Blind Lake (14 page)

Tess said that was all right.

She played in her room until dinner. Dinner was spaghetti with canned tomato sauce. The black truck delivered food every week, and the food was distributed according to ration points through the supermarket where people used to shop before the quarantine. That meant you couldn’t pick and choose your favorites. Everybody got the same weekly allotment of fruits and vegetables and canned and frozen food.

But Tess didn’t mind spaghetti. And there was buttered bread and cheese to go with it, and pears for dessert.

After dinner, Tessa’s father called. Since the quarantine it was impossible to phone or e-mail outside the fence, but there was still basic communication through Blind Lake’s central server. Tess took the call on her own phone, a pink plastic Mattel phone without a screen or much memory. Her father’s voice over the toy phone sounded small and far away. The first thing he said was, “Are you all right?”

He asked the same thing every time he called. Tess answered as she always did: “Yes.”

“Are you sure, Tessa?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do today?”

“Played,” she said.

“In the snow?”

“Yes.”

“Were you careful?”

“Yes,” Tess said, though she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be careful about.

“I hear you had a visitor today.”

“The boarder,” Tess said. She wondered how her father had heard about it so quickly.

“That’s right. How do you feel about having a visitor?”

“It’s okay. I don’t know.”

“Is your mother looking after you all right?”

Another familiar question. “Yes.”

“I hope so. You know, if there’s ever a problem over there, you just have to call me. I can come pick you up.”

“I know.”

“Anyway, next week you’re back home again with me. Can you wait another week?”

“Yes,” Tess said.

“Be a good girl till then?”

“I will.”

“Call me if there’s any problem with your mother.”

“I will.”

“Love you, Tessa.”

“I know.”

Tess put the pink phone back in her pocket.

The boarder came back that evening with a duffel bag. He said he’d already had dinner. He went to the basement to do some work. Tess went to her room.

The embroidery of ice had melted from the windowpane during the day but had reformed after sunset, new and different symmetries growing like a private garden. Tess imagined crystal roads and crystal houses and crystalline creatures inhabiting them: ice cities, ice worlds.

Outside, the snow had stopped falling and the temperature had dropped. The sky was very clear, and when she rubbed away the ice Tess could see a great many winter stars beyond the snow-bent tree limbs and the towers of Hubble Plaza.

Chris met Elaine for dinner at the Sawyer’s restaurant in the mallway. Despite the rationing, Ari Weingart had lobbied to keep the local restaurants open as meeting places and for the sake of the town’s morale. Hot meals strictly at lunch, just sandwiches after 3 P.M., no alcoholic drinks, no seconds, but no bill, either: since no one was getting paid it would have been futile to try to keep the local economy running on a cash basis. Staff had been told their wages would be totalled and paid at the end of the quarantine, and customers with pocket change were encouraged to tip whatever they deemed appropriate.

This evening Chris and Elaine were the only customers—yesterday’s snowfall was keeping people at home. The single waitress who had shown up was a teenage part-timer, Laurel Brank, who spent most of her time in the far corner of the room reading
Bleak House
from a pocket display and picking at a bowl of Fritos.

“Heard you got billetted,” Elaine said.

A cold front had followed the storm. The air was clear and bitter and the wind had picked up, rearranging yesterday’s snowfall and rattling the restaurant windows. “I’m in the middle of something I don’t entirely understand. Weingart signed me up with a woman named Marguerite Hauser who lives with her daughter in the housing west of town.”

“I know the name. She’s a recent arrival from Crossbank, heads up Observation and Interpretation.” Elaine had been interviewing all the important Blind Lake committee people—the kind of interviews Chris tended not to get, given his reputation. “I haven’t talked to her directly, but she doesn’t seem to have many friends.”

“Enemies?”

“Not enemies exactly. She’s just a newbie. Still kind of an outsider. The big deal with her is—”

“Her ex-husband.”

“Right. Ray Scutter. I gather it was an acrimonious divorce. Scutter’s been talking her down. He doesn’t think she’s qualified to head a committee.”

“You think he’s right?”

