Vortex

“You really believe that?”

“Of course I do.”

“On the basis of a few prophecies?”

“On the basis of the calculations and inferences of the founders of Vox. Those calculations were sound enough to carry us across the oceans of a half dozen worlds. And sound enough to get us to Earth.”

“A dead planet.”

He smiled. Oscar had held back a nugget of information, like a stage magician waiting for the right moment to pull a paper flower out of his sleeve. “Not entirely dead. We have new images from Antarctica. Look.”

He showed me another video segment. Like the rest, it had been shot from high in the troposphere; like the rest, it was hard to interpret. At first glance it appeared to show one more stretch of generic desert, from a part of the world that in my day had been buried in ice. I might have been looking at boulders or pebbles: the scale was marked in characters I couldn’t read. But at the center of the image was a blip of regularity, and the image stabilized and resolved as the aircraft moved closer. There was something structural there, for sure. Mist-obscured squares and rectangles in dusty pastel colors. Some of these objects, Oscar said, were nearly the size of Vox Core. And they weren’t ruined or abandoned buildings, not in the ordinary sense. It was increasingly obvious as the view honed down to a narrow field that some of the structures had left long, linear trails in the Antarctic dust. They were mobile.

“We believe these are the work of the Hypotheticals,” Oscar said mildly.

I guessed he was right. The structures didn’t look like anything human beings would build. But the image abruptly faded to a staticky blank. The drone aircraft’s sensors had failed, Oscar explained. More drones had been sent to the same site, but they had failed too. Oscar chose to interpret the failures optimistically. “Clearly, the Hypotheticals still have a presence on Earth. Just as clearly, they registered the presence of the unmanned vehicles and reacted to them. Which means—I think the conclusion is inescapable—that they’re aware of us. ” His smile was fixed and unworried. “They know we’re coming, Mr. Findley. And I believe they’re waiting for us to arrive.”

Chapter Eleven Sandra and Bose

The institution where Sandra’s brother Kyle Cole lived was called the Live Oaks Polycare Residential Complex. It was located on a broad expanse of land that had once been a ranch. A creek ran nearby, and there was, in fact, a grove of live oaks on the property.

When she first arranged to have Kyle committed to this place Sandra had been curious enough to run a search on the term “live oaks”—why “live”? Live as opposed to what? But it turned out the trees were called live oaks because they stayed green in winter, prosaically enough. In Texas, she had read, a grove of live oaks was called a “mott.”

She had tried out the term on the receptionist once, back when she was new in the state and still bashful about her New England accent. “I’d like to take Kyle out to that mott of live oaks by the creek.” The receptionist had given her a blank stare. “I mean the grove of trees,” Sandra added, blushing. Oh. Well, surely.

Mott or not, it had become a ritual, weather permitting. Most of the day staff recognized her by now; Sandra knew the majority of them by name. “Another hot one today,” the attending nurse said, helping Sandra help her brother out of bed and into a wheelchair. “But Kyle likes the warm weather, I think.”

“He likes the shade of the trees.”

That was, of course, a surmise. Kyle hadn’t expressed a preference for the shade of the trees or for anything else. Kyle couldn’t walk or control his bowels or speak a coherent sentence. When he was distressed he scrunched up his face and made a hooting sound. When he was happy—or at least not un happy—he grimaced in a way that showed his teeth and gums: an animal’s smile. His happy-sounds were soft sighs, formed deep in his throat. Ah, ah, ah, ah.

Today he seemed happy to see Sandra. Ah. He turned his face toward her as she wheeled him down the stone-paved pathway and across the green lawn to the live oaks. The nurse had put an Astros cap on him, to keep the sun out of his eyes. The baseball cap threatened to fall off as he craned his neck. Sandra straightened it for him.

There was a picnic table in the grove, more for visitors than for the patients, most of whom weren’t ambulatory. Today she and Kyle had the grove to themselves. The shade, and a moist coolness that seemed to rise up from the creek, made the heat tolerable and almost pleasant. There was, thank God, a breeze. The oak leaves trembled and seined the light.

Kyle was five years older than Sandra. Before what the doctors called his “accident,” Sandra had always been able to share her troubles with him. He had taken his role as big brother seriously, though he joked about it. “I don’t have any advice for you, Sandy,” he used to say. He was the only person she would allow to call her Sandy. “All my advice is bad advice.” But he had always listened, carefully and thoughtfully, and that was the important thing.

She still liked talking to him, though he couldn’t understand even a syllable of what she said. His eyes followed her when she spoke, perhaps because he liked the sound of her voice, and she wondered, despite what the neurologists said, whether there was still some fragment of working memory inside him, an ember of awareness that might occasionally flicker with recognition.

“I’m in a little bit of trouble these days,” she began.

Ah, Kyle said, a sound as gentle and meaningless as the rustling of the leaves.

* * *

It was the Spin that had killed her father and ruined her brother.

Sandra had considered and reconsidered the event over many years, looking for an ultimate cause. She would have liked to pin her hatred on some particular thing or person. But in this case, blame was slippery. It glided over potential targets but refused to stick. And ultimately, behind all the trivial and quotidian facts, behind the million unfathomable contingencies, there was the Spin. The Spin had changed and mutilated many lives, not just her brother’s, not just her own.

In a perverse way, the Spin had been good for Sandra’s mother. Sandra’s mother was an electronics engineer whose career had stalled out, until the Spin rendered satellite communications obsolete and created a booming market for aerostatic signal-relay devices. She had been hired by a company owned by the aerostat tycoon E. D. Lawton, where she designed an airborne antenna stabilization system that became an industry standard. Her work was much in demand and she was often away from home.

The opposite was true of Sandra’s father. The initial chaos and confusion that followed the disappearance of the stars from the sky had triggered a global recession in which her father’s software business had wilted like a Christmas poinsettia after New Year’s Day. That—or the Spin itself, the blunt and simple fact of it—had thrown him into a state of depression that occasionally lifted but never entirely went away. “He just kind of forgot how to smile,” Sandra’s brother once explained; and Sandra, ten, had accepted this non-explanation somberly.

Easy for us, Sandra thought, the generation that followed: we’re so accustomed to these truths, that the Earth was encircled by nameless alien beings capable of manipulating even the passage of time; that to these godlike beings the human race was both trivial and somehow significant. You lived with it because you had always lived with it. Sandra herself had been born at the tag end of the Spin, about the time the stars (scattered and strange though they had become) reappeared in the sky. She may have owed her own existence to a last burst of optimism or desperation on the part of her parents, the affirmative act of creating new life in a world that had seemed to be crumbling into anarchy.

But the return of the stars had made no real difference to her father. It was as if some internal process of decay had taken root within him and could not be halted in its advance. No one ever said anything meaningful about