Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy) (34 page)

0028: GHOST BIRD

The Crawler was behind them. The words were behind them. It was just a submerged tunnel on a warm day. It was just a forest. It was just a place they were walking out of.

Ghost Bird and Grace did not talk much as they walked. There wasn’t much to say, such a world lay between them now. She knew that Grace did not consider her quite human, yet something about her must reassure the woman enough to keep traveling with her, to trust her when she said that something had
changed
beyond the climate, that they should head for the border and see what that something was. The scent of pine pollen clung to the air, rich and golden and ripe. The wrens and yellow warblers chased each other through the bushes and trees.

They encountered no one and the animals while not tame seemed somehow unwary. Not wary of them, anyway. Ghost Bird thought of Control, back there, in the tunnel. What had he found down below? Had he found the true Area X, or had his death been the catalyst for the change she had felt, that manifested all around them? Even now she could not see Control clearly, knew only that his absence was a loss, a sadness, to her. He had been there almost her entire life—the real, lived-in life she had now, not the one she had inherited. That still meant something.

At the moment he had gone through the door so far below, she had seen him and had felt the Crawler’s seekers fall away, the entire apparatus receding into the darkness after him. There had come a shuddering miniature earthquake, as the sides of the tunnel convulsed once, twice, and then were again still. Known that although nothing could be reversed, the director had been right: It could be changed, it could change, and that Control had added or subtracted something from an equation that was too complex for anyone to see the whole of. Perhaps the director had been right about the biologist, just not in the way she’d thought. The words from the wall still blazed across her thoughts, wrapped themselves around her like a shield.

Ghost Bird had walked up into the light to find Grace staring at her with fear, with suspicion, and she had smiled at Grace, had told her not to be afraid. Not to be afraid. Why be afraid of what you could not prevent? Did not want to prevent. Were they not evidence of survival? Were they not evidence of some kind? Both of them. There was nothing to warn anyone about. The world went on, even as it fell apart, changed irrevocably, became something strange and different.

They walked. They camped for the night. They walked again at first light, the world ablaze with sunrise and the awakening of the landscape around them. There were no soldiers, no suggestion of a ribbon stitching through the sky. The winter weather had lifted and it was hot, it was summer now in Area X.

The present moments elongated, once past still ponds and into the final miles. She lived in the present by dint of blistered feet and chafed ankles and biting flies drawn to the sweat on her ears or forehead and the parched feeling in her throat despite drinking water from her canteen. The sun had decided to lodge itself behind her eyes and shine out so that the inside of her head felt burned. Every beautiful thing that lay ahead she knew she had seen at least once behind her. Eternity found in the repetition of Grace’s steps, her sometimes halting steps, and the constant way the light gripped the ground and sent its heat back up at her.

“Do you think the checkpoints are still manned?” Grace asked.

Ghost Bird did not reply. The question made no sense, but enough humanity remained to her that she didn’t want to argue. The hegemony of what was real had been altered, or broken, forever. She would always know now the biologist’s position, near or far, a beacon somewhere in her mind, a connection never closed.

In the final miles to the old position of the border, the sun was so bright and hot that she felt a little delirious, even though she knew it was a mirage—she had water and was still hobbling through blisters and petty aches. How could the sun be so oppressive and yet the scene so unbearably beautiful?

“If we do make it through, what do we tell them?”

Ghost Bird doubted there would be a “them” to tell. She longed now for Rock Bay, wished to see it through the eyes of Area X, wondered how it might have changed, how it might have remained the same. This was really her only goal: to return to a place that had been like the island was to the biologist.

They reached where the old border had been, on the lip of the giant sinkhole. The white tents of the Southern Reach had turned dark green with mold and other organisms. The brick of the army outpost was half pulled down and sunken in as if some giant creature had attacked it. There were no soldiers, there were no checkpoints.

