Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “I would like a cup of coffee,” Orrin said.

  Sandra turned, but drew back before she could step off the curb. A car pulled up, blocking her path. The passenger-side window rolled down and Sandra could see two men inside. The passenger was a middle-aged man, smiling tightly. The driver had a gun held loosely across his thigh.

  “Hello, Dr. Cole,” the passenger said. “Hello, Orrin.”

  Sandra recognized the voice. She felt numb. She wanted to run but she couldn’t take her eyes from the car. She felt rooted in place.

  “Hello, Mr. Findley,” Orrin said sadly.

  “I’m sorry to see you here, Orrin. That’s not good news for either of us. Why don’t you and Dr. Cole get in back, so we can talk.”

  * * *

  The driver kept his engine idling but didn’t drive away. Sandra prayed he wouldn’t. As long as she was within sight of this ugly road, the bus stop, the coffee shop across the street with its yellow lighted windows, it was possible to believe she might still get away unhurt. But if the car began to move it would carry her out of the familiar world, into that unlit land where unspeakable things happen.

  She knew about the unlit land. Often enough, at State, she had interviewed candidates who had been routinely beaten, abused, abandoned, or degraded. They were refugees from the land of unspeakable things, and through their eyes she had begun to sense the vastness and emptiness of its geography.

  Findley looked at her from the front seat, his face lined and pockmarked, his eyes deceptively mild. “First things first,” he said. “One of you is missing. What happened to Officer Bose, Dr. Cole?”

  She doubted she could have answered even had she wanted to. All the moisture in her mouth had dried up. The world was drenched in rain, and she couldn’t even spit.

  “Come on,” Findley said impatiently.

  She managed, “I don’t know.”

  “Please.”

  “He’s not with me. I don’t know where he is.”

  Findley sighed. “You should have accepted the offer I made you, Dr. Cole. It was perfectly authentic. A second life for your brother, in exchange for nothing important. There was no downside to it. It was generous. You were stupid.” He paused. “Over there across the street, parked in back, that’s Bose’s car. So where is he, Dr. Cole?”

  She closed her mouth firmly and shook her head.

  The driver—the gunman—turned in his seat to look at her. He didn’t look like a criminal, Sandra thought. His face wasn’t unpleasant. He looked like a high school English teacher, tired after a long day.

  He showed her the gun. She didn’t know anything about guns and she couldn’t say what kind it was. It was as if he was saying, “Here is the source of my power over you.” As if he wanted her to acknowledge and understand it. Then he struck her in the face with the grip clenched in his fist.

  The blow glanced off her cheekbone and loosened a tooth. The pain was literally sickening. She wanted to vomit. Her eyes clenched shut and she felt tears leaking out of them.

  “Don’t do that,” Orrin said.

  Findley turned to face him. “Look at all this trouble you caused, Orrin. And why? What did I ever do to you but take you off the street and give you respectable work?”

  “None of this is my fault, Mr. Findley.”

  “Whose fault is it, then? Tell me.”

  “Your own, I guess,” Orrin said.

  The gunman jacked his seat back so he could reach Orrin, but Findley raised a hand to stop him. Sandra watched through slit eyes, one hand clamped over her bleeding mouth. Everything looked watery, as if the rain had come inside the car.

  “How do you figure that?” Findley asked.

  “Your own son hates you,” Orrin said calmly.

  Findley reddened. “My son? What do you know about my family?”

  “You shouldn’t have done what you did about his friend Latisha. I don’t believe he’ll ever forgive you for that.”

  “Who have you been talking to?”

  Orrin closed his mouth and looked away. Sandra cringed, waiting for the inevitable blow.

  But the gunman was looking past her, down the street. He said, “Here it comes now, Mr. Findley.”

  Sandra risked a look. What was coming was a plain white van. Sandra couldn’t begin to guess at its significance, but Findley was pleased to see it. He waved at the driver of the van as it passed. “All right then,” he said. “We might as well get moving.” Into the land of unspeakable things.

  “One more chance to tell me about Bose,” Findley said. Sandra glanced at the gunman, who smiled horribly.

  Orrin watched the van pull ahead. “Mr. Findley?”

  “What do you imagine you have to say, Orrin?”

  “Mr. Findley, I believe that truck’s on fire.”

  * * *

  Yellow flame guttered out of the van’s loosely chained rear doors. Smoke, too, though rain and mist concealed it. The driver of the van apparently hadn’t yet noticed.

  Then something inside ignited with a visceral thump. The rear doors flew open, feeding air to a sudden inferno. The van swerved and came up hard against the curb. Two men tumbled out of the cab, looked back in horror, then ran into the darkness.

  Findley and the gunman were still staring when Bose’s car barrelled out of the coffee shop parking lot. Findley saw it first: “Go! Drive for fuck’s sake!” he shouted; but Bose braked directly in front of the car, blocking it. The gunman put the car into reverse but succeeded only in ramming his rear bumper into the concrete bus bench. His last recourse was the weapon in his hand. He raised the pistol, looking for a target. Findley was still shouting, pointlessly.

