Vortex

Sunset often made her think of the Spin. The sun had aged and expanded during the radically foreshortened years of the Spin, and although it looked prosaic enough in the western sky, that was an engineered illusion. The real sun was an aged and bloated monster, furiously dying at the heart of the solar system. What she saw on the horizon was what remained of its lethal radiation after it had been filtered and regulated by the inconceivably powerful technology of the Hypotheticals. For years now—for all of Sandra’s adult life—humanity had been living on the sufferance of those alien and voiceless beings.

The sky was a hard blue, obscured to the southeast by clouds like glassy coral growths. One hundred five degrees Fahrenheit in downtown Houston according to the weather report, just as it had been yesterday and the day before. The talk on the newscasts was all about the ongoing White Sands launches, rockets that injected sulfur aerosols into the upper atmosphere in an attempt to slow global warming. Against that pending apocalypse (which was none of their doing) the Hypotheticals had offered no defense. They would protect the Earth from the swollen sun, but the CO₂ content of the atmosphere, apparently, was none of their business. It was, self-evidently, mankind’s business. And yet the tankers continued creeping up the Houston Ship Channel with their cargoes of oil, plentiful and cheap now that Equatorian crude had begun to flow from the new world beyond the Arch. Two planets’ worth of fossil fuels to cook ourselves with, Sandra thought. The car’s laboring air conditioner hummed a rebuke to her hypocrisy, but she couldn’t bring herself to forego the rush of cool air.

Ever since she finished her internship at UCSF and went to work for State Care, Sandra had spent her days rendering pass/fail verdicts over troubled minds, applying tests most functional adults easily passed. Is the subject oriented to time and place? Does the subject understand the consequences of his actions? But if she could give the same test to humanity as a whole, Sandra thought, the outcome would be very much in doubt. Subject is confused and often self-destructive. Subject pursues short-term gratification at the expense of his own well- being.

By the time she reached her apartment in Clear Lake night had fallen and the temperature had dropped a trivial degree or two. She microwaved dinner, opened a bottle of red wine, and checked to see if Bose’s email had reached her yet.

It had. A few dozen pages. Pages Orrin Mather had supposedly written, but she saw at once how unlikely that was.

She printed the pages and settled down in a comfortable chair to read them.

My name is Turk Findley, the document began.

Chapter Two Turk Findley’s Story

1.

My name is Turk Findley, and this is the story of the life I lived long after everything I knew and loved was dead and gone. It begins in the desert of a planet we used to call Equatoria, and it ends—well, that’s hard to say.

These are my memories. This is what happened.

2.

Ten thousand years, more or less, is how long I was away from the world. That was a terrible thing to know, and for a span of time it was nearly all I knew.

I woke up dizzy and naked in the open air. The sun was hammering out of an empty blue sky. I was radically, painfully thirsty. My body ached and my tongue felt thick and dead in my mouth. I tried to sit up and nearly toppled over. My vision was blurred. I didn’t know where I was or how I had got here. Nor could I really remember where I had come from. All I had of knowledge was the sickening conviction that almost ten thousand years (but who had counted them?) had passed.

I forced myself to sit absolutely still, eyes closed, until the worst of the vertigo passed. Then I raised my head and tried to make sense of what I saw.

I was outdoors in what appeared to be a desert. There was no one on the ground for miles, as far as I could tell, but I wasn’t exactly alone: a number of aircraft were passing overhead at low speed. The aircraft were peculiarly shaped and it wasn’t obvious what was keeping them aloft, since they seemed to have no wings or rotors.

I ignored them for the time being. The first thing I needed to do was to get out of the sunlight—my skin was burned red and there was no telling how long I’d been exposed.

The desert was hardpacked sand all the way to the horizon, but it was littered with fragments of what looked like gigantic broken toys: a smoothly curved half-eggshell, at least ten feet tall and dusty green, a few yards away; and in the distance other similar shapes in bright but fading colors, as if a giant’s tea party had come to grief. Beyond all this there was a range of mountains like a blackened jawbone. The air smelled of mineral dust and hot rock.

I crawled a few yards into the shadow of the fractured eggshell, where the shade was blissfully cool. What I needed next was water. And maybe something to cover myself up. But the effort of moving had made me dizzy again. One of the strange aircraft seemed to be hovering overhead; I tried to wave my arms to attract its attention but my strength had deserted me, and I closed my eyes and passed out.

3.

The next time I woke I was being lifted into some kind of stretcher.

The bearers were dressed in yellow uniforms and wore dust masks over their mouths and noses. A woman in the same yellow clothing walked beside me. When our eyes met she said, “Please try to stay calm. I know you’re frightened. We have to hurry, but trust me, we’ll get you to a safe place.”

Several of the aircraft had landed, and I was carried into one of them. The woman in yellow said a few words to her companions in a language I didn’t recognize. My captors or saviors set me on my feet and I discovered I could stand without falling. A door came down, cutting off the view of the desert and the sky. Softer light suffused the interior of the aircraft.

Men and women in yellow jumpers bustled around me, but I kept my eye on the woman who had spoken English. “Steady,” she said, taking my arm. She wasn’t much taller than five feet and change, and when she pulled off her mask she looked reassuringly human. Her skin was brown, her features were vaguely Asian, her dark hair was cut short. “How do you feel?”

That was a complicated question. I managed to shrug.

We were in a large room and she escorted me to one corner of it. A surface like a bed slid out of the wall, along with a rack of what might have been medical equipment. The woman in yellow told me to lie down. The other soldiers or airmen—I didn’t know how to think of them—ignored us and went about their business, working control surfaces along the walls or hurrying off to other chambers of the aircraft. I felt a rising-elevator sensation and I guessed we had lifted off, though there was no noise apart from the sound of voices speaking a language I didn’t recognize. No bounce, no chop, no turbulence.

The woman in yellow pressed a blunt metallic tube against my forearm and then against my rib cage, and I felt my anxiety ease into numbness. I guessed I had been drugged but I didn’t really mind. My thirst had vanished.