Blind Lake (21 page)

Falling, but not helplessly. The pilot seemed to be struggling for control. It was a small plane, a private plane, canary yellow, nothing military; Chris saw it in silhouette as it flew briefly level, parallel to the road from Blind Lake and maybe a couple hundred feet off the ground. Coming closer, he realized. Maybe trying to use the road as a landing strip.

Then the aircraft faltered again, veering wildly and ejecting a gout of black smoke.

Coming in badly, and coming in close. “Get down,” he told Tess. “Down on the ground.
Now
.”

The girl remained rigid, motionless, staring. Chris pushed her back into the snow and covered her with his body. Some of the sledders began to scream. Apart from that, the silence of the afternoon had become eerie: the plane’s engines had cut out. It should make more noise, Chris thought. All that falling metal.

It touched ground at the north end of the parking circle, nosing up at the last minute before it collided with a bright red Ford van, translating all that kinetic energy into a fan of red and yellow debris that cut trails and craters into the fallen snow. Tessa’s body trembled at the sound. The shrapnel traveled east and away from the sledding hill, and it was still coming down in a patter of snow-muted thunks when the wreckage burst into flame.

Chris pulled Tess into a sitting position.

She sat up as if catatonic, arms rigid at her sides. She stared but didn’t blink.

“Tess,” he said, “listen to me. I have to help, but I want you to stay here. Button up if you get cold, look for another adult if you need help, otherwise
wait for me
, okay?”

“I guess.”

“Wait for me.”

“Wait for you,” she said dully.

He didn’t like the way she looked or sounded, but she wasn’t physically injured and there might be survivors in the burning wreckage. Chris gave her what he hoped was a reassuring hug and then bounded down the slope, his feet gouging imperfections into snow compressed and made slick by the sledders.

He reached the burning airplane along with three other adults, two men and a woman, presumably all parents who had come sledding with their children. He advanced as close to the fire as he dared, the heat of it prickling the skin of his face and boiling snow into the air. The paved lot showed through the snow in watery black patches. He could see enough of the van—its roof had been sheared off—to know there was no one inside. The small plane was another matter. Behind its furiously cooking engine a human shape struggled against the clouded glass of the cabin door.

Chris peeled off his cloth jacket and wrapped it around his right hand.

Later, Marguerite would tell him he acted “heroically.” Maybe so. It didn’t feel that way. What it felt like was the obvious next thing to do. He might not have attempted it if the fire had not been relatively contained, if the plane had been heavier with fuel. But he didn’t recall doing any risk-benefit calculation. There was only the job at hand.

He felt the heat on his face, prickling his skin, gusts of cold air behind him angling toward the flames. The figure faintly visible in the crumpled cabin twitched, then stopped moving altogether. The door was hot even through the folds of his jacket. It was slightly ajar but stuck in its frame. Chris fumbled at it futilely, backed away to catch a breath of cooler air, then kicked hard at the accordioned aluminum. Once, twice, three times, until it bent far enough that he was able to brace himself, grasp the door in the folds of his now-smoldering jacket, and apply some leverage.

The pilot spilled onto the damp ground like a bag of meat. His face was hairless and blackened where it wasn’t a shocking, charred red. He wore a pair of aviator glasses, one lens missing and the other lens crazed. But he was breathing. His chest lifted and fell in cresting waves.

The men behind him dashed close enough to pull the pilot away from the wreckage. Chris found himself hesitating pointlessly. Was there something more he was supposed to do? The heat had made him dizzy.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, felt himself tugged away from the flames. Just a few feet away the air seemed dramatically colder, far colder than it had been on the hillside with Tess. He staggered away, then sat on the hood of an undamaged automobile and let his head droop. Someone brought him a bottle of water. He drained it almost at once, though that made him feel sicker. He heard an ambulance screaming down the road from Blind Lake.

Tess, he thought. Tess on the hillside.

How much time had passed? He looked for her on the slope. Everyone had come down, they had all gathered in the parking lot a safe distance from the burning plane. Everyone but Tess. He’d told her to stay put, and she had taken him literally. He called to her, but she was too far away to hear.

