* * *
—
In the Republic of Texas the next afternoon, she wanted to go for a walk again, because on the map, her hotel—a La Quinta that faced another La Quinta, a parking lot between them—was just across the road from a cluster of restaurants and shops, but what the map didn’t show was that the road was an eight-lane expressway with no crosswalk and constant traffic, mostly modern hovercraft but also the occasional defiantly retro wheeled pickup truck, so she walked along the expressway for a while with the shops and the restaurants shining like a mirage on the other side. There was no way to cross without risking her life, so she didn’t. When she got back to her hotel she felt something scratching her ankles, and when she looked down her socks were spiked with little burrs, astonishingly sharp black-brown stars like miniature weapons that had to be extracted very carefully. She set them on the desk and photographed them from every angle. They were so perfectly hard and shiny that they could’ve passed for biotech, but when she pulled one apart, she saw that it was real. No, real wasn’t the word for it. Everything that can be touched is real. What she saw was it was a thing that grew, a castoff from some mysterious plant they didn’t have in the moon colonies, so she wrapped a few of them in a sock and carefully stowed the sock away in her suitcase to give to her daughter, Sylvie, who was five and collected that kind of thing.
* * *
—
“I was so confused by your book,” a woman in Dallas said. “There were all these strands, narratively speaking, all these characters, and I felt like I was waiting for them to connect, but they didn’t, ultimately. The book just ended. I was like”—she was some distance away, in the darkened audience, but Olive saw that she was miming flipping through a book and running out of pages—“I was just like, Huh? Is the book missing pages? It just ended.”
“Okay,” Olive said. “So just to clarify, your question is…”
“I was just, like, what,” the woman said. “My question is just…” She spread her hands, like help me out here, I’ve run out of words.
* * *
—
The hotel room that night was all black and white. Olive had dreams about playing chess with her mother.
* * *
—
Did the book end too abruptly? She fixated on the question for three days, from the Republic of Texas to western Canada.
* * *
—
“I’m trying not to be pessimistic,” Olive said, on the phone to her husband, “but I’ve barely slept in three days and I doubt I’ll be terribly impressive in my lecture tonight.” This was in Red Deer. Outside the hotel room window, the lights of residential towers glimmered in the dark.
“Don’t be pessimistic,” Dion said. “Think of that quote I’ve got pinned up in my office.”
“？‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,’？” Olive said. “How’s work going, speaking of your office?”
He sighed. “I got assigned to the new project.” Dion was an architect.
“The new university?”
“Yeah, kind of. A center for the study of physics, but also… I signed an ironclad confidentiality agreement, so don’t tell anyone?”
“Of course. I won’t tell a soul. But what’s so secret about the architecture of a university?”
“It’s not quite…I’m not sure it’s exactly a university.” Dion sounded troubled. “There’s some serious weirdness in the blueprints.”
“What kind of weirdness?”
“Well, for starters, there’s a tunnel under the street connecting the building to Security Headquarters,” he said.
“Why would a university need a tunnel to the police?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. And the building backs up on the government building,” Dion said, “which, I mean, at first I thought nothing of it. That’s prime downtown real estate, so you know, why shouldn’t the university build next to the government building, but the two buildings aren’t separate. There are so many passageways between them that it’s functionally the same building.”
“You’re right,” Olive said, “that seems weird.”
“Well, it’s a good project for my portfolio, I guess.”
Olive understood from his tone that he wanted to change the subject. “How’s Sylvie?”
“Doing fine.” Dion immediately pivoted the conversation to some trivial matter involving the grocery order and Sylvie’s school lunches, from which she understood that Sylvie probably wasn’t in fact doing particularly well in her absence, and she was grateful for his kindness in not telling her this.