of the Tower or the Crawler. Perhaps
the Crawler depended upon it, and it had some subsidiary benefit to the Tower. Or
vice versa. Perhaps words didn’t matter because it was a process of fertilization , only completed when the entire left-hand wall of the Tower had a line of words running
along its length.
Despite my attempt to sustain the aria in my head, I experienced a jarring return
to reality as I worked through these possibilities. Suddenly I was just a person trudging
across a natural landscape of a type I had seen before. There were too many variables,
not enough data, and I was making some base assumptions that might not be true. For
one thing, in all of this I assumed that neither Crawler nor Tower was intelligent,
in the sense of possessing free will . My procreation theory would still apply in such a widening context, but there were
other possibilities. The role of ritual, for example, in certain cultures and societies.
How I longed for access to the anthropologist’s mind now, even though in studying
social insects I had gained some insight into the same areas of scientific endeavor.
And if not ritual, I was back to the purposes of communication, this time in a conscious
sense, not a biological one. What could the words on the wall communicate to the Tower?
I had to assume, or thought I did, that the Crawler didn’t just live in the Tower—it
went far afield to gather the words, and it had to assimilate them, even if it didn’t
understand them, before it came back to the Tower. The Crawler had to in a sense memorize them, which was a form of absorption. The strings of sentences on the Tower’s walls
could be evidence brought back by the Crawler to be analyzed by the Tower.
But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental.
You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in
your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan. I had to leave it there, compartmentalized, until I could
write it all down, and seeing it on the page, begin to divine the true meaning. And
now the lighthouse had finally gotten larger on the horizon. This presence weighed
on me as I realized that the surveyor had been correct about at least one thing. Anyone
within the lighthouse would see me coming for miles. Then, too, that other effect
of the spores, the brightness in my chest, continued to sculpt me as I walked, and
by the time I reached the deserted village that told me I was halfway to the lighthouse,
I believed I could have run a marathon. I did not trust that feeling. I felt, in so
many ways, that I was being lied to.
* * *
Having seen the preternatural calm of the members of the eleventh expedition, I had
often thought during our training of the benign reporting from the first expedition.
Area X, before the ill-defined Event that locked it behind the border thirty years
ago and made it subject to so many inexplicable occurrences, had been part of a wilderness
that lay adjacent to a military base. People had still lived there, on what amounted
to a wildlife refuge, but not many, and they tended to be the tight-lipped descendants
of fisherfolk. Their disappearance might have seemed to some a simple intensifying
of a process begun generations before.
When Area X first appeared, there was vagueness and confusion, and it is still true
that out in the world not many people know that it exists. The government’s version
of events emphasized a localized environmental catastrophe stemming from experimental
military research. This story leaked into the public sphere over a period of several
months so that, like the proverbial frog in a hot pot, people found the news entering
their consciousness gradually as part of the general daily noise of media oversaturation
about ongoing ecological devastation. Within a year or two, it had become the
the Crawler depended upon it, and it had some subsidiary benefit to the Tower. Or
vice versa. Perhaps words didn’t matter because it was a process of fertilization , only completed when the entire left-hand wall of the Tower had a line of words running
along its length.
Despite my attempt to sustain the aria in my head, I experienced a jarring return
to reality as I worked through these possibilities. Suddenly I was just a person trudging
across a natural landscape of a type I had seen before. There were too many variables,
not enough data, and I was making some base assumptions that might not be true. For
one thing, in all of this I assumed that neither Crawler nor Tower was intelligent,
in the sense of possessing free will . My procreation theory would still apply in such a widening context, but there were
other possibilities. The role of ritual, for example, in certain cultures and societies.
How I longed for access to the anthropologist’s mind now, even though in studying
social insects I had gained some insight into the same areas of scientific endeavor.
And if not ritual, I was back to the purposes of communication, this time in a conscious
sense, not a biological one. What could the words on the wall communicate to the Tower?
I had to assume, or thought I did, that the Crawler didn’t just live in the Tower—it
went far afield to gather the words, and it had to assimilate them, even if it didn’t
understand them, before it came back to the Tower. The Crawler had to in a sense memorize them, which was a form of absorption. The strings of sentences on the Tower’s walls
could be evidence brought back by the Crawler to be analyzed by the Tower.
But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental.
You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in
your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan. I had to leave it there, compartmentalized, until I could
write it all down, and seeing it on the page, begin to divine the true meaning. And
now the lighthouse had finally gotten larger on the horizon. This presence weighed
on me as I realized that the surveyor had been correct about at least one thing. Anyone
within the lighthouse would see me coming for miles. Then, too, that other effect
of the spores, the brightness in my chest, continued to sculpt me as I walked, and
by the time I reached the deserted village that told me I was halfway to the lighthouse,
I believed I could have run a marathon. I did not trust that feeling. I felt, in so
many ways, that I was being lied to.
* * *
Having seen the preternatural calm of the members of the eleventh expedition, I had
often thought during our training of the benign reporting from the first expedition.
Area X, before the ill-defined Event that locked it behind the border thirty years
ago and made it subject to so many inexplicable occurrences, had been part of a wilderness
that lay adjacent to a military base. People had still lived there, on what amounted
to a wildlife refuge, but not many, and they tended to be the tight-lipped descendants
of fisherfolk. Their disappearance might have seemed to some a simple intensifying
of a process begun generations before.
When Area X first appeared, there was vagueness and confusion, and it is still true
that out in the world not many people know that it exists. The government’s version
of events emphasized a localized environmental catastrophe stemming from experimental
military research. This story leaked into the public sphere over a period of several
months so that, like the proverbial frog in a hot pot, people found the news entering
their consciousness gradually as part of the general daily noise of media oversaturation
about ongoing ecological devastation. Within a year or two, it had become the
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