Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  No, but he didn’t know that. “Well… I appreciate the thought.” She added almost in spite of herself, “I’ll think about it.” Because now she could think about it. She was unemployed and falling freely. She could risk everything without risking much at all. “Why is this so easy for you? I’m jealous.”

  “Maybe I’ve been thinking about it longer than you have.”

  But no, it wasn’t that. It was something more profoundly a part of Bose’s nature, a degree of inner calm that was almost eerie. She said, “You’re not like other people.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You know what it means. You just don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Well,” he said, fishing his wallet out of his pocket, “we can talk about it after we get Orrin out of town.”

  * * *

  Sandra needed a change of clothes, so she persuaded Bose to swing by her apartment long enough for her to run inside and throw a few things into a suitcase. She packed items from her wardrobe, of course, but she also took her passport, her gig drives, her personal papers. She didn’t know when she would be back. Maybe soon. Maybe never. She took a last look around before she left. The apartment seemed already untenanted, as if it had sensed her intentions and dismissed her.

  Downstairs she found Bose waiting patiently, playing some kind of tinny shitkicker music on the car’s audio system. She tossed her bag into the backseat and climbed in beside him. “I didn’t know you liked country music.”

  “It’s not country music.”

  “It sounds like an alley cat fucking a fiddle.”

  “Show some respect. This is classic western swing. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.”

  Recorded with a tin can and a string, by the sound of it. “This is what’s keeping you in Texas?”

  “No, but it’s just about the only thing that makes me sorry to leave.”

  He was tapping the steering wheel in merry rhythm when his phone buzzed. A hands-free app displayed the caller’s number in the lower-left corner of the car’s windshield. “Answer,” Bose said, which prompted the car to cut the music and open the phone connection. “Bose here.”

  “It’s me,” a shrill voice said, “it’s Ariel Mather—is that you, Officer Bose?”

  “Yeah, Ariel. What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Orrin!”

  “Is he all right?”

  “I don’t know if he’s all right—I don’t where he is! He went out to the Coke machine and now he’s gone!”

  “Okay,” Bose said. “Wait for us right where you are. We’re on our way.”

  Sandra saw the change that came over him, the way his lips went taut and his eyes narrowed. You’re not like other people, she had said, and it still seemed true, as if Bose had a deep reservoir of calm inside him—but it wasn’t calm now, Sandra thought. Now it was filled with a fierce resolve.

  Chapter Twenty

  Turk’s Story

  1.

  What I saw after the surgery, as I was coming up from anesthesia, not quite awake and not entirely asleep, was a vision of a man on fire—a burning man dancing in a pool of flame, staring at me through ripples of superheated air.

  The vision had all the qualities of a nightmare. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a memory.

  * * *

  The medical team had shown me the limbic implant before they installed it. I believe they interpreted my horror as preoperative anxiety.

  The node was a flexible black disk a few centimeters wide and less than a centimeter thick. It was covered with nubs the size of pinheads from which fibers of artificial nervous tissue would grow, once the node established a suitable blood supply from the surrounding capillaries. Almost as soon as it was installed the implant would power up its link to the Network; within days its artificial nerves would have bonded to the spinal medulla and begun to infiltrate the targeted areas of my brain.

  The medics asked me if I understood all this. I told them I did.

  Then: the prick of an anesthetic injection, a cold swab at the back of my neck, oblivion while the surgeon wielded his knife.

  * * *

  The burning man had been a night watchman at my father’s warehouse in Houston.

  He was a stranger to me. The killing was unpremeditated, and in a court of law the charge might have been reduced from murder to manslaughter. But I never went before a court.

  Twice in my life I had told some version of that story to another person—once when I was drunk, once when I was sober; once to a stranger, once to a woman with whom I had fallen in love. In both cases the story I told was incomplete and partially fabricated. Even my best attempts at confession inevitably foundered on lies.

  The people I had confessed to were all ten thousand years gone, but the dead man was locked in my conscience, where he had never stopped burning. And now I had given the keys to my conscience to the Coryphaeus, and I didn’t know what that might mean.

  2.

  The first change I noticed after the surgery wasn’t in myself but in other people, especially their faces.

  I felt some of the side effects I had been warned about—transient dizziness, loss of appetite—but the symptoms weren’t severe and they passed quickly. What scared me wasn’t what I felt but what I might not be feeling… what I might have lost without knowing I had lost it. I questioned every unguarded impulse and I kept to myself for days, hardly speaking even to Allison (who in any case had begun treating me with a kind of mournful disdain, which I hoped was only theatrical). Both of us knew what had to be done; both of us knew I wasn’t yet ready to attempt it.

  The medics had prescribed exercises in what they called “interactive volitional skills,” meaning the ability to manipulate node-enabled control surfaces—things as simple as turning on a graphic display by a combination of touch and will. These were the same skills I would need to pilot us away from Vox, so I pushed myself up a fairly steep learning curve. Oscar stopped in from time to time to monitor my progress, and on one of these visits he brought me a selection of tutelary devices intended for Voxish children: Network toys that changed color or made music when I told them to. Except mostly they didn’t. The node was still infiltrating key parts of my brain, still learning to enhance or suppress activity at selected sites; not all the necessary feedback loops had formed or stabilized. Oscar counseled patience.

