Authority

Authority Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Authority Read Online Free PDF
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
kid soon revealed as just a brief moment set against a
     landscape of unhappiness. Not unique: the kind of depressingly familiar painting you’d
     find in a seaside antique store but never buy.
    The silence was punctuated by arguments, a silence created not just by the secrets
     she carried with her but by those she could not divulge, and, Control realized as
     an adult, by her inner reserve, which after a time could not be bridged. Her absences
     tore at his father, and by the time Control was ten, that was the subtext and sometimes
     the transcript of their dispute: She was killing his art and that wasn’t fair, even
     though the art scene had moved on and what his father did was expensive and required
     patrons or grants to sustain.
    But still his father would sit there with his schematics, his plans for new work,
     spread out around him like evidence when she came back between field assignments.
     She bore the recrimination, Control remembered, with calm and a chilly, aloof compassion.
     She was the unstoppable force that came blowing in—not there, there—with presents
     bought at the last minute in far-off airports and an innocent-sounding cover story
     about what she’d been up to, or a less innocent story that Control realized years
     later, when faced with a similar dilemma, had been coming to them from a time delay.
     Something declassified she could now share but that had happened to her long ago.
     The stories, and the aloofness, agitated his father, but the compassion infuriated
     him. He could not read it as anything other than condescending. How can you tell if
     a streak of light across the sky is sincere?
    When they divorced, Control went south to live with his dad, who became embedded in
     a community that felt comfortable because it included some of his relatives and fed
     his artistic ambitions even as his bank account starved. Control could remember the
     shock when he realized how much noise and motion and color could be found in someone’s
     house, once they’d moved. How suddenly he was part of a larger family.
    Yet during those hot summers in that small town not very far from the Southern Reach,
     as a thirteen-year-old with a rusty bike and a few loyal friends, Control kept thinking
     about his mother, out in the field, in some far-off city or country: that distant
     streak of light that sometimes came down out of the night sky and materialized on
     their doorstep as a human being. Exactly in the same way as when they’d been together
     as a family.
    One day, he believed, she would take him with her, and he would become the streak
     of light, have secrets no one else could ever know.
    *   *   *
    Some rumors about Area X were elaborate and in their complexity seemed to Control
     like schools of the most deadly and yet voluminous jellyfish at the aquarium. As you
     watched them, in their undulating progress, they seemed both real and unreal framed
     against the stark blue of the water. Invasion site. Secret government experiments. How could such an organism actually exist? The simple ones that echoed the official
     story—variations on a human-made ecological disaster area—were by contrast so commonplace
     these days that they hardly registered or elicited curiosity. The petting-zoo versions
     that ate out of your hand.
    But the truth did have a simple quality to it: About thirty-two years ago, along a
     remote southern stretch known by some as as the “forgotten coast,” an Event had occurred
     that began to transform the landscape and simultaneously caused an invisible border
     or wall to appear. A kind of ghost or “permeable pre-border manifestation” as the
     files put it—light as fog, almost invisible except for a flickering quality—had quickly
     emanated out in all directions from an unknown epicenter and then suddenly stopped
     at its current impenetrable limits.
    Since then, the Southern Reach had been established and sought to investigate what
     had occurred, with
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