Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)(23)

“You don’t want to find out if the psychologist is there?”

The surveyor gave me a look as if I had said something idiotic. “Holed up in a high position with clear lines of sight in every direction? In a place they’ve told us has a weapons cache? I’ll take my chances here. If you were smart, you’d do the same. You might ‘find out’ that you don’t like a bullet hole in the head. Besides, she might be somewhere else.”

Her stubbornness tore at me. I didn’t want to split up for purely practical reasons—it was true we had been told prior expeditions had stored weapons at the lighthouse—and because I believed it more likely that the surveyor would try to go home without me there.

“It’s the lighthouse or the tower,” I said, trying to sidestep the issue. “And it would be better for us if we found the psychologist before we went back down into the tower. She saw whatever killed the anthropologist. She knows more than she’s told us.” The unspoken thought: That perhaps if a day passed, or two, whatever lived in the tower, slowly making words on the wall, would have disappeared or gotten so far ahead of us we would never catch up. But that brought to mind a disturbing image of the tower as endless, with infinite levels descending into the earth.

The surveyor folded her arms. “You really don’t get it, do you? This mission is over.”

Was she afraid? Did she just not like me enough to say yes? Whatever the reason, her opposition angered me, as did the smug look on her face.

In the moment, I did something that I regret now. I said, “There’s no reward in the risk of going back to the tower right now.”

I thought I had been subtle in my intonation of one of the psychologist’s hypnotic cues, but a shudder passed over the surveyor’s face, a kind of temporary disorientation. When it cleared, the look that remained told me she understood what I had tried to do. It wasn’t even a look of surprise; more that in her mind I had confirmed an impression of me that had been slowly forming but was now set. Now, too, I had learned that hypnotic cues only worked for the psychologist.

“You’d do anything, wouldn’t you, to get your way,” the surveyor said, but the fact was: She held the rifle. What weapon did I really have? And I told myself it was because I didn’t want the anthropologist’s death to be meaningless that I had suggested this course of action.

When I did not reply, she sighed, then said, with weariness in her voice, “You know, I finally figured it out while I was developing those useless photographs. What bothered me the most. It’s not the thing in the tunnel or the way you conduct yourself or anything the psychologist did. It’s this rifle I’m holding. This damn rifle. I stripped it down to clean it and found it was made of thirty-year-old parts, cobbled together. Nothing we brought with us is from the present. Not our clothes, not our shoes. It’s all old junk. Restored crap. We’ve been living in the past this whole time. In some sort of reenactment. And why?” She made a derisive sound. “You don’t even know why.”

It was as much as she’d ever said to me at one time. I wanted to say that this information registered as little more than the mildest of surprises in the hierarchy of what we had thus far discovered. But I didn’t. All I had left was to be succinct.

“Will you remain here until I return?” I asked.

This was now the essential question, and I didn’t like the speed of her reply, or its tone.

“Whatever you want.”

“Don’t say anything you can’t back up,” I said. I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.

“Fuck off,” she said.

So that’s how we left it—her leaning back in that rickety chair, holding her assault rifle, as I went off to discover the source of the light I had seen the night before. I had with me a knapsack full of food and water, along with two of the guns, equipment to take samples, and one of the microscopes. Somehow I felt safer taking a microscope with me. Some part of me, too, no matter how I had tried to convince the surveyor to come with me, welcomed the chance to explore alone, to not be dependent on, or worried about, anyone else.

I looked back a couple of times before the trail twisted away, and the surveyor was still sitting there, staring at me like a distorted reflection of who I’d been just days before.





03: IMMOLATION

Now a strange mood took hold of me, as I walked silent and alone through the last of the pines and the cypress knees that seemed to float in the black water, the gray moss that coated everything. It was as if I traveled through the landscape with the sound of an expressive and intense aria playing in my ears. Everything was imbued with emotion, awash in it, and I was no longer a biologist but somehow the crest of a wave building and building but never crashing to shore. I saw with such new eyes the subtleties of the transition to the marsh, the salt flats. As the trail became a raised berm, dull, algae-choked lakes spread out to the right and a canal flanked it to the left. Rough channels of water meandered out in a maze through a forest of reeds on the canal side, and islands, oases of wind-contorted trees, appeared in the distance like sudden revelations. The stooped and blackened appearance of these trees was shocking against the vast and shimmering gold-brown of the reeds. The strange quality of the light upon this habitat, the stillness of it all, the sense of waiting, brought me halfway to a kind of ecstasy.