'Absolution' Excerpt: Read the Beginning of Jeff VanderMeer's Newest Southern Reach Book

But then, too, determination was the assurance, the confidence, successful the accounts of the biologists arsenic remedy to allay suspicion. Because Sergeant Rocker, too, had past taken to the waters and disappeared, the biologists utilizing their tracking instrumentality to marque definite they could travel the alligators successful their caller lives.

The Tyrant kept to herself, portion the others remained successful adjacent proximity, for a while. None, astatine slightest overnight, seemed inclined to permission the area, and by the 4th day, Team Leader 1 enactment the astir inferior subordinate of their enactment connected the task of monitoring moments that mightiness see a afloat time of basking successful the aforesaid agelong of mud.

On time six they recovered Firestorm’s beforehand leg, bobber ligament wrapped astir it, the full prominently displayed connected a mudbank with heavy footwear prints suggesting poachers. There was, 1 biologist wrote, “a bathetic oregon pathetic prime to the paleness of the leg, enraptured successful the grounds of our experiment, mislaid truthful acold from her home. I wept for an hour, but bash not cognize if this was an due response.”

(No, Old Jim did not judge it was an due response, adjacent arsenic helium himself wept astatine unusual hours, for his ain reasons, down successful Central’s archives.)

Battlebee turned up dormant and bloated and white, with a chunk ripped retired of him postmortem by immoderate creature, perchance Sergeant Rocker, speculation being that accent and the anesthetic had been excessively hard connected him. Postmortem introspection revealed tummy contents that included fish, a turtle, mud, and, inexplicably, a breached teacup.

She had besides been pregnant, “a information that amazed us,” Team Leader 2 wrote, “given her credentials identified her arsenic a male,” amid immoderate wide confusion: “To beryllium honest, I cannot present retrieve erstwhile we archetypal took this task on, erstwhile we archetypal encountered these subjects. The vigor present is abysmal.”

Sergeant Rocker opted retired of the task by shedding his harness successful the h2o adjacent the structure of Team Leader 1, indicating, arsenic she absurdly enactment it, “A politeness connected the portion of Sergeant Rocker successful keeping with his property erstwhile I knew him best. I felt this nonaccomplishment overmuch much profoundly than expected.”

This sentimentality toward an alligator seen arsenic an work conscionable days earlier weighed connected Old Jim, though helium could not enactment a digit connected why. Nor did helium recognize wherefore the alligator experimentation registered with the biologists successful their reports arsenic a large success, and they would adjacent notation it with a benignant of beautiful, all-consuming nostalgia erstwhile the ngo began to sour. The story of competence, perhaps. The story of persistence. The story of objectivity.

Perhaps, some helium and the biologists would person been wiser to absorption connected however Sergeant Rocker had turned into an flight artist, for the harness was intact and inactive latched, with nary tears anywhere. So however had the alligator perchance gotten free? Old Jim kept seeing the biologists by a instrumentality of faulty video moving distant from the merchandise site, lone to re-form successful their drinking circle.

He replayed the video truthful often that it became a disconcerting messiness of airy and shadow, of pixelated disembodied heads and legs and shapes that leapt retired and sharpened, lone to go subsumed into the past.

“All imaginable measures were taken but thing could beryllium done.”

Or had the result been precisely arsenic intended?

Excerpted from Absolution: A Southern Reach Novel by Jeff VanderMeer. Published by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc. All rights reserved.