Authority(42)

The area had the aspect of a shrine, even with the downpour. Especially because the downpour cut off abruptly at the border even though the landscape continued uninterrupted. Somehow Control had expected the equivalent of the disconnect when a two-page spread didn’t quite line up in a coffee-table book. But instead it just looked like they were slogging through a huge terrarium or greenhouse with invisible glass revealing a sunny day on the grounds beyond.

They continued to the end amid a profusion of lush plant life and an alarmingly crowded landscape of birdlife and insects, with deer visible in the middle distance through the veil of rain. Hsyu had said something during their meeting about making assumptions about terminology, and he had replied, to a roaring silence, “You mean like calling something a ‘border’?” Tracking back from stripping names from expedition members: What if when you accreted personality and other details around mere function, a different picture emerged?

After a few minutes of sloshing through mud, they curved around to come to a halt in front of the wooden structure.

He had not expected any of it to be beautiful, but it was beautiful.

* * *

Beyond the red wooden frame, Control could see a roughly rectangular space forming an arch at the top, through which swirled a scintillating, questing white light, a light that fizzed and flickered and seemed always on the point of being snuffed out but never was … there was a kind of spiraling effect to it, as it continually circled back in on itself. If you blinked quickly it almost looked as if the light consisted of eight or ten swiftly rotating spokes, but this was an illusion.

The light was like nothing he had ever seen. It was neither harsh nor soft. It was not twee, like faery lite from bad movies. It was not the darkish light of hucksters and magicians or anyone else looking to define light by use of shadows. It lacked the clarity of the all-revealing light of the storage cathedral, but it wasn’t murky or buttery or any other descriptor he could think of right then. He imagined trying to tell his father about it, but, really, it was his father who could have described the quality of that light to him.

“Even though it’s such a tall corridor and so wide, you have to crawl with your pack as close to the middle as possible. As far away from the sides as possible.” Cheney, confirming what Control had already read in summaries. Like cats with duct tape on their backs, slinking forward on their bellies. “No matter how you feel about enclosed or open spaces, it’ll be strange in there, because you will feel simultaneously as if you are progressing across a wide open field and as if you’re on a narrow precipice without guardrails and could fall off at any moment. So you exist in a confined and limitless space all at once. One reason we put the expedition members under hypnosis.”

Not to mention—and Cheney never did—that the expedition leader in each case had to endure the experience without benefit of hypnosis, and that some experienced strange visions while inside. “It was like being in one of those aquariums with the water overhead, but murkier, so that I could not really tell what was swimming there. Or it wasn’t the water that was murky but instead the creatures.” “I saw constellations and everything was near and far all at once.” “There was a vast plain like where I grew up, and it just kept expanding and expanding, until I had to look at the ground because I was getting the sense of being filled up until I would have burst.” All of which could just as easily have occurred inside the subjects’ minds.

Nor did the length of the passageway correspond to the width of the invisible border. Some reports from returning expeditions indicated that the passageway meandered, while others described it as straight. The point was, it varied and the time to travel through it into Area X could not be estimated except within a rough parameter of a “norm” of three hours to ten hours. Indeed, because of this, one of the earliest fears of Central had been that the entry point might disappear entirely, even if other opinions differed. Among the files on the border, Control had found a relevant quote from James Lowry: “… the door when I saw it looked like it had always been there, and would always be there even if there was no Area X.”

The director had apparently thought the border was advancing, but there was no evidence to support that view. An interceding note in the files from far up the chain of command had offered the comment that perhaps the director was just trying to get attention and money for a “dying agency.” Now that he saw the entrance, Control wondered how anyone would know what an “advance” meant.

“Don’t stare at it directly for too long,” Whitby offered. “It tends to draw you in.”