Authority

“The director didn’t agree.”

“How is Whitby working out, anyway?” she asked by way of reply, and he knew his expression had confirmed his source. Forgive me, Whitby, for giving you up. Yet this also told him Grace was concerned about Whitby talking to him. Did that mean Whitby was Cheney’s creature?

He pressed forward: “But the director didn’t agree.”

“No,” she admitted. Control wondered what kind of betrayal that had been. “She did not. She thought these were all pluses, that we were too concerned about the usual measurements of suitability. So we deferred to her.”

“Even though she had the bodies of the prior expedition disinterred and reexamined?”

“Where did you hear that?” she asked, genuinely surprised.

“Wouldn’t that speak to the director’s own suitability?”

But Grace’s surprise had already ossified back into resistance, which meant she was on the move again as she said curtly, “No. No, it would not.”

“She suspected something, didn’t she?” Control asked, catching up to her again. Central thought the files suggested that even if the unique mind-wiped condition of the prior expedition didn’t signal a kind of shift in the situation in Area X, it might have signaled a shift in the director.

Grace sighed, as if tired of trying to shake him. “She suspected that they might have … changed since the autopsies. But if you’re asking, you know already.”

“And had they? Had they changed?” Disappeared. Been resurrected. Flown off into the sky.

“No. They had decomposed a little more rapidly than might be expected, but no, they hadn’t changed.”

Control wondered how much that had cost the director in respect and in favors. He wondered if by the time the director had told them she was attaching herself to the twelfth expedition some of the staff might have felt not alarm or concern but a strange sort of guilty relief.

He had another question, but Grace was done, had already pivoted to veer off down a different corridor in the maze.

There followed some futile, halfhearted efforts to rearrange his office, along with a review of some basic reports Grace had thrown at him, probably to slow his progress. He learned that the Southern Reach had its own props design department, tasked with creating equipment for the expeditions that didn’t violate protocols. In other words, fabrication of antiquated technology. He learned that the security on the facilities that housed returning expedition members was undergoing an upgrade; the outdated brand of surveillance camera they’d been using had suffered a systemic meltdown. He’d even thrown out a DVD given to him by a “lifecycle biologist” that showed a computer-generated cross section of the forgotten coast’s ecosystem. The images had been created as a series of topographical lines in a rainbow of colors. It was very pretty but the wrong level of detail for him.

At day’s end, on his way out, he ran into Whitby again, in the cafeteria around which the man seemed to hover, almost as if he didn’t want to be down in the dungeon with the rest of the scientists. Or as if they sent him on perpetual errands to keep him away. A little dark bird had become trapped inside, and Whitby was staring up at where it flew among the skylights.

Control asked Whitby the question he’d wanted to ask Grace before her maze-pivot.

“Whitby, why are there so few returning journals from the expeditions?” Far, far fewer than returnees.

Whitby was still mesmerized by the flight of the bird, his head turning the way a cat’s does to follow every movement. There was an intensity to his gaze that Control found disconcerting.

“Incomplete data,” Whitby said. “Too incomplete to be sure. But most returnees tell us they just don’t think to bring them back. They don’t believe it’s important, or don’t feel the need to. Feeling is the important part. You lose the need or impetus to divulge, to communicate, a bit like astronauts lose muscle mass. Most of the journals seem to turn up in the lighthouse anyway, though. It hasn’t been a priority for a while, but when we did ask later expeditions to retrieve them, usually they didn’t even try. You lose the impetus or something else intercedes, becomes more crucial and you don’t even realize it. Until it’s too late.”

Which gave Control an uncomfortable image of someone or something in Area X entering the lighthouse and sitting atop a pile of journals and reading them for the Southern Reach. Or writing them.

“I can show you something interesting in one of the rooms near the science division that pertains to this,” Whitby said in a dreamy tone, still following the path of the bird. “Would you like to see it?” His disconnected gaze clicked into hard focus and settled on Control, who had a sudden jarring impression of there being two Whitbys, one lurking inside the other.

“Why don’t you just tell me about it?”

“No. I have to show you. It’s a little strange. You have to see it to understand it.” Whitby now gave the impression of not caring if Control saw the odd room, and yet caring entirely too much at the same time.

Control laughed. Various people had been showing him bat-shit crazy things since his days working in domestic terrorism. People had said bat-shit crazy things to him today.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll see it tomorrow.” Or not. No surprises. No satisfaction for the keepers of strange secrets. No strangeness before its time. He had truly had enough for one day, would gird his loins overnight for a return encounter. The thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn’t care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort. He wondered if Grace had put Whitby up to this after their conversation, whether it was some odd practical joke and he’d been meant to stick his hand into a space only to find his hand covered in earthworms, or open a box only for a plastic snake to spring out.

The bird now swooped down in an erratic way, hard to make out in the late-afternoon light.

“You should see it now,” Whitby said, in a kind of wistfully hurt tone. “Better late than never.”

But Control had already turned his back on Whitby and was headed for the entrance and then the (blessed) parking lot.

Late? Just how late did Whitby think he was?

004: REENTRY (#ulink_21169755-22da-5ac0-a1bc-ed4e7fc0ff41)

The car offered a little breathing room, a chance to decompress and transform from one thing to another. The town of Hedley was a forty-minute drive from the Southern Reach. It lay against the banks of a river that, just twenty miles later, fed into the ocean. Hedley was large enough to have some character and culture without being a tourist trap. People moved there even though it fell just short of being “a good town to raise a family in.” Between the sputtering shops huddled at one end of the short river walk and the canopy roads, there were hints of a certain quality of life obscured in part by the strip malls that radiated outward from the edges of the city. It had a small private college, with a performing arts center. You could jog along the river or hike greenways. Still, though, Hedley also partook of a certain languor that, especially in the summers, could turn from charming to tepid overnight. A stillness when the breeze off the river died signaled a shift in mood, and some of the bars just off the waterfront had long been notorious for sudden, senseless violence—places you didn’t go unless you could pass for white, or maybe not even then. A town that seemed trapped in time, not much different from when Control had been a teenager.

