Blind Lake (7 page)

School ended early on Wednesday.

The final bell rang at 1:30, so that the teachers could hold some kind of meeting. It had been homeroom all morning, Mr. Fleischer talking about wetlands and geography and the different kinds of birds and animals that lived around here; and Tess, although she had stared out the window most of the time, had been listening closely. Blind Lake (the lake, not the town) sounded fascinating, at least the way Mr. Fleischer described it. He had talked about the sheet of ice that had covered this part of the world, thousands upon thousands of years ago. That in itself had been intriguing. Tess had heard of the Ice Age, of course, but she had not quite grasped that it had happened
here
, that the land right under the school’s foundations had once been buried in an unbearable weight of ice; that the glaciers, advancing, had pushed rocks and soil before them like vast plows, and, retreating, had filled the land’s declivities and depressions with ancient water.

Today was cloudy and cool but not rainy or unpleasant. Tess, with the afternoon before her like an unopened gift, decided to visit the wetlands, the original Blind Lake. She came across Edie Jerundt in the playground and asked whether she’d like to go too. Edie, punching a tetherball, frowned and said, “Unh-uh.” The tetherball chimed dully against its metal post. Tess shrugged and walked away.

The ice had been here ten thousand years ago, Mr. Fleischer had said. Ten thousand summers, growing cooler if you imagined travelling backward toward the glaciers. Ten thousand winters merging into winter uninterrupted. She wondered what it had been like when the world had just begun to warm, glaciers retreating to reveal the land underneath (“ground moraine,” Mr. Fleischer had said; “washboard moraine,” whatever that meant), far-carried soil dropped from the ice to block bedrock valleys and muddy the new rivers and make fresh sod for the grasslands. Maybe everything had smelled like spring back then, Tess thought. Maybe it had smelled that way for years at a time, smelled like muck and rot and new things growing.

And long before that, before the Ice Age, had there been a global autumn? There must have been. Tess was sure of it. A whole world made like right now, she thought, with patches of frost in the morning and being able to see your breath when you walked to school.

She knew the wetlands lay beyond the paved spaces of town and at least a mile east, past the cooling towers of Eyeball Alley, and farther on beyond the low hill where (Edie Jerundt had told her) there was sledding in winter but the older kids were mean and would crash into you unless you came with an adult.

It was a long walk. She followed the sidewalkless access road that led east from the town houses toward the Alley, turning aside when she reached the perimeter of that cluster of buildings. Tess had never been inside Eyeball Alley, though she had been on a school tour of the similar building back at Crossbank. To be honest, she was a little scared of the Alley. Her mother said it was just like the one at Crossbank—a duplicate of it, in fact—and Tess had not liked those deep enclosed corridors or the huge racks of O/BEC platens or the loud cryopumps that kept them cold. All these things frightened her, more so because her then-teacher Mrs. Flewelling kept saying that these machines and processes were “not well understood.”

She understood, at least, that images of the ocean planet at Crossbank and Lobsterville here at the Lake were generated at these places, at Eyeball Alley or what they had called at Crossbank the Big Eye. From these structures arose great mysteries. Tess had never been much impressed with the images themselves, the Subject’s static life or the even more static ocean views—they made boring video—but when she was in the mood she could stare at them the way she might stare out a window, feeling the exquisite strangeness of daylight on another planet.

The cooling towers at Eyeball Alley emitted faint trails of steam into the afternoon air. Clouds moved above them like nervous herd animals. Tess skirted the building, keeping well clear of its perimeter fences. She cut west along a trail through the wild grass, one of the innumerable trails that had been scythed into the prairie by Blind Lake’s children. She buttoned the collar of her jacket against a rising wind.

By the time she reached the top of the sledding hill she was already footsore and ready to turn back, but her first view of the wetlands fascinated her.

Beyond the hill and past a grassy perimeter lay Blind Lake, a “semipermanent wetland,” Mr. Fleischer had said, a square mile of watery meadow and shallow marshes. The land was overgrown with humps of grass and broad stands of cattails, and in the patches of open water she could see resting Canada geese like the ones that had passed overhead in noisy V-formation all this autumn.

