Blind Lake (11 page)

She sucked in enough air to call him an asshole. He said, “We’re out of there, aren’t we?”

“Jesus,
yeah
, but—”

Something out the side window caught her eye. Bob caught a glimpse of it, too. Some small thing leaping out of the tall grass.

Probably a bird, he thought, but suddenly the car was full of cold air and hard little flakes of snow, and his ears hurt, and there was window glass everywhere, and it seemed like Courtney was bleeding: he saw blood on the dashboard, blood all over his good leather jacket…

“Court?” he said. His own voice sounded strange and underwatery.

His foot stabbed the brake, but the road was slippery and the Tesla began to swerve despite the best efforts of its overworked servos. Something caused the engine to explode in a gout of blue fire. The body of the car rose from the road. Bob was pressed against his seat, watching the tarmac and the tall grass and the dark sky revolve around him, and for a fraction of a second he thought,
Why, we’re flying
! Then the car came down on its right front fender and he was thrown into Courtney. Into the sticky ruin of her, at least: into Courtney gone all red and licked with flames.

“The fuck?” Ray Scutter asked when he saw the fireball. Dimitry Shulgin, the Civilian Security chief, could only mumble something about “ordnance.” Ordnance! Ray tried to grasp the significance of that. A car had run the fence. The car had caught fire and rolled over. It came to a stop, top-down. Then everything was still. Even the crowd at the gate was momentarily silent. It was like a photograph. A frozen image. Halted time. He blinked. Pellet snow blew into his face, stinging.

“Drones,” Shulgin pronounced. It was as if he had broken the crust of the silence. Several people in the crowd began to scream.

Drones: those objects hovering over the burning automobile? Winged softballs? “What does that mean?” Ray asked. He had to shout the question twice. Spectators began to dash for their cars. Headlights sprang on, raking the prairie. Suddenly everybody wanted to go home.

Heedless as a bad dream, the gate continued gliding open until it was parallel to the road.

The black robotic truck inched forward again, past the barrier and into the Lake.

“Nothing good,” Shulgin replied—Ray, by this time, had forgotten the question. The Security chief edged away from the tarmac, seeming to fight his own urge to run. “
Look
.”

Out beyond the gate, in the hostile emptiness, the driver’s-side door of the burning car groaned open.

Now that the car had come to rest Bob registered little more than the need to escape from it—to escape the flames and the bloody, blackened object Courtney had somehow become. At the back of his mind was the need to
get help
, but there was also, dwelling in the same place, the unwelcome knowledge that Court was beyond all human help. He loved Courtney, or at least he liked to tell himself so, and he often felt a genuine affection for her, but what he needed now more than anything else in the world was to put some distance between himself and her ravaged body, between himself and the burning car. There was no gasoline in the motor, but there were other flammable fluids, and something had ignited all of them at once.

He scrambled away from Courtney to the driver’s-side door. The door was crumpled and didn’t want to open; the latch-handle came off in his hand. He braced himself against the steering wheel and the seatback and kicked outward, and though it hurt his feet hellishly, the door did at last creak and groan a little way open on its damaged hinges. Bob forced it wider and then tumbled out, gasping at the cold air. He rose to his knees. Then, shaking, he stood upright.

This time he saw quite clearly the device that popped out of the tall grass at the verge of the road. He happened to be looking in the right direction, happened to catch sight of it in a moment of frozen hyperclarity, this small, incongruous object that was in all likelihood the last thing he would ever see. It was round and camouflage-brown and it flew on buzzing pinwheel wings. It hovered at a height of about six feet—level with Bob’s head. He looked at it, eyeball to eyeball, assuming some of those small dents or divots were equivalent to eyes. He recognized it as a piece of military equipment, though it was like nothing he had ever encountered in his weekends with the Reserves. He didn’t even think about running from it. One doesn’t run from such things. He stiffened his spine and began, but had no time to finish, the act of closing his eyes. He felt the sting of snow against his skin. Then a brief, fiery weight on his chest, then nothing at all.

