Blind Lake

“For what it’s worth, you caught me in a moment of sincerity.”

“Elaine, I’m just not in the mood for a lecture.”

“Well, I didn’t really think you were in the mood for it. Okay, Chris. Do what you think is best.” She waved at his plate. “Eat that poor assaulted fish.”

“A tent,” he said. “The Gobi Plateau.”

“Well, sort of a tent. An inflatable habitat airdropped from Beijing. Rechargeable fuel cells, heat at night, all the satellite cha

“Just like Roy Chapman Andrews?”

“Hey,” she said. “I’m a journalist, not a martyr.”

Five

To Marguerite’s dismay, and Tessa’s grave disappointment, video and download reception did not improve over the weekend. Nor was it possible to put a call or net co

Marguerite assumed this was some new incarnation of Blind Lake’s elaborate security protocols. There had been several such shutdowns back at Crossbank during the time Marguerite had worked there. Most had lasted only a few hours, though one such occasion (an unauthorized overflight that turned out to be nothing more than a private pilot who’d burned out both his nav chips and his transponders) had created a minor scandal and sealed the security perimeter for nearly a week.

Here at Blind Lake the shutdown was, at least for Marguerite, not much of an inconvenience, at least so far. She hadn’t pla

Not that Tess was one of those kids who lived in front of the video panel. Tess liked to play outside, though she mostly played alone, and Blind Lake was one of the few places on Earth where a child could wander unaccompanied with negligible fear of drugs or crime. This weekend, though, the weather wasn’t cooperating. A crisp, sunlit Saturday morning gave way by noon to rolling asphalt-colored clouds and brief, violent squalls of rain. October sounding the horn of winter. The temperature dropped to a chilly ten degrees Centigrade, and although Tess ventured out once — to the garage, to root through a box of dolls not yet unpacked from the move — she was quickly back inside, shivering under her fla

Sunday was the same, with wind gusting around the eaves troughs and piping through the bathroom ceiling vent. Marguerite asked Tess if there was anyone from school she’d like to play with. Tess was dubious at first but finally named a girl called Edie Jerundt. She wasn’t certain about the spelling, but there were, thank goodness, only a few J’s in the Blind Lake intramural access directory.

Co

Edie Jerundt had brought along a handful of recent downloads, and the two girls settled down immediately in front of the video panel. Co

Marguerite watched the two girls as they sat in the living room staring at the video panel.

The downloads were a bit babyish for Tess, Panda Girl adventures, and Edie had brought along those image-synched glasses that were supposed to be bad for your eyes if you wore for them for more than a few hours. Both girls flinched from the enhanced 3-D action sequences.

Apart from that they might have been alone. They sat at opposite ends of the sofa, inclined at contrasting angles against plump pillows. Marguerite felt immediately and obscurely sorry for Edie Jerundt, one of those girls designed by nature to be picked on and ostracized, arms and legs awkward as stilts, her grasp approximate, her words halting, her embarrassment perpetual and profound.

It was nice, Marguerite reflected, that Tess had befriended a girl like Edie Jerundt.

Unless—

Unless it was Edie who had befriended Tess.

After the downloads the girls played with the dolls Tess had liberated from the garage. The dolls were a motley bunch, most collected by Tess at outdoor flea markets back when Ray used to make weekend drives from Crossbank into the New Hampshire countryside. Sun-paled fashion dolls with strangely twisted joints and mismatched clothes; oversized baby dolls, a majority of them naked; a scattering of action figures from forgotten movies, arms and legs frozen akimbo. Tess tried to enlist Edie in a scenario (this is the mother, this is the father; the baby is hungry but they have to go to work so this is the baby-sitter), but Edie quickly grew bored and was reduced to parading the dolls across the coffee table and giving them nonsense monologues (I’m a girl, I have a dog, I’m pretty, I hate you). Tess, as if gently nudged aside, retired to the sofa and watched. She began to bump her head rhythmically against the sofa cushion. About one beat per second, until Marguerite, passing, steadied her head with her hand.

This ryhthmic bumping, plus a worrisome speech-delay, had been Marguerite’s first clue that there was something different about Tessa. Not something wrong — Marguerite would not accede to that judgmental word. But, yes, Tess was different; Tess had some problems. Problems none of the well-intentioned therapists Marguerite had consulted were ever quite able to define. Most often they talked about idiosyncratic threshold-level autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. Which meant: we have a labelled bin in which to toss your daughter’s symptoms, but no real treatment.

Marguerite had taken Tess for physiotherapy aimed at correcting her clumsiness and “poor proprioception,” had tried her on courses of drugs designed to modify her supply of serotonin or dopamine or Factor Q, none of which had made any perceptible change in Tess’s condition. Which implied, perhaps, only that Tess had an unusual personality; that her skewed aloofness, her social isolation, were problems she would have to carry indefinitely or overcome as an act of personal will. Fooling with her neurochemical architecture was counterproductive, Marguerite had come to believe. Tess was a child; her personality was still a work-in-progress; she should not be drugged or bullied into someone else’s notion of maturity.

And that had seemed like a plausible compromise, at least until Marguerite left Ray, until the trouble back at Crossbank.

There had not even been a newspaper this weekend. Usually it was possible to e-print sections of the New York Times (or most any other urban paper), but even that meager co