Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Close enough,” I whispered.

  “And I hope you succeed.”

  “Does that mean—what are you saying? Do you want to come with us?”

  His smile faded. “That’s not possible. When I was reconstructed, important neurological functions were delegated to remote processors inside the Network. Only part of me lives in this body. You understand that, don’t you? That a person can have more than one nature?”

  “… Yes…”

  “I can’t come with you, but I may be able to help.”

  “Help how?”

  “Turk can’t pilot an aircraft until his node is functional enough for him to gain access to the vehicle’s controls. But once the node is fully functional, he won’t be willing to leave. I assume you understand how narrow that window of opportunity is.”

  “Obviously, but—”

  “Right now Turk sees himself as facing a choice between escape and bondage. Once the node begins to influence his brain, it may seem more like a choice between escape and forgiveness.”

  Forgiveness for what? I wondered but didn’t ask.

  “The point is, I can warn you when he’s close to that line. And I can help by diverting the attention of the Coryphaeus at the critical time. We can talk about it in more detail later on, but I want you to know you have a friend and an ally. I hope you’ll think of me that way.”

  He sounded so much like a precocious child who wanted to be liked that I almost forgot to be afraid of him. But when he stood up and moved toward the door I nearly panicked. “Wait! The Network surveillance in this room, is it turned off permanently?”

  “No, I’m sorry. There are limits to what I can do. Unless I’m physically present, you should assume the Network is listening.”

  I forced myself to stand close to him. The skin on the right side of his face was seashell-pink and almost poreless, imperfect because it was too perfect. His eyes were softly radiant. “One more question.”

  “What is it?”

  “Are you—you know, what they say you are?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “What the prophecies say you are. Can you really talk to the Hypotheticals?”

  “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  * * *

  Less than an hour later Oscar showed up at the door, obviously distraught. He knew Isaac had been here, and he was maddeningly curious about what Isaac might have said, but he couldn’t access a Network record of it. He demanded an explanation.

  I had known Oscar reasonably well back when I was Treya, training for liaison duties. Oscar had always had a serene confidence in the purity and purpose of his work. There was a Voxish saying: “He rises and falls with the tide,” describing someone who tracks the needs of Vox Core and caters to them uncomplainingly. That was Oscar. But lately his serenity had begun to fray at the edges. The fact that Isaac had chosen to meet privately with a nodeless apostate—and to enforce that privacy even against the Network’s routine surveillance—had sabotaged his finely honed sense of order.

  I told him Isaac had wanted to reminisce about the twenty-first century.

  “Anything you might know about the past he can easily access for himself.”

  “Maybe he was curious about me. I don’t know. Maybe he felt like speaking English for a little while.”

  “What could you possibly have to say that would interest a being like him —even in English?”

  That was insulting, so I used an expression Oscar might not have encountered in his formal training: “Fuck you,” I said, and closed the door.

  2.

  No word came from Turk—he had warned me they might keep him overnight after the surgery—and I decided I couldn’t sit alone any longer, partly because I was afraid my elevated heartbeat or hormonal chemistry might give the Network another clue to my state of mind, especially if Isaac wasn’t paying attention and blocking the sensors. I needed distraction. So I left the suite and rode transit to the nearest large public space, a terrace overlooking a market zone, to watch the parade of lights that marked the Festival of Ido.

  Vox Core was a city of rituals and festivals. As Treya, I had always loved them. The part of me that was Allison was surprised that a polity as tight-laced as Vox should be so fond of celebrations. But Vox was a limbic democracy; sharing public emotion was what we did best.

  Vox had been founded on a planet called Ester, five worlds away from Old Earth. We still kept the Esterish year of 723 days and the Esterish division of a day into twenty-four hours (a custom as ancient as Earth itself, though Ester’s days and hours were slightly longer). Vox had journeyed through all five of those worlds, sailing the isotropic sea that linked every Ring world with the exception of Mars. We marked many of our days with celebrations: celebrations of the Founding, of the Prophecies, of the anniversaries of historical battles and so on. The Festival of Ido commemorated our victory over bionormative forces at the Arch of Terivine—the battle in which we had taken the prisoners who eventually formed the nucleus of the Farmer caste.

  It was a martial holiday, with fireworks and drums and torch parades. Most years the celebration was joyous, bountiful. This year the feasts were rationed and there was a note of hysteria in the festivities. Everyone knew it might be the last Ido before the remaking of the world.

  Obviously, I couldn’t participate. Even if I had wanted to, everyone in Vox Core knew me from the newsfeeds. I was a traitor to my own past, a dissonant note in the story of the Uptaken, and because I was nodeless my behavior would seem opaque and untrustworthy. I wasn’t in any danger from the crowds—at least, not yet—but I would be ostracized and ignored if I tried to join them. So I found a place where I could be alone, a wooded patch overlooking the market zone. A half mile or so downslope, as ambient light dimmed toward night, the market square filled with celebrants. They carried luminous rods of various sizes and colors, and they gathered behind a leader who conducted them through the maze of market stalls in a sinuous moving line. The effect was spectacular in the dark and from a distance, a glowing multicolored snake twining around and through itself, swaying to the beat of the drums.

