“A nut job.” Paraphrasing Cheney’s latest puzzled, hurt soliloquy about lack of good data: “Even a falling acorn tells us something about where it fell from, Newton would tell us, wouldn’t you say. There’d be a trajectory, for heck’s sake, and then you’d backtrack, even if theoretical, find some point on the tree that acorn came from, or near enough.” You can’t say you’ve ever understood more than a third of his ellipticals.
“A White Tits nut job,” Grace says, referring to the frozen white tents of the Southern Reach border command and control.
“Our White Tits nut job,” you say sternly, wagging a finger. “But at least not nut jobs like the water-feature crew.”
After Cheney’s outburst, you went over yet another pointless, nonproductive report from the “water-feature crew,” the agency studying radio waves for signals from extraterrestrial life. Central has suggested more than once that you “team up with” them. They listen for messages from the stars—across a sliver of two microwave regions unencumbered by radio waves from natural sources. These frequencies they call the water hole because they correspond to hydrogen and hydroxyl wavelengths. A fool’s chance, to assume that other intelligent species would automatically gravitate to the “watering hole” as they called it.
“While what they were looking for snuck in the back door—”
“Set up the back door and walked through it—”
“You’re looking up and meanwhile something walks by and steals your wallet,” Grace says, cackling.
“Water feature built for nothing; they prefer the servants’ entrance, thank you very much,” you say grandly, passing the bourbon. “You don’t just turn on the sprinklers and pump up the Slip ’N Slide.”
You truly don’t know what you’re saying anymore, but Grace bursts into laughter, and then things are all right again with Grace, for a while, and you can go back to Henry and Suzanne, the talking mannequins, the deathly dull or just deathly twins.
But at some point that same week, Grace finds you throwing file folders against the far wall, and you’ve no excuse for it except a shrug. Bad day at the doctor’s. Bad day prepping for the expedition. Bad day doing research. Just a bad day in a succession of bad days.
So you do something about it.
* * *
You fly out to Lowry’s headquarters about one month before the twelfth expedition. Even though it’s your idea, you’re unhappy you have to travel, had hoped to lure Lowry to the Southern Reach one last time. Everything around you—your office, the conversation in the corridors, the view from Beyond Reach—has acquired a kind of compelling sheen to it, a clarity that comes from knowing you will soon be gone.
Lowry’s in the final stages of his pre-expedition performance, has been exporting the less invasive of his techniques to Central. He enjoys impersonating an instructor for the benefit of expedition members, according to Severance. The biologist, she reassures you, has suffered “minimal meddling.” The only thing you want ratcheted up in the biologist is her sense of alienation from other people. All you want is that she become as attuned inward to Area X as possible. You’re not even sure she really needs your push in that regard, from all reports. No one in the history of the program has so willingly given up the use of her name.
Light hypnotic suggestion, conditioning that’s more about Area X survival than any of Lowry’s dubious “value adds,” his claims to have found a way around the need, on some level, for the subject to want to perform the suggested action—“a kind of trickery and substitution.” The stages you’ve seen described are identification, indoctrination, reinforcement, and deployment, but Grace has seen other documents that borrow the semiotics of the supernatural: “manifestation, infestation, oppression, and possession.”
Most of Lowry’s attention has accreted around the linguist, a volunteer with radicalized ideas about the value of free will. You wonder if Lowry prefers it when there’s more or less resistance. So you absorb the brunt of his briefing, his report on progress, his teasing taunt about whether you’ve reconsidered his offer of hypnosis, of conditioning, with the hint behind it that you couldn’t stop him if you tried.
Honestly, you don’t give a shit about his briefing.
* * *
At some point, you steer Lowry toward the idea of a walk—down by the fake lighthouse. It’s early summer, the weather still balmy, and there’s no reason to sit there in Lowry’s command-and-control lounge. You cajole him into it by appealing to his pride, asking for the full tour, taking just one thin file folder you’ve brought with you.