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

his sleeping quarters. He did pause to evacuate liquid waste over an open drain in the floor. The thick greenish liquid cascaded from a cloacal gap in his lower abdomen. There was, of course, no sound to accompany the image, but Marguerite’s imagination supplied the splash and gurgle.
    She reminded herself that these events had happened half a century ago. It lessened her sense of invasion. She would never speak to this creature, never interact with him in any way; this image, however mysteriously it had traveled, was in all likelihood limited to the speed of light. The parent star 47 Ursa Majoris was fifty-one light years from Earth.
    (And by the same token, if anyone elsewhere in the galaxy were watching
her
, she would be safely in her grave long before her observers could attempt to interpret her bathroom functions.)
    Subject left his warren without preamble. His two-legged gait looked awkward by human standards, but it covered ground efficiently. This part of the day could be interesting. Subject did essentially the same thing every morning—walked to the factory where he assembled machine parts—but he seldom took the same route to work. Enough evidence had accumulated to suggest that this was a cultural or biological imperative (i.e., most others did the same thing), perhaps out of an atavistic instinct to avoid predation. Too bad; Marguerite would have preferred to think of it as Subject’s idiosyncrasy, an individual preference, a discernible choice.
    In any case, the observation program tracked him precisely and predictably. When Subject moved, the apparent point of view (the “virtual camera,” folks in Image Acquisition called it) followed him at a constant distance. Subject was centered in the screen but his world was visible around him as he traveled. He strode with others of his kind through the incandescently lit corridors of his warren, everyone moving in the same direction, as if the passages were one-way streets, though their “wayness” varied day by day. In a crowd, she had learned to identify Subject not just by the centrality of his image (he was sometimes, briefly, obscured from view) but by the vivid orange-yellow of his dorsal-cranial crest and the rounded contour of his shoulders.
    She glimpsed daylight as he passed balconies and rotundas that opened to the air. The sky today was powdery blue. Lobsterville got most of its rain during the mild winter season, and it was high summer now, the very middle of the southern latitude’s long dalliance with the sun. The planet possessed a gentle axial tilt but a very lengthy orbit around its star: it would be summer in the Subject’s city for another two terrestrial years.
    In summer it was more often dust than rain clouds that darkened the sky. UMa47/E was drier than the Earth; like Mars, it could generate vast electrically charged dust storms. There was always fine dust suspended in the atmosphere, and the skies were never as clear as a terrestrial sky. But today was calm, Marguerite surmised. Warm, judging by the flourish of the Subject’s cooling cilia. The colored-chalk blue of the sky was as good as it got. (Marguerite blinked and imagined Arizona or New Mexico, cliffside pueblos in a still noon.)
    At last the Subject emerged onto one of the broad exterior ways that wound down to the floor of the city.
    The original high-altitude survey had identified no less than forty of these large stone cities, and twice as many significantly smaller ones, scattered across the surface of UMa47/E. Marguerite kept a globe of Subject’s planet on her desk, the cities marked and named only by their latitude and longitude. (No one wanted to give them proper names for fear of seeming arrogant or anthropocentric—“Lobsterville” was only a nickname, and you learned not to use it in front of administrators or the press.)
    Maybe it was even an error of attribution to call this community a “city.” But it looked like a city to Marguerite, and she loved the