Wearily, he hiked back up the slope. Tess was standing immobile, staring at the wreckage. She didn’t acknowledge him when he called to her. Not good. She was in some kind of shock, Chris supposed.

He knelt in front of her, put his face in her line of vision and his hands on her small shoulders. “Tess,” he said. “Tess, are you all right?”

At first she didn’t react. Then she trembled. Her body shook. She blinked and opened her mouth soundlessly.

“We need to get you someplace warm,” he said.

She leaned into him and started to cry.

Marguerite lost track of Charlie in the noisy chaos of the control room.

For a fraction of a second there was utter blackness—complete electrical failure. Then the lights flickered back and the room was full of voices. Marguerite found an unoccupied corner and stayed out of the way. There was nothing she could do to help and she knew better than to interfere.

Something bad had happened, something she didn’t understand, something that had driven the engineers into a frenzy of activity. She focused on the big wall screen, the direct feed from the Eye, still alarmingly blank. It could end at any time.

Her phone buzzed. She ignored it. She caught sight of Charlie and watched him orbit the room, coordinating activity. Since she was helpless—or at least unable to help—she began to feel a presentiment of loss. Loss of intelligibility. Loss of orientation. Loss of vision. Loss of the Subject, with whom she had struggled across a desert to the heart of a sandstorm. Periodically, the wall screen erupted into stochastic cascades of color. Marguerite stared, trying but failing to extract an image. No signal, just noise. Only noise.

A few more green lights
, she heard someone say. Was that good? Apparently so. Here came Charlie, and he wasn’t smiling, but the expression on his face wasn’t as grave as it had been—how long ago? An hour?

“We’re getting a little something back,” he said.

“An image?”

“Maybe.”

“We’re still fixed on the Subject?”

“Just watch, Marguerite.”

She focused again on the screen, which had begun to fill with new light. Tiny digital mosaics, assembled in the unfathomable depths of the O/BEC platens. White faded to tawny brown. The desert.
We’re back
, Marguerite thought, and a tingle of relief flowed up her spine—but where was the Subject, and what was this blank emptiness?

“Sand,” she murmured. Fine silicate grains undisturbed by wind. The storm must have passed. But the sand wasn’t still. The sand mounded and slid this way and that.

Subject lifted himself out of a cloak of sand. He had been buried by the wind, but he was alive. He pulled himself up by his manipulating arms, then stood, unsteadily, in the startling sunlight. The virtual camera rose with him. Behind him Marguerite saw the sand squall where it had retreated to the horizon, trailing black vortices like mares’ tails.

All around the Subject were lines and angles of stone. Old stone columns and pyramidal structures and sand-scoured foundations. The ruins of a city.

Man, on Earth, could go no further toward conquering the limitations of atmosphere, metals, and optics. Through this gigantic mirror, underlying a telescope in whose construction the efforts of dozens of great minds had been united for years to produce an instrument of unrivaled accuracy, intricacy, and range, equipped with every device desired by and known to astronomers, study of the universe had reached a climax.

—Donald Wandrei,
“Colossus,” 1934

Coming into February now, and it was obvious to Marguerite as she drove home from her Saturday ration trip what a different place the Lake had become.

Superficially, nothing had changed. The snowplows still emerged from the back bays of the retail mall whenever it snowed, and they kept the streets passably clear. Lights still burned in windows at night. Everybody was warm and no one was hungry.

But there was a shabbiness about the town, too, an unwashed quality. There were no outside contractors to repair winter potholes or replace the shingles that had been torn from so many roofs in the post-Christmas storms. Garbage was collected on the regular schedule but it couldn’t be trucked off-site—the sanitation people had set up a temporary dump at the western extremity of the lake, near the perimeter fence and as far as possible from the town and the preserved wetlands; still, the stench drifted with the wind like an augur of decay, and on especially breezy days she had seen crumpled papers and food wrappers wheeling along the Mallway like tumbleweeds. The question was so commonplace no one bothered to ask it anymore:
when will it end
?

Because it could end at any time.

Tess had come back from the site of the airplane crash weak and dazed. Marguerite had wrapped her up and fed her hot soup and put her to bed for the night—Marguerite herself hadn’t slept, but Tess had, and in the morning she had seemed herself again.
Seemed
was the key word. Between Christmas and New Year’s Tess had not so much as mentioned Mirror Girl; there had been no provocative episodes; but Marguerite had recognized the worry creases on Tessa’s face and had sensed in her daughter’s silences something weightier than her customary shyness.

She had been extremely reluctant to send Tess for her weeklong visit with Ray, but there was no way around it. Had she objected, Ray would almost certainly have sent one of his rent-a-cop security guys around to collect Tess by force. So, with deep unease, Marguerite had helped her daughter pack her rucksack of treasured possessions and ushered her out the door as soon as Ray pulled up at the curb in his little scarab-colored automobile.

Ray had remained a silhouette in the shaded cab of the car, unwilling to show her his face. He looked indistinct, Marguerite thought, like a fading memory. She watched Tess greet him with a cheeriness that struck her as either false or heartbreakingly naive.

The only upside of this was that during the next week she would have more free time for Chris.

She pulled into the driveway, thinking of him.

Chris. He had made a powerful impression on her, with his wounded eyes and his obvious courage. Not to mention the way he touched her, like a man stepping into a spring of warm water, testing the heat before he gave himself up to it. Good Chris. Scary Chris.

Scary because having a man in the house—being intimate with a man—provoked unwelcome memories of Ray, if only by contrast. The smell of aftershave in the bathroom, a man’s pants abandoned on the bedroom floor, male warmth lingering in the crevices of the bed… with Ray all these things had come to seem loathsome, as objectionable as a bruise. But with Chris it was just the opposite. Yesterday she had found herself not only volunteering to wash his clothes but furtively inhaling the smell of him from an undershirt before she committed it to the washing machine. How ridiculously schoolgirlish, Marguerite thought. How very dangerously
infatuated
she was with this man.

She supposed it was at least therapeutic, like draining venom from a snakebite.

People talked about “lockdown romances.” Was this a lockdown romance? Marguerite’s experience was limited. Ray had been not only her first husband but her first lover. Marguerite had been, like Tess, one of those awkward girls at school: bright but gawky, not especially pretty, intimidated into silence in any social setting. When boys were like that they were called “geeks,” but at least they seemed able to take solace in the company of others like themselves. Marguerite had never made real friends of either sex, at least not until she was in graduate school. There, at least, she had found colleagues, people who respected her talent, people who liked her for her ideas, some of whom had progressed to the status of friends.

Maybe that was why she had been so impressed with Ray when Ray began to take an explicit interest in her. Ray had been ten years her senior, doing cutting-edge astrophysical work back when she was still struggling to find a way into Crossbank. He had been blunt in his opinions but flattering toward Marguerite, and he had obviously been sizing her up for marriage from the beginning. What Marguerite had not learned was that for some men marriage is a license to drop their masks and show their true and terrible faces. Nor was this merely a figure of speech: it seemed to Marguerite that his face had actually changed, that he had shed the gentle and indulgent Ray of their engagement as efficiently as a snake sheds its skin.

Clearly, she had been a lousy judge of character.

So what did that make Chris? A lockdown romance? A potential second father for Tess? Or something in between?

And how could she even begin to construct an idea of the future, when even the possibility of a future could end at any time?

Chris had been working in his basement study, but he came up the stairs when he heard her puttering around the kitchen and said, “Are you busy?”

Well, that was an interesting question. It was Saturday. She wasn’t obliged to work. But what was work, what
wasn’t
work? For months she had divided her attention between Tess and the Subject, and now Chris. Today she’d planned to catch up on her notes and keep an eye on the direct feed. The Subject’s odyssey continued, though the sandstorm crisis had passed and the ruined city was now far behind him. He had left the road; he was traveling through empty desert; his physical condition had changed in troublesome ways; but nothing absolutely critical was happening, at least not at the moment. “What did you have in mind?”