We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Absolution, the surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series—available now from MCD.
When the Southern Reach trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestseller list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.
And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast—before Area X was called Area X—had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?
Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.
002: THE CAVALRY
In addition to equipment and supplies, the biologists had brought a kind of burden with them to the Forgotten Coast, and it was with a sense of relief that they prepared to release that burden into the marshes before setting up a base camp.
That this burden had been imposed on them could be sensed in how they spoke about the process of transporting their unwieldy subjects to the release site. That they, in this one particular, shared an affinity with the locals, in not knowing how the burden had been imposed, despite the attached documents, the apparent bona “des of the burden’s university sponsors.
“We could not wait to be free to conduct our general explorations,” Team Leader 1 said, while Team Leader 2 observed that “Megafauna always catch the eye of journals, but I would rather observe the bubble fortresses of the crayfish on the mud flats, because we know so little about their ways.”
For, within a week of arriving at the Forgotten Coast, the biologists would release the alligators they had brought from one hundred miles south into the local ecosystems. This plan would not be common knowledge to the locals for some weeks, for reasons unclear to Old Jim. When it did, the county sheriff spared the expedition a visit, only dissuaded from issuing some kind of ticket, or even warning, by the presentation of so many federal government permits. Or as Man Boy Slim put it, “Quills out, folks. The biologists went quills out over those alligators.”
But the locals had a wider, more practical objection to the experiment than just how it had been withheld from them.
“There must be ten thousand alligators up here already,” Man Boy Slim’s friend Drunk Boat said in disbelief, when word did finally get out. “There must be a hundred million alligators up here. Already.”
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“Drunk Boat” was Man Boy Slim’s nickname for the Village Bar’s alcoholic poet in residence—a man of letters who had not been above a bit of night poaching with a flashlight and, of all things, a handgun. (Old Jim had read up on Man Boy Slim’s file by then, and his nod to an obscure French poet didn’t surprise him. Despite initial impressions, Man Boy Slim had a fine academic record, with a college emphasis on English before he had dropped out from lack of funds.)
As far as the biologists knew, the four large, “fifteen-year-old alligators had been captured in the wild. But in the margin of the files, that place where a separate truth often flourished, Old Jim read a shorthand on the alligators that gave them a different origin. Three had been plucked fortuitous from roadside zoos and the fourth—the largest female, “code name Smaug”—came from some prior Central experiment. The university sponsor did not exist.
While under anesthetic at the release location, the alligators were fitted with an adjustable soft harness that the experiment notes promised “had the necessary give and pull to not be slipped nor pose a hazard to the reptile.” The harnesses had been attached to a thin but strong rubber-coated wire that led to a radio receiver embedded in a spinner and that attached to a bobber. When the battery ran out, the spinner would power the tracker in the bobber by the reptile’s movements through the water and, erratically, by the wind when the beast hauled itself onto land.
One stated goal was to “eld-test cutting-edge equipment, while the primary purpose consisted solely of seeing if the alligators would, via wetlands and interconnected waterways, return to their prior locations. How, then, did bodies understand the landscape? How did minds flourish or wither, still tuned to a distant frequency?
“In other words, could these reptiles be reintroduced to areas of scarcity and be expected to remain there?” Team Leader 1 posed the question, paraphrasing from the brief imposed upon them, itself a kind of “cover.” “What kind of site loyalty has such a beast? What stressors in a new environment might evoke site loyalty? Would what might be called ‘cultural mutations’ need to occur in addition to what we might call ‘normal’ adaptations?”
This suggested a life of the mind to Old Jim that he found disturbing, but Central’s only scribble in the margin of the transcript noted that Team Leaders 1 and 2 had formed a “close bond” during training.
Surely this information was irrelevant?
Some in the Village would later call the four alligators the Cavalry, despite what happened next. In the fierce and abiding imagination of the Forgotten Coast, the Cavalry remained forever and eternal, still roamed the swamps and marshes. Still lived on in more than memory—cherished yet feared, such that many an unexplained “incident” in later years would be attributed, perhaps comfortingly, to “the Cavalry.”
The day of the release, the biologists gathered on a raised berm at the edge of a lake that fed into swamp landward and marsh seaward, a liminal place that held a brackish kind of fresh water, neither one thing nor the other.
It was bright and breezy, with tree swallows darting through the blazing blue sky. The drugged reptiles had been outfitted with their gear and constrained by containers that resembled huge, long coolers with removable wire-mesh tops and collapsible doors in the front. Nothing in the expedition’s official journals hinted at errors or false steps in the release, but Team Leader 2 would later write in her journal that “The moment felt fraught, tense, of greater importance than the actual purpose of the release.”
Team Leaders 1 and 2 must not have thought the release important enough to record via video footage, in the context of their other work. The team’s medic alluded to “some still shots,” which did not exist in Central’s archives. But, no matter, someone had secretly hidden a grainy surveillance camera on-site, and, even more valuable, the biologists’ journals allowed a seemingly accurate reconstruction.
The process only went smoothly for the one once named Smaug but renamed the Tyrant at Team Leader 2’s insistence, the harness no impediment. The Tyrant ran-slithered in all her ten-foot glory down to the water’s edge and disappeared almost in that same instant, as if the water were as much a portal as blessed release.
