Jeff VanderMeer - Authority

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For Ann

CONTENTS

INCANTATIONS

In Controls dreams it is early morning, the sky deep blue with just a twinge of light. He is staring from a cliff down into an abyss, a bay, a cove. It always changes. He can see for miles into the still water. He can see ocean behemoths gliding there, like submarines or bell-shaped orchids or the wide hulls of ships, silent, ever moving, the size of them conveying such a sense of power that he can feel the havoc of their passage even from so far above. He stares for hours at the shapes, the movements, listening to the whispers echoing up to him and then he falls. Slowly, too slowly, he falls soundless into the dark water, without splash or ripple. And keeps falling.

Sometimes this happens while he is awake, as if he hasnt been paying enough attention, and then he silently recites his own name until the real world returns to him.

001: FALLING

First day. The beginning of his last chance.

These are the survivors?

Control stood beside the assistant director of the Southern Reach, behind smudged one-way glass, staring at the three individuals sitting in the interrogation room. Returnees from the twelfth expedition into Area X.

The assistant director, a tall, thin black woman in her forties, said nothing back, which didnt surprise Control. She hadnt wasted an extra word on him since hed arrived that morning after taking Monday to get settled. She hadnt spared him an extra look, either, except when hed told her and the rest of the staff to call him Control, not John or Rodriguez. She had paused a beat, then replied, In that case, call me Patience, not Grace, much to the stifled amusement of those present. The deflection away from her real name to one that also meant something else interested him. Thats okay, hed said, I can just call you Grace, certain this would not please her. She parried by continually referring to him as the acting director. Which was true: There lay between her stewardship and his ascension a gap, a valley of time and forms to be filled out, procedures to be followed, the rooting out and hiring of staff. Until then, the issue of authority might be murky.

But Control preferred to think of her as neither patience nor grace. He preferred to think of her as an abstraction if not an obstruction. She had made him sit through an old orientation video about Area X, must have known it would be basic and out of date. She had already made clear that theirs would be a relationship based on animosity. From her side, at least.

Where were they found? he asked her now, when what he wanted to ask was why they hadnt been kept separate from one another. Because you lack the discipline, because your department has been going to the rats for a long time now? The rats are down there in the basement now, gnawing away.

Read the files, she said, making it clear he should have read them already.

Then she walked out of the room.

Leaving Control alone to contemplate the files on the table in front himand the three women behind the glass. Of course he had read the files, but he had hoped to duck past the assistant directors high guard, perhaps get her own thoughts. Hed read parts of her file, too, but still didnt have a sense of her except in terms of her reactions to him.

His first full day was only four hours old and he already felt contaminated by the dingy, bizarre building with its worn green carpet and the antiquated opinions of the other personnel he had met. A sense of diminishment suffused everything, even the sunlight that halfheartedly pushed through the high, rectangular windows. He was wearing his usual black blazer and dress slacks, a white shirt with a light blue tie, black shoes hed shined that morning. Now he wondered why hed bothered. He disliked having such thoughts because he wasnt above it allhe was in itbut they were hard to suppress.

Control took his time staring at the women, although their appearance told him little. They had all been given the same generic uniforms, vaguely army-issue but also vaguely janitorial. Their heads had all been shaved, as if they had suffered from some infestation, like lice, rather than something more inexplicable. Their faces all retained the same expression, or could be said not to retain any expression. Dont think of them by their names, hed told himself on the plane. Let them carry only the weight of their functions at first. Then fill in the rest. But Control had never been good at remaining aloof. He liked to burrow in, try to find a level where the details illuminated without overwhelming him.

The surveyor had been found at her house, sitting in a chair on the back patio.

The anthropologist had been found by her husband, knocking on the back door of his medical practice.

The biologist had been found in an overgrown lot several blocks from her house, staring at a crumbling brick wall.

Just like the members of the prior expedition, none of them had any recollection of how they had made their way back across the invisible border, out of Area X. None of them knew how they had evaded the blockades and fences and other impediments the military had thrown up around the border. None of them knew what had happened to the fourth member of their expeditionthe psychologist, who had, in fact, also been the director of the Southern Reach and overridden all objections to lead them, incognito.

None of them seemed to have much recollection of anything at all.

* * *

In the cafeteria that morning for breakfast, Control had looked out through the wall-to-wall paneled window into the courtyard with its profusion of stone tables, and then at the people shuffling through the linetoo few, it seemed, for such a large buildingand asked Grace, Why isnt everyone more excited to have the expedition back?

She had given him a long-suffering look, as if he were a particularly slow student in a remedial class. Why do you think, Control? Shed already managed to attach an ironic weight to his name, so he felt as if he were the sinker on one of his grandpas fly rods, destined for the silt near the bottom of dozens of lakes. We went through all this with the last expedition. They endured nine months of questions, and yet we never found out anything. And the whole time they were dying. How would that make you feel? Long months of disorientation, and then their deaths from a particularly malign form of cancer.

Hed nodded slowly in response. Of course, she was right. His father had died of cancer. He hadnt thought of how that might have affected the staff. To him, it was still an abstraction, just words in a report, read on the plane down.

Here, in the cafeteria, the carpet turned dark green, against which a stylized arrow pattern stood out in a light green, all of the arrows pointing toward the courtyard.

Why isnt there more light in here? he asked. Where does all the light go?

But Grace was done answering his questions for the moment.