Vortex

* * *

Less than an hour later Oscar showed up at the door, obviously distraught. He knew Isaac had been here, and he was maddeningly curious about what Isaac might have said, but he couldn’t access a Network record of it. He demanded an explanation.

I had known Oscar reasonably well back when I was Treya, training for liaison duties. Oscar had always had a serene confidence in the purity and purpose of his work. There was a Voxish saying: “He rises and falls with the tide,” describing someone who tracks the needs of Vox Core and caters to them uncomplainingly. That was Oscar. But lately his serenity had begun to fray at the edges. The fact that Isaac had chosen to meet privately with a nodeless apostate—and to enforce that privacy even against the Network’s routine surveillance—had sabotaged his finely honed sense of order.

I told him Isaac had wanted to reminisce about the twenty-first century.

“Anything you might know about the past he can easily access for himself.”

“Maybe he was curious about me. I don’t know. Maybe he felt like speaking English for a little while.”

“What could you possibly have to say that would interest a being like him —even in English?”

That was insulting, so I used an expression Oscar might not have encountered in his formal training: “Fuck you,” I said, and closed the door.

2.

No word came from Turk—he had warned me they might keep him overnight after the surgery—and I decided I couldn’t sit alone any longer, partly because I was afraid my elevated heartbeat or hormonal chemistry might give the Network another clue to my state of mind, especially if Isaac wasn’t paying attention and blocking the sensors. I needed distraction. So I left the suite and rode transit to the nearest large public space, a terrace overlooking a market zone, to watch the parade of lights that marked the Festival of Ido.

Vox Core was a city of rituals and festivals. As Treya, I had always loved them. The part of me that was Allison was surprised that a polity as tight-laced as Vox should be so fond of celebrations. But Vox was a limbic democracy; sharing public emotion was what we did best.

Vox had been founded on a planet called Ester, five worlds away from Old Earth. We still kept the Esterish year of 723 days and the Esterish division of a day into twenty-four hours (a custom as ancient as Earth itself, though Ester’s days and hours were slightly longer). Vox had journeyed through all five of those worlds, sailing the isotropic sea that linked every Ring world with the exception of Mars. We marked many of our days with celebrations: celebrations of the Founding, of the Prophecies, of the anniversaries of historical battles and so on. The Festival of Ido commemorated our victory over bionormative forces at the Arch of Terivine—the battle in which we had taken the prisoners who eventually formed the nucleus of the Farmer caste.

It was a martial holiday, with fireworks and drums and torch parades. Most years the celebration was joyous, bountiful. This year the feasts were rationed and there was a note of hysteria in the festivities. Everyone knew it might be the last Ido before the remaking of the world.

Obviously, I couldn’t participate. Even if I had wanted to, everyone in Vox Core knew me from the newsfeeds. I was a traitor to my own past, a dissonant note in the story of the Uptaken, and because I was nodeless my behavior would seem opaque and untrustworthy. I wasn’t in any danger from the crowds—at least, not yet—but I would be ostracized and ignored if I tried to join them. So I found a place where I could be alone, a wooded patch overlooking the market zone. A half mile or so downslope, as ambient light dimmed toward night, the market square filled with celebrants. They carried luminous rods of various sizes and colors, and they gathered behind a leader who conducted them through the maze of market stalls in a sinuous moving line. The effect was spectacular in the dark and from a distance, a glowing multicolored snake twining around and through itself, swaying to the beat of the drums.

I felt sad, I felt perversely nostalgic. I wasn’t Treya anymore and I didn’t want to be Treya, but I missed the pleasure Treya had once taken in events like this. That is, my pleasure. She, me, mine, hers. Deceptively simple words, not as easy to parse as they had once seemed.

Even nodeless, I could tell when a fresh rush of excitement swept through the crowd. I had to look across a gap of treetops to one of the festival’s huge video displays to see what had happened. The display showed a group of snakedancers unfurling a banner; on the banner was a portrait of Isaac Dvali, literally glowing in the dark. Cheering and applause echoed up the terrace like the sound of a hard rain falling.

But it wasn’t really Isaac they were cheering for. They were cheering for what Isaac represented: the fulfillment of prophecy, the imminent end of days. It was the voice of the doomed Coryphaeus, worshipping itself through the body of Vox.

* * *

How do you measure a universal madness? I took as signs the contagious irrationalities, the bland indifference to real problems (shortages of grain and animal protein, for instance), the public obsession with the Hypotheticals that followed the massacre in the Antarctic desert. Images of the Hypothetical machines were everywhere now, and a belief had begun to emerge that the soldiers and scientists killed in the vanguard expedition weren’t really dead but had been Uptaken.

Presumably, when the machines eventually arrived at Vox, the rest of us would be similarly raptured into communion with the Hypotheticals… or killed; the terms were commutable. Prophecy had always been a little vague on that point. Vox’s founders had believed the end of Vox would take the form of what they called ajientei, for which the nearest English equivalent might be “enlargement”—the diffusion of human consciousness over galactic space and geologic time, the scale on which the Hypotheticals were presumed to operate.

In any case, our scholars had estimated that at their current rate of progress the Hypothetical machines wouldn’t reach Vox for months or even years. In fact certain pious elderly citizens were petitioning to be flown to the machines so they could be Uptaken before they died.

They needn’t have worried. Only hours after the Festival of Ido, our unmanned aircraft delivered unsettling news from the Wilkes Basin. The Hypothetical machines had begun to move more quickly than before. In fact they were accelerating—doubling their speed every few hours. That didn’t amount to much at the moment, but if the acceleration continued they would arrive sooner than expected. Much sooner, the scholars said: a matter of weeks. Possibly days.

Vox rang like a bell with the news.

Chapter Nineteen Sandra and Bose

“We’re not safe yet,” Bose said when they pulled into a parking space outside Ariel Mather’s motel room.

Sandra had no trouble believing him. She had seen how vigilantly he watched his mirrors as he drove away from State. The plan, he said, was to check Ariel Mather out of her room and put her and Orrin in a different motel for the night. In the morning, Bose’s “friends” would drive them to a safe place out of town.

Sandra stayed in the car with Orrin while Bose knocked at the door of Ariel’s room. Moments later he was back, followed by Ariel with her single scuffed plastic suitcase. Ariel wore denim jeans frayed at the cuffs and a black T-shirt with UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA printed on it. Sandra doubted Ariel had been any closer to the