Excerpt from Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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 fides 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."

"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 field-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.

Excerpted from Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer. Copyright © 2024 by Jeff VanderMeer. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.