Читать книгу Authority - Jeff VanderMeer - Страница 10

Just close your eyes and you will remember me,” Control’s father had told him three years ago, in a place not far from where he was now, the dying trying to comfort the living. But when he closed his eyes, everything disappeared except the dream of falling and the accumulated scars from past assignments. Why had the biologist said that? Why had she said she was drowning? It had thrown him, but it had also given him an odd sense of secret sharing between them. As if she had gotten into his head and seen his dream, and now they were bound together. He resented that, did not want to be connected to the people he had to question. He had to glide above. He had to choose when he swooped down, not be brought to earth by the will of another.

When Control opened his eyes, he was standing in the back of the U-shaped building that served as the Southern Reach’s headquarters. The curve lay in the front, a road and parking lot preceding it. Built in a style now decades old, the layered, stacked concrete was a monument or a midden—he couldn’t decide which. The ridges and clefts were baffling; the way the roof leered slightly over the rest made it seem less functional than like performance art or abstract sculpture on a grand and yet numbing scale. Making things worse, the area coveted by the open arms of the U had been made into a courtyard, looking out on a lake ringed by thick old-growth forest. The edges of the lake were singed black, as if at one time set ablaze, and a wretched gnarl of cypress knees waded through the dark, brackish water. The light that suffused the lake had a claustrophobic gray quality, separate and distinct from the blue sky above.

This, too, had at one time been new, perhaps back during the Cretaceous period, and the building had probably stood here then in some form, reverse engineered so far into the past that you could still look out the windows and see dragonflies as big as vultures.

The U that hugged them close inspired no great confidence; it felt less a symbol of luck than of the incomplete. Incomplete thoughts. Incomplete conclusions. Incomplete reports. The doors at the ends of the U, through which many passed as a shortcut to the other side, confirmed a failure of the imagination. And all the while, the abysmal swamp did whatever swamps did, as perfect in its way as the Southern Reach was imperfect.

Everything was so still that when a woodpecker swooped across that scene it was as violent as the sonic boom of an F-16.

To the left of the U and the lake—just visible from where he stood—a road threaded its way through the trees, toward the invisible border, beyond which lay Area X. Just thirty-five miles of paved road and then another fifteen unpaved beyond that, with ten checkpoints in all, and shoot-to-kill orders if you weren’t meant to be there, and fences and barbed wire and trenches and pits and more swamp, possibly even government-trained colonies of apex predators and genetically modified poison berries and hammers to hit yourself on the head with … but in some ways, ever since Control had been briefed, he had wondered: To what point? Because that’s what you did in such situations? Keep people out? He’d studied the reports. If you reached the border in an “unauthorized way” and crossed over anywhere but the door, you would never be seen again. How many people had done just that, without being spotted? How would the Southern Reach ever know? Once or twice, an investigative journalist had gotten close enough to photograph the outside of the Southern Reach’s border facilities, but even then it had just confirmed in the public imagination the official story of environmental catastrophe, one that wouldn’t be cleaned up for a century.

There came a tread around the stone tables in the concrete courtyard across which little white tiles competed with squares of clotted earth into which unlikely tulips had been shoved at irregular intervals … he knew that tread, with its special extra little dragging sound. The assistant director had been a field officer once; something had happened on assignment, and she’d hurt her leg. Inside the building, she could disguise it, but not on the treacherous grouted tiles. It wasn’t an advantage for him to know this, because it made him want to empathize with her. “Whenever you say ‘in the field,’ I have this image of all of you spooks running through the wheat,” his father had said to his mother, once.

Grace was joining him at his request, to assist him in staring out at the swamp while they talked about Area X. Because he’d thought a change of setting—leaving the confines of the concrete coffin—might help soften her animosity. Before he’d realized just how truly hellish and prehistoric the landscape was, and thus now pre-hysterical as well. Look out upon this mosquito orgy, and warm to me, Grace.

