Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “We believe these are the work of the Hypotheticals,” Oscar said mildly.

  I guessed he was right. The structures didn’t look like anything human beings would build. But the image abruptly faded to a staticky blank. The drone aircraft’s sensors had failed, Oscar explained. More drones had been sent to the same site, but they had failed too. Oscar chose to interpret the failures optimistically. “Clearly, the Hypotheticals still have a presence on Earth. Just as clearly, they registered the presence of the unmanned vehicles and reacted to them. Which means—I think the conclusion is inescapable—that they’re aware of us. ” His smile was fixed and unworried. “They know we’re coming, Mr. Findley. And I believe they’re waiting for us to arrive.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Sandra and Bose

  The institution where Sandra’s brother Kyle Cole lived was called the Live Oaks Polycare Residential Complex. It was located on a broad expanse of land that had once been a ranch. A creek ran nearby, and there was, in fact, a grove of live oaks on the property.

  When she first arranged to have Kyle committed to this place Sandra had been curious enough to run a search on the term “live oaks”—why “live”? Live as opposed to what? But it turned out the trees were called live oaks because they stayed green in winter, prosaically enough. In Texas, she had read, a grove of live oaks was called a “mott.”

  She had tried out the term on the receptionist once, back when she was new in the state and still bashful about her New England accent. “I’d like to take Kyle out to that mott of live oaks by the creek.” The receptionist had given her a blank stare. “I mean the grove of trees,” Sandra added, blushing. Oh. Well, surely.

  Mott or not, it had become a ritual, weather permitting. Most of the day staff recognized her by now; Sandra knew the majority of them by name. “Another hot one today,” the attending nurse said, helping Sandra help her brother out of bed and into a wheelchair. “But Kyle likes the warm weather, I think.”

  “He likes the shade of the trees.”

  That was, of course, a surmise. Kyle hadn’t expressed a preference for the shade of the trees or for anything else. Kyle couldn’t walk or control his bowels or speak a coherent sentence. When he was distressed he scrunched up his face and made a hooting sound. When he was happy—or at least not un happy—he grimaced in a way that showed his teeth and gums: an animal’s smile. His happy-sounds were soft sighs, formed deep in his throat. Ah, ah, ah, ah.

  Today he seemed happy to see Sandra. Ah. He turned his face toward her as she wheeled him down the stone-paved pathway and across the green lawn to the live oaks. The nurse had put an Astros cap on him, to keep the sun out of his eyes. The baseball cap threatened to fall off as he craned his neck. Sandra straightened it for him.

  There was a picnic table in the grove, more for visitors than for the patients, most of whom weren’t ambulatory. Today she and Kyle had the grove to themselves. The shade, and a moist coolness that seemed to rise up from the creek, made the heat tolerable and almost pleasant. There was, thank God, a breeze. The oak leaves trembled and seined the light.

  Kyle was five years older than Sandra. Before what the doctors called his “accident,” Sandra had always been able to share her troubles with him. He had taken his role as big brother seriously, though he joked about it. “I don’t have any advice for you, Sandy,” he used to say. He was the only person she would allow to call her Sandy. “All my advice is bad advice.” But he had always listened, carefully and thoughtfully, and that was the important thing.

  She still liked talking to him, though he couldn’t understand even a syllable of what she said. His eyes followed her when she spoke, perhaps because he liked the sound of her voice, and she wondered, despite what the neurologists said, whether there was still some fragment of working memory inside him, an ember of awareness that might occasionally flicker with recognition.

  “I’m in a little bit of trouble these days,” she began.

  Ah, Kyle said, a sound as gentle and meaningless as the rustling of the leaves.

  * * *

  It was the Spin that had killed her father and ruined her brother.

  Sandra had considered and reconsidered the event over many years, looking for an ultimate cause. She would have liked to pin her hatred on some particular thing or person. But in this case, blame was slippery. It glided over potential targets but refused to stick. And ultimately, behind all the trivial and quotidian facts, behind the million unfathomable contingencies, there was the Spin. The Spin had changed and mutilated many lives, not just her brother’s, not just her own.

  In a perverse way, the Spin had been good for Sandra’s mother. Sandra’s mother was an electronics engineer whose career had stalled out, until the Spin rendered satellite communications obsolete and created a booming market for aerostatic signal-relay devices. She had been hired by a company owned by the aerostat tycoon E. D. Lawton, where she designed an airborne antenna stabilization system that became an industry standard. Her work was much in demand and she was often away from home.

  The opposite was true of Sandra’s father. The initial chaos and confusion that followed the disappearance of the stars from the sky had triggered a global recession in which her father’s software business had wilted like a Christmas poinsettia after New Year’s Day. That—or the Spin itself, the blunt and simple fact of it—had thrown him into a state of depression that occasionally lifted but never entirely went away. “He just kind of forgot how to smile,” Sandra’s brother once explained; and Sandra, ten, had accepted this non-explanation somberly.

