Blind Lake Read online

  Blind Lake—the lake, not the town—was a muddy swamp between two low hills, full of cattails and wild frogs and snapping turtles, herons and Canada geese and stagnant green water. Mr. Fleischer had told the class about it. It was called a lake but it was actually a wetland, ancient water trapped in the stony, porous land.

  So Blind Lake, the lake, wasn’t really a lake. Tess thought that made a certain kind of sense, because Blind-Lake-the-town wasn’t really a town, either. It was a National Laboratory, built here in its entirety, like a movie set, by the Department of Energy. That’s why the houses and shops and office buildings were so sparse and so new and why they began and ended so abruptly in a vast and empty land.

  Tess walked by herself. She was eleven years old and she hadn’t made any friends at school yet, though Edie Jerundt (whom the other children called Edie Grunt) at least spoke to her once in a while. But Edie walked the other way home, toward the mallway and the administrative buildings; the tall cooling towers of Eyeball Alley, far away to the west, were Tessa’s landmark. Tess—when she was with her father, at least, which was one week out of four—lived in one of a row of pastel-colored town houses pressed up one against the next like soldiers at attention. Her mother’s house, though even farther west, was almost identical.

  She had stayed twenty minutes late at school, helping Mr. Fleischer clean the boards. Mr. Fleischer, a man with a white-brown beard and a bald head, had asked her a lot of questions about herself—what she did when she was home, how she got along with her parents, whether she liked school. Tess had answered dutifully but unenthusiastically, and after a while Mr. Fleischer had frowned and stopped asking. Which was perfectly okay with her.

  Did she like school? It was too early to tell. School had hardly started. The weather wasn’t even cool yet, though the wind that brushed the sidewalk and flapped her skirt had a touch of autumn in it. You couldn’t tell about school, Tess thought, until at least Halloween, and Halloween was still a couple of weeks away. By then you knew how it would be—for better or worse.

  She didn’t even know if she liked Blind Lake, the town-not-a-town near the lake-not-a-lake. Crossbank had been better, in some ways. More trees. Autumn colors. Snow on the hills in winter. Her mother had said there would be snow here, too, and plenty of it, and maybe this time she would make friends to go sledding with. But the hills seemed too low and gentle for proper sledding. Trees were sparse here, mostly saplings planted around the science buildings and the shopping concourse. Like trees imperfectly wished-for, Tess thought. She passed some of these on the lawns of the town houses: trees so new they were still staked to the earth, still trying to take root.

  She came to her father’s small house and saw that his car wasn’t in the driveway. He wasn’t home yet. That was unusual but not unheard-of. Tess used her own key to let herself inside. The house was ruthlessly tidy and the furniture still smelled new, welcoming but somehow unfamiliar. She went to the narrow, gleaming kitchen and poured herself a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator. Some of the juice spilled over the lip of the glass. Tess thought about her father, then took a paper towel and wiped the tiled counter clean. She deposited the balled-up evidence in the bin under the sink.

  She carried her drink and a napkin into the living room, stretched out on the sofa, and whispered “Video” to turn on the entertainment panel. But there was nothing except static on any of the cartoon channels. The house had saved a couple of programs for her from yesterday, but they were dull ones—King Koala, The Unbelievable Baxters—and she wasn’t in the mood. She guessed there must be something wrong with the satellite, because there was nothing else to see, either…only the closed-circuit feed from the downloads, Lobster City nighttime, the Subject motionless and probably asleep under a naked electric light.

  Her phone buzzed deep in her schoolbag on the floor at her feet, and Tess sat up abruptly. A mouthful of orange juice went down the wrong way. She fumbled the phone out and answered, hoarsely.

  “Tessa, is that you?”

  Her father.

  She nodded, which was useless, then said, “Yes.”

  “Everything okay?”

  She assured him she was fine. Daddy always wanted to know whether she was okay. Some days he asked more than once. To Tess it always sounded like: What’s the matter with you? Is something wrong? She never had an answer for that.

