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“I’d appreciate that.”

“And I appreciate the vote of confidence. Marguerite?”

“What?”

“How would you feel about giving me an interview? About Blind Lake, the siege, how you fit in?”

“Oh, God.” It wasn’t what she had expected him to say. But what had she expected him to say? “Well, not tonight.”

“No, not tonight.”

“The last time anyone interviewed me it was the high school paper. About my science project.”

“Good project?”

“Blue ribbon. Scholarship prize. All about mitochondrial DNA, back when I thought I wanted to be a geneticist. Pretty heavy stuff for a clergyman’s daughter.” She yawned. “I really do have to sleep.”

Impulsively — or maybe drunkenly — Marguerite put her hand on the table, palm up. It was a gesture he could reasonably ignore. And no harm done if he did ignore it.

Chris looked at her hand, maybe a few seconds too long. Then he covered it with his own. Willingly? Grudgingly?

She liked the way his palm felt on hers. No adult male had held her hand since she left Ray, not that Ray had been much of a hand-holder. She discovered she couldn’t look Chris in the eye. She let the moment linger; then she pulled back, gri

“Sleep well,” Chris Carmody said.

“You too,” she told him, wondering what she was getting herself into.

Before she turned in she gave the direct feed from the Eye a last look.

Nothing much was doing. Subject continued his two-week-old odyssey. He was far along the eastern road, walking steadily into another morning. His skin looked increasingly dull as the days passed, but that was probably just ambient dust. There had been no rain for months now, but that was typical of a summer in these latitudes.

Even the sun seemed dimmer, until Margaret realized that the haze was unusually thick today, and particularly thick to the northeast, almost like an approaching squall line. She could ask Meteorology about it, she guessed. Tomorrow.

Finally, before she took herself to bed, Marguerite peeked into Tessa’s room.

Tess was soundly asleep. The empty pane in the window beside her bed was still protected by Chris’s plastic-and-veneer lash-up and the room was cozily warm. Darkness outside and in. Mirrors happily vacant. No sound but Tessa’s easy breathing.

And in the quiet of the house Marguerite realized who she was writing her narrative for. Not for herself. Certainly not for other scientists. And not for the general public.

She was writing it for Tess.

The realization was energizing; it chased away the possibility of sleep. She went back to her office, turned on the desk lamp, and brought out the notebook again. She opened it and wrote:

More than fifty years ago, on a planet so far away that no living human being can ever hope to travel there, there was a city of rock and sandstone. It was a city as large as any of our own great cities, and its towers rose high into that world’s thin, dry air. The city was built on a dusty plain, overlooked by tall mountains whose peaks were snowy even during the long summer. Someone lived there, someone who was not quite a human being, but who was a person in his own way, very different from us but in some ways much alike. The name we gave him was “Subject”…

Fifteen

Sue Sampel was begi





For a while it had been a toss-up: weekdays busy but tarnished by the tantrums and weirdness of her boss; Saturday and Sunday slow and melancholy because she couldn’t hop in the car and drive into Constance for some R R. At first she had spent her weekends restlessly stoned, until her personal stash began to run low. (Another item the black trucks weren’t delivering.) Then she borrowed a handful of Tiffany Arias novels from another support-staffer at the Plaza, five fat books about a wartime nurse in Shiugang torn between her love for an air force surveillance pilot and her secret affair with a hard-drinking gunru

Then Sebastian Vogel showed up on her doorstep with a billet note from Ari Weingart and a battered brown suitcase.

At first sight he didn’t look promising. Cute, maybe, in a Christmas-elf kind of way, pushing sixty, a little overweight, fringe of gray hair framing his shiny bald head, a bushy red-gray beard. He was obviously shy — he stuttered when he introduced himself — and worse, Sue got the impression he was some kind of clergyman or retired priest. He promised to be “no trouble at all,” and she feared that was probably true.

She had asked Ari about him the next day. Ari said Sebastian was a retired academic, not a priest, one of the three-pack of journalists who were stranded in Blind Lake. Sebastian had written a book called God the Quantum Vacuum — Ari lent her a copy. The book was a lot drier than a Tiffany Arias novel but considerably more substantial.

Still, Sebastian Vogel wasn’t much more than a silent partner in the household until the night he caught her rolling a joint on the kitchen table.

“Oh, my,” Sebastian said from the doorway.

It was too late to hide the cookie tin or the papers. Guiltily, Sue tried to make a joke of it. “Um,” she said, “care to join me?”

“Oh, no, I can’t—”

“No, I completely understand—”

“I can’t impose on your hospitality. But I have a half-ounce in my luggage, if you don’t mind sharing it with me.”

It got better after that.

He was fifteen years older than Sue and his birthday was January ninth. By the time that rolled around, she was sharing her bed with him. Sue liked him enormously — and he was a lot more fun than she ever would have guessed — but she also knew this was probably just a “lockdown romance,” a term she’d picked up in the staff cafeteria. Lockdown romances had sprung up all over town. The combination of cabin fever and constant anxiety turned out to be a real aphrodisiac.

His birthday fell on a Saturday, and Sue had been pla

She brought the cake into the dining room, a single candle planted in it. “Happy birthday,” she said.

It wasn’t really much of a cake. But it had symbolic value.

Sebastian’s small mouth curled into a smile only partially obscured by his mustache. “This is too kind! Sue, thank you!”

“It’s nothing,” she said.

“No, it’s fine!” He admired the cake. “I haven’t seen luxury food in weeks. Where did you get this?”

It wasn’t really a cake. It was a DingDong with a birthday candle stuck in it. “You don’t want to know,” Sue said.

Saturday, Sebastian had agreed to meet his friends for lunch at Sawyer’s. He asked Sue to come along.

She agreed, but not without doubts. Sue had earned a B.Sc. some twenty years ago, but all it had gotten her was a glorified clerical job at Blind Lake. She had been frozen out of too many technical discussions to relish an afternoon of science-journalist peer-talk. Sebastian assured her it wouldn’t be like that. His friends were writers, not scientists. “Outspoken but not snobbish.”

Maybe so, maybe not.

Sue drove Sebastian, who had no car of his own, to Sawyer’s, where they parked in a flurry of light snow. The wind was brisk, the sun peeking out now and again between canyons of cloud. The air inside the restaurant was sleepily warm and moist.