Authority (10 page)

His thoughts turned again to the biologist. To the need to know what the biologist
had seen and experienced in Area X. Aware of the fact the assistant director might
do more than threaten to take her away. Aware that the assistant director wanted to
use that uncertainty to get him to make unsound decisions.

A one-way road fringed with weeds and strewn with gravel from potholes led him down
to the river. He emerged from a halo of branches onto a rickety pontoon dock, bent
his knees to keep his balance. Finally came to a stop there, at the end of the dock,
next to a speedboat lashed to it. Few lights across the river, just little clusters
here and there, nothing compared to the roaring splash of lights to his left, where
the river walk waited under the deliberate touristy feature of stupid faux-Victorian
lampposts topped with globes full of blurry soft-boiled eggs.

Somewhere across the river and off to the left lay Area X—many miles away but still
visible somehow as a weight, a shadow, a glimmering. Expeditions would have been coming
back or not coming back while he was still in high school. The psychologist would
have been transitioning to director at some point as well. A whole secret history
had been playing out while he and his friends drove into Hedley, intent on scoring
some beers and finding a party, not necessarily in that order.

He’d had a phone call with his mother the day before he’d boarded the plane, headed
for the Southern Reach. They’d talked a little bit about his connection to Hedley.
She’d said, “I only knew the area because you were there. But you don’t remember that.”
No, he didn’t. Nor had he known that she had worked briefly for the Southern Reach,
a fact that both did and didn’t surprise him. “I worked there to be closer to you,”
she said, and something in his heart loosened, even as he wasn’t sure whether to believe
her.

Because it was so hard to tell. At that time he would have been receiving her time-lapse
stories from earlier assignments. He tried to fast-forward, figure out when, if ever,
she’d told him a disguised version of the Southern Reach. He couldn’t find the point,
or his memory just didn’t want to give it to him. “What did you do there?” he’d asked,
and the only word back had been a wall: “Classified.”

He turned off his music, stood there listening to the croaking of frogs, the lap and
splash of water against the side of the speedboat as a breeze rippled across the river.
The dark was more complete here, and the stars seemed closer. The flow of the river
had been faster back in the day, but the runoff from agribusiness had generated silt
that slowed it, stilled it, and changed what lived in it and where. Hidden by the
darkness of the opposite shore lay paper mills and the ruins of earlier factories,
still polluting the groundwater. All of it coursing into seas ever-more acidic.

There came a distant shout across the river, and an even-more distant reply. Something
small snuffled and quorked its way through the reeds to his right. A deep breath of
fresh air was limned by a faint but sharp marsh smell. It was the kind of place where
he and his father would have gone canoeing when he was a teenager. It wasn’t true
wilderness, was comfortingly close to civilization, but existed just enough apart
to create a boundary. This was what most people wanted: to be
close to
but not
part of
. They didn’t want the fearful unknown of a “pristine wilderness.” They didn’t want
a soulless artificial life, either.

Now he was John Rodriguez again, “Control” falling away. John Rodriguez, son of a
sculptor whose parents had come to this country looking for a better life. Son of
a woman who lived in a byzantine realm of secrets.

By the time he started back up the hill, he was thinking about whether he should just
pursue an exit strategy now. Load everything in the car and leave, not have to face
the assistant director again, or any of it.

It always started well.

It might not end well.

But he knew that when morning came, he would rise as Control and that he would go
back to the Southern Reach.

RITES

005: THE FIRST BREACH

“What is it? Is it on me? Where is it on me? Is it on me? Where on me? Can you see
it on me? Can you see it? Where is it on me?”

Morning, after a night filled with dreams from atop the cliff, staring down. Control
stood in the parking lot of a diner with his to-go cup of coffee and his breakfast
biscuit, staring from two cars away at a thirtysomething white woman in a purple business
suit. Even gyrating to find the velvet ant that had crawled onto her, she looked like
a real estate agent, with careful makeup and blond hair in a short pageboy cut. But
her suit didn’t fit well, and her fingernails were uneven, her red nail polish eroded,
and he felt her distress extended well back beyond the ant.

The ant was poised on the back of her neck, unmoving for a moment. If he’d told her,
she would have smacked it dead. Sometimes you had to keep things from people just
so they wouldn’t do the first thing that came into their heads.

“Hold still,” he told her as he set his coffee and biscuit atop the trunk of his car.
“It’s harmless, and I’ll get it off you.” Because no one else seemed of any use. Most
were ignoring her, while some, as they got into or out of their cars and SUVs, were
laughing at her. But Control wasn’t laughing. He didn’t find it amusing. He didn’t
know where Area X was on him, either, and all the questions in his head seemed in
that moment as frenetic and useless as the woman’s questions.

“Okay, okay,” she said, still upset as he curled around and brought his hand down
level with the ant, which, after a bit of gentle prodding, climbed on board. It had
been struggling to progress across the field of golden hairs on the woman’s neck.
Red-banded and soft yet prickly, it roamed across his hand in an aimless fashion.

The woman shook her head, craned her neck as if trying to see behind her, gave him
a hesitant smile, and said, “Thanks.” Then bolted for her car as if late for an appointment,
or afraid of him, the strange man who had touched her neck.

Control took the ant into the fringe of vegetation lining the parking lot and let
it crawl from his thumb onto the wood chips there. The ant quickly got its bearings
and walked off with purpose toward the green strip of trees that lay between the parking
lot and the highway, governed by some sense of where it was and where it needed to
be that was beyond Control’s understanding.

“So long as you don’t tell people you don’t know something, they’ll probably think
you know it.” That from his father, not his mother, surprisingly. Or perhaps not.
His mother knew so much that maybe she thought she didn’t need to pretend.

Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the
woman?