  “I’m working late tonight,” he said. “I can’t take you to Mom’s. You’ll have to phone her and have her pick you up.”

  Tonight was the night she changed over to her mother’s house. Tess had a room in each house. A small, neat one at Daddy’s. A big messy one at her mother’s. She would have to pack her school stuff for the change. “Can’t you call her?”

  “It’s better if you do it, sweetie.”

  She nodded again; then said, “All right.”

  “Love you.”

  “You too.”

  “Keep your chin up.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll call you every day, Tess.”

  “Okay,” Tess said.

  “Don’t forget to call your mother.”

  “I won’t.”

  Dutiful, and undistracted by the blank video panel, Tess said good-bye, then whispered “Mom” at the phone. There was an interlude of insect sounds, then her mother picked up.

  “Daddy says you have to come get me.”

  “He does, huh? Well—are you at his place?”

  Tess liked the sound of her mother’s voice even over the phone. If her father’s voice was distant thunder, her mother’s was summer rain—soothing, even when it was sad.

  “He’s working late,” Tess explained.

  “According to the agreement he’s supposed to bring you. I have work of my own to finish up.”

  “I guess I can walk,” Tess said, though she made no effort to conceal her disappointment. It would take her a good half hour to walk to her mom’s place, past the coffee shop and the teenagers who gathered there and who had taken to calling her Spaz because of the way she jerked her head to avoid their eyes.

  “No,” her mother said, “it’s getting late…. Just have your stuff together. I’ll be there in, oh, I guess twenty minutes or so. ’Kay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe we’ll get takeout on the way home.”

  “Great.”

  After she deposited the phone back in her schoolbag, Tess made sure she had all the things she needed to bring to Mom’s: her notebooks and texts, of course, but also her favorite shirts and blouses, her plush monkey, her plug-in library, her personal night-light. That didn’t take long. Then, restless, she put her stuff in the foyer and went out back to watch the sunset.

  The nice thing about her Dad’s place was the view from the yard. It wasn’t a spectacular view, no mountains or valleys or anything as dramatic as that, but it looked out over a long stretch of undeveloped meadowland sloping toward the road into Constance. The sky seemed immensely large from here, free of any borders except the fence that encircled Blind Lake. Birds lived in the high grass beyond the neatly trimmed lawn, and sometimes they rose up into the huge clean sky in flocks. Tess didn’t know what kind of birds they were—she didn’t have a name for them. They were many and small and brown, and when they folded their wings they flew like darts.

  The only man-made things Tess could see from her father’s backyard (as long as she faced away from the mechanical line of the adjoining town houses) were the fence, the road that led across the rolling hills to Constance, and the guardhouse at the gate. She watched a bus driving away from Blind Lake, one of the buses that carried day workers home to their houses far away. In the fading dusk the windows of the bus were warm with yellow light.

  Tess stood silently watching. If her father were here, he would have called her inside by now. Tess knew that she sometimes stared at things too long. At clouds or hills or, when she was in school, out the spotless window to the soccer field where white goalposts clocked the hours with their sha
dows. Until someone called her back to the world. Wake up, Tessa! Pay attention! As if she had been asleep. As if she had not been paying attention.

  Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.

  The yellow-windowed bus stopped at the distant guardhouse. A second bus pulled up behind it. Tess waited for the guard to wave the buses through. Almost a thousand people worked days at Blind Lake—clerks and support staff and the people who ran the stores—and the guard always waved the buses through.

  Tonight, however, the buses stopped and stayed stopped.

  Tess, the wind said. Which made Tess think about Mirror Girl and all the trouble that had caused her back at Crossbank….

  “Tess!”

  She jumped involuntarily. The voice had been real. Her mother’s.

  “Sorry if I scared you—”

  “It’s okay.” Tess turned and was pleased and reassured by the sight of her mother coming across the broad, neat lawn. Tessa’s mother was a tall woman, her long brown hair somewhat askew around her face, her ankle-length skirt flirting with the wind. The setting sun turned everything faintly red: the sky, the town houses, her mother’s face.

