Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Not to mention the inevitable gossip that would ensue in the parched social universe of the State Care staff. Nurse Wattmore beat her back to work by half an hour, time enough to spread the word that Sandra had been lunching with a cop. She got a set of knowing glances and half-smiles from the nurses at Reception. Bad luck—but Wattmore was a force of nature, as unstoppable as the tides.

  Of course, the tide of gossip flowed both ways. Sandra knew that Mrs. Wattmore, a widow, forty-four years of age, had slept with three of the four former ward supervisors. “That woman lives in a glass house,” one of the nurses confided in Sandra when they crossed paths in the staff commissary. “You know? Lately she’s been taking her breaks with Dr. Congreve.”

  Sandra hurried to her office and closed the door. She had two case summaries that needed writing up. She gave the folders a guilty look and pushed them aside. Then she took the envelope Bose had given her from her purse and tugged out the sheaf of closely written pages and began to read.

  * * *

  She was brimming with fresh questions when she met Bose that evening.

  This time he had picked the restaurant, a Northside theme pub, shepherd’s pie and Guinness and green paper napkins embossed with pictures of harps. He was waiting when she arrived. She was surprised to find another woman sitting at the table with him.

  The woman wore a blue flower-print dress that was neither fresh nor in good repair. She was skinny to the point of emaciation and she seemed both nervous and angry. When Sandra approached the table the woman looked at her warily.

  Bose stood hastily. “Sandra, I’d like you to meet Ariel Mather—Orrin’s sister.”

  Chapter Six

  Turk Findley’s Story

  1.

  There had been moments during my captivity when I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to live or die. If there was any sense or meaning in the life I had lived—from the unforgivable act that had caused me to leave Houston many years ago to the moment I woke up in the Equatorian desert—I couldn’t see it. But now the mindless urge to live came roaring back. I watched as swarms of Voxish aircraft began the systematic slaughter of the Farmer rebels, and all I wanted was to get to a safe place.

  2.

  From the cart on its hillside we were able to see the treeless plain surrounding Vox Core as it became the scene of a rolling apocalypse. The Farmer armies had already begun to retreat as soon as the sirens sounded. At the first sight of the approaching aircraft they dropped their makeshift pikes and broke formation, but the Voxish warplanes came on relentlessly, skimming over the ranks of their enemies like hunting birds. The weapon they used was new to me: the aircraft projected fiery wave fronts that rolled across the landscape and then vanished like summer lightning, leaving cone-shaped swathes of smoldering soil and charred bodies in their wake. The sound they made was a seismic exhalation, powerful enough that I felt it in my rib cage. The war sirens went on wailing like mournful giants.

  Briefly, it seemed as if we might be safe up here on the hill. Then one of the warplanes banked nearby, as if considering us, and the wind carried up the stench of smoke and burning flesh. Our guard detail evaporated, running for the woods, with the exception of Digger Choi, who seemed immobilized. I caught his eye. He was clearly terrified. I held out my bound hands to him, hoping he could interpret the gesture: Don’t leave us tied up like hogs at a slaughter. Allison added a few pleading words in Voxish, barely audible under the general roar.

  Digger Choi turned his back.

  I called out, “ Cut us loose, you cowardly fuck! ” And although he surely didn’t understand English he stopped and turned back, glowering through his fear. He dropped the latch on the cart’s gate and cut us free with the knife he carried, two hasty slashes, first Allison, then me. The blade bit my wrist but I didn’t care. I was cravenly grateful.

  Allison muttered a Voxish word that might have meant “Thanks.” I couldn’t translate the Farmer’s response, but the go-to-hell tone of it was unmistakeable.

  Down on the plain the carnage continued. The stink of frying human flesh became nauseatingly dense. Digger Choi turned to follow his friends in their dash for the treeline, but stopped in his tracks when a shadow eclipsed the distant lights of Vox Core. It was one of the Voxish aircraft, directly overhead, flying slow and low. Suddenly there was light all around us, so bright the air itself seemed whitewashed. An amplified voice called out incomprehensible orders in Voxish. “Stay still,” Allison said, putting her hand on my arm. “Don’t move.”