“You interviewed just the biologist. I still do not know why.” She said this before he could extend even a tendril of an opening gambit … and all of his resolve to play the diplomat, to somehow become her colleague, not her enemy—even if by misdirection or a metaphorical jab in the kidneys—dissolved into the humid air.

He explained his thought processes. She seemed impressed, although he couldn’t really read her yet.

“Did she ever seem, during training, like she was hiding something?” he asked.

“Deflection. You think she is hiding something.”

“I don’t know yet, actually. I could be wrong.”

“We have more expert interrogators than you.”

“Probably true.”

“We should send her to Central.”

The thought made him shudder.

“No,” he said, a little too emphatically, then worried in the next split second that the assistant director might guess that he cared about the biologist’s fate.

“I have already sent the anthropologist and the surveyor away.”

Now he could smell the decay of all that plant matter slowly rotting beneath the surface of the swamp, could sense the awkward turtles and stunted fish pushing their way through matted layers. He didn’t trust himself to turn to face her. Didn’t trust himself to say anything, stood there suspended by his surprise.

Cheerfully, she continued: “You said they weren’t of any use, so I sent them to Central.”

“By whose authority?”

“Your authority. You clearly indicated to me that this was what you wanted. If you meant something else, my apologies.”

A tiny seismic shift occurred inside of Control, an imperceptible shudder.

They were gone. He couldn’t have them back. He had to put it out of his mind, would feed himself the lie that Grace had done him a favor, simplified his job. Just how much pull did she have at Central, anyway?

“I can always read the transcripts if I change my mind,” he said, attempting an agreeable tone. They’d still be questioned, and he’d given her the opening by saying he didn’t want to interview them.

She was scanning his face intently, looking for some sign that she’d come close to hitting the target.

He tried to smile, doused his anger with the thought that if the assistant director had meant him real harm, she would have found a way to spirit the biologist away, too. This was just a warning. Now, though, he was going to have to take something away from Grace as well. Not to get even but so she wouldn’t be tempted to take yet more from him. He couldn’t afford to lose the biologist, too. Not yet.

Into the awkward silence, Grace asked, “Why are you just standing out here in the heat like an idiot?” Breezily, as if nothing had happened at all. “We should go inside. It’s time for lunch, and you can meet some of the admin.”

Control was already growing accustomed to her disrespect of him, and he hated that, wanted an opportunity to reverse the trend. As he followed her in, the swamp at his back had a weight, a presence. Another kind of enemy. He’d had enough of such views, growing up nearby as a teenager after his parents’ divorce, and, again, while his father slowly died. He’d hoped to never see a swamp again.

“Just close your eyes and you will remember me.”

I do, Dad. I do remember you, but you’re fading. There’s too much interference, and all of this is becoming much too real.

Control’s father’s side of the family came originally from Central America, Hispanic and Indian; he had his father’s hands and black hair, his mother’s slight nose and height, a skin color somewhere in between. His paternal grandfather had died before Control was old enough to know him, but he had heard the epic stories. The man had sold clothespins door-to-door as a kid, in certain neighborhoods, and been a boxer in his twenties, not good enough to be a contender but good enough to be a paid opponent and take a beating. Afterward, he’d been a construction worker, and then a driving instructor, before an early death from a heart attack at sixty-five. His wife, who worked in a bakery, passed on just a year later. His eldest child, Control’s father, had grown up to be an artist in a family mostly composed of carpenters and mechanics, and used his heritage to create abstract sculptures. He had humanized the abstractions by painting over them in the bright palette favored by the Mayans and by affixing to them bits of tile and glass—bridging some gap between professional and outsider art. That was his life, and Control never knew a time that his father was not that person and only that person.

The story of how Control’s father and mother fell in love was also the happy story of how his father had risen, for a time, as a favorite in high-end art galleries. They had met at a reception for his work and, as they told it, had been enamored with each other right from the first glance, although later Control found that difficult to believe. At the time, she was based up north and had what amounted to a desk job, although she was rising fast. His father moved to be with her, and they had Control and then only a year or two later she was reassigned, from a desk job to active duty in the field, and that was the start of the end of it all, the story that anchored Control as a kid soon revealed as just a brief moment set against a landscape of unhappiness. Not unique: the kind of depressingly familiar painting you’d find in a seaside antique store but never buy.