Hedley’s location worked for Control. He wanted to be close to the sea but not on the coast. Something about the uncertainty of Area X had created an insistence inside of him on that point. His dream in a way forbid it. His dream told him he needed to be at a remove. On the plane down to his new assignment, he’d had strange thoughts about the inhabitants of those coastal towns to either side of Area X being somehow mutated under the skin. Whole communities no longer what they once were, even though no one could tell this by looking. These were the kinds of thoughts you had to both keep at bay and fuel, if you could manage that trick. You couldn’t become devoured by them, but you had to heed them. Because in Control’s experience they reflected something from the subconscious, some instinct you didn’t want to go against. The fact was, the Southern Reach knew so little about Area X, even after three decades, that an irrational precaution might not be unreasonable.

And Hedley was familiar to him. This was the city to which he and his friends had come for fun on weekends once some of them could drive, even knowing it was kind of a shithole, too, just not as small a shithole as where they lived. Landlocked and forlorn. His mother had even alluded to it the last time he’d seen her. She’d flown in at his old job up north, which had been gradually reduced from analysis and management to a more reactive and administrative role. Due to his own baggage, he guessed. Due to the fact it always started out well, but then, if he stayed too long … sometimes something happened, something he couldn’t quite define. He became too invested. He became too empathic, or less so. It confused him when it all went to shit because he couldn’t remember the point at which it had started to go bad—was still convinced he could get the formula right.

But his mother had come from Central and they’d met in a conference room he knew was probably bugged. Had the Voice traveled with her, been set up in a saltwater tank in the adjoining room?

It was cold outside and she wore a coat, an overcoat, and a scarf over a professional business suit and black high heels. She took off the overcoat and held it in her lap. But she didn’t take off the scarf. She looked as if she could surge from her chair at any moment and be out the door before he could snap his fingers. It had been five years since he’d seen her—predictably unreachable when he’d tried to get a message to her about her ex-husband’s funeral—but she had aged only a little bit, her brown hair just as fashion-model huge as ever and eyes a kind of calculating blue peering out from a face on which wrinkles had encroached only around the corners of the eyes and, hidden by the hair, across her forehead.

She said, “It will be like coming home, John, won’t it?” Nudging him, wanting him to say it, as if he were a barnacle clinging to a rock and she were a seagull trying to convince him to release his grip. “You’ll be comfortable with the setting. You’ll be comfortable with the people.”

He’d had to suppress anger mixed with ambivalence. How would she know whether she was right or wrong? She’d rarely been there, even though she’d had visitation rights. Just him and his father, Dad beginning to fall apart by then, to eat too much, to drink a little too much, during a succession of flings once the divorce was final … then redirecting himself to art no one wanted. Getting his house in order and going off to college had been a guilty relief, to not live in that atmosphere anymore.

“And, comfortably situated in this world I know so well, what would I do?”

She smiled at him. A genuine smile. He could tell the difference, having suffered so many times under the dull yellow glow of a fake one that tried to reheat his love for her. When she really smiled, when she meant it, his mother’s face took on a kind of beauty that surprised anyone who saw it, as if she’d been hiding her true self behind a mask. While people who were always sincere rarely got credit for that quality.

“It’s a chance to do better,” she said. “It’s a chance to erase the past.”

The past. Which part of the past? The job up north had been his tenth posting in about fifteen years, which made the Southern Reach his eleventh. There were a number of reasons, there were always reasons. Or one reason, in his case.

“What would I have to do?” If he had to pull it out of her, he knew it might not be something he wanted. But he was already tired of the repetitive nature of his current position, which had turned out to be less about fixing and more about repainting facades. He was tired of the office politics, too. Maybe that had always been his problem, at heart.

“You’ve heard of the Southern Reach?”

He had, mostly through a couple of colleagues who had worked there at one time. Vague allusions, keeping to the cover story about environmental catastrophe. Rumors of a chain of command that was eccentric at best. Rumors of significant variation, of there being more to the story. But, then, there always was. He didn’t know, on hearing his mother say those words, whether he was excited or not.

“And why me?”

The smile that prefaced her response was tinged with a bit of sadness or regret or something else that made Control look away. When she’d been on assignment, before she’d left for good, she’d had a short period when she’d been good at writing long, handwritten letters to him—almost as good as he had been at not finding the time or need to read them. But now he almost wished she was writing to him about the Southern Reach in a letter, not telling him about it in person.

“Because they’re downsizing this department, although you might not know that, and you’ll be on the chopping block. And this is the right fit for you.”

That lurch in the pit of his stomach. Another change. Another city. Never any chance to catch his balance. The truth was that after Control had joined up, he had rarely felt like a flash of light. He had often felt heavy, and realized his mother probably felt heavy, too. That she had been feigning a kind of aloofness and lightness, hiding from him the weight of information, of history and context. All of the things that wore you down, even as that was balanced by the electric feeling of being on the side of a border where you knew things no one else knew.

“Is it the only option?” Of course it was, since she hadn’t mentioned any other options. Of course it was, since she hadn’t traveled all this way just to say hello. He knew that he was the black sheep, that his lack of advancement reflected poorly on her. Had no idea what internecine battles she fought at the higher levels of clandestine departments so far removed from his security clearance that they might as well exist in the clouds, among the angels.