Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  2.

  Our aircraft pushed through the electrostatic barrier into murky daylight.

  Suddenly Vox was a dark patch on the surface of the Ross Sea far below us, the scuttled islands of the Farmers surrounding it like a sunken reef. We rose at a vertiginous speed until the sea was lost in mist, rose until we soared above a deck of clouds that ran to every horizon.

  Turk confirmed our destination with the aircraft’s onboard protocols and managed to lock out any signals coming from Vox. Which also isolated his node from the activity of the Coryphaeus—he shuddered once, then shook his head as if to clear it. He instructed the vehicle to alert us in the event of pursuit (there was none, probably thanks to Isaac) and sat back, drained and pale, from the control surfaces. The clouds below us looked as forbidding as a range of wild mountains.

  He looked at me with his eyes narrowed. I remembered that feeling—the way Treya had felt when the Network shut down, as if all the color and sense had been drained from the world. “Promise me something,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The thing they attached to my spine—once we get where we’re going, promise you’ll cut it out of me.”

  Solemnly, I promised I would.

  * * *

  Once we get where we’re going. We hadn’t been able to talk much about that.

  Back at Vox Core I had spent a lot of time viewing material from the Voxish archives (using only manual interfaces, a slow and frustrating process) and reading the histories that had been prepared for Turk. Vox had been persecuted for centuries by jealous cortical democracies, or so I had been taught. But without the cheerleading of the Coryphaeus, those familiar stories seemed ambiguous and even disturbing. The founders of Vox had been the activist wing of a radical belief system, ostracized by the bionormative majorities of the Middle Worlds for their experiments with banned Hypothetical biotechnology. In response the founders had chosen to create their own closed polity, a limbic democracy with a built-in metaphysics.

  Vox must have seemed, at least at first, just a slightly more eccentric example of the many artificial island communities that grew and thrived in the oceans of Ester, a watery Middle World. The founders had abandoned experiments with Hypothetical biotech in favor of their belief in an eventual human-Hypothetical union, which was why they made saints of everyone who had ever been touched by the Hypotheticals—beginning with Jason Lawton at the dawn of the Spin era and including countless longevity cultists, ancient Martian Fourths, and the reckless or unlucky souls who had been taken up by temporal Arches.

  The bionormative majority was the recurring villain in Voxish history. Ester had banned limbic neural collectives soon after the tragedies of Hyum and Loi, and Vox had been forced to raise anchor and set off on its centuries-long pilgrimage to Old Earth. But today, on most planets up the Ring—Ester and Cloud Harbor, especially—the cortical democracies were still thriving. Once we get where we’re going meant, in the long term, one of those prosperous, peaceful Middle Worlds.

  I thought about that after sunset, as we traveled north. Turk ate listlessly, alternating his gaze between the barren moon above and the toxic clouds below. His mind had wandered to old griefs. He said, “We fucked up this planet pretty good, didn’t we?”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘we.’”

  “People in general. I guess, my generation in particular.”

  The view from the forward cabin was ample testimony to human failure. The clouds were oddly beautiful, but the moonlight that reflected from them was tinted a poisonous green. “Maybe so,” I said. “But that’s not the end of the story. What was the population of Earth when you left it? Six, seven billion people?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But we don’t just live on Earth anymore. We live on all the worlds of the Ring. You know how many people are alive in the Ring of Worlds right now? Almost fifty billion. And that’s not a toxic bloom, like the population on Old Earth. That’s fifty billion people living in a sustainable relationship with their environment—fifty billion reasonably happy human beings. We’re not a failed species. We’re a success story.”

  “That’s what Vox was running from? A success story?”

  “Well, Vox… Vox wasn’t running away from the Middle Worlds. It was running toward the Hypotheticals.”

  “It wasn’t the Hypotheticals who nuked Vox Core.”

  “The Middle Worlds aren’t paradise. People are still people—greedy and shortsighted, often enough. But they’ve learned how to make better decisions.”

  “By putting wires in their heads?”

  His hand stroked the lump at the back of his skull, perhaps unconsciously. “Not exactly,” I said. But it wasn’t the concept of cortical democracy he was struggling with. “Turk—did something happen? After I left you, before you came up to the aircraft docks…”

  “No… nothing important.”

  I didn’t need to be Networked to know that for a lie. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “Not now,” he said. “Maybe when we get where we’re going.”

  * * *

  We were still a couple of hours away from the Indian Ocean when the aircraft’s alarm sounded.

  I had been asleep. Turk had insisted on standing watch in the forward compartment—he didn’t trust the ship to pilot itself without supervision—but I was too exhausted to keep him company. So I had crawled into a crew cot and closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the alarm was chiming.

  I hurried forward. Turk had already synced himself up with the ship’s interface, and by the frustrated look on his face I could tell he was having trouble working the controls. The wall was still a window; the moon had set; the sky was dark except for the high tip of the Arch, close to zenith now, reflecting a reddish glow that in another couple of hours would be our sunrise.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. He looked up and said, “I’ve got a warning display but I don’t know how to read it.”

  “Okay. Can you put it into the wall so I can see it too?”

