Blind Lake

Tess said that was all right.

She played in her room until di

But Tess didn’t mind spaghetti. And there was buttered bread and cheese to go with it, and pears for dessert.

After di

He asked the same thing every time he called. Tess answered as she always did: “Yes.”

“Are you sure, Tessa?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do today?”

“Played,” she said.

“In the snow?”

“Yes.”

“Were you careful?”

“Yes,” Tess said, though she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be careful about.

“I hear you had a visitor today.”

“The boarder,” Tess said. She wondered how her father had heard about it so quickly.

“That’s right. How do you feel about having a visitor?”

“It’s okay. I don’t know.”

“Is your mother looking after you all right?”

Another familiar question. “Yes.”

“I hope so. You know, if there’s ever a problem over there, you just have to call me. I can come pick you up.”

“I know.”

“Anyway, next week you’re back home again with me. Can you wait another week?”

“Yes,” Tess said.

“Be a good girl till then?”

“I will.”

“Call me if there’s any problem with your mother.”

“I will.”

“Love you, Tessa.”

“I know.”

Tess put the pink phone back in her pocket.

The boarder came back that evening with a duffel bag. He said he’d already had di

The embroidery of ice had melted from the windowpane during the day but had reformed after sunset, new and different symmetries growing like a private garden. Tess imagined crystal roads and crystal houses and crystalline creatures inhabiting them: ice cities, ice worlds.

Outside, the snow had stopped falling and the temperature had dropped. The sky was very clear, and when she rubbed away the ice Tess could see a great many winter stars beyond the snow-bent tree limbs and the towers of Hubble Plaza.

Twelve

Chris met Elaine for di

This evening Chris and Elaine were the only customers — yesterday’s snowfall was keeping people at home. The single waitress who had shown up was a teenage part-timer, Laurel Brank, who spent most of her time in the far corner of the room reading Bleak House from a pocket display and picking at a bowl of Fritos.

“Heard you got billetted,” Elaine said.

A cold front had followed the storm. The air was clear and bitter and the wind had picked up, rearranging yesterday’s snowfall and rattling the restaurant windows. “I’m in the middle of something I don’t entirely understand. Weingart signed me up with a woman named Marguerite Hauser who lives with her daughter in the housing west of town.”

“I know the name. She’s a recent arrival from Crossbank, heads up Observation and Interpretation.” Elaine had been interviewing all the important Blind Lake committee people — the kind of interviews Chris tended not to get, given his reputation. “I haven’t talked to her directly, but she doesn’t seem to have many friends.”

“Enemies?”

“Not enemies exactly. She’s just a newbie. Still kind of an outsider. The big deal with her is—”

“Her ex-husband.”

“Right. Ray Scutter. I gather it was an acrimonious divorce. Scutter’s been talking her down. He doesn’t think she’s qualified to head a committee.”

“You think he’s right?”

“I wouldn’t know, but her career record’s impeccable. She was never a big hitter like Ray and she doesn’t have the same academic credentials, but she hasn’t been as spectacularly wrong as Ray’s been either. You know the debate over cultural inteligibility?”

“Some people think we’ll eventually understand the Lobsters. Some don’t.”

“If the Lobsters were looking at us, how much of what we do could they figure out? Pessimists say, nothing — or very little. They might work out our system of economic exchange and some of our biology and technology, but how could they possibly interpret Picasso, or Christianity, or the Boer War, or The Brothers Karamazov, or even the emotional content of a smile? We aim all our signalling at each other, and our signals are predicated on all kinds of human idiosyncracies, from our external physiology down to our brain structure. That’s why the research people talk about the Lobsters in weird behavioral categories — food-sharing, economic exchanges, symbol-making. It’s like a nineteenth-century European trying to work out Kwakiutl kinship systems, without learning the language or being able to communicate… except that the European shares fundamental needs and urges with the Indian, and we share nothing at all with the Lobsters.”

“So it’s futile to try?”

“A pessimist would say yes — would say, let’s collect and collate our information and learn from it, but forget the idea of ultimate comprehension. Ray Scutter is one of those guys. In a lecture, he once called the idea of exocultural understanding ‘a romantic delusion comparable to the Victorian fad for table-rapping and spirit chambers.’ Sees himself as a hard-core materialist.”

“Not everybody in Blind Lake takes that point of view,” Chris said.

“Obviously not. There’s another school of thought. Of which Ray’s ex happens to be a charter member.”

“Optimists.”

“You could say. They argue that, while the Lobsters have unique physiological constraints on their behavior, those are observable and can be understood. And culture is simply learned behavior modified by physiology and environment — learnable, hence comprehensible. They think if we know enough about the daily life of the Lobsters, understanding will inevitably follow. They say all living things share certain common goals, like the need to reproduce, the need to feed and excrete, and so forth — and that’s enough commonality to make the Lobsters more like distant cousins than ultimate aliens.”

“Interesting. What do you think?”

“What do I think?” Elaine seemed startled by the question. “I’m an agnostic.” She canted her head. “Let’s say it’s 1944. Let’s say some E.T. is examining the Earth, and let’s suppose he happens to drop in on an extermination camp in Poland. He’s watching Nazis extract the gold from the teeth of dead Jews, and he’s asking himself, is this economic behavior or is it part of the food chain or what? He’s trying to make sense of it, but he never will. Never. Because some things just don’t make sense. Some things make no fucking sense at all.”

“This is what’s between Ray and Marguerite, this philosophical debate?”