Vortex

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.)

In other words I had begun to create a Voxish identity for myself in every way I could, short of having a node installed at the base of my neck.

Meanwhile Allison was moving in the opposite direction, away from her past and deeper into her impersona. The price she paid was social isolation and a chronic, brittle loneliness. And that served a purpose, too. She wanted her overseers to believe she was losing touch with reality.

After I left Oscar I made my way back to the quarters I shared with her. I found her sitting at a table, shoulders hunched, doing what she had been doing daily and obsessively for weeks now: writing. She wrote on sheets of paper with a pencil. Paper hadn’t been hard to come by, since Vox manufactured small amounts of it for various purposes. Vox didn’t use conventional pens or pencils, however, but once I explained the concept to Oscar he had agreed to have a machine shop produce a few samples—rods of graphite in carbon-fiber tubes, more like what we used to call “mechanical” pencils.

The original Allison Pearl had been an obsessive writer, which was one reason her diaries had been so useful to the Voxish scholars who re-created her. I put my hand on Allison’s shoulder to let her know I was home. Leaning over her I caught a glimpse of her cursive script. (Big letters, shakily produced: she had been given Allison Pearl’s urge to write but not the physical skill itself.) Vox was anchored relatively close to the mainland of Antarctica, in a deep basin where the Ross Ice Shelf had once been; Allison had visited one of the high towers today, and she was writing about what she’d seen.

… the mountains are the Queen Maud Range in the ancient atlases, gray bleak teeth under an ugly sky dead as everything else on this ruined planet, green clouds dropping yellow rain on the windward slopes. It’s like a judgment on humanity and tho I know humans have moved on from this place it still looks like a monument to our mistakes, how we lived lives with consequences we could never truly predict or understand…

She cupped her hand over the paper and looked up at me.

“Oscar wants me to go inland,” I said.

Her eyes flared, but she kept silent.

I told her about the proposed expedition. We talked about that a while, the way we talked about everything these days, calculating the effect our words might have on an unseen audience. She didn’t like the idea, but she didn’t argue about it.

Eventually she went back to her writing. I picked up one of my books (The Collapse of Mars and the Martian Diaspora ) and took it to bed with me, remembering what Oscar had said about the “incomprehensible majesty” of the Hypotheticals. The Hypotheticals had created a string of worlds linked by Arches, one end anchored on Earth and the other on Mars, the ten vastly distant habitable planets between them comprising a continuous extended landscape, something the book called a “distributed interstellar topology.” Mars had never been an easy place for human beings to live, despite our engineering of it, and a doorway to greener, kinder worlds had been a gift too great for the Martians to refuse. But without their careful husbandry Mars had reverted to its essential nature as a cold, dry planet—one more hostile desert in a universe that seemed full of them. The Martians, like the Earthlings, had lost a habitable homeworld.

I remembered stories about the Martian ambassador Wun Ngo Wen, who had arrived on Earth during the Spin. His Mars had sounded like a saner place than Earth. The Martians had already tapped Hypothetical technology in a modest way, using it to create their famous longevity treatment. But according to the book they had eventually repudiated that and every other form of Hypothetical technology. Most of the early bionormative philosophers had been Martians, the book said. Not that they opposed biotechnology in itself—the first cortical democracies had been Martian inventions—but they insisted on restricting themselves to human biotech, which could be fully understood and controlled.

That was a shortsighted and oppressive doctrine, the book suggested.

I had put down the book by the time Allison came to bed. We still slept together, though we hadn’t made love for weeks. It was our unguarded moments that put us most at risk: there was no telling what dangerous inferences the Network might draw from our sighs and gasps. The script we had written for ourselves would play out more plausibly without passionate interludes.

But I missed her, and not just physically. I woke that night and found her mumbling a slurry of English and Voxish words, asleep but not at rest, her eyelids trembling and her face wet with tears, and when I touched her cheek she moaned and turned away.

2.

The day before the expedition was scheduled to leave I visited Isaac Dvali in the medical suite. Oscar insisted on coming with me: he took a professional interest in my interactions with Isaac. “Your presence always has a measurable effect on him,” he told me. “His pulse rate increases when you’re with him. The electrical activity in his brain becomes more intense and more coherent.”

“Maybe he just likes company.”

“No one else has this effect on him.”

“Could be he recognizes me.”

“I’m sure he does,” Oscar said. “In one way or another.”

