Vortex (17 page)

Kyle had been sedated for the flight west. Sandra had arranged to be present when he woke up. But if waking up in a strange bed in a strange room had caused him any distress or anxiety, Kyle had shown no sign of it.

*   *   *

He sat in the midday warmth as if waiting for her to speak. Today, unusually, Sandra wasn’t sure where to begin.

She started by telling him about Jefferson Bose. Who he was and how much she liked him. “I think you’d like him, too. He’s a policeman.” She paused. “But he’s something else, too.”

She lowered her voice, though there was no one else in the mott to hear her.

“You always liked stories about Mars from the Spin days. How the human colonies turned into whole civilizations while Earth was wrapped up in the Spin barrier. How they had a fourth stage of life, where people could live longer if they took on certain obligations and duties. Remember that? The stories Wun Ngo Wen told the world, before he was killed?

“Well, Mars doesn’t talk to us anymore, and some pretty unscrupulous people have turned those Martian pharmaceuticals into something uglier, something they can sell for profit on the black market. But there were people around Wun Ngo Wen, people like Jason Lawton and his friends, who took Martian ethics seriously. I used to hear rumors, and there were always stories online, about that. About clandestine groups who took the longevity treatment the way the Martians did. Keeping it pure and not selling it, but sharing it, the way it was made to be shared, all strings attached. Using it wisely.”

She was nearly whispering now. Kyle’s eyes still followed the motion of her lips.

“I didn’t used to believe those stories. But now I think they’re true.”

This morning Bose had told her he wasn’t just a cop. He told her he had connections with people who followed the Martian customs. His friends hated the black market trade, he said. The police could be bribed, but Bose’s friends couldn’t, because they already had taken the longevity treatment—the original version. And what he was doing, he was doing in their interests.

She said this, very quietly, to Kyle.

“Now, the question you probably want to ask,” the question, as an older brother, he surely
would
have asked, “is, do I trust him?”

Kyle blinked, meaninglessly.

“I do,” she said, and she felt better for confirming it aloud. “It’s what I don’t know that worries me.”

Like the meaning, if any, of Orrin Mather’s sci-fi story. Like the bandage on Jack Geddes’s arm, and what it might imply about Orrin’s capacity for violence. Like the scar Bose had tried to conceal from her, and which he had still not explained.

Time passed. Eventually a nurse came down the pathway to the grove of live oaks, moving slowly in the heat. “Time to get this fella back to bed,” she announced. Kyle’s hat had fallen off, though that didn’t matter so much in the shade of the trees. His hair was thinning prematurely. Sandra could see his scalp, pink as a baby’s skin, through wisps of pale blond hair. She picked up the Astros cap and put it on him, gently.

Ah.

“Okay,” she said. “Rest easy, Kyle. See you soon,” she told him.

*   *   *

Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend. There were more and better antidepressant medications now than when her father had endured his long decline, and that was a good thing, but despair itself remained mysterious, clinically and personally, as much a visitation as a disease.

The long drive back to Houston took her past a State Care internment facility, one of the places her patients went after they were assigned custodial status. Passing the State camp inevitably tweaked her conscience. Usually Sandra avoided looking at it—it was comfortingly easy to overlook. The entrance was marked only with a small and dignified sign; the facility itself was hidden beyond a grassy ridge (yellow and sere); very little of it showed from the highway, though she glimpsed the tops of the guard towers. But she had been up that road a couple of times and knew what lay beyond it: a huge two-story cinderblock residence surrounded by makeshift expansion housing, mostly sheet-metal trailers donated by FEMA from surplus stock, encircled by wire fencing. It was a community of men (mostly men) and women (a few), carefully segregated from one another and endlessly waiting. Because that was what you did in such a place: you waited. Waited for your turn in an occupational rehab program, waited for the slim possibility of transfer to a State Care halfway house, waited for letters from distant and indifferent relatives. Waited with slowly hemorrhaging optimism for the miraculous advent of a new life.

It was a town made of wire and corrugated aluminum and chronic despair.
Medicated
despair—she herself had probably written some of the prescriptions that were perennially renewed at the camp dispensary. And sometimes even that wasn’t enough—Sandra had heard that the biggest security problem at the compound was the flow of intoxicants (liquor, pot, opiates, meth) smuggled in from outside.

There was a bill before the Texas legislature to privatize the residential camps. Attached to the bill was a proviso that “work therapy” could be construed as permission to hire out healthy inmates for roadwork or seasonal farm labor, to defray the public expense of their internment. If it passed, Sandra thought, the legislation would mean the end of any tattered idealism still attached to the State Care project. What had been intended as a way of providing comfort and protection to the chronically indigent would have become a cosmetically acceptable source of indentured labor—slavery with a haircut and a clean shirt.

The watchtowers disappeared in her rearview mirror, hidden among the baking yellow hills. She thought about how angry she had been at Congreve, who had taken her off Orrin Mather’s case to prevent her from rendering an inconvenient diagnosis. But how clean were her own hands? How many souls had she committed to internment just because they matched a profile in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual? Saving them from the cruelty and violence of the streets, yes, saving them from exploitation and HIV and malnutrition and addiction, and there was enough truth in that to salve her conscience; but in the end, saving them for what?

It was almost dark when she got home. September now, the days getting shorter, though it was still hotter than high August. She checked for any fresh message from Bose. There was one, but it was only another installment of Orrin’s notebook.

Her phone buzzed while she was microwaving dinner. She picked up without looking at the display, expecting Bose, but the voice on the other end was unfamiliar. “Dr. Cole? Sandra Cole?”

“Yes?” Feeling wary, though she couldn’t say why.

