Blind Lake

Tess, he thought. Tess on the hillside.

How much time had passed? He looked for her on the slope. Everyone had come down, they had all gathered in the parking lot a safe distance from the burning plane. Everyone but Tess. He’d told her to stay put, and she had taken him literally. He called to her, but she was too far away to hear.

Wearily, he hiked back up the slope. Tess was standing immobile, staring at the wreckage. She didn’t acknowledge him when he called to her. Not good. She was in some kind of shock, Chris supposed.

He knelt in front of her, put his face in her line of vision and his hands on her small shoulders. “Tess,” he said. “Tess, are you all right?”

At first she didn’t react. Then she trembled. Her body shook. She blinked and opened her mouth soundlessly.

“We need to get you someplace warm,” he said.

She leaned into him and started to cry.

Marguerite lost track of Charlie in the noisy chaos of the control room.

For a fraction of a second there was utter blackness — complete electrical failure. Then the lights flickered back and the room was full of voices. Marguerite found an unoccupied corner and stayed out of the way. There was nothing she could do to help and she knew better than to interfere.

Something bad had happened, something she didn’t understand, something that had driven the engineers into a frenzy of activity. She focused on the big wall screen, the direct feed from the Eye, still alarmingly blank. It could end at any time.

Her phone buzzed. She ignored it. She caught sight of Charlie and watched him orbit the room, coordinating activity. Since she was helpless — or at least unable to help — she began to feel a presentiment of loss. Loss of intelligibility. Loss of orientation. Loss of vision. Loss of the Subject, with whom she had struggled across a desert to the heart of a sandstorm. Periodically, the wall screen erupted into stochastic cascades of color. Marguerite stared, trying but failing to extract an image. No signal, just noise. Only noise.

A few more green lights, she heard someone say. Was that good? Apparently so. Here came Charlie, and he wasn’t smiling, but the expression on his face wasn’t as grave as it had been — how long ago? An hour?

“We’re getting a little something back,” he said.

“An image?”

“Maybe.”

“We’re still fixed on the Subject?”

“Just watch, Marguerite.”

She focused again on the screen, which had begun to fill with new light. Tiny digital mosaics, assembled in the unfathomable depths of the O/BEC platens. White faded to tawny brown. The desert. We’re back, Marguerite thought, and a tingle of relief flowed up her spine — but where was the Subject, and what was this blank emptiness?

“Sand,” she murmured. Fine silicate grains undisturbed by wind. The storm must have passed. But the sand wasn’t still. The sand mounded and slid this way and that.

Subject lifted himself out of a cloak of sand. He had been buried by the wind, but he was alive. He pulled himself up by his manipulating arms, then stood, unsteadily, in the startling sunlight. The virtual camera rose with him. Behind him Marguerite saw the sand squall where it had retreated to the horizon, trailing black vortices like mares’ tails.

All around the Subject were lines and angles of stone. Old stone columns and pyramidal structures and sand-scoured foundations. The ruins of a city.

PART THREE

The Ascent of the Invisible

Man, on Earth, could go no further toward conquering the limitations of atmosphere, metals, and optics. Through this gigantic mirror, underlying a telescope in whose construction the efforts of dozens of great minds had been united for years to produce an instrument of unrivaled accuracy, intricacy, and range, equipped with every device desired by and known to astronomers, study of the universe had reached a climax.

Seventeen

Coming into February now, and it was obvious to Marguerite as she drove home from her Saturday ration trip what a different place the Lake had become.

Superficially, nothing had changed. The snowplows still emerged from the back bays of the retail mall whenever it snowed, and they kept the streets passably clear. Lights still burned in windows at night. Everybody was warm and no one was hungry.

But there was a shabbiness about the town, too, an unwashed quality. There were no outside contractors to repair winter potholes or replace the shingles that had been torn from so many roofs in the post-Christmas storms. Garbage was collected on the regular schedule but it couldn’t be trucked off-site — the sanitation people had set up a temporary dump at the western extremity of the lake, near the perimeter fence and as far as possible from the town and the preserved wetlands; still, the stench drifted with the wind like an augur of decay, and on especially breezy days she had seen crumpled papers and food wrappers wheeling along the Mallway like tumbleweeds. The question was so commonplace no one bothered to ask it anymore: when will it end?

Because it could end at any time.

Tess had come back from the site of the airplane crash weak and dazed. Marguerite had wrapped her up and fed her hot soup and put her to bed for the night — Marguerite herself hadn’t slept, but Tess had, and in the morning she had seemed herself again. Seemed was the key word. Between Christmas and New Year’s Tess had not so much as mentioned Mirror Girl; there had been no provocative episodes; but Marguerite had recognized the worry creases on Tessa’s face and had sensed in her daughter’s silences something weightier than her customary shyness.

She had been extremely reluctant to send Tess for her weeklong visit with Ray, but there was no way around it. Had she objected, Ray would almost certainly have sent one of his rent-a-cop security guys around to collect Tess by force. So, with deep unease, Marguerite had helped her daughter pack her rucksack of treasured possessions and ushered her out the door as soon as Ray pulled up at the curb in his little scarab-colored automobile.

Ray had remained a silhouette in the shaded cab of the car, unwilling to show her his face. He looked indistinct, Marguerite thought, like a fading memory. She watched Tess greet him with a cheeriness that struck her as either false or heartbreakingly naive.

The only upside of this was that during the next week she would have more free time for Chris.

She pulled into the driveway, thinking of him.

Chris. He had made a powerful impression on her, with his wounded eyes and his obvious courage. Not to mention the way he touched her, like a man stepping into a spring of warm water, testing the heat before he gave himself up to it. Good Chris. Scary Chris.

Scary because having a man in the house — being intimate with a man — provoked unwelcome memories of Ray, if only by contrast. The smell of aftershave in the bathroom, a man’s pants abandoned on the bedroom floor, male warmth lingering in the crevices of the bed… with Ray all these things had come to seem loathsome, as objectionable as a bruise. But with Chris it was just the opposite. Yesterday she had found herself not only volunteering to wash his clothes but furtively inhaling the smell of him from an undershirt before she committed it to the washing machine. How ridiculously schoolgirlish, Marguerite thought. How very dangerously infatuated she was with this man.

She supposed it was at least therapeutic, like draining venom from a snakebite.

People talked about “lockdown romances.” Was this a lockdown romance? Marguerite’s experience was limited. Ray had been not only her first husband but her first lover. Marguerite had been, like Tess, one of those awkward girls at school: bright but gawky, not especially pretty, intimidated into silence in any social setting. When boys were like that they were called “geeks,” but at least they seemed able to take solace in the company of others like themselves. Marguerite had never made real friends of either sex, at least not until she was in graduate school. There, at least, she had found colleagues, people who respected her talent, people who liked her for her ideas, some of whom had progressed to the status of friends.