Authority by Jeff VanderMeer
“Are you here to take me back?” she said. “Because I’m not going back.”
“No, I’m not,” he said, and realized it was true. Whatever impulse in that regard that might have lived within him had been snuffed out. “The Southern Reach doesn’t exist anymore,” he admitted. “There may not be anything we’d recognize out there very soon.”
There in the twilight, no birds now overhead, the smoke fading into the dusk, the raucous surf the only thing that seemed alive besides the two of them.
“How did you know I’d be here?” she asked, deep in thought. “I was so careful.”
“I didn’t. I guessed.” Somehow his face must have given something of his thoughts away, because she looked a little startled, a little wrong-footed.
“Why would you do that if you don’t want to take me back?”
“I don’t know.” To try to save the world? To save her? To save himself? But he did know. Nothing had changed since the interrogation room. Not really.
When he looked up again, she was saying, “I thought I could just stay here. Build the life she didn’t build, that she messed up. But I can’t. It’s clear I can’t. Someone will be after me no matter what I do.”
Now that the sun had truly set there was a glimmer of a light dimly familiar to him coming from deep in the lagoon below.
“What’s down there?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Said too quickly.
“Nothing? It’s too late to lie—there’s no point.” It was never too late to lie, to obscure, to delay. Control knew this too well.
But she didn’t. She hesitated, then said, “I was sick when I got here. One night I came out here and I had a dizzy spell and I was unconscious for a while. I woke up with the tide rising and I wasn’t sick anymore. The brightness was done with me. But there was something at the bottom of that hole.”
“What?” Although he thought he already knew. The swirling light was too familiar, despite being broken by ripples and the thickness of the water.
“It’s a way into Area X, I think,” she said, and now she looked scared. “I think I brought it with me.” He didn’t know how she knew this. He thought it might be true, remembered what Cheney had said about how difficult and enervating that travel could be. Whitby’s horrible description of the border.
Now that the darkness was complete and she was just a shadow standing in front of him, they could both see the lights farther down the coast. Bobbing. Floating. Trudging. Dozens of them. And so far down below, that glimmer, that hint of an impossible light.
“I don’t think we have much longer,” he said. “I don’t even know if we have the night. We’ll have to find a place to hide.” Not wanting to think about the other possibility. Not wanting even a hint of it in his thoughts to invade her thoughts.
“It will be high tide soon,” she said. “You have to get off the rocks.” But not her? Even though he could not see her face, he knew the expression that must be etched there.
“We both have to get off the rocks.” He wasn’t sure he meant it. He could hear the helicopter now, could hear boats again, too. But if she was unhinged, if she was lying, if she didn’t actually know anything at all …
“I want to know who I am,” she said. “I can’t do that here. I can’t do that locked up in a cell.”
“I know who you are—it’s all in my head, your file. I can give you that.”
“I’m not going back,” she said. “I’m never going back.”
“It’s dangerous,” he told her, pleading, as if she didn’t know. “It’s unproven. We don’t know where you’ll come out.” The hole was so deep and so jagged, and the water beginning to churn from the waves. He had seen wonders and he had seen terrible things. He had to believe that this was one more and that it was true and that it was knowable.
Her stare took the measure of him. She was done talking. She threw her gun away. She dove into the water, down deep.
He took one last look back at the world he knew. He took one huge gulp of it, every bit of it he could see, every bit of it he could remember.
“Jump,” said a voice in his head.
Control jumped.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my editor, Sean McDonald, and everyone at FSG for their expertise, passion, sense of humor, and, above all, patience. Thanks as well to everyone at the Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Canada, Blackstone Audiobooks, and my foreign-language publishers. Thanks to my agent, Sally Harding, and my wife, Ann, for helping me find the mental space to write these novels. Thanks to Black Dog Café, All Saints Café, the Fermentation Lounge, San Luis Mission Park, and Shared Worlds for giving me physical spaces to work in. Thanks to Eric Schaller, Geoffrey A. Landis, and Ashley Davis for science discussions. Finally, thanks to my first readers for their help, including Brian Evenson, Tessa Kum, Greg Bossert, Jeremy Zerfoss, Karin Tidbeck, Craig Gitney, Berit Ellingsen, and Adam Mills.
ALSO BY JEFF VANDERMEER
FICTION
Annihilation
Dradin, in Love
The Book of Lost Places (stories)
Veniss Underground
City of Saints and Madmen
Secret Life (stories)
Shriek: An Afterword
The Situation
Finch
The Third Bear (stories)
NONFICTION
Why Should I Cut Your Throat?
Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer
Monstrous Creatures
The Steampunk Bible: An Illustrated Guide to the World of Imaginary Airships, Corsets and Goggles, Mad Scientists, and Strange Literature
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and multiple year’s-best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian, among others. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Copyright © 2014 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.
All rights reserved
First edition, 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
VanderMeer, Jeff.
Authority: a novel / Jeff VanderMeer. — First Edition.
pages cm. — (The Southern Reach trilogy; 2)
ISBN 978-0-374-10410-8 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-374-71078-1 (ebook) I. Title.
PS3572.A4284 A93 2014
813'.54—dc23
2013041337
www.fsgoriginals.com
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All three volumes of
Jeff VanderMeer’s
Southern Reach trilogy
will be published in 2014
ANNIHILATION
February 2014
AUTHORITY
May 2014
ACCEPTANCE
September 2014
FSG ORIGINALS
www.fsgoriginals.com
Jeff VanderMeer, Authority