  “You have your stuff?”

  “At the front door.”

  Tess saw her mother glance away toward the distant road. Another bus had come up behind the first two, and now all three were motionless at the gate.

  Tess said, “Is something wrong with the fence?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sure it’s nothing.” But she frowned and stood a moment, watching. Then she took Tessa’s hand. “Let’s go home, shall we?”

  Tess nodded, suddenly eager for the warmth of her mother’s house, for the smell of fresh laundry and takeout food, for the reassurance of small enclosed spaces.

  Three

  The campus of the Blind Lake National Laboratory, its scientific and administrative offices and supply and retail outlets, had been constructed on the almost imperceptibly gentle slope of an ancient glacial moraine. From the air it resembled any newly built suburban community, peculiar only in its isolation, served by a single two-lane road. At its center, adjacent to a partially enclosed retail strip called the mallway, was an O-shaped ring of ten-story concrete buildings, Hubble Plaza. This was where the interpretive work of the Blind Lake facility was done. The Plaza, with its narrow escutcheon windows and its grassy enclosed park, was the brain of the installation. The beating heart was a mile east of the inhabited town, in an underground structure from which two massive cooling towers rose into the brittle autumn air.

  This building was officially the Blind Lake Computational Array, but it was commonly called Eyeball Alley, or the Alley, or simply the Eye.

  Charlie Grogan had been chief engineer at the Alley since it had been powered up five years ago. Tonight he was working late, if you could call it “working late” when it was his regular custom to stick around well after the day shift had gone home. There was, of course, a night shift, and a supervising engineer to go with it (Anne Costigan, whose abilities he had come to respect). But it was precisely this relaxation of his official vigilance that made the after-hours shift rewarding. He could catch up on paperwork without risk of interruption. Better, he could go down into the hardware rooms or the O/BEC gallery and hang out with the hands-on guys in a non-official capacity. He enjoyed spending time in the works.

  Tonight he finished filling out a requisition form and told his server to transmit it in the morning. He checked his watch. Ten to nine. The guys in the stacks were due for a break. Just a walk-through, Charlie promised himself. Then home to feed Boomer, his elderly hound, and maybe catch some downloads before bed. The eternal cycle.

  He left his office and rode an elevator two levels deeper into the underground. The Alley was quiet at night. He passed no one in the sea-green lower-level hallways. There was only the sound of his footsteps and the chime of the transponder in his ID tag as he crossed into restricted areas. Mirrored doors offered him unwelcome reminders of his age—he had turned forty-eight last January—the creeping curvature of his spine, the paunch that ballooned over his belt buckle. A fringe of gray hair stood out against his dark skin. His father had been a light-skinned Englishman, taken by cancer twenty years ago; his mother, a Sudanese immigrant and Sufi scholar, had survived him by less than a year. Charlie resembled his father more than ever these days.

  He detoured through the O/BEC gallery—though, like “staying late,” it was probably wrong to call it a “detour.” This was one of the stations of his habitual nightly walk.

  The gallery was constructed like a surgical theater without the student seating, a ring-shaped tiled hallway fitted with sealed glass windows on its inner perimeter. The windows overlooked a circular chamber forty feet deep. At the bottom of the chamber, serviced by columns of supercooled gases and bundles of light pipes and monitoring devices, were the three huge O/BEC platens. Inside each tubular platen were rank upon rank of microscopically thin gallium arsenide wafers, bathed in helium at a temperature of -451° Fahrenheit.

  Charlie was an engineer, not a physicist. He could maintain the machines that maintained the platens, but his understanding of the fundamental process at work was partial at best. A “Bose-Einstein Condensate” was a highly ordered state of matter, and the BECs created linked electron particles called “excitons,” and excitons functioned as quantum gates to form an absurdly fast and subtle computing device. Anything beyond that Reader’s Digest sketch he left to the intense and socially awkward young theorists and graduate students who cycled through Eyeball Alley as if it were a summer resort. Charlie’s job was more practical: he kept it all working, kept it cool, kept the I/O smooth, fixed little problems before they became big problems.

