Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Down in the crater a chorus line of machines began welding iron beams, sparks showering from their fingers like falling stars.

  “Maybe if I went first,” I said. “I mean, if I volunteered for the surgery.”

  Oscar’s eyes widened. Then, slowly, he began to smile.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Sandra and Bose

  Bose phoned as he was pulling into the State Care parking lot. Sandra tucked everything she wanted to keep from her office—a few gigs of files, a photo of Kyle from before he was hurt—into her bag, then went to Reception to meet him.

  Jack Geddes was still keeping vigil in the hallway. He stood up from his chair and said, “You leaving now, Dr. Cole?”

  “Good night, Jack,” she said, which was not an answer. But he watched her head for the main lobby and waved as she turned the corner, no doubt happy to be released from surveillance duty.

  Bose’s uniform and badge got him past the guard who was posted at Reception. The next hurdle was the night nurse in charge of the locked ward. Sandra led the way.

  She knew the night nurse by reputation only. Her name was Meredith something—Sandra couldn’t remember, and the woman’s nametag just said MEREDITH. She appeared to be in her mid-fifties, with a don’t-mess-with-me expression that sat so naturally on her face Sandra suspected it might be congenital. Meredith stepped out from behind her desk when she saw Bose and Sandra approaching, effectively blocking the door to the ward. Before she could say anything Bose handed her a standard release-to-next-of-kin form, which he must have filled out himself. Meredith gave the document a frowning study.

  “Just unlock the door, please, ma’am,” Bose said. “It’s late and I’d like to get this prisoner back to his family.”

  “Prisoner he may be but he’s not your prisoner, not right now anyhow. And yes it’s late—what brings you around this hour of the night?”

  Sandra took the initiative: “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Dr. Cole. You’re right, it’s an unusual time to transfer up a patient, but just bear with us, please. I’ll sign the patient out.”

  Meredith appeared to hesitate. According to staff gossip, the night nurses ran their wards like private fiefdoms. Clearly Meredith didn’t appreciate this intrusion into her kingdom. “Okay, Dr. Cole, but this Orrin Mather’s on a special protocol and I don’t see anything on his chart about you being his physician of record. What I do see is a notation from Dr. Congreve that you were pulled off the case a couple days ago.”

  “Do you see anything on that chart about preventing a staff physician or a police officer from entering this ward? Because I’m starting to get impatient, Meredith.”

  Meredith glared but reached for the switch that would unlock the ward door. Then she drew her hand back. “A patient transfer needs authorization from the attending physician.”

  “I’m just asking you to open the door, Meredith.”

  “Dr. Congreve might not like it.”

  “If you keep us waiting any longer, I won’t like it. And I may not be Dr. Congreve, but I can sure as hell let him know you thought it was a good idea to stand here and give us attitude.”

  Meredith made a lemon-sucking face but threw the switch. “I’m gonna have to talk to Dr. Congreve about this.”

  “Your choice,” Sandra said.

  The door ratcheted open. Sandra followed Bose along the corridor toward Orrin’s room. The lights had been dimmed, making the green-tiled hallway seem long and subterranean. “Nice work,” Bose said, glancing back. “But she’s already on the phone.”

  The next problem was obvious as soon as Sandra used her pass card to open the door to Orrin’s room. Orrin lay on the bed as if he’d been dropped on it. Sandra shook him gently. “Orrin,” she said. “Hey! Orrin! ”

  His eyes drifted open but the lids stayed at half-mast. “What?” he said softly. “What now, what now?”

  He was heavily medicated. “Orrin, it’s me. It’s Dr. Cole.”

  He gave her a groggy look. Fucking night staff, Sandra thought. Were they double-dosing everybody on the ward, to keep them quiet? Or just Orrin? “It’s dark outside, Dr. Cole…”

  “I know it is, but you have to get up. Get up and come with us, okay?”

  “Officer Bose,” Orrin said, still lying there inertly, his hospital gown rucked up over his skinny butt. “Hi.”

