Blind Lake (2 page)

The Crossbank installation was focused on a biologically active world circling HR8832—second planet from that sun, depending on how you tallied up the ring of planetesimals circling half an AU inward toward the star. The planet was an iron-cored, rocky body with 1.4 times the mass of the Earth and an atmosphere relatively rich in oxygen and nitrogen. Both poles were frigid agglutinations of water ice at temperatures occasionally cold enough to freeze out CO
₂
, but the equatorial regions were warm, shallow seas over continental plates and rich with life.

That life was simply not glamorous. It was multicellular but purely photosynthetic; evolution on HR8832/B seemed to have neglected to invent the mitochondria necessary for animal life. Which is not to say that the landscape was not often spectacular, particularly the huge stromatolite-like colonies of photosynthetic bacteria that rose, often two or three stories tall, from the green sea-surface mats; or the fivefold symmetry of the so-called coral stars, anchored to the sea-beds and floating half-immersed in open water.

It was an exquisitely beautiful world and it had captured a great deal of public attention back when Crossbank was the only installation of its kind. The equatorial seas yielded stunning sunsets every 47.4 terrestrial hours on average, often with stratocumulus clouds billowing far higher than any on Earth, cloud-castles extracted from a Victorian bicycle ad. Time-adjusted twenty-four-hour video loops of the equatorial seascape had been popular as faux windows for a few years.

A beautiful world, and it had yielded a host of insights into planetary and biological evolution. It continued to produce extraordinarily useful data. But it was static. Nothing much moved on the second world of HR8832. Only the wind, the water, and the rain.

Eventually it had been labeled “the planet where nothing happens,” a phrase coined by a
Chicago Tribune
columnist who considered the whole New Astronomy just one more federally funded font of gaudy but useless knowledge. Crossbank had learned to be wary of journalists.
Visions East
had negotiated at length to get Chris, Elaine, and Sebastian inside for a week. There had been no guarantee of cooperation, and it was probably only Elaine’s rep as a solid science journalist that had finally sold the public relations staff. (Or Chris’s reputation, perhaps, that had made them so difficult to convince.)

But the Crossbank visit had been generally successful. Both Elaine and Sebastian claimed to have done good work there.

For Chris it had been a little more problematic. The head of the Observation and Interpretation Department had flatly refused to speak to him. His best quote had come from the kid in the cafeteria.
It could end at any time
. And even the kid in the cafeteria had finally leaned forward to eyeball Chris’s name badge and said, “You’re the guy who wrote that book?”

Chris had confessed that he was, yes, the guy who wrote that book.

And the kid had nodded once and stood up and carried his half-eaten lunch to the recycling rack without saying another word.

Two surveillance aircraft passed overhead during the next ten minutes, and the van’s dashboard all-pass transponder began to blinking spastically. They had crossed any number of checkpoints already, well before they reached the steel and accordion-wire fence that snaked into the prairie in both directions, the steel and cinderblock guardhouse from which a uniformed officer stepped to wave them to a stop.

The guard examined the driver’s ID and then Elaine’s and Sebastian Vogel’s, finally Chris’s. He spoke into his personal microphone briefly, then supplied the three journalists with clip-on badges. At last he waved them through.

And they were inside. As simple as that, barring the weeks of negotiation between the magazine and the Department of Energy.

So far it was just one stretch of rolling wild grass separated from another by chain-link fence and barbed wire. But the entry was more than figurative; it carried, at least for Chris, a genuine sense of ceremony. This was Blind Lake.

This was practically another planet.

He looked back as the van gathered speed and saw the gate glide shut with what he would remember, much later, as a terrible finality.

There really was a lake in Blind Lake, Tessa Hauser had learned. She thought about that as she walked home from school, following her own long shadow down the sparkling white sidewalk.

Blind Lake—the lake, not the town—was a muddy swamp between two low hills, full of cattails and wild frogs and snapping turtles, herons and Canada geese and stagnant green water. Mr. Fleischer had told the class about it. It was called a lake but it was actually a wetland, ancient water trapped in the stony, porous land.