  * * *

  It was our clothing that saved us—our greasy, bloodstained, road-worn yellow tunics.

  The Network had been restored, and if Allison’s limbic implant had been intact it would have alerted the Voxish forces to our presence. But the Farmers had destroyed her node, and I had never worn one to begin with, so we should have been indistinguishable from anyone else on this killing ground.

  Except for our clothes. Microscopic radio-frequency tags were embedded in the coarse weave, identifying us (or at least what we wore) as survivors of the Equatorian recovery mission. That was enough to buy us a reprieve. The aircraft bellied down to land. A door sprang open and soldiers in military gear vaulted out and formed a cordon around us, weapons aimed.

  Digger Choi was caught inside the cordon. He seemed to understand that surrender was his only option. He dropped to his knees and put his hands over his head in a gesture that would have been familiar on any battlefield ten thousand (or twenty thousand) years ago. The Voxish soldiers kept their weapons trained as Allison stammered out an explanation or a demand.

  After a quick consultation the soldiers gestured to their aircraft. “They’re taking us to Vox Core,” Allison said, and the relief in her voice was palpable. “They don’t know for sure that I’m telling the truth, but they know we’re not Farmers.”

  They knew with equal certainty that Digger Choi was a Farmer, and one of the soldiers aimed a weapon at his head.

  I said, “I’m not going anywhere until that man puts his gun down. Tell him so.”

  Given the slaughter that was taking place on every side of us, maybe the summary execution of Digger Choi was a small bone to choke on. But he had risked his life to set us free, even if he had been sullen about it. I didn’t feel like watching his execution.

  Allison gave me a peculiar look but she gauged my temperament correctly. She barked out a translation.

  The soldier hesitated. I stepped forward, grabbed the Farmer’s forearm and pulled him upright. I could feel him trembling under my hand. “Run,” I told him.

  Allison translated the single word. Digger Choi didn’t need to be told twice. He darted toward a part of the forest not yet burning. The soldiers shrugged and let him go.

  He lived a little longer because of what I had done. But only a little.

  * * *

  The aircraft carried us over the killing fields and across the city wall to a landing bay on one of the towers of Vox Core. During the brief flight the Voxish soldiers appeared to have received confirmation of our identities: after a quiet mutual consultation they began to treat me with deference and spoke to Allison in what sounded like sympathetic voices. Even before the aircraft docked we were given fresh clothing (crisp new jumpers, this time in a shade of blue). One of the soldiers, evidently a medic, slathered a soothing balm on my wrist where Digger Choi had slashed it in the process of cutting me loose. The same soldier attempted to examine the wound where Allison’s node had been removed, but she pulled away from him and snarled. We were given water to drink: clean, cool, heavenly.

  The landing dock was a windy rooftop. We left the aircraft and the soldiers escorted us to an enormous elevator housing, but Allison balked at the entrance and asked the soldier in charge a question. Her eyes widened at his answer. She spoke again, he answered curtly; the discussion began to sound like an argument, until at last the soldier gave her an exasperated nod.

  “We’re almost exactly at the midpoint in the passage of the Arch,”
she said to me. “The Network estimates twenty minutes or so to the transit, assuming it happens. I’m staying here until it does.”

  I didn’t see the point. Vox would make the crossing to Earth or not, whether we were out here on this ledge or in some more comfortable space below.

  “I don’t care.” She added in a lower voice, “I want to see it. I told them you did, too. What I want doesn’t matter, but you’re Uptaken—they have to pay attention.”