Firestorm followed with some complications of timing between final fitting of the harness and releasing the door mechanism via a “deconstructed wire coat hanger”—these “1 followed by 2” operations happening, as far as Old Jim could tell, at the exact same moment, so that there had been a possibility of disaster, despite success—and the disappearance of the reptile into the water so immediate that he did not begrudge the biologists their relief.
Who could blame the biologists for ignoring the alternate universe in which Firestorm had struggled loose and ravaged bodies until the blood sprayed and sprawled across the mudbanks in waves? Yet, there had been blood, “some minor cuts, dealt with on-site.” The Medic, quoted in the official report.
Old Jim also noted a margin scrawl in the Medic’s record books that “all possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.” The ink color differed from the rest of the page, so perhaps the scrawled note had occurred much later, and in his panic during the disaster of that future time… the Medic had accidentally written it on the wrong page.
Battlebee and Sergeant Rocker fared less well. The former refused to leave his glorified cooler, appearing disoriented, and the latter became harness-entangled, despite the assurances, and had to be tranq’d and prepped again later that afternoon, by which time most of the expedition had been “drinking.”
But what did that mean? Drinking what? Had there been some other impairment also in play?
A glitch in the surveillance tape slowed down their steps, so the biologists appeared to have choreographed a slow retreat, a slow surrender, and then reassembled running, only to part ways again in waves, branching off in opposite directions across the berm. The grainy stick figures appeared tiny against the immensity of wetlands and sky. If not for the glitch, Old Jim would have thought they had been running from something.
Finally, Battlebee made an exit by making an entrance. Sergeant Rocker, though, snapped and skittered sideways toward his well-wishers with such ferocious intent that the biologists fled again, even as one amongst them, Old Jim couldn’t tell which, circled the beast while calling out what sounded like an absurd “Here, kitty, kitty!” That couldn’t be right, could it? (The video ended there.)
“Hilarious,” some prior analyst at Central had written as a note. But it wasn’t hilarious. Both this moment and the drinking registered as disquieting, out of place with the discipline one would expect at the start of a scientific expedition. He also distrusted the amount of redaction surrounding the alligator experiment in the archives. It signified a growing level of circumspection, like peering through mist come up over black swamp water, even as he continued to glide forward, unable to see what lay to both sides.
But then, too, there was the assurance, the confidence, in the accounts of the biologists as remedy to allay suspicion. Because Sergeant Rocker, too, had then taken to the waters and disappeared, the biologists using their tracking equipment to make sure they could follow the alligators in their new lives.
The Tyrant kept to herself, while the others remained in close proximity, for a while. None, at least overnight, seemed inclined to leave the area, and by the fourth day, Team Leader 1 put the most junior member of their party on the task of monitoring moments that might include a full day of basking in the same stretch of mud.
On day six they found Firestorm’s front leg, bobber wire wrapped around it, the whole prominently displayed on a mudbank with deep boot prints suggesting poachers. There was, one biologist wrote, “a bathetic or pathetic quality to the paleness of the leg, enraptured in the evidence of our experiment, lost so far from her home. I wept for an hour, but do not know if this was an appropriate response.”
(No, Old Jim did not believe it was an appropriate response, even as he himself wept at odd hours, for his own reasons, down in Central’s archives.)
Battlebee turned up dead and bloated and white, with a chunk ripped out of him postmortem by some creature, possibly Sergeant Rocker, speculation being that stress and the anesthetic had been too hard on him. Postmortem examination revealed stomach contents that included fish, a turtle, mud, and, inexplicably, a broken teacup.
She had also been pregnant, “a fact that surprised us,” Team Leader 2 wrote, “given her credentials identified her as a male,” amid some general confusion: “To be honest, I cannot now remember when we first took this project on, when we first encountered these subjects. The heat here is abysmal.”
Sergeant Rocker opted out of the project by shedding his harness in the water near the tent of Team Leader 1, indicating, as she absurdly put it, “A politeness on the part of Sergeant Rocker in keeping with his personality when I knew him best. I felt this loss much more deeply than expected.”
This sentimentality toward an alligator seen as an obligation just days before weighed on Old Jim, although he could not put anger on why. Nor did he understand why the alligator experiment registered with the biologists in their reports as a great success, and they would even reference it with a kind of beautiful, all-consuming nostalgia when the mission began to sour. The myth of competence, perhaps. The myth of persistence. The myth of objectivity.
Perhaps, both he and the biologists would have been wiser to focus on how Sergeant Rocker had turned into an escape artist, for the harness was intact and still latched, with no tears anywhere. So how had the alligator possibly gotten free? Old Jim kept seeing the biologists by a trick of faulty video running away from the release site, only to re-form in their drinking circle.
He replayed the video so often that it became a disconcerting mess of light and shadow, of pixelated disembodied heads and legs and shapes that leapt out and sharpened, only to become subsumed into the past.
“All possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.”
Or had the outcome been exactly as intended?
Excerpted from Absolution, copyright © 2024 by Jeff VanderMeer.