  I felt sad, I felt perversely nostalgic. I wasn’t Treya anymore and I didn’t want to be Treya, but I missed the pleasure Treya had once taken in events like this. That is, my pleasure. She, me, mine, hers. Deceptively simple words, not as easy to parse as they had once seemed.

  Even nodeless, I could tell when a fresh rush of excitement swept through the crowd. I had to look across a gap of treetops to one of the festival’s huge video displays to see what had happened. The display showed a group of snakedancers unfurling a banner; on the banner was a portrait of Isaac Dvali, literally glowing in the dark. Cheering and applause echoed up the terrace like the sound of a hard rain falling.

  But it wasn’t really Isaac they were cheering for. They were cheering for what Isaac represented: the fulfillment of prophecy, the imminent end of days. It was the voice of the doomed Coryphaeus, worshipping itself through the body of Vox.

  * * *

  How do you measure a universal madness? I took as signs the contagious irrationalities, the bland indifference to real problems (shortages of grain and animal protein, for instance), the public obsession with the Hypotheticals that followed the massacre in the Antarctic desert. Images of the Hypothetical machines were everywhere now, and a belief had begun to emerge that the soldiers and scientists killed in the vanguard expedition weren’t really dead but had been Uptaken.

  Presumably, when the machines eventually arrived at Vox, the rest of us would be similarly raptured into communion with the Hypotheticals… or killed; the terms were commutable. Prophecy had always been a little vague on that point. Vox’s founders had believed the end of Vox would take the form of what they called ajientei, for which the nearest English equivalent might be “enlargement”—the diffusion of human consciousness over galactic space and geologic time, the scale on which the Hypotheticals were presumed to operate.

 
In any case, our scholars had estimated that at their current rate of progress the Hypothetical machines wouldn’t reach Vox for months or even years. In fact certain pious elderly citizens were petitioning to be flown to the machines so they could be Uptaken before they died.

  They needn’t have worried. Only hours after the Festival of Ido, our unmanned aircraft delivered unsettling news from the Wilkes Basin. The Hypothetical machines had begun to move more quickly than before. In fact they were accelerating—doubling their speed every few hours. That didn’t amount to much at the moment, but if the acceleration continued they would arrive sooner than expected. Much sooner, the scholars said: a matter of weeks. Possibly days.

  Vox rang like a bell with the news.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sandra and Bose

  “We’re not safe yet,” Bose said when they pulled into a parking space outside Ariel Mather’s motel room.

  Sandra had no trouble believing him. She had seen how vigilantly he watched his mirrors as he drove away from State. The plan, he said, was to check Ariel Mather out of her room and put her and Orrin in a different motel for the night. In the morning, Bose’s “friends” would drive them to a safe place out of town.

  Sandra stayed in the car with Orrin while Bose knocked at the door of Ariel’s room. Moments later he was back, followed by Ariel with her single scuffed plastic suitcase. Ariel wore denim jeans frayed at the cuffs and a black T-shirt with UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA printed on it. Sandra doubted Ariel had been any closer to the University of North Carolina than the thrift shop where she bought her clothes.

  “There are people out there who might still think of Orrin as a threat,” Bose explained to her as she crouched into the backseat. “So we’re taking you to another motel, just overnight. Tomorrow you can get out of Houston and away from all this. That all right with you, Ms. Mather?”

  “Yeah,” Ariel said abstractedly. “I don’t have any better idea. What’s the matter with Orrin? Orrin, you all right? Wake up!”

  “He was sedated,” Sandra said. “He’ll be fine in a few hours. In the meantime it might be better just to let him sleep it off, if that’s what he wants to do.”

  “They drugged him?”

  “Just a sleeping pill.”

  “Huh! Honestly, I don’t know how you can stand to work in a place that drugs up innocent people for no reason.”

  “I guess I can’t stand it,” Sandra said. “I don’t work there anymore.”

  * * *

  Bose drove side streets until he was sure they weren’t being followed, then stopped at an anonymous two-story motel near the airport. By this time Orrin was functional enough to climb out of the car and stagger to his room on the arm of his sister. Sandra waited in the motel’s small lobby while Bose carried Ariel’s suitcase.

  Getting late now, and she’d had almost no sleep herself, but she was alert and slightly buzzed, still processing the adrenaline she had generated back at State Care. Ariel’s rough tenderness toward Orrin made her think of her own brother, passing the night in an institution far kinder than State and vastly more expensive. She thought about the man on the phone who had tried to bribe her by offering the longevity drug.

  To which Bose’s anonymous friends also had access—the original Martian drug, not the hacked commercial version. Would such people also be willing to help Kyle? If so, what would they ask in return?

  “It isn’t some kind of elaborate secret society,” Bose had said—was it really only yesterday? “The original group consisted of people Jason Lawton happened to know.” Jason Lawton, the scientist, to whom Wun Ngo Wen had entrusted his inventory of pharmaceuticals. “Not people who took the treatment, necessarily, though some did, but people who were willing to make themselves custodians of it. To distribute it ethically and, until the laws are changed, secretly. The circle expanded over the years. It’s not foolproof and it’s not airtight, but we try to take care of each other.”

