Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(45)
“Hit the ground running.” The notes and these sessions were still firmly within his domain. He didn’t want to postpone, so he’d go to her. With any luck, he wouldn’t bump into Grace. Whitby he could’ve used help from, but even though he’d buzzed him, the man was making himself scarce.
As he said that he’d stop by soon, Control realized that it might be some ploy—the obvious one of not playing along, but also that by going he might be giving up some advantage or confirming that she held some power over him. But his head was full of scraps of notes and the puzzle of a possible clandestine trip by the director across the border and the deadly echo of muffled interiors of jewelry boxes. He wanted to clear it out, or fill it up with something else for a while.
He left his office, headed down the corridor. Of the smattering of personnel in the hall beyond some were actually in lab coats for once. For his benefit? “Bored?” a pale gaunt man who looked vaguely familiar murmured to the black woman walking beside him as they passed. “Eager to get on with it,” came the reply. “You prefer this place, you really do, don’t you?” Should he be playing it by the book more? Perhaps. He couldn’t deny that the biologist had gotten lodged inside of his head: A faint pressure that made the path leading to the expedition wing narrower, the ceilings lower, the continuous seeking tongue of rough green carpet curling up around him. They were beginning to exist in some transitional space between interrogation and conversation, something for which he could not quite find a name.
“Good afternoon, Director,” said Hsyu, head rising unexpected from a water fountain to his left so that it was as if a large puppet or art installation had come to life. “Is everything okay?”
Everything had been fine just a second before. Why would anything be different now? “You just looked very serious.” Perhaps you’re not very serious today; couldn’t that be it? But he didn’t say it, just smiled and continued on down the hall, already leaving the Lilliputian domain of the linguistics subdepartment.
Every time the biologist spoke something changed in his world, which he found suspicious on some level, resented it for the distraction. But not a flirtation, no, nor even the ordinary emotional bond. He knew with absolute certainty that he would not become overly fixated or obsessional, enter into some downward spiral, if they continued to talk, to share the same space. That had no place in his plans, didn’t fit his profile.
The expedition wing featured four layers of obvious security, with the debriefing room they usually used perched on the edge of the outer layer—right after you passed through a decontamination zone that scanned you for everything from bacteria to the ghost of that rusty nail that had risen up through your foot on the rocky beach when you were ten. Considering the biologist had stood in a festering empty lot full of weeds, rusted metal, cracked concrete, and dog shit for hours before arriving, this seemed pointless. But still they did it, with an unsmiling and calm efficiency. Beyond that, all was rendered in an almost blinding white that contrasted with the washed-out teal-and-copper textures of the rooms off the corridor. Three more locked doors lay between the rest of the Southern Reach and the “suites,” aka the holding areas. A texture and tone that might once have been futurist but now felt retro-futurist clung to white-and-black furniture that had an abstract modernist quality. This is a version of a chair. This is an approximation of a table, a counter. The “bedeviled” glass partitions, as his dad would have joked, had been etched and frosted into simplistic wilderness scenes, including a row of reeds with an approximation of a marsh hawk hovering above. Like most such efforts, all of this could have come from the set of a low-budget 1970s sci-fi movie. It had none of the fluidity and sense of frozen motion, either, that his father had tried to put into his abstract sculptures.
In the minimalist foyer and rec rooms that served as preamble to the suites you could also find a novel’s worth of photographs and portraits that had no relationship to reality. The photographs had been carefully chosen to suggest post-mission success, complete with grins and cheers, when they actually depicted pre-mission prep, often for expeditions gone disastrously wrong, or actors from photoshoots. The portraits, a long procession of them ending at the suites, were worse, in Control’s estimation. They depicted all twenty-five “returning” members of the first expedition, the triumphant pioneers who had encountered the “pristine wilderness” that in fact had killed all but Lowry. This was the alternative reality any staff that came into contact with expedition members had to support. This was the fiction that came with its own made-up or tailored stories of bravery and endurance meant to evoke these same qualities in the current expedition. Like some socialist dictatorship’s glorious heroes of the revolution.
What did it mean? Nothing. Had the biologist believed it all? Perhaps. The tale wanted to be believed, begged to be believed: a story of good old national can-do pride. Roll up your sleeves and get down to work, and if you try hard enough you’ll come back alive and not a broken-down zombie with a distant gaze and cancer in place of a personality and an intact short-term memory.
* * *
He found Ghost Bird in her room, on her cot—or, someone other than him might have reported back, her bed. The place combined the ambiance of a whitewashed barracks, a summer camp, and a failing hotel. The same pale walls—although here you could see painted-over graffiti, the same as in a prison cell. The high ceiling included a skylight, and on the side wall a narrow window, too high for the biologist to peer out of it. The bed had been built into the far wall, and opposite it a TV with DVD player: approved movies only and a couple of approved channels. Nothing too realistic. Nothing that might fill in the amnesia. It was mostly ancient science-fiction and fantasy movies or melodramas. Documentaries and news programs were on the No list. Animal shows could go either way.