Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(28)
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.