Vortex (10 page)

I didn’t see the point. Vox would make the crossing to Earth or not, whether we were out here on this ledge or in some more comfortable space below.

“I don’t care.” She added in a lower voice, “I want to
see
it. I told them you did, too. What I want doesn’t matter, but you’re Uptaken—they have to pay attention.”

So we were escorted to an enclosed balcony a single level below the landing docks, still high above the city, and we stood there like two grimy and slightly bloodstained scarecrows, gazing out at the island of Vox and the far sea shimmering under the small Equatorian moon. Smoke rose from the fields where the Farmers were dying (or had, by this time, surely died), but it trailed abaft of us and the sky ahead was starry and clear. The warplanes were already circling back to their bases.

Allison spoke to the nearest soldier in our escort, then translated her questions and his answers for me. Did the soldier think Vox would actually achieve a transit to Earth? Yes, he was certain of it; the prophecies were being fulfilled; the Uptaken were among us. What about the Uptaken who had already been taken to Vox Core when the city was bombed? Bad luck, the soldier said. Bad luck that a missile had penetrated the Voxish defenses, bad luck that the strike had damaged Vox Core’s essential infrastructure—and
very
bad luck that the rescued Uptaken had been situated so close to ground zero.

It wasn’t clear to me how many “others” had been collected in the Equatorian desert, but I believed that would have included the hybrid boy Isaac Dvali, possibly his mother, maybe a few unlucky civilians who happened to be nearby. Had the missile killed them all?

“All but one,” Allison translated.

“Who’s the survivor?”

More translation.

“The youngest one.”

The boy, then. Isaac.

“But he was badly hurt,” Allison added. “He’s only barely alive.”

“And that’s enough to get the attention of the Hypotheticals? You think they’ll really open a closed Arch and carry us to Earth just because they recognize one injured boy and a confused ex-sailor?”

It was a question she didn’t have to answer. The answer came out of the sky in a blush of green light.

3.

It had been night on the Equatorian ocean. It was daylight on Earth.

The transition was as sudden and as unnervingly simple as it had been the first time I rode a rusty freighter from Sumatra to Equatoria. I felt a little heavier—Earth is a slightly more massive planet than Equatoria—but it was a sensation no more alarming than the feeling you get in a rising elevator. The other changes were less subtle.

We blinked at murky daylight. Beyond the shores of Vox, the sea was flat and oily to every horizon. The sky was a nasty-looking shade of green.

“God,
no,
” Allison whispered.

The soldiers gawked.

“Poison,” she said. “It’s all poison…”

The war sirens stopped wailing. In the silence the Voxish soldiers stood with abstracted expressions, as if they were listening to voices I couldn’t hear—and probably that’s what they were doing, consulting their Network or their superiors.

Then one of them addressed Allison. She told me, “We’re ordered below, no exceptions this time. The city’s being sealed.”

Before we turned away I took a last look at the open land beyond the walls. The corpses of Farmers lay motionless in charred meadowland, bathed in sour green daylight. A few survivors moved among them, but even from this height they looked shocked and aimless. I asked Allison whether at least some of them could be brought inside as prisoners.

“No,” she said.

“But if the air’s poisonous—”

“Just be grateful
we
were rescued.”

“There might be hundreds of people out there. You’re talking about abandoning them to die.” She nodded blankly. I said, “Whoever’s in charge here, do they really want that on their conscience?”

She gave me a peculiar look. “Vox is a limbic democracy,” she said. “There’s only one conscience. It’s called the Coryphaeus. And it doesn’t give a shit how many Farmers die.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

SANDRA AND BOSE

“This is Sandra Cole,” Bose said, “Orrin’s doctor over at State Care.”

“Well, I’m not his doctor exactly,” Sandra began, feeling more than a little ambushed. Ariel Mather gave her a look so steely and unwavering that her voice dried up in midsentence. Ariel was skinny but she was tall; even though she was sitting down her head was almost level with Sandra’s. She would have towered over Orrin. She had Orrin’s bony facial structure and similarly lustrous brown eyes. But there was nothing of Orrin’s baleful tentativeness about her. Her glare could have blinded a cat.

“You got my brother locked up?”

“No, not exactly … he’s being evaluated for admission to the Texas State Care Adult Custodial Program.”

“What’s that mean? Is he free to go or isn’t he?”

Clearly, the woman wanted a blunt answer. Sandra sat down and gave her one. “No, he’s not free to go. Not yet, anyway.”

“Take it easy, Ariel,” Bose said. “Sandra’s on our side.”

Were there
sides
? Apparently there were, and apparently Sandra had been recruited to one.

An intimidated waiter dropped off a basket of rolls and scurried away.

“All’s I know,” Ariel said, “is that I got a call from
this
man telling me Orrin was in jail for getting beat up, which I guess is a crime in Texas—”

“He was taken into custody,” Bose said, “for his own protection.”

“
Custody,
then, and would I come and get him. Well, he’s my little brother. I took care of him all his life and half mine. Course I’ll come get him. Now I find out Orrin’s not in jail anymore, he’s in something called
State Care.
That’s your business, you said, Dr. Cole?”

Sandra took a moment to compose her thoughts, deliberately buttering a roll under Ariel’s flinty scrutiny. “I’m an intake psychiatrist. I work for State, yes. I spoke to Orrin when Officer Bose first brought him in. Do you know how State Care works? It’s a little different in North Carolina, I believe.”

“Officer Bose says it’s some kind of lock-up for crazy people.”