*   *   *

Control spent the first fifteen minutes of his morning searching for the key to the
locked desk drawer. He wanted to solve that mystery before his appointment with the
greater mystery posed by the biologist. His stale breakfast biscuit, cooling cup of
coffee, and satchel lay graceless to the side of his computer. He didn’t feel particularly
hungry anyway; the rancid cleaning smell had invaded his office.

When he found the key, he sat there for a moment, staring at it, and then at the locked
drawer and the earthy stain across the bottom left corner. As he turned the key in
the lock, he suppressed the ridiculous thought that he should have someone else present,
Whitby perhaps, when he opened it.

There was something dead inside—and something living.

A plant grew in the drawer, had been growing there in the dark this whole time, crimson
roots attached to a nodule of dirt. As if the director had pulled it out of the ground
and then, for whatever reason, placed it in the drawer. Eight slender leaves, a deep
almost luminous green, protruded from the ridged stem at irregular intervals to form
a pleasing circular pattern when viewed from above. From the side, though, the plant
had the look of a creature trying to escape, with a couple of limbs, finally freed,
reflexively curled over the edge of the drawer.

At the base, half-embedded in the clump of dirt, lay the desiccated corpse of a small
brown mouse. Control couldn’t be certain the plant hadn’t been feeding on it somehow.
Next to the plant lay an old first-generation cell phone in a battered black leather
case, and underneath both plant and phone he found stacked sedimentary layers of water-damaged
file folders. Almost as if someone had, bizarrely, come in and watered the plant from
time to time. With the director gone, who had been doing that? Who had done that rather
than remove the plant, the mouse?

Control stared at the mouse corpse for a moment, and then reluctantly reached beside
it to rescue the phone—the case looked a little melted—and, with the tip of a pen,
teased open the edges of a file or two. These weren’t official files, from what he
could tell, but instead were full of handwritten notes, scraps of newspaper, and other
secondary materials. He caught glimpses of words that alarmed him, let the pages fall
back into place.

The effect was oddly as if the director had been creating a compost pile for the plant.
One full of eccentric intel. Or some ridiculous science project: “mouse-powered irrigation
system for data relay and biosphere maintenance.” He’d seen weirder things at high-school
science fairs, although his own lack of science acumen meant that when extra credit
had been dangled in front of him, he’d stuck to time-honored classics, like miniature
volcanoes or growing potatoes from other potatoes.

Perhaps, Control conceded as he rummaged a bit more, the assistant director had been
correct. Perhaps he would have been better off taking a different office. Sidling
out from behind his desk, he looked for something to put the plant in, found a pot
behind a stack of books. Maybe the director had been searching for it, too.

Using a few random pages from the piles stacked around his desk—if they held the secret
to Area X, so be it—Control carefully removed the mouse from the dirt and tossed it
in the garbage. Then he lifted the plant into the pot and set it on the edge of his
desk, as far away from him as possible.

Now what? He’d de-bugged and de-moused the office. All that was left beyond the herculean
task of cleaning up the stacks and going through them was the closed second door that
led nowhere.

Fortifying himself with a sip of bitter coffee, Control went over to the door. It
took a few minutes to clear the books and other detritus from in front of it.

Right. Last mystery about to be revealed. He hesitated for a moment, irritated by
the thought that all of these little peculiarities would have to be reported to the
Voice.

He opened the door.

He stared for several minutes.

After a while, he closed it again.

006: TYPOGRAPHICAL ANOMALIES

Same interrogation room. Same worn chairs. Same uncertain light. Same Ghost Bird.
Or was it? The residue of an unfamiliar gleam or glint in her eyes or her expression,
he couldn’t figure out which. Something he hadn’t caught during their first session.
She seemed both softer and harder-edged than before. “If someone seems to have changed
from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.” A warning from
his mother, once upon a time, delivered as if she’d upended a box of spy-advice fortune
cookies and chosen one at random.

Control casually set the pot on the table to his left, placed her file between them
as the ever-present carrot. Was that a slightly raised eyebrow in response to the
pot? He couldn’t be sure. But she said nothing, even though a normal person might
have been curious. On a whim, Control had retrieved the mouse from the trash and placed
it in the pot with the plant. In that depressing place it looked like trash.

Control sat. He favored her with a thin smile, but still received no response. He
had already decided not to pick up where they had left off, with the drowning, even
though that meant he had to fight off his own sudden need to be direct. The words
Control had found scrawled on the wall beyond the door kept curling through his head
in an unpleasant way.
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring
forth the seeds of the dead …
A plant. A dead mouse. Some kind of insane rant. Or some kind of prank or joke. Or
continued evidence of a downward spiral, a leap off the cliff into an ocean filled
with monsters. Maybe at the end, before she shoehorned herself into the twelfth expedition,
the director had been practicing for some perverse form of Scrabble.

Nor could the assistant director be entirely innocent of this devolution. Another
reason Control was happy she wouldn’t be watching from behind the one-way glass. Stealing
a trick he’d learned from a colleague who had done it to him at his last job, Control
had given Grace an afternoon time for the session. Then he had walked down to the
expedition holding area, spoken to the security guard, and had the biologist brought
to the debriefing room.

As he dove in, without preamble this time, Control ignored the water stains on the
ceiling that resembled variously an ear and a giant subaqueous eye staring down.

“There’s a topographical anomaly in Area X, fairly near base camp. Did you or any
members of your expedition find this topographical anomaly? If so, did you go inside?”
In actual fact, most of those who encountered it called it a tower or a tunnel or
even a pit, but he stuck with “topographical anomaly” in hopes she would give it a
more specific name on her own.

“I don’t remember.”

Her constant use of those words had begun to grate, or perhaps it was the words on
the wall that grated, and the consistency of her stance was just pushing that irritation
forward.