Authority(39)
“Has anyone ever tried to eat any of the samples?” he asked Grace. If they’d just devoured the undying plant, Control was fairly sure it wouldn’t have come back.
“Shhhh,” she said, exactly as if they were in church and he had spoken too loudly or received a cell-phone call. But he noticed Whitby looking at him quizzically, head cocked to one side within his helmet. Had Whitby sampled the samples? Despite his terror?
Parallel to this thought, the knowledge that Hsyu and other non-biologists had never seen the samples cathedral. He wondered what they might have read in the striations of the fur of a dead swamp rat or in the vacant glass eyes of a marsh hawk, its curved beak. What susurrations or utterances might verbalize all unexpected from a cross section of tree moss or cypress bark. The patterns to be found in twigs and leaves.
It was too absurd a thought to give words to, not when he was so new. Or, perhaps, even when he was old in this job, should he be that lucky or unlucky.
So there he was.
When the assistant director closed the door and they moved on to the next section of the cathedral, Control had to bite his thumb to stop a giggle from escaping. He’d had a vision of the samples starting to dance behind that door, freed of the terrible limitations of the human gaze. “Our banal, murderous imagination,” as the biologist had put it in a rare unguarded moment with the director before the twelfth expedition.
* * *
In the corridor afterward, with Whitby, a little drained by the experience: “Was that the room you wanted me to see?”
“No,” Whitby said, but did not elaborate.
Had he insulted the man with his prior refusal? Even if not, Whitby had clearly withdrawn his offer.
* * *
Glimpses of towns now under kudzu and other vines, moldering in the moss: a long-abandoned miniature golf course with a pirate theme. The golf greens had been buried in leaves and mud. The half decks of corsairs’ ships rose at crazy angles as if from choppy seas of vegetation, masts cracked at right angles and disappearing into the gloom as it began to rain. A crumbling gas station lay next door, the roof caved in by fallen trees, the pavement so cracked by gnarled roots that it had crumbled into water-ripe pieces with the seeming texture and consistency of dark, moist brownies. The fuzzy, irregular shapes of houses and two-story buildings through the trees proved that people had lived here before the evacuation. This close to the border as little as possible was disturbed, and so these abandoned places could only be broken down by the natural process of decades of rain and decay.
The final stretch to the border had Whitby circling ever lower until Control was certain they were below sea level, before they came up again slightly to a low ridge upon which sat a drab green barracks, a more official-looking brick building for army command and control, and the local Southern Reach outpost.
According to a labyrinthine hierarchical chart that resembled several thick snakes fucking one another, the Southern Reach was under the army’s jurisdiction here, which might be why the Southern Reach facility, closed down between expeditions, looked a bit like a row of large tents that had been made of lemon meringue. Which is to say, it looked like any number of the churches Control had become familiar with in his teenage years, usually because of whatever girl he was dating. The calcification of revivalists and born-agains often took this form: as of something temporary that had hardened and become permanent. And thus it was either a series of white permafrost tents that greeted them or the white swell of huge waves, frozen forever. The sight was as out of place and startling as if the facility had resembled a fossilized herd of huge MoonPies, a delicacy of those youthful years.
Army HQ was in a dome-shaped section of the barracks after the final checkpoint, but no one seemed to be around except a few privates standing in the churned mud bath that was the unofficial parking lot. Loitering with no regard for the light rain falling on them, talking in a bored but intense way while smoking cherry-scented filtered cigarettes. “Whatever you want.” “Fuck off.” They had the look of men who had no idea what they guarded, or knew but had been trying to forget.
Border commander Samantha Higgins—who occupied a room hardly larger than a storage closet and just as depressing—was AWOL when they called on her. Higgins’s aide-de-camp—“add the camp” as his punning father would’ve put it—relayed an apology that she’d had to “step out” and couldn’t “receive you personally.” Almost as if he were a special-delivery signature-required package.
Which was just as well. There had been awkwardness between the two entities after the final eleventh expedition had turned up back home—procedures changed, the security tapes scrutinized again and again. They had rechecked the border for other exit points, looking for heat signals, fluctuations in air flow, anything. Found nothing.