Three rings orbited the Crawler, circling clockwise, and at times waves and surges of energy discharged between them, rippled across the Crawler’s body. The first ring spun in drunken dreamlike revolutions just below the arm: an irregular row of half-moons. They resembled delicate jellyfish, with feathery white tendrils descending that continually writhed in a wandering search for something never found. The second ring, spinning faster right above the writing arm, resembled a broad belt of tiny black stones grouped close together, but these stones, as they bumped into one another, gave with a sponginess that made her think of soft tadpoles and of the creatures that had rained from the sky on the way to the island. What function these entities performed, whether they were part of the Crawler’s anatomy or a symbiotic species, she could not fathom. All she knew was that both rings were in their way reassuringly corporeal.
But the third ring, the halolike ring above the Crawler, did not reassure her at all. The swift-moving globes of gold numbered ten to twelve, appeared to be both lighter than air and yet heavier, too. They spun with a ferocious velocity, so that at first she almost could not tell what they were. But she knew that they were dangerous, that words like defense and aggression might apply.
Perhaps the lighthouse keeper had always been a delusion, a lie written by Area X and conveyed back to the biologist. Yet she distrusted, too, this avatar, this monster costume, this rubber suit meant for a scientist’s consumption: so precise, so specific. Or perhaps the truth, for it did not fluctuate in its aspect, morph into other forms.
“Nothing but a horror show,” Ghost Bird said to Control, so still and silent behind her, absorbing or being absorbed.
What else was she to do? She stepped forward, into the gravitational field of its orbits. This close, the translucent layer was more like a microscope slide of certain kinds of long, irregularly shaped cells. The patterns beneath, on the second layer, she could almost read, but remained obscured, as if in shallows disturbed by wide ripples.
She reached out a hand, felt a delicate fluttering against her fingers as though encountering a porous layer, a veil.
Was this first contact, or last contact?
Her touch triggered a response.
The halo far above dissolved to allow one of its constituent parts to peel off like a drooping golden pearl as large as her head—and down it came to a halt in front of her, hovering there to assess her. Reading her, with a kind of warmth that felt like sunburn. Yet still she was not afraid. She would not be afraid. Area X had made her. Area X must have expected her.
Ghost Bird reached out and plucked the golden pearl from the air, held it warm and tender in her hand.
A brilliant gold-green light erupted from the globe and plunged into the heart of her and an icy calm came over her, and through the calm bled a kind of monumental light and in that light she could see all that could be revealed even as Area X peered in at her.
She saw or felt, deep within, the cataclysm like a rain of comets that had annihilated an entire biosphere remote from Earth. Witnessed how one made organism had fragmented and dispersed, each minute part undertaking a long and perilous passage through spaces between, black and formless, punctuated by sudden light as they came to rest, scattered and lost—emerging only to be buried, inert, in the glass of a lighthouse lens. And how, when brought out of dormancy, the wire tripped, how it had, best as it could, regenerated, begun to perform a vast and preordained function, one compromised by time and context, by the terrible truth that the species that had given Area X its purpose was gone. She saw the membranes of Area X, this machine, this creature, saw the white rabbits leaping into the border, disappearing, and coming out into another place, the leviathans, the ghosts, watching from beyond. All of this in fragments through taste or smell or senses she didn’t entirely understand.
While the Crawler continued in its writing as if she did not even exist, the words ablaze with a richer and more meaningful light than she had ever seen, and worlds shone out from them. So many worlds. So much light. That only she could see. Each word a world, a world bleeding through from some other place, a conduit and an entry point, if you only knew how to use them, the coordinates the biologist now used in her far journeying. Each sentence a merciless healing, a ruthless rebuilding that could not be denied.
Should she now say, “Stop!” Should she now plead for people she had never met who lived in her head, who the biologist had known? Should she somehow think that what came next would destroy the planet or save it? In its recognition of her, Ghost Bird knew that something would survive, that she would survive.
What could she do? Nothing. Nor did she want to. There was a choice in not making a choice. She released the sphere, let it hover there in the air.