Authority(36)

And, as often happened, one big lie had let in a series of little lies, under the guise of “changing the metrics,” of altering the experiment. So that as they got diminishing returns, the director fiddled more and more with the composition of the expeditions, and fiddled with what information she told them, and who knew if any of it had helped anything at all? You reached a certain point of desperation, perhaps thought the train was coming faster than others did, and you’d use whatever you found hidden under the seats, whether a weapon or just a bent paper clip.

* * *

If you quacked like a scientist and waddled like a scientist, soon, to nonscientists, you became the subject under discussion and not a person at all. Some scientists lived within this role, almost embraced it, transformed into walking theses or textbooks. This couldn’t be said about Cheney, though, despite lapses into jargon like “quantum entanglements.”

At a certain point on the way to the border, Control began to collect Cheneyisms. Much of it came to Control unsolicited because he found that Cheney, once he got warmed up, hated silence, and threw into that silence a strange combination of erudite and sloppy syntax. All Control had to do, with Whitby as his innocent accomplice, was not respond to a joke or comment and Cheney would fill up the space with his own words. Jesus, it was a long drive.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of enabling of each other’s dip-shittery. It’s almost all we’ve got.”

“We don’t even understand how every organism on our planet works. Haven’t even identified them all yet. What if we just don’t have the language for it?”

“Are we obsolete? I think not, I think not. But don’t ask the army’s opinion of that. A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”

“As a physicist, what do you do when you’re faced by something that doesn’t care what you do and isn’t affected by your actions? Then you start thinking about dark energy and you go a little nuts.”

“Yeah, it’s something we think about: How do you know if something is out of the ordinary when you don’t know if your instruments would register the progressions? Lasers, gravitational-wave detectors, X-rays. Nothing useful there. I got this spade here and a bucket and some rubber bands and duct tape, you know?”

“Hardly any scientists at Central, either. Am I right?”

“I guess it’s kind of strange. To practically live next to this. I guess I could say that. But then you go home and you’re home.”

“Do you know any physics? No of course you don’t. How could you?”

“Black holes and waves have a similar structure, you know? Very, very similar as it turns out. Who would’ve expected that?”

“I mean, you’d expect Area X to cooperate at least a little bit, right? I’d’ve staked my reputation on it cooperating with us enough to get some accurate readings at least, an abnormal heat signature or something.”

Later, a refinement of this statement: “There is some agreement among us now, reduced though we may be, that to analyze certain things, an object must allow itself to be analyzed, must agree to it. Even if this is just simply by way of some response, some reaction.”

These last two utterances, jostling elbows, Cheney had offered up a bit plaintively because, in fact, he had staked his reputation to Area X—in the general sense that the Southern Reach had become his career. The initial glory of it, of being chosen, and then the constriction of it, like a great snake named Area X was suffocating him, and then also what he had to know in his innermost thoughts, or even coursing across the inner rind of his brain. That the Southern Reach had indeed destroyed his career, perhaps even been the reason for his divorce.

“How do you feel about all of the misinformation given to the expedition?” Control asked Cheney, if only to push back against the flood of Cheneyisms. He knew Cheney had had some influence in shaping that misinformation.

Cheney’s frown made it seem as if Control’s question were akin to criticizing the paint job on a car that had been involved in a terrible accident. Was Control a killjoy to want to snuff out Cheney’s can-do, his can’t-help-it brand of the jowly jovial? But jovial grated on Control most of the time. “Jovial” had always been a pretext, from the high school football team’s locker room on—the kind of hearty banter that covered up greater and lesser crimes.

“It wasn’t—isn’t—really misinformation,” Cheney said, and then went dark for a moment, searching for words. Possibly he thought it was a test. Of loyalty or attitude or moral rigor. But he found words soon enough: “It’s more like creating a story or a narrative to guide them through the narrows. An anchor.”