“What if some of them are returnees?” Control asked.
“What?”
Control thought Cheney had heard, but he repeated the question.
“You mean from across the border—they got across and came back? Well, that would be bad. That would be sloppy. Because we know that they’ve spread fairly far. The ones savvy enough to survive. And as happens, some of them have gotten out of the containment zone and been trapped by enterprising souls and sold to pet stores.”
“So you’re saying that it’s possible that some of the progeny of your fifteen-year-old experiment are now residing in people’s homes? As pets?” Control was astonished.
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way, but that’s the gist, I guess,” Cheney conceded.
“Remarkable” was Control’s only comment, aghast.
“Not really,” Cheney replied, pushing back gently but firmly. “Way of the world. Or at least of invasive species everywhere. I can sell you a python from the dread peninsula that’s got the same motivations.”
Whitby, a few moments later, the most he said in one gulp during the whole trip: “The few white-and-brown ones are the offspring of white rabbits mating with the native marsh rabbits. We call them Border Specials, and the soldiers shoot and eat them. But not the pure white ones, which I don’t think makes sense. Why shoot any of them?”
Why not shoot all of them? Why eat any of them?
* * *
Fifty thousand samples languished in the long rooms that formed the second floor of the left-hand side of the U, assuming an approach from the parking lot. They’d gone before lunch, left Hsyu behind. They had to don white biohazard suits with black gloves, so that Control was actually wearing a version of the gloves that had so unsettled him down in the science division. This was his revenge, to plunge his hands into them and make them his puppets, even if he didn’t like their rubbery feel.
The atmosphere was like that inside a cathedral, and as if the science division had been some kind of rehearsal for this event, the sequence of air locks was the same. An ethereal, heavenly music should have been playing, and the way the light struck the air meant that in certain pools of illumination Control could see floating dust motes, and certain archways and supporting walls imbued the rooms with a numinous feeling, intensified by the high ceilings. “This is my favorite place in the Southern Reach,” Whitby told him, face alight through his transparent helmet. “There’s a sense of calm and safety here.”
Did he feel unsafe in the other sections of the building? Control almost asked Whitby this question, but felt that doing so would break the mood. He wished he had his neoclassical music on headphones for the full experience, but the notes played on in his mind regardless, like a strange yearning.
He, Whitby, and Grace walked through in their terrestrial space suits like remote gods striding through a divinely chosen terrain. Even though the suits were bulky, the lightweight fabric didn’t seem to touch his skin, and he felt buoyant, as if gravity operated differently here. The suit smelled vaguely of sweat and peppermint, but he tried to ignore that.
The rows of samples proliferated and extended, the effect enhanced by the mirrors that lined the dividing wall between each hall. Every kind of plant, pieces of bark, dragonflies, the freeze-dried carcasses of fox and muskrat, the dung of coyotes, a section from an old barrel. Moss, lichen, and fungi. Wheel spokes and the glazed eyes of tree frogs staring blindly up at him. He had expected, somehow, a Frankenstein laboratory of two-headed calves in formaldehyde and some hideous manservant with a hunchback lurching ahead of them and explaining it all in an incomprehensible bouillabaisse of good intentions and slurred syntax. But it was just Whitby, and it was just Grace, and in that cathedral neither felt inclined to explain anything.
Analysis by Southern Reach scientists of the most recent samples, taken six years ago and brought back by expedition X.11.D, showed no trace of human-created toxicity remained in Area X. Not a single trace. No heavy metals. No industrial runoff or agricultural runoff. No plastics. Which was impossible.
Control peeked inside the door the assistant director had just opened for him. “There you are,” she said, inanely he thought. But there he was, in the main room, with an even higher ceiling and more columns, looking at endless rows and rows of shelves housed inside of a long, wide room.
“The air is pure here,” Whitby said. “You can get high just from the oxygen levels.”
Not a single sample had ever shown any irregularities: normal cell structures, bacteria, radiation levels, whatever applied. But he had also seen a few strange comments in the reports from the handful of guest scientists who had passed the security check and come here to examine the samples, even as they had been kept in the dark about the context. The gist of these comments was that when they looked away from the microscope, the samples changed; and when they stared again, what they looked at had reconstituted itself to appear normal. “There you are.” To Control, in that brief glance, staring across the vast litter of objects spread out before him, it mostly looked like a cabinet of curiosities: desiccated beetle husks, brittle starfish, and other things in jars, bottles, beakers, and boxes of assorted sizes.