  Easy for us, Sandra thought, the generation that followed: we’re so accustomed to these truths, that the Earth was encircled by nameless alien beings capable of manipulating even the passage of time; that to these godlike beings the human race was both trivial and somehow significant. You lived with it because you had always lived with it. Sandra herself had been born at the tag end of the Spin, about the time the stars (scattered and strange though they had become) reappeared in the sky. She may have owed her own existence to a last burst of optimism or desperation on the part of her parents, the affirmative act of creating new life in a world that had seemed to be crumbling into anarchy.

  But the return of the stars had made no real difference to her father. It was as if some internal process of decay had taken root within him and could not be halted in its advance. No one ever said anything meaningful about this. Sandra’s mother, when she was home, labored to create an impression of normalcy. And because neither Sandra nor Kyle dared to contradict her, the illusion was surprisingly easy to sustain. Her father was often ill. He spent a lot of time upstairs, resting. That wasn’t difficult to understand, was it? Of course not. It was sad; it was inconvenient; but life went on. It did, at least, until the day Sandra came home from school and found her father and her brother in the garage.

  Sandra was three weeks away from her eleventh birthday when it happened. She had been surprised to find the house empty. Kyle, home from school with a cold, had left his computer unfolded on the kitchen table. It was playing a movie, something noisy with airplanes and explosions, the sort of thing he liked. She switched it off. And that was when she heard the car motor growling. Not the car her mother drove to work but the family’s second car, the one parked in the garage, the one her father used to drive before he hid himself in the upstairs dimness.

  She understood suicide, or at any rate the idea of it. She even knew that some people committed suicide by locking themselves in a closed space with an idling engine. Carbon monoxide poisoning. She supposed—it was a thought she harbored mainly in the bitter months that followed—that she even understood her father’s wish to die. People could get that way. It was like a sickness. No one should be blamed for it. But why had her father taken Kyle into the garage with him, and why had Kyle agreed to go?

  She opened the door that connected the garage to the kitchen. The exhaust fumes made her dizzy, so she turned back and went outside and lifted up th
e big garage door to allow clean air to flow in to flush out the poison. The door slid open easily even though her father had stuffed rags into the gaps to keep the fumes from leaking away. It wasn’t even locked. Then she opened the car door on the driver’s side and managed to lean across her father’s lap and turn the engine off. Her father’s head had lolled onto his shoulders and his skin had turned a delicate, uncanny shade of blue. There was a crust of dried spittle on his lips. She tried unsuccessfully to wake him. Kyle was up front beside his father, wearing a seat belt. Had he been expecting to go somewhere? Neither of them stirred when she shook them, when she shouted.

  She called 911 and waited in front of the house for the ambulance. Minutes passed like hours. She thought about calling her mother but her mother was at a trade show in Sri Lanka and Sandra didn’t know how to reach her. It was a sunny afternoon in May, beginning to feel like summer in the Boston suburb where Sandra lived. There was no one else on the street. It was as if the houses had gone to sleep. As if all the neighbors had been sealed indoors, like dreams the houses were dreaming.

  The medics who arrived took Sandra to the hospital with them and found a place for her to sleep. Sandra’s mother arrived back from Colombo the following morning. Sandra’s father, it turned out, had been dead long before Sandra discovered him. There was nothing she could have done. Kyle’s young body had put up a fiercer resistance to the poison he was breathing, a doctor explained. He was alive, but his brain was irreversibly damaged and he would never recover his higher functions.

  * * *

  Sandra’s mother had died seven years after her father, of a pancreatic cancer that had been diagnosed too late for meaningful treatment. Her will had stipulated a sum of money to be held in trust for Sandra’s education and a far more substantial amount to pay for Kyle’s continuing needs. When Sandra moved to Houston she had asked the estate’s lawyers to find Kyle a residence nearby, if there was an acceptable one, where she could visit him regularly. The Live Oaks Polycare Residential Complex was what they had chosen. Live Oaks was devoted to caring for severely disabled patients and was rated as one of the best such facilities in the country. It was expensive, but no matter; the estate could afford it.

  Kyle had been sedated for the flight west. Sandra had arranged to be present when he woke up. But if waking up in a strange bed in a strange room had caused him any distress or anxiety, Kyle had shown no sign of it.

  * * *

  He sat in the midday warmth as if waiting for her to speak. Today, unusually, Sandra wasn’t sure where to begin.

  She started by telling him about Jefferson Bose. Who he was and how much she liked him. “I think you’d like him, too. He’s a policeman.” She paused. “But he’s something else, too.”

  She lowered her voice, though there was no one else in the mott to hear her.

  “You always liked stories about Mars from the Spin days. How the human colonies turned into whole civilizations while Earth was wrapped up in the Spin barrier. How they had a fourth stage of life, where people could live longer if they took on certain obligations and duties. Remember that? The stories Wun Ngo Wen told the world, before he was killed?

