Blind Lake

Marguerite rooted the girls out of Tess’s room. Edie was sprawled on the bed, her feet against the wall, picking through Tess’s shoebox of faux jewelery, ornamental combs, and tortoiseshell barrettes. Tess sat at her dresser, in front of the mirror.

“Your mom’s here, Edie,” Marguerite said.

Edie blinked her froggishly large eyes, then scurried downstairs to hunt for her shoes.

Tess remained at the mirror, twining her hair around her right forefinger.

“Tess?”

The hair made a glossy curl from fingernail to knuckle, then fell away.

“Tess? Did you have a good time with Edie?”

“I guess.”

“Maybe you should tell her so.”

Tess shrugged.

“Maybe you should tell her now. She’s downstairs, getting ready to go.”

But by the time Tess had loped down to the front door, both Edie and her mother were already gone.

By Monday, what had begun as a tedious inconvenience began to feel more like a crisis.

Marguerite dropped Tess off at school on her way to Hubble Plaza. The crowd of parents in the parking lot — including Co

Marguerite refused to take part in the speculation. Obviously (or at least it seemed obvious to Marguerite), the logical thing to do was to get on with the work at hand. It might not be possible to talk to the outside world, but the outside world was still providing Blind Lake’s power and presumably still expected Blind Lake’s people to go about their business. She kissed Tess good-bye, watched her daughter walk a long stochastic loop through the playground, and drove off when the bell sounded.

The rain had stopped but October had taken charge of the weather, a cold wind blowing out of a gem-blue sky. She was glad she had insisted on a sweater for Tess. For herself she had selected a vinyl windbreaker, which proved inadequate on the long hike from the Hubble Plaza parking facility to the lobby of the east wing. Snow before long, Marguerite thought, and Christmas coming, if you looked past the looming headland of Thanksgiving. The change in the weather made the quarantine that much more unsettling, as if isolation and anxiety had rolled in with the thin Canadian air.

As she waited for the elevator Marguerite caught a glimpse of Ray, her ex-husband, ducking into the lobby convenience shop, probably for his morning fix of DingDongs. Ray was a man of fiercely regular habits, one of them being DingDongs for breakfast. Ray used to go to amazing lengths to guarantee his supply, even during business trips or on vacation. He packed DingDongs in Tupperware in his carry-on luggage. A day without DingDongs brought out the worst in him: his petulance, his near-tantrums at the slightest frustration. She kept her eye on the shop entrance while the elevator inched down from the tenth floor. Just as the bell chimed, Ray emerged with a small bag in his hand. The DingDongs, for sure. Which he would devour, no doubt, behind the closed door of his office: Ray didn’t like to be seen eating sweets. Marguerite pictured him with a DingDong in each fist, nibbling at them like a mad squirrel, dribbling crumbs over his starched white shirt and funereal tie. She stepped into the elevator with three other people and punched her floor promptly, making sure the door closed before Ray could run for it.

Marguerite’s own work — though she loved it and had fought hard to get it — sometimes made her feel like a voyeur. A paid, dispassionate voyeur; but a voyeur nonetheless.

She hadn’t felt that way at Crossbank; but her talents had been wasted at Crossbank, where she had spent five years distilling botanical details from archival surveys, the kind of scut-work any bright postgraduate student could have done. She could still recite the tentative Latin binomials for eighteen varieties of bacterial mats. After a year there she had grown so accustomed to the sight of the ocean on HR8832/B that she had imagined she could smell it, smell the near-toxic levels of chlorine and ozone the photochromatic assays had detected, a sour and vaguely oily smell, like drain cleaner. She had been at Crossbank only because Ray had taken her there — Ray had worked administration at Crossbank — and she had turned down several offers to transfer to Blind Lake, mostly because Ray wouldn’t countenance the move.

Then she had sucked up her courage and initiated the divorce, after which she had accepted this Obs position, only to discover that Ray had also had himself seconded to Blind Lake. Not only that, but he moved west a month before Marguerite was scheduled to do so, establishing himself as a fixture at the Lake and probably sabotaging Marguerite’s reputation among the senior administrators.

Still, she was doing the work she had trained for, longed for: the closest thing to field astrozoology the world had ever seen.

She picked her way through the maze of support-staff desks, said hello to the clerks and secretaries and programmers, stopped by the staff kitchen to fill her souvenir Blind Lake lobster-motif cup with overcooked coffee and half-and-half, then closed herself into her office.

Paper covered her desk, e-paper littered her virtual desktop. This was work pending, most of it the kind of procedural checkmarking that was necessary but frustratingly tedious and time-consuming. But she could clean up some of that later, at home.

Today she wanted to spend time with the Subject. Raw time, realtime.

She closed the blinds over the window, dimmed the sulfur-dot ceiling lights, and illuminated the monitor that comprised the entire west wall of the office.

Good timing. UMa47/E’s seventeen-hour day had just begun.

Morning, and the Subject stirred from his pallet on the warren’s stone floor.

As usual, dozens of smaller creatures — parasites, symbiotes, or offspring — scuttled away from his body, where they had been nursing at the sleeping Subject’s exposed blood-nipples. These small animals, no larger than mice, many-legged and sinuously articulated, disappeared into gaps where the sandstone walls met the floor. Subject sat up, then stood to his full height.

Estimates put the Subject’s height at roughly seven feet. Certainly he was an impressive specimen. (Marguerite used the masculine pronoun privately. She would never dare commit an assumption of gender in her official writing. The gender and reproductive strategies of the aliens were still wholly unresolved.) Subject was bipedal and bilaterally symmetrical, and from a great distance, in silhouette, he might have been mistaken for a human being. But there the resemblance ended.

His skin — not an exoskeleton, as the ridiculous “lobster” nickname implied — was a tough, red-brown, pebble-textured integument. Because of this dense moisture-conserving skin, and because of the lung louvers exposed on his ventral surface and such details as the multiple jointing of his legs and arms and the tiny food-manipulating limbs that grew from the sides of his mandibles, some had speculated that Subject and his kindred might have evolved from an insect-like form. One scenario pictured a strain of invertebrates attaining the size and mobility of mammals by burying their notochord in a chitinous spinal column while losing their hard carapace in favor of a thick but lighter and more flexible skin. But little evidence had emerged for this or any other hypothesis. Exozoology was difficult enough; exopaleobiology was a daydream of a science.

Subject was clearly visible in the light cast by the string of incandescent bulbs suspended across the ceiling. The bulbs were small, more like Christmas lights than household lamps, but otherwise they seemed ridiculously familiar, were familiar: the filaments were of ordinary tungsten, spectroscopy had revealed. Dumb, rugged technology. At intervals, other aboriginals would arrive to replace exhausted bulbs and check the insulated copper wire for gaps or irregularities. The city boasted an elaborate, reliable maintenance infrastructure.