Blind Lake

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 di

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

“Ms. Hauser?”

“Speaking.”

“Sorry to bother you so close to di

“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.

Six

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 i

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.)