Robert Charles Wilson - Blind Lake

Robert Charles Wilson, says The New York Times, writes superior science fiction thrillers. His Darwinia won Canadas Aurora Award; his most recent novel, The Chronoliths, won the prestigious John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Now he tells a gripping tale of alien contact and human love in a mysterious but hopeful universe.

At Blind Lake, a large federal research installation in northern Minnesota, scientists are using a technology they barely understand to watch everyday life in a city of lobster like aliens upon a distant planet. They cant contact the aliens in any way or understand their language. All they can do is watch.

Then, without warning, a military cordon is imposed on the Blind Lake site. All communication with the outside world is cut off. Food and other vital supplies are delivered by remote control. No one knows why.

The scientists, nevertheless, go on with their research. Among them are Nerissa Iverson and the man she recently divorced, Raymond Scutter. They continue to work together despite the difficult conditions and the bitterness between them. Ray believes their efforts are doomed; that culture is arbitrary, and the aliens will forever be an enigma.

Nerissa believes there is a commonality of sentient thought, and that our failure to understand is our own ignorance, not a fact of nature. The behavior of the alien she has been tracking seems to be developing an elusive narrative logicand she comes to feel that the alien is somehow, impossibly, aware of the projects observers.

But her time is running out. Ray is turning hostile, stalking her. The military cordon is tightening. Understanding had better come soon

Telescopes of surpassing power revealed to her the unrevealed depths of the cosmos on polished mirrors of floating mercury. The dead worlds of Sirius, the half-formed worlds of Arcturus, the rich but lifeless worlds whirling around vast Antares and Betelgeusethese she studied, without avail.

Polton Cross,

Wings Across the Cosmos, 1938

It could end at any time.

Chris Carmody rolled into a zone of warmth in an unfamiliar bed: a depression in the cotton sheets where someone had lately been. Someone: her name was elusive, still lost in layers of sleep. But he craved the warmth of her recent presence, the author of this lingering heat. He pictured a face, benevolent and smiling and a little bit walleyed. He wondered where she had gone.

It had been a while since he had shared anyones bed. Strange how what he relished, as much as anything, was the heat she left behind. This space he entered in her absence.

It could end at any time. Had he dreamed the words? No. He had written them in his notebook three weeks ago, transcribing a comment from a grad student he had met in the cafeteria at Crossbank half a continent away. Were doing amazing work, and theres a kind of rush, knowing it could end at any time

Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. Across this small bedroom, the woman with whom he had slept was wrangling herself into a pair of pantyhose. She caught his glance and smiled cautiously. Hey, baby, she said. Not to rush you, but didnt you say you had an appointment somewhere?

Memory caught up with him. Her name was Lacy. No surname offered. She was a waitress at the local Dennys. Her hair was red and long in the current style and she was at least ten years younger than Chris. She had read his book. Or claimed to have read it. Or at least to have heard of it. She suffered from a lazy eye, which gave her a look of constant abstraction. While he blinked away sleep, she shrugged a sleeveless dress over freckled shoulders.

Lacy wasnt much of a housekeeper. He noted a scattering of dead flies on the sunny windowsill. The makeup mirror on the side table, where, the night before, she had razored out skinny, precise lines of cocaine. A fifty-dollar bill lay on the carpet beside the bed, rolled so tightly it resembled a budding palm leaf or some bizarre stick-insect, a rust spot of dried blood on one end.

It was early fall, still warm in Constance, Minnesota. Balmy air turned gauzy curtains. Chris relished the sense of being in a place he had never been and to which he would in all likelihood never return.

Youre actually going to the Lake today, huh?

He reclaimed his watch from a stack of the print edition of People on the nightstand. He had an hour to make his connection. Actually going there. He wondered how much he had said to this woman last night.

You want breakfast?

I dont think I have time.

She seemed relieved. Thats okay. It was really exciting meeting you. I know lots of people who work at the Lake but theyre mostly support staff or retail. I never met anybody who was in on the big stuff.

Im not in on the big stuff. Im just a journalist.

Dont undersell yourself.

I had a good time too.

Youre sweet, she said. You want to shower? Im done in the bathroom.

The water pressure was feeble and he spotted a dead cockroach in the soap dish, but the shower gave him time to adjust his expectations. To ramp up whatever was left of his professional pride. He borrowed one of her pink disposable leg razors and shaved the ghostly image of himself in the bathroom mirror. He was dressed and at the door by the time she was settling down to her own breakfast, eggs and juice in the apartments tiny kitchenette. She worked evenings; mornings and afternoons were her downtime. A tiny video panel on the kitchen table played an interminable daytime drama at half-volume. Lacy stood and hugged him. Her head came up as far as his breastbone. In the gentle embrace there was an acknowledgment that they meant essentially nothing to each other, nothing more than an evenings whim recklessly indulged.

Let me know how it goes, she said. If youre back this way.

He promised politely. But he wouldnt be back this way.

He reclaimed his luggage from the Marriott, where Visions East had thoughtfully but needlessly booked him a room, and caught up to Elaine Coster and Sebastian Vogel in the lobby.

Youre late, Elaine told him.

He checked his watch. Not by much.

Would it kill you to be punctual once in a while?

Punctuality is the thief of time, Elaine.

Who said that?

Oscar Wilde.

Oh, theres a great role model for you.

Elaine was forty-nine years old and immaculate in her safari clothes, a digital imager clipped to her breast pocket and a notebook microphone dangling from the left arm of her zirconium-encrusted sunglasses like a stray hair. Her expression was stern. Elaine was a working science journalist almost twenty years Chriss elder, highly respected in a field where he himself was lately regarded with a certain disdain. He liked Elaine, and her work was top-notch, and so he forgave her tendency to address him the way a grade-school teacher might address the kid who planted the whoopee cushion.

Sebastian Vogel, the third member of the Visions East expeditionary force, stood silently a few feet away. Sebastian wasnt really a journalist at all; he was a retired professor of theology from Wesleyan University who had written one of those books that becomes an inexplicable bestsellerGod & the Quantum Vacuum, it was called, and it was that ampersand in place of the conventional and, Chris suspected, that had made it acceptably fashionable, fashionably elliptical. The magazine had wanted a spiritual take on the New Astronomy, to complement Elaines rigorous science and Chriss so-called human angle. But Sebastian, who might be brilliant, was also terminally soft-spoken. He wore a beard that obscured his mouth, which Chris took as emblematic: the words that found their way out were sparse and generally difficult to interpret.