  It wasn’t until I stopped focusing on control surfaces and ventured out into the public spaces of Vox Core that I saw the difference the node had made. I had walked these corridors and passed through these tiers and terraces dozens of times, but suddenly it was as if I had never really seen them. The faces of the people I passed were almost luminous in their expressiveness and complexity. I found I could read the moods of strangers as accurately as if I had known them all my life. The doctors had told me this would happen, but since their explanations had been couched in phrases like “amygdalic linkage” and “mirror neuron profusion” and “chiasmic induction”—Oscar’s translations—I had never really grasped the significance of it. Now the effect was almost overwhelming.

  I decided to travel up to one of the city’s high places, away from the crowds. Taking vertical transit in Vox was like riding an elevator the size of a subway car: it put me eye-to-eye with other passengers. I sat opposite a woman holding a young child in her lap. She noticed me and smiled. It was the smile you might give any amiable stranger, except that in some sense we weren’t strangers—we were bound by the Network, and wordless intimacies scrolled between us. Her restless eyes and the alternating ease and tension of her body told me she was anxious about the future—it had recently been announced that the Hypothetical machines were accelerating toward us—but she was humbly willing to submit to whatever fate the prophets had mandated for her. It was when she looked at her infant son that her uneasiness grew more focused and concentrated. The boy was five or six months old and his own limbic implant was still a prominent pink bump at the base of his skull. He radiated simple needs and absolute depen
dency. And she was reluctant to entrust him to the care of the Hypotheticals, no matter how benevolent she believed them to be. Whenever she held her son in her arms, she was tempted by the sin of fear.

  I felt the soothing euphoria of the Coryphaeus running through both of them, counterpoint to the text of their bodies and gestures. That was unnerving. And of course they sensed my reaction as keenly as I sensed theirs. The mother frowned and averted her eyes, as if she had seen something distasteful. The child squirmed and arched against her body.

  I hurried away at the next stop.

  * * *

  The next time I felt restless I went out at night, when the corridors were dimly lit and mostly empty. I had been working with Network interfaces all day and although I was tired I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  News had come from our fleet of drone aircraft that the Hypothetical machines were crossing the Transarctic Mountains faster than expected. Out in the Wilkes Basin the machines had looked like cumbersomely solid objects, but when they encountered rough ground they deformed in order to negotiate large obstacles. In extreme terrain they actually seemed to flow like a viscous liquid, moving edgelessly up narrow passes and steep, chaotic inclines. Estimates of the time it would take the machines to reach Vox were revised downward yet again.

  The few people I encountered that night were bristling with conflicting emotions—their faces glowed like torches, to my eyes—and I hurried past them. I had begun to understand what Allison meant about collective insanity. It wasn’t just euphoria the Coryphaeus was sharing. Fear smoldered in the Voxish collective like a fire in a coal seam, too strong to be entirely suppressed. I passed a maintenance worker whose anxiety literally radiated from his face, a spiky halo of awe and dread. I felt it myself, a pressure as faint and persistent as the beating of my heart: the longing for a better and larger existence, set against the suspicion that what was approaching from the Antarctic desert might be nothing but a quick and nasty death.

  Allison was awake when I got back, and she wasn’t alone. Isaac Dvali was with her.

  I knew about Isaac’s miraculous recovery and the endorsement of the Voxish prophecies that had made him a public hero. His image was everywhere in Vox Core. But he was here without his minders, he was smiling at Allison and she was smiling at me: “We can talk!” she said.

  Which made no sense. I stared at Isaac. To my eyes he looked gilded, like a painting of a medieval saint. More subtly, I could see hints of the trauma that had shaped him, sparks in an aura—he was a mosaic of colored glass, coruscating with unexpected energies. I asked him what he wanted.

  “Let me explain,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Sandra and Bose

  Ariel Mather paced the floor of her motel room, shaking with anxiety. At first she had insisted on going out to look for Orrin (“right now! ”), but Bose had convinced her to stay in the room at least long enough to explain what had happened. Sandra sat on the unmade bed, listening carefully and not saying much, letting the crisis unspool around her.

  “You went to lunch,” Bose prompted.

  “Yeah, over to the coffee shop. We had hamburgers. Does that information help you in some way?”

  “How was Orrin feeling this morning?”

  “Pretty good, I spose, considering he was drugged last night.”

  “Okay, he was in a good mood. What did you talk about?”

  “Mostly about what happened since he left Raleigh. How he came to Houston and got hired by that man Findley. I asked him why he wanted to leave home in the first place—was it something I did wrong, was he unhappy there? He said no and he was sorry I worried so much about him. He said he just felt like there was business in Houston he had to take care of.”

  “What business?”

  “I asked him that but he was cagy. And I didn’t push, because I figured it was all over with now. We were going home—so I thought.”

  “What else did you talk about?”

