Free Authority by Jeff VanderMeer Page B

needed to
     be at a remove. On the plane down to his new assignment, he’d had strange thoughts
     about the inhabitants of those coastal towns to either side of Area X being somehow
     mutated under the skin. Whole communities no longer what they once were, even though
     no one could tell this by looking. These were the kinds of thoughts you had to both
     keep at bay and fuel, if you could manage that trick. You couldn’t become devoured
     by them, but you had to heed them. Because in Control’s experience they reflected
     something from the subconscious, some instinct you didn’t want to go against. The
     fact was, the Southern Reach knew so little about Area X, even after three decades,
     that an irrational precaution might not be unreasonable.
    And Hedley was familiar to him. This was the city to which he and his friends had
     come for fun on weekends once some of them could drive, even knowing it was kind of
     a shithole, too, just not as small a shithole as where they lived. Landlocked and
     forlorn. His mother had even alluded to it the last time he’d seen her. She’d flown
     in at his old job up north, which had been gradually reduced from analysis and management
     to a more reactive and administrative role. Due to his own baggage, he guessed. Due
     to the fact it always started out well, but then, if he stayed too long … sometimes
     something happened, something he couldn’t quite define. He became too invested. He
     became too empathic, or less so. It confused him when it all went to shit because
     he couldn’t remember the point at which it had started to go bad—was still convinced
     he could get the formula right.
    But his mother had come from Central and they’d met in a conference room he knew was
     probably bugged. Had the Voice traveled with her, been set up in a saltwater tank
     in the adjoining room?
    It was cold outside and she wore a coat, an overcoat, and a scarf over a professional
     business suit and black high heels. She took off the overcoat and held it in her lap.
     But she didn’t take off the scarf. She looked as if she could surge from her chair
     at any moment and be out the door before he could snap his fingers. It had been five
     years since he’d seen her—predictably unreachable when he’d tried to get a message
     to her about her ex-husband’s funeral—but she had aged only a little bit, her brown
     hair just as fashion-model huge as ever and eyes a kind of calculating blue peering
     out from a face on which wrinkles had encroached only around the corners of the eyes
     and, hidden by the hair, across her forehead.
    She said, “It will be like coming home, John, won’t it?” Nudging him, wanting him
     to say it, as if he were a barnacle clinging to a rock and she were a seagull trying
     to convince him to release his grip. “You’ll be comfortable with the setting. You’ll
     be comfortable with the people.”
    He’d had to suppress anger mixed with ambivalence. How would she know whether she
     was right or wrong? She’d rarely been there, even though she’d had visitation rights.
     Just him and his father, Dad beginning to fall apart by then, to eat too much, to
     drink a little too much, during a succession of flings once the divorce was final …
     then redirecting himself to art no one wanted. Getting his house in order and going
     off to college had been a guilty relief, to not live in that atmosphere anymore.
    “And, comfortably situated in this world I know so well, what would I do?”
    She smiled at him. A genuine smile. He could tell the difference, having suffered
     so many times under the dull yellow glow of a fake one that tried to reheat his love
     for her. When she really smiled, when she meant it, his mother’s face took on a kind
     of beauty that surprised anyone who saw it, as if she’d been hiding her true self
     behind a mask. While people who were always sincere rarely got credit for that quality.
    “It’s a chance to do better,” she said.