Blind Lake

The Subject had finished his story. Now he wanted to finish his journey. He wanted to go to the core of the star structure and find whatever waited for him there. Marguerite felt his urge to turn away and was suddenly reluctant to let him go.

She said to Mirror Girl, “Can I touch him?”

A pause. “He says yes.”

She put her hand out and took a step forward. Subject remained motionless. Her hand looked pale against the textured roughness of his skin. She rested her fingers against his body above the oral vent. His skin felt like pliant, sun-warmed tree bark. He towered over her, and he smelled perfectly awful. She steeled herself and looked into his blank white eyes. Seeing everything. Seeing nothing.

“Thank you,” she whispered. And: “I’m sorry.”

Ponderously, slowly, the Subject turned away. His huge feet on the sandy soil made a sound like dry leaves rustling.

When he had vanished into the shadowy i

How strange, she thought, to see this thing, this entity, in the shape of Tess. How misleading.

“How many other intelligent species have you known? You and your sisters?”

Mirror Girl cocked her head to the side, another Tess-like gesture. “Thousands and thousands of progenitor species,” she said. “Over millions and millions of years.”

“Do you remember them all?”

“We do.”

Thousands of sentient species on worlds circling thousands of stars. Life, Marguerite thought, in almost infinite variety. All alike. No two alike. “Do they have anything in common?”

“A physical thing? No.”

“Then, something intangible?”

“Sentience is intangible.”

“Something more than that.”

Mirror Girl appeared to consider the question. Consulting her “sisters,” perhaps.

“Yes,” she said finally. Her eyes were bright and not at all like Tessa’s. Her expression was solemn. “Ignorance,” she said. “Curiosity. Pain. Love.”

Marguerite nodded. “Thank you.”

“Now,” Mirror Girl said, “I think you need to go help your daughter.”

Thirty-Four

The elevator door opened onto the dark and flickering spaces of the O/BEC gallery, and Ray was astonished to find Tess waiting for him.

She looked up at him with wide, wondering eyes. He lowered the knife but resisted the temptation to hide it behind his back. It was difficult to understand the purpose or meaning of her presence here.

“You’re sweating,” she said.

The air was warm. The light was dim. The O/BEC devices were still a corridor away, but Ray imagined he could feel their proximity, a pressure on his eardrums, the weight of a headache. What had he come here to do? To kill the thing that had eroded his authority, overturned his marriage, and subverted his daughter’s mind. He had presumed it was still vulnerable — he had only a knife and his bare hands, but he could pull a plug, cut a cable, or sever a supply line. The O/BECs existed by human consent and he would withdraw that consent.

But what if the O/BECs had discovered a way to defend themselves?

“Why do you want to do that?” Tess asked, as if he had spoken aloud. Maybe he had. He looked at his daughter critically.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

She reached for his hand. Her small fingers were warmer than the air. “Come look,” Tess said. “Come on!”

He followed her through a series of unma

Inside the O/BEC platens, quasibiological networks inhabited an almost infinite phase-space, linked to the exterior world (at first) by the telemetry from TPF interferometers, ru

The O/BEC chamber, three stories deep, had been a NASA-style clean room. Nothing (apart from the O/BECs) should have lived there. But it seemed to Ray, in this dim light, that the chamber had been overrun with something — if not life, at least something self-reproducing, a transparent growth that had partially filled the O/BEC enclosure and was rising up the walls like frost on a winter window. The bottom of the chamber, thirty feet down, was immersed in a gelatinous crystalline fluid that glinted and moved like sea foam on a beach.

“It’s so the O/BECs can sustain themselves without exterior power,” Tess said. “The roots go down way underground. Tapping heat.”

How deep did you have to go to “tap heat” from a snowbound prairie? A thousand feet, two thousand? All the way to molten magma? No wonder the earth had trembled.

And how did Tess know this?

Clearly Tess had developed some kind of empathy for the O/BECs. A contagious madness, Ray thought. Tess had always been unstable. Perhaps the O/BECs were exploiting that weakness.

And there was nothing he could do about it. The platens were beyond his reach and his daughter had been hopelessly compromised. The knowledge struck him with the force of a physical blow. He backed against the wall and slid to a sitting position on the floor, the knife in his limp right hand.

Tess knelt and looked into his eyes.

“You’re tired,” she said.

It was true. He had never felt so tired.

“You know,” Tess said, “it wasn’t her fault. Or yours.”

What wasn’t whose fault? Ray gave his daughter a despairing look.

“When you got out of the car,” she said. “That you lived. You were just a child.”

She was talking about his mother’s death. But Ray had never told Tess that story. He hadn’t told Marguerite, either, or anyone else in his adult life. Ray’s mother (her name was Bethany but Ray never called her anything but Mother) had driven him to school in the family’s big Ford, a kind of car you never saw anymore, powered by the combination of biodiesel fuel and rechargeable cells that had been commonplace after the Saudi conflict, a patriotic vehicle in which he had always been proud to be seen. The car was a vivid red, Ray remembered, red as some desirable new toy, Teflon-slick and enamel-bright. Ray was ten and keenly aware of colors and textures. His mother had driven him to school in the car, and he had hopped out and almost reached the schoolyard fence (snapshot: Baden Academy, a private junior school in a tree-lined Chicago suburb, a fashionably old-fashioned yellow-brick building slumbering in September-morning heat) when he turned to wave good-bye (hand upraised, listening to children’s voices and the high-voltage whine of cicadas) in time to see a Modesto and Fuchs Managed Care Mobile Health Maintenance truck — hijacked, he learned later, by an Oxycontin addict attempting to score narcotics from the vehicle’s onboard supply — as it careened from the wrong-way lane of Duchesne Street directly into the side of the bright red Ford.

The patriotic Ford sustained the impact well, but Ray’s mother had seen the truck coming and had unwisely tried to exit the vehicle. The Modesto and Fuchs truck had crushed her between the door and the frame and had then bounced back several yards, leaving Bethany Scutter in the street with her abdomen opened like the middle pages of a blue and red book.

Ray, seeing this from the Olympian mountaintop of incipient shock, made certain observations about the human condition that had stayed with him these many years. People, like their promises, were fragile and unreliable. People were bags of gas and fluid dressed up for masquerade roles (Parent, Teacher, Therapist, Wife), liable at any moment to collapse into their natural state. The natural state of biological matter was road-kill.