Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “So what are the smugglers afraid of, that Orrin will reveal some secret?”

  “I said the federal agencies are too busy to take on corruption in HPD, and that’s true. But there are ongoing investigations related to longevity-drug rings. Findley—and the people Findley works for—are nervous about Orrin as a potential witness, now that his name and history are in the database. You see where this is going?”

  She nodded slowly. “His psychological condition.”

  “Exactly. If Orrin’s admitted to State Care, that constitutes a formal declaration of incompetence. Any testimony he might give would be fatally compromised.”

  “Which is where I come in.” She sipped her beer. She seldom drank beer. She thought it tasted the way old socks smell. But it was gratifyingly cold, and she welcomed the slight buzz, that oddly clarifying wisp of intoxication. “Except I’m not on Orrin’s case anymore. I can’t do anything to help him.”

  “I don’t expect you to. I probably shouldn’t have told you what I did, but—like you said, quid pro quo. And I’m still interested in your opinion of Orrin’s writing.”

  “So you think his document is what, some kind of coded confession?”

  “I honestly don’t know what Orrin’s document is. And although it mentions the warehouse—”

  “It does?”

  “In a section you haven’t read. But it’s hardly the kind of evidence you can take to court. I’m just…” He seemed to struggle for a word. “You could say, professionally curious.”

  You could say that, Sandra thought, but you’d only be telling a fraction of the truth. “Bose, I saw the way you acted when you brought him in. You’re more than curious. You actually appear to give a shit about him. As a human being, I mean.”

  “By the time Orrin was remanded to State I’d got to know him a little bit. He’s being railroaded, and he doesn’t deserve it. He’s… well, you know how he is.”

  “Vulnerable. Innocent.” But a lot of the people Sandra dealt with were both vulnerable and innocent; it was commonplace. “Endearing, in a kind of spooky way.”

  Bose nodded. “That thing his sister said back at the restaurant. ‘A wind blows through him.’ I’m not exactly sure what she meant by that. But it sounds about right.”

  * * *

  Sandra couldn’t say at what point she decided to stay the night. Probably there was no single point of decision; that wasn’t how it worked. In her relatively limited experience, intimacy was a slow glide orchestrated not by words but by gestures: eye contact, the first touch (as she put a hand on Bose’s arm to make some conversational point), the easy way he came and sat beside her, thigh to thigh, as if they had known each other for half an eternity. Strange, she thought, how familiar it began to seem, and then how inevitable that she would go to bed with him. There was no first-time awkwardness about it. He was as sweet in bed as she had suspected he would be.

  She fell asleep beside him, one hand draped across his hip. She wasn’t aware of him when he slipped away from her. But she was dimly awake when he came back from the bathroom, caught for a moment in the amber glow of city light through the bedroom window. She saw the scar she had already felt with her fingertips, a pale ridge that began below his navel and meandered like a mountain road along his rib cage and up toward his right shoulder.

  She wanted to ask him about it. But he turned away hastily when he saw her looking, and the moment passed.

  * * *

  In the morning Bose made French toast and coffee even though there wasn’t time to linger over it. He moved around the kitchen, heating butter in a skillet, breaking eggs, with a confidence and ease she found pleasant to watch.

  A thought had come to her during the night. “You’re not working for the federal agencies,” she said, “and you’re barely working for HPD. But you’re not alone in all this. You’re working for somebody. Isn’t that right?”

  “Everybody works for somebody.”

  “An NGO? A charitable organization? A detective agency?”

  “I guess we’d better talk about that,” he said.

  Chapter Eight

  Allison’s Story

  1.

  Once we’d made the transit to Earth, the managers put us in adjoining medical care suites and we slept for most of two days. A team of nurses hovered over me at all times, and at intervals I asked them about Turk. They said he was doing well and that I could talk to him soon. They wouldn’t say more than that.

  I needed the rest, for obvious reasons, and it was pleasant to wake, sleep, dream, and wake again without fearing for my life. Obviously, there were problems I would have to face sooner or later. Big ones. But the meds I was swallowing washed away all urgency.

  My wounds were minor and they healed nicely. Eventually I woke feeling fit and hungry and for the first time impatient, and I asked the bedside nurse—a male worker with big eyes and a fixed smile—when I could have something more substantial than protein paste to eat.

  “After the surgery,” he said blandly.

  “What surgery?”

  “To replace your node,” he said, in a tone of voice that suggested he thought he was talking to a slow-witted child. “I know how hard it must have been for you, surviving in the wild without it. When the Network went down it was hard for all of us. Like being alone in the dark.” He shuddered at the memory. “But we’ll have you repaired before the end of the day.”

  “No,” I said instantly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t want surgery. I don’t want my node back.”

  He frowned for a moment, then turned his maddening smile back on. “It’s perfectly natural to experience anxiety at a time like this. I can adjust your medication—would you like that?”

  I told him my medication was fine and that I was simply and explicitly refusing surgery, as was my right under established Voxish medical protocols.

  “But it’s not an invasive surgery. It’s just a repair! I’ve seen your history. You were implanted at birth like everyone else. We’re not changing you in any way, Treya. We’re restoring you.”