The silence was punctuated by arguments, a silence created not just by the secrets she carried with her but by those she could not divulge, and, Control realized as an adult, by her inner reserve, which after a time could not be bridged. Her absences tore at his father, and by the time Control was ten, that was the subtext and sometimes the transcript of their dispute: She was killing his art and that wasn’t fair, even though the art scene had moved on and what his father did was expensive and required patrons or grants to sustain.

But still his father would sit there with his schematics, his plans for new work, spread out around him like evidence when she came back between field assignments. She bore the recrimination, Control remembered, with calm and a chilly, aloof compassion. She was the unstoppable force that came blowing in—not there, there—with presents bought at the last minute in far-off airports and an innocent-sounding cover story about what she’d been up to, or a less innocent story that Control realized years later, when faced with a similar dilemma, had been coming to them from a time delay. Something declassified she could now share but that had happened to her long ago. The stories, and the aloofness, agitated his father, but the compassion infuriated him. He could not read it as anything other than condescending. How can you tell if a streak of light across the sky is sincere?

When they divorced, Control went south to live with his dad, who became embedded in a community that felt comfortable because it included some of his relatives and fed his artistic ambitions even as his bank account starved. Control could remember the shock when he realized how much noise and motion and color could be found in someone’s house, once they’d moved. How suddenly he was part of a larger family.

Yet during those hot summers in that small town not very far from the Southern Reach, as a thirteen-year-old with a rusty bike and a few loyal friends, Control kept thinking about his mother, out in the field, in some far-off city or country: that distant streak of light that sometimes came down out of the night sky and materialized on their doorstep as a human being. Exactly in the same way as when they’d been together as a family.

One day, he believed, she would take him with her, and he would become the streak of light, have secrets no one else could ever know.

Some rumors about Area X were elaborate and in their complexity seemed to Control like schools of the most deadly and yet voluminous jellyfish at the aquarium. As you watched them, in their undulating progress, they seemed both real and unreal framed against the stark blue of the water. Invasion site. Secret government experiments. How could such an organism actually exist? The simple ones that echoed the official story—variations on a human-made ecological disaster area—were by contrast so commonplace these days that they hardly registered or elicited curiosity. The petting-zoo versions that ate out of your hand.

But the truth did have a simple quality to it: About thirty-two years ago, along a remote southern stretch known by some as the “forgotten coast,” an Event had occurred that began to transform the landscape and simultaneously caused a border or wall to appear. A kind of ghost or “permeable pre-border manifestation” as the files put it—light as fog, almost invisible except for a flickering quality—had quickly emanated out in all directions from an unknown epicenter and then suddenly stopped at its current impenetrable limits.

Since then, the Southern Reach had been established and sought to investigate what had occurred, with little success and much sacrifice of lives via the expeditions—sent in through the sole point of egress. Yet that loss of life was trifling compared to the possibility of some break in containment across a border that the scientists were still studying and trying to understand. The riddle of why equipment, when recovered, had been rendered nonfunctional, some of it decomposing at an incredibly fast rate. The teasing, inconsistent way in which some expeditions came back entirely unharmed that seemed almost more inexplicable.

“It started earlier than the border coming down,” the assistant director told him after lunch in his new-old office. She was all business now, and Control chose to accept her at face value, to continue to put away, for now, his anger at her preemptive strike in banishing the anthropologist and the surveyor.

Grace rolled out the map of Area X on a corner of his desk: the coastline, the lighthouse, the base camp, the trails, the lakes and rivers, the island many miles north that marked the farthest reach of the … Incursion? Invasion? Infestation? What word worked? The worst part of the map was the black dot hand-labeled by the director as “the tunnel” but known to most as “the topographical anomaly.” Worst part because not every expedition whose members had survived to report back had encountered it, even when they’d mapped the same area.