  Sandra saw Orrin lunge forward and grab the gunman’s right arm. Orrin who wouldn’t so much as step on a bug, Sandra thought. Unless he was provoked. He had wrenched the gun to a vertical angle when it went off. The bullet cut a flanged hole in the roof of the car, allowing in a fine spray of rain. Findley jerked open the passenger-side door and threw himself out, landing and rolling on the wet street. Sandra realized she should do the same. But she couldn’t bring herself to move. She had become a still point around which the universe was revolving. Her body was leaden and her ears were ringing.

  She wanted to help Orrin, who had one knee braced against the back of the driver’s seat and was struggling to leverage the gunman’s arm backward. The pistol looped around like a rattlesnake looking for something to bite. Orrin grunted and redoubled his effort, clutching the gunman’s arm and pumping with both feet. The pistol went off again.

  Then Bose pulled open the driver’s-side door. He moved with a speed that took Sandra by surprise. His Fourth reflexes, maybe. He reached in and gripped the gunman’s arm just as Orrin fell back, exhausted, letting it loose. Bose took the gun away and tucked it into his belt. He pulled out the gunman, who crouched in a pool of ponded rainwater like a cornered animal, clutching his wrist, teeth bared, looking at Bose and at the gun. Then he turned and ran. Bose let him go.

  The burning van was the brightest light on the block, casting long and hectic shadows down the slick street. Sandra looked over at Orrin, who was slumped against the seat. He turned up his face, wincing with pain. “I’m all right, Dr. Cole,” he said. But he wasn’t. The second shot from the pistol had cut across his shoulder, furrowing a wound. Sandra looked at it professionally, as if she had been transported from this madness back to her internship. The med school basics. Apply pressure. The wound was bleeding, but not too badly.

  She guided him out of Findley’s car and into Bose’s. When she straightened up Bose put a hand on her arm to keep her still and examined her face where the gunman had hurt her. She said, “It looks worse than it is,” then contradicted herself by spitting a wad of blood onto the wet sidewalk.

  “We need to get away from here,” Bose said.

  * * *

  Findley stood in the road, staring at a figure across the street.

  The figure was his son, Turk. Sandra imagined she could see waves o
f surmise and dismay working their way into Findley’s shocked consciousness.

  “He knows what you are,” she said—sternly and loudly, though the words were slurred by her loose tooth and swelling cheek. “He knows all about it, Mr. Findley.”

  Findley turned to her, his face a mask of rage and confusion.

  Sandra ignored him. She was watching the boy now. The kid. Turk. The kid yanked the hood of his poncho up over his head and turned away from his father in a gesture that was eloquent with contempt. He was bound away from here, Sandra realized. She could read that in his body, the way he hunched his shoulders and straightened his spine. It wasn’t the way it had happened in Orrin’s story but it was the same, somehow. The boy was heading for his own unspeakable land… though perhaps not the one Orrin Mather had imagined for him.

  Findley saw his son begin that long walk away from him. “Wait,” he called out, weakly.

  But Turk ignored him. He walked past the window of the coffee shop, casting a reflection on the rain-slick, fire-bright asphalt. He turned a corner into darkness. Findley stared into the falling rain until there was nothing to see.

  * * *

  Sandra slid into the backseat of Bose’s car, looking for something she could use to bandage Orrin’s wound. Bose gave her a roll of cotton from the first-aid kit he kept in the glove compartment. Orrin had bled a lot—blood and rain had soaked the loose weave of his shirt—but a few sutures would close the wound. Sandra could do it herself, she supposed, if Bose decided they couldn’t risk an emergency ward. “Hold this here,” she told Orrin, putting his free hand on the cotton wad. “Can you do that?”

  He nodded. “Thank you,” he said, his voice unnaturally calm.

  Bose drove past the burning van, a few barren blocks to the highway. The highway was almost empty of traffic and the storm was as dense as fog, a rain-slashed darkness. He drove at a steady pace toward the city he couldn’t see.

  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.

&nbs
p; 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.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Sandra

  Sandra told her brother Kyle about the facility outside of Seattle. She thought he’d like it—it was a lot like Live Oaks, she said. Good doctors. Big rooms. Lots of green lawn and even a little bit of forest, that green wet West Coast forest. Seldom as hot as Houston.

  Though even Houston was tolerably cool this morning. She had wheeled Kyle from his room at the residential complex to the mott of live oaks by the creek. The sky was blue. There was a breeze. The oaks bent together conspiratorially.

  Kyle was looking skinny. The doctors had said they were adjusting his feeding regimen to deal with a minor but persistent digestive problem. But today his mood was benign. He registered his appreciation of the weather, or her presence, or the sound of her voice, or nothing at all, with a gentle ah.

  The managers of Kyle’s trust fund had given tentative approval to her plan to relocate him, and they were negotiating terms with the Seattle facility. As for herself… Bose had been patient and encouraging, but it was still a radically new life she was about to embark on. Certainly, she couldn’t go back to the old one.