Vortex

Chapter Thirty Turk’s Story

We flew to Vox under a crazed sky. External temperature readings rose so high that the ship’s sensors began to sound intermittent alarms. Dawn was viciously bright, and the sun when it rose looked bloated and threatening. But it wasn’t the sun that had changed; it was the protective barrier surrounding the Earth.

During the first uneasy years after the end of the Spin, people had speculated about what would happen if the Hypotheticals withdrew their protection. The answer was so appalling as to be unthinkable. And whatever their purposes, however obscure their motives, the Hypotheticals had seemed intent on preserving human life; so we had accepted the illusion of normalcy and even begun to believe in it, which was presumably what they wanted us to do.

But I remembered what the astrophysicists had said. During the Spin the sun had aged almost four billion years. The sun was a star, and stars expand as they grow old, often enough swallowing the planets that surround them. Without the continuing intervention of the Hypotheticals, the atmosphere of the Earth would be scoured away, the seas would evaporate like puddles on a July afternoon, and the rocky mantle itself would begin to melt.

Now, at last, that protection had been withdrawn.

The influx of radiation was already driving the weather. We flew south to Antarctica at sixty thousand feet, dodging thunderheads that boiled into the stratosphere like black, fluid mountains. And as we approached Vox—as we dipped down into the buffeting winds and streaming rain—our aircraft informed us that it was pushing the limits of its performance envelope. A little more of this and it wouldn’t be able to fly.

“Cut it out of me,” I said to Allison.

We were in the forward cabin, watching the end of the world. She gave me a queasy look.

“I mean it,” I said. “You told me this vehicle would fly back to Vox by itself if I wasn’t controlling it.”

“Yes, but—”

“Then cut the node out of me.”

She thought about what I was asking her. “I’m not sure I can,” she said. “I mean… cleanly.”

“Then do it messy,” I said. “You promised me as much.”

She gave me a defiant stare, then dropped her head and nodded.

The man I had killed was not in any absolute sense an innocent man. Nor was my father, whose crimes were exposed by the killing.

The man I had killed (I learned) was a drifter by the name of Orrin Mather, who had robbed a half dozen liquor stores between Raleigh and Biloxi before he was hired by my father. In all of these robberies he had threatened to use a weapon (a secondhand.42 caliber pistol), and in three of them he had actually fired the gun. None of his victims died, but he left one paralyzed from the waist down. All these facts emerged during my father’s trial.

My father may not have known the man he hired was a criminal, but it surely wouldn’t have surprised him. It was his habit to recruit employees from among the casual and undocumented laborers who gathered around the Houston bus depot. He paid them in cash and asked only that they keep their mouths shut. If he happened to learn about a man’s criminal record or uncertain immigration status, he used the knowledge to extort the man’s loyalty. Generally he started such men as lifters and carriers in the warehouse, moving them into more sensitive positions if they demonstrated an acceptable combination of sobriety and servility. That had been Orrin Mather’s career path.

I was never arrested for my crime. The fire was self-evidently an act of arson, but there were no witnesses. The subsequent investigation uncovered a cache of highly controlled substances in the warehouse, chemical compounds imported from the Middle East and marked for delivery to a longevity-drug ring operating out of New Mexico. By the time my father was remanded for trial I was on the road; by the time he was sentenced I was an ordinary seaman in the recently revived U.S. Merchant Marine, doing deck duty on a freighter bound for Venezuela. My father was found guilty on three counts including conspiracy to distribute, and he ultimately served five years of a ten-year sentence. I learned all that from the newscasts. I had no further contact with my family.

If Allison was correct, those things had happened not to me but to someone else—to the original and authentic Turk Findley, the long-extinct template from which I had been reconstructed.

And maybe that was true. Maybe I even wanted it to be true.

But if I wasn’t the man who had started that fire, if I wasn’t the man whose life had been shaped by it, if I wasn’t the man who had carried his burden of guilt from an old world to a new one, if I wasn’t the man who had second-guessed every opportunity and repented every pleasure, if I wasn’t the man who had allowed a shamefaced sense of obligation to take him deep into the oil lands of Equatoria—if I wasn’t that man, what was I?

Allison brought a med kit to the forward compartment and performed the surgery in view of the sky. Without moving my head I could see clouds the color of steel wool roiling against the aircraft’s leading edge. “Stay still,” she warned me.

She cut deep and fast. The blood covered her hands and clotted in my hair, and even after she packed the wound with gels, the pain was sickening. But she killed the limbic implant and extracted every part of it she could safely reach.

Our aircraft homed in on Vox, fighting turbulence so severe I could feel the deck bucking under me. According to its built-in protocols, it had been trying to contact Vox Core for landing instructions. I asked Allison whether there had been any response.

“Briefly,” she said.

“Someone’s alive down there?”

“Isaac,” she said.

The clouds opened and we could see Vox Core a few hundred feet below us. There had been visible damage—the exposed surfaces of walls and towers looked eroded, almost melted—but most of the city was intact. Our aircraft banked unsteadily toward the nearest tower and landed on an open bay, along with a gust of toxic air.

Allison helped me to the hatch as soon as the air outside was clean enough to breathe.

Isaac had come up to meet us. He had left a trail of footprints on the deck, which was covered with floury white dust. The dust, he said, was what was left of the Hypothetical machines. They had come to consume Vox, to dismantle it, to catalog it, molecule by molecule, and Isaac had hacked their procedural protocols, broadcasting disruptive codes from deep in the Coryphaeus. But not soon enough.

“They took flesh first of all,” he said.

There was no one left alive. No one but us, three bloodstained witnesses to the world’s end. We went down into the ancient city to wait.