“What made Whitby the one to find it?”
“A good question.” A gift from Dead Whitby.
“Why did it allow itself to be found?”
That sounds like the right question, and some days you want to tell Grace … everything. But most days you want to shield her from information that will make no difference to her job, her life. Somehow Dead Whitby and the Saul apparition fall on the same side as telling her that your name is not your name. That all of the unimportant things about you are a lie.
Eventually, into the middle of all this comes the call you’ve been dreading: Lowry, with a purpose. While you’re staring at the incriminating photograph on the wall: you on the rocks, shouting either before or after the shot was taken, “I’m a monster! I’m a monster!”
“Another eleventh expedition is a go.”
“Already.”
“Three months. We’re almost there.”
You want to say, but don’t say, “It’s time to stop tampering, not time to intensify the tampering.” The fiddling. All the ways Lowry tries to control what cannot really be controlled.
“That’s too soon,” you say. Too soon by far. Nothing has changed, except that you interfered and went over the border and brought back two objects you can’t explain.
“Maybe it’s time for you to stop being a fucking coward,” Lowry says. “Three months. Get ready, Cynthia.” He bangs the phone down, and you imagine him banging it down into a housing that’s a polished human skull.
They implant into the brain of the psychologist—on what will turn out to be the last eleventh—what Lowry calls “a pearl of surveillance and recall.” Some tiny subset of the silver egg that is Central, passing first through Lowry’s deforming grip. They make a man not himself, and you go along with it to keep your job, to stay close to what is important to you.
Twelve months later, the last eleventh expedition comes back, acting almost like zombies, memories cloudier than the drunk veteran’s at the Star Lanes Lounge. Eighteen months later, they’re all dead of cancer, and Lowry’s back on the phone talking about the “next eleventh” and “making refinements to our process” and you realize something has to change. Again. And short of putting a gun to Lowry’s head and pulling the trigger, it’s going to come down to influencing the composition of the expeditions, how they are deployed, and a host of lesser factors. None of which may make a difference, but you have to try. Because you never want to see such lost, vacant faces ever again, never again want to see people who have been stripped of something so vital that it can’t be expressed through words.
* * *
Morale at the Southern Reach becomes worse after the last eleventh returns and then, so quickly, passes on to the next place, wherever that might be. Numbness? A sense of having gone through so many crises that emotion must be hoarded, that it might not run out.
From the transcripts: “It was a beautiful day.” “The expedition was uneventful.” “We had no problems in completing the mission.”
What was the mission, in their eyes? But they’d never answer that question. Grace spoke of them in reverential tones, almost as if they’d become saints. Down in the science division, Cheney became more muted and subdued for a long time, as if the color TV of his commentary had been replaced by a black-and-white model with a single channel of pixelated fuzz. Ephemeral, ethereal Pitman called from Central with oblique condolences and a kind of calculated indifference to his tone that suggested misdirection.
But you were the one who had seen the curling worm of Lowry’s corruption at work—that what he’d done, the bargain you had made that had allowed him to be so invasive and controlling, hadn’t been worth it.
Even worse, Jackie Severance visits regularly afterward, as if maybe Central is concerned about something, takes to pacing around your office and gesticulating as she talks, rather than just sitting still. This emissary of Central you have to deal with in the flesh rather than just Lowry.
“She’s my parole officer,” you tell Grace.
“Then who is Lowry?”
“Lowry’s the parole officer’s partner? Boss? Employee?” Because you don’t know.
“A riddle wrapped in a puzzle,” Grace says. “Do you know what her father, Jack Severance, is up to?”
“No, what?”
“Everything.” So much everything that Grace is still wading through all of it.
When Severance comes calling, there’s a sense she’s checking up on her investment, her shared risk.
“Does it ever get to you?” Severance asks you more than once, and you’re fairly sure she’s just making conversation.