The interior of vault 3011A is, once again, a mild surprise for Mahlo. He always expects a space where a somewhat humanoid entity could plausibly live; at minimum, a bed. Instead he finds a dense warren of tall, dark wooden shelves. The shelves are filled with boxes of many sizes and the boxes are filled to bursting with paperwork, folders, and cards. It seems to be a library archive room, the kind he remembers from espionage work in the 1970s. The stale taste of the air gives him an unexpected jab of nostalgia.

There is little space to move between the shelves, or see past them. But after some exploration, tucked in the far corner of the unit, he finds a little desk with a lamp with a sad yellow incandescent bulb, and a folding metal chair. The chair is occupied.

There is no second chair for guests. So Mahlo leans against the nearest shelf, ill at ease. It takes him some time to gather his thoughts and begin to speak. He tells it like a story. He speaks in a measured, level tone. He is in no hurry.

“And what do we discover?

“We discover that there is time missing from our world. More than a year of recent history. And we discover that there are spaces, significant spaces, in every population center, which cannot be perceived or entered. Our cities are rerouting around them, like mountains or radiation zones. And along with that time and that space, we discover that there are enough people missing, without any explanation whatsoever, that if I spent the rest of my life counting them, I could not count to that number.”

He pauses.

“And outside of our fledgling Noöspherics Division,” he says, “no one, not a single person, is even aware of these…thefts. Even those in the Division, who made these new discoveries, do not recall what happened during that missing time. And no one can enter that missing space. The gap in reality, itself, can barely be perceived. It is this…shocking, blinding absence. This unknown Unknown.

“We have—cautiously—hypothesized that three to four years ago an unimaginable Unknown entered our reality. And then, sometime later, it left. Taking all of that space, and all of that time, and all of those people with it. We do not know what it was, or what it did. We have tried to find out, but the truth evades my best noösphericists. The question fights back, as if it doesn’t want to be answered. And we do not know why the Unknown left, though my experts say that in the conceptual realm, there is evidence—traces—of what could have been a conflict. And in the distance, shining down on us, there is a great new star.”

He hesitates again.

“Even I don’t remember what happened,” he continues, with his voice lowered. “Which I, personally, find…deeply alarming. Because this is recent history. Like nearly everybody alive, I must have been there. In some respect, I must have gone through it.

“But if we have learned nothing else, we have learned this: Humans can walk away from, and forget, anything. Civilization can go back to ‘normal’ after anything.”

He contemplates the archive shelves in silence, for some time. He worries, briefly, that he really does know the truth, and that there is nothing anomalous preventing him from knowing it. That it’s simple denial. But he won’t say that aloud, even here.

He knows.

He says,

“And I am given to wonder: What was the Organization’s role in this? Were we witness to this anomaly? Did we resist it when it came? Were we the ones who defeated it? Did we negotiate? Participate?

“We are here, now. Intact. Like the rest of human civilization, we are, somehow, back. To what do we owe that? Did we hide, or run?

“Do we deserve to be back? Have we that right? We failed in our stated objective. These people are gone, and it’s useless to pretend that they aren’t dead. We failed orders of magnitude harder than we’ve ever failed before. Despite which, we remain clandestine, and unknown to greater humanity. Which means that no one external to the Organization can ever hold us accountable for our failure. If what Vopěnka said at the C-level meeting yesterday is any indication, we will certainly never hold ourselves accountable.

“What happened to those people? My people. Where are they? No one is just dead, no one is merely, passively dead. Death is caused.”

U-0055 cannot answer him. He won’t even meet his gaze. He never can.

Mahlo says, his voice rising, “These things happen. And we say to ourselves, ‘Never again.’ And a hundred years pass. And they happen. Again.”

He says, “Last time. The time before this one, the time none of us remember, the time for which there is no evidence of any kind, but that I now realize must exist. That time, when we told ourselves and each other, ‘We must do better,’ what did we do differently, from then on, and why didn’t it work?”

He says, “What do we need to be? Where do we need to be, and how far is that place from here? Can we see it from here?

“Or is this it?”

He does not know.

And after leaving the containment unit, he knows, he will not even remember the questions.

■

Direct observation is harmful to Cela’s species. Her mother died when she was a juvenile, killed instantly when an Organization researcher took a close-up flash photograph of her face. The Organization thinks her whole species is extinct, wiped out by infertility and disease, as an indirect result of excessively close Organization study.

But they are not extinct. Some of them adapted. They fled, across oceans and then inland. They grew thicker antimemetic armor.

Cela is a fully grown adult Cryptomorpha gigantes, a massive, vertically elongated quadruped, almost a kilometer tall at the shoulder. As Mahlo’s motorcade leaves Black River, she is standing just beyond the site’s perimeter, with a crumpled metaspider in her mouth. She is unable to perceive the motorcade or the site itself, any more than any human can perceive her. They only barely walk the same earth.

The spider is a 200-meter-long bundle of legs, eyes, and chitin, long body parts dangling from each side of Cela’s jaws. The spider convulses ineffectually. It can’t escape. The spider population, once rampant, is under control once again. They were numerous, and tasty, but the Ones Who Walk Very Slowly have a broad diet.

Cela bites down, biting through the last of the spider’s legs, which begin an achingly slow tumble to the ground, accompanied by a gout of bug juice. Cela tosses the spider’s mauled thorax in the air and catches it in the back of her throat. She gulps it down, mostly whole, still twitching. She raises her head and vocalizes triumphantly, a deafening, inaudible, infrasonic warble. The call carries all the way to her mate and children, on the horizon.

█