Vortex

She stared at him. “Christ, Bose! You just open up your mouth and say these things…”

“Obviously, I don’t know much about your line of work. But my friends are your friends. Come to Seattle and maybe we can help you find something.”

“That’s just—I can’t—”

“You have any reason to stay in Houston?”

“Of course I do.” But really, did she? No real friends, no prospect of employment. “There’s Kyle, for one.”

“Your brother. Okay, but is it possible he could be transferred to a facility in Washington State?”

“That would involve a lot of paperwork.”

“Oh. Paperwork.”

“I mean, I guess it could be done, but…”

He waved a hand apologetically: “I’m sorry—it was a selfish question. It just seems like we’re in the same boat here. No fault of your own. You were doing all right before I walked into your life.”

No, but he didn’t know that. “Well… I appreciate the thought.” She added almost in spite of herself, “I’ll think about it.” Because now she could think about it. She was unemployed and falling freely. She could risk everything without risking much at all. “Why is this so easy for you? I’m jealous.”

“Maybe I’ve been thinking about it longer than you have.”

But no, it wasn’t that. It was something more profoundly a part of Bose’s nature, a degree of inner calm that was almost eerie. She said, “You’re not like other people.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You know what it means. You just don’t want to talk about it.”

“Well,” he said, fishing his wallet out of his pocket, “we can talk about it after we get Orrin out of town.”

* * *

Sandra needed a change of clothes, so she persuaded Bose to swing by her apartment long enough for her to run inside and throw a few things into a suitcase. She packed items from her wardrobe, of course, but she also took her passport, her gig drives, her personal papers. She didn’t know when she would be back. Maybe soon. Maybe never. She took a last look around before she left. The apartment seemed already untenanted, as if it had sensed her intentions and dismissed her.

Downstairs she found Bose waiting patiently, playing some kind of tinny shitkicker music on the car’s audio system. She tossed her bag into the backseat and climbed in beside him. “I didn’t know you liked country music.”

“It’s not country music.”

“It sounds like an alley cat fucking a fiddle.”

“Show some respect. This is classic western swing. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.”

Recorded with a tin can and a string, by the sound of it. “This is what’s keeping you in Texas?”

“No, but it’s just about the only thing that makes me sorry to leave.”

He was tapping the steering wheel in merry rhythm when his phone buzzed. A hands-free app displayed the caller’s number in the lower-left corner of the car’s windshield. “Answer,” Bose said, which prompted the car to cut the music and open the phone connection. “Bose here.”

“It’s me,” a shrill voice said, “it’s Ariel Mather—is that you, Officer Bose?”

“Yeah, Ariel. What’s wrong?”

“It’s Orrin!”

“Is he all right?”

“I don’t know if he’s all right—I don’t where he is! He went out to the Coke machine and now he’s gone!”

“Okay,” Bose said. “Wait for us right where you are. We’re on our way.”

Sandra saw the change that came over him, the way his lips went taut and his eyes narrowed. You’re not like other people, she had said, and it still seemed true, as if Bose had a deep reservoir of calm inside him—but it wasn’t calm now, Sandra thought. Now it was filled with a fierce resolve.

Chapter Twenty Turk’s Story

1.

What I saw after the surgery, as I was coming up from anesthesia, not quite awