Vortex (30 page)

He opened his mouth to say something. But I had already tossed the match. It tumbled through the air, leaving a coiled trail of smoke. I had time to take a single startled step backward. The night watchman just gawked. I don’t think he understood what was about to happen.

The flames were blue and they ran along the surface of the liquid and around the rims of the watchman’s shoes. Then some critical boundary between vapor and air ignited. There was a vast exhalation of hot air, and I was pushed off my feet. I turned and scuttled out the door into the gouting rain. Now the doorway was a curtain of flame and smoke, but through it I could see the watchman burning. He tried to run, and that might have saved his life, but his feet went out from under him. He did a kind of dance before he toppled into the flaming liquid. The dry flooring burned like tinder. He looked like he was screaming, but I couldn’t hear anything over the rush and bite of the flames.

*   *   *

I thought of Allison making her way to the aircraft docks. Maybe she was there already, waiting. Waiting for me, while the rest of Vox waited for a ticket to heaven.

“You don’t have to carry that weight alone,” Oscar said. He sounded as indulgent and unshockable as the pastor at First Baptist, where my mother used to take me when I was a child. “We’ll share it with you, Mr. Findley. The Coryphaeus will share it with you, once your interface is complete.”

The limbic implant was doing its work. I was sorely tempted to accept his offer of salvation, same as I had been at First Baptist, back when my sins were trivial things. Lay your burden down, young man. Lay it at your savior’s feet. Even as a child, I had understood why so many weeping souls made the journey to the altar. The Coryphaeus knew me, word and deed, inside and out. My sins were its sins.

Oscar watched me closely. “But you’re still not ready to take that last step. Unconditional forgiveness from a polity of your peers … you want it, but you won’t accept it.”

A forgiveness that would last as long as it took the Hypotheticals to show up. Or had I been wrong about that, too? Maybe Vox really would be redeemed, maybe Vox would live forever. There was a presence in my head that insisted it would. I said, “I’m not sure every sin deserves to be forgiven.”

“The man you killed has been dead ten thousand years. Clinging to a single tragic misjudgment is a vain and wasteful act.”

“Not talking about
my
sin, necessarily.”

“Oh? Whose, then?”

“It was more than murder, Oscar. The death of all those Farmers. It was an act of genocide.”

Whatever Oscar saw in my face, it made him flinch. He glittered with sudden uncertainty. “The Farmers would never have been taken up by the Hypotheticals … their death was always inevitable.”

“They were only here because Vox enslaved them and brought them here.”

“
Necessity
brought them here.”

“Someone made the decision.”

“We all made the decision!”

“And you all forgave yourselves for it.”

“The
Coryphaeus
forgave us. The Coryphaeus is our conscience.”

“I don’t mean to offend you, Oscar, but doesn’t it seem to you that a conscience that can rationalize genocide might be defective?”

He stared at me, radiating violet spikes of anger and resentment. Then he shrugged. “You haven’t lived with your node long enough. Before long you’ll understand.”

That’s what frightens me,
I thought.

“None of this matters now,” he said. “Come with me.”

I wanted to. All the years of my adult life I had lived in the harsh light of the burning man. I longed to let the Coryphaeus shoulder my sins. And if the price I paid was oblivion or death, maybe that was nothing but belated justice. At least I would die clean.

Did I deserve to die clean?

“I’d rather be with Allison,” I said. “When the time comes.”

“Then why isn’t she here? I know you feel responsible for her, but she’s an aberration, an empty vessel. Even her affection for you is artificial. You’re Networked now—you must have seen that in her.”

I didn’t want to tell him what I had seen in her.

“Go on, Oscar,” I said. “Go be with your family.”

He started to object, then closed his mouth and nodded in resignation. Maybe he saw how deeply I envied him, and maybe he was too kind to mention it.

He stood up. “All right. Good-bye, Mr. Findley,” he said.

The door closed behind him. I waited until I was sure he had cleared the corridor. I told myself it was time to go. But it would be so much easier to rest, I thought. To let what would happen, happen. It was a foolishness, a terrible vanity, this idea of escape. An insult to the millions who had already lived and died in Vox Core and to the millions more whose bright hopes were burning behind my eyes.

I took a last look around. I thought about Allison, waiting for me. Then I headed for the aircraft docks.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

SANDRA AND BOSE

Before Bose could say anything else—before Sandra could even begin to consider what he had told her—another bus pulled up at the stop across the street. She turned her head to watch.

Under the orange glare of a streetlight, the shiny-wet bus looked like a floating hallucination. Nobody got on. Two men got off. Just a couple of shift workers carrying dinner pails. The bus pulled away, and the men hurried off wherever they were going—not in the direction of the Findley warehouse.

“It’s getting late,” Sandra said. She wasn’t ready to think about what Bose had admitted about himself, and Bose seemed willing to back away from the subject. “What if he doesn’t show up?”

“I think he will,” Bose said.

“Because of what he wrote?”

“Whatever else they might be, I think Orrin believes his notebooks are prophetic. The passage about Turk Findley setting fire to the warehouse—in Orrin’s mind that’s not something that
did
happen, it’s something that
might
happen. He wants to change the outcome.”

“Obviously he knows a few things about the Findley family—if any of it’s true.”

“The basics weren’t hard to confirm. Findley spent a few years in Istanbul. He has an eighteen-year-old son. The high school his son graduated from also has a Latisha Philips registered the same year.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“No. What would I say? She’s not implicated in any of this.”

“Or the son?” Whose nickname, Sandra presumed, was Turk.

“Hard to do that without tipping off Findley.”

