Authority (Southern Reach #2)

by Jeff VanderMeer

“So long as you don’t tell people you don’t know something, they’ll probably think you know it.”

A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”

“As a physicist, what do you do when you’re faced by something that doesn’t care what you do and isn’t affected by your actions? Then you start thinking about dark energy and you go a little nuts.”

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

The truth was, if the man who looked like the high school quarterback had responded by turning into something monstrous and torn him out into the night, part of Control wouldn’t have minded because he would have been closer to the truth about Area X, and even if the truth was a fucking maw, a fanged maw that stank like a cave full of putrefying corpses, that was still closer than he was now.

Control reached out for the large double doors. Reached for the handle, missed it, tried again. But there were no doors where there had always been doors before. Only wall. And the wall was soft and breathing under the touch of his hand. He was screaming, he thought, but from somewhere deep beneath the sea.

Here it was all cliffs and sharp curves and the sense that you might dive off into the sky around each upward bend. That the little thought you always overrode—to stop turning the wheel to match the road—might not be stifled this time and you’d gun the engine and push on into the air, and snuff out every secret thing you knew and didn’t want to know.