“I wouldn’t know, but her career record’s impeccable. She was never a big hitter like Ray and she doesn’t have the same academic credentials, but she hasn’t been as spectacularly
wrong
as Ray’s been either. You know the debate over cultural inteligibility?”

“Some people think we’ll eventually understand the Lobsters. Some don’t.”

“If the Lobsters were looking at us, how much of what we do could
they
figure out? Pessimists say, nothing—or very little. They might work out our system of economic exchange and some of our biology and technology, but how could they possibly interpret Picasso, or Christianity, or the Boer War, or
The Brothers Karamazov
, or even the emotional content of a smile? We aim all our signalling at each other, and our signals are predicated on all kinds of human idiosyncracies, from our external physiology down to our brain structure. That’s why the research people talk about the Lobsters in weird behavioral categories—food-sharing, economic exchanges, symbol-making. It’s like a nineteenth-century European trying to work out Kwakiutl kinship systems, without learning the language or being able to communicate… except that the European shares fundamental needs and urges with the Indian, and we share nothing at all with the Lobsters.”

“So it’s futile to try?”

“A pessimist would say yes—would say, let’s collect and collate our information and learn from it, but forget the idea of ultimate comprehension. Ray Scutter is one of those guys. In a lecture, he once called the idea of exocultural understanding ‘a romantic delusion comparable to the Victorian fad for table-rapping and spirit chambers.’ Sees himself as a hard-core materialist.”

“Not everybody in Blind Lake takes that point of view,” Chris said.

“Obviously not. There’s another school of thought. Of which Ray’s ex happens to be a charter member.”

“Optimists.”

“You could say. They argue that, while the Lobsters have unique physiological constraints on their behavior, those are observable and can be understood. And culture is simply learned behavior modified by physiology and environment—learnable, hence comprehensible. They think if we know enough about the daily life of the Lobsters, understanding will inevitably follow. They say all living things share certain common goals, like the need to reproduce, the need to feed and excrete, and so forth—and that’s enough commonality to make the Lobsters more like distant cousins than ultimate aliens.”

“Interesting. What do you think?”

“What do
I
think?” Elaine seemed startled by the question. “I’m an agnostic.” She canted her head. “Let’s say it’s 1944. Let’s say some E.T. is examining the Earth, and let’s suppose he happens to drop in on an extermination camp in Poland. He’s watching Nazis extract the gold from the teeth of dead Jews, and he’s asking himself, is this economic behavior or is it part of the food chain or what? He’s trying to make sense of it, but he never will. Never. Because some things just don’t make sense. Some things make no fucking sense at all.”

“This is what’s between Ray and Marguerite, this philosophical debate?”

“It’s far from just philosophical, at least as far as Blind Lake politics go. Careers are made and broken. The big thing about UMa47 was the discovery of a living, sentient culture, and that’s where most of the time and attention gets lavished. But if Lobster culture is static and ultimately incomprehensible, maybe that’s wrong. There are planetologists who’d rather be studying the geology and the climate, there are even exozoologists who’d like to get a closer look at some of the other local fauna. We’re ignoring a lot in order to stare at these bugs—the five other planets in the system, for instance. None of them is habitable but they’re all novel. Astronomers and cosmologists have been demanding diversification for years.”

“You’re saying Marguerite’s in a minority?”

“No… the plurality of opinion has been on the side of studying Lobsterville, at least so far, but support isn’t nearly as strong as it used to be. What Ray Scutter’s been doing is trying to swing support for diversification. He doesn’t like being locked onto a single subject, which has been Marguerite’s pet policy.”

“All that’s beside the point, isn’t it—since the siege, I mean?”

“It just takes a different form. Some people are starting to argue for shutting down the Eye altogether.”

“You shut it down, there’s no guarantee it’ll ever function again. Even Ray must know that.”

“So far these are just whispers. But the logic is, we’re under siege because of the Eye, because of what somebody is afraid we’ll see. Shut down the Eye and the problem disappears.”

“If the people outside wanted us shut down they could turn off the power supply. A word to Minnesota Edison is all it would take.”

“Maybe they’re willing to keep us up and running just to see what happens. We don’t know the logic of it. The argument goes, maybe we’re guinea pigs. Maybe we should pull the plug on the Eye and see if that makes them open the cage.”

