Vortex (14 page)

Then I took him to the lowest levels of Vox, the engineering decks. The engines that drove Vox were immense—more a territory than an object—but I showed him reactor units the size of small towns, bathed in an eternal wash of desalinated water; I showed him a shadowy acreage of mu-metal chambers in which magnetic fields directed flows of molten iron; I led him past superconductive field coils around which moisture condensed like snow and was swept away in gales of forced air. Turk was awed, which would play well with the administrators who were no doubt monitoring us. There were ears in the walls even here.

But there were no ears where I took him next. We rode a transit stem up as far as it would go, then transferred to a smaller transport that slid up the spine of Vox’s tallest tower. Two more transfers and we arrived at the highest accessible public platform in Vox Core, essentially a roof with a view.

Back when Vox had sailed the oceans of habitable worlds, this platform had not been enclosed. Now an osmotic perimeter had been established—I told Turk it was a “force field,” a quaint and inaccurate term but one he more or less understood. “It doesn’t seem to be working too well,” he said. “Smells a little like a pig farm out here.”

I guessed it did. The air was rank and windless, though we could see clouds speeding past aloft, seemingly close enough to touch. I felt sick with vertigo even before we approached the rim. For the first time I almost regretted the loss of my node: missed its calming presence, an invisible anchor. I felt as if a brisk wind would carry me away.

Vox was moving steadily south by southeast, out of the Indian Ocean and into the South Pacific. The sea here was faintly purple to every horizon, the sky a poisonous shade of ocher. I hated the look of it.

Turk peered into the misty distance. “The whole world’s like this?”

I nodded. It was the decline and death of these oceans that had spurred the great Terrestrial exodus, which in turn had fed the bitter rivalries and conflicts of the previously settled Middle Worlds. “And the Hypotheticals did nothing to prevent it. Doesn’t that seem strange? That they would protect the planet from the expanding sun but do nothing to prevent a catastrophic human die-off? Apparently they’re happy with an Earth populated exclusively by bacteria. No one knows why.”

“Your people expected to find something different.”

They weren’t
my people.
But I didn’t correct him. “They expected to enter into direct communion with the Hypotheticals as soon as they arrived on Earth. It’s a religious idea, really. The people who founded Vox were fanatics by any rational measure. The history books won’t tell you so, but it’s true. Vox is a cult. Its beliefs were built into its Network and scripted into its limbic democracy. When you’re Networked all these doctrines feel reasonable, they feel like common sense…”

“But not to you.”

Not anymore. “And not to the Farmers. The Farmers are something less than citizens. They were Networked into compliance but not into communion.”

“They were slaves, in other words.”

“I suppose you could say that. They were taken as prisoners back in the Middle Worlds, generations ago. They refused to accept full citizenship, so they were modified into cooperation.”

“Harnessed and put to work.”

“That’s why they destroyed their nodes as soon as the Network crashed.” Though the survivors—the ones who had stayed in their environmentally sealed farmlands under the out-islands—would have been reyoked by now. The rebels, of course, were all dead. Including Digger Choi, whose life Turk had attempted to save. Saved him for all of half an hour, maybe. If the warplanes hadn’t got him, he would have died choking on the poisonous air.

Turk pressed up against the security railing that followed the edge of the roof, surveying what had become of the exterior land of Vox. The island was unprotected from the atmosphere and looked as if it had entered some grim and final autumn. The forests were dead. Leaves were brown and scattered, fruit rotted. Even the limbs of the trees looked leprous and fragile. The wind of passage was dismantling the woodlands branch by branch.

“Vox,” I said, “I mean the collective Vox, limbic Vox, considered itself redeemed when we managed to pass through the Arch. But you’re right, what they found isn’t what they expected, and disappointment is setting in. That’s what we need to talk about, up here where no one can hear us. We need to make a plan.”

He stood a moment gazing over the ruined lands. Then he said, “How bad do you expect it to get?”

“Assuming Vox fails to find a door into Paradise down in Antarctica, it could get—well, really bad. The idea of merging Vox with the Hypotheticals is a foundational faith. It’s the reason Vox exists. It’s the promise we were all given at birth, along with our nodes. No dissent from it has ever been possible, nor would it have been tolerated. But now—”

“You’re up against an awkward truth.”

“
They
are. I’m not one of them anymore.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Sailing to Antarctica is an act of desperation, and it’s only postponing the inevitable.”

“Okay, so reality sets in sooner or later—then what? Chaos, anarchy, blood in the streets?”

I was Voxish enough to feel a trace of shame at the answer to that question. “There have been other limbic cult communities in the past, and when they fail … well, it’s ugly. Fear and frustration are amplified by the Network to the point of self-destruction. People turn on their neighbors, their families, ultimately themselves.” There was no one to hear us, but I lowered my voice. “Social breakdown, maybe communal suicide. Eventually starvation when the food supply fails. And no one can opt out. You can’t just reconfigure the prophecies or choose to believe something else—the contradiction is built into the Coryphaeus.”

I had seen hints of it even today, as we traveled through the city—a general sullenness too subtle for Turk to pick up on but plain enough to me, like the sound of thunder on a rising wind.

“And there’s no way to protect ourselves?”

“Not if we stay here, no.”

“And nowhere to go even if we had a way out. Christ, Allison.” He couldn’t stop staring at the mottled horizon, the rotting forest. “This was a pretty nice planet, once upon a time.”

I stood closer to him, because we had come to the heart of the matter. “Listen. There are aircraft on Vox that can fly from pole to pole without refueling. And because you’re Uptaken, the Arch is still open to us. We
can
leave. If we’re careful and lucky, we can get ourselves back to Equatoria.”

