Blind Lake (26 page)

Chris folded his napkin and stood up. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about me,” he said.

After Chris had left the house, and before the call came from Charlie Grogan asking her to pick up her daughter, Marguerite had spent the morning with the Subject.

Despite the implied danger to Blind Lake and Ray’s explicit threats, there was nothing useful she could do, at least not right now. Much would be asked of her, Marguerite suspected, and probably very soon. But not yet. Now she was stuck in a limbo of dread and ignorance. No real work to do and no way to calm the churn of her emotions. She hadn’t slept, but sleep was out of the question.

So she made herself a pot of tea and watched the Subject, scribbling notes for queries she would probably never submit. The entire enterprise was doomed, Marguerite thought, and so probably was the Subject himself. He appeared visibly weaker as the sun rose into a pale sky flecked with high clouds. He had been hiking for weeks, far from any traveled road, with scant supplies of food and water. His morning cloacal evacuations were thin and faintly green. When he walked, his body periodically contorted in angles that suggested pain.

But this morning he found both food and water. He had entered the foothills of a tall range of mountains, and though the land was still terribly dry he discovered an oasis where a stream of glacial water cascaded down a terrace of rocks. The water pooled in a cup of granite, deep and transparent as glass. Fan-leafed succulents splayed their foliage around it.

Subject bathed before he ate. He advanced gingerly into the pool, then stood under the falling stream. He had accumulated a coat of dust during his journey and it discolored the water around him. When he emerged from the pool his dermal integument was gleaming, changed from near-white to a somber burnt-umber. He swiveled his head as if scanning for predators. (Were there predatory species in this part of his world? It seemed unlikely—where was the game to support a large predator?—but was not, Marguerite supposed, impossible.) Then, reassured, he plucked, peeled, and washed several of the fleshy leaves and began to devour them. Moist flecks fell from his mandibles and collected at his feet. After he had eaten the leaves he found mossy patches on the granite near the waterfall, and he licked these clean with his broad blue-gray tongue.

Then he sat patiently digesting his meal, and Marguerite called up the file she had been writing for Tess: her children’s-book story of the Subject’s odyssey.

The act of writing soothed her, although the narrative was far from up-to-date. She had just finished a description of the sandstorm crisis and Subject’s awakening in the ruined city of the desert.

She wrote:

All around him in the still and windless morning were the pillars and mounds of buildings long abandoned and eroded by the seasons.
These structures were not like the tall conical buildings of his home city. Whoever had made these buildings—perhaps his own ancestors—had made them differently. They had erected pillars, like the Greeks, and the pillars might once have supported much greater houses, or temples, or places of business.
The pillars were hewn from black stone. The gritty desert wind had polished them to a fine smoothness. Some stood tall, but most had been worn to fractions of their original size, and where they had not fallen the wind had left them listing toward the east. There were the remains of other kinds of buildings too, some square foundations and even a few low pyramids, all of them as rounded as the rocks you find at the bottom of a stream.
The storm had scoured the desert floor to a level surface, and now the sun cast stark shadows among the ruins. Subject stood in contemplation. The sundial shadows grew shorter as the morning wore on. Then—perhaps thinking of his destination—Subject began to walk westward once again. By noon he had left the ruined city entirely, and it vanished below the horizon as if utterly lost, and nothing remained ahead of him but glittering sand and the ghostly blue silhouettes of distant mountains.

She had just keyed the period when she took Charlie Grogan’s call.

Tess was quiet in the car as they left the Alley.

Marguerite drove slowly, struggling to assemble her thoughts. She had an important choice to make.

But first she wanted to know what had happened. Tess had left school and wandered over to the Eye to bother Charlie, that much was obvious, but why?

“I’m sorry,” Tess said, shooting apprehensive glances at her from the passenger seat. Am I, Marguerite wondered, as frightening as that? Judge and jury? Is that how she sees me?

“You don’t have to apologize,” Marguerite said. “Tell you what. I’ll call Mr. Fleischer and tell him you had an appointment but you forgot to give him the note. How’s that sound?”