Grace tossed files on top of the map. It still struck Control, with a kind of nostalgia rarely granted to his generation, how anachronistic it was to deal in paper. But the concern about sending modern technology across the border had infected the former director. She had forbidden certain forms of communication, required that all e-mails be printed out and the original, electronic versions regularly archived and purged, and had arcane and confusing protocols for using the Internet and other forms of electronic communication. Would he put an end to that? He didn’t know yet, had a kind of sympathy for the policy, impractical though it might be. He used the Internet solely for research and admin. He believed a kind of a fragmentation had crept into people’s minds in the modern era.

“It started earlier …”

“How much earlier?”

“Intel indicates that there may have been odd … activity occurring along that coast for at least a century before the border came down.” Before Area X had formed. A “pristine wilderness.” He’d never heard the word pristine used so many times before today.

Idly, he wondered what they called it—whoever or whatever had created that pristine bubble that had killed so many people. Maybe they called it a holiday retreat. Maybe they called it a beachhead. Maybe “they” were so incomprehensible he’d never understand what they called it, or why. He’d asked the Voice if he needed access to the files on other major unexplained occurrences, and the Voice had made “No” sound like a granite cliff, with only flailing blue sky beyond it.

Control had already seen at least some of the flotsam and jetsam now threatening to buckle the desk in the file summary. He knew that quite a bit of the information peeking out at him from the beige folders came from lighthouse journals and police records—and that the inexplicable in it had to be teased out from the edges, pushed forward into the light like the last bit of toothpaste in the dehydrated tube curled up on the edge of the bathroom sink. The kind of “strange doings” alluded to by hard-living bearded fishermen in old horror movies as they stared through haunted eyes at the unforgiving sea. Unsolved disappearances. Lights in the night. Stories of odd salvagers, and false beacons, and the hundred legends that accrete around a lonely coastline and a remote lighthouse.

There had even been an informal group—the Séance & Science Brigade—dedicated to applying “empirical reality to paranormal phenomenon.” Members of the S&S Brigade had written several self-published books that had collected dust on the counters of local businesses. It was the S&SB that had in effect named Area X, identifying that coast as “of particular interest” and calling it “Active Site X”—a name prominent on their bizarre science-inspired tarot cards. The Southern Reach had discounted S&SB early on as “not a catalyst or a player or an instigator” in whatever had caused Area X—just a bunch of (un)lucky “amateurs” caught up in something beyond the grasp of their imaginations. Except, almost every effective terrorist Control had encountered was an “amateur.”

“We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.” Bullshit artist in this context meant his mother, but the statement had wide applications.

So was all or any of it random coincidence—or part of some vast, pre–Area X conspiracy? You could spend years wading through the data, trying to find the answer—and it looked to Control as if that’s exactly what the former director had been doing.

“And you think this is credible evidence?” Control still didn’t know how far into the mountain of bullshit the assistant director had fallen. Too far, given her natural animosity, and he wouldn’t be inclined to pull her out of it.

“Not all of it,” she conceded, a thin smile erasing the default frown. “But tracking back from the events we know have occurred since the border came down, you begin to see patterns.”

Control believed her. He would have believed Grace had she said visions appeared in the swirls of her strawberry gelato on hot summer days or in the fracturing of the ice in another of her favorites, rum-and-diet with a lime (her personnel file was full of maddeningly irrelevant details). It was in the nature of being an analyst. But what patterns had colonized the former director’s mind? And how much of that had infiltrated the assistant director? On some level, Control hoped that the mess the director had left behind was deliberate, to hide some more rational progression.

“But how is that different from any other godforsaken stretch of coast half off the grid?” There were still dozens of them all across the country. Places that were poison to real-estate agents, with little infrastructure and a long history of distrust of the government.

