Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

She had been at Crossbank only because Ray had taken her there—Ray had worked administration at Crossbank—and she had turned down several offers to transfer to Blind Lake, mostly because Ray wouldn’t countenance the move.
    Then she had sucked up her courage and initiated the divorce, after which she had accepted this Obs position, only to discover that Ray had also had himself seconded to Blind Lake. Not only that, but he moved west a month
before
Marguerite was scheduled to do so, establishing himself as a fixture at the Lake and probably sabotaging Marguerite’s reputation among the senior administrators.
    Still, she was doing the work she had trained for, longed for: the closest thing to field astrozoology the world had ever seen.
    She picked her way through the maze of support-staff desks, said hello to the clerks and secretaries and programmers, stopped by the staff kitchen to fill her souvenir Blind Lake lobster-motif cup with overcooked coffee and half-and-half, then closed herself into her office.
    Paper covered her desk, e-paper littered her virtual desktop. This was work pending, most of it the kind of procedural checkmarking that was necessary but frustratingly tedious and time-consuming. But she could clean up some of that later, at home.
    Today she wanted to spend time with the Subject. Raw time, realtime.
    She closed the blinds over the window, dimmed the sulfur-dot ceiling lights, and illuminated the monitor that comprised the entire west wall of the office.
    Good timing. UMa47/E’s seventeen-hour day had just begun.
     
     
    Morning, and the Subject stirred from his pallet on the warren’s stone floor.
    As usual, dozens of smaller creatures—parasites, symbiotes, or offspring—scuttled away from his body, where they had been nursing at the sleeping Subject’s exposed blood-nipples. These small animals, no larger than mice, many-legged and sinuously articulated, disappeared into gaps where the sandstone walls met the floor. Subject sat up, then stood to his full height.
    Estimates put the Subject’s height at roughly seven feet. Certainly he was an impressive specimen. (Marguerite used the masculine pronoun privately. She would never dare commit an assumption of gender in her official writing. The gender and reproductive strategies of the aliens were still wholly unresolved.) Subject was bipedal and bilaterally symmetrical, and from a great distance, in silhouette, he might have been mistaken for a human being. But there the resemblance ended.
    His skin—
not
an exoskeleton, as the ridiculous “lobster” nickname implied—was a tough, red-brown, pebble-textured integument. Because of this dense moisture-conserving skin, and because of the lung louvers exposed on his ventral surface and such details as the multiple jointing of his legs and arms and the tiny food-manipulating limbs that grew from the sides of his mandibles, some had speculated that Subject and his kindred might have evolved from an insect-like form. One scenario pictured a strain of invertebrates attaining the size and mobility of mammals by burying their notochord in a chitinous spinal column while losing their hard carapace in favor of a thick but lighter and more flexible skin. But little evidence had emerged for this or any other hypothesis. Exozoology was difficult enough; exopaleobiology was a daydream of a science.
    Subject was clearly visible in the light cast by the string of incandescent bulbs suspended across the ceiling. The bulbs were small, more like Christmas lights than household lamps, but otherwise they seemed ridiculously familiar,
were
familiar: the filaments were of ordinary tungsten, spectroscopy had revealed. Dumb, rugged technology. At intervals, other aboriginals would arrive to replace exhausted bulbs and check the insulated copper wire for gaps or irregularities. The city boasted an elaborate, reliable maintenance infrastructure.
    Subject did not dress nor did he eat; he had never been observed to eat in