Authority (5 page)

“It started earlier than the border coming down,” the assistant director told him
after lunch in his new-old office. She was all business now, and Control chose to
accept her at face value, to continue to put away, for now, his anger at her preemptive
strike in banishing the anthropologist and the surveyor.

Grace rolled out the map of Area X on a corner of his desk: the coastline, the lighthouse,
the base camp, the trails, the lakes and rivers, the island many miles north that
marked the farthest reach of the … Incursion? Invasion? Infestation? What word worked?
The worst part of the map was the black dot hand-labeled by the director as “the tunnel”
but known to most as “the topographical anomaly.” Worst part because not every expedition
whose members had survived to report back had encountered it, even when they’d mapped
the same area.

Grace tossed files on top of the map. It still struck Control, with a kind of nostalgia
rarely granted to his generation, how anachronistic it was to deal in paper. But the
concern about sending modern technology across the border had infected the former
director. She had forbidden certain forms of communication, required that all e-mails
be printed out and the original, electronic versions regularly archived and purged,
and had arcane and confusing protocols for using the Internet and other forms of electronic
communication. Would he put an end to that? He didn’t know yet, had a kind of sympathy
for the policy, impractical though it might be. He used the Internet solely for research
and admin. He believed a kind of a fragmentation had crept into people’s minds in
the modern era.

“
It started earlier…”

“How much earlier?”

“Intel indicates that there may have been odd … activity occurring along that coast
for at least a century before the border came down.” Before Area X had formed. A “pristine
wilderness.” He’d never heard the word
pristine
used so many times before today.

Idly, he wondered what
they
called it—whoever or whatever had created that pristine bubble that had killed so
many people. Maybe they called it a holiday retreat. Maybe they called it a beachhead.
Maybe “they” were so incomprehensible he’d never understand what they called it, or
why. He’d asked the Voice if he needed access to the files on other major unexplained
occurrences, and the Voice had made “No” sound like a granite cliff, with only flailing
blue sky beyond it.

Control had already seen at least some of the flotsam and jetsam now threatening to
buckle the desk in the file summary. He knew that quite a bit of the information peeking
out at him from the beige folders came from lighthouse journals and police records—and
that the inexplicable in it had to be teased out from the edges, pushed forward into
the light like the last bit of toothpaste in the dehydrated tube curled up on the
edge of the bathroom sink. The kind of “strange doings” alluded to by hard-living
bearded fishermen in old horror movies as they stared through haunted eyes at the
unforgiving sea. Unsolved disappearances. Lights in the night. Stories of odd salvagers,
and false beacons, and the hundred legends that accrete around a lonely coastline
and a remote lighthouse.

There had even been an informal group—the Séance & Science Brigade—dedicated to applying
“empirical reality to paranormal phenomenon.” Members of the S&S Brigade had written
several self-published books that had collected dust on the counters of local businesses.
It was the S&SB that had in effect named Area X, identifying that coast as “of particular
interest” and calling it “Active Site X”—a name prominent on their bizarre science-inspired
tarot cards. The Southern Reach had discounted S&SB early on as “not a catalyst or
a player or an instigator” in whatever had caused Area X—just a bunch of (un)lucky
“amateurs” caught up in something beyond the grasp of their imaginations. Except,
almost every effective terrorist Control had encountered was an “amateur.”

“We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit
artists all want causality.” Bullshit artist in this context meant his mother, but
the statement had wide applications.

So was all or any of it random coincidence—or part of some vast, pre–Area X conspiracy?
You could spend years wading through the data, trying to find the answer—and it looked
to Control as if that’s exactly what the former director had been doing.

“And you think this is credible evidence?” Control still didn’t know how far into
the mountain of bullshit the assistant director had fallen. Too far, given her natural
animosity, and he wouldn’t be inclined to pull her out of it.

“Not all of it,” she conceded, a thin smile erasing the default frown. “But tracking
back from the events we know have occurred since the border came down, you begin to
see patterns.”

