Blind Lake

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 a

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.

Seven

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, sca

“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 ru