“Okay,” Tess said cautiously, waiting for the hook.

“But I’m sure he’s worried about you. So am I. How come you didn’t go back for class this afternoon?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to go to the Eye.”

“How come? I thought you didn’t like it there. You hated the tour, back at Crossbank.”

“Just felt like it.”

“Badly enough to skip school?”

“I guess.”

“How’d you get inside? Mr. Grogan seemed a little upset over that.”

“I walked in. Nobody was looking.”

That, at least, was probably true. Tess was too guileless to have bluffed her way in or found a hidden entrance. In all likelihood she had just walked up to the front door and opened it: Charlie’s investigation would discover a sleepy security guard or some employee who’d wandered out to smoke a joint. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I wasn’t really looking for anything.”

“Learn anything?”

Tess shrugged.

“Because, you know, that’s pretty unusual behavior for you. You never skipped school before.”

“It was important.”

“Important how, Tess?”

No answer. Only a teary frown.

“Was it because of Mirror Girl?”

Tessa’s unhappy expression condensed into misery. “Yes.”

“She told you to go there?”

“She never tells me anything. She just wanted to go. So I went.”

“Well, what was Mirror Girl looking for?”

“I don’t know. I think she just wanted to see if she could see her reflection.”

“Her reflection? Her reflection where?”

“In the Eye,” Tess said.

“A mirror at the Eye? It isn’t that kind of telescope. There’s no real mirror.”

“Not in a mirror—in the
Eye
.”

Marguerite didn’t know how to proceed, how to ask the next question. She was afraid of Tessa’s answers. They sounded crazy. Crazy: the forbidden word. The unspeakable thought. She hated all this talk of Mirror Girl because it sounded crazy, and Marguerite didn’t think she could bear that. Almost anything else, an injury, a disease; she could imagine Tess in leg braces or with her arm in a sling, she knew how to console her when she was hurt; that was well within the range of her mothering skills. But please, she thought, not craziness, not the kind of refractory madness that excludes all comfort or communication. Marguerite had worked nights at a psychiatric hospital during college. She had seen incurable schizophrenics. Crazy people lived in their own nightmarish VR, more alone than physical isolation could ever make them. She refused to imagine Tess as one of those people.

She pulled into the school parking lot but asked Tess to sit for a minute with her.

Death and madness: could she really protect her daughter from either of those things?

I can’t even protect her from Ray
.

Ray had threatened to keep Tess with him, to take physical custody of her—in effect, to kidnap her. But she’s with me now, Marguerite thought. And if I had a choice I’d take her away from here, drive her down the road to Constance and from there away, away, anywhere away from the quarantine and the distressing rumors Chris had brought home, away from Eyeball Alley and away from Mirror Girl.

But she couldn’t do that.

She had to send Tess back to school, and from school Tess would go home to Ray and the increasingly fragile illusion of normality. If I keep her with me, Marguerite thought, then I’ll be the one violating the letter of our agreement, and Ray will send his security people to get her.

But if I let her go back to him, and something happens—

“Can I get out now?” Tess asked.

Marguerite took a deep, calming breath. “I guess so,” she said. “Back to school with you. No more expeditions during class, though, all right?”

“All right.”

“Promise me?”

“Promise.” She put her hand on the door handle.

“One more thing,” Marguerite said. “Listen to me.
Listen
. This is important, Tess. If anything strange happens at Dad’s, you call me. Doesn’t matter what time of day or night. You don’t even have to think about it. Just call me. Because I’m looking out for you even when you’re not with me.”

“Is Chris looking out for me, too?”

Surprised, Marguerite said, “Sure he is. Chris too.”

“Okay,” Tess said, and she opened the door and scooted out of the car. Marguerite watched her daughter cross the desolate parking lot, scuffling through whirls of old snow, her jacket still cross-buttoned and her winter hat clasped in her small gloved hands.

I’ll see her again, Marguerite told herself. I will. I must.

Then Tess vanished through the front door of the school and the afternoon was still and empty.

Sue Sampel woke up nervous.

