Acceptance: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy) (28 page)

“They are already somewhere else,” Control said, although he knew Grace and Ghost Bird wouldn’t understand. They were already in the reflection, through which an alligator now swam. Where swooped through the trees, oblivious, a flicker.

So they continued on, him with his sickness that he no longer wanted diagnosed, Grace with her limp, and Ghost Bird keeping her own counsel.

There was nothing to be done, and no reason to: their path would skirt the fire.

*   *   *

In Control’s imagination, the entrance to the topographical anomaly was enormous, mixed with the biologist’s vast bulk in his thoughts so that he had expected a kind of immense ziggurat upside down in the earth. But no, it was what it had always been: a little over sixty feet in diameter, circular, located in the middle of a small clearing. The entrance lay there open for them, as it had for so many others. No soldiers here, nothing more unusual than the thing itself.

On the threshold, he told them what would happen next. There was in his voice only the shadow of the authority of a director of the Southern Reach, but within that shadow a kind of resistance.

“Grace, you will stay here at the top, standing guard with the rifles. There are any number of dangers, and we do not want to be trapped down there. Ghost Bird, you will come with me, and you will lead the way. I’ll follow at a little distance behind you. Grace, if we are down there longer than three hours”—the maximum time recorded by prior expeditions—“you are released of any responsibility for us.” Because if there were a world to return to, the person to survive should be someone with something to return to.

They stared at him. They stared, and he thought they would object, would override him, and then he would be lost. Would be left out here, at the top.

But that moment never came and an almost debilitating relief settled over him as Grace nodded and said to be careful, rattled off advice he barely heard.

Ghost Bird stood off to the side, a curious expression on her face. Down there, she would experience the ultimate doubling of experience with the biologist, and he couldn’t protect her from that.

“Whatever you have in your head now, hold on to it,” Grace said. “Because there may be nothing left of it when you go down below.”

What was coiled within his head, and how would it affect the outcome? Because his goal was not to reach the Crawler. Because he wondered what else might lie within the brightness that had come with him.

They descended into the tower.

0020: THE DIRECTOR

Whitby’s worthless report on the blossom is on your desk by the time you go off to another pre-expedition interview of the biologist, the possible candidates for the twelfth whittled down to ten, and you and Grace, you and Lowry, pushing for your favorites, with members of the science department shadowboxing in the background as they whisper their own choices at you. Severance seems terminally uninterested in the question.

It’s not a good time to interview anyone but you don’t have a choice. The plant is blossoming again in your mind as you conduct the interview in a cramped little office in the biologist’s town—a place you’ve borrowed and can pretend is your own, with all of the appropriate psychological and psychiatric texts on the bookshelves. The diplomas and family pictures of the room’s true occupant have been removed. In a concession to Lowry, for his studies, you’ve allowed his people to swap out chairs, light fixtures, and other elements of the room, as if in redecorating and changing the color scheme from placid blues and greens to red, orange, and gray or silver there’s some answer to a larger question.

Lowry claims his arrangements and recombinations can have a “subliminal or instinctual” effect on the candidates.

“To make them feel secure and at ease?” you asked, a rare moment of poking the beast with a stick, but he ignored you, and in your head he was saying, “To make them do what we want.”

There’s the smell of water damage still, from a burst pipe in the basement. There’s a water stain in the corner, hidden by a little table, as if you need to cover up some crime. The only giveaway that it’s not your office: you’re cramped, stuffed into your chair.

The plant is blossoming in your mind, and each time it does there’s less time to work with, less you can do. Is the plant a challenge or an invitation or a worthless distraction? A message? And if so, what did it mean, assuming Whitby didn’t imagine it? The light at the bottom of a topographical anomaly, from a door into Area X, on the tarot card used by the Séance & Science Brigade. The blossoming light of an MRI body scan, the one you endured last week.

In the middle of all that blossoming in your brain, the kind of thing that would elicit a joke from Grace if only you could tell her, there, bestriding the world: the biologist, a talisman arriving just as everything is closing in again and your time has become more limited.