So Blind Lake, the lake, wasn’t really a lake. Tess thought that made a certain kind of sense, because Blind-Lake-the-town wasn’t really a town, either. It was a National Laboratory, built here in its entirety, like a movie set, by the Department of Energy. That’s why the houses and shops and office buildings were so sparse and so new and why they began and ended so abruptly in a vast and empty land.

Tess walked by herself. She was eleven years old and she hadn’t made any friends at school yet, though Edie Jerundt (whom the other children called Edie Grunt) at least spoke to her once in a while. But Edie walked the other way home, toward the mallway and the administrative buildings; the tall cooling towers of Eyeball Alley, far away to the west, were Tessa’s landmark. Tess—when she was with her father, at least, which was one week out of four—lived in one of a row of pastel-colored town houses pressed up one against the next like soldiers at attention. Her mother’s house, though even farther west, was almost identical.

She had stayed twenty minutes late at school, helping Mr. Fleischer clean the boards. Mr. Fleischer, a man with a white-brown beard and a bald head, had asked her a lot of questions about herself—what she did when she was home, how she got along with her parents, whether she liked school. Tess had answered dutifully but unenthusiastically, and after a while Mr. Fleischer had frowned and stopped asking. Which was perfectly okay with her.

Did she like school? It was too early to tell. School had hardly started. The weather wasn’t even cool yet, though the wind that brushed the sidewalk and flapped her skirt had a touch of autumn in it. You couldn’t tell about school, Tess thought, until at least Halloween, and Halloween was still a couple of weeks away. By then you knew how it would be—for better or worse.

She didn’t even know if she liked Blind Lake, the town-not-a-town near the lake-not-a-lake. Crossbank had been better, in some ways. More trees. Autumn colors. Snow on the hills in winter. Her mother had said there would be snow here, too, and plenty of it, and maybe this time she would make friends to go sledding with. But the hills seemed too low and gentle for proper sledding. Trees were sparse here, mostly saplings planted around the science buildings and the shopping concourse. Like trees imperfectly wished-for, Tess thought. She passed some of these on the lawns of the town houses: trees so new they were still staked to the earth, still trying to take root.

She came to her father’s small house and saw that his car wasn’t in the driveway. He wasn’t home yet. That was unusual but not unheard-of. Tess used her own key to let herself inside. The house was ruthlessly tidy and the furniture still smelled new, welcoming but somehow unfamiliar. She went to the narrow, gleaming kitchen and poured herself a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator. Some of the juice spilled over the lip of the glass. Tess thought about her father, then took a paper towel and wiped the tiled counter clean. She deposited the balled-up evidence in the bin under the sink.

She carried her drink and a napkin into the living room, stretched out on the sofa, and whispered “Video” to turn on the entertainment panel. But there was nothing except static on any of the cartoon channels. The house had saved a couple of programs for her from yesterday, but they were dull ones—
King Koala, The Unbelievable Baxters
—and she wasn’t in the mood. She guessed there must be something wrong with the satellite, because there was nothing else to see, either… only the closed-circuit feed from the downloads, Lobster City nighttime, the Subject motionless and probably asleep under a naked electric light.

Her phone buzzed deep in her schoolbag on the floor at her feet, and Tess sat up abruptly. A mouthful of orange juice went down the wrong way. She fumbled the phone out and answered, hoarsely.

“Tessa, is that you?”

Her father.

She nodded, which was useless, then said, “Yes.”

“Everything okay?”

She assured him she was fine. Daddy always wanted to know whether she was okay. Some days he asked more than once. To Tess it always sounded like:
What’s the matter with you? Is something wrong
? She never had an answer for that.

“I’m working late tonight,” he said. “I can’t take you to Mom’s. You’ll have to phone her and have her pick you up.”

Tonight was the night she changed over to her mother’s house. Tess had a room in each house. A small, neat one at Daddy’s. A big messy one at her mother’s. She would have to pack her school stuff for the change. “Can’t you call her?”

