Authority. Jeff VanderMeer

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      Just close your eyes and you will remember me,” Control’s father had told him three years ago, in a place not far from where he was now, the dying trying to comfort the living. But when he closed his eyes, everything disappeared except the dream of falling and the accumulated scars from past assignments. Why had the biologist said that? Why had she said she was drowning? It had thrown him, but it had also given him an odd sense of secret sharing between them. As if she had gotten into his head and seen his dream, and now they were bound together. He resented that, did not want to be connected to the people he had to question. He had to glide above. He had to choose when he swooped down, not be brought to earth by the will of another.

      When Control opened his eyes, he was standing in the back of the U-shaped building that served as the Southern Reach’s headquarters. The curve lay in the front, a road and parking lot preceding it. Built in a style now decades old, the layered, stacked concrete was a monument or a midden—he couldn’t decide which. The ridges and clefts were baffling; the way the roof leered slightly over the rest made it seem less functional than like performance art or abstract sculpture on a grand and yet numbing scale. Making things worse, the area coveted by the open arms of the U had been made into a courtyard, looking out on a lake ringed by thick old-growth forest. The edges of the lake were singed black, as if at one time set ablaze, and a wretched gnarl of cypress knees waded through the dark, brackish water. The light that suffused the lake had a claustrophobic gray quality, separate and distinct from the blue sky above.

      This, too, had at one time been new, perhaps back during the Cretaceous period, and the building had probably stood here then in some form, reverse engineered so far into the past that you could still look out the windows and see dragonflies as big as vultures.

      The U that hugged them close inspired no great confidence; it felt less a symbol of luck than of the incomplete. Incomplete thoughts. Incomplete conclusions. Incomplete reports. The doors at the ends of the U, through which many passed as a shortcut to the other side, confirmed a failure of the imagination. And all the while, the abysmal swamp did whatever swamps did, as perfect in its way as the Southern Reach was imperfect.

      Everything was so still that when a woodpecker swooped across that scene it was as violent as the sonic boom of an F-16.

      To the left of the U and the lake—just visible from where he stood—a road threaded its way through the trees, toward the invisible border, beyond which lay Area X. Just thirty-five miles of paved road and then another fifteen unpaved beyond that, with ten checkpoints in all, and shoot-to-kill orders if you weren’t meant to be there, and fences and barbed wire and trenches and pits and more swamp, possibly even government-trained colonies of apex predators and genetically modified poison berries and hammers to hit yourself on the head with … but in some ways, ever since Control had been briefed, he had wondered: To what point? Because that’s what you did in such situations? Keep people out? He’d studied the reports. If you reached the border in an “unauthorized way” and crossed over anywhere but the door, you would never be seen again. How many people had done just that, without being spotted? How would the Southern Reach ever know? Once or twice, an investigative journalist had gotten close enough to photograph the outside of the Southern Reach’s border facilities, but even then it had just confirmed in the public imagination the official story of environmental catastrophe, one that wouldn’t be cleaned up for a century.

      There came a tread around the stone tables in the concrete courtyard across which little white tiles competed with squares of clotted earth into which unlikely tulips had been shoved at irregular intervals … he knew that tread, with its special extra little dragging sound. The assistant director had been a field officer once; something had happened on assignment, and she’d hurt her leg. Inside the building, she could disguise it, but not on the treacherous grouted tiles. It wasn’t an advantage for him to know this, because it made him want to empathize with her. “Whenever you say ‘in the field,’ I have this image of all of you spooks running through the wheat,” his father had said to his mother, once.

      Grace was joining him at his request, to assist him in staring out at the swamp while they talked about Area X. Because he’d thought a change of setting—leaving the confines of the concrete coffin—might help soften her animosity. Before he’d realized just how truly hellish and prehistoric the landscape was, and thus now pre-hysterical as well. Look out upon this mosquito orgy, and warm to me, Grace.

      “You interviewed just the biologist. I still do not know why.” She said this before he could extend even a tendril of an opening gambit … and all of his resolve to play the diplomat, to somehow become her colleague, not her enemy—even if by misdirection or a metaphorical jab in the kidneys—dissolved into the humid air.

      He explained his thought processes. She seemed impressed, although he couldn’t really read her yet.

      “Did she ever seem, during training, like she was hiding something?” he asked.

      “Deflection. You think she is hiding something.”

      “I don’t know yet, actually. I could be wrong.”

      “We have more expert interrogators than you.”

      “Probably true.”

      “We should send her to Central.”

      The thought made him shudder.

      “No,” he said, a little too emphatically, then worried in the next split second that the assistant director might guess that he cared about the biologist’s fate.

      “I have already sent the anthropologist and the surveyor away.”

      Now he could smell the decay of all that plant matter slowly rotting beneath the surface of the swamp, could sense the awkward turtles and stunted fish pushing their way through matted layers. He didn’t trust himself to turn to face her. Didn’t trust himself to say anything, stood there suspended by his surprise.

      Cheerfully, she continued: “You said they weren’t of any use, so I sent them to Central.”

      “By whose authority?”

      “Your authority. You clearly indicated to me that this was what you wanted. If you meant something else, my apologies.”

      A tiny seismic shift occurred inside of Control, an imperceptible shudder.

      They were gone. He couldn’t have them back. He had to put it out of his mind, would feed himself the lie that Grace had done him a favor, simplified his job. Just how much pull did she have at Central, anyway?

      “I can always read the transcripts if I change my mind,” he said, attempting an agreeable tone. They’d still be questioned, and he’d given her the opening by saying he didn’t want to interview them.

      She was scanning his face intently, looking for some sign that she’d come close to hitting the target.

      He tried to smile, doused his anger with the thought that if the assistant director had meant him real harm, she would have found a way to spirit the biologist away, too. This was just a warning. Now, though, he was going to have to take something away from Grace as well. Not to get even but so she wouldn’t be tempted to take yet more from him. He couldn’t afford to lose the biologist, too. Not yet.

      Into the awkward silence, Grace asked, “Why are you just standing out here in the heat like an idiot?” Breezily, as if nothing had happened at all. “We should go inside. It’s time for lunch, and you can meet some of the admin.”

      Control СКАЧАТЬ