Authority (Southern Reach #2)

by Jeff VanderMeer

When change seems inevitable and irreversible, can it be controlled to some degree? Can the self remain intact after the mind and body have been Ship-of-Theseus’d into something unrecognizable?

You cannot fight that with which you have become complicit. The best you can do is realize what’s happening and hope it’s not too late by the time you do.

Human beings are syncretic; some element of who and what we were will always remain in what we become. Entropy cannot be stopped, but new energy can be added to the system, and those who are caught up in the transformation can claim a degree of that power for themselves. And ultimately, syncretism means that we are carried forward regardless—if only in part. Still better than nothing.

“Never do something for just one reason,” his grandpa had told him more than once, and that, at least, Control had taken to heart.

“We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.”

It wasn’t true wilderness, was comfortingly close to civilization, but existed just enough apart to create a boundary. This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn’t want the fearful unknown of a “pristine wilderness.” They didn’t want a soulless artificial life, either.

The ant was poised on the back of her neck, unmoving for a moment. If he’d told her, she would have smacked it dead. Sometimes you had to keep things from people just so they wouldn’t do the first thing that came into their heads.

“If someone seems to have changed from one session to another, make sure you haven’t changed instead.”

“Did you know,” she replied, “that the phorus snail attaches the empty shells of other snails onto its own shell. As a result, the saltwater phorus snail is very clumsy. It staggers and tumbles about because of these empty shells, which offer camouflage, but at a price.”

“We don’t even understand how every organism on our planet works. Haven’t even identified them all yet. What if we just don’t have the language for it?” “Are we obsolete? I think not, I think not. But don’t ask the army’s opinion of that. A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”

How do you know if something is out of the ordinary when you don’t know if your instruments would register the progressions?

“There is some agreement among us now, reduced though we may be, that to analyze certain things, an object must allow itself to be analyzed, must agree to it. Even if this is just simply by way of some response, some reaction.”

The point of terroir is that no two areas are the same. That no two wines can be exactly the same because no combination of elements can be exactly the same. That certain varietals cannot occur in certain places. But it requires a deep understanding of a region to reach conclusions.”

He had not expected any of it to be beautiful, but it was beautiful.

What was true empathy anyway but sometimes turning away, leaving someone alone?

From the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe.

A girlfriend who had gleaned some sense of his job had once asked, “Why do you do it?”—meaning why serve such a clandestine purpose, a purpose that could not be shared, could not be revealed. He’d given his standard response, in a portentous manner, to poke fun at himself. To disguise the seriousness. “To know. To go beyond the veil.” Across the border. Even as Control said it, he had known that he was also telling her he didn’t mind leaving her there, alone, on the other side.

“Look—there are still some tadpoles,” she said, pointing, something approaching contentment on her face. He was beginning to understand that keeping her inside had been cruel.

You’re a hologram. You’re a construct. I’m going to throw chum overboard until you’re so blood-enraged you can’t swim properly.

“It was quite beautiful, quite peaceful in Area X.”

He understood why the biologist liked this part of the world, how you could lose yourself here in a hundred ways. How you could even become someone very different from who you thought you were. His thoughts became still for hours of his search. The frenetic need to analyze, to atomize the day or the week fell away from him—and with it the weight and buzz of human interaction and interference, which could no longer dwell inside his skull.