Authority (Southern Reach, #2)(48)

* * *

By the late afternoon, Control felt as if he hadn’t gotten much further—just given himself a respite from governance of the Southern Reach—although even that was interrupted (again) by the sound of his reconstituted chair barricade being encountered by an apparition who turned out to be Cheney ambitiously leaning forward across the clattery chairs so he could peer around the corner.

“… Hello, Cheney.”

“Hello … Control.”

Perhaps because of his precarious position, Cheney seemed at a loss, even though he was the intruder. Or as if he had thought the office might be empty, the chairs foreshadowing some shift in hierarchy?

“Yes?” Control said, not wanting to invite Cheney all the way in.

The X of his face tightened, the lines unsuccessfully trying to break free and become either parallel or one line. “Oh, yes, well, I guess I just wondered if you’d followed up about, you know, the director’s trip.” This last bit delivered in a low voice backed up by a quick glance away down the hall. Did Cheney have a faction, too? That would be tiresome. But no doubt he did: He was the one true hope of the nervous scientists huddled in the basement, waiting to be downsized, plucked one by one from their offices and cubicles by the giant, invisible hand of Central and then tossed into a smoldering pit of indifference and joblessness.

“Since I’ve got you here, Cheney, here’s a question for you: Anything out of the ordinary about the second-to-last eleventh expedition?” Another thing Control hated about the iterations: a metric mouthful to enunciate, harder still to remember the actual number. “X.11.H, it was, right?”

Cheney, stabilized by some crude chair rearrangement, appeared in full, motorcycle jacket and all, in the doorway. “X.11.J. I don’t think so. You have the files.”

But that was just it. Control had a fairly crude report, including the intel that the director had conducted the exit interviews … which were astonishingly vague in their happy-happy nothing-bad-happened message. “Well, it was the expedition before the director’s special trip. I thought you might have some insight.”

Cheney shook his head, seemed now to very much regret his intrusion. “No, nothing much. Nothing that comes to mind.” Did the director’s office somehow make him uncomfortable? His gaze couldn’t seem to fix on one thing, ricocheted from the far wall to the ceiling and then, ever so briefly, like the brush of a moth’s wings, touched upon the mounds of unprofessional evidence circling Control. Did Cheney think of them as piles of gold Control would steal or piles of shit sandwiches he was being forced to eat?

“Let me ask you about Lowry, then,” Control said, thinking about the ambiguous “L.” notes he’d found and the video he’d be watching all too soon. “How did Lowry and the director get along?”

Cheney seemed just as uncomfortable with this question but more willing to answer. “How does anyone get along, when you think about it, really? Lowry didn’t like me personally but we got along fine professionally. He had an appreciation for our role. He knew the value of having good equipment.” Which probably meant Lowry had approved every purchase order Cheney ever wrote.

“But what about him and the director?” Control asked. Again.

“Bluntly? Lowry admired her in his way, tried to make her his protégé, but she didn’t want to be. She was very much her own person. And I think she thought he got too much credit for just surviving.”

“Wasn’t he a hero?” A glorious hero of the revolution plastered on a wall, remade in the image created by a camera lens and doctored documents. Rehabilitated from his awful experiences. Made productive. Booted up to Central after a while.

“Sure, sure,” Cheney said. “Sure enough. But, you know, maybe overrated. He liked to drink. He liked to throw his weight around. I remember the director once said something unkind, compared him to a prisoner of war who thinks just because he suffered he knows a lot. So, some friction. But they worked together, though. They did work together. Respect in opposition.” Quick flash of a smile, as if to say, “We’re all comrades here.”

“Interesting.” Although not really. Another tactical discovery: Evidence of infighting in the Southern Reach, a breakdown in organizational harmony because people weren’t robots, couldn’t be made to act like robots. Or could they?

“Yes, if you say so,” Cheney said, and trailed off.

“Is there anything else?” Control asked, a pointed stare beneath a frozen smile daring Cheney to ask again about his investigation into the director’s trip.

“No, I guess not. Nope. Not that I can think of,” Cheney said, clearly relieved. He tossed his goodbyes in classic convoluted Cheneyesque fashion as he backed out, amble-stumbling over the chairs and out of sight down the corridor.

After that, Control concentrated on nothing but basic sorting, until all the bits of paper had been accounted for and the piles safely stored in separate filing boxes for further categorizing. Although Control had noticed numerous references to the Séance & Science Brigade, he had found only three brief mentions of Saul Evans to go with the photo. As if the director’s interests had led her elsewhere.

He had, however, uncovered and set aside a sheet handwritten by the director, of seemingly random words and phrases, which he eventually realized, by taking a cross-referencing peek at Grace’s DMP file, had been used as hypnotic commands on the twelfth expedition. Now that was interesting. He almost buzzed Cheney to ask him about it, but something made him put the phone receiver down before punching in the extension.