Authority(54)

As he went back through the layers of security, passing the faked portraits and photos, he acknowledged that at least she had admitted some of her memories of the expedition were intact. That was a kind of progress. Although it still felt too slow, felt every now and then as if everything was happening too slow, and that he was taking too long to understand. A ticking clock he couldn’t see, that was beyond his power to truly see.

One day her portrait would be up on the wall. When the subject was still alive, did they have to sit for those, or were they created from existing photographs? Would she have to recount some fiction about her experiences in Area X, without ever having a complete memory of what had actually happened?





015: SEVENTH BREACH

Photographs had also been buried in the sedimentary layers of the director’s desk. Many were of the lighthouse from different angles, a few from various expeditions but also reproductions of ancient daguerreotypes taken soon after the lighthouse had first been built, along with etchings and maps. The topographical anomaly as well, although fewer of these. Among them was a second copy of one of the photographs that hung on the wall opposite his desk—almost certainly the photograph the biologist had seen. That black-and-white photograph of the last lighthouse keeper, Saul Evans, with one of his assistants to his left, and on the right, hunched over as she clambered up some rocks in the background, a girl whose face was half-obscured by the hood of her jacket. Was her hair black, brown, or blond? Impossible to tell from the few strands visible. She was dressed in a practical flannel shirt and jeans. The photo had a wintry feel to it, the grass in the background faded and sparse, the waves visible beyond the sand and rocks cresting in a cold kind of way. A local girl? As with so many others, they might never know who she had been. The forgotten coast had not been the best place to live if you cared about anyone finding you from census records.

The lighthouse keeper was in his late forties or early fifties, except Control knew you could only serve until fifty, so he must have been in his forties. A weathered face, bearded as you might expect. A sea captain’s hat, even though the man had never been any kind of sailor. Control couldn’t intuit much from looking at Saul Evans. He looked like a walking, talking cliché, as if he’d tried hard for years to mimic first an eccentric lay preacher whose sermons referenced hellfire and then whatever one might expect from a lighthouse keeper. You could become invisible that way, as Control knew from his few operations in the field. Become a type, no one saw you. Paranoid thought: What better disguise? But disguise for what?

The photo had been taken by a member of the Séance & Science Brigade about a week or two before the Event that had created Area X. The photographer had gone missing when the border came down. It remained the only photo of Saul Evans they had, except for some shots from twenty years earlier, well before he’d come to the coast.

* * *

By the late afternoon, Control felt as if he hadn’t gotten much further—just given himself a respite from governance of the Southern Reach—although even that was interrupted (again) by the sound of his reconstituted chair barricade being encountered by an apparition who turned out to be Cheney ambitiously leaning forward across the clattery chairs so he could peer around the corner.

“… Hello, Cheney.”

“Hello … Control.”

Perhaps because of his precarious position, Cheney seemed at a loss, even though he was the intruder. Or as if he had thought the office might be empty, the chairs foreshadowing some shift in hierarchy?

“Yes?” Control said, not wanting to invite Cheney all the way in.

The X of his face tightened, the lines unsuccessfully trying to break free and become either parallel or one line. “Oh, yes, well, I guess I just wondered if you’d followed up about, you know, the director’s trip.” This last bit delivered in a low voice backed up by a quick glance away down the hall. Did Cheney have a faction, too? That would be tiresome. But no doubt he did: He was the one true hope of the nervous scientists huddled in the basement, waiting to be downsized, plucked one by one from their offices and cubicles by the giant, invisible hand of Central and then tossed into a smoldering pit of indifference and joblessness.

“Since I’ve got you here, Cheney, here’s a question for you: Anything out of the ordinary about the second-to-last eleventh expedition?” Another thing Control hated about the iterations: a metric mouthful to enunciate, harder still to remember the actual number. “X.11.H, it was, right?”

Cheney, stabilized by some crude chair rearrangement, appeared in full, motorcycle jacket and all, in the doorway. “X.11.J. I don’t think so. You have the files.”