Authority(48)

So he was left with trying to build a true terroir vision of the director—her motivations and knowledge base—from everything he was sorting through and by creating a whole layering of other, non-DMP categories in his mind. She had a subscription to a table television guide, as well as a selection of culture and art magazines, judging not just from torn pages but from subscription renewal forms. She had owed the dentist $72.12 at one point for a cleaning not covered by her insurance and didn’t care who knew it. A bowling alley outside of town was a frequent haunt. She got birthday cards from an aunt, but either wasn’t sentimental about cards or wasn’t that close to the woman. She liked pork chops and shrimp with grits. She liked to dine alone, but one receipt from the barbecue place had two dinner orders on it. Company? Perhaps, like him, she sometimes ordered food to go so she’d have a lunch for the next day.

There was not much about the border in her notes, but that white spiral, that enormous space, did not leave him completely. There was an odd synchronicity as he worked that linked the spiral to his mother’s flash of light across the sky, the literal and the metaphoric joined together across an expanse of time and context so vast that only thoughts could bridge the gap.

* * *

The sedimentary layers that had existed under the plant and mouse proved the most difficult to separate out. Some pages were brittle and thin, and the scraps of paper and ragged collages of leaves had a tendency to stick together, while being infiltrated and bound more tightly by the remains of translucent roots touched by lines of crimson left behind by the plant. As Control painstakingly separated one page from another, a musty smell that had lain dormant rose up, became strong and pungent. He tried not to compare it to the stench of dirty socks.

The layers continued to support that the director liked both nature and a cold breakfast. As he liberated the proof of purchase cut out of a box of bran flakes from an oak leaf stained blue by words thickened into almost unreadable ink blots, he knew that the cardboard had never before been unwedded from its brittle bride. “Review transcripts from X.10.C, esp. anthro on LH landing” read the cardboard. “Recommend discontinuing use of black boxes for conditioning purposes” read the leaf. He placed the oak leaf on the unknown pile, as in “unknown value.”

Other intriguing fragments revealed themselves, too, some peeking out between books on the stacks or just shoved roughly between pages, less like bookmarks and more as if she had become irritated with them and was punishing the very words she had scribbled down. It was between the pages of a basic college biology textbook that looked worn enough to have been the director’s own that Control found, on real paper, bizarrely printed on a dot matrix printer despite a date of only eighteen months ago, a note on the twelfth expedition.

In the note, which hadn’t made it into Grace’s DMP file, the director called the surveyor “someone with a strong sense of reality, a good, bracing foil to the others.” The linguist discarded in the border prep area she called “useful but not essential; possibly a dangerous addition, a sympathetic but narrow character who might deflect attention.” Sympathetic to whom? Deflect attention from what? And was this deflection desirable or…? The anthropologist was referred to by her first name, which confused Control until he suddenly recognized it. “Hildi will be on board, will understand.” He stared at that note for a while. On board with what? Understand what?

Beyond a frustrating lack of context, the notes conveyed a sense that the director had been casting a play or movie. Notes for actors. Teams needed cohesion, but the director didn’t seem as concerned with morale and the group dynamic as with … some other quality.

The note on the biologist was the most extensive and caused Control to vibrate with additional questions.

Not a very good biologist. In a traditional sense. Empathic more toward environments than people. Forgets the reasons she went, who is paying her salary. But becomes embedded to an extraordinary extent. Would know Area X better than I do from almost the first moment sets foot there. Experience with similar settings. Self-sufficient. Unburdened. Connection through her husband. What would she be in Area X? A signal? A flare? Or invisible? Exploit.

Another note, found nearby in volume 2 of a slim three-pamphlet set on xenobiology, came to mind: “bio: expo to TA contam?” Biologist exposure to topographical anomaly contamination was his best guess—an easy guess. But without a date, he could not even be sure it pertained to the same expedition. Similarly, when had “Keep from L” and “L said no—no surprise” been written on two separate scraps, and did “L” stand for Lowry or in some esoteric and less likely way mean “lighthouse keeper”?