Jeff VanderMeer - Authority

“And,” he said, drawing out the word, working through it, “what about the way into Area X, through the border? How did you create that?”

Cheney frowned, gave his colleagues a helpless glance, then retreated into the X of his own face when none of them stepped into the breach. “We didn’t create that. We found it. One day, it was just … there.”

An anger rose in Control then. In part because Grace’s initial briefing had been too vague, or he’d made too many assumptions. But mostly because the Southern Reach had sent expedition after expedition in through a door they hadn’t created, into God knew what—hoping that everything would be all right, that they would come home, that those white rabbits hadn’t just evaporated into their constituent atoms, possibly returned to their most primeval state in agonizing pain.

“Entity One or Entity Two?” he asked Cheney, wishing there were some way the biologist could have sat in on this conversation, already thinking of new questions for her.

“What?”

“Which Event creator opened a door in the border, do you think?”

Cheney shrugged. “Well, that’s impossible to say, I’m afraid. Because we don’t know if its main purpose was to let something in or to allow something out.”

Or both. Or Cheney didn’t know what he was talking about.

Control caught up with the assistant director while navigating his way through one of the many corridors he hadn’t quite connected one to the other. He was trying to find HR to file paperwork but still couldn’t see the map of the building entire in his head and remained a little off-balance from the phone call with the Voice.

The scraps of overheard conversation in the hallways didn’t help, pointing as they did to evidence for which he as yet had no context. “How deep do you think it goes down?” “No, I don’t recognize it. But I’m not an expert.” “Believe me or don’t believe me.” Grace didn’t help, either. As soon as he came up beside her, she began to crowd him, perhaps to make the point that she was as strong and tall as him. She smelled of some synthetic lavender perfume that made him stifle a sneeze.

After fielding an inquiry about the visit with the scientists, Control turned and bore down on her before she could veer off. “Why didn’t you want the biologist on the twelfth expedition?”

She stopped, put some space between them to look askance at him. Good—at least she was willing to engage.

“What was on your mind back then? Why didn’t you want the biologist on that expedition?”

Personnel were passing by them on either side. Grace lowered her voice, said, “She did not have the right qualifications. She had been fired from half a dozen jobs. She had some raw talent, some kind of spark, yes, but she was not qualified. Her husband’s position on the prior expedition—that compromised her, too.”

“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.