  “Well, Mars doesn’t talk to us anymore, and some pretty unscrupulous people have turned those Martian pharmaceuticals into something uglier, something they can sell for profit on the black market. But there were people around Wun Ngo Wen, people like Jason Lawton and his friends, who took Martian ethics seriously. I used to hear rumors, and there were always stories online, about that. About clandestine groups who took the longevity treatment the way the Martians did. Keeping it pure and not selling it, but sharing it, the way it was made to be shared, all strings attached. Using it wisely.”

  She was nearly whispering now. Kyle’s eyes still followed the motion of her lips.

  “I didn’t used to believe those stories. But now I think they’re true.”

  This morning Bose had told her he wasn’t just a cop. He told her he had connections with people who followed the Martian customs. His friends hated the black market trade, he said. The police could be bribed, but Bose’s friends couldn’t, because they already had taken the longevity treatment—the original version. And what he was doing, he was doing in their interests.

  She said this, very quietly, to Kyle.

  “Now, the question you probably want to ask,” the question, as an older brother, he surely would have asked, “is, do I trust him?”

  Kyle blinked, meaninglessly.

  “I do,” she said, and she felt better for confirming it aloud. “It’s what I don’t know that worries me.”

  Like the meaning, if any, of Orrin Mather’s sci-fi story. Like the bandage on Jack Geddes’s arm, and what it might imply about Orrin’s capacity for violence. Like the scar Bose had tried to conceal from her, and which he had still not explained.

  Time passed. Eventually a nurse came down the pathway to the grove of live oaks, moving slowly in the heat. “Time to get this fella back to bed,” she announced. Kyle’s hat had fallen off, though that didn’t matter so much in the shade of the trees. His hair was thinning prematurely. Sandra could see his scalp, pink as a baby’s skin, through wisps of pale blond hair. She picked up the Astros cap and put it on him, gently.

  Ah.

  “Okay,” she said. “Rest easy, Kyle. See you soon,” she told him.

  * * *

  Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend. There were more and better antidepressant medications now than when her father had endured his long decline, and that was a good thing, but despair itself remained mysterious, clinically and personally, as much a visitation as a disease.

  The long drive back to Houston took her past a State Care internment facility, one of the places her patients went after they were assigned custodial status. Passing the State camp inevitably tweaked her conscience. Usually Sandra avoided looking at it—it was comfortingly easy to overlook. The entrance was marked only with a small and dignified sign; the facility itself was hidden beyond a grassy ridge (yellow and sere); very little of it showed from the highway, though she glimpsed the tops of the guard towers. But she had been up that road a couple of times and knew what lay beyond it: a huge two-story cinderblock residence surrounded by makeshift expansion housing, mostly sheet-metal trailers donated by FEMA from surplus stock, encircled by wire fencing. It was a community of men (mostly men) and women (a few), carefully segregated from one another and endlessly waiting. Because that was what you did in such a place: you waited. Waited for your turn in an occupational rehab program, waited for the slim possibility of transfer to a State Care halfway house, waited for letters from distant and indifferent relatives. Waited with slowly hemorrhaging optimism for the miraculous advent of a new life.

  It was a town made of wire and corrugated aluminum and chronic despair. Medicated despair—she herself had probably written some of the prescriptions that were perennially renewed at the camp dispensary. And sometimes even that wasn’t enough—Sandra had heard that the biggest security problem at the compound was the flow of intoxicants (liquor, pot, opiates, meth) smuggled in from outside.

  There was a bill before the Texas legislature to privatize the residential camps. Attached to the bill was a proviso that “work therapy” could be construed as permission to hire out healthy inmates for roadwork or seasonal farm labor, to defray the public expense of their internment. If it passed, Sandra thought, the legislation would mean the end of any tattered idealism still attached to the State Care project. What had been intended as a way of providing comfort and protection to the chronically indigent would have become a cosmetically acceptable source of indentured labor—slavery with a haircut and a clean shirt.

  The watchtowers disappeared in her rearview mirror, hidden among the baking yellow hills. She thought about how angry she had been at Congreve, who had taken her off Orrin Mather�
��s case to prevent her from rendering an inconvenient diagnosis. But how clean were her own hands? How many souls had she committed to internment just because they matched a profile in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual? Saving them from the cruelty and violence of the streets, yes, saving them from exploitation and HIV and malnutrition and addiction, and there was enough truth in that to salve her conscience; but in the end, saving them for what?

  It was almost dark when she got home. September now, the days getting shorter, though it was still hotter than high August. She checked for any fresh message from Bose. There was one, but it was only another installment of Orrin’s notebook.

  Her phone buzzed while she was microwaving dinner. She picked up without looking at the display, expecting Bose, but the voice on the other end was unfamiliar. “Dr. Cole? Sandra Cole?”

  “Yes?” Feeling wary, though she couldn’t say why.

  “I hope you had a rewarding visit with your brother today.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Someone with your best interests at heart.”

  She was conscious of the fear that began in her belly and traveled up her spine and seemed to lodge, somehow, in her heart. This is not good, she thought. But she didn’t put down the phone. She waited, listening.