Vortex (20 page)

*   *   *

Wind and squalls persisted all the way to our landing point.

Maps from my day would have been a poor guide to Antarctica as it existed now. The great ice sheets had disappeared centuries ago, and the Ross Sea and the Weddel Sea had joined to separate East Antarctica from the huge islands off its western coast. Oscar said the place where we landed was in what geological surveys had once called the Wilkes Basin, roughly seventy degrees south latitude. It was a flat, pebbly wasteland.

We suited up as soon as the aircraft touched ground. We wore thick, insulated outer garments to keep us warm and tight-fitting masks that fed us canned air. The ship’s airlock opened onto a landscape that was bleak but not actually ugly. All of Antarctica was a desert, but deserts are often beautiful: I thought of the Equatorian outback, or the deserts of Utah and Arizona, or the old pictures of Mars before it was terraformed, pre-Spin. The terrain here was nearly Martian in its stony lifelessness. The climate was cold, Oscar said, but not cold enough to sustain a permanent icecap, and relatively dry. A late-summer snowfall like this would likely melt off before the day passed. The snow came down in intermittent flurries, drifting into hollows and blurring the outlines of the low, parallel ridges that stretched into the distance.

The sun was a dim incandescence behind the clouds, close to the horizon. We could expect another few hours of daylight but we were fully equipped to operate in darkness. The soldiers loaded portable high-intensity lights and a host of other gear onto self-powered carts with big, articulated wheels. Then they fell into formation and advanced, the civilians following behind.

We navigated by compass. The Hypothetical machines were still invisibly distant. We had landed well outside the perimeter that had been defined by the loss of the drone vehicles. How the attempt to cross that perimeter would affect us and our gear was an open question. “Of course we trust the Hypotheticals,” Oscar said. “But they have autonomic functions just like any other living thing. Events can happen without conscious volition, especially given the hugely different scales of time and space on which they operate.” But none of that seemed as real or substantial as the tug of the wind, the monotonous crunch of gravel under our feet, or the faint stink of hydrogen sulfide that infiltrated our masks.

*   *   *

We had marched for most of an hour when one of the technical crew, consulting an instrument, called a halt.

“This is the perimeter,” Oscar whispered: the point of proximity beyond which all pilotless drones had mysteriously failed.

Three of the soldiers marched ahead while the rest of us waited nervously. The snow had thinned and there were open patches of sky above us, but daylight was fading fast. The science crew aimed a couple of their lights into the gloom.

The point men halted at a fixed distance, then waved us on. We followed from a prudent distance, announced by sweeping beams of light—we would be hard to miss, I thought, if the Hypotheticals happened to be looking.

But we were well inside the perimeter now, and nothing had happened.

*   *   *

The temperature dropped with the fall of night. We cinched the hoods of our survival gear tight around our face masks. The wind remained brisk but the squalling snow stopped suddenly, and in the clear air we could make out the shapes of the Hypothetical machines ahead of us, startlingly close. The technicians hurried to aim their mobile lamps.

We had been calling these structures “the Hypothetical machines,” but from the ground they looked less like machines than huge geometric solids. The nearest of them was a perfectly rectangular cube, half a mile on a side and moving at a slow but (barely) perceptible speed. Now that we were close to it I believed I could feel that ponderous motion under my feet, a gentle seismic tremor.

We approached the cube in silence. The soldiers on point were dwarfed by it. The technicians began to angle up their lamps, playing the beams against the nearest vertical face, a featureless surface the texture of sandstone. Because of its regularity it was hard not to think of this thing as an absurdly large
building,
but it was a building without windows or doors, as enigmatic as a sealed pyramid.

For a while we did nothing but stare at it. Oscar said it must already have detected our presence; but if it did, it failed to react in any obvious way. Then the technical crew got down to business. They erected tripods and secured their lamps on them; they unpacked sensors and recording devices and anchored them in the pebbly, cold soil. A steadily increasing number of fiercely bright beams divided the desert into a quilt of light and dark.

On the plain beyond the cube, scattered over a couple of kilometers, were a half dozen objects of similar size and different but equally simple shapes—huge cylinders, octagons, truncated spheres, conical sections. Some were sandstone-colored, like the cube; others were black, cobalt blue, obsidian black, cadmium yellow. Any one of them could have enclosed a small city, and all of them were creeping at the same patient speed toward the distant mountains and the sea. “So immense,” Oscar said breathlessly, “these objects, but such an insignificant fraction of the whole body of the Hypotheticals.” The stark light cut shadows into his mask and made him look like a timid animal peering out of a hole. “It would be easy to commit the impertinence of fear.”

Way too easy, out here on the polar desert of the planet that had given birth to the first human beings and had become an unmarked grave for billions more. While the scientific crew activated sensors and surveying devices, I walked without Oscar’s permission (but he scurried after me) to within a few hundred yards of the base of the cube.

It was old. It wasn’t weathered or cracked, and for all I knew it might have been manufactured a day or an hour ago, but it
felt
old—age seemed to radiate from it like cold air from an icefield. Inches ahead of it the thin layer of new-fallen snow was disappearing from the desert floor, sublimating into the night air.

“The Hypotheticals are endlessly patient, Mr. Findley. They’re older than most of the stars in the sky. To be so close to their work … this is a sacred moment.”

We all wore earpieces to facilitate communication. I had turned down the volume on mine—the few simple Voxish words I had learned weren’t much use here—but we both heard a burst of excited chatter erupt from the technical crew. Two beams of high-intensity light swept upward.

The beams diffused into what appeared to be a pale cloud at the top of the cube. Snow or mist, I thought; but no—elsewhere, the sky was clear. The cloud appeared to be boiling off the top of the cube itself—and the other, more distant objects were generating similar clouds, pale mists that sifted down gently despite a wind that should have dispersed them.

