Authority(12)
“Not all of it,” she conceded, a thin smile erasing the default frown. “But tracking back from the events we know have occurred since the border came down, you begin to see patterns.”
Control believed her. He would have believed Grace had she said visions appeared in the swirls of her strawberry gelato on hot summer days or in the fracturing of the ice in another of her favorites, rum-and-diet with a lime (her personnel file was full of maddeningly irrelevant details). It was in the nature of being an analyst. But what patterns had colonized the former director’s mind? And how much of that had infiltrated the assistant director? On some level, Control hoped that the mess the director had left behind was deliberate, to hide some more rational progression.
“But how is that different from any other godforsaken stretch of coast half off the grid?” There were still dozens of them all across the country. Places that were poison to real-estate agents, with little infrastructure and a long history of distrust of the government.
The assistant director stared at him in a way that made him feel uncomfortably like a middle-school student again, sent up for insolence.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Have we been compromised by our own data? The answer is: Of course. That is what happens over time. But if there is something in the files that is useful, you might see it because you have fresh eyes. So I can archive all of this now if you like. Or we can use you the way we need to use you: not because you know anything but because you know so little.”
A kind of resentful pride rose up in Control that wasn’t useful, that came from having a parent who did seem to know everything.
“I didn’t mean that I—”
Mercifully, she cut him off. Unmercifully, her tone channeled contempt. “We have been here a long time … Control. A very long time. Living with this. Unable to do very much about this.” A surprising amount of pain had entered her voice. “You don’t go home at night with it in your stomach, in your bones. In a few weeks, when you have seen everything, you will have been living with it for a long time, too. You will be just like us—only more so, because it is getting worse. Fewer and fewer journals recovered, and more zombies, as if they have been mind-wiped. And no one in charge has time for us.”
It could have been a moment to commiserate over the vagaries and injustices perpetrated by Central, Control realized later, but he just sat there staring at her. He found her fatalism a hindrance, especially suffused, as he misdiagnosed it at first, with such a grim satisfaction. A claustrophobic combination that no one needed, that helped no one. It was also inaccurate in its progressions.
The first expedition alone had, according to the files, experienced such horrors, almost beyond imagining, that it was a wonder that they had sent anyone after that. But they’d had no choice, understood they were in it for “the long haul” as, he knew from transcripts, the former director had liked to say. They hadn’t even let the later expeditions know the true fate of the first expedition, had created a fiction of encountering an undisturbed wilderness and then built other lies on top of that one. This had probably been done as much to ease the Southern Reach’s own trauma as to protect the morale of the subsequent expeditions.
“In thirty minutes, you have an appointment to tour the science division,” she said, getting up and looming over him, leaning with her hands on his desk. “I think I will let you find the place yourself.” That would give him just enough time to check his office for surveillance devices beforehand.
“Thanks,” he said. “You can leave now.”
So she left.
But it didn’t help. Before he’d arrived, Control had imagined himself flying free above the Southern Reach, swooping down from some remote perch to manage things. That wasn’t going to happen. Already his wings were burning up and he felt more like some ponderous moaning creature trapped in the mire.
* * *
As he became more familiar with it, the former director’s office revealed no new or special features to Control’s practiced eye. Except that his computer, finally installed on the desk, looked almost science-fictional next to all the rest of it.
The door lay to the far left of the long, rectangular room, so that you wandered into its length toward the mahogany desk set against the far wall. No one could have snuck up on the director or read over her shoulder. Each wall had been covered in bookcases or filing cabinets, with stacks of papers and some books forming a second width in front of this initial layering. At the highest levels, or in some ridiculous cases, balanced on the stacks, those bulletin boards with ripped pieces of paper and scribbled diagrams pinned to them. He felt as if he had been placed inside someone’s disorganized mind. Near her desk, on the left, he uncovered an array of preserved natural ephemera. Dusty and decaying bits of pinecone trailed across the shelves. A vague hint of a rotting smell, but he couldn’t track down the origin.