Blind Lake (6 page)

Still, she was doing the work she had trained for, longed for: the closest thing to field astrozoology the world had ever seen.

She picked her way through the maze of support-staff desks, said hello to the clerks and secretaries and programmers, stopped by the staff kitchen to fill her souvenir Blind Lake lobster-motif cup with overcooked coffee and half-and-half, then closed herself into her office.

Paper covered her desk, e-paper littered her virtual desktop. This was work pending, most of it the kind of procedural checkmarking that was necessary but frustratingly tedious and time-consuming. But she could clean up some of that later, at home.

Today she wanted to spend time with the Subject. Raw time, realtime.

She closed the blinds over the window, dimmed the sulfur-dot ceiling lights, and illuminated the monitor that comprised the entire west wall of the office.

Good timing. UMa47/E’s seventeen-hour day had just begun.

Morning, and the Subject stirred from his pallet on the warren’s stone floor.

As usual, dozens of smaller creatures—parasites, symbiotes, or offspring—scuttled away from his body, where they had been nursing at the sleeping Subject’s exposed blood-nipples. These small animals, no larger than mice, many-legged and sinuously articulated, disappeared into gaps where the sandstone walls met the floor. Subject sat up, then stood to his full height.

Estimates put the Subject’s height at roughly seven feet. Certainly he was an impressive specimen. (Marguerite used the masculine pronoun privately. She would never dare commit an assumption of gender in her official writing. The gender and reproductive strategies of the aliens were still wholly unresolved.) Subject was bipedal and bilaterally symmetrical, and from a great distance, in silhouette, he might have been mistaken for a human being. But there the resemblance ended.

His skin—
not
an exoskeleton, as the ridiculous “lobster” nickname implied—was a tough, red-brown, pebble-textured integument. Because of this dense moisture-conserving skin, and because of the lung louvers exposed on his ventral surface and such details as the multiple jointing of his legs and arms and the tiny food-manipulating limbs that grew from the sides of his mandibles, some had speculated that Subject and his kindred might have evolved from an insect-like form. One scenario pictured a strain of invertebrates attaining the size and mobility of mammals by burying their notochord in a chitinous spinal column while losing their hard carapace in favor of a thick but lighter and more flexible skin. But little evidence had emerged for this or any other hypothesis. Exozoology was difficult enough; exopaleobiology was a daydream of a science.

Subject was clearly visible in the light cast by the string of incandescent bulbs suspended across the ceiling. The bulbs were small, more like Christmas lights than household lamps, but otherwise they seemed ridiculously familiar,
were
familiar: the filaments were of ordinary tungsten, spectroscopy had revealed. Dumb, rugged technology. At intervals, other aboriginals would arrive to replace exhausted bulbs and check the insulated copper wire for gaps or irregularities. The city boasted an elaborate, reliable maintenance infrastructure.

Subject did not dress nor did he eat; he had never been observed to eat in his sleeping quarters. He did pause to evacuate liquid waste over an open drain in the floor. The thick greenish liquid cascaded from a cloacal gap in his lower abdomen. There was, of course, no sound to accompany the image, but Marguerite’s imagination supplied the splash and gurgle.

She reminded herself that these events had happened half a century ago. It lessened her sense of invasion. She would never speak to this creature, never interact with him in any way; this image, however mysteriously it had traveled, was in all likelihood limited to the speed of light. The parent star 47 Ursa Majoris was fifty-one light years from Earth.

(And by the same token, if anyone elsewhere in the galaxy were watching
her
, she would be safely in her grave long before her observers could attempt to interpret her bathroom functions.)

Subject left his warren without preamble. His two-legged gait looked awkward by human standards, but it covered ground efficiently. This part of the day could be interesting. Subject did essentially the same thing every morning—walked to the factory where he assembled machine parts—but he seldom took the same route to work. Enough evidence had accumulated to suggest that this was a cultural or biological imperative (i.e., most others did the same thing), perhaps out of an atavistic instinct to avoid predation. Too bad; Marguerite would have preferred to think of it as Subject’s idiosyncrasy, an individual preference, a discernible choice.