  “The weather. This damn heat. It gets hot in Raleigh, but Texas! I don’t know why anybody lives here, honestly. Nothing much else than that. While we ate Orrin kept his notebooks in his lap, you know, those ratty notebooks of his, the ones you gave him back yesterday.”

  “Did he say anything about them?”

  “He showed me a couple of pages this morning, but he was real shy about it. There are words in there I didn’t think he knew… words I don’t know. I asked him, did he write this? Sort of, he says. I asked him how you can ‘sort of’ write something—was he holding the pen that made these words or was he not? He was, he says. Somebody with him at the time? No, he says. Then you wrote them, I said. Whatever they mean. He said it was just a story. But I don’t know about that, the way he clings to those pages. Why? Does that have something to do with him running off?”

  “I don’t know,” Bose said. “What happened after lunch?”

  “He asked me for some walking-around money.”

  “Walking around?”

  “That’s what we called it back in Raleigh. He worked odd jobs to help with the rent but he didn’t usually have any money of his own, so I used to give him a little cash on Saturdays so he could walk down to the store and buy something, or maybe go to the municipal pool or get himself lunch at McDonald’s. He didn’t like to be away from home without money in his pocket.” Ariel stopped pacing and shook her head. “I gave him forty dollars to keep him happy. I didn’t think he’d take it and run. What’s forty dollars in a city like this? After lunch we went back to the room to wait for you two. Then he says, Ariel, I’m going to the lobby and get change for the Coke machine. I said I would give him coins. He said no, I already gave him money, he wanted to change a bill. Twenty minutes and he’s not back, so I went to look for him. He wasn’t down at the soda machine and when I went to the lobby he wasn’t there, either. The clerk told me he saw Orrin waiting for a city bus at the highway stop.”

  “Going which direction?” Bose asked.

  “You’ll have to ask the clerk.”

  “Was Orrin alone or was he with somebody?”

  “Clerk didn’t say anything about anybody else.”

  Sandra waited until Bose had wrung out of Ariel all the information she was capable of giving. Then she said, “I have a couple of questions, if it’s all right.”

  Bose seemed surprised. Ariel sighed impatiently but nodded.

  “Last time we talked you said Orrin was gentle, that he would never hurt anyone. Do you remember that?”

  Ariel’s lips went taut. “Of course I remember.”

  “But when he tried to leave State he fought with the orderly who tried to restrain him.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “It may be, but the orderly was wearing a bandage the next day. He claims Orrin bit him.”

  “I wouldn’t take anything those people say seriously. I thought you mentioned you quit that job?”

  “I did. I don’t work there anymore. I just want to get clear on this.”

  Ariel paced a few moments more. Then she said, “Nobody’s perfect, Dr. Cole. I told you Orrin’s gentle, and that’s the truth. Maybe I exaggerated last time we talked, but you were working for the people who locked him up—I didn’t want to say anything to make it worse.”

  “Exaggerated how?”

  “Orrin had a few encounters when he was growing up. He’s slow to anger, Dr. Cole, and he hates fights, but that doesn’t mean he never got in one. The neighbor children used to bother him. Called him names and all that. Mostly Orrin would run away, but every once in a while he’d lose his patience.”

  Sandra and Bose exchanged glances. Bose said, “How often did this happen, Ariel?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe once or twice a year when he was younger.”

  “Was it ever serious? Did he get hurt, did he hurt anyone else?”

  “No…”

  “Whatever you can tell us might help us find him.”

  “I don’t see how.” Pause. “Well. Once he h
it the Lewisson boy hard enough he had to get stitches over his eye. Other times it was just scuffles. Maybe a black eye or two. Sometimes Orrin got the worst of it. Sometimes not.” She added, “He always felt bad about it afterward.”

  “Okay, thank you,” Bose said. “Anything else Orrin talked about this morning that you can recall? Anything at all, even if it seems unimportant.”

  “No. Just the weather, like I said. He was interested in the weather report coming over the radio in the coffee shop. They’re calling for heavy rain tonight. That excited him. ‘I guess it’s tonight,’ he said. ‘Tonight’s the night.’”

  “Any idea what he meant by that?”

  “Well, he always did like storms. You know. The thunder and all.”

  * * *

  Bose convinced Ariel to stay in her room, “otherwise I’ll end up looking for the both of you.” And Ariel had calmed down enough to see the sense in it.

  “You’ll call me, though, right? Soon as you know anything?”

  “I’ll call you whether we know anything or not.”

  Back in the motel lobby, Bose talked to the desk clerk for a few minutes. Orrin had been waiting for the downtown bus, the clerk said. No, he hadn’t actually seen Orrin get on. Just noticed him waiting out there. Skinny guy in torn jeans and a yellow T-shirt standing in the sun by the side of the road. “Begging for heat stroke in this weather, if you ask me. Those buses only come along every forty-five minutes.”

  “So what do we do?” Sandra asked when Bose had finished.

  “Depends. Maybe you want to stay here with Ariel?”

  “Or maybe I don’t.”

  “I can think of a couple of places we might look.”