Control believed her. He would have believed Grace had she said visions appeared in
the swirls of her strawberry gelato on hot summer days or in the fracturing of the
ice in another of her favorites, rum-and-diet with a lime (her personnel file was
full of maddeningly irrelevant details). It was in the nature of being an analyst.
But what patterns had colonized the former director’s mind? And how much of that had
infiltrated the assistant director? On some level, Control hoped that the mess the
director had left behind was deliberate, to hide some more rational progression.

“But how is that different from any other godforsaken stretch of coast half off the
grid?” There were still dozens of them all across the country. Places that were poison
to real-estate agents, with little infrastructure and a long history of distrust of
the government.

The assistant director stared at him in a way that made him feel uncomfortably like
a middle-school student again, sent up for insolence.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Have we been compromised by our own data?
The answer is: Of course. That is what happens over time. But if there is something
in the files that is useful, you might see it because you have fresh eyes. So I can
archive all of this now if you like. Or we can use you the way we need to use you:
not because you know anything but because you know so little.”

A kind of resentful pride rose up in Control that wasn’t useful, that came from having
a parent who
did
seem to know everything.

“I didn’t mean that I—”

Mercifully, she cut him off. Unmercifully, her tone channeled contempt. “We have been
here a long time … Control. A very long time. Living with this. Unable to do very
much about this.” A surprising amount of pain had entered her voice. “You don’t go
home at night with it in your stomach, in your bones. In a few weeks, when you have
seen everything, you will have been living with it for a long time, too. You will
be just like us—only more so, because it is getting worse. Fewer and fewer journals
recovered, and more zombies, as if they have been mind-wiped. And no one in charge
has time for us.”

It could have been a moment to commiserate over the vagaries and injustices perpetrated
by Central, Control realized later, but he just sat there staring at her. He found
her fatalism a hindrance, especially suffused, as he misdiagnosed it at first, with
such a grim satisfaction. A claustrophobic combination that no one needed, that helped
no one. It was also inaccurate in its progressions.

The first expedition alone had, according to the files, experienced such horrors,
almost beyond imagining, that it was a wonder that they had sent anyone after that.
But they’d had no choice, understood they were in it for “the long haul” as, he knew
from transcripts, the former director had liked to say. They hadn’t even let the later
expeditions know the true fate of the first expedition, had created a fiction of encountering
an undisturbed wilderness and then built other lies on top of that one. This had probably
been done as much to ease the Southern Reach’s own trauma as to protect the morale
of the subsequent expeditions.

“In thirty minutes, you have an appointment to tour the science division,” she said,
getting up and looming over him, leaning with her hands on his desk. “I think I will
let you find the place yourself.” That would give him just enough time to check his
office for surveillance devices beforehand.

“Thanks,” he said. “You can leave now.”

So she left.

But it didn’t help. Before he’d arrived, Control had imagined himself flying free
above the Southern Reach, swooping down from some remote perch to manage things. That
wasn’t going to happen. Already his wings were burning up and he felt more like some
ponderous moaning creature trapped in the mire.

*   *   *

As he became more familiar with it, the former director’s office revealed no new or
special features to Control’s practiced eye. Except that his computer, finally installed
on the desk, looked almost science-fictional next to all the rest of it.

The door lay to the far left of the long, rectangular room, so that you wandered into
its length toward the mahogany desk set against the far wall. No one could have snuck
up on the director or read over her shoulder. Each wall had been covered in bookcases
or filing cabinets, with stacks of papers and some books forming a second width in
front of this initial layering. At the highest levels, or in some ridiculous cases,
balanced on the stacks, those bulletin boards with ripped pieces of paper and scribbled
diagrams pinned to them. He felt as if he had been placed inside someone’s disorganized
mind. Near her desk, on the left, he uncovered an array of preserved natural ephemera.
Dusty and decaying bits of pinecone trailed across the shelves. A vague hint of a
rotting smell, but he couldn’t track down the origin.