Beyond that was another fence, or rather the same fence that surrounded all of the Blind Lake National Laboratory and the wetlands too. This land was enclosed, but it was also wild. It lay within the so-called perimeter of security. Tess, if she wandered into these marshes, would be safe from terrorist attack or espionage agents, though perhaps not from snapping turtles or muskrats. (She didn’t know what a muskrat looked like, but Mr. Fleischer had said they lived here and Tess disliked the sound of the name.)

She walked downhill a little way farther, until the ground oozed under the pressure of her feet and the cattails loomed before her like brown sentinels with woolly heads. In a pool of still water to the left of her she could see her own reflection.

Unless it was Mirror Girl looking back at her.

Tess was barely willing to entertain that possibility even in the privacy of her own mind. There had been so much trouble back at Crossbank. Counselors, psychiatrists, all those endless and maddeningly patient questions she had been asked. The way people had looked at her; the way even her father and mother had looked at her, as if she had done something shameful without being aware of it. No, not that. Not again.

Mirror Girl had only been a game.

The problem was, the game had seemed real.

Not
real
real, the way a rock or a tree was real and substantial. But more real than a dream. More real than a wish. Mirror Girl looked just like Tess and had inhabited not only mirrors (where she had first appeared) but also empty air. Mirror Girl whispered questions Tess would never have thought to ask, questions she couldn’t always answer. Mirror Girl, the therapist had said, was Tessa’s own invention; but Tess didn’t believe she could invent a personality as persistent and frequently annoying as Mirror Girl had been.

She risked another glance at the reflective water at her feet. Water full of clouds and sky. Water where her own face looked back at an oblique angle and seemed to smile in recognition.

Tess
, said the wind, and her reflection vanished in a corrugation of ripples.

She thought of the astronomy book she had been reading. Of the deepness of time and space in which even an Ice Age was only a moment.

Tess
, the cattails and the rushes whispered.

“Go away,” Tess said angrily. “I don’t want any more trouble with you.”

The wind gusted and died, though the sense of unwanted presence remained.

Tess turned away from the suddenly forbidding wetlands. When she faced west she found the sun peeking out from a rack of cloud almost level with the hilltop. She glanced at her watch. Four o’clock. The house key she kept on a chain around her neck felt like a ticket to paradise. She didn’t want to be out in this lonely wetness anymore. She wanted to be home, with this leaden knapsack off her back, curled into the sofa with something good on the video panel or a book in her hands. She felt suddenly doubtful and guilty, as if she had done something wrong just by coming here, though there were no rules against it (only Mr. Fleischer’s passing remark that it was possible to get lost in the marshes and that the shallow water wasn’t always as shallow as it looked).

A huge blue heron rose into the air from the rushes only a few yards away, cracking the air with its wings. It carried something green and wiggling in the vise of its beak.

Tess turned and ran to the top of the ridge, anxious for the reassuring sight of Blind Lake (the town). Wind whistled in her ears, and the shush-shush noise of her trouser legs brushing together sounded like urgent conversation.

She was comforted by the towers of the Alley as she hurried past them, comforted by the smooth blackness of the asphalt road as it wound into the town houses, comforted by the nearness of the tall buildings of Hubble Plaza.

But she didn’t care for the sound of police-car sirens down by the south gate. Sirens always sounded to Tess like wailing babies, hungry and lonely. They meant something bad was happening. She shivered and ran the rest of the way home.

Wednesday morning, Sebastian Vogel joined Chris at one of the tiny makeshift tables in the community center cafeteria.

Breakfast consisted of croissants, watery scrambled eggs, orange juice, and coffee, free of charge to involuntary guests. Chris started with the coffee. He wanted a little neurochemical fortification before he even glanced at the steam table.

Sebastian ambled up and dropped a copy of
God & the Quantum Vacuum
on the tabletop. “Elaine said you were curious. I inscribed it for you.”