  Tonight there were four maintenance guys in sterile suits down in the plumbing, probably Stitch and Chavez and the new hands cycling through from Berkeley Lab. More people than usual…he wondered if Anne Costigan had ordered some unscheduled work.

  He walked the circumference of the gallery once, then followed another corridor past the solid-state physics labs to the data control room. Charlie knew as soon as he stepped inside that something was up.

  Nobody was on break. The five night engineers were all at their posts, feverishly scrolling systems reports. Only Chip McCullough looked up as Charlie came through door, and all he got from Chip was a glum nod. All this, in the few hours since his shift had officially ended.

  Anne Costigan was here, too. She glanced up from her handheld monitor and saw him standing by the door. She held up a finger to the junior supervisor—one second—and strode over. Charlie liked this about Anne, her economy of motion, every gesture purposeful. “Christ, Charlie,” she said, “don’t you ever sleep?”

  “Just on my way out.”

  “Through the stacks?”

  “Came for coffee, actually. But you guys are busy.”

  “We had a big spike through the I/O’s an hour ago.”

  “Power spike?”

  “No, an activity spike. The switchboard lit up, if you know what I mean. Like somebody fed the Eye a dose of amphetamine.”

  “It happens,” Charlie said. “You remember last winter—”

  “This one’s a little unusual. It settled down, but we’re doing a systems check.”

  “Still making data?”

  “Oh, yeah, nothing bad, just a blip, but…you know.”

  He understood. The Eye and all its interrelated systems hovered perpetually on the brink of chaos. Like a harnessed wild animal, what the Eye needed was not maintenance so much as grooming and reassurance. In its complexity and unpredictability, it was very nearly a living thing. Those who understood that—and Anne was one of them—had learned to pay attention to the small things.

  “You want to stick around, lend a hand?”

  Yes, he did, b
ut Anne didn’t need him; he would only get underfoot. He said, “I have a dog to feed.”

  “Tell Boomer hello for me.” She was clearly anxious to get back to work.

  “Will do. Anything I can get you?”

  “Not unless you have a spare phone. Abe’s out on the coast again.” Abe was Anne’s husband, a financial consultant; he made it to Blind Lake maybe one month out of three. The marriage was troubled. “Local calls are okay, but I can’t get through to L.A. for some reason.”

  “You want to borrow mine?”

  “No, not really; I tried Tommy Gupta’s; his didn’t work either. Something wrong with the satellites, I guess.”

  Strange, Charlie thought, how everything seemed to have gone just slightly askew tonight.

  For the fifth time in the last hour, Sue Sampel told her boss she hadn’t been able to put his call through to the Department of Energy in Washington. Each time, Ray looked at her as if she had personally fucked up the system.

  She was working way late, and so, it seemed, was everybody else in Hubble Plaza. Something was up. Sue couldn’t figure out what. She was Ray Scutter’s executive assistant, but Ray (typically) hadn’t shared any information with her. All she knew was that he wanted to talk to D.C., and the telecoms weren’t cooperating.

  Obviously it wasn’t Sue’s fault—she knew how to punch a number, for God’s sake—but that didn’t prevent Ray from glaring at her every time he asked. And Ray Scutter packed a killer glare. Big eyes with pinpoint pupils, bushy eyebrows, flecks of gray in his goatee…she had once thought he might be handsome, if not for his receding chin and slightly pouchy cheeks. But she didn’t entertain that thought anymore. What was the expression? Handsome is as handsome does. Ray didn’t do handsome.

  He turned away from her desk and stalked back to his inner office. “Naturally,” he growled over his shoulder, “I’ll be blamed for this somehow.”

  Y3, Sue thought wearily. It had become her mantra in the months she’d been working for Ray Scutter. Y3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ray was surrounded by incompetents. Ray was being ignored by the research staff. Ray was thwarted at every turn. Yeah, yeah, yeah.