Blind Lake

He nodded, owl-eyed and ridiculously solemn.

“I need at least five minutes warning if Ray is on his way.”

“You’ll have it,” Sebastian said.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

The morning crept past too quickly. The Town Hall meeting started at one, and she asked Sebastian to drive so he could drop her off inconspicuously outside Hubble Plaza. They didn’t talk much in the car. She gave him a quick kiss when he stopped. Then she stepped out into the cold air, carded herself into the Plaza’s main entrance, waved hello to the lobby guard, and walked without obviously hurrying to the elevators. Her footsteps resounded in the tiled lobby like the tick of a metronome, allegro, in time with the beat of her heart.

Marguerite arrived at the community center auditorium at 12:45, and when she spotted Ari Weingart looking for her in the lobby crowd she turned to Chris and said, “Oh, God. This is a mistake.”

“The lecture?”

“Not the lecture. Going on stage with Ray. Having to look at him, having to listen to him. I wish I could — oh, hi, Ari.”

Ari took a firm grip on her arm. “This way, Marguerite. You’re up first, did I mention that? Then Ray, then Lisa Shapiro from Geology and Climatology, then we throw it open for audience questions.”

She took a last look back at Chris, who shrugged and gave her what she guessed was a supportive smile.

Really, she thought, trailing Ari through a staff-only door into the backstage dimness, this is crazy. Not just because she would be forced to appear with Ray but because it would be a charade for both of them. Both pretending they hadn’t seen clues about the Crossbank disaster (whatever it was). Both pretending there had never been a confrontation over Tess. Pretending they didn’t despise each other. Pretending, not to civility, but at least to indifference.

Knowing it could end at any time.

This is a prescription for disaster, Marguerite thought. Not only that, but her “lecture” was a series of notes she had made for herself and never really pla

It had seemed like a good idea, at least until she found herself onstage behind a closed curtain with Lisa Shapiro sitting between her and her ex-husband. She avoided his eyes but couldn’t shake a claustrophobic awareness of his presence.

He was impeccably dressed, she had noticed on the way in. Suit and tie, creases razor-sharp. A little pursed smile on his face, accentuated by his jowls and his receding chin, like a man who smelled something unpleasant but was trying to be polite about it. A sheaf of paper in his hands.

To the left of her there was a podium, and Ari stood there now signaling for someone to raise the curtain. Already? Marguerite checked her watch. One on the dot. Her mouth was dry.

The auditorium accommodated an audience of two thousand, Ari had told her. They had admitted roughly half that number, a mixture of working scientists, support staff, and casual labor. Ari had arranged four of these events since the begi

How civilized we are in our cage, Marguerite thought. How easily we distract ourselves from the knowledge of the bodies outside the gates.

Now the curtain was drawn, the stage illuminated, the audience a shadowy void more sensed than seen. Now Ari was introducing her. Now, in the strange truncation of time that always happened when she addressed an audience, Marguerite herself was at the podium, thanking Ari, thanking the crowd, fumbling with the cue display on her pocket server.

“The question—”

Her voice cracked into falsetto. She cleared her throat.

“The question I want to pose today is, have we been deceived by our own rigorously deconstructive approach to the observed peoples of UMa47/E?”

That was dry enough to make the laypeople in the audience feel sleepy, but she saw a couple of familiar faces from Interpretation coagulate into frowns.

“This is deliberately provocative language — the observed peoples. From the begi

“And so, we tell ourselves, the subjects of our study at 47 Ursa Majoris should be called ‘creatures’ or ‘organisms,’ not ‘peoples.’ We must presume nothing about them. We must not bring to the analytical table our fears or our desires, our hopes or our dreams, our linquistic prejudices, our bourgeois metanarratives, or our cultural baggage of imagined aliens. Check Mr. Spock at the door, please, and leave H.G. Wells in the library. If we see a city we must not call it a city, or call it that only provisionally, because the word ‘city’ implies Carthage and Rome and Berlin and Los Angeles, products of human biology, human ingenuity, and thousands of years of accumulated human expertise. We remind ourselves that the observed city may not be a city at all; it may be more analogous to an anthill, a termite tower, or a coral reef.”

When she paused she could hear the echo of her voice, a basso resonance returning from the back of the hall.

“In other words, we try very hard not to deceive ourselves. And by and large we do a good job of it. The barrier between ourselves and the peoples of UMa47/E is painfully obvious. Anthropologists have long told us that culture is a collection of shared symbols, and we share none with the subjects of our study. Omnis cultura ex cultura, and the two cultures are as imiscible, we presume, as oil and water. Our epigenetic behaviors and theirs have no point of intersection.

“The downside is that we’re forced to begin from first principles. We can’t talk about a chthonic ‘architecture,’ say, since we would have to strip from that seemingly i

“We say the Subject travels here, performs this or that action, is relatively slow or relatively fast, turns left or right, eats such-and-such, at least if we don’t balk at the word ‘eats’ as creeping anthropocentrism; maybe ‘ingests’ is better. It means the same thing, but it looks better in the written report. ‘Subject ingested a bolus of vegetable material.’ Actually, he ate a plant — you know it and I know it, but a peer reviewer a Nature would never let it pass.” There was some cautious laughter. Behind her, Ray snorted derisively and audibly. “We patrol the co

“But I wonder if we aren’t blinding ourselves at the same time.

“What is missing from our discourse about the peoples of UMa47/E, I would suggest, is narrative.