-physical, then words on a wall don’t mean that much at all, really, in my opinion. I could analyze those words for years—which is, incidentally, what I understand the director may have done—and it wouldn’t help me to understand anything. The type of conduit helps decide how fast the message arrives, and perhaps some context, but that’s all. Further”—and here Control recognized that Hsyu had slipped into the rote routine of a lecture given many times before, possibly accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation—“if someone or something is trying to jam information inside your head using words you understand but a meaning you don’t, it’s not even that it’s not on a bandwidth you can receive, it’s much worse. Like, if the message were a knife and it created its meaning by cutting into meat and your head is the receiver and the tip of that knife is being shoved into your ear over and over again…”

  She didn’t need to say more for Control to think of the expeditions come to grief before they had banned names and modern communication technology. What if the fate of the first expedition in particular had been sealed by a kind of interference they had brought with them that had made them simply unable to listen, to perceive?

  He returned to the lighthouse keeper. “So we think that Saul Evans wrote all of this long ago, right? He can’t possibly be writing anything now, though. He’d be ancient at this point.”

  “We don’t know. We just don’t know.”

  This, unhelpfully, from Whitby, while they all gave him a look like animals caught in the middle of the road late at night with a car coming fast.

  008: THE TERROR

  An hour or so later, it was time to visit the border, Grace telling him that Cheney would take him on the tour. “He wants to, for some reason.” And Grace didn’t, clearly. Down the corridor again to those huge double doors, led by Whitby, as if Control had no memory—only to be greeted by a cheerful Cheney, whose brown leather jacket seemed not so much ubiquitous or wedded to him as a part of him: a beetle’s carapace. Whitby faded into the background, disappearing through the doors with a conspicuous and sharp intake of breath as if about to dive into a lake.

  “I thought I’d come up and spare you the dread gloves,” Cheney exclaimed as he shook Control’s hand. Control wondered if there was some cunning to his affability, or if that was just paranoia spilling over from his interactions with Grace.

  “Why keep them there?” Control asked as Cheney led him via a circuitous “shortcut” past security and out to the parking lot.

  “Budget, I’m afraid. Always the answer around here,” Cheney said. “Too expensive to remove them. And then it became a joke. Or, we made it into a joke.”

  “A joke?” He’d had enough of jokes today.

  At the entrance, Whitby miraculously awaited them at the wheel of an idling army jeep with the top down. He looked like a silent-movie star, the person meant to take the pratfalls, and his pantomimed unfurling of his hand to indicate they should get on board only intensified the impression. Control gave Whitby an eye roll and Whitby winked at him. Had Whitby been a member of the drama club in college? Was he a thwarted thespian?

  “Yes, a joke,” Cheney continued, agreeable, as they jumped into the back; Whitby or someone had conspicuously put a huge file box in the front passenger seat so no one could sit there. “As if whatever’s strange and needs to be analyzed comes to us from inside the building, not from Area X. Have you met those people? We’re a bunch of lunatics.” A bullfrog-like smile—another joke. “Whitby—take the scenic route.”

  But Control was hardly listening; he was wrinkling his nose at the unwelcome fact that the rotting honey smell had followed them into the jeep.

  * * *

  For a long time, Whitby spoke not at all and Cheney said things Control already knew, playing tour guide
and apparently forgetting he was repeating things from the bunny briefing just the day before. So Control focused most of his attention on his surroundings. The “scenic route” took them the usual way Control had seen on maps: the winding road, the roadblocks, the trenches like remnants from an ancient war. Where possible, the swamp and forest had been retained as natural cover or barriers. But odd bald patches of drained swamp and clear-cut forest appeared at intervals, sometimes with guard stations or barracks placed there but often just turned into meadows of yellowing grass. Control got a prickling on his neck that made him think of snipers and remote watchers. Maybe it helped flush out intruders for the drones. Most army personnel they passed were in camouflage, and it was hard for him to judge their numbers. But he knew everyone they passed outside the last checkpoint thought what lay beyond was an area rendered hazardous due to environmental contamination.

  In “cooperation with” the Southern Reach, the army had been tasked with finding new entry points into Area X, and relentlessly—or, perhaps, with growing boredom—monitored the edges for breaches. The army also still tested the border with projectiles from time to time. He knew, too, that nukes were locked in on Area X from the nearest silos, military satellites keeping watch from above.

  But the army’s primary job was to work hard to keep people out while maintaining the fiction of an ecological disaster area. Annexing the land that comprised Area X, and double again around it, as a natural expansion of a military base farther up the coast had helped in that regard. As did the supposed “live fire ranges” dotting the area. The army’s role had arguably become larger as the Southern Reach had been downsized. All medical staff and engineers now resided with army command, for example. If a toilet broke down at the Southern Reach, the plumber came over from the military base to fix it.

  Whitby whipped the jeep from side to side on a rough stretch of road, bringing Cheney alarmingly close. On further inspection, Cheney displayed the remnants of a body builder’s physique, as if he had once been fit, but that this condition, like all human conditions, had receded—and then reconstituted itself in the increased thickness around his waist—but in receding had left behind a still-solid chest, jutting forward through the white shirt, out from the brown jacket, in a triumphant way that almost gave cover to his gut. He was also, according to his file, “a first-rate scientist partial to beer,” the kind of mind Control had seen before. It needed dulling to slow it down or to distance itself from the possibility of despair. Beer versus scientist represented a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought. An ongoing battle.