I took an instinctive step backward. Then:
“Look,”
Oscar said in a hushed voice.

Something had landed on the arm of his protective suit. Oscar regarded it with a kind of terrified reverence. A snowflake, I thought at first. But on closer inspection it was more like a tiny crystalline butterfly—two pale and perfectly translucent wings beating over a body the size of a grain of rice.

Oscar lifted his arm so we could get a better look. The winged crystal had no eyes or segments or any other division in its body. It was just a curl of something like quartz, with legs (if you could call them that) as fine as eyelashes, which it used to cling to the fabric of Oscar’s suit. Its wings beat against the pressure of the wind. It looked as harmless as a piece of costume jewelry. The cloud descending the walls of the cube was composed of countless numbers of these things—millions, maybe billions of them.

Then, out along the periphery of the lights, a soldier began to scream.

2.

The soldiers reacted quickly and professionally: they grabbed the portable lights and began waving the civilians back the way we had come. They did this despite the fact that hundreds or thousands of these tiny crystalline butterflies were swarming them, obscuring their vision and covering their clothing.

The butterflies were settling on me and Oscar, too, but not as aggressively. When I flicked my arm they fell away and dropped to the ground, inert. And when I brushed them away from Oscar they scattered from my hand.

Nevertheless we ran. Everyone was running now. The lamps the soldiers carried cast wheeling, hectic beams ahead of us. Through my earpiece I could hear barked commands and more screams, while the cloud of crystalline devices swirled around us like silent snow.

Other members of the expedition began to fall away behind us. I saw this in serial glances, looking back over my shoulder. Anyone who dropped to the ground was instantly swarmed, covered in a glassy drift, becoming a pale mound that heaved at first but quickly
settled
—I don’t have a better word for it. I began to understand that these men and women were dying.

The technicians died first. The soldiers wore heavier protective clothing, but even they were slowly being overwhelmed. The lamps when they dropped them raked light at static angles across the plain.

Twice I had to stop and brush Oscar free of the butterflies. I was too terrified to wonder why I was apparently immune to them. Oscar clearly wasn’t: his protective clothing was ragged now, torn in places by their small but razor-sharp legs, and some of those ragged patches were speckled with blood. I worried about his mask and oxygen supply and I tried to make sure I cleared the most vulnerable parts first. For a while we ran arm-in-arm, which seemed to keep the swarms at bay. All the panicked chatter and terrified screaming that had filled my earpiece slowly began to fade, and the final silence, when it came, was even more terrifying than the screams. I couldn’t say how long or how far we ran. We ran until we couldn’t run any more, until there was no sound but the roar of my own labored breath. Then I felt a sudden resistance, Oscar’s arm tugging me backward, and I thought,
They got him, he’s dead weight
—

But he wasn’t. When I turned to face him I found his suit was clean: there were no butterflies on him. His face through the moist blur of his mask was shocked but relatively calm. “Stop,” he gasped. “We’re out of range. We’re beyond the perimeter now. Please,
stop.
”

I took a long look back.

We had come a fair distance. The abandoned lamps were still working, the Hypothetical machines plainly visible in a skewed crosshatching of artificial light. Nothing human was moving.

The wind blew grains of snow around our feet and the stars glittered overhead. We stood shivering, waiting for whatever might come out of the darkness after us—another attack, a straggling survivor. But there was no one, nothing.

Then, in quick succession, the distant lamps began to blink off.

*   *   *

We reached the aircraft guided by signal-finders built into our suits. It was a long walk but we were too shaken to talk much. Oscar eventually managed to establish voice contact with Vox Core, and he exchanged curt messages with managers and military personnel. Remote telemetry had broadcast most of what happened, and Vox was already attempting to analyze the data. “Probably,” he said at one point, “our presence triggered a defensive reflex of some kind.” Maybe so. But I wasn’t Voxish and I didn’t have to believe in the benevolence of the Hypotheticals—I didn’t have to make excuses for a senseless slaughter.

Our aircraft rested on the Antarctic plain like some incongruous deposition from a vanished glacier. I asked Oscar whether he would be able to pilot it back to Vox.

“Yes. Really, I just need to tell it to carry us home.”

“You sure? You’re bleeding, Oscar.”

He glanced down at his ravaged clothing. “Not badly,” he said.

Once we passed the airlock he stripped off his gear. His upper body had sustained a number of small cuts, none of them deep or life-threatening. He told me where to find a medical kit, and I smeared his wounds with something that stopped the bleeding.

A few of the tiny crystalline butterflies—dead or dormant—were still clinging to his discarded survival gear. Oscar emptied a ration box, tweezed one of the dead butterflies between his thumb and forefinger and dropped it inside. A sample for analysis, he said. Then we dumped the rest of our tattered clothes out the airlock.

*   *   *

“They didn’t touch you,” Oscar said, once we were aloft and the aircraft was following a programmed route to Vox.

What had been a crowded crew cabin on the flight out now seemed grimly and cavernously empty. The air, our bodies, even the fresh clothing we put on all reeked of hydrogen sulfide.

“No…”

“Because they
recognized
you.” His voice had been reduced to a shocked querulousness.

“I don’t know what that means, Oscar.”

“Obviously, they recognized you because you were Uptaken.”

“I don’t understand what happened any more than you do. But I’m not Isaac—I don’t have any Hypothetical biotech inside me.”

“Mr. Findley,” he said, “are you still denying it, even now? A human body doesn’t pass through a temporal Arch the way it might pass through one of the spatial Arches. We know this from many years of study. You weren’t
preserved,
like a frozen vegetable. In all likelihood you were re-created from stored information. The reconstruction may seem flawless to human eyes and human instruments. But
they
know you for one of their own.”