Authority(34)
Whitby whipped the jeep from side to side on a rough stretch of road, bringing Cheney alarmingly close. On further inspection, Cheney displayed the remnants of a body builder’s physique, as if he had once been fit, but that this condition, like all human conditions, had receded—and then reconstituted itself in the increased thickness around his waist—but in receding had left behind a still-solid chest, jutting forward through the white shirt, out from the brown jacket, in a triumphant way that almost gave cover to his gut. He was also, according to his file, “a first-rate scientist partial to beer,” the kind of mind Control had seen before. It needed dulling to slow it down or to distance itself from the possibility of despair. Beer versus scientist represented a kind of schism between the banality of speech versus the originality of thought. An ongoing battle.
Why would Cheney play the buffoon to Control when he was in fact a mighty brain? Well, maybe he was a buffoon, outside of his chosen field, but then Control wasn’t exactly anyone’s first invitee to a cocktail party, either.
* * *
Once they’d put the distraction of the major checkpoints behind them and entered the stretch of fifteen miles of gravel road—which seemed to take all of Whitby’s attention, so he continued to say little—Control asked, “Is this the route that the expedition would take to the border, too?”
The longer they had been traveling, the more the image in his head, of the progress of the expeditions down this very road, each member quiet, alone in the vast expanse of their thoughts, had been interrupted by the stage business of lurching to a stop at so many checkpoints. The destruction of solace.
“Sure,” Cheney said. “But in a special bus that doesn’t need to stop.”
A special bus. No checkpoints. No limousine for the expeditions, not on this road. Were they allowed last-meal requests? Was the night before often a drunken reverie or more of a somber meditation? When was the last time they were allowed to see family or friends? Did they receive religious counsel? The files didn’t say; Central descended on the Southern Reach like a many-limbed über-parasite to coordinate that part.
Loaded down or unencumbered? “And already with their backpacks and equipment?” he asked. He was seeing the biologist on that special bus, sans checkpoints, fiddling with her pack, or sitting there silent with it beside her on the seat. Nervous or calm? No matter what her state of mind at that point, Control guessed she would not have been talking to her fellow expedition members.
“No—they’d get all of that at the border facility. But they’d know what was in it before that—it’d be the same as their training packs. Just fewer rocks.” Again, the look that meant he was supposed to laugh, but, always considerate, Cheney chuckled for him yet again.
So: Approaching the border. Was Ghost Bird elated, indifferent? It frustrated him that he had a better sense of what she wouldn’t be than what she was.
“We used to joke,” Cheney said, interrupted by a pothole poorly navigated by Whitby, “we used to joke that we ought to send them in with an abacus and a piece of flint. Maybe a rubber band or two.”
In checking Control’s reaction to his levity, Cheney must have seen something disapproving or dangerous, because he added, “Gallows humor, you know. Like in an ER.” Except he hadn’t been the one on the gallows. He’d stayed behind and analyzed what they’d brought back. The ones who did come back. A whole storeroom of largely useless samples bought with blood and careers, because hardly any of the survivors went on to have happy, productive lives. Did Ghost Bird remember Cheney, and if so, what was her impression of him?
The endless ripple of scaly brown tree trunks. The smell of pine needles mixed with a pungent whiff of decay and the exhaust from the jeep. The blue-gray sky above, through the scattered canopy. The back of Whitby’s swaying head. Whitby. Invisible and yet all too visible. The cipher who came in and out of focus, seemed both near and far.
* * *
“The terror,” Whitby had said during the morning meeting, staring at the plant and the mouse. “The terror.” But oddly, slurring it slightly, and in a tone as if he were imparting information rather than reacting or expressing an emotion.
Terror sparked by what? Why said with such apparent enthusiasm?
But the linguist talked over Whitby and soon pushed so far beyond the moment that Control couldn’t go back to it at the time.
“A name conveys a whole series of related associations,” Hsyu had said, launching some more primordial section of her PowerPoint, created during a different era and perhaps initially pitched to an audience of the frozen megafauna Control remembered so vividly from the natural history museum. “A set of related ideas, facts, etc. And these associations exist not just in the mind of the one named—form their identity—but also in the minds of the other expedition members and thus accessible to whatever else might access them in Area X. Even if by a process unknown to us and purely speculative in nature. Whereas ‘biologist’—that’s a function, a subset of a full identity.” Not if you did it right, like Ghost Bird, and you were totally and wholly your job to begin with. “If you can be your function, then the theory is that these associations narrow or close down, and that closes down the pathways into personality. Perhaps.”