Opposite the entrance lay another door, situated in a gap between bookcases, but this
had been blocked by more piles of file folders and cardboard boxes and he’d been told
it opened onto the wall—detritus of an inelegant remodeling. Opposite the desk, on
the far wall about twenty-five feet away, was a kind of break in the mess to make
room for two rows of pictures, all in the kinds of frames cheaply bought at discount
stores. From bottom left, clockwise around to the right: a square etching of the lighthouse
from the 1880s; a black-and-white photograph of two men and a girl framed by the lighthouse;
a long, somewhat amateurish watercolor panorama showing miles of reeds broken only
by a few isolated islands of dark trees; and a color photograph of the lighthouse
beacon in all its glory. No real hints of the personal, no pictures of the director
with her Native American mother, her white father—or with anyone who might matter
in her life.

Of all the intel Control had to work through in the coming days, he least looked forward
to what he might uncover in what was now his own office; he thought he might leave
it until last. Everything in the office seemed to indicate a director who had gone
feral. One of the drawers in the desk was locked, and he couldn’t find the key. But
he did note an earthy quality to the locked drawer that hinted at something having
rotted inside a long time ago. Which mystery didn’t even include the mess drooping
off the sides of the desk.

Ever-helpful, unhelpful spy Grandpa used to reflexively say, whether it was washing
the dishes or preparing for a fishing trip, “Never skip a step. Skip a step, you’ll
find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.”

The search for surveillance equipment, for bugs, then, was more time-consuming than
he’d thought it would be, and he buzzed the science division to let them know he’d
be late. There was a kind of visceral grunt in response before the line went dead,
and he had no idea who had been on the other end. A person? A trained pig?

Ultimately, after a hellish search, Control to his surprise found twenty-two bugs
in his office. He doubted many of them had actually been reporting back, and even
if they had, if anyone had been watching or listening to what they conveyed. For the
fact was, the director’s office had contained an unnatural history museum of bugs—different
kinds from different eras, progressively smaller and harder to unearth. The behemoths
of this sort were bulging, belching metal goiters when set next to the sleek ethereal
pinheads of the modern era.

The discovery of each new bug contributed to a cheerful, upbeat mood. Bugs made sense
in a way some of the other things about the Southern Reach didn’t. In his training
as an omnivore in the service, he’d had at least six assignments that involved bugging
people or places. Spying on people didn’t bring him the kind of vicarious rush it
gave some, or if it did, that feeling faded as he came to know his subjects better
and invested in a sense of protectiveness meant to shield them. But he did find the
actual devices fascinating.

When he thought his search complete, Control amused himself by arranging the bugs
across the faded paper of the blotter in what he believed might be chronological order.
Some of them glittered silver. Some, black, absorbed the light. There were wires attached
to some like umbilical cords. One iteration—disguised within what appeared to be a
small, sticky ball of green papier-mâché or colored honeycomb—made him think that
a few might even be foreign-made: interlopers drawn by curiosity to the black box
that was Area X. Clearly, though, the former director knew and hadn’t cared they were
there. Or perhaps she had thought it safest to leave them. Perhaps, too, she’d put
some there herself. He wondered if this accounted for her distrust of modern technology.

As for installing his own, he’d have to wait until later: No time now. No time, either,
to deploy these bugs for another purpose that had just occurred to him. Control carefully
swept them all into a desk drawer and went to find his science guide.

*   *   *

The labs had been buried in the basement on the right side of the U, if you were facing
the building from the parking lot out front. They lay directly opposite the sealed-off
wing that served as an expedition pre-prep area and currently housed the biologist.
Control had been assigned one of the science division’s jack-of-all-trades as his
tour guide. Which meant that despite seniority—he had been at the agency longer than
anyone on staff—Whitby Allen was a push-me-pull-me who, in part due to staff attrition,
often sacrificed his studies as a “cohesive naturalist and holistic scientist specializing
in biospheres” to type up someone else’s reports or run someone else’s errands. Whitby
reported to the head of the science division, but also to the assistant director.
He was the scion of intellectual aristocracy, came from a long line of professors,
men and women who had been tenured at various faux-Corinthian-columned private colleges.
Perhaps to his family, he had become an outlaw: The dropout art-school student who
went wandering and only later got a proper degree.