The assistant director stared at him in a way that made him feel uncomfortably like a middle-school student again, sent up for insolence.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Have we been compromised by our own data? The answer is: Of course. That is what happens over time. But if there is something in the files that is useful, you might see it because you have fresh eyes. So I can archive all of this now if you like. Or we can use you the way we need to use you: not because you know anything but because you know so little.”

A kind of resentful pride rose up in Control that wasn’t useful, that came from having a parent who did seem to know everything.

“I didn’t mean that I—”

Mercifully, she cut him off. Unmercifully, her tone channeled contempt. “We have been here a long time … Control. A very long time. Living with this. Unable to do very much about this.” A surprising amount of pain had entered her voice. “You don’t go home at night with it in your stomach, in your bones. In a few weeks, when you have seen everything, you will have been living with it for a long time, too. You will be just like us—only more so, because it is getting worse. Fewer and fewer journals recovered, and more zombies, as if they have been mind-wiped. And no one in charge has time for us.”

It could have been a moment to commiserate over the vagaries and injustices perpetrated by Central, Control realized later, but he just sat there staring at her. He found her fatalism a hindrance, especially suffused, as he misdiagnosed it at first, with such a grim satisfaction. A claustrophobic combination that no one needed, that helped no one. It was also inaccurate in its progressions.

The first expedition alone had, according to the files, experienced such horrors, almost beyond imagining, that it was a wonder that they had sent anyone after that. But they’d had no choice, understood they were in it for “the long haul” as, he knew from transcripts, the former director had liked to say. They hadn’t even let the later expeditions know the true fate of the first expedition, had created a fiction of encountering an undisturbed wilderness and then built other lies on top of that one. This had probably been done as much to ease the Southern Reach’s own trauma as to protect the morale of the subsequent expeditions.

“In thirty minutes, you have an appointment to tour the science division,” she said, getting up and looming over him, leaning with her hands on his desk. “I think I will let you find the place yourself.” That would give him just enough time to check his office for surveillance devices beforehand.

“Thanks,” he said. “You can leave now.”

So she left.

But it didn’t help. Before he’d arrived, Control had imagined himself flying free above the Southern Reach, swooping down from some remote perch to manage things. That wasn’t going to happen. Already his wings were burning up and he felt more like some ponderous moaning creature trapped in the mire.

As he became more familiar with it, the former director’s office revealed no new or special features to Control’s practiced eye. Except that his computer, finally installed on the desk, looked almost science-fictional next to all the rest of it.

The door lay to the far left of the long, rectangular room, so that you wandered into its length toward the mahogany desk set against the far wall. No one could have snuck up on the director or read over her shoulder. Each wall had been covered in bookcases or filing cabinets, with stacks of papers and some books forming a second width in front of this initial layering. At the highest levels, or in some ridiculous cases, balanced on the stacks, those bulletin boards with ripped pieces of paper and scribbled diagrams pinned to them. He felt as if he had been placed inside someone’s disorganized mind. Near her desk, on the left, he uncovered an array of preserved natural ephemera. Dusty and decaying bits of pinecone trailed across the shelves. A vague hint of a rotting smell, but he couldn’t track down the origin.

Opposite the entrance lay another door, situated in a gap between bookcases, but this had been blocked by more piles of file folders and cardboard boxes and he’d been told it opened onto the wall—detritus of an inelegant remodeling. Opposite the desk, on the far wall about twenty-five feet away, was a kind of break in the mess to make room for two rows of pictures, all in the kinds of frames cheaply bought at discount stores. From bottom left, clockwise around to the right: a square etching of the lighthouse from the 1880s; a black-and-white photograph of two men and a girl framed by the lighthouse; a long, somewhat amateurish watercolor panorama showing miles of reeds broken only by a few isolated islands of dark trees; and a color photograph of the lighthouse beacon in all its glory. No real hints of the personal, no pictures of the director with her Native American mother, her white father—or with anyone who might matter in her life.

Of all the intel Control had to work through in the coming days, he least looked forward to what he might uncover in what was now his own office; he thought he might leave it until last. Everything in the office seemed to indicate a director who had gone feral. One of the drawers in the desk was locked, and he couldn’t find the key. But he did note an earthy quality to the locked drawer that hinted at something having rotted inside a long time ago. Which mystery didn’t even include the mess drooping off the sides of the desk.