  I argued with him at length and fiercely. I used words I shouldn’t have, both Voxish and English. He was shocked at first, then silent. He left the room with moist eyes and a perplexed expression, and I figured I’d won a victory, or at least gained a reprieve.

  Ten minutes later they wheeled in the prep cart and the knives. That was when I started to scream. I was too weak to make much noise, but I was loud enough to be heard in the adjoining rooms.

  The medical workers were about to strap me down when Turk came bulling through the doorway. Turk was wearing a patient’s gown cinched at the waist, and he didn’t look intimidating—our sojourn in the wilderness had left him skinny and brown as a nut. But the med staff must have seen the ferocity in his eyes, not to mention his balled fists. More than that, he was Uptaken, touched by the Hypotheticals: in Voxish theology that made him something next door to a god.

  I told him in a few words that the medics were trying to re-install my limbic implant and turn me back into Treya.

  “Tell them to stop,” he said. “Tell them to take their fucking knives away or I will personally call down the wrath of the Hypotheticals on Vox and all its works.”

  I translated, with embellishments. The medical staff hastened out of the room with eyes averted, abandoning their surgical tools. But this, too, was only a reprieve. The medics were almost instantly replaced by a man in a gray jumpsuit, an administrator, a manager—a man I recognized from Treya’s training sessions. He had been one of my teachers, not one of my favorites.

  Apparently he and Turk had already met. “Stay out of this, Oscar,” Turk said in English.

  The administrator’s Voxish name was long and decorated with honorifics, but “Oscar” was a decent approximation of the patrilineal fraction of it. Oscar spoke English, of course. His English wasn’t as nuanced as mine—he had learned it mainly from ancient textbooks and legal documents—but it was f
unctional, and unlike me he was empowered to speak on behalf of the managerial class.

  “Please calm down, Mr. Findley,” he said in his reedy voice. He was a small man, pale-skinned, yellow-haired, a couple of years past young.

  “Fuck you, Oscar. Your people were about to force a surgical procedure on a friend of mine. I don’t take that lightly.”

  “The woman you describe as your ‘friend’ was badly injured in the Farmer rebellion. You witnessed that injury, didn’t you? In fact you tried to stop it.”

  It figured that Oscar would attempt some kind of legalistic argument, schooled as he was in ancient writs and warrants. Turk ignored him and turned to me. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay for the time being. I won’t be, if they put my node back in.”

  “That’s irrational,” Oscar said. “Surely you must see that, Treya.”

  “My name isn’t Treya.”

  “Of course it is. Your denial is a symptom of your disorder. You’re suffering from a pathological cognitive dissociation that cries out for repair.”

  “Oscar, shut the fuck up, ” Turk said. “I need to speak to Allison privately.”

  “There is no ‘Allison,’ Mr. Findley. ‘Allison’ is a tutelary construct, and the longer we allow Treya to sustain this delusion the harder it will be to cure her.”

  Treya herself would have deferred to Oscar without question, and I could still feel that old and craven impulse. But now it was hateful to me. “Oscar,” I said in a quieter voice.

  He shot me a hard look and repeated his Voxish name with all its status markers: I was a worker, and it was an insolence to call him by his short name. “Oscar,” I repeated. “Are you hard of hearing? Turk asked you to shut the fuck up.”

  His pale complexion turned red. “I don’t understand this. Have we hurt you, Mr. Findley? Have we threatened you in any way? Haven’t I served as your personal liaison in a satisfactory manner?”

  “You’re not my liaison,” Turk said. “Allison is.”

  “There is no Allison, and this woman can’t function as a liaison—she has no connection to the Network… she doesn’t have a working neural node!”

  “She speaks English well enough.”

  “Like a native,” I said.

  “There you go.”

  “But—!”

  “So I’m appointing her as my translator,” Turk said. “From now on, any interaction I have with Vox goes through her. And we’re both finished with doctors for the time being. No knives, no drugs. Can you arrange that?”

  Oscar hesitated. Then he addressed me directly, in Voxish: “If you were a whole human being you would recognize your behavior as an act of treason, not just against the administrative class but against the Coryphaeus.”

  They were weighty words. Treya would have trembled. “Thank you, but I know what I’m doing,” I said in the same language. “Oscar.”

  * * *

  It was during this time that Vox began its lumbering, hopeless journey to Antarctica.

  Getting any kind of hard information out of Oscar (who continued to pop up with annoying regularity) was impossible; but the nurses who still hovered around us, bringing meals or inquiring about our health like nosy parents, could occasionally be coaxed to talk. Through them I learned that the Voxish consensus had evolved from jubilation (“We transited to Earth, the prophecies are fulfilled”) to dismay (“But the Earth is a ruin and the Hypotheticals continue to ignore us”) to a stoic rededication to the ancient cause (“The Hypotheticals won’t come to us, we’ll have to seek them out”).