This final act of bloody interdiction was more than enough for the crowd. They watched the dead man, if you could call that headless bundle of exposed body parts a man, crumple to the ground. There was an absolute silence. Then screams, then sobs; then car doors slamming and kids wheeling their bikes around for a panicked trip back through the snowy dusk toward the lights of Blind Lake.

Once the spectators had cleared out, it was easier for Shulgin to organize his security people. They weren’t trained for anything like this. They were bonded nightwatchmen, mostly, hired to keep drunks and juveniles out of delicate places. Some were retired veterans; most had no military experience. And to be honest, Ray thought, there was nothing much for them to do here, only establish a mobile cordon around the slowly-moving truck and prevent the few remaining civilians from getting in the way. But they did a presentable job of it.

Within fifteen minutes of the events beyond the gate the black transport truck came to a stop inside the perimeter of Blind Lake.

“It’s a delivery vehicle,” Elaine said to Chris. “It was designed to drop cargo and go home. See? The cab’s disengaging from the flat.”

Chris watched almost indifferently. It was as if the attack on the fleeing automobile had been burned into his eyes. Out in the darkness the fire had already been reduced to smoldering embers in the wet snow. A couple of people had died here, and they had died, it seemed to Chris, in order to communicate a message to Blind Lake in the bluntest possible way. You may not pass. Your community has become a cage.

The truck cab reversed direction, pulling itself and its sheath of armor away from the conventional aluminum cargo container shielded within. The cab kept moving, more quickly than it had arrived, back through the open gate along the road to Constance. When it reached the smoldering ruins of the automobile it pushed them out of its way, shoveled them onto the verge of the road like idle garbage.

The gate began to swing closed.

Smooth as silk, Chris thought. Except for the deaths.

The cargo container remained behind. The overworked security detail hurried to surround it… not that anyone seemed anxious to get close.

Chris and Elaine circled back for a better view. The rear of the container was held closed by a simple lever. There was some dialogue between Ray Scutter and the man Elaine had identified as the Lake’s security chief. At last the security man stepped through the cordon and pulled down the lever decisively. The container’s door swung open.

A half-dozen of his men played flashlight over the contents. The container was stacked high with cardboard boxes. Chris was able to read some of the printing on the boxes.

Kellogg’s. Seabury Farm. Lombardi Produce
.

“Groceries!” Elaine said.

We’re going to be here awhile, Chris thought.

Having an intelligence of a vastly different order than that of Man, the decapods were unable to conceive the fact that an Earth-man was a thinking entity. Possibly to them Man was no more than a new type of animal; his buildings and industry having impressed them no more than the community life of an ant impresses the average man—aside from his wonder at the analogy of that life to his own.

—Leslie Frances Stone,

“The Human Pets of Mars,” 1936

“Chris Carmody? What’d you do, walk here? Brush off that snow and come in. I’m Charlie Grogan.”

Charlie Grogan, chief engineer at Eyeball Alley, was a big man, more robust than fat, and he put out a beefy hand for Chris to shake. Full head of hair, gone white at the temples. Confident but not aggressive. “Actually,” Chris said, “yeah, I did walk here.”

“No car?”

No car, and he had arrived in Blind Lake without winter clothes. Even this unlined jacket was borrowed. The snow tended to get down the collar.

“When you work in a building without windows,” Grogan said, “you learn to pick up clues about the weather outside. Are we still this side of a blizzard?”

“It’s coming down pretty good.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you know, December, you have to expect a little snow, this part of the country. We were lucky to get through Thanksgiving with only a couple of inches. Hang your coat over there. Take off those shoes, too. We got these little rubber slippers, grab a pair off the shelf. That thing you’re wearing, is that a voice recorder?”

“Yes, it is.”

“So the interview’s already started?”

“Unless you tell me to turn it off.”

“No, I guess that’s what we’re here for. I was afraid you wanted to talk about the quarantine—I don’t know any more about it than anyone else. But Ari Weingart tells me you’re working on a book.”

“A long magazine article. Maybe a book. Depending.”

“Depending on whether we’re ever allowed outside again?”

