Authority(41)
“And this isn’t being done already?”
Whitby shrugged. “Some of it. Some of it. Just not all of it considered together, in my opinion. I feel there is an overemphasis on the lighthouse, the tower, base camp—those discrete elements that could be said to jut out of the landscape—while the landscape itself is largely ignored. As is the idea that Area X could have formed nowhere else … although that theory would be highly speculative and perhaps based mostly on my own observations.”
Control nodded, unable now to shake a sturdy skepticism. Would terroir really be more useful than another approach? If something far beyond the experience of human beings had decided to embark upon a purpose that it did not intend to allow humans to recognize or understand, then terroir would simply be a kind of autopsy, a kind of admission of the limitations of human systems. You could map the entirety of a process—or, say, a beachhead or an invasion—only after it had happened, and still not know the who or the why. He wanted to say to Whitby, “Growing grapes is simpler than Area X,” but refrained.
“I can provide you with some of my personal findings,” Whitby said. “I can show you the start of things.”
“Great,” Control said, nodding with exaggerated cheeriness, and was relieved that Whitby took that single word as closure to the conversation and made a fairly rapid exit, less relieved that he seemed to take it as undiluted affirmation.
Grand unified theories could backfire—for example, Central’s overemphasis on trying to force connections between unconnected right-wing militia groups. Recalled that his father had made up stories about how one piece in his ragtag sculpture garden commented on that one, and how they were all part of a larger narrative. They had all occupied the same space, were by the same creator, but they had never been meant to communicate, one to another. Just as they had never been meant to molder and rust in the backyard. But that way at least his father could rationalize them remaining out there together, under the hot sun and in the rain, even if protected by tarps.
The border had come down in the early morning, on a day, a date, that no one outside of the Southern Reach remembered or commemorated. Just that one inexplicable event had killed an estimated fifteen hundred people. How did you factor ghosts into any terroir? Did they deepen the flavor, or did they make things dry, chalky, irreconcilable? The taste in Control’s mouth was bitter.
* * *
If terroir meant a confluence, then the entrance through the border into Area X was the ultimate confluence. It was also the ultimate secret, in that there were no visual records of that entry point available to anyone. Unless you were there, looking across at it, you could never experience it. Nor did it help if you were peering at it through a raging thunderstorm, shoes filling up with mud, with only one umbrella between the three of you.
They stood, soaked and cold, near the end of a path that wound from the barracks across the ridge above the giant sinkhole and then on to more stable land. They were looking at the right side of a tall, sturdy, red wooden frame that delineated the location, the width and height, of the entrance beyond. The path ran parallel to a paint line perpetually refreshed to let you know the border lay fifteen feet beyond. If you went ten feet beyond the line, the lasers from a hidden security system would activate and turn you into cooked meat. But otherwise, the army had left as small a footprint as possible; no one knew what might change the terroir. Here the toxicity levels almost matched those inside of Area X, which was to say: nil, nada, nothing.
As for terror, his personal level had been intensified by deltas of lightning that cracked open the sky and thunder that sounded like a giant in a bad mood ripping apart trees. Yet they had persevered, Cheney holding the blue-and-white-striped umbrella aloft, arm fully extended toward the sky, and Control and Whitby huddled around him, trying to shuffle in a synchronized way along the narrow path without tripping. All of it useless against the slanted rain.
“The entrance isn’t visible from the side,” Cheney said in a loud voice, his forehead flecked with bits of leaf and dirt. “But you’ll see it soon. The path circles around to meet it head-on.”
“Doesn’t it project light?” Control smacked away something red with six legs that had been crawling up his pants.
“Yes, but you can’t see it from the side. From the side it doesn’t appear to be there at all.”
“It is twenty feet high and twelve feet wide,” Whitby added.
“Or, as I say, sixty rabbits high and thirty-six rabbits wide,” Cheney said.
Control, struck by a sudden generosity, laughed at that one, which he imagined brought a flush of happiness to Cheney’s features although they could barely recognize each other in the slop and mire.