  Seeking them out was the hard part. Fleets of drone aircraft were dispatched to survey the landmasses of what had once been Indonesia and southern India, but all they found was an unrelieved wasteland. There was nothing alive there—or at least, nothing larger than a bacterium.

  The oceans were anoxic. Back in Champlain, I had done a lot of reading about ocean toxicity. All the CO2 we were pumping into the air back then—the fossil carbon reserves of not one but two planets—had been the trigger event, though it had taken centuries for the full effect to be felt. Rapid warming had stratified the seas and fed huge blooms of sulfate-reducing bacteria, which in turn spewed clouds of poisonous hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere. The word for this process was “eutrophocation.” It had happened before, without human intervention; eutrophication episodes had been blamed for some of the planet’s prehistoric mass extinctions.

  Vox’s administrative class had studied the few surviving records of the Terrestrial Diaspora and concluded that we ought to proceed to the site of the last known human habitation, near the southern pole, on the shore of what used to be called the Ross Sea. In the meantime, robotic craft would extend the aerial survey as far as Eurasia and the Americas.

  When I told Turk all this he asked me how long the trip to Antarctica would take. Turk still thought of Vox more as an island chain than a seagoing vessel. But although it was vastly larger than any ship Turk had ever sailed or even imagined, it was a ship, with a surprisingly shallow draft and decent maneuverability for its colossal size. A couple of months to reach the Ross Sea, I told him. I promised I’d take him down to see the engine decks sometime soon… and it was a promise I meant to keep, for reasons I wasn’t yet willing to explain.

  There was a whole lot I couldn’t explain, for the simple reason that we had no privacy. In Vox Core, the walls had ears. Also eyes.

  Not necessarily for the purpose of spying. All those nanoscale eyes and ears, embedded in structural surfaces, fed their data to the Network, which sorted it for anomalies and issued alerts whenever an unusual situation arose: a health crisis, a technological failure, a fire, or even a violent argument. I was guessing, however, that an exception had been made in our case. Back when I was Treya I had been taught that when interacting with an Uptaken like Turk Findley, no word or gesture was too trivial to be sifted for clues about the Hypotheticals or the state of existence the Uptaken had experienced among them. So we were almost certainly being listened to, and not just by machines. I couldn’t allow myself to say anything I didn’t want the administrators to overhear. Which ruled out much of what I needed to say, and needed to say quickly.

  (And even if the administrators weren’t listening, the Coryphaeus surely was. I had been thinking a lot about the Coryphaeus… but I didn’t want the Coryphaeus to know that.)

  I also wanted Turk to have at least a basic understanding of the geography of Vox Core and how it operated, because the knowledge might be useful later. So for the next few days I tried to act like a compliant and acceptable liaison, doing what Treya had been trained to do even though I was no longer Treya nor wanted to be.

  I introduced Turk to the book room just down the corridor. The book room had been prepared years in advance as a way of educating the Uptaken, and it was just what the name suggested: a room housing a substantial shelf of books. Real books, as Turk said admiringly when he saw them. Books printed on paper and bound in boards, freshly minted but startlingly archaic.

  They were the only such books in all of Vox, and they had been created explicitly for the use of the Uptaken. The books were mostly histories, assembled by scholars and translated into simple English and five other ancient languages. They were reasonably reliable texts, according to my understanding. Turk was interested but intimidated by the dozens of titles, and I helped him pick out a few volumes:

  The Collapse of Mars and the Martian Diaspora

  On the Nature and Purpose of the Hypothetical Entities

  The Decline of the Terrestrial Ecology

  The Principles and Destiny of the Polity of Vox

  Cortical and Limbic Democracies of the Middle Worlds

  —and a couple more, enough to give him a rough sense of what Vox was and why it had fought its battles back in the Ring of Worlds. The titles, I told him, were more daunting than the texts.

  “Really?” he said. “So what are, uh, ‘cortical and limbic democracies’?”

  Ways o
f implementing consensus governance, I explained. Neural augmentation and community-wide Networks had made possible many different kinds of decision-making. Most of the communities of the Middle Worlds were “cortical” democracies, so called because the brain areas they interfaced with were clustered in the neocortex. They used noun-based and logically mediated collective reasoning to make policy decisions. (Turk blinked at the words but kindly let me keep talking.) “Limbic” democracies like Vox worked differently: their Networks modulated more primitive areas of the brain in order to create an emotional and intuitive (as opposed to a purely rational) consensus. “To put it crudely, in cortical democracies citizens reason together; in limbic democracies they feel together.”

  “I’m not sure I understand. Why the distinction? Why not a cortical-limbic democracy? Best of both worlds?”

  Such arrangements had been attempted. Treya had studied them in school. The few cortico-limbic democracies that had been created had worked well enough for a period of time, and some had seemed idyllically peaceful. But they were ultimately unstable—they almost always decayed into Network-mediated catatonic loops, a kind of mass suicide by blissful indifference.

  Not that the limbic democracies had fared much better, though I didn’t say so where the walls might hear me. Limbic democracies had their own weaknesses. They were prone to collective insanity.

  Except our own, of course. Vox was an exception to all the rules. At least, that was what I had been taught in school.