Vortex

have any chance of succeeding.

If there still was a plan. If we hadn’t already surrendered to our own lies.

* * *

The truth was that I had no home in the world but Vox. And Vox, as Oscar insisted, was eager to adopt me, if I was in a mood to accept it.

I tried to behave like a man for whom that offer held some attraction.

Maybe, on some level, it did. Now that I knew it better, Vox had ceased to be a frightening abstraction. I had learned how to dress so that I wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, and I understood at least the most basic social customs. I continued to study the books I had been given, trying to pry comprehensible stories out of the legalistic prose. I knew that Vox had originated as a planned polity in the global ocean of a planet called Ester, a Middle World in the chain of habitable planets. I had learned to name the founders of Vox’s limbic democracy and to enumerate its five hundred years of wars and alliances, victories and defeats. I could recite a little of the vast collage of theory and speculation that constituted the Voxish Prophecies. (Some of us who had disappeared into Equatoria’s temporal Arch ten thousand years ago were named in those prophecies, eerily enough. Our second coming had been calculated to the day and hour.)

In other words I had begun to create a Voxish identity for myself in every way I could, short of having a node installed at the base of my neck.

Meanwhile Allison was moving in the opposite direction, away from her past and deeper into her impersona. The price she paid was social isolation and a chronic, brittle loneliness. And that served a purpose, too. She wanted her overseers to believe she was losing touch with reality.

After I left Oscar I made my way back to the quarters I shared with her. I found her sitting at a table, shoulders hunched, doing what she had been doing daily and obsessively for weeks now: writing. She wrote on sheets of paper with a pencil. Paper hadn’t been hard to come by, since Vox manufactured small amounts of it for various purposes. Vox didn’t use conventional pens or pencils, however, but once I explained the concept to Oscar he had agreed to have a machine shop produce a few samples—rods of graphite in carbon-fiber tubes, more like what we used to call “mechanical” pencils.

The original Allison Pearl had been an obsessive writer, which was one reason her diaries had been so useful to the Voxish scholars who re-created her. I put my hand on Allison’s shoulder to let her know I was home. Leaning over her I caught a glimpse of her cursive script. (Big letters, shakily produced: she had been given Allison Pearl’s urge to write but not the physical skill itself.) Vox was anchored relatively close to the mainland of Antarctica, in a deep basin where the Ross Ice Shelf had once been; Allison had visited one of the high towers today, and she was writing about what she’d seen.

… the mountains are the Queen Maud Range in the ancient atlases, gray bleak teeth under an ugly sky dead as everything else on this ruined planet, green clouds dropping yellow rain on the windward slopes. It’s like a judgment on humanity and tho I know humans have moved on from this place it still looks like a monument to our mistakes, how we lived lives with consequences we could never truly predict or understand…

She cupped her hand over the paper and looked up at me.

“Oscar wants me to go inland,” I said.

Her eyes flared, but she kept silent.

I told her about the proposed expedition. We talked about that a while, the way we talked about everything these days, calculating the effect our words might have on an unseen audience. She didn’t like the idea, but she didn’t argue about it.

Eventually she went back to her writing. I picked up one of my books (The Collapse of Mars and the Martian Diaspora ) and took it to bed with me, remembering what Oscar had said about the “incomprehensible majesty” of the Hypotheticals. The Hypotheticals had created a string of worlds linked by Arches, one end anchored on Earth and the other on Mars, the ten vastly distant habitable planets between them comprising a continuous extended landscape, something the book called a “distributed interstellar topology.” Mars had never been an easy place for human beings to live, despite our engineering of it, and a doorway to greener, kinder worlds had been a gift too great for the Martians to refuse. But without their careful husbandry Mars had reverted to its essential nature as a cold, dry planet—one more hostile desert in a universe that seemed full of them. The Martians, like the Earthlings, had lost a habitable homeworld.

I remembered stories about the Martian ambassador Wun Ngo Wen, who had arrived on Earth during the Spin. His Mars had sounded like a saner place than Earth. The Martians had already tapped Hypothetical technology in a modest way, using it to create their famous longevity treatment. But according to the book they had eventually repudiated that and every other form of Hypothetical technology. Most of the early bionormative philosophers had been Martians, the book said. Not that they opposed biotechnology in itself—the first cortical democracies had been Martian inventions—but they insisted on restricting themselves to human biotech, which could be fully understood and controlled.

That was a shortsighted and oppressive doctrine, the book suggested.

I had put down the book by the time Allison came to bed. We still slept together, though we hadn’t made love for weeks. It was our unguarded moments that put us most at risk: there was no telling what dangerous inferences the Network might draw from our sighs and gasps. The script we had written for ourselves would play out more plausibly without passionate interludes.

But I missed her, and not just physically. I woke that night and found her mumbling a slurry of English and Voxish words, asleep but not at rest, her eyelids trembling and her face wet with tears, and when I touched her cheek she moaned and turned away.

2.

The day before the expedition was scheduled to leave I visited Isaac Dvali in the medical suite. Oscar insisted on coming with me: he took a professional interest in my interactions with Isaac. “Your presence always has a measurable effect on him,” he told me. “His pulse rate increases when you’re with him. The electrical activity in his brain becomes more intense and more coherent.”

“Maybe he just likes company.”

“No one else has this effect on him.”

“Could be he recognizes me.”

“I’m sure he does,” Oscar said. “In one way or another.”

Isaac’s condition had improved considerably and most of the life-support machines that had been attached to him had been taken away. A crowd of physicians and nurses still hovered out of earshot, but he ignored them and looked directly at me.

He could do that now. The reconstruction of his ruined head and body was almost complete. The flesh on the left side of his skull was still translucent, and when he opened his mouth I could see the hinge of his jaw moving like a crab in a milky tide pool. But his new left eye had lost its bloodshot opacity and it focused in tandem with the other. I took a step toward the chair where he was reclining. “Hey, Isaac,” I said.

His jaw did its crab-dance under a veil of capillaries. “Tuh,” he managed to say. “Tuh-tuh—”

“It’s me, it’s Turk.”

“Turk!” He nearly shouted it.

One of the Voxish physicians whispered to Oscar, who translated: “Isaac’s voluntary motor functions are much better now but his impulse control is still very poor—”

“SHUT UP!” Isaac screeched.

Isaac had been touched hard by the Hypotheticals, which made him the next best thing to a living god. I tried to imagine how Oscar felt, being chastised by a deity with poor impulse control.

“Hey, I’m here,” I said. “Right here, Isaac.”

But the effort at speech had already wearied him. His eyelids went to half-mast. His arms trembled against