  “Hi there, Orrin. Listen to me. Dr. Cole’s right. We have to get you out of here. Take you to see your sister Ariel. Is that okay with you?”

  It took a few seconds for the question to register. Then Orrin offered a loopy grin. “That’s just exactly what I want, Officer Bose. Thank you… I’m pretty tired, though.”

  “I know.” Bose bent down and put his arm around Orrin’s shoulders and helped him to his feet. Orrin wobbled but managed to remain standing.

  “Easier with a wheelchair,” Sandra said. She ducked out of the room—the corridor was still empty, Nurse Meredith still at her station but talking vigorously into her phone—and grabbed one of the folding wheelchairs from the supply cubby. STATE CARE OF TEXAS / HOUSTON AREA UNIT was stenciled across the leather backpiece. The chair rattled as she wheeled it into Orrin’s room, startlingly loud in the stillness of the ward.

  Bose helped Orrin into the chair. As soon as he was seated Orrin’s chin nodded toward his chest and his eyelids slid shut again. Maybe it was better that way, Sandra thought. She took the handles of the chair while Bose led the way to the exit.

  But Meredith was blocking the ward door again, and now she had company—Jack Geddes.

  “Hold on right there,” Meredith said. “I got Dr. Congreve on the phone, and he says you have no right to remove this patient. So you just wheel Mr. Mather back to his room and you can take up the matter with management in the morning.”

  Bose ignored Meredith and directed his remarks to Geddes, who had bulled up to him with his chest thrust forward. “This is a police matter. I’m removing Mr. Mather on my authority.”

  “You don’t have any authority,” Meredith said.

  “You can get out of my way,” Bose told Geddes, “or I can arrest you for interference, but make up your mind, sir. I wouldn’t be here at this hour if this wasn’t urgent business.”

  Sandra imagined Congreve taking the call in his car, turning around, heading back to State. How long ago had he left? Half an hour, forty-five minutes? Had he gone straight home or stopped on the way? She tried not to betray her anxiety by looking at her watch.

  Geddes had locked eyes with Bose, a classic stare-down, Sandra thought, but then the orderly sighed and turned to Nurse Meredith. “This man showed you his badge? His papers?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then I can’t do nothing about it, ma’am.”

  Geddes stepped aside. Bose, preternaturally calm, asked Meredith, “Do you need my signature?”

  “If you insist on taking him you better had sign.” Nurse Meredith thrust a clipboard at him. “At the bottom. You too, Dr. Cole. Be hell to pay when Dr. Congreve gets here. It’s on you, that’s all I can say.”

  Bose signed; Sandra added her own slightly shaky signature. Then she wheeled Orrin down the hallway at a brisk clip, following Bose’s long stride. Orrin had gone back to sleep, miraculously. She could hear his soft, rasping snores over the rattle of the wheels.

  As soon as they were past the main door into the parking lot Sandra’s face began to prickle with sweat. A reef of clouds had hidden all the stars.

  “The paperwork you gave them,” Sandra said, “was that legitimate?”

  “Hardly. It’s a standard form. I just scribbled in a few of the boxes.”

  “That’s not entirely legal, is it?”

  He smiled. “Another bridge burned.”

  “They’re going down fast.”

  She took a last look back at State. She would never be allowed inside this building again. She was unemployed, she was free, and she was so frightened she felt like laughing out loud.

  * * *

&
nbsp; They headed toward the motel where Ariel Mather was staying. Orrin slept in the backseat, his body lax against the seat belt, his hospital gown spindled around his thighs. “We’ll need to get him some fresh clothes,” Sandra said.

  “I believe Ariel brought him some clothes from Raleigh, just in case.”

  A car passed by, speeding in the opposite direction—Sandra thought it might be Congreve’s car, though she couldn’t be sure. She spent a few moments relishing the thought of Congreve getting the news from Jack Geddes or Nurse Meredith.

  “I brought his notebooks, too,” Bose said. “Orrin’ll be glad to have them back.”

  “I read what you sent me. But there’s more, right?”