In any case, the observation program tracked him precisely and predictably. When Subject moved, the apparent point of view (the “virtual camera,” folks in Image Acquisition called it) followed him at a constant distance. Subject was centered in the screen but his world was visible around him as he traveled. He strode with others of his kind through the incandescently lit corridors of his warren, everyone moving in the same direction, as if the passages were one-way streets, though their “wayness” varied day by day. In a crowd, she had learned to identify Subject not just by the centrality of his image (he was sometimes, briefly, obscured from view) but by the vivid orange-yellow of his dorsal-cranial crest and the rounded contour of his shoulders.

She glimpsed daylight as he passed balconies and rotundas that opened to the air. The sky today was powdery blue. Lobsterville got most of its rain during the mild winter season, and it was high summer now, the very middle of the southern latitude’s long dalliance with the sun. The planet possessed a gentle axial tilt but a very lengthy orbit around its star: it would be summer in the Subject’s city for another two terrestrial years.

In summer it was more often dust than rain clouds that darkened the sky. UMa47/E was drier than the Earth; like Mars, it could generate vast electrically charged dust storms. There was always fine dust suspended in the atmosphere, and the skies were never as clear as a terrestrial sky. But today was calm, Marguerite surmised. Warm, judging by the flourish of the Subject’s cooling cilia. The colored-chalk blue of the sky was as good as it got. (Marguerite blinked and imagined Arizona or New Mexico, cliffside pueblos in a still noon.)

At last the Subject emerged onto one of the broad exterior ways that wound down to the floor of the city.

The original high-altitude survey had identified no less than forty of these large stone cities, and twice as many significantly smaller ones, scattered across the surface of UMa47/E. Marguerite kept a globe of Subject’s planet on her desk, the cities marked and named only by their latitude and longitude. (No one wanted to give them proper names for fear of seeming arrogant or anthropocentric—“Lobsterville” was only a nickname, and you learned not to use it in front of administrators or the press.)

Maybe it was even an error of attribution to call this community a “city.” But it looked like a city to Marguerite, and she loved the sight of it.

There were over a thousand sandstone ziggurats in the city, and each one was enormous. As the Subject wound his way downward—his sleeping chamber was high up this particular structure—Marguerite’s view was panoramic. The towers were all very similar, nautilus-shell spires coiling upward from red tiled plazas, the industrial structures distinguished by the smokestacks erupting from their peaks and the streams of light or dark smoke dispersing in the still air. All over the city, freshly wakened natives filled the external ways and crowded the open spaces. The sun, rapidly rising, sent fingers of yellow light down the east-facing canyons. Beyond the city Marguerite glimpsed irrigated agricultural lands; beyond that, brown scrubland and a horizon jagged with distant mountains. (And if she closed her eyes she could see the afterimage lingering in contrary colors as if unmediated by a billion dollars’ worth of incomprehensible technology, as if she were actually there, breathing the thin atmosphere, fine dust burning her nostrils.)

Subject reached ground level, walked on through parallel bands of light and shadow to the industrial tower where he spent his days.

Marguerite watched, ignoring her desk work. She was not a primary viewer nor was it likely she would notice anything pertinent that the five focal committees had missed. Her job was to integrate their observations, not to make her own. But that could wait at least until after lunch. The security shutdown meant that exterior agencies couldn’t read her reports in any case. She was free to watch.

Free, if she wanted, to dream.

She grabbed lunch at the Plaza’s west-wing staff cafeteria. Ray wasn’t there, but she caught a glimpse of his assistant Sue Sampel picking up coffee at the checkout. Marguerite had met Sue only once or twice but felt genuinely sorry for her. She knew how Ray treated his employees. Even back at Crossbank, Ray’s staff had cycled pretty quickly. Sue had probably already applied for a transfer. Or soon would. Marguerite waved; Sue absently nodded back.