  He managed to do that. The display appeared superimposed on the night sky. It was a radar signature with tracking details. Turk said, “It’s seeing something, but I can’t read range or trajectory.”

  Were we being chased? But no: the object the ship had detected was high and to the northeast. I said, “The ship pinged us because there shouldn’t be anything in that airspace. Whatever it is, it looks like it’s not on a controlled course. It’s ballistic.”

  It was falling, in other words. Probably a natural phenomenon, some piece of ancient debris tumbling out of orbit. But then the alarm chimed and chimed again, and two more targets popped up on the display.

  By the end of an hour we had detected five such falling objects, all traveling east to west and roughly parallel to the equator. They were impacting close enough to our charted course that Turk instructed the aircraft to hold and circle until we could figure out what was going on. There was a lull of twenty minutes or so, then the alarm chimed yet again. According to the vector display it had detected an even bigger target this time, maybe big enough to be visible to the naked eye. Turk instructed the ship to aim its window at the appropriate quadrant of the sky.

  We looked out into darkness, a few stars beginning to dim behind the first light of the dawn. “There,” Turk said.

  The object streaked across the horizon a couple of degrees above the cloud deck. It was as bright as burning phosphorous and it left a luminous trail that quickly faded. The glare of it tracked across the cloudscape and made hectic, moving shadows. Once it had passed out of sight darkness fell again, but only briefly. The next burst of light came from beyond the horizon. That was the impact.

  “Ask the ship to calculate its trajectory backward,” I said. “See where it came from.”

  Easier said than done, with only a rough estimate of the object’s size and mass to work with. But the ship calculated a cone of possible trajectories and matched it against the other objects it had m
onitored, then superimposed the likely paths. The result was inconclusive, but Turk saw what I saw: the most likely trajectories all intersected at the Arch of the Hypotheticals.

  “What’s that mean?” Turk asked.

  I didn’t know. But the sun was coming up and the nearest leg of the Arch would soon be visible from where we hovered. Turk aimed the window so we could see it.

  The Arch of the Hypotheticals had been and would forever be the largest artificial structure ever to contact the surface of the Earth. Its apex was higher than the atmosphere and the base of it was embedded deep in the planet’s mantle. It straddled the Indian Ocean like a wedding band dropped edge-up into a shallow pond. The fraction of it we could see from where we circled above the clouds looked like a silver thread laced into the yellow fabric of the dawn. “Focus on the peak of it,” I told Turk, “and amplify the image.”

  He struggled with the interface but eventually succeeded. Because he had configured the display as a window, we seemed to zoom suddenly and dangerously close to the upper reaches of the Arch. The image wavered, distorted by the intervening atmosphere; then the one-dimensional thread acquired width and became a ribbon. In reality it was many miles wide.

  The most detailed telescopic images of the Arch, beginning back in Turk’s day, had never revealed even the slightest imperfection in its surface. Until now. Now the ribbon was visibly flawed. The smoothly curving edge of it was ragged and sawtoothed. “Amplify it another times-ten,” I said, though we were approaching the limits of the aircraft’s optical functions.

  Another vertiginous leap forward. The image writhed and twisted until the ship applied corrective algorithms.

  And I gasped. The Arch was worse than merely imperfect. Visible cracks ran across it. There were gaps where immense pieces of it had calved away.

  That was what had been coming out the sky: pieces of the Arch the size of small islands, some of them moving at only a little less than orbital velocity, burning on re-entry and spending their enormous kinetic energy in the Earth’s dead oceans or on its lifeless continents.

  It should have been impossible. But it happened again as we watched. A dark crack widened and expanded and intersected another, and suddenly a piece of the Arch separated and began to fall. It moved with the elephantine grace of its own inertia, and I guessed it might circle the planet a couple more times before it began its final burn and tumble.

  I looked at Turk, he looked at me. We didn’t have to say anything. We both knew what it meant. It meant the door to Equatoria had been closed forever. It meant our plan had failed. It meant we had nowhere to go.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Sandra and Bose

  Bose followed a line of hedges down the street, keeping low and hoping the rain would help disguise his presence. The kid with the plastic bag—Turk, presumably—strode down the sidewalk, out in the open and half a block ahead. Another couple of yards and he’d be within sight of one of the guard cars Bose had identified earlier, an anonymous-looking gray vehicle with two sullen and undoubtedly well-armed men inside it.

  Bose recognized the moment the kid spotted the car by the hitch in his step, a momentary hesitation you’d never notice if you weren’t looking for it. The kid gave no other indication. He kept walking, head down, rain running off his poncho. He walked straight past the car. The guards inside watched as he passed, their heads turning in unison as if they were attached to a string.

  A left turn would have taken the kid down another block to the front entrance of the Findley warehouse, but he kept on going, sensibly. Bose took the opportunity to cut through the weedy lot in back of an industrial building, which shielded him from the guard car but also cut off his view of Turk. The rain was coming down so hard it felt like brusque hands trying to get his attention. His shoes were already saturated. At the next corner he caught sight of the kid again, still kept walking in the same direction, well past the warehouse now. Just keep on going, he thought. Catch another bus. Make my life easier.