Ever-helpful, unhelpful spy Grandpa used to reflexively say, whether it was washing the dishes or preparing for a fishing trip, “Never skip a step. Skip a step, you’ll find five more new ones waiting ahead of you.”

The search for surveillance equipment, for bugs, then, was more time-consuming than he’d thought it would be, and he buzzed the science division to let them know he’d be late. There was a kind of visceral grunt in response before the line went dead, and he had no idea who had been on the other end. A person? A trained pig?

Ultimately, after a hellish search, Control to his surprise found twenty-two bugs in his office. He doubted many of them had actually been reporting back, and even if they had, if anyone had been watching or listening to what they conveyed. For the fact was, the director’s office had contained an unnatural history museum of bugs—different kinds from different eras, progressively smaller and harder to unearth. The behemoths of this sort were bulging, belching metal goiters when set next to the sleek ethereal pinheads of the modern era.

The discovery of each new bug contributed to a cheerful, upbeat mood. Bugs made sense in a way some of the other things about the Southern Reach didn’t. In his training as an omnivore in the service, he’d had at least six assignments that involved bugging people or places. Spying on people didn’t bring him the kind of vicarious rush it gave some, or if it did, that feeling faded as he came to know his subjects better and invested in a sense of protectiveness meant to shield them. But he did find the actual devices fascinating.

When he thought his search complete, Control amused himself by arranging the bugs across the faded paper of the blotter in what he believed might be chronological order. Some of them glittered silver. Some, black, absorbed the light. There were wires attached to some like umbilical cords. One iteration—disguised within what appeared to be a small, sticky ball of green papier-mâché or colored honeycomb—made him think that a few might even be foreign-made: interlopers drawn by curiosity to the black box that was Area X. Clearly, though, the former director knew and hadn’t cared they were there. Or perhaps she had thought it safest to leave them. Perhaps, too, she’d put some there herself. He wondered if this accounted for her distrust of modern technology.

As for installing his own, he’d have to wait until later: No time now. No time, either, to deploy these bugs for another purpose that had just occurred to him. Control carefully swept them all into a desk drawer and went to find his science guide.

The labs had been buried in the basement on the right side of the U, if you were facing the building from the parking lot out front. They lay directly opposite the sealed-off wing that served as an expedition pre-prep area and currently housed the biologist. Control had been assigned one of the science division’s jack-of-all-trades as his tour guide. Which meant that despite seniority—he had been at the agency longer than anyone on staff—Whitby Allen was a push-me-pull-me who, in part due to staff attrition, often sacrificed his studies as a “cohesive naturalist and holistic scientist specializing in biospheres” to type up someone else’s reports or run someone else’s errands. Whitby reported to the head of the science division, but also to the assistant director. He was the scion of intellectual aristocracy, came from a long line of professors, men and women who had been tenured at various faux-Corinthian-columned private colleges. Perhaps to his family, he had become an outlaw: The dropout art-school student who went wandering and only later got a proper degree.

Whitby was dressed in a blue blazer with a white shirt and an oddly unobtrusive burgundy bow tie. He looked much younger than his age, with eternal brown hair and the kind of tight, pinched face that allows a fifty-something to look a boyish thirty-two from afar. His wrinkles had come in as tiny hairline fractures. Control had seen him in the cafeteria at lunch next to a dozen dollar bills fanned out on the table beside him for no good reason. Counting them? Making art? Designing a monetary biosphere?

Whitby had an uncomfortable laugh and bad breath and teeth that clearly needed some work. Up close, Whitby also looked as if he hadn’t slept in years: a youth wizened prematurely, all the moisture leached from his face, so that his watery blue eyes seemed too large for his head. Beyond this, and his fanciful attitude toward money, Whitby appeared competent enough, and while he no doubt had the ability to engage in small talk, he lacked the inclination. This was as good a reason as any, as they threaded their way through the cafeteria, for Control to question him.