  “A little more.”

  “You still want my opinion of it?”

  He gave her a curious look. “Anything you have to say, I’m interested.”

  “At one point you thought the document constituted some kind of evidence.”

  “Yeah. You may not have read the relevant parts yet.”

  “But that’s not the real question, is it? The real question is, how much of it is true?”

  He laughed, but she saw his grip tighten on the steering wheel. “Come on, Sandra. True? ”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You really think Orrin’s channeling spirits from the year twelve thousand?”

  “I willing to bet you’ve given it some thought. There are corroborative details in there, stuff you could have tracked down. Stuff even I could track down. Allison Pearl, for instance. Born and grew up in Champlain, New York. A truly incurious man might not wonder whether such a person really exists. But you’re not an incurious man.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “As it happens, there’s no Allison Pearl in the Champlain directory.”

  He wasn’t smiling anymore. “You checked?”

  “Only a handful of Pearls altogether. No Allison, but there’s a couple with a daughter by that name.”

  “You called them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they tell you I called them too?”

  “Yes, but thank you for mentioning it.”

  “Because Orrin, or whoever wrote that document, might not have picked those names out of the air—Turk Findley, Allison Pearl. I asked Mrs. Pearl whether she knows Orrin or Ariel Mather or anyone fitting their description.”

  A question that hadn’t occurred to Sandra. “Does she?”

  “No. She never heard of them. But that doesn’t rule out a connection. Orrin could have come across the name Allison Pearl somewhere, maybe from a neighbor who happens to be a distant relative—I don’t know. Or it could just be a coincidence.”

  “Does that seem likely?”

  “Compared to what? The idea that Orrin can travel in time? As far as I can tell the only trip he ever took was Raleigh to Houston on a Greyhound bus.”

  “So we’ll never know?”

  He shrugged.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Allison’s Story

  1.

  Often in the weeks after the first encounter between Vox and the Hypothetical machines I caught myself quietly repeating my own name— Allison Pearl, Allison Pearl —anchoring myself to the syllables, the sound of them, the feeling of them in my throat and on my tongue.

  As Allison, I had once read a book about the human brain. From that book I had learned the term “neural plasticity,” which means the ability of the brain to modify itself in response to changes in its environment. Neural plasticity was what made it possible for me to be Allison Pearl. It was also what made it possible for a living brain to be wired to a limbic implant. The brain adapts: that’s what brains do.

  When Turk told me he had volunteered for surgery I pretended to be surprised. The implant had been an essential part of our plan from the beginning. But for the benefit of the Network’s hidden sensors I was obliged to feel betrayed, I was obliged to argue with him. So I argued. So I wept. It was a convincing performance. It was convincing because it was nine-tenths sincere. I didn’t doubt his courage, but no plan is foolproof. I was terrified of what he might become.

  Shit happens, as the original Allison once wrote in her diary. No truer words, etc. For instance: the day Turk had his node installed—probably about the time he was being wheeled into surgery—Isaac Dvali came to see me, and he laid my secrets bare.

  * * *

  I knew from the newsfeeds that Isaac’s recovery had proceeded at an astonishing rate. Everyone in Vox Core was paying breathless attention to him now. Far more than Turk, Isaac had become what the city’s founders had hoped and believed one of the Uptaken ought to be: a living connection to the Hypotheticals—which meant the city’s promised transcendence remained at least plausible. Without Isaac, Vox was nothing but a congregation of fanatics whose faith had stranded them on a dead and deadly planet. With Isaac, it was still possible to believe Vox was a community of like-minded pioneers poised at the vanguard of human destiny.

  Only days after the disaster in the Wilkes Basin, Isaac had mastered the ability to speak fluent Voxish. His motor skills improved to the point where he could walk unassisted, his body went from frail to remarkably robust, and the reconstructed portions of his skull began to look almost normal. The croaking, screaming creature Turk had known was gone. The newly and unsettlingly articulate Isaac had been released from medical care, though he still lived and slept in the rooms where he had been treated. Lately he had conducted vague but ingratiating interviews with scholars and managers, the contents of which were publicly broadcast. He praised Vox for its dedication and endurance; he expressed his admiration for the wisdom of the founding prophecies. For days now he had been traveling around the city like a tourist, sometimes mobbed by curious children whose equally curious parents hung back shyly and didn’t dare speak.