  We, she had noticed.

  Bose came back to the lobby alone. He said, “It’s not a good idea for you to be home by yourself. I figured I’d take a room here for the night.” He smiled. “I’ll make it a double, if you want to save money.”

  “So that’s what, an economic proposition?”

  “No,” he said, “not quite.”

  * * *

  The air-conditioning was anemic, but some things were worth sweating for.

  After they made love, lying in the dim and intermittent light cast by passing headlights on the blinds of their room, Sandra ran her finger along the line of Bose’s scar, belly to shoulder. When he realized what she was doing he flinched, but then—maybe by sheer force of will—relaxed. She said, “What happened? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  He was silent long enough that she guessed he did mind. Then he sat up, bracing himself against the backboard of the bed.

  “I was seventeen,” he said. “I was in Madras visiting my father. This was after my parents split up. My father was an engineering consultant for a company that installed shallow-water wind generators. The company rented him a bungalow with a sea view but it was in a dicey neighborhood, the security was bad. Thieves broke in one night. They killed my father. Me, I was stupid enough to try to defend him.” He covered her hand with his. “They were carrying knives.”

  If the scar was a knife wound they must nearly have gutted him. “That’s terrible… I’m so sorry.”

  “A neighbor heard the scuffle and called the police. I lost a lot of blood—it was kind of touch and go for a while. My mom flew over and took charge, pulled some strings, made sure I got the right kind of medical care.”

  Sandra wondered if that was why he ended up at HPD: outrage at the crime, a sense of the police as belated saviors. Southern India after the Spin: “I heard it was pretty bad over there for a few years.”

  “Not much worse than Houston,” Bose said. But he was uncomfortable talking about it, and she dropped the subject and let herself drift toward sleep.

  * * *

  It was strange to wake up next to him in an unfamiliar bed, the morning already gone, diesel-scented air seeping in through the poorly sealed motel windows. She sat up and yawned. Bose was still asleep, lying on his back and breathing in a rhythm as regular as waves breaking on a beach. The salty, delicate odor of their lovemaking still clung to the sheets.

  She would have liked to lie here indefinitely—and she guessed she could; she was functionally if not officially unemployed; she had nowhere to go—but some Calvinist impulse caused her to pick up her watch from the bedside table. Noon, a little past. The day half wasted. Shocking.

  She left the bed without disturbing Bose and used the shower. Her only clothes were the jeans and shirt she’d worn yesterday, and they weren’t especially fresh, but they would have to do.

  When she came out of the bathroom he was awake and grinning at her. “Breakfast,” he said.

  “It’s a little late for breakfast.”

  “Lunch, then. I called Ariel’s room. Orrin’s still groggy but he’s feeling better. They’re going to the motel coffee shop. Maybe you and I can sneak away for something a little nicer? Then come back here. We’re booked for another night, but I can arrange a ride for Orrin and Ariel before dark.”

  Yes, Sandra thought. And then? Once the Mather sibs were safely out of town… what then?

  * * *

  The heat wave still hadn’t broken, but the news was predicting storms tonight. Sandra hoped that was true. The sky was dusty and hot, and on the southern horizon the clouds were beginning to build their afternoon cathedrals into higher, cooler air.

  Bose’s idea of “somewhere a little nicer” to eat lunch turned out to be a chain restaurant off the highway. Sandra ordered a sandwich and ignored the cowboy-motif decor and the aggressively cheerful waitstaff. By the time they were served the noon crowd had come and gone and the warehouse-sized dining room was comfortably quiet. Bose polished off a huge plate of steak and eggs in what Sandra imagined
was a kind of postcoital protein binge. Over coffee she said, “I guess we’ll never know. About Orrin’s notebooks, I mean. Where all that stuff came from and what it means to him.”

  “There are a lot of things we’ll never know.”

  “He’ll go into hiding and we’ll do… whatever it is we do next. Did you check your phone today?”

  “‘Turn in your badge and go home.’ Voice and text. They probably would have sent a candygram if they knew how to reach me.”

  “You have any plans?”

  “Long- or short-term?”

  “Long, I guess.”

  “I’ve been thinking about Seattle. It’s chilly and it rains a lot.”

  “Just pick up and go? Just like that?”

  “I don’t know any other way.” He put down his coffee cup. “Come with me.”

  She stared at him. “Christ, Bose! You just open up your mouth and say these things…”

  “Obviously, I don’t know much about your line of work. But my friends are your friends. Come to Seattle and maybe we can help you find something.”

  “That’s just—I can’t—”

  “You have any reason to stay in Houston?”

  “Of course I do.” But really, did she? No real friends, no prospect of employment. “There’s Kyle, for one.”

  “Your brother. Okay, but is it possible he could be transferred to a facility in Washington State?”

  “That would involve a lot of paperwork.”

  “Oh. Paperwork.”

  “I mean, I guess it could be done, but…”

  He waved a hand apologetically: “I’m sorry—it was a selfish question. It just seems like we’re in the same boat here. No fault of your own. You were doing all right before I walked into your life.”