Chris tried to look grateful. The book was a premium edition, printed on real paper and bound in boards, sturdy as a brick and about as heavy. He imagined Elaine suppressing a smile when she told Sebastian how “anxious” Chris was to read it. Sebastian must have carried a suitcase full of these into Blind Lake, as if he were on a promotional tour.

“Thanks,” Chris said. “I owe you one of mine.”

“No need. I downloaded a copy of
Weighted Answers
before the links were cut. Elaine recommends it highly.”

Chris wondered how he could repay Elaine for this. Strychnine in her breakfast cereal, perhaps.

“She seems to think,” Sebastian went on, “this security crisis may work to our advantage.”

Chris leafed through Vogel’s book, scanning the chapter heads. “Borrowing God,” he read. “Why Genes Make Minds & Where They Find Them.” The pernicious ampersand. “To our advantage how?”

“We see the institution in crisis. Especially if the lockdown goes on much longer. She says we can get past Ari Weingart’s publicity machine and talk to some real people. See a side of Blind Lake that’s never been explored in the press.”

Elaine was right, of course, and for once Chris was ahead of her. For a couple of days now he had been interviewing the stranded day workers, getting their take on the security shutdown.

He hadn’t needed Elaine’s pep talk the other night. He knew this was in all likelihood his last chance to salvage his career as a journalist. The only question was whether he wanted to take it. As Elaine had also pointed out, there were other options. Chronic alcoholism or drug abuse, for instance, and he had come close enough to both of those to understand the attraction. Or he could take some inconspicuous job writing ad copy or tech manuals and slide into a sedate, respectable middle age. He wasn’t the first adult to face diminished expectations and he didn’t feel entitled to sympathy for it.

The assignment to Crossbank and Blind Lake had come like a childhood dream too long deferred. A dream gone stale. He had grown up in love with space, had relished the images from the early NASA and EuroStar optical interferometers—tentative, crude pictures that had included the two gas giants of UMa47’s system (each with enormous, complex ring systems) and the tantalizing smudge that was a rocky planet inside the habitable zone of the star.

His parents had indulged his enthusiasm but never really understood it. Only his younger sister Portia had been willing to listen to him talk about it, and she treated these discussions as bedtime stories. Everything was a story, as far as Portia was concerned. She liked to hear him talk about these distant and freshly envisioned worlds but always wanted him to go beyond the established facts. Were there people on these planets? What did they look like?

“We don’t know,” he used to tell her. “They haven’t discovered that yet.” Portia would pout in disappointment—couldn’t he have made something up?—but Chris had acquired what he would later think of as a journalistic respect for the truth. If you understood the facts they needed no embroidery: all the wonder was already there, the more spellbinding because it was true.

Then the NASA interferometer had begun to lose signal strength, and the newly designed O/BEC devices, quantum computers running adaptive neural nets in an open-ended organic architecture, were enlisted to strain the final dregs of signal from noise. They had done more than that, of course. Out of their increasingly deep and recursive Fourier analysis they had somehow derived an optical image
even after the interferometers themselves ceased to function
. The analytic device had replaced the telescope it was meant to augment.

Chris was spending his last year at home when the first images of HR8832/B were released to the media. His family hadn’t paid much attention. Portia by that time was a bright teenager who had discovered politics and was frustrated that she hadn’t been allowed to go to Chicago to protest the inauguration of the Continental Commonwealth. His parents had withdrawn from one another into their own pocket universes—his father into woodworking and the Presbyterian church, his mother into a late-blooming bohemianism marked by Mensa meetings and Madras blouses, psychic fairs and Afghan scarves.

And although they had marveled at the images of HR8832/B they hadn’t truly understood them. Like most people, they couldn’t say how far away the planet was, what it meant that it orbited “another star,” why its seascapes were more than abstractly pretty, or why there was so much fuss over a place no one could actually visit.

Chris had wanted desperately to explain. Another nascent journalistic impulse. The beauty and significance of these images were transcendent. Ten thousand years of humanity’s struggle with ignorance had culminated in this achievement. It redeemed Galileo from his inquisitors and Giordano Bruno from the flames. It was a pearl salvaged from the rubble of slavery and war.