  But the kid turned left. He was circling the warehouse from a distance, Bose realized, looking for a way past the cordon.

  * * *

  Bose tried to put himself inside the kid’s head, on the assumption that this really was Turk Findley, more or less as described in Orrin’s notebook. It wasn’t easy. Bose had worshipped his own father. Patricide—even symbolic patricide—was a foreign concept to him.

  But he understood rage and impotence well enough. It was what he had felt when the thieves had broken down the door and come into his father’s home in Madras. Bose’s father had sent him to hide under the desk in his room, and Bose had stayed there, dutifully, his heart beating madly in his chest, his lungs starved for air because he kept trying to hold his breath. “I’ll deal with this,” his father had said, and Bose had believed him. He didn’t come out until he heard his father’s first and final scream. Which was followed, soon enough, by his own.

  His father hadn’t taken the Fourth treatment himself, though he had facilitated the treatment for many others. He had still been in the broad midstream of his life, not yet ready to assume the duties and obligations of longevity. Bose’s mother had been less scrupulous: she arranged the treatment as a life-saving intervention for Bose himself. Bose was far too young for it, but Martian ethics made an exception for life-or-death cases. Typically, she had administered the treatment first and asked for her colleagues’ approval only later. Bose had never been as grateful as he knew he should have been; often, when the memories of the Madras attack came back to torment him, he thought it wouldn’t have been so bad if she had just let him die.

  The kid in the rain kept walking at a steady pace. He passed a second guard car. The perimeter was even better defended than it had been when Bose did his first drive-around, hours earlier. So what was going on at the warehouse that required all this security? He guessed Findley had been alarmed by the news that Orrin had escaped from State Care. Probably he was afraid some federal agency might issue a warrant for the premises. But what he was doing to counter that threat remained an open question.

  Bose hoped Turk would simply give up and go home; failing that, Bose might have to intercept him and warn him away. Too much time was passing and he still had Orrin Mather to worry about. He sped up a little, avoiding streetlights and keeping to the Dumpster-and-delivery lanes whenever possible.

  The next time he came within sight of Turk the kid was only a dozen yards away, standing still. He was south of the Findley warehouse by a couple of blocks and there were no guards in sight. Bose ducked back as the kid surveyed the street in both directions, seeing nothing but locked doors, shabby sidewalks, the endlessly falling rain. The kid was nervous, shifting the heavy plastic bag he carried from hand to hand. Bose was about to step out, either to confront him or to scare him off, when the kid suddenly turned left, cradling the bag in his arms, and ran between two darkened buildings.

  Shit, Bose thought. He followed quickly but cautiously, hoping the kid wouldn’t be spotted and get them both killed.

  But the kid was quick and, at least in the tactical sense, smart. He knew the neighborhood was riddled with alleys and laneways, many of them poorly lit, and he managed to make his way undetected to the street on which the warehouse had its front entrance. That street was well watched, but Turk sidled up between two empty parked cars, dashed across the open space in a particularly heavy gust of rain, and made it unseen to the mouth of another alley. It wasn’t the front of the warehouse Turk wanted access to, Bose surmised. It was the back lane with the loading bays. Just like in Orrin’s story.

  Bose followed along the same route, feeling absurdly conspicuous. He reminded himself that his only objective was to keep the kid from making a huge mistake and getting himself or someone else hurt. The problem was, any attempt he made to approach Turk at this point might startle him into unpredictable action. Nevertheless, he had to make contact.

  He was weaponless but he brought some skills of his own to the situation. Unli
ke the hacked pharmaceuticals the longevity-sellers traded in, the Martian treatment suppressed and enhanced certain neurological functions. It suppressed spontaneous aggression, which meant Bose was what people called “slow to anger.” It enhanced empathy and it suppressed fear. It also improved visual acuity and reaction time, which had helped gain Bose his police academy reputation as a first-rate sharpshooter.

  Turk moved up the laneway to the place where it intersected the alley behind the warehouse. He crouched down, almost invisible in his black poncho, darting his head out to see what was happening. Bose used the opportunity to move up behind him.

  Now or never. “Hey,” he said, keeping his voice low but just loud enough to be heard over the rattle of the rain.

  The kid jerked out of his crouch and whirled around. Bose held his hands out, palms up. “I’m unarmed,” he said, taking a couple of steps closer. “And I’m not one of them.”

  “Who are you, then?” the kid managed. He had the jug of methyl hydrate in it in his right hand, holding it so he could swing it like a mace.

  “I used to be a cop,” Bose said. “You’re Turk Findley, right? The owner’s son?” The kid said nothing, but his unsurprised silence served as confirmation. “All I want,” Bose said, “is for us both to turn around and get out of here. Whatever you’re thinking of doing, it’s not practical. Not tonight.”

  Rain guttered down from the kid’s sodden black hair into the collar of his poncho. He looked at Bose through the downpour. Then he said in a small, flat voice, “Behind you.”

  “What?”

  “They’re behind you.”

  The kid crouched down hastily. So did Bose. He risked a look back. There were two men coming up the alley, wraithlike in the rain. They hadn’t seen Bose or Turk yet—the angle of the wall had hidden them—but unless they turned around they surely would.