“Did you know the members of the twelfth expedition before they left?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘know,’” Whitby said, clearly uncomfortable with the question.

“But you saw them around.”

“Yes.”

“The biologist?”

“Yes, I saw her.”

They cleared the cafeteria and its high ceiling and stepped into an atrium flooded with fluorescent light. The crunchy chirp of pop music dripped, distant, out of some office or another.

“What did you think of her? What were your impressions?”

Whitby concentrated hard, face rendered stern by the effort. “She was distant. Serious, sir. She outworked all of the others. But she didn’t seem to be working at it, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you mean, Whitby.”

“Well, it didn’t matter to her. The work didn’t matter. She was looking past it. She was seeing something else.” Control got the sense that Whitby had subjected the biologist to quite a bit of scrutiny.

“And the former director? Did you see the former director interact with the biologist?”

“Twice, maybe three times.”

“Did they get along?” Control didn’t know why he asked this question, but fishing was fishing. Sometimes you just had to cast the line any place at all to start.

“No, sir. But, sir, neither of them got along with anyone.” He said this last bit in a whisper, as if afraid of being overheard. Then said, as if to provide cover, “No one but the director wanted that biologist on the twelfth expedition.”

“No one?” Control asked slyly.

“Most people.”

“Did that include the assistant director?”

Whitby gave him a troubled look. But his silence was enough.

The director had been embedded in the Southern Reach for a long time. The director had cast a long shadow. Even gone, she had a kind of influence. Perhaps not entirely with Whitby, not really. But Control could sense it anyway. He had already caught himself having a strange thought: That the director looked out at him through the assistant director’s eyes.

The elevators weren’t working and wouldn’t be fixed until an expert from the army base dropped by in a few days, so they took the stairs. To get to the stairs, you followed the curve of the U to a side door that opened onto a parallel corridor about fifty feet long, the floor adorned with the same worn green carpet that lowered the property value of the rest of the building. The stairs awaited them at the corridor’s end, through wide swinging doors more appropriate for a slaughterhouse or emergency room. Whitby, out of character, felt compelled to burst through those double doors as if they were rock stars charging onto a stage—or, perhaps, to warn off whatever lay on the other side—then stood there sheepishly holding one side open while Control contemplated that first step.

“It’s through here,” Whitby said.

“I know,” Control said.

Beyond the doors, they were suddenly in a kind of free fall, the green carpet cut off, the path become a concrete ramp down to a short landing with a staircase at the end—which then plunged into shadows created by dull white halogens in the walls and punctuated by blinking red emergency lights. All of it under a high ceiling that framed what, in the murk, seemed more a human-made grotto or warehouse than the descent to a basement. The staircase railing, under the shy lights, glittered with luminous rust spots. The coolness in the air as they descended reminded him of a high-school field trip to a natural history museum with an artificial cave system meant to mimic the modern day, the highlight of which had been non sequiturs: mid-lunge reproductions of a prehistoric giant sloth and giant armadillo, mega fauna that had taken a wrong turn.

“How many people in the science division?” he asked when he’d acclimated.

“Twenty-five,” Whitby said. The correct answer was nineteen.

“How many did you have five years ago?”

“About the same, maybe a few more.” The correct answer was thirty-five.

“What’s the turnover like?”

Whitby shrugged. “We have some stalwarts who will always be here. But a lot of new people come in, too, with their ideas, but they don’t really change anything.” His tone implied that they either left quickly or came around … but came around to what?

Control let the silence elongate, so that their footsteps were the only sound. As he’d thought, Whitby didn’t like silences. After a moment, Whitby said, “Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s just sometimes frustrating when new people come in and want to change things without knowing … our situation. You feel like if they just read the manual first … if we had a manual, that is.”

Control mulled that, making a noncommittal sound. He felt as if he’d come in on the middle of an argument Whitby had been having with other people. Had Whitby been a new voice at some point? Was he the new Whitby, applied across the entire Southern Reach rather than just the science division?