“It’s better if you do it, sweetie.”

She nodded again; then said, “All right.”

“Love you.”

“You too.”

“Keep your chin up.”

“What?”

“I’ll call you every day, Tess.”

“Okay,” Tess said.

“Don’t forget to call your mother.”

“I won’t.”

Dutiful, and undistracted by the blank video panel, Tess said good-bye, then whispered “Mom” at the phone. There was an interlude of insect sounds, then her mother picked up.

“Daddy says you have to come get me.”

“He does, huh? Well—are you at his place?”

Tess liked the sound of her mother’s voice even over the phone. If her father’s voice was distant thunder, her mother’s was summer rain—soothing, even when it was sad.

“He’s working late,” Tess explained.

“According to the agreement he’s supposed to bring you. I have work of my own to finish up.”

“I guess I can walk,” Tess said, though she made no effort to conceal her disappointment. It would take her a good half hour to walk to her mom’s place, past the coffee shop and the teenagers who gathered there and who had taken to calling her Spaz because of the way she jerked her head to avoid their eyes.

“No,” her mother said, “it’s getting late… Just have your stuff together. I’ll be there in, oh, I guess twenty minutes or so. ‘Kay?”

“Okay.”

“Maybe we’ll get takeout on the way home.”

“Great.”

After she deposited the phone back in her schoolbag, Tess made sure she had all the things she needed to bring to Mom’s: her notebooks and texts, of course, but also her favorite shirts and blouses, her plush monkey, her plug-in library, her personal night-light. That didn’t take long. Then, restless, she put her stuff in the foyer and went out back to watch the sunset.

The nice thing about her Dad’s place was the view from the yard. It wasn’t a spectacular view, no mountains or valleys or anything as dramatic as that, but it looked out over a long stretch of undeveloped meadowland sloping toward the road into Constance. The sky seemed immensely large from here, free of any borders except the fence that encircled Blind Lake. Birds lived in the high grass beyond the neatly trimmed lawn, and sometimes they rose up into the huge clean sky in flocks. Tess didn’t know what kind of birds they were—she didn’t have a name for them. They were many and small and brown, and when they folded their wings they flew like darts.

The only man-made things Tess could see from her father’s backyard (as long as she faced away from the mechanical line of the adjoining town houses) were the fence, the road that led across the rolling hills to Constance, and the guardhouse at the gate. She watched a bus driving away from Blind Lake, one of the buses that carried day workers home to their houses far away. In the fading dusk the windows of the bus were warm with yellow light.

Tess stood silently watching. If her father were here, he would have called her inside by now. Tess knew that she sometimes stared at things too long. At clouds or hills or, when she was in school, out the spotless window to the soccer field where white goalposts clocked the hours with their shadows. Until someone called her back to the world.
Wake up, Tessa! Pay attention
! As if she had been asleep. As if she had
not
been paying attention.

Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.

The yellow-windowed bus stopped at the distant guardhouse. A second bus pulled up behind it. Tess waited for the guard to wave the buses through. Almost a thousand people worked days at Blind Lake—clerks and support staff and the people who ran the stores—and the guard always waved the buses through.

Tonight, however, the buses stopped and stayed stopped.

Tess
, the wind said. Which made Tess think about Mirror Girl and all the trouble that had caused her back at Crossbank…

“Tess!”

She jumped involuntarily. The voice had been real. Her mother’s.

“Sorry if I scared you—”

“It’s okay.” Tess turned and was pleased and reassured by the sight of her mother coming across the broad, neat lawn. Tessa’s mother was a tall woman, her long brown hair somewhat askew around her face, her ankle-length skirt flirting with the wind. The setting sun turned everything faintly red: the sky, the town houses, her mother’s face.

“You have your stuff?”

“At the front door.”

Tess saw her mother glance away toward the distant road. Another bus had come up behind the first two, and now all three were motionless at the gate.

Tess said, “Is something wrong with the fence?”