Vortex (35 page)

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.

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.

Nor could Bose. The investigation of the fire at the Findley warehouse had been appended to a federal investigation of the life-drug ring Findley had serviced. The FBI had cited Bose as a “person of interest,” which meant he had to stay out of sight for a while, but that wasn’t a problem: Bose’s community of friends knew how to shield one of their own. He had asked her to join him, without preconditions, long-term or short-term, as a friend or a lover—or whatever she was comfortable with. His friends, he said, would help her find work.

She had met some of those friends of his, the ones who administered the Martian longevity treatment as the Martians had intended—the middle-aged couple who had driven Orrin and Ariel out of Houston, to begin with, and others when she visited Seattle.

They seemed like decent-enough people, earnest in their beliefs. The only hope of salvaging this overheated and heedless world, they believed, was to find a new way of being human. The Fourth treatment was a step in that direction. Or so they claimed, and Sandra wasn’t sure they were wrong … though they might be naïve.

And there was Bose himself, a Fourth by default and at the wrong age. Some of the qualities she loved in Bose might have come out of that treatment—his easy calm, his generosity, his sense of justice. But most of Bose was just—Bose. She was certain of it. It was Bose she had fallen in love with, not his blood chemistry or his neurology.

But he had told her bluntly there was no hope of getting the Fourth treatment for Kyle. Bose had received it because it was the only way of saving his life; Kyle didn’t qualify, mainly because the treatment wouldn’t really cure him. As Bose had said, it would only render him an infant in a healthy man’s body, perhaps permanently. And that was an outcome Bose’s friends, after all their colloquies and ethical debates, couldn’t countenance.

Kyle slumped in the wheelchair with his head inclined, his eyes tracking the swaying oaks.

“I got a letter from Orrin Mather yesterday.” Bose’s friends had been characteristically generous about helping Orrin and Ariel during the investigation that followed the fire, finding them a home where neither the law nor the criminals were likely to come looking. “Orrin’s working part-time at a commercial nursery. His shoulder healed up nicely, he says. He says he hopes things are going well for me and Officer Bose. Which I guess they are. And he says he doesn’t mind about me reading his notebooks.”

(
I would of given you permission,
Orrin had written,
if you had asked,
and Sandra accepted the implied rebuke.)

“He says what I read was everything he ever wrote, except for a few pages he finished after he got to Laramie. He enclosed them with his letter. Look—I brought them with me.”

You can keep these pages,
Orrin had written.
I don’t need them anymore. I believe I’m finished with all that business. Maybe you will understand it better than I do. It is all bewildering to me. To be honest I would rather just get on with things.

She listened to the creek as it rippled through the grove. Today the creek was running shallow, as clean and bright as glass. She guessed this water would eventually wend its way into the Gulf—or evaporate, perhaps, to fall as rain in some cornfield in Iowa, as snow in some wintery northern town.

The sum of all paths,
Sandra thought.

Then she took up the pages Orrin had sent her and began to read them aloud.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

ISAAC’S STORY / ORRIN’S STORY / THE SUM OF ALL PATHS

My name is Isaac Dvali, and this is what happened after the end of the world.

*   *   *

In the end, Vox was mine. Its people (whom I had hated) were dead (which I regretted), and there was no one left alive but Turk Findley and the impersona of Allison Pearl.

Do you blame me for hating Vox?

The people of Vox had resurrected me when all I wanted was to die. They had believed I was something more than human, when in fact I was something less. All I had ever received at their hands was pain and incomprehension.

I had been among the Hypotheticals, my captors insisted, the Hypotheticals had “touched” me; but that wasn’t true. Because the Hypotheticals (as Vox imagined them) simply didn’t exist.

My father had made me so that I could hear the Hypotheticals talking to themselves, the whispers they sent between stars and planets, and what I had learned was that the Hypotheticals were a
process
—an ecology, not an organism. I could have told my captors so … but it was a truth they would have rejected, and it would have changed nothing.

