Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(38)

“Why can we see the corridor?” Control asked.

“Not sure what you mean,” Cheney said.

“If it’s visible, then we were meant to see it.” Maybe. Who really knew? Every off-the-cuff comment Control made came, or so he thought, with a built-in echo, as if the past banal observations of visitors and new employees lingered in the air, seeking to merge, same with same, and finding an exact match far too often.

Cheney sucked on his cheek a second, grudgingly admitted, “That’s a theory. That’s definitely a theory, all right. I can’t say it isn’t.”

Staggering thought: What might come out into the world down a corridor twenty feet tall by twelve feet wide?

They stood there for long moments, bleeding time but not acknowledging it, heedless of the rain. Whitby stood apart, letting the rain soak him, contemptuous of the umbrella. Behind them, through the thunder, the hard trickle of water from the creeks gurgling back down into the sinkhole beyond the ridge. Ahead, the clarity of a cloudless summer day.

While Control tried to stare down that sparkling, that dancing light.





010: FOURTH BREACH

“The terroir” infiltrated his thoughts again, when, late in the day, drying off, Control received the transcripts from his morning session with the biologist, the trip to the border kaleidoscoping through his head. He had just reluctantly re-tossed the mouse into the trash and repatriated the plant with the storage cathedral. It had taken an effort of will to do that and to close the door on the weird sermon scrawled on his wall. He hated to engage in superstition, but the doubt remained—that he had made a mistake, that the director had left both mouse and plant in her desk drawer for a reason, as a kind of odd protection against … what?

He still didn’t know as he performed an Internet search on Ghost Bird’s reference to the phorus snail, which revealed she was quoting almost word for word from an old book by an obscure amateur “parson-naturalist.” Something she would have encountered in college, with whatever associated memories that, too, might bring. He didn’t believe it had significance, except for the obvious one: The biologist had been comparing him to an awkward snail.

Then he thumbed through the transcript, which he found comforting. At one point during the session, fishing, Control had pivoted away from both tower and lighthouse, back to where she had been picked up.

Q: What did you leave at the empty lot?

What if, he speculated there at his desk—still ignoring the water-stained pages in the drawer next to him—the empty lot was a terroir related to the terroir that was Area X? What if some confluence of person and place meant something more than just a return home? Did he need to order a complete historical excavation of the empty lot? And what about the other two, the anthropologist and the surveyor? Mired in the arcana of the Southern Reach, he wouldn’t have time to check on them for another few days. Grudging gratitude to Grace for simplifying his job by sending them away.

Meanwhile, the biologist was answering his question on the page.

A: Leave? Like, what? A necklace with a crucifix? A confession?

Q: No.

A: Well, why don’t you tell me what you thought I might’ve left there?

Q: Your manners?

That had earned him a chuckle, if a caustic one, followed by a long, tired sigh that seemed to expel all the air from her lungs.

A: I’ve told you that nothing happened there. I woke up as if from an endless dream. And then they picked me up.

Q:Do you ever dream? Now, I mean.

A: What would be the point?

Q: What do you mean?

A: I’d just dream of being out of this place.

Q: Do you want to hear about my dreams?

He didn’t know why he had said this to her. He didn’t know what he’d tell her. Would he tell her about the endless falling into the bay, into the maw of leviathans?

To his surprise, she said:

A: What do you dream of, John? Tell me.

It was the first time she’d used his name, and he tried to hate how it had sent a kind of spark through him. John. She had brought her feet up onto the chair so she was hugging her knees and peering at him almost impishly.

Sometimes you had to adjust your strategy, give up something to get something. So he did tell her his dream, even though he felt self-conscious and hoped Grace wouldn’t see it in the official record, use it against him somehow. But if he’d lied, if he’d made something up, Control believed that Ghost Bird would know, that even as he’d been trying to interpret her tells, she had been processing him the whole time. Even when he asked the questions he was hemorrhaging data. He had a sudden image of information floating out the side of his head in a pixelated blood-red mist. These are my relatives. This is my ex-girlfriend. My father was a sculptor. My mother is a spy.

But she had relented, too, during the conversation, for a moment.

A: I woke in the empty lot and I thought I was dead. I thought I was in purgatory, maybe, even though I don’t believe in an afterlife. But it was quiet and so empty … so I waited there, afraid to leave, afraid there might be some reason I was meant to be there. Not sure I wanted to know anything else. Then the police came for me, and then the Southern Reach after that. But I still believed I wasn’t really alive.

What if the biologist had just that morning decided she was alive, not dead? Perhaps that accounted for the change in her mood.