Whitby looked paler than before, almost sick. He was staring off into the middle distance while his feet listlessly slapped the steps. With each step, he seemed more ill at ease. He had stopped saying “sir.”

Some form of pity or sympathy came over Control; he didn’t know which. Perhaps a change of subject would help Whitby.

“When was the last time you had a new sample from Area X?”

“About five or six years ago.” Whitby sounded more confident about this answer, if no more robust, and he was right. It had been six years since anything new had come to the Southern Reach from Area X. Except for the forever changed members of the eleventh expedition. The doctors and scientists had exhaustively tested them and their clothing, only to find … nothing. Nothing at all out of the ordinary. Just one anomaly: the cancer.

No light reached the basement except for what the science division created for itself: They had their own generator, filtration system, and food supply. Vestiges, no doubt, of some long-ago imperative that boiled down to “in an emergency, save the scientists.” Control found it hard to imagine those first days, when behind closed doors the government had been in panic mode, and the people who worked in the Southern Reach believed that whatever had come into the world along the forgotten coast might soon turn its attentions inland. But the invasion hadn’t happened, and Control wondered if something in that thwarting of expectation had started the Southern Reach’s decline.

“Do you like working here, Whitby?”

“Like? Yes. I must admit it’s often fascinating, and definitely challenging.” Whitby was sweating now, beads breaking on his forehead.

It might indeed be fascinating, but Whitby had, according to the records, undergone a sustained spasm of transfer requests about three years ago—one every month and then every two months like an intermittent SOS, until it had trailed off to nothing, like a flatlined EKG. Control approved of the initiative, if not the sense of desperation embedded in the number of attempts. Whitby didn’t want to be stuck in a backwater and just as clearly the director or someone hadn’t wanted him to leave.

Perhaps it was his utility-player versatility, because it was clear to Control that, just like every department in the Southern Reach, the science division had been “stripped for parts,” as his mother would have put it, by antiterrorism and Central. According to the personnel records, there had once been one hundred and fifteen scientists in-house, representing almost thirty disciplines and several subdepartments. Now there were only sixty-five people in the whole haunted place. There had even been talk, Control knew, about relocating, except that the building was too close to the border to be used for anything else.

The same cheap, rotting scent came to him again just then, as if the janitor had unlimited access to the entire building.

“Isn’t that cleaning smell a bit strong?”

“The smell?” Whitby’s head whipped around, eyes made huge by the circles around them.

“The rancid honey smell.”

“I don’t smell anything.”

Control frowned, more at Whitby’s vehemence than anything else. Well, of course. They were used to it. Tiniest of his tasks, but he made a note to authorize changing cleaning supplies to something organic.

When they curved down at an angle that seemed unnecessarily precipitous, into a spacious preamble to the science division, the ceiling seeming higher than ever, Control was surprised. A tall metal wall greeted them, and a small door within it with a sophisticated security system blinking red.

Except the door was open.

“Is this door always open, Whitby?” he asked.

Whitby seemed to believe hazarding a guess might be perilous, and hesitated before saying, “This used to be the back end of the facilities—they only added a door a year or two ago.”

Which made Control wonder what this space had been used for back then. Dance hall? Weddings and bar mitzvahs? Impromptu court-martials?

They both had to stoop to enter, only to be greeted by two space-program-quality air locks, no doubt to protect against contamination. The portal doors had been cantilevered open and from within glowed an intense white light that, for whatever reason, refused to peek out beyond the unsecured security door.

Along the walls, at shoulder height, both rooms were lined with flaccid long black gloves that hung in a way that Control could only think of as dejected. There was a sense that it had been a long time since they had been brought to life by hands and arms. It was a kind of mausoleum, entombing curiosity and due diligence.

“What are those for, Whitby? To creep out guests?”

“Oh, we haven’t used those for ages. I don’t know why they’ve left them in here.”

It didn’t really get much better after that.