  So we were escorted to an enclosed balcony a single level below the landing docks, still high above the city, and we stood there like two grimy and slightly bloodstained scarecrows, gazing out at the island of Vox and the far sea shimmering under the small Equatorian moon. Smoke rose from the fields where the Farmers were dying (or had, by this time, surely died), but it trailed abaft of us and the sky ahead was starry and clear. The warplanes were already circling back to their bases.

  Allison spoke to the nearest soldier in our escort, then translated her questions and his answers for me. Did the soldier think Vox would actually achieve a transit to Earth? Yes, he was certain of it; the prophecies were being fulfilled; the Uptaken were among us. What about the Uptaken who had already been taken to Vox Core when the city was bombed? Bad luck, the soldier said. Bad luck that a missile had penetrated the Voxish defenses, bad luck that the strike had damaged Vox Core’s essential infrastructure—and very bad luck that the rescued Uptaken had been situated so close to ground zero.

  It wasn’t clear to me how many “others” had been collected in the Equatorian desert, but I believed that would have included the hybrid boy Isaac Dvali, possibly his mother, maybe a few unlucky civilians who happened to be nearby. Had the missile killed them all?

  “All but one,” Allison translated.

  “Who’s the survivor?”

  More translation.

  “The youngest one.”

  The boy, then. Isaac.

  “But he was badly hurt,” Allison added. “He’s only barely alive.”

  “And that’s enough to get the attention of the Hypotheticals? You think they’ll really open a closed Arch and carry us to Earth just because they recognize one injured boy and a confused ex-sailor?”

  It was a question she didn’t have to answer. The answer came out of the sky in a blush of green light.

  3.

  It had been night on the Equatorian ocean. It was daylight on Earth.

  The transition was as sudden and as unnervingly simple as it had been the first time I rode a rusty freighter from Sumatra to Equatoria. I felt a little heavier—Earth is a slightly more massive planet than Equatoria—but it was a sensation no more alarming than the feeling you get in a rising elevator. The other changes were less subtle.

  We blinked at murky daylight. Beyond the shores of Vox, the sea was flat and oily to every horizon. The sky was a nasty-looking shade of green.

  “God, no, ” Allison whispered.

  The soldiers gawked.

  “Poison,” she said. “It’s all poison…”

  The war sirens stopped wailing. In the silence the Voxish soldiers stood with abstracted expressions, as if they were listening to voices I couldn’t hear—and probably that’s what they were doing, consulting their Network or their superiors.

  Then one of them addressed Allison. She told me, “We’re ordered below, no exceptions this time. The city’s being sealed.”

  Before we turned away I took a last look at the open land beyond the walls. The corpses of Farmers lay motionless in charred meadowland, bathed in sour green daylight. A few survivors moved among them, but even from this height they looked shocked and aimless. I asked Allison whether at least some of them could be brought inside as prisoners.

  “No,” she said.

  “But if the air’s poisonous—”

  “Just be grateful we were rescued.”

  “There might be hundreds of people out there. You’re talking about abandoning them to die.” She nodded blankly. I said, “Whoever’s in charge here, do they really want that on their conscience?”

  She gave me a peculiar look. “Vox is a limbic democracy,” she said. “There’s only one conscience. It’s called the Coryphaeus. And it doesn’t give a shit how many Farmers die.”

  Chapter Seven

  Sandra and Bose

  “This is Sandra Cole,” Bose said, “Orrin’s doctor over at State Care.”

  “Well, I’m not his doctor exactly,” Sandra began, feeling more than a little ambushed. Ariel Mather gave her a look so steely and unwavering that her voice dried up in midsentence. Ariel was skinny but she was tall; even though she was sitting down her head was almost level with Sandra’s. She would have towered over Orrin. She had Orrin’s bony facial structure and similarly lustrous brown eyes. But there was nothing of Orrin’s baleful tentativeness about her. Her glare could have blinded a cat.

  “You got my brother locked up?”

  “No, not exactly… he’s being evaluated for admission to the Texas State Care Adult Custodial Program.”

  “What’s that mean? Is he free to go or isn’t he?”