“So maybe we can assume Orrin talked to the boy, or overheard something and drew his own conclusions, and he incorporated that into his story.”

“Logically, yeah. He’s not psychic.”

“Well, he predicted the storm,” Sandra said. The rain eased off every once in a while but it always came roaring back, as if half the Gulf of Mexico had levitated over the city and yielded to gravity.

“But he was wrong about other details. Orrin’s document says the warehouse was empty except for the night watchman. It’s not, not tonight. Also, one of the reasons Orrin was so upset when he was fired is that he thought
he
was supposed to be the watchman on duty when Turk set fire to the place.”

“He was predicting his own death?”

“In a sense. But not because he wants to die. Orrin doesn’t strike me as remotely suicidal. I think he came here to prevent the thing he was predicting, whether he’s the victim of it or not.”

Bose sketched out the scenario for her. Orrin, working at the Findley warehouse, somehow uncovers a plan on the part of the boss’s son to commit an act of arson, and he incorporates that knowledge into his ongoing notebook fantasies. The notebooks are the work of a troubled young man who happens to be smarter than anyone including his sister imagines he is, but whose grip on reality is tentative at best. Unexpectedly fired from his job, and then locked up at State, Orrin panics: he believes the time of the planned arson is close and he thinks he can stop it if he can get free. (Which was why he bit Jack Geddes during his clumsy attempt to break out, Sandra thought.) Once Bose and Sandra cut him loose, he borrows car fare from Ariel and sets out to prevent Turk Findley from committing an unforgiveable act.

Sandra thought about it. “Seems like your timeline is a little off. Orrin was fired before he could have known anything about Turk’s romantic problems.”

“We don’t know who his source is. Maybe it was secondhand. Maybe he stayed in touch with someone at the warehouse. The pertinent passages in the document are the most recent ones, and we don’t know for sure when they were written.”

“Why would he even care whether Turk Findley sets fire to his father’s business? Orrin already lost his job there—work that paid less than minimum wage and barely covered the rent on a flophouse room.”

“I don’t know,” Bose admitted. “A few days ago I was hoping you could tell me.”

She didn’t have an answer for him, then or now. “What if the explanation is even stranger than that? I don’t know. Something just … weird.”

“Then we’re still sitting here,” Bose said. “Doing what we’re doing.”

*   *   *

The woman behind the restaurant counter, the one who had invited Bose to make himself comfortable, left for the day. Sandra caught a glimpse of her as she drove off in a ten-year-old blue Honda. She was replaced by a teenage boy with facial eczema and a nervous tic. The night manager poked his head out of his office a couple of times, eyeing them, until Bose got up and said something reassuring. He bought a couple of doughnuts, which neither of them touched.

The next bus arrived on schedule. The rain was still gushing down, overflowing the gutters and rinsing the street of its sheen of oil. Four people got off this time. They all looked like shift workers to Sandra. None of them was Orrin Mather. Three of them ran to the left, hurrying toward shelter. One turned right and began walking at a casual pace, as if the rain didn’t concern him.

She turned away from the window but found Bose still staring intently through the glass. “What is it?”

“The young guy. The one by himself.”

Young, yes. A skinny young guy wearing a black poncho and carrying something bulky in a plastic bag.

“Shit,” Bose said.

She leapt to the same absurd but unavoidable conclusion: “You think it’s Findley’s son? You think that’s Turk Findley?” The boy reached the corner and then turned south, toward the warehouse. “What do we do?”

Bose stood up abruptly. “Stay here. Keep your phone handy. Call me if you see Orrin. Or anything else I need to know about. Otherwise sit tight until you hear from me.”

“Bose!” she said.

“Love you,” he said, maddeningly and for the first time.

He was out the door before she could close her mouth. She watched through the window as he cut through the restaurant parking lot, keeping to a fence line parallel to the street and ignoring the rain that instantly soaked him.

The counter clerk must have noticed her startled expression. “Ma’am?” he asked helpfully. “You want a coffee or something?”

“Crazy,” she said aloud.

“Ma’am?”

“Not you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

ALLISON’S STORY

1.

I waited for Turk among the aircraft on the docking level high above the city.

I had taken a twisty route to get here, up the quiet starboard terraces and along the shaded parkland corridors Treya had loved as a child. Every garden and gateway along the way was freighted with memory (
her
memory). It was hard not to grieve. Vox was dying and there was nothing I could do about it—nothing I could do for lost friends or the family that had ostracized me or the city I had once loved. Nothing except carry my memories and misgivings to a safer place, worlds away.

The aircraft bay was an open terrace, protected from the toxic atmosphere by an electrostatic roof. Voxish aircraft were aligned across this vast flat acreage as if they had been planted there, silvery crops in a mechanical garden. The maintenance and flight crews had all gone home to be with their families. My footsteps sounded like water dripping in a vacant room.

I found an inconspicuous place at the base of a light tower and sat down and waited. An uncomfortable amount of time passed. I began to think Turk might not show up. That he might have been prevented from showing up. That he might have
chosen
not to show up. The node had finally infiltrated the parts of his brain that governed love, loyalty, needs, and desires, and with every passing moment the neural webwork grew more subtle and efficient. The Coryphaeus was singing a soft, sweet refrain in the echo chamber of his medial prefrontal cortex.

What if he didn’t come? But it was an easy question to answer: I would die here. In all likelihood the Hypothetical machines would dismantle and consume Vox Core the way they had dismantled and consumed the vanguard expedition out on the Antarctic plain, and that would be the end of it. I felt an uncontrollable upwelling of fear. Not the predictable fear of dying but the special and very Voxish fear of dying
alone
 …