She bent down to tighten the laces on her boots, a velvet ant beside her foot. From what seemed like a great distance, she heard a scrambling huff from the lush vegetation of the sinkhole. For an instant, some odd, broad-shouldered marmot pushed its face through the reeds. Then saw her and hurriedly disappeared with a plop into the creek behind it—while she rose, amused.

“What is it?” Grace asked from behind her.

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

Then she was walking again, laughing a bit, and everything was pressed out of her except a yearning for water and a clean shirt. Inexplicably, unaccountably happy, grinning even.

*   *   *

A day later, they reached the Southern Reach building. The swamp had crept up to the courtyard and seeped across the tiles, pushed up against the concrete steps leading inside. Storks and ibises had built nests on a roof that looked half caved in. The evidence of a fire that had burned itself out inside the building, somewhere near the science department, showed in scorch marks on the outer walls. From afar, they could see no signs of human life. No shadow of the people Grace had known there. Behind them lay the holding pond and the scrawny pine strung with lights, now two feet taller than when Ghost Bird had last seen it.

By mutual unspoken decision, they halted at the edge of the building. From there, a gash in the side showed them three floors of empty, debris-strewn rooms, and a greater darkness within. They stood for a moment, hidden by the trees, and peered at those remains.

Grace could not sense the way the building slowly took one breath and then another, the way it
sighed
. She could not sense the echo at the heart of the Southern Reach that told Ghost Bird that this place had built its own ecology, its own biosphere. To disturb that, to enter, would be a mistake. The time for expeditions was over.

They did not linger, look for survivors, or do any of the other usual or perhaps foolish things that they could have done.

But now came the crucible, now came the test.

“What if there is no world out there? Not as we know it? Or no way out to the world?” Grace saying this, while existing in that moment in a world that was so rich and full.

“We’ll know soon enough,” Ghost Bird said, and took Grace’s hand for a moment, squeezed it.

Something in Ghost Bird’s expression must have calmed her, for Grace smiled, said, “Yes, we will. We’ll know.” Between them, they might know more than any person still living on Earth.

It was just an ordinary day. Another ordinary summer day.

So they walked forward, throwing pebbles as they went, throwing pebbles to find the invisible outline of a border that might not exist anymore.

They walked for a long time, throwing pebbles at the air.

000X: THE DIRECTOR

You sit in the dark at your desk in the Southern Reach in the minutes before leaving for the twelfth expedition, your backpack beside you, the guns tucked into the outer mesh, safeties on, not loaded. You will leave it all a mess. The bookshelves have become overgrown, your notes nothing anyone would recognize as an organized pattern. So many things that make no sense, or only make sense to you. Like a plant and a battered cell phone. Like a photograph on the wall from when you knew Saul Evans.

Your letter to him is in your pocket. It feels awkward to you. It feels like trying to say something that needed to be said without words, to someone who may no longer be able to read it. But perhaps, too, it is like the script on the walls of the tower: The words aren’t important but what’s channeled through them is. Maybe the important thing is getting it out on the page so it can be there in your mind.

You agonize for the thousandth time that your course of action is poorly thought out. You have a choice. You can let it all go on as it has before. Or … you can do this thing that in just a short while will take you out of the dark, out of the silence, and on a path from which you cannot come back. Even if you make it back.

You have already said all the things to Grace that you had to say to make it seem like it would be all right. All the things said to the beloved mark, to reassure her. To keep up morale. And you almost believe she believed it, for your sake.
When I get back. When we solve this. When we …

A pale, curious head peers in, turned at an angle: Whitby, the mouse peeking out from his shirt pocket, all ears and black little eyes and fragile handlike paws.

You feel suddenly old and helpless and everything seems very far from you—the chair, the door beyond, the hall, and Whitby a canyon yawning wide miles and miles away. You let out a little sob, a little attempt to draw in breath. Reeling there in momentary panic in the garbage heap of your notes. And yet, under that, a core that must not yield.

“Help me up, Whitby,” you tell him, and he does, the man stronger than he looks, holding you up even as you lean into him, looming over his slight frame.