“State your name for the record.”

“I did that last time.”

“Nevertheless.”

The biologist looks at you like you’re an opponent, not the person who can send her where she so obviously wants to go. You note again not just the musculature of this woman but the fact that she’s willing to complicate even the simple business of stating her name. That she has a kind of self-possession that comes not just from knowing who she is but from knowing that, if it comes down to it, she needs no one. Some professionals might diagnose that as a disorder, but in the biologist it comes across as an absolute and unbending clarity.

“Tell me about your parents.”

“What are your earliest memories?”

“Did you have a happy childhood?”

All of the usual, boring questions, and her terse answers boring, too, in a way. But, after that, the more interesting ones.

“Do you ever have violent thoughts or tendencies?” you ask.

“What do you consider a violent act?” she replies. An attempt to evade, or genuine interest? You’d bet on the former.

“Harm toward other people or animals. Extreme property damage, like arson.” The Realtor at Star Lanes has dozens of stories about violence against houses, relates them all with an edge to her voice. The biologist would probably classify the Realtor as an alien species.

“People are animals.”

“Harm toward animals, then?”

“Only toward human animals.”

She’s trying to entangle you or provoke you, but the usual cross-referencing and analysis of intel turned up something interesting, something you can’t confirm. While a grad student on the West Coast, she had worked as an intern at a forest ranger station in a national park. Her two years there had roughly coincided with a series of what some might call “tree-hugger terrorism.” In the worst case, three men had been badly beaten by “an assailant wearing a mask.” The motive, according to the police: “The victims had been tormenting an injured owl by poking at it with a stick and trying to light its wing on fire.” No suspect had ever been identified, no arrest made.

“What would you do if your fellow expedition members exhibited violent tendencies?”

“Whatever I had to.”

“Would that include killing someone?”

“If it came down to that, I would have to.”

“Even if it was me?”

“Especially if it was you. Because these questions are so tedious.”

“More tedious than your job working with plastics?”

That sobers her up. “I don’t plan on killing anyone. I’ve never killed anyone. I plan on taking samples. I plan on learning as much as I can and circumventing anyone who doesn’t follow the mission parameters.” That hard edge again, the shoulder turned in toward you, to block you out. If this were a boxing match, the shoulder would be followed by an uppercut or body shot.

“And what if you turn out to be the threat?”

The biologist laughs at that question, and gives you a stare so direct you have to look away.

“If I’m the threat, then I won’t be able to stop myself, will I? If I’m the threat, then I guess Area X has won.”

“What about your husband?”

“What about my husband? He’s dead.”

“Do you hope to find out what happened to him in Area X?”

“I hope to find Area X in Area X. I hope to be of use.”

“Isn’t that heartless?”

She leans forward, fixes you again with that gaze, and it’s a struggle to maintain your composure. But that’s okay—antagonism is okay. In fact, anything helps you that helps her reject whatever traces of corruption you might have picked up, that might have adhered to you all unknowing.

She says, “It’s a fallacy for you, a total stranger, to project onto me the motives and emotions you think are appropriate. To think you can get inside my head.”

You can’t share with her that the other candidates have been easy to read. The surveyor will be the meat-and-potatoes backbone of the expedition, without a trace of passive-aggressiveness. The anthropologist will provide empathy and nuance, although you’re not sure whether her need to prove herself is a plus or a minus. She’ll push herself further, harder because of that, but what will Area X think of that? The linguist talks too much, has too little introspection, but is a recruit from within the Southern Reach and has demonstrated absolute loyalty on more than occasion. Lowry’s favorite, with all that entails.

Before the interview, you met with Whitby, who had rallied for this discussion, in your office, amid the increasing clutter. It was the biologist you talked about the most, the importance of keeping her paranoid and isolated and antisocial, how there’s a shift in the biochemistry of the brain, naturally arrived at, that might be what Lowry’s secret experiments are trying to induce artificially—and since her husband has already gone to Area X, “been read by it,” this represents a unique opportunity “metrics-wise” because of “that connection,” because “it’s never happened before.” That, in a sense, the biologist had forged a relationship with Area X before ever setting foot there. It might lead to what Whitby calls “a terroir precognition.”