*   *   *

The Hypotheticals were already billions of years old when they first intervened in human history.

They had originated with the first sentient biological civilizations to arise in the galaxy, long before the Earth and its sun condensed from interstellar dust. Like the first shoots rising from a wheat field in the spring, those forerunner civilizations were fragile, vulnerable, and alone. None of them survived the exhaustion and ecological collapse of their host planets.

But before they died they launched fleets of self-replicating machines into interstellar space. The machines were designed to explore nearby stars and broadcast home whatever data they acquired, and they did that, patiently and faithfully, long after their creators had ceased to exist. They moved from star to star, competing for scarce heavy elements, exchanging behavioral templates and fractions of operating code, changing and evolving over time. They were, in a sense, intelligent, but they were never (and would never become) self-aware.

What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was
the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection
. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency—chaos, complexity, life.

*   *   *

I hated the people of Vox—whom I could
hate
collectively, because they
behaved
collectively—for their deeply embedded limbic superstitions, and for calling me back from the indifference of death into the pain of my physical body. But I could not hate Turk Findley or the woman who had come to call herself Allison Pearl.

Turk and Allison were broken and imperfect things—like me. Like me, they had been created or summoned by the will of Vox. And, like me, they proved to be something more and less than Vox had anticipated.

I had first met Turk in the Equatorian desert, before he or I had passed through the temporal Arch. Out of ignorance or spite, and not quite by accident, Turk had once killed a man, and he had built a life on the foundation of that guilt. His best acts were acts of atonement. His failures he accepted as a kind of punishment. He craved a forgiveness he could never earn, and he was horrified when the Coryphaeus offered him that forgiveness. Accepting it would have dishonored the man Turk had killed (who was named Orrin Mather); and the people of Vox, by submerging all such feelings in their closed limbic collectivity, had made themselves monstrous in Turk’s eyes.

Allison was a different case. She was a native of Vox whose artificial persona had allowed her a rare glimpse beyond the boundaries and limitations of her life. By adopting that persona as her own, she had successfully liberated herself from the Coryphaeus. The liberation had come at the expense of her family, her friends, and her faith.

It was a bargain I understood very well.

I wanted these two people to survive. That was why I abetted their escape. Even then, I had doubted they could successfully cross the failing Arch. But I made it possible for them to live a little longer, depending on how you measure time.

*   *   *

For more than a millennium the Hypothetical machines had been scouring the surface of the Earth, dismantling and interpreting and remembering the ruins of the civilization we had built on the planet that gave us birth.

There was no conscious will behind this act of scavenging, no thought, no
agency.
It was simply behavior that had evolved over time, like photosynthesis. The devices Turk had confronted on the Antarctic plain had accumulated a rich storehouse of data. Earth’s tangible resources—rare elements that had been refined by human activity and concentrated in the wreckage of our cities—had already been extracted and transferred to orbit and beyond, where the space-faring elements of the Hypothetical ecology had feasted on them. The Hypotheticals were very nearly finished with the Earth.

But their sensors (orbital arrays of devices no bigger than grains of dust, complexly networked) had detected Vox as soon as it crossed the Arch and directed ground-based scavengers toward it. What the Voxish prophecies had imagined as an apotheosis was just a mopping-up exercise: the last berry plucked from a barren, dying bush.

The Hypotheticals arrived not long after Turk and Allison had fled, as a cloud of insect-sized disassemblers. They were sharp-toothed and efficient. They exuded complex catalysts that unzipped chemical bonds; they came through the melting walls like smoke, followed by the toxic external atmosphere. Gusts of poison blew down the corridors and walkways of Vox Core. This was a mercy, in a way—most of the citizens succumbed to asphyxiation before they could be devoured alive.

Could I have saved them?

I hated the people of Vox for compounding my suffering by resurrecting me, but I wouldn’t have wished such a fate on them. In fact I did what I could to protect them—which was nothing.