“That, and whether there’s still an audience to read it.”

“It’s like playing let’s-pretend, isn’t it? Pretend we still live in a sane world. Pretend we have useful jobs to do.”

“Call it an act of faith,” Chris said.

“What I’m prepared to do—my act of faith, I guess—is show you around the Alley and talk about its history. That’s what you want?”

“That’s what I want, Mr. Grogan.”

“Call me Charlie. You already wrote a book, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. Book about Ted Galliano, that biologist. Some people say it was character assassination.”

“Have you read it?”

“No, and no offense, but I don’t want to. I was introduced to Galliano at a conference on bioquantum computing. Maybe he was a genius with antivirals, but he was an asshole, too. Sometimes when people get famous they also get a little celebrity-happy. He wasn’t content unless he was talking to media or big investors.”

“I think he needed to feel like a hero, whether he deserved it or not. But I didn’t come here to talk about Galliano.”

“Just wanted to clear the air. I don’t hold your book against you. If Galliano decided to drive his motorcycle over that cliff, it surely wasn’t your fault.”

“Thank you. How about that tour?”

Eyeball Alley was a replica of the installation at Crossbank, which Chris had also visited. Structurally identical, at least. The differences were all in the details: names on doors, the color of the walls. Some halfhearted seasonal decor had lately been installed, a festoon of green and red crepe over the cafeteria entrance, a paper wreath and menorah in the staff library.

Charlie Grogan wore a pair of glasses that showed him things Chris couldn’t see, little local datafeeds telling him who was in which office, and as they passed a door marked ENDOSTATICS Charlie had a brief conversation (by throat microphone) with the person inside. “Hey there, Ellie… keeping busy… nah, Boomer’s fine, thanks for asking…”

“Boomer?” Chris asked.

“My hound,” Charlie said. “Boomer’s getting on in years.”

They took an elevator several stories down, deep into the controlled environment of the Alley’s core. “We’ll get you suited up and into the stacks,” Charlie said, but when they approached a wide door marked STERILE GEAR there was a flashing red light above it. “Unscheduled maintenance,” Charlie explained. “No tourists. Are you prepared to wait an hour or so?”

“If we can talk.”

Chris followed the chief engineer back to the cafeteria. Charlie had not had lunch; nor, for that matter, had Chris. The food on the steam tables was the same food they served back at the community center, the same prefabricated rice pilaf and chicken curry and wrapped sandwiches delivered by the same weekly black truck. The engineer grabbed a wedge of ham-on-rye. Chris, still a little chilled by his walk to the Alley, went for the hot food. The air in the cafeteria was pleasantly steamy and the smell from the kitchen rich and reassuring.

“I go a fairly long way back in this business,” Charlie said. “Not that there are any novices at the Lake, apart from the grad students we cycle through. Did Ari tell you I was at Berkeley Lab with Dr. Gupta?”

Tommy Gupta had done pioneering work on self-evolving neural-net architectures and quantum interfaces. “You must have been an undergraduate yourself.”

“Yup. And thank you for noticing. This was back when we were using Butov chips for logic elements. Interesting times, though nobody knew exactly how interesting it was going to get.”

“The astronomical application,” Chris said, “you were in on that, too?”

“A little bit. But it was all unexpected, obviously.”

In truth, Chris didn’t need this playback. The story was familiar and every general astronomy and pop-science journalist of the last several years had recounted some version of it. Really, he thought, it was only the latest chapter of mankind’s long ambition to see the unseeable, embellished with twenty-first-century technology. It had begun when NASA’s first generation of spaceborne planet-spotting observatories, the so-called Terrestrial Planet Finders, identified three arguably earthlike planets orbiting nearby sunlike stars. The TPFs begat the High Definition Interferometers, which begat the greatest of all the optical interferometer projects, the Galileo Array, six small but complex automated spacecraft all operating beyond the orbit of Jupiter, linked to create one virtual telescope of immense resolving power. The Galileo Array, it was said at the time, could map the shapes of continents on worlds hundreds of light years away.