It was Saturday morning, and today she was supposed to perform the small act of information theft she had so rashly promised earlier in the week. Her hand shook when she brushed her teeth, and her reflection in the mirror was the perfect image of a terrified middle-aged woman.

She let Sebastian sleep another hour while she made herself coffee and toast. Sebastian was one of those people who could sleep through storms or earthquakes, while a noisy sparrow was enough to bring Sue to groggy, unwelcome consciousness.

Sebastian’s book was on the kitchen table, and Sue leafed through it for distraction. She had read it all the way through weeks ago and had lately taken a second run at it, trying to absorb ideas that had slipped past her the first time.
God & the Quantum Vacuum
. A weighty title. Like a couple of sumo wrestlers balanced on an ampersand.

But the book had not been sappy or superficial. In fact it had taxed her to the limits of her bachelor of science degree. Fortunately, Sebastian was pretty good at explaining difficult concepts. And she had been privileged to have the author handy when she got stuck on something.

The book was not overtly religious nor was it a work of rigorous science. Sebastian himself called it “speculative philosophy.” Once he had described it as “a bull session, writ large. Very large.” That, Sue supposed, was modesty speaking.

The book was full of arcane scientific history and evolutionary lore and quantum physics. Heady material for a college religion prof whose previous published works had included such torrid bodice-rippers as “Errors of Attribution in First-Century Pauline Texts.” Basically, his argument was that human beings had achieved their current state of consciousness by appropriating a small piece of a universal intelligence. Tapping into God, in other words. This definition of God, he argued, could be stretched to fit definitions of deity across a spectrum of cultures and beliefs. Was God omnipresent and omniscient? Yes, because He permeated all of creation. Was He singular or multiple? Both: He was omnipresent because He was inherent in the physical processes of the universe; but His mind was knowable (by human beings) only in discrete and often dissimilar fragments. Was there life after death, or perhaps reincarnation? In the most literal sense, no; but because our sentience was borrowed it lived on without our bodies, albeit as a tiny piece of something almost infinitely larger.

Sue understood what he was getting at. He wanted to give people the consolation of religion without the baggage of dogmatism. He was pretty casual about his science, and that pissed off people like Elaine Coster. But his heart was in the right place. He wanted a religion that could plausibly comfort widows and orphans without committing them to patriarchy, intolerance, fundamentalism, or weird dietary laws. He wanted a religion that wasn’t in a perpetual fistfight with modern cosmology.

Not such a bad thing to want, Sue thought. But where’s
my
consolation? Consolation for the petty thief. The larcenous office-worker. Forgive me, for I know exactly what I do and I’m of two minds about it.

Assuming any of that mattered. Assuming they weren’t all doomed. She had read the magazine fragment at Sawyer’s and she had drawn her own conclusions.

Sebastian came downstairs freshly showered and dressed in his casual finest: blue jeans and a green knit sweater that looked like something an English vicar might have thrown away.

“Today’s the heist,” Sue said.

“How do you feel?”

“Scared.”

“You know, you don’t have to do this. It was good of you to volunteer, but nobody will say anything if you change your mind.”

“Nobody except Elaine.”

“Well, maybe Elaine. But seriously—”

“Seriously, it’s okay. Just promise me one thing.”

“What?”

“When you’re at that Town Hall meeting… I mean, I know the others are looking out for me, they’ll call if Ray takes off for the Plaza. But the only one I really trust is you.”

He nodded, owl-eyed and ridiculously solemn.

“I need at least five minutes warning if Ray is on his way.”

“You’ll have it,” Sebastian said.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

The morning crept past too quickly. The Town Hall meeting started at one, and she asked Sebastian to drive so he could drop her off inconspicuously outside Hubble Plaza. They didn’t talk much in the car. She gave him a quick kiss when he stopped. Then she stepped out into the cold air, carded herself into the Plaza’s main entrance, waved hello to the lobby guard, and walked without obviously hurrying to the elevators. Her footsteps resounded in the tiled lobby like the tick of a metronome,
allegro
, in time with the beat of her heart.