  Clearly, the woman wanted a blunt answer. Sandra sat down and gave her one. “No, he’s not free to go. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Take it easy, Ariel,” Bose said. “Sandra’s on our side.”

  Were there sides? Apparently there were, and apparently Sandra had been recruited to one.

  An intimidated waiter dropped off a basket of rolls and scurried away.

  “All’s I know,” Ariel said, “is that I got a call from this man telling me Orrin was in jail for getting beat up, which I guess is a crime in Texas—”

  “He was taken into custody,” Bose said, “for his own protection.”

  “ Custody, then, and would I come and get him. Well, he’s my little brother. I took care of him all his life and half mine. Course I’ll come get him. Now I find out Orrin’s not in jail anymore, he’s in something called State Care. That’s your business, you said, Dr. Cole?”

  Sandra took a moment to compose her thoughts, deliberately buttering a roll under Ariel’s flinty scrutiny. “I’m an intake psychiatrist. I work for State, yes. I spoke to Orrin when Officer Bose first brought him in. Do you know how State Care works? It’s a little different in North Carolina, I believe.”

  “Officer Bose says it’s some kind of lock-up for crazy people.”

  Sandra hoped Bose had not said exactly that. “The way it works is, when indigent people, people with no fixed address or income, have trouble with the police, they can be remanded to State Care even if they haven’t committed a crime—especially if the police believe the person can’t be safely abandoned back on the street. State Care isn’t a lock-up, Ms. Mather. And it’s not a mental hospital. There’s an evaluation period of seven days, during which we determine whether an individual is a candidate for full-time care in what we call a custodial guided-living environment. At the end of that time the person in question is either released or accorded dependency status.” She was conscious of using words Ariel probably wouldn’t understand—worse, the same words printed in State Care’s three-page pamphlet for concerned families. But what other words were there?

  “Orrin’s not crazy.”

  “I interviewed him myself, and I’m inclined to agree with you. In any case, nonviolent candidates can always be released into the custody of a willing family member with an income and a legal address.” She spared a glance for Bose, who should have explained all this. “If you can prove you’re Orrin’s sister—just a driver’s license and a social security card will do—and if you’re verifiably employed and willing to sign the forms, we can release Orrin to you more or less immediately.”

  “I told Ariel the same thing,” Bose said. “In fact I called State to say we were submitting the paperwork. But there’s a problem. Your supervisor, Dr. Congreve, claims Orrin had a violent spell this afternoon. He assaulted an orderly, Congreve says.”

  Sandra blinked. “Seriously? I didn’t hear anything ab
out a violent incident. If Orrin assaulted anyone, it’s news to me.”

  “It’s bullshit is what it is, ” Ariel said. “You talked to Orrin even a little, you’d know it’s bullshit. Orrin never assaulted nobody in his life. Can’t crush a bug without apologizing to it first.”

  “The accusation may not be true,” Bose said, “but it makes it more difficult to release him.”

  Sandra was still struggling with the idea. “Certainly it doesn’t sound like behavior I would expect from Orrin.” Though how well did she really know him, after a single interview and a follow-up conversation? “But what are you saying—that Congreve is lying? Why would he do that?”

  “To keep Orrin locked up,” Ariel said.

  “Yes, but why? We’re underfunded and overloaded as it is. Usually, if we can remand a patient to family, that’s a best-case outcome. Good for the patient, good for us. In fact it’s my impression Congreve was hired because the board of directors believed he would reduce the number of people going on State lists.” Ethically or not, she added silently.

  “Maybe,” Ariel said, “you don’t know as much as you think you know about what goes on where you work.”

  Bose cleared his throat. “Keep in mind that Sandra’s here to help us. She’s our best shot at getting Orrin a fair deal.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out about this incident. I don’t know whether I can help, but I’ll do my best. Ms. Mather, would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions about Orrin? The more I know about his background, the easier it’ll be for me to move the case forward.”