Blind Lake

Mirror Girl found these thoughts intensely interesting.

Mr. Fleischer called on her a couple of times. Tess was able to answer his science question (it was Isaac Newton who had discovered the laws of motion), but later, during English, she heard nothing of the question itself, only her name as Mr. Fleischer called it out — “Anyone? Tessa?”

They had been reading David Copperfield. Tess had finished reading the book last week. She tried to imagine what Mr. Fleischer might have asked, but her mind was a blank. She stared at the top of her desk, hoping he’d call on someone else. The seconds ticked by uneasily and Tess felt the weight of Mr. Fleischer’s disappointment. She wrapped a curl of hair around her forefinger.

A

“Edie?” Mr. Fleischer said at last.

“The Industrial Revolution,” Edie said triumphantly.

“Right, it was called the Industrial Revolution…”

Tess returned her attention to the window.

At the end of the morning she told Mr. Fleischer she was going home for lunch. He looked surprised. “That’s a bit of a hike, isn’t it, Tess?”

Yes, but she had hoped Mr. Fleischer didn’t know that. “My dad is picking me up.” A complete and total lie. She was surprised at how easily it came out of her mouth.

“Special occasion?”

Tess shrugged.

Once she was outside, wrapped in her winter jacket (but lacking Edie’s two sweaters), she realized she wasn’t going home and that she wouldn’t be back for the after-lunch session of school. Mirror Girl had brought her here, and Mirror Girl had her own plans for the afternoon.

Since the end of the sandstorm crisis the Eye had performed smoothly and without the slightest glitch.

It was almost u

The Subject made slow progress. Sort of like a snail on an empty sidewalk. Bored, and without any maintenance duties for once, Charlie skipped lunch and wandered down to the glass-walled gallery above the O/BEC platens.

The gallery was mainly for show. It was a place you could bring a visiting congressman or European head of state, back before the siege. The gallery overlooked the platens from a secure height. Absent tourists, the gallery was usually empty; Charlie often came here to be alone.

He leaned into the inch-thick i

What is an angel? That which dances on the head of a pin. What dances on the head of a pin? An angel, of course.

These O/BECs were only the most central part of the vast machine that supported them. All told, the Eye occupied an immense amount of square footage. Standing here in the middle of it, Charlie imagined he could feel the cold ferocity of its thoughts. He closed his eyes. Dream me an explanation.

But the only thing he could see behind his eyelids was a memory of the Subject, the Subject lost in the hinterlands of his dry old planet. Fu

Strange. Charlie leaned into the glass wall and imagined himself reaching out to the Subject. Surely even the O/BECs had never translated an image as distilled, as supernaturally pure, as this. He could, if he chose, count every bump on the Subject’s pebbled skin. He could hear the metronomic steps of the Subject’s dusty, elephantine feet; and he could see the trail the Subject left behind him, two punctuated parallel lines scribed into the granular material of the desert floor. He could smell the air: it smelled like hot rock, like mica-laden granite exposed to the noonday sun.

He imagined putting his hand on the Subject’s shoulder, or at least that sloping bit of gristle behind the Subject’s head that passed for a shoulder. How would it feel? Not leathery but hard, Charlie thought, each gooseflesh bump like a buried knuckle, some of them prickly with stiff white hairs. Subject’s coxcomb, flush with blood, most likely served to adjust his core temperature to the heat; and if I touched it, Charlie thought, it would feel moist and flexible, like cactus flesh…

Subject stopped abruptly and turned as if startled. Charlie found himself gazing into the Subject’s blank white billiard-ball eyes and thought, Oh, shit!

He opened his own eyes wide and reeled back from the glass. Here in the O/BEC gallery. Home safe. He blinked away what could only have been a dream.

“Are you all right?”

Startled a second time, Charlie turned and saw a young girl standing behind him. She wore a winter jacket haphazardly buttoned, one side of the collar poking up past her chin. She twirled a strand of her curly dark hair around her finger.

She looked familiar. He said, “Aren’t you Marguerite Hauser’s daughter?”

The girl frowned, then nodded.

Charlie’s first impulse was to call Security, but the girl — Tess, he recalled, was her name — seemed timid and he was reluctant to frighten her. Instead he asked, “Is your mom or dad here?”

She shook her head no.

“No? Who let you in?”

“Nobody.”

“Do you have a pass card?”

“No.”

“Didn’t the guards stop you?”

“I came in when no one was looking.”

“That’s some trick.” In fact it should have been impossible. But here she was, goggle-eyed and obviously unsure of herself. “Are you looking for someone?”

“Not really.”

“What brings you here, then, Tess?”

“I wanted to see it.” She gestured at the O/BEC array.

For a long moment he was afraid she would ask him how it worked.

“You know,” Charlie said, “you’re really not supposed to be wandering around all by yourself. How about you come to my office and I’ll give your mom a call.”

“My mom?”

“Yeah, your mom.”

The girl appeared to think it over.

“Okay,” she said.

Tess sat in his office looking at some glossy brochures he scared up for her while he buzzed Marguerite’s pocket server. She was obviously surprised to hear from him and her first question was about the Subject — had something interesting happened?

Depends how you look at it, Charlie thought. He couldn’t shake that dream of the Subject from his mind. Eyeball to eyeball. It had seemed ridiculously real.