Blind Lake

Thirty-One

Confused beyond the point of terror, Marguerite forced herself to focus on her breathing. She ignored the sandy soil under her hands and knees, ignored the sensation of dry heat, above all closed her eyes and ignored the presence of the Subject. Draw breath, she thought. Breathing was important. Breathing was important because— because—

Because if she were really on the surface of UMa47/E, breathing would be impossible.

The atmosphere of UMa47/E was less oxygenated than Earth’s and highly rarefied. The pressure differential would have burst her eardrums, had she traveled here from Blind Lake.

But it was fear, not anoxia, that was making her gasp, and her ears felt normal.

Therefore, she thought — still kneeling, eyes tightly closed — therefore, therefore, I’m not really here. Therefore I’m in no immediate danger.

(But if I’m not here then why do I feel the grains of sand under my fingernails, why do I feel the breeze on my skin?)

The summer Marguerite turned eleven, her parents had vacationed in Alaska. Much to Marguerite’s dismay, her father had bought the family a ride over Glacier Bay National Park in a tiny single-engine aircraft. The aircraft had dipped and rocked in the mountain winds, and Marguerite had been terrified to the point of nausea, far too terrified to even think about looking out the window.

Then her father had put an arm around her and said in his most profoundly ministerial voice, “It’s all right, Margie. You’re perfectly safe.”

She had repeated that phrase to herself for the rest of the flight. Her mantra. You’re perfectly safe. Oil on troubled waters. It had calmed her. The words came back to her now.

You’re perfectly safe.

(But I’m not. I’m lost, I’m helpless, I don’t know what’s happening, and I don’t know the way back home—)

Perfectly safe. The perfect lie.

She opened her eyes and forced herself to stand.

The Subject stood motionless more than a meter away from her. Marguerite knew from experience that, once he was still, he would probably stay that way for a while. (She remembered Chris’s comment — not a great party planet — and suppressed an incoherent urge to giggle.) Those inscrutable white eyes stared at her, or at least in her general direction, and she was tempted to stare back. But first things first, Marguerite told herself. Be a scientist. (You’re a scientist. You’re perfectly safe. Two enabling lies.)

Evaluate your surroundings.

She stood just inside the perimeter of the structure the Subject had entered. Looking back through its arches Marguerite could see with a shocking immediacy the desert, which she instinctively put into the context of the geography of UMa47/E: the central plateau of the largest continental plate, far from any of the planet’s shallow, salty seas, at the equatorial extreme of a temperate zone. But it was so much more than that. It was a sky as luminous and white as freshly fired china; it was a range of eroded basaltic hills fading into the distance; it was the long light of a foreign sun, and shadows that lengthened visibly as she watched. It was an irregular wind that smelled of lime and dust. It was not an image but a place: tactile, tangible, fully textured.

If I’m not here, Marguerite thought, where am I?

The ceiling of this structure screened the direct light of the sun. “Structure,” she thought, was one of those weasel-words so beloved of the people in Obs; but could she really call it a “building”?

There were no proper walls, only rank upon rank of pillars (abalone-white and coral-pink) arranged in a series of irregular arches that joined to form a roof. Farther in, the shadows deepened to impenetrability. The floor was simply blown and drifted sand. It resembled nothing in the Lobster city. It might have grown here, she thought, over the centuries. She touched the nearest pillar. It was cool and faintly iridescent, like mother-of-pearl.

Her hand began to tingle, and she pulled it away.

Of course it was all impossible, and not just because she was breathing normally on the surface of a planet unfit to support human life. The O/BEC images of UMa47/E had traveled across fifty-one light-years. What the monitors had displayed was almost literally ancient history. There was no such thing as simultaneity, not unless the O/BECs had learned to defy the fundamental laws of the universe.

Maybe it was better to think of this experience as deep VR. Immersive observation. A vivid dream.

Flimsy as that scaffolding was, it gave her the courage to look directly at the Subject.

The Subject was half-again taller than Marguerite. None of her observation had prepared her for the sheer animal bulk of him. She had felt the same the first time she went to a petting zoo back in grade eight. Animals that had looked i

The Subject was very much himself. Apart from his erect bipedal stance, there was nothing human about him. Nor did he resemble an insect or a crustacean, despite the ridiculous “lobster” tag that had been foisted on him.

His feet were broad, flat, leathery, and lacking toes or nails. Built for standing, not ru

His legs were no longer than her own but nearly twice as thick. There was an implied muscularity about them, like two tree trunks wrapped in brick-red leather. His legs met seamlessly at his crotch, where there was none of the complex paraphernalia of human sexuality, perhaps not surprisingly: there might be better places to install one’s genitalia, not that anyone had ever demonstrated that the Subject or his kind even possessed genitalia of the conventional sort.

His thorax broadened to the shape of a fat disk, to which his arms were attached. His manipulating arms were slender, lithe, and equipped at their ends with what looked roughly like human hands — three fingers and an opposable digit — although the joints were all wrong. The stubby food-grasping arms, just long enough to reach from his shoulders to his mouth, were altogether stranger, as much an externalized jaw as an extra set of limbs. Instead of hands, these secondary arms possessed bony cup-and-blade structures for cutting and grinding vegetable material.

Subject’s head was a mobile dome with wattles of loose flesh where human anatomy would have put a neck. His mouth was a vertical pink slit that concealed a long, rasping, almost prehensile tongue. His eyes were set apart almost as widely as a bird’s, cosseted in bluish-purple gristle, the eyes themselves not purely white, Marguerite realized, but faintly yellow, the color of old piano keys. No interior structure of the eye was visible, no pupil, no cornea; his eyes might have been unorganized bundles of light-sensitive cells, or perhaps their structure was concealed under a partially opaque surface, like a permanent eyelid.

The orange coxcomb atop his head served no purpose anyone had been able to define. On Earth such features were usually sexual displays, but among the Subject’s people it could hardly be gendered, since every individual possessed one.

The most prominent — or most prominently strange — feature of the Subject was the dorsal cavity ru