And in Equatoria we could surrender to Vox’s ancient enemies, the people who had nuked Vox Core in an attempt to prevent us from provoking the Hypotheticals. The cortical democracies despised and feared Vox, but they wouldn’t refuse to accept a pair of earnest refugees—I hoped. They might even help us make our way from Equatoria to one of the pleasanter Middle Worlds, where we could live out our lives in peace.

Turk was giving me a hard look. “You can fly one of these vehicles?”

“No,” I said. “But
you
can.”

*   *   *

I told him all of it then. I told him the plan I’d worked out in the long nights when I couldn’t sleep, nights when Treya’s loneliness threatened to shut down Allison’s defiance, nights when it was almost impossible to find a space between those two borders of self, impossible even to name myself with any real conviction. The plan was practical, I believed, or might be. But it required a sacrifice Turk might not be willing to make.

When he understood what I was asking, he didn’t give me an answer. He said he’d have to think about it. I accepted that. I said we could come up here in a few days and talk about it again.

“In the meantime,” he said, “there’s something else I need to do.”

“What?”

“I want to see the other survivor,” he said. “I want to see Isaac Dvali.”

CHAPTER NINE

SANDRA AND BOSE

After she left Bose’s condo Sandra had to drive to her apartment for fresh clothes, so she was most of an hour late for work. Not that she really cared, under the circumstances. Yesterday, Orrin Mather had been accused of a violent outburst—perhaps, or
probably,
if what Bose had told her was true, because Congreve or someone above him had been paid (in cash or longevity) to keep Orrin locked up. Sandra tried to contain her anger during the drive, but succeeded only in damping it down to a low simmer.

She had disliked Arthur Congreve since the day he was appointed supervisor, but it had never occurred to her that he might be as corrupt as he was unpleasant. But she knew Congreve had connections with municipal government—a cousin who was a sitting councilman—and although the street cops at HPD thought he was too stingy with admissions, the chief of police had made approving visits to State not once but twice since Congreve had been installed.

She parked carelessly and hurried through the metal detector at the building’s entrance. As soon as she was badged up, she walked directly to the isolation wing.

It looked like any other part of the State Care building. “Isolation” didn’t imply dank, sealed cells, as it might have in a federal prison. The isolation ward was just a little more generously supplied with locks and unbreakable furniture than the open wards, designed to segregate potentially violent patients from less aggressive inmates. Such cases were relatively few: the State system was empowered to deal with chronic homelessness, not outright psychosis. In a sense these were the least troublesome of the patients who passed through the system; they required little debate among the staff and were usually transferred to psychiatric hospitals in short order.

Whatever else Orrin Mather might be, he wasn’t a psychopath. Sandra would have bet her degree on it. She wanted him out of isolation as soon as possible, and she meant to begin by getting his side of the story.

It was sheer bad luck that Nurse Wattmore happened to be presiding over the entrance to the locked ward. She should have buzzed Sandra through without comment, but she didn’t. “Sorry, Dr. Cole, but I have my instructions,” and she proceeded to page Congreve while Sandra stood and helplessly fumed. Congreve appeared promptly. His office was only a few doors down the corridor, and he took Sandra by the arm and steered her there.

He closed the door behind him and folded his arms. His office was at least twenty degrees cooler than the temperature outside—the air-conditioning murmured stoically in its vents—but the air smelled stale and greasy. The empty wrappers of fast-food breakfast items littered his desk. Sandra started to speak, but Congreve held up his hand: “I want you to know, first of all, that I’m really disappointed by the unprofessional behavior you’ve been displaying lately.”

“I don’t know what you mean. What unprofessional behavior?”

“Talking to this patient, Orrin Mather, after I assigned the case to Dr. Fein. And I have to assume that’s where you were headed again this morning.”

“Follow-up with a patient is hardly unprofessional. When I conducted his intake interview, I told him I’d be working his case. I wanted to make sure he was okay with Fein and that he didn’t feel he’d been abandoned.”

“That ceased to be your concern when I pulled you off the file.”

“Pulled me off the file for no good reason.”

“I’m not obliged to justify that decision or any other I might happen to make. Not to you, Dr. Cole. When the board appoints you to a managerial position you can question my choices; until then you need to take care of the duties I assign to you. You might be better able to do that, by the way, if you show up on time.”

It was the first time she had been late in, what, a year and a half? But she was too angry to slow down. “And this story about Orrin assaulting an orderly—”

“Excuse me, were you a witness to that event? Do you know something you haven’t told me?”

“It can’t be true. Orrin wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

The objection was feeble and she knew she had made a mistake as soon as she said it. Congreve rolled his eyes. “You determined this after a twenty-minute interview? That makes you a pretty remarkable diagnostician. I guess we’re lucky to have you.”

Her cheeks were burning. “I talked to his sister—”

“You did?
When?
”

“I met her outside the facility. But—”

“You’re telling me you consulted with the patient’s family on your own time? Then I guess you must have written up a formal report … or at least a memo to me and Dr. Fein. No?”

“No,” Sandra admitted.

“And you fail to see a pattern of unprofessional behavior here?”

“That doesn’t explain—”

“Stop! Just
stop,
before you make it worse.” Congreve softened his tone. “Look. I admit your work has been satisfactory up to this point. So I’m willing to write off recent events as stress-related. But you really need to step back and think about things. In fact, why don’t you take the rest of the week off?”

“That’s ridiculous.” She hadn’t anticipated this.

“I’m reassigning your caseload. All of it. Go home, Dr. Cole, calm down, and deal with whatever it is that’s distracting you from your duties. Take a week, minimum—more, if you like. But don’t come back until you’ve recovered some objectivity.”