Blind Lake

“Anything else?”

“No.” Get the fuck out. “Please close the door.”

She closed it gently. Ray imagined he could hear her laughter floating behind her like a bright red ribbon.

Ray considered himself a realist. He knew some of his behavior could be labeled misogynistic by anyone who wanted to smear him (and his enemies were legion). But he didn’t hate women. Quite the opposite: he gave them every opportunity to redeem themselves. The problem was not that he hated women but that he was so consistently disappointed by them. For instance, Marguerite. (Always Marguerite, forever Marguerite… )

Ari Weingart came in at ten with a series of morale-enhancing proposals. Cayti Lane from the PR department wanted to put together a local video ring for news and social updates — Blind Lake TV, in effect — which she would host. “I think it’s a good idea,” Ari said. “Cayti’s bright and photogenic. What I also want to do is pool the individual downloads people have residing in their house servers so we can rebroadcast them. No-choice scheduled television, very twentieth century, but it might help hold things together. Or at least give people something to talk about at the water cooler.”

Fine, all this was fine. Ari went on to propose a series of live debates and lectures Saturday nights at the community center. Also fine. Ari was trying to reconfigure the siege as a church social. Let him, Ray thought. Let him distract the whining inmates with dog-and-pony shows. But all this boosterism was ultimately tiresome, and it was a relief when Ari finally packed up his grin and left the room.

Ray counted his DingDongs again.

Of course, it could have been Sue who had broken into his desk. There was no sign that the mechanism had been tampered with — maybe he’d been careless about locking the drawer and she had taken advantage of his lapse of attention. Sue often worked later than Ray, especially when Tess was in his care; unlike Marguerite, he didn’t like leaving his daughter alone in the house after school. Sue was the prime suspect, Ray decided, though the cleaning staff weren’t entirely above suspicion.

Men were easier to deal with than women. With men it was a matter of barking loud enough to command attention. Women were slyer, Ray thought, overtly yielding but easily subverted. Their loyalties were tentative and too quickly revoked. (Marguerite, for instance… )

At least Tess wouldn’t grow up to be one of those kind of women.

Dimi Shulgin showed up at eleven, crisp in a gray tailored suit, a welcome distraction even though he was full of ominous news. Shulgin had mastered the art of Baltic inscrutability, his doughy face impassive as he described the mood prevailing among the day workers and salaried staff. “They’ve endured the siege this long,” Shulgin said, “with minimal problems, probably because of what happened to unfortunate Mr. Krafft when he tried to run the fence. That was a blessing in disguise, I think. It frightened people into acceptance. But discontent is growing. Casual and support staff outnumber the scientific and management people by five to one, you know. Many of them are demanding a voice in decision-making, and not a few of them would like to shut down the Eye and see what happens.”

“It’s all talk,” Ray said.

“So far, it’s all talk. In the long run — if this lockdown continues — who knows?”

“We should be seen to be doing something positive.”

“The appearance of action,” Shulgin said, any irony safely buried under his turgid accent, “would be helpful.”

“You know,” Ray said, “my desk was broken into recently.”

“Your desk?” Shulgin’s caterpillar eyebrows rose. “Broken into? This was vandalism, theft?”

Ray waved his hand in what he imagined was a magnanimous gesture. “It was trivial, office vandalism at most, but it got me thinking. What if we launched an investigation?”

“Into the vandalism of your desk?”

“No, for Christ’s sake, into the siege.”

“An investigation? How could we? All the evidence is on the other side of the fence.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Please explain.”

“There’s a theory we’re under lockdown because something happened at Crossbank, something dangerous, something co

“Yes, which is why there’s a growing movement to switch off our own processors, but—”

“Forget about the O/BECs for a minute. Think about Crossbank. If Crossbank had a problem, wouldn’t we have heard about it?”

Shulgin considered. He rubbed a finger against his nose. “Possibly, possibly not. All the senior administrators were in Cancun when the gates closed. They would have been the first to know.”

“Yes,” Ray said, gently urging the idea to its conclusion, “but messages might have stacked up on their personal servers before the quarantine went into effect.”

“Anything urgent would have been forwarded…”

“But copies would still reside in the Blind Lake servers, wouldn’t they?”

“Well… presumably. Unless someone took the trouble to erase them. But we can’t break into the personal servers of senior staff.”

“Can’t we?”

Shulgin shrugged. “I would have thought not.”

“In ordinary circumstances the question wouldn’t even arise. But circumstances are a long way from ordinary.”

“Crack the servers, read their mail. Yes, it’s interesting.”

“And if we find anything useful we should a

“If there are any results. Apart from voicemail from wives and mistresses. Shall I talk to my people, find out how difficult it would be to break into our servers?”

“Yes, Dimi,” Ray said. “You do that.”

He liked this better the more he thought about it. He went to lunch a happier man.

Ray’s moods were mercurial, however, and by the time he left the Plaza at the end of the day he was feeling sour again. The DingDong thing. Sue had probably shared the story with her friends in the staff cafeteria. Every day, some fresh humiliation. He liked DingDongs for breakfast: was that so fucking fu

He drove carefully through flurries of hard snow, trying unsuccessfully to time the stoplights on the main street.

People were assholes, and that was what the exocultural theorists always missed, people like Marguerite, blind little featherweight optimists. One world full of assholes wasn’t enough for them. They wanted more. A whole living universe of assholery. A shiny pink organic cosmos, a magic mirror with a happy face beaming out of it.

Dusk closed around the car like a curtain. How much cleaner the world would be, Ray thought, if it contained nothing but gas and dust and the occasional flaring star — cold but pristine, like the snow enshrouding the few high towers of Blind Lake. The real lesson of Lobsterville was the politically incorrect one, the unspeakable but obvious fact that sentience (so-called) was nothing but a focused irrationality, a suite of behaviors designed by DNA to make more DNA, empty of any logic but the runaway mathematics of self-reproduction, Chaos with feedback, z -› z2 + c blindly repeated until the universe had eaten and excreted itself.

Including me, Ray thought. Better not to shy from that caustic truth. Everything he loved (his daughter) or thought he had loved (Marguerite) represented nothing more than his participation in that equation, was no more or less sane than the nocturnal bleeding of the aboriginals of UMa47/E. Marguerite, for instance: acting out flawed genetic scripts, the possessive if unfit mother, a walking womb claiming equality under the law. How quickly she still came to mind. Every insolence Ray suffered was a mirror of her hatred.

The garage door rolled open as it sensed the approach of the car. He parked under the glare of the overhead light.