Isaac’s condition had improved considerably and most of the life-support machines that had been attached to him had been taken away. A crowd of physicians and nurses still hovered out of earshot, but he ignored them and looked directly at me.

He could do that now. The reconstruction of his ruined head and body was almost complete. The flesh on the left side of his skull was still translucent, and when he opened his mouth I could see the hinge of his jaw moving like a crab in a milky tide pool. But his new left eye had lost its bloodshot opacity and it focused in tandem with the other. I took a step toward the chair where he was reclining. “Hey, Isaac,” I said.

His jaw did its crab-dance under a veil of capillaries. “Tuh,” he managed to say. “Tuh-tuh—”

“It’s me, it’s Turk.”

“Turk!” He nearly shouted it.

One of the Voxish physicians whispered to Oscar, who translated: “Isaac’s voluntary motor functions are much better now but his impulse control is still very poor—”

“SHUT UP!” Isaac screeched.

Isaac had been touched hard by the Hypotheticals, which made him the next best thing to a living god. I tried to imagine how Oscar felt, being chastised by a deity with poor impulse control.

“Hey, I’m here,” I said. “Right here, Isaac.”

But the effort at speech had already wearied him. His eyelids went to half-mast. His arms trembled against the restraints that bound him to his chair. I looked over my shoulder and said, “Does he really need to be tied down?”

More consultation with the Voxish physicians; then Oscar said in a barely audible whisper, “Yes, I’m afraid so, for his own safety. At this stage of his recovery he could easily hurt himself.”

“You mind if I stay a while longer?”

I had addressed the question to Isaac, but it was Oscar who fetched me a chair. When I sat down Isaac’s eyes veered nervously until they found me again. An expression that might have been anxiety or relief played over his pale face.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I told him. He trembled against his restraints.

“He responds positively to the sound of your voice,” one of the physicians suggested.

So I talked. I talked to Isaac for most of an hour, registering his occasional grunts as encouragement. Since I wasn’t sure how much he understood about Vox or how he’d got here, that was what I talked about. I told him how we had been taken up by the temporal Arch in the Equatorian desert and how we had come to Vox after a passage of ten thousand years. We were back on Earth now, I said—Vox had some business to attend to here—but Earth had suffered considerably in all the centuries we’d been gone.

I got the feeling Oscar didn’t like me saying any of this. Probably he had hoped to introduce Isaac to Vox in his own way and in his own words. But the doctors seemed pleased with Isaac’s physical reaction, and Oscar wasn’t willing to provoke another outburst.

It was Isaac himself who ultimately shut the session down. His eyes wandered and he began to look sleepy. I took that as a cue. “I don’t want to tire you out,” I said. “I’ll be away for a little while, but I’ll come and see you again soon, promise.”

I stood up. That was when Isaac began to shake—not a gentle tremor but a full-blown convulsion. His head whipped from side to side and his eyes bulged against their paper-thin lids. The team of doctors hurried toward him as I backed away. “Turk!” he shouted, spittle frothing on his lips.

Then he stiffened. His eyes rolled up until only the whites showed. But his lips and tongue and jaw began to move, forming precise English words: “Majestic!” he whispered. “Billions of diverse components distributed over an entire galaxy! They know we’re here! They’re coming to meet us!”

The same words Oscar had used.

I glanced at Oscar. His face was nearly as pale as Isaac’s.

“Turk!” Isaac shouted again.

One of the physicians pressed a silvery tube against Isaac’s neck. His body slumped back into the chair, his eyes closed, and the chief medic gave me a look that needed no interpretation: Leave. Now.

3.

Allison came with me to the aircraft docks the day the survey expedition was due to leave. The docks were situated on a high platform above the city, protected from the toxic air by a transparent osmotic filter. A crowd of soldiers milled around us, their gear stacked on the deck waiting to be loaded. Ocher-colored clouds swept past, somber in the raking light of the sun.

Allison hugged me and said good-bye. “Come back,” she said, and then, recklessly, she whispered into my ear: “Soon.”

Uttering even that single word was a risk. She must have hoped the Network wouldn’t hear her; or, if it did, that the word would sound like a lover’s appeal to a man who was beginning to edge out of her grasp.

But that wasn’t what she meant. What she meant was, We have to act soon or we’ll lose our best shot at escape.

She meant, We could be exposed at any time.

“I will,” I whispered back.

Meaning: I know.