An expedition into Area X with the biologist would be different than with Whitby. You wouldn’t lead, except in the way at the store as a teenager you sometimes walked ahead of your dad so you wouldn’t seem to be with him, but always with a look back at him, to see where he was going.

As the questioning continues, you’re more and more certain of what you feel in your gut. You are reminded of Area X somehow. The biologist reminds you of being in Area X.

*   *   *

The rest of the biologist’s file is breathtaking in its focus, its narrowness, and yet fecund despite that. You’re driving across the desert with her, in a tiny car, to check out the holes made by burrowing owls. You’re lost on a plateau above an untouched coastline, stalked by a cougar, a place where the grass is the color of gold and reaches up to your knees and the trees are blackened by fire, silver-gray with ash. You’re hiking up a mountain in scrubland, up huge blocks of stone, every muscle in your legs protesting even as you’re possessed by a wild giddiness that keeps you moving past exhaustion. You’re back with her during her first year of college, when she made a rare confession to a roommate that she wanted isolation and moved out the next day to her own apartment and walked the five miles from campus home in utter silence, receiving the world through a hole in her shoe.

You’re certain you’ll have to give up something to Lowry to keep him away from the biologist, but whatever the price you’ll pay it, you decide as you order a whiskey for a change at the bar at Chipper’s—order a whiskey for everyone at the bar, for a change, all four of them. Because it’s late, because it’s a weekday, because Chipper’s is getting long in the tooth and the clientele is getting older and older. Like you. The doctor’s told you cancer has blossomed in your ovaries and it’s going to spread to your liver before you can even blink, even get used to the idea. Another thing no one needs to know.

“And before we could even think about selling that house,” the Realtor’s telling you, “we had to pull ten layers of wallpaper off. All this woman had done for a decade was keep re-wallpapering her house. It was a hell of a lot of wallpaper, and garish, like she was putting up warning signals. Wrapping her house from the inside out. I tell you, I’ve never seen that before.”

You nod, smiling, with nothing to add, nothing to say, but happy to listen. Terminally interested.

It’s plain old normal cancer, nothing like the accelerated all-out assault experienced by the last eleventh. It’s just plain old life catching up with you, trying to kill you, and you can either take the aggressive chemo and leave the Southern Reach and die anyway, or you can hang on long enough to join the twelfth expedition and, with the biologist by your side, go across the border one last time. You’ve kept secrets before. What’s one final one?

Besides, other, more interesting, secrets are opening up, because Grace has finally found something on Jackie Severance. There’s been plenty of dirt, including the scandal involving her son—a blown assignment that resulted in a woman’s death—but nothing until now that made any real difference. On a top-secret list, not of Jackie’s open case files but Jack’s closed ones, which makes sense because Jack is a little easier: He’s retired, in his early seventies, and some of what he worked on exists only in paper form.

“Look at the fifth line item,” Grace says, up on the rooftop, after a quick sweep for bugs. You’ve never found any there, but it’s worth being cautious.

The line reads:

Payment request—SB, Project Serum Bliss

“Is there more?” It’s not quite what you expected, but you think you know what it is.

“No, that’s the only one. There might be more, but the rest of the files from the period are missing. This page wasn’t even supposed to be there.”

“What do you think ‘Serum Bliss’ means?”

“Protocol back then would’ve meant it wasn’t supposed to mean anything. Probably generated at random.”

“It’s flimsy,” you say. “That’s not even ‘S&SB.’”

“It’s fucking rice paper,” Grace says. “It might mean nothing, but…”

But if, somehow, the S&SB was on Central’s payroll—even just a little bit, a side project—and Jack ran the operation, and Jackie knew about it, and the S&SB had anything at all to do with the creation of Area X …