Authority (38 page)

Authors: Jeff VanderMeer

BOOK: Authority

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The truth was, he didn’t know what he had thought would happen, had perhaps unconsciously
fallen back on an idea of their relationship at the Southern Reach. But that didn’t
apply here. He sobered up, hands held high now as if surrendering.

“What if I said
I
had answers,” he said. But all he had to show her that was tangible was Whitby’s
manuscript.

“I’d say you’re lying and I’d be right.”

“What if I said you still hold some of the answers, too.” He was as serious as he
had been giddy just moments before. He tried to hold her with his gaze, even through
the murk, but he couldn’t. God, but the coast here was painfully beautiful, the dark
lush greens of the fir trees piercing his brain, the half-raging sky and sea, the
surge of salt water against the rocks twinned to the urgent wash of blood through
his arteries as he waited for her to kill him or hear him out. Seditious thought:
There would be nothing too terrible about dying out here, about becoming part of all
of this.

“I’m not the biologist,” she said. “I don’t care about my past as the biologist, if
that’s what you mean.”

“I know,” he said. He’d figured it out on the boat, even if he hadn’t articulated
it yet. “I know you’re not. You’re some version, though. You have her memories, to
some extent, and somewhere back in Area X, the biologist may still be alive. You’re
a replica, but you’re your own person.”

Not an answer she had expected. She lowered the gun. A little. “You believe me.”

“Yes.” It had been right there. In front of him, in the video, in the very mimicry
of cells, the difference in personality. Except she’d broken the mold. Something had
been different in her creation.

“I’ve been trying to remember this place,” she said, almost plaintively. “I love it
here, but the entire time I’ve felt like it was the one remembering me.”

A silence that John didn’t know if he wanted to break, so he just stood there.

“Are you here to take me back?” she said. “Because I’m not going back.”

“No, I’m not,” he said, and realized it was true. Whatever impulse in that regard
that might have lived within him had been snuffed out. “The Southern Reach doesn’t
exist anymore,” he admitted. “There may not be anything we’d recognize out there very
soon.”

There in the twilight, no birds now overhead, the smoke fading into the dusk, the
raucous surf the only thing that seemed alive besides the two of them.

“How did you know I’d be here?” she asked, deep in thought. “I was so careful.”

“I didn’t. I guessed.” Somehow his face must have given something of his thoughts
away, because she looked a little startled, a little wrong-footed.

“Why would you do that if you don’t want to take me back?”

“I don’t know.” To try to save the world? To save her? To save himself? But he did
know. Nothing had changed since the interrogation room. Not really.

When he looked up again, she was saying, “I thought I could just stay here. Build
the life she didn’t build, that she messed up. But I can’t. It’s clear I can’t. Someone
will be after me no matter what I do.”

Now that the sun had truly set there was a glimmer of a light dimly familiar to him
coming from deep in the lagoon below.

“What’s down there?” he asked.

“Nothing.” Said too quickly.

“Nothing? It’s too late to lie—there’s no point.” It was never too late to lie, to
obscure, to delay. Control knew this too well.

But she didn’t. She hesitated, then said, “I was sick when I got here. One night I
came out here and I had a dizzy spell and I was unconscious for a while. I woke up
with the tide rising and I wasn’t sick anymore. The brightness was done with me. But
there was something at the bottom of that hole.”

“What?” Although he thought he already knew. The swirling light was too familiar,
despite being broken by ripples and the thickness of the water.

“It’s a way into Area X, I think,” she said, and now she looked scared. “I think I
brought it with me.” He didn’t know how she knew this. He thought it might be true,
remembered what Cheney had said about how difficult and enervating that travel could
be. Whitby’s horrible description of the border.

Now that the darkness was complete and she was just a shadow standing in front of
him, they could both see the lights farther down the coast. Bobbing. Floating. Trudging.
Dozens of them. And so far down below, that glimmer, that hint of an impossible light.

“I don’t think we have much longer,” he said. “I don’t even know if we have the night.
We’ll have to find a place to hide.” Not wanting to think about the other possibility.
Not wanting even a hint of it in his thoughts to invade her thoughts.

“It will be high tide soon,” she said. “You have to get off the rocks.” But not her?
Even though he could not see her face, he knew the expression that must be etched
there.

“We
both
have to get off the rocks.” He wasn’t sure he meant it. He could hear the helicopter
now, could hear boats again, too. But if she was unhinged, if she was lying, if she
didn’t actually know anything at all …

“I want to know who I am,” she said. “I can’t do that here. I can’t do that locked
up in a cell.”

“I know who you are—it’s all in my head, your file. I can give you that.”

“I’m not going back,” she said. “I’m never going back.”

“It’s dangerous,” he told her, pleading, as if she didn’t know. “It’s unproven. We
don’t know where you’ll come out.” The hole was so deep and so jagged, and the water
beginning to churn from the waves. He had seen wonders and he had seen terrible things.
He had to believe that this was one more and that it was true and that it was knowable.

Her stare took the measure of him. She was done talking. She threw her gun away. She
dove into the water, down deep.

He took one last look back at the world he knew. He took one huge gulp of it, every
bit of it he could see, every bit of it he could remember.

“Jump,” said a voice in his head.

Control jumped.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to my editor, Sean McDonald, and everyone at FSG for their expertise,
passion, sense of humor, and, above all, patience. Thanks as well to everyone at the
Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Canada, Blackstone Audiobooks, and my foreign-language
publishers. Thanks to my agent, Sally Harding, and my wife, Ann, for helping me find
the mental space to write these novels. Thanks to Black Dog Café, All Saints Café,
the Fermentation Lounge, San Luis Mission Park, and Shared Worlds for giving me physical
spaces to work in. Thanks to Eric Schaller, Geoffrey A. Landis, and Ashley Davis for
science discussions. Finally, thanks to my first readers for their help, including
Brian Evenson, Tessa Kum, Greg Bossert, Jeremy Zerfoss, Karin Tidbeck, Craig Gitney,
Berit Ellingsen, and Adam Mills.

ALSO BY JEFF VANDERMEER

FICTION

Annihilation

Dradin, in Love

The Book of Lost Places
(stories)

Veniss Underground

City of Saints and Madmen

Secret Life
(stories)

Shriek: An Afterword

The Situation

Finch

The Third Bear
(stories)

NONFICTION

Why Should I Cut Your Throat?

Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer

Monstrous Creatures

The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets
and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature

Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated
into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s
American Fantastic Tales
and multiple year’s-best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for
The Washington Post
,
The New York Times Book Review
, the
Los Angeles Times
, and
The Guardian
, among others. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida,
with his wife.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

First edition, 2014

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases,
please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

VanderMeer, Jeff.

Authority: a novel / Jeff VanderMeer. — First Edition.

pages cm. — (The Southern Reach trilogy; 2)

ISBN 978-0-374-10410-8 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-374-71078-1 (ebook) I. Title.

PS3572.A4284 A93 2014

813'.54—dc23

2013041337

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