Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(29)

“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.