“Don’t you
In the morning, over breakfast, sitting at her kitchen table and watching Bose plow through the eggs she had scrambled for him, Sandra thought about what the anonymous caller had said about Kyle.
“The longevity drug,” she said, “would it really help someone like my brother?”
Last night, in the dark of her bedroom, she had told Bose about Kyle and her father. Bose had put his arms around her while she told the story. When she finished he hadn’t said anything falsely consoling—hadn’t said anything at all; he had just kissed her forehead, gently, and that was enough.
“It might repair the physical damage. But it wouldn’t restore him to what he was before. It wouldn’t bring back his memories or his skills or even his original personality.”
She remembered scans of Kyle’s brain the neurologist at Live Oaks had shown her, huge patches of necrotic tissue like the wings of a deadly black moth. Even if those areas were magically repaired they would still be blank and empty. After the treatment Kyle might be trainable, he might even learn to speak… but he would never recover completely. (Or, if he did, he wouldn’t be
“And,” Bose said, “the treatment would change him in another way. Once the biotech infiltrates your cells, it’s there for good. Some people find that idea abhorrent.”
“Because it’s derived from Hypothetical technology?”
“Presumably.”
“According to Orrin’s notebook,” Sandra said, “the Martians eventually abolished the procedure.”
“Yeah, well—on that subject Orrin’s guess is as good as anybody’s.”
“We still don’t know where he came up with all that stuff.”
“No,” Bose said.
“But I guess we don’t have to, right? All we have to do is keep him safe.”
Bose was silent for a while. Sandra had come to respect these silences, the cadences of his thought. She opened the kitchen window, wanting fresh air, but the breeze that blew through was hot and faintly metallic.
Bose said, “I’m worried about how dangerous this has become for you.”
“Thank you. So am I. But I still want to help Orrin.”
“I’m sorry about all this. Getting you involved in it. Short of doing what the caller suggested, I think you’re pretty much out of a job at this point.”
“I expect so.”
“And you’re not the only one. I was called into the precinct captain’s office yesterday. He said I have a choice. I can keep my distance from whatever’s going on at State Care or I can turn in my gun and badge.”
“I take it you’re not planning to keep your distance?”
“I’ll worry about my career tomorrow. We need to get Orrin out of that building. Then he and his sister can lay low until all this is resolved, one way or another.”
“Okay, great. How do we do that?”
Another evaluative silence. “You absolutely sure you want to get deeper into this?”
“Just tell me what to do, Bose.”
“Well, it depends.” He scrutinized her. “Are you willing to go back there and apologize, make it look like you’re cooperating?”
“That’s your plan?”
“Part of it.”
“All right, suppose I do go back… what then?”
“You give me a call as soon as Congreve leaves for the night. I’ll come by when I hear from you. Then we’ll see if we can pry Orrin out of the locked ward.”
Chapter Fourteen
Turk’s Story
1.
The “vanguard expedition,” as Oscar insisted on calling it, consisted of fifty people, mostly soldiers but including a half dozen manager-class civilians and twice that many scientific and technical personnel, plus all their gear and an aircraft big enough to accommodate us.
Allison had told me one of these vehicles could be flown by a single pilot with a nodal link. The link made it possible to gain access to the control interfaces—the real pilot was the ship itself, quasi-autonomous subsystems that enacted the operator’s intentions. Touch menus and visual displays popped up on any available surface. Exterior views were distributed throughout the cabin on virtual windows, one of them on a wall opposite the bench where Oscar and I were seated.
The view was uniformly drab until we crossed onto the mainland and approached the Queen Maud Range. There was still a trace of glaciation on the highest peaks of these mountains. The ice was clean, distilled by evaporation from the cesspool of the sea, and in the shadowed slopes it gave back a crisp blue radiance.
Coming down the windward slope into the interior desert we ran into heavy cloud and intermittent snow. I asked Oscar whether it was safe to fly under these conditions. He looked at me as if I’d asked a child’s question. “Yes, of course.”
He was visibly anxious for a different reason. Generations had lived and died in the expectation that Vox would one day meet and merge with the Hypotheticals, but it was Oscar’s generation that was confronting the fulfillment of that prophecy. By joining this expedition he had put himself at the cutting edge of the encounter. That was a spectacular piece of luck, from Oscar’s point of view—whether good or bad remained to be seen.
Wind and squalls persisted all the way to our landing point.
Maps from my day would have been a poor guide to Antarctica as it existed now. The great ice sheets had disappeared centuries ago, and the Ross Sea and the Weddel Sea had joined to separate East Antarctica from the huge islands off its western coast. Oscar said the place where we landed was in what geological surveys had once called the Wilkes Basin, roughly seventy degrees south latitude. It was a flat, pebbly wasteland.
We suited up as soon as the aircraft touched ground. We wore thick, insulated outer garments to keep us warm and tight-fitting masks that fed us canned air. The ship’s airlock opened onto a landscape that was bleak but not actually ugly. All of Antarctica was a desert, but deserts are often beautiful: I thought of the Equatorian outback, or the deserts of Utah and Arizona, or the old pictures of Mars before it was terraformed, pre-Spin. The terrain here was nearly Martian in its stony lifelessness. The climate was cold, Oscar said, but not cold enough to sustain a permanent icecap, and relatively dry. A late-summer snowfall like this would likely melt off before the day passed. The snow came down in intermittent flurries, drifting into hollows and blurring the outlines of the low, parallel ridges that stretched into the distance.
The sun was a dim incandescence behind the clouds, close to the horizon. We could expect another few hours of daylight but we were fully equipped to operate in darkness. The soldiers loaded portable high-intensity lights and a host of other gear onto self-powered carts with big, articulated wheels. Then they fell into formation and advanced, the civilians following behind.
We navigated by compass. The Hypothetical machines were still invisibly distant. We had landed well outside the perimeter that had been defined by the loss of the drone vehicles. How the attempt to cross that perimeter would affect us and our gear was an open question. “Of course we trust the Hypotheticals,” Oscar said. “But they have autonomic functions just like any other living thing. Events can happen without conscious volition, especially