Sandra hoped Bose had not said exactly that. “The way it works is, when indigent people, people with no fixed address or income, have trouble with the police, they can be remanded to State Care even if they haven’t committed a crime—especially if the police believe the person can’t be safely abandoned back on the street. State Care isn’t a lock-up, Ms. Mather. And it’s not a mental hospital. There’s an evaluation period of seven days, during which we determine whether an individual is a candidate for full-time care in what we call a custodial guided-living environment. At the end of that time the person in question is either released or accorded dependency status.” She was conscious of using words Ariel probably wouldn’t understand—worse, the same words printed in State Care’s three-page pamphlet for concerned families. But what other words were there?

“Orrin’s not crazy.”

“I interviewed him myself, and I’m inclined to agree with you. In any case, nonviolent candidates can always be released into the custody of a willing family member with an income and a legal address.” She spared a glance for Bose, who should have explained all this. “If you can prove you’re Orrin’s sister—just a driver’s license and a social security card will do—and if you’re verifiably employed and willing to sign the forms, we can release Orrin to you more or less immediately.”

“I told Ariel the same thing,” Bose said. “In fact I called State to say we were submitting the paperwork. But there’s a problem. Your supervisor, Dr. Congreve, claims Orrin had a violent spell this afternoon. He assaulted an orderly, Congreve says.”

Sandra blinked. “Seriously? I didn’t hear anything about a violent incident. If Orrin assaulted anyone, it’s news to me.”

“It’s
bullshit
is what it
is,
” Ariel said. “You talked to Orrin even a little, you’d
know
it’s bullshit. Orrin never assaulted nobody in his life. Can’t crush a bug without apologizing to it first.”

“The accusation may not be true,” Bose said, “but it makes it more difficult to release him.”

Sandra was still struggling with the idea. “Certainly it doesn’t sound like behavior I would expect from Orrin.” Though how well did she really know him, after a single interview and a follow-up conversation? “But what are you saying—that Congreve is lying? Why would he do that?”

“To keep Orrin locked up,” Ariel said.

“Yes, but why? We’re underfunded and overloaded as it is. Usually, if we can remand a patient to family, that’s a best-case outcome. Good for the patient, good for us. In fact it’s my impression Congreve was hired because the board of directors believed he would reduce the number of people going on State lists.” Ethically or not, she added silently.

“Maybe,” Ariel said, “you don’t know as much as you think you know about what goes on where you work.”

Bose cleared his throat. “Keep in mind that Sandra’s here to help us. She’s our best shot at getting Orrin a fair deal.”

“I’ll see what I can find out about this incident. I don’t know whether I
can
help, but I’ll do my best. Ms. Mather, would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions about Orrin? The more I know about his background, the easier it’ll be for me to move the case forward.”

“I told Officer Bose everything already.”

“But if you don’t mind repeating yourself? My interest in Orrin is a little different from Officer Bose’s.” Or a lot different. Clearly Sandra hadn’t yet taken the full measure of Jefferson Amrit Bose. “Has Orrin lived with you all his life?”

“Up till the day he got on the bus to Houston, yes.”

“You’re his sister—what about your parents?”

“Me and Orrin had different daddies and neither one of ’em stuck around. Mama was Danela Mather and she died when I was just sixteen. She looked after us as best as she could but she got distracted pretty easy. And she had trouble with drugs toward the end. Meth and the wrong men, if you know what I mean. After that it was only me there to take care of Orrin.”

“Did he need a lot of taking care of?”

“Yes and no. He never asked for much in the way of attention. Orrin was always happy to be by himself, looking at picture books or whatever. Even when he was little he didn’t cry much at all. But he was pretty useless at school and he cried plenty when Mama took him to class, so he just mostly stayed home. And he wasn’t good at feeding himself. You didn’t put food in front of him twice a day, he’d blink and go hungry. That’s just how he was.”

“Different from other children, in other words?”

“Different he surely was, but if you mean is he retarded I have to say no he is not. He can write letters and read words. He’s smart enough to hold a job if anybody’d hire him. He worked a night watchman job a while back in Raleigh—and here, too, Officer Bose tells me, until he got fired.”

“Does Orrin ever hear voices or see things that aren’t there?”

Ariel Mather crossed her arms and glared. “I already told you he’s not crazy. He just has a good imagination. That was obvious even when he was little, the way he’d make up stories about his toy animals or whatnot. Sometimes I’d find him staring at the TV when it wasn’t even turned on, like what he saw in that empty screen was just as interesting as any show on cable. Or at the sky, watching clouds go by. Windows on a rainy day, he liked to look at those. That don’t make him crazy, I don’t think.”

“I don’t think so either.”

“And what’s it matter? All’s you have to do is get him out of that place he’s locked up in.”

“The only way I can do that—
if
I can do that—is to convince my colleagues Orrin isn’t in danger of going back to the streets and getting hurt. What you’re telling me is helpful. Which I have to assume is why Officer Bose brought us together.” Sandra gave Bose another sidelong look. “You said Orrin was never aggressive?”

“Orrin’d run from an argument with his hands over his ears. He’s
shy,
not
violent
. It was always hard for him when Mama came home with a man. He hid out, mostly, times like that. Especially if there was any kind of disagreement or unpleasantness.”

“And I’m sorry I have to ask this, but was your mother ever aggressive toward Orrin?”

“She had her meth fits sometimes, especially toward the end. Some scenes. Nothing serious.”

“You mentioned that Orrin liked to tell stories. Does he ever write them down? Did he keep a journal?”

Ariel seemed surprised at the question. “No, nothing like that. His printing is neat but he don’t practice it much.”

“Did he have a girlfriend back in Raleigh?”