Absolution (Southern Reach #4)

by Jeff VanderMeer

None of the locals ever did get a straight answer about why the biologists had been sent, this much Old Jim knew from the files, because it had been ordered that no straight answer ever be given to “those people.”

he claimed to have seen a biologist “leap into the air and catch a dragonfly with his teeth,” so delicate this maneuver that the lithe biologist spit the insect unharmed into a jar, where it vibrated a confused blurred emerald, unsure of what had happened.

Already, almost from the start, the biologists were changing from something human in the eyes of the locals into something uncanny.

Perhaps they thought it an ironic joke of some kind, perhaps they, in their private moments around a campfire too hot for the season, understood how absurd it was to call dead a place so alive with insects and plants and fungi. Perhaps signs and symbols held no power over them.

Rogue might not understand the harm it could cause.

the bobbing headlamps of the biologists “well out to sea, so to speak,”

They took fine nylon nets and created capture zones for songbirds, often running aghast to the rescue of what they themselves had endangered, for a songbird was a terrible curse: unpredictable and angry and easy to harm.

There’s no reward in the risk.

“the null effect—to create a something from the nothing in the darkness, the mind betraying you every time.”

Man Boy Slim abruptly changed the subject to speak eloquently of the trials and tribulations of the summer tanagers headed north once more.

and a cognitive bifurcation between sinister and non-sinister explanations,

Yet how could they guard against what could enter the mind?

Because so much on that coast, humid and hot and closed off, decayed sprang to life decayed sprang to life. The eye, misled, did not know what was truly and forever dead. The eye did not know where to focus, could not tell what might next be resurrected.

What was a person, sometimes, but a wandering fire. But put the flames out, and what was left?

“Everything is between here and Bleakersville, Jim.”

“You’re a mighty stain on the world,” had been Jack’s call sign once, and Old Jim’s countersign had been, “And you’re a horrible mess.” Followed, in more dire circumstances, with, “Are you the one dying?” “No, I’m the one knifing you in the back.” A life around Jack eroded the wall between do and not do.

If they were going to ignore him, he’d be the fucking loudest ghost in the world. He’d be the ghost with the most, the one with the fucking megaphone shouting out the truth of the spirit world, which was that it was just the real world when no one listened to it.

what they called Area X wanted the past, too, and that was what freaked Lowry out so much he almost pissed himself: The casual way the Changeling’s molt told him that the world was gone already. That it might last a few more decades, but it was fucking toast, or most of it. That the fucking thing they fought in here, the way it had no central nervous system, no fucking sorcerer who came out from behind the curtain so Lowry could shoot him in the fucking eyeball … that this … thing wanted the past, too, in an automatic, thoughtless way. So that there could be no future but its future, no ability to adapt.

There, lost in the middle of an alien catastrophe, and yet still Lowry cared, still Lowry hoped to return to the normal, ordinary world, a rich man. That, he had decided.