Vortex

Oh! “Did he give his name?”

“Yes, but I don’t recall it. I told him the same as I’m telling you—sorry, but it’s not our Allison. Good luck finding the one you’re hunting for, though.”

“Thank you,” Sandra said.

* * *

A staff conference—Sandra wasn’t invited—kept Congreve in the building well past his usual departure time. He knocked at her office on his way out, a few minutes after seven. “Still here, Dr. Cole?”

“I’m just finishing up.”

“Did you prepare the letter I asked for?”

“It’ll be on your desk in the morning.”

“Fine.”

She glanced out the door as he left. Jack Geddes was still sitting in the hallway, chair tipped back, humming to himself. She listened until Congreve’s footsteps had faded down the corridor. The State facility had begun to take on its after-hours aspect. Most of the day staff had already left; the open-ward patients were back from the commissary, some of them watching TV in the common room. She heard a couple of orderlies laughing together down by the main entrance.

She closed the door and went back to her desk. Then she opened her phone and tapped in Bose’s number.

Chapter Sixteen Turk’s Story

1.

The medics kept Oscar and me in a weeklong quarantine, scanning us for any sign of contamination. They failed to find anything unusual in our bodies or our psyches, though that wasn’t conclusive—Hypothetical devices were perfectly capable of eluding detection. But we measured consistently clean, and the sample we had brought back with us, the crystalline butterfly in its sealed container, remained dead or dormant.

News of what happened out in the Wilkes Basin quickly spread through Vox. Collective grief for the lost soldiers and scientists was written in the faces of the medics who examined us and in Oscar’s face, too. I asked him what it was like to feel an emotion amplified by the entire population of a city.

“It’s painful,” he admitted. “But it’s better than being alone. What was unbearable was what we felt after the attack that shut down the Coryphaeus—so many dead, and no way to share that grief. It was agonizing, horrible beyond belief.”

“Coryphaeus” was the word scholars had chosen to translate a concept for which there was no English equivalent. In the ancient dictionaries it was defined as a noun from classical Greek: the leader of a chorus, a choirmaster. In Vox it referred to the nest of feedback loops and functional algorithms that regulated the input and output of the community’s neural nodes. It was the emotional heart of the Network—Allison had called it “the parliament of love and conscience.”

Solitary grief (like guilt, like love) was an inescapable part of the human condition, or at least it once had been. We had endured it for most of our tenure as a species. I guessed it wasn’t a bad thing to be able to share that burden in a way that lessened the pain, and maybe there was something admirable in the willingness of the people of Vox to shoulder their countrymen’s burden of tears. But the price of that anodyne was reckoned in personal autonomy; it was reckoned in privacy.

I tried to give Oscar the impression that I was sympathetic and even curious. That, too, was part of the plan.

* * *

As soon as we were released from quarantine I hurried back to the quarters I shared with Allison. She ran to me as the door slid open and came shivering into my arms.

We couldn’t say any of the things we wanted and needed to say. We settled for a few self-conscious endearments. After a while we fixed a meal in the kitchen dispensary and Allison accessed (clumsily, with a manual interface) a video stream that was the local equivalent of a newscast. The final images from the vanguard expedition were playing on a loop, slowed down so that events happened as if in an underwater ballet. The glassy butterflies dropped out of the darkness and settled like lethal snowflakes on the soldiers and technicians; the human figures froze in astonishment, then jerked and danced like unstrung marionettes as they were systematically swarmed and killed.

The loop ran for two cycles before I asked Allison to turn it off.

After the disaster a drone aircraft had been sent to survey the site from a safe distance. But by daybreak there was no sign that anything unusual had happened—no human bodies, no trace of the analytical gear or of the crystalline insects that had destroyed it. Nothing but the immense and indifferent Hypothetical machines, patiently grinding across the Antarctic wasteland.

2.

Soon, Allison had whispered to me at the aircraft docks, which meant I had to cultivate Oscar’s confidence despite what had happened in the Wilkes Basin. I arranged to meet him on a platform overlooking the nuked sector of Vox Core—I wanted to see how the reconstruction work was going. I left early for the appointment and took a roundabout route.

The better I had come to know Vox Core, the less monolithic it seemed. The five elements of Voxish urban design (Oscar had explained this) were terraces, zones, enclosures, plains, and tiers, each of these terms having a precise technical definition—as I walked and rode that morning I passed through three terraces and an enclosure and caught a glimpse of a plain from a bridge that spanned two tiers. Vox Core ran on a seasonless diurnal cycle, sixteen hours of artificial daylight and eight hours of night, but every sector had its own unique and shifting quality of light. I crossed a terrace in which the light was as diffuse as rainy daylight and I walked through an enclosure illuminated by a point-source as bright as the noonday sun. Come nightfall the busy slopes would glitter like separate cities, while the wooded or grassy plains slipped into silent darkness.

The last time I had come to the ruined sector of the city it had been an ugly and impenetrable mass of debris. Now most of that debris had been collected and recycled or dumped into the sea. Lingering radiation had been “chelated” (Oscar’s word) by some technology I didn’t understand, and the reconstruction was proceeding briskly. The main crater had been retained as a memorial, but it was already scalloped with new slopes and elegantly landscaped terraces.

I met Oscar at a workers’ commissary overlooking the site. The food we were given was good but the portions were small: supplies were low due to the loss of farming manpower after the transit to Earth. We talked a while about Allison. I told him I was worried about her, that her bouts of depression were becoming more frequent and more severe. I mentioned her crying jags, her intermittent crippling anxiety.

“This isn’t unexpected,” Oscar said. He gazed from our table across a low wall and into the crater. Below and aft of us, robotic construction machines were cutting foamed-granite pillars for a new terrace. “The fact is, she simply can’t become what she wants to be—what some part of her mind insists she is.