You sway there, looking down. Whitby has to stay behind, even as it all falls apart. As Whitby falls apart, because no one can withstand that vision for months, for years. But you have to ask it of him. You have no choice. Grace will run the agency. Whitby will be its recording, its witness.

“You have to write down whatever you see, your observations. It might still be important.”

You can hear the surf in your ears. You can see the lighthouse. The words on the wall in the tower.

Whitby says nothing, just stares with his large eyes, but he doesn’t need to. The fact that he stands there, silent, by your side, is enough.

When you take the first steps toward the door, you feel the weight on your back and the weight of your decision. But you ignore it. You walk into the hallway. It is very late. The fluorescent lights seem dim but a sickly heat comes off them, or from the vents, passing across the top of your head like a whisper. An unrecoverable reality.

The night will be cool and there might be the scent of honeysuckle in the air, even a half-remembered hint of salt spray, and it will seem to take no time at all, the familiar ride there, under the clear half-moon, and through the dark, submerged shapes of ruined buildings. With the other members of the twelfth expedition.

*   *   *

At the border, you enter the white tents of the Southern Reach mission control, and the linguist, the surveyor, the biologist, the anthropologist are escorted to their separate rooms for the final decontamination and conditioning process. Before long you will be at the border, will be headed with as much grace as your tall, broad shape can manage toward the luminescence of the enormous door.

You watch them all on the monitors. All but the linguist seem calm, movements relaxed and without evidence of jitters. The linguist is trembling and shivering. The linguist blinks at a rapid rate. Her lips move but no words come out.

The tech looks over at you for direction.

“Let me go in there,” you say.

“We’ll need to restart the process for her if you do.”

“It’s all right.” And it is all right. You have enough resolve for both of you. For the moment.

Carefully, you sit down across from the linguist. You are trying to banish thoughts of your first trip across the border, of how it affected Whitby, but it’s Whitby’s face you see right now, not Saul’s, not your mother’s. The human cost across the years, the lives lost and broken, the long grift. The contortions and the subterfuge. All of the lies, and for what? Lowry, back at his headquarters, unable to see the irony, lecturing you: “Only by identifying the dysfunction and disease within a system can we begin to marshal a response whose logic would be to abolish the problems themselves.”

The linguist has been placed on a regimen of psychotropic drugs. She has been operated on, reconditioned, broken down, brainwashed, fed false information that runs counter to her own safety, built back up again, and all of this she has on some level known about, volunteered for—Lowry finding in her story of lost family members on the forgotten coast the closest thing to a Gloria surrogate. It’s a kind of taunt to you, a kind of petulant message, and, Lowry believes, the ultimate expression of his art. His coiled weapon—so tense that she’s unraveling right here in front of you. The last eleventh’s psychologist all over again, just from a different direction.

Her face reflects a confusion of impulses, the mouth ticking open, wanting to speak but not knowing what to say. The eyes are squinting as if expecting some kind of blow, and she will not meet your gaze. She’s scared and she feels alone and she’s been betrayed before she’s ever even set foot in Area X.

You could still use her on the mission, could find a dozen ways to deploy her, even damaged. Fodder for whatever is waiting in the topographical anomaly. Fodder for Area X, a bit of misdirection for the other expedition members. But you want no distractions, not this way. It’s just you. It’s just the biologist. A plan that’s really a guess in the dark, finding your way by feel.

You lean close and you take the linguist’s hand in both of yours. You’re not going to ask her if she still wants to go, if she can do that. You’re not going to order her to go. And by the time Lowry finds out what you’ve done, it will be too late.

She stares at you with an eviscerated smile.

“You can stand down,” you tell her. “You can go home. And it’s going to be okay, it will all be okay.”

With those words, the linguist recedes from you, gliding back into darkness, her and the chair and the room, as if they were merely props, and you’re above Area X again, floating over the reeds, down toward the beach, the surf beyond. The wind and the sun, the warmth of the air.