“It would be an incredible loss to science.”

“But the day workers and the civil staff don’t necessarily care about that. They just want to see their kids or their dying parents or their fiancées. Even among the research staff, people are starting to talk about ‘options’.”

“Including Ray?”

“Ray keeps his opinions to himself. But he was a late convert to the cause of astrobiology. Ray used to believe in an uninhabited, sterile universe. He jumped on the bandwagon when it made career sense, but I suspect some part of him still dislikes all this messy organic stuff. According to my sources he hasn’t breathed a word of support for switching off the Eye. But he hasn’t said anything against it, either. He’s a consummate politician. He’s probably waiting to see which way the wind blows.”

Wind rattled the window. Elaine smiled.

“From the north,” Chris said. “Briskly. I’d better get back.”

“Which reminds me. I got you something.” She reached into the bag at her feet. “I raided the community center lost-and-found.”

She pulled out a brown knit scarf. Chris accepted it gratefully.

“To keep the wind out of your collar,” Elaine said. “I hear you trekked out to the Alley and talked to Charlie Grogan.”

“Yes.”

“So you’re working again?”

“After a fashion.”

“Good. You’re too talented to hang it up.”

“Elaine—”

“No, don’t worry. I’m finished. Stay warm, Chris.”

He tipped for both of them and stepped out into the night.

Marguerite hadn’t given him a key. He rang the bell at the door of the town house after his walk from Sawyer’s. He appreciated the scarf Elaine had given him, but the wind was almost surgical, knifing from a dozen angles. Stars rippled in the brutally clear night sky.

He had to ring twice, and it wasn’t Marguerite who finally answered, it was Tessa. The girl looked up at him solemnly.

He said, “Can I come in?”

“I guess so.” She held the inner door ajar.

He shut it hastily behind him. His fingers burned in the warm air. He stripped off his jacket, his snow-encrusted shoes. Too bad Elaine hadn’t scavenged a pair of boots for him, too. “Your mom’s not home?”

“She’s upstairs,” Tess said. “Working.”

The girl was cute but uncommunicative, a little chubby and owl-eyed. She reminded Chris of his younger sister Portia—except that Portia had been a nonstop talker. She watched closely as Chris hung his jacket in the closet. “It’s cold out,” she said.

“That it is.”

“You should get warmer clothes.”

“Good idea. You think it would be all right with your mom if I made coffee?”

Tess shrugged and followed Chris to the kitchen. He counted teaspoons into the filter basket, then sat at the small table while the coffee brewed, warmth seeping back into his extremities. Tess pulled up a chair opposite him.

“Did they open the school today?” Chris asked.

“Only in the afternoon.” The girl put her elbows on the table, hands under her chin. “Are you a writer?”

“Yes,” Chris said. Probably. Maybe.

“Did you write a book?”

The question was guileless. “Mostly I write for magazines. But I wrote a book once.”

“Can I see it?”

“I didn’t bring a copy with me.”

Tess was clearly disappointed. She rocked in the chair and nodded her head rhythmically. Chris said, “Maybe you should tell your mom I’m here.”

“She doesn’t like to be bothered when she’s working.”

“Does she always work this late?”

“No.”

“Maybe I should say hello.”

“She doesn’t like to be bothered,” Tess repeated.

“I’ll just tap at the door. See if she wants coffee.”

Tess shrugged and stayed in the kitchen.

Marguerite had given him a tour of the house yesterday. The door to her home office was ajar, and Chris cleared his throat to announce himself. Marguerite sat at a cluttered desk. She was scribbling notes on a handpad, but her attention was focused on the screen on the far wall. “Didn’t hear you come in,” she said without looking up.

“Sorry to interrupt your work.”

“I’m not working. Not officially, anyhow. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on.” She turned to face him. “Take a look.”

On the screen, the so-called Subject was climbing an upward-sloping ramp by the light of a few tungsten bulbs. The virtual viewpoint floated behind him, keeping his upper half-torso centered. From behind, Chris thought, the Subject looked like a wrestler in a red leather burka. “Where’s he going?”