“I hope you had a rewarding visit with your brother today.”

“Who is this?”

“Someone with your best interests at heart.”

She was conscious of the fear that began in her belly and traveled up her spine and seemed to lodge, somehow, in her heart.
This is not good,
she thought. But she didn’t put down the phone. She waited, listening.

CHAPTER TWELVE

TURK’S STORY

1.

“What is majestic about them,” Oscar was saying, “almost
incomprehensibly
majestic, is their physical structure—trillions upon trillions of diverse components, from the microscopic to the very large, distributed over an entire galaxy! A human body is trivial, less than microscopic by comparison. And yet we matter to them! In some way, we’re a significant part of their existence.” He wore the abstracted smile of a man contemplating a sacred vision. “And they know we’re here, and they’re coming to meet us.”

He was talking about the Hypotheticals.

For the first time, Oscar had invited me to his home. Before today I hadn’t really envisioned Oscar having either a home or a family. But he had both, and he wanted me to see them. His home was a low, pleasant wood and stone structure deep in one of the starboard tiers of Vox Core, set around with delicate thin-leafed trees. The members of his family present when I visited were three women and two children. The children, his daughters, were eight and ten years of age. One of the women was his permanent partner; the other two were more distant members of the family—the Voxish language had a word for the relationship but Oscar said it wasn’t easy to translate into English; we settled on “cousins.” The family shared a meal of braised fish and vegetables, during which I answered polite questions about the twenty-first century; then the cousins escorted the noisy daughters away. Oscar’s partner, a mild-eyed woman named Brion (with the customary string of titles and honorifics), lingered after dinner but eventually excused herself. Which left Oscar talking to me about the Hypotheticals as the artificial daylight faded to dusk.

It wasn’t just casual conversation. I began to understand that Oscar had invited me here to pose a difficult question or make some onerous demand.

“Even if they know about us,” I said, “what’s that mean?”

He touched a control surface in the table, calling up a two-dimensional image that floated in the air between us. It showed a recent aerial view of the Hypothetical machines as they inched their way across the Antarctic desert: three featureless boxes accompanied by a half dozen smaller rectangles, objects as bluntly simple as drawings in a high school geometry text. “Over the course of the last week,” he said, “they changed direction. The path they’re now following intersects precisely with our current location.”

The pride he took in this apparent confirmation of Voxish prophecy wasn’t just his own. I had seen the same knowing smile on other faces today.

“These machines, or devices similar to them, have crossed and recrossed all the continents of Earth. Now that we know what to look for we can recognize and analyze their tracks. Evidence suggests they may even have traveled across the ocean floors—that’s not impossible. Our scholars believe they’re mapping the topography of the Earth to a very close approximation.”

“Why would they want to do that?”

“Any answer would be speculative. But think of it, Mr. Findley. These machines are the local incarnation of a system of intelligence that literally spans the galaxy, and they’re coming
for us!
”

If so, they weren’t in any hurry. The Hypothetical machines were traveling at two or three kilometers per hour over flat land. And they were still more than a thousand kilometers away, out in the windswept Wilkes Basin, with the Transarctic Mountains between us and them. “For that reason,” Oscar said, “we’ve decided to send an expedition to meet them.”

He seemed to expect me to share his delight at this news, as if his enthusiasm was contagious—as it would have been, I guessed, had I been wired into the Network. When I didn’t respond he continued: “Our unmanned aircraft consistently fail to function if they come within a certain distance of the machines. The same may be true of manned vehicles. Therefore we propose to travel to a point outside that radius and proceed on foot.”

“Why, Oscar? What do you expect to happen?”

“If nothing else, we can conduct a passive reconnaissance. Or some sort of interaction with the machines might take place.”

One of the cousins brought us glasses of juice and left us alone again. The evening breeze moved through the open architecture of the house. A window looked aft, and I could see rain falling over distant regions of the tier, gossamer banners of it, far away.

“In any case,” Oscar said cautiously, “we think it would be desirable to have one of the Uptaken on the expedition.”

There were only two Uptaken in Vox Core, and I was one of them. The other, of course, was Isaac Dvali. I had been following his progress. Isaac’s skull had been successfully reconstructed, and lately he had learned to walk a few paces and pronounce a few tentative words. But he was far too fragile to risk on an expedition to the Antarctic hinterland.

“Do I have a choice in this?”

“Of course you do. At this point, I’m simply asking you to consider it.”

In fact I knew I would have to accept. Doing this for Oscar would buttress his belief in my possible conversion to Voxish principles. And it was necessary for Oscar to believe in that possibility, if Allison’s plan was to have any chance of succeeding.

If there still
was
a plan. If we hadn’t already surrendered to our own lies.

*   *   *

The truth was that I had no home in the world but Vox. And Vox, as Oscar insisted, was eager to adopt me, if I was in a mood to accept it.

I tried to behave like a man for whom that offer held some attraction.

Maybe, on some level, it did. Now that I knew it better, Vox had ceased to be a frightening abstraction. I had learned how to dress so that I wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, and I understood at least the most basic social customs. I continued to study the books I had been given, trying to pry comprehensible stories out of the legalistic prose. I knew that Vox had originated as a planned polity in the global ocean of a planet called Ester, a Middle World in the chain of habitable planets. I had learned to name the founders of Vox’s limbic democracy and to enumerate its five hundred years of wars and alliances, victories and defeats. I could recite a little of the vast collage of theory and speculation that constituted the Voxish Prophecies. (Some of us who had disappeared into Equatoria’s temporal Arch ten thousand years ago were named in those prophecies, eerily enough. Our second coming had been calculated to the day and hour.)