Blind Lake

Sixteen

Chris found Marguerite in her upstairs office, shouting into her pocket phone. The direct feed from the Eye filled the wall monitor.

The image looked bad to Chris. It looked degraded — streaked with spurious lines and fleeting white pinpricks. Worse, the Subject was struggling through some intensely bad weather, ribbons of ochre and rust, a dust storm so fierce it threatened to obscure him altogether.

“No,” Marguerite was saying. “I don’t care what they’re saying at the Plaza. Come on, Charlie, you know what this means! No! I’ll be there. Soon.” She saw Chris and added, “Fifteen minutes.”

The original high-altitude mapping of UMa47/E had shown seasonal dust storms of almost Martian intensity, primarily in the southern hemisphere. This one must be anomalous, Chris thought, since Subject had not journeyed more than a hundred miles from Lobsterville, and Lobsterville was well north of the equator. Or maybe it was perfectly natural, part of some long-term cycle early surveillance had missed.

Subject pushed into the opaque air, torso bent forward. His image faded, clarified, faded again. “Charlie’s afraid they’ll lose him altogether,” Marguerite said. “I’m going out to the Eye.”

Chris followed her downstairs. Tess was in the living room watching Blind Lake TV’s Saturday matinee. An animated feature: rabbits with huge eyeglasses growing carrots in medieval beakers and alembics. Her head bounced gently and rhythmically against the sofa.

“You said we could go sledding,” Tess called out.

“Honey, it’s a work emergency. I told you. Chris will look after you, ‘kay?”

“I suppose I could take her sledding,” Chris said. “It’s a long walk, though.”

“Really?” Tess asked. “Can we?”

Marguerite pursed her lips. “I guess, but I don’t want you hiking there and back. Mrs. Colangelo said we could borrow her car if we needed it — Chris can look into that.”

He promised he’d ask. Tess was mollified, and Marguerite shrugged into her winter jacket. “If I’m not back by di

“How serious is the problem?”

“It took a lot of delicate work training the O/BECs to fix on a single individual. If we lose him in the storm we might not get him back. Worse, there’s a lot of signal degradation happening, and Charlie doesn’t know what’s causing it.”

“You think you can help?”

“Not with the engineering. But there are people in the Plaza who’d love to use this as an opportunity to pull back from the Subject. I don’t want that to happen. I’m ru

“Good luck.”

“Thank you. And thanks for keeping Tess company. One way or another, I’ll be back before her bedtime.”

She hurried out the door.

In the interest of journalistic brotherhood, Chris called Elaine and told her about the developing crisis at the Eye. She said she’d find out what she could. “Things are getting strange,” she said. “I’m getting that batten-down-the-hatches feeling.”

He had to admit he was a little skittish himself. Almost four months of quarantine now, and no matter how you tried to ignore it or rationalize it, that meant something monumentally bad was happening — maybe outside, maybe inside. Something bad, something dangerous, something hidden that would eventually come screaming into the light.

Mrs. Colangelo managed the clothing store in the Blind Lake retail mall and she had been effectively retired since the lockdown. She let him borrow her little lime-green Marconi roadster, and Tess loaded her old-fashioned wooden sled into the back. Most kids used i

Tess was still something of a cipher to Chris. She reminded him of his sister Portia in many (maybe too many) ways — her willfulness, her unpredictability, her spiky moods. But Porry had been a great talker, especially when she picked up some new enthusiasm. Tess spoke only sporadically.

Tess was silent for the first five minutes of the ride, but apparently she had also been thinking of Portia: “Did your sister ever go sledding?” she asked.

Since the window episode Tess had come to him several times for Porry stories. Tess, an only child, seemed fascinated by the idea of Chris as an older brother — something less than a parent, more than a friend. She seemed to think Portia had led an enchanted existence. Not true. Portia was buried in a rainy Seattle cemetery, victim of the fatal disease of adulthood in its most acute form. He would not, of course, say that to Tess. “It didn’t snow much where we grew up. The closest thing to sledding we did was snow-tubing at a little resort up in the mountains.”

“Did Portia like that?”

“Not at first. At first she was pretty scared. But after a couple of runs she decided it was fun.”

“I think she liked it,” Tess said, “except that she got cold.”

“That’s right, she didn’t like the cold very much.”

Elaine had accused him of “setting up housekeeping” at Marguerite’s. He wondered if that was true. Over the last several weeks he had become very much a part of Marguerite and Tessa Hauser’s universe, almost in spite of himself. No, that was wrong; not in spite of himself; he had taken every step willingly. But the steps had added up to an unpla

He had yet to go to bed with Marguerite, but according to every signal he could read that was where this trip was taking him. And it wasn’t a neat little temporary bargain, a one-night stand or even an explicit lockdown romance, the exchange of warmth for warmth and no promises made or implied. The stakes were much, much higher.

Did he want that?

He liked Marguerite, he liked everything about Marguerite. Every late-night conversation — and lately there had been many — had drawn him closer to her. She was a generous storyteller. She talked freely about her childhood (she had lived with her father in a Presbyterian rectory in a little rail-stop bedroom suburb outside of Cinci

And what did she see in Chris? Not exactly the anti-Ray, but maybe a more benevolent vision of masculinity, someone she could confide in, someone she could lean against without fear of retribution; and he was flattered by that, but it was an uninformed opinion. Not that he was incapable of love. He had loved his work, he had loved his family, he had loved his sister Portia, but the things he loved tended to come to pieces in his hands, torn apart by his clumsy desire to protect them.

He would never hurt her the way Ray had hurt her, but in the long term he might prove just as dangerous.

Tess had told him where the best sledding was, along the low hills a quarter mile past Eyeball Alley, where the access road ended in a paved cul-de-sac. The Alley’s cooling towers came up on the left side of the road, dark sentinels in a white landscape. Tess broke the silence again: “Did Portia have problems at school?”

“Sure she did. Everybody does, now and then.”

“I hate Physical Education.”

“I could never climb that rope,” Chris said.

“We don’t do ropes yet. But we have to wear stupid gym clothes. Did Portia ever have nightmares?”