  I had followed all this on the newsfeeds. Vox was listing toward insanity, and the abject worship of Isaac Dvali was just the latest symptom. I told myself to expect more of the same. “Expect the unexpected,” Allison had written in her diary. Not an original sentiment but always apt.

  And I believed I was well braced for surprises… but I was shocked beyond words when Isaac showed up at my door, pale as a mushroom and bright-eyed as an infant, smiling and calling me by name: not Treya but, amazingly, Allison.

  * * *

  I was afraid of him, of course.

  I didn’t know what he wanted and I was instantly terrified of the attention he would attract—must already have attracted—just by being here. Somewhere in the nearby corridors and walks his minders were surely hovering. The hidden ears and eyes of the Network were pricked and focused.

  But all he said was, “May I come in?” And I nodded, mutely, and let the door slide shut behind him.

  Somehow I found the courage to ask him to sit down.

  He remained standing. “I won’t stay long.” He spoke in English. It was the language he had been born to, I reminded myself. Under all the layers of synthesis and reconstruction there was still at least some fragment of the Isaac Dvali he once had been, a boy raised in the Equatorian desert by people whose urge to make contact with the Hypotheticals had been almost Voxish in its intensity. He was, like me, like Turk, a divided and incomplete soul. He was also, at least potentially, a very dangerous one.

  Apart from his pale skin, his eyes were his most striking feature. When he looked at me my first instinct was to wince. He told me not to be frightened and I said, “That’s not so easy.”

  “You came to my suite when I was sick,” he said.

  “You remember that?”

  He nodded, smiling. “I’ve learned a lot about you since then.”

  “About me?”

  “From the Network. I know who and what you are. And I think it would be useful if we can talk to each other. I won’t hurt you. And I won’t tell anyone about your plan to escape.”

  For months I had been training myself in the art of inscrutability, as a way of keepi
ng that one simple secret. Now the charade had collapsed, and I was too shocked to move.

  “No one can hear us,” Isaac said.

  “You’re wrong,” I managed to say.

  His smile was insistent, maddening. “The Network sensors in this room are disabled. They’ll stay that way as long as I’m here.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Because of what I am, because of what the surgeons put inside me, I can influence the Network and even the Coryphaeus.”

  Was that possible?

  The Coryphaeus was the sum and master of the Voxish collectivity, a nested hierarchy of quantum processors distributed throughout Vox Core. Even a nuclear attack had only temporarily silenced it. It had never occurred to me that the Coryphaeus could be influenced. But there had never been anyone like Isaac before, either. He had been deeply infused with Hypothetical biotechnology since birth, and his neural implant hadn’t simply been added to his brain; his brain had been regrown around it.

  “It’s true,” he said. “At least for now, you can speak as freely as you like.”

  My heart was pounding. But since Isaac apparently knew about our plan—and since he had announced it out loud—I could only hope he was telling the truth. “You can really shut down the sensors?”

  “Yes, or make sure anything they observe is left unanalyzed.”

  “But if you already know about…”

  “Your escape,” he said. I flinched again. “You were extremely clever about hiding it. Pulse, respiration, cortisol traces in your sweat and urine, all those markers have been at elevated levels for weeks; but the effect was indistinguishable from emotional stress. Stochastic and heuretic indicators—the things you did or didn’t say or do—took the Coryphaeus much longer to analyze. But you would have been found out eventually.” That Buddha smile again. “If I hadn’t intervened.”

  I took a breath and said, “Then… how did you know?”

  “The Coryphaeus was already beginning to draw inferences. I extrapolated from that. The details aren’t clear to me, but I guess you intend to steal an aircraft and take it through the Arch to Equatoria.”