Blind Lake

Ray didn’t go back to Baden Academy for a year, during which time he received, courtesy of his father, every pharmaceutical and metaphysical medicine for melancholy offered at the better clinics. His recovery was swift. He had already shown a predilection for mathematics, and he immersed himself in the inorganic sciences — astronomy and, later, astrophysics, wherein the scales of time and space were large enough to lend a welcome perspective. He had been secretly pleased when Mars and Europa were proved devoid of life: how much more disturbing it would have been to find them shot through with biology, rotten as a crate of Christmas oranges gone green in the corner of the basement.

Cascades of silvery-gray frost-fingers ran up the windows of the O/BEC gallery, dimming the light, arranging themselves into shapes reminiscent of columns and arches. Ray decided he shouldn’t have told Tess this story. If indeed he had told her. It seemed, in his confusion, that she had been telling it to him.

“You’re wrong,” Tess said. “She didn’t die to make you hate her.”

His eyes widened. Startled and angered by what his daughter had become, Ray took up the knife again.

Thirty-Five

She’s here, Chris thought. He ran down the emergency stairs toward the O/BEC gallery, consumed with a sense of urgency he couldn’t explain even to himself. His footsteps rattled up the hollow concrete column of the stairwell like the sound of gunfire.

She was here. The knowledge was as inescapable as a headache. Tessa’s vanishing snow trail had been an ambiguous clue at best. But he knew she was in the O/BEC gallery just as surely as he had known where Porry had gone on the Night of the Tadpoles. It was more than intuition; it was as if the information had been delivered directly to his bloodstream.

Maybe it had. If Tess could vanish from a snowbound parking lot, what else might be possible? What was happening here must be very like what had happened at Crossbank, something massive, apparently catastrophic, possibly contagious, and profoundly strange.

And Tess was at the heart of it, and so, very nearly, was he. He arrived at a door marked GALLERY LEVEL (RESTRICTED). It unlocked itself at his touch, courtesy of Charlie Grogan’s transponder.

The Alley groaned around him, shifting after this morning’s tremor, subject to stresses unknown. Chris knew the structure was potentially unsafe, but his concern for Tess overrode his considerable personal fear.

Not that he had any business being here. Porry’s death had taught him that good intentions could be as lethal as malice, that love was a clumsy and unreliable tool. Or so he thought. Yet here he was, many long miles up Shit Creek, desperately trying to protect the daughter of a woman for whom he cared deeply. (And who had also vanished; but the dread he felt for Tess seemed not to extend to Marguerite. He believed Marguerite was safe. Again, this was a sourceless knowledge.)

The building groaned again. The emergency Klaxons stuttered and went dead, and in the sudden silence he was able to hear voices from the gallery: a child’s voice, probably Tessa’s; and a man’s, perhaps Ray’s.

The whole universe is telling a story, Mirror Girl explained.

Tess crouched behind a massive wheeled cart bearing an empty white helium cylinder twice the size of her body. Mirror Girl was not physically present, but Tess could hear her voice. Mirror Girl was answering questions Tess had hardly started to ask.

The universe was a story like any other story, Mirror Girl said. The hero of the story was named “complexity.” Complexity was born on page one, a fluctuation in the primordial symmetry. Details of the gestation (the synthesis of quarks, their condensation into matter, photogenesis, the creation of hydrogen and helium) mattered less than the pattern: one thing became two, two became many, many combined in fundamentally unpredictable ways.

Like a baby, Tess thought. She had learned this part in school. A fertilized cell made two cells, four cells, eight cells; and the cells became heart, lungs, brain, self. Was that “complexity”?

An important part of it, yes, Mirror Girl said. Part of a long, long chain of births. Stars formed in the cooling, expanding universe; old stellar cores enriched galactic clouds with calcium, nitrogen, oxygen, metals; newer stars precipitated these elements as rocky planets; rocky planets, bombarded by ice from their star’s accretion disk, formed oceans; life arose, and another story began: single cells joined in strange collectives, became multicellular creatures and then thinking beings, beings complex enough to hold the history of the universe inside their calcified skulls…

Tess wondered if that was the end of the story.

Not nearly, Mirror Girl said. Not by a long shot. Thinking creatures make machines, Mirror Girl said, and their machines grow more complex, and eventually they build machines that think and do more than think: machines that invest their complexity into the structure of potential quantum states. Cultures of thinking organisms generate these nodes of profoundly dense complexity in the same way massive stars collapse into singularities.

Tess asked if that was what was happening now, here in the dim corridors of Eyeball Alley.

Yes.

“What happens next?”

It surpasses understanding.

“How does the story end?”

No one can say.

“Is that my father’s voice?” It was a voice that seemed to come from the observation level of the O/BEC gallery, where Tess wanted to go but where she was deeply afraid of going.

Yes.

“What’s he doing here?”

Thinking about dying, Mirror Girl said.

The O/BEC observation gallery was circular, in the style of a surgical theater, and Chris entered it on the side opposite Ray. He could see Ray and Tess only as blurred shapes distorted by the panels of glass that enclosed the yards-wide O/BEC chamber.

The glass should have been clear. Instead it was obscured by what looked like ropes and columns of frost. Something catastrophically strange was happening down in the core platens.

He crouched and began to move slowly around the perimeter of the gallery. He could hear Ray’s voice, soft and uninflected, couched in echoes from the rounded walls:

“I don’t hate her. What would be the point? She taught me a lesson. Something most people never learn. We live in a dream. A dream about surfaces. We love our skins so much we can’t see under them. But it’s only a story.”

Tessa’s voice was u

Now Chris could see them both around the curvature of the glass wall. He crouched motionless, watching.

Ray sat on the floor, legs splayed, staring straight ahead. Tess sat on his lap. She caught sight of Chris and smiled. Her eyes were luminous.

Ray had a knife in his right hand. The knife was poised at Tessa’s throat.

But, of course, it wasn’t Tess.

Ray felt as if he had fallen off a cliff, each impact on the way down doing him an irreparable injury, but this was the final blow, the hard landing, the awareness that this thing he had mistaken for his daughter was not Tess but the symptom of her sickness. Of all their sicknesses, perhaps.

This was Mirror Girl.

“You came to kill me,” Mirror Girl said.

He held the knife against her throat. She had Tessa’s voice and Tessa’s body, but her eyes betrayed her. Her eyes and their intimate knowledge of him.

“You think the only true thing is pain,” she whispered. “But you’re wrong.”

This was too much. He pressed the knife into the hollow of her throat, impossible as this act was, a murder that couldn’t succeed, the execution of a primordial force in the shape of his only child, and pulled it hard across her pale skin.