‘Absolution’ Excerpt: Read the beginning of Jeff VanderMeer’s latest book Southern Reach
But then there is also reassurance, a reliance on biologists’ accounts as a remedy to assuage doubts. Because Sergeant Rocker also then entered the water and disappeared, biologists used their tracking equipment to ensure that they could follow the crocodiles in their new lives.
Tyrant kept to himself while the others remained close together for a while. No one, at least overnight, seemed to have any intention of leaving the area, and by the fourth day, Team Leader 1 tasked the most junior member of their team with the task of watching for possible moments including a full day of soaking in the same mud. .
On Friday, they found Firestorm’s front leg, bobber straps wrapped around it, the whole thing standing out against a mudbank with deep shoe prints suggesting poachers. “There was a pitiful or pathetic quality to the paleness of the leg,” wrote one biologist, fascinated by the evidence of our experiment, having been lost very far from her home. I cried for an hour but didn’t know if this was an appropriate reaction or not.”
(No, Old Jim doesn’t believe that’s an appropriate response, even if he himself cried at odd hours, for his own reasons, in the Central archives.)
Battlebee died, bloated and pale, with a piece of his body torn off after death by some creature, possibly Sergeant Rocker, speculated to be due to stress and the anesthetic being too strong. he. An autopsy revealed that the stomach contents included fish, a turtle, mud and a broken, unexplained teacup.
She was also pregnant, “a fact that surprised us,” Team Leader 2 wrote, “as the information confirmed she was male,” amid some general confusion: “Honestly said, now I can’t remember the first time we did this project.” next, when we encounter these topics for the first time. The temperature here is terrible.”
Sergeant Rocker opted out of the project by dropping her harness into the water near Team Leader 1’s tent, indicating, as she deadpanned, “A courtesy of Sergeant Rocker to accommodate to his character as I knew him best. I feel this loss much more deeply than expected.”
This feeling towards an alligator that had been considered a duty only a few days before weighed heavily on Old Jim, although he could not understand why. He also didn’t understand why the experiment with crocodiles was noted by biologists in their reports as a great success, and they even mentioned it with a kind of beautiful, haunting nostalgia when The mission begins to go awry. Perhaps the myth of ability. The myth of perseverance. The myth of objectivity.
Perhaps, both he and the biologists would have been wiser to focus on how Sergeant Rocker turned into an escape artist, since the harness was intact and still latched, unmarked. any tear. So how could the crocodile escape? Old Jim repeatedly sees the biologists by a botched video trick fleeing the release site, only to return to their drinking circle.
He replayed the video so often that it became a startling mess of light and shadow, with pixelated heads, legs, and monstrous forms that jumped out and sharp, only to sink. into the past.
“All possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.”
Or was the result as intended?
Excerpted from Absence: A Southern Novel by Jeff VanderMeer. Published by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc. All rights reserved.