After lunch Marguerite buckled down to her paperwork. She vetted a particularly interesting report from a Physiology team leader who had put a thousand hours of video through a graphics processor, marking the motile parts of Subject’s body and correlating its changes with time of day and situation. This approach had yielded surprising amounts of hard data, which would need to go out to all the other divisions in a high-priority FYI bulletin. She’d have to compose it herself, with input from Bob Corso and Felice Kawakami of Physiology whenever they got back from the Cancun conference… a bullet-point summary, she supposed, with hints for follow-up, keeping it as succinct as possible so the various team bosses wouldn’t bitch about the added infoload.

She kept Subject on the wall panel so she could look up from her work and see the Subject doing his. Subject worked in what was almost certainly a factory. He stood at a pedestal in a vast enclosed space under a spotlight that illuminated his station. Similar beams of light demarked similar aboriginals, hundreds of them, arrayed behind him like phosphorescent pillars in a gloomy cavern. Subject took modular parts (cylindrical devices as yet unidentified) from a bin at the side of the pillar and inserted them into prepunched disks. The disks rose from a chamber in his pedestal on an elevated platform and subsided again once he had completed them. The cycle repeated every ten minutes or so. To call it monotonous, Marguerite thought, was pushing the limits of understatement.

But something had caught her attention.

Because the Subject was more or less stationary, the virtual camera had rotated to image him head-on. She could see Subject’s face, stark in the overhead light. If you could call it a face. People had called it “horrifying,” but it wasn’t, of course; only intensely unfamiliar. Shocking at first because one recognized some of the component parts (the eyes, for instance, which sat in cups of bone like human eyes, though they were white through and through) while other features (the feeding arms, the mandibles) were insectile or otherwise unfamiliar. But you learned to transcend those distressing first impressions. More disturbing was the inability to see past them. To see
meaning
. Humans were wired to recognize human emotion reflected in human faces, and with some skill a researcher could learn to understand the expressions of apes or wolves. But Subject’s face defied interpretation.

His hands, though—

They
were
hands, disturbingly humanlike. The long, flexible fingers numbered three, and the “thumb” was a fixed bony protruberance erupting from the wrist. But all the parts made instant sense. You could imagine grasping something with those hands. They moved in a fast, familiar fashion.

Marguerite watched them work.

Were they trembling?

It seemed to Marguerite that the Subject’s hands were trembling.

She forwarded a quick note to the Physiology team:

Tremor in Subject’s hands?
Looked like it (3:30 this P.M. on direct feeds).
Let me know.
M.

Then she went back to her own work. It was pleasant, somehow, tapping at her keyboard with the image of the Subject over her shoulder. As if they were working together. As if she had company. As if she had a friend.

She picked up Tess on the way home.

It was a gym day, and on gym days Tess inevitably left school with her blouse buttoned off-kilter or her shoes untied. Today was no exception. But Tess was subdued, huddling against the autumn chill in the passenger seat, and Marguerite said nothing about her clothes. “Everything okay?”

“I guess,” Tess said.

“From what I hear, the data pipes are still shut down. No video tonight.”

“We watch
Sunshine City
on Mondays.”

“Yeah, but not tonight, sweetie.”

“I have a book to read,” Tess volunteered.

“That’s good. What are you reading?”

“A thing about astronomy.”

Home, Marguerite fixed dinner while Tess played in her room. Dinner was a frozen chicken entree from the Blind Lake grocery store. Dull but expedient and within the range of Marguerite’s limited culinary skills. The chicken was rotating in the microsteamer when her phone buzzed.

Marguerite dug the talkpiece out of her shirt pocket. “Yes?”

“Ms. Hauser?”

“Speaking.”

“Sorry to bother you so close to dinnertime. This is Bernie Fleischer—Tessa’s homeroom teacher.”

“Right.” Marguerite disguised the sudden queasiness she felt. “We met in September.”

“I was wondering whether you might be able to stop by and have a talk sometime this week.”

“Is there a problem with Tess?”

“Not a problem as such. I just thought we should touch base. We can talk about it in more detail when we get together.”

Marguerite set a date and replaced the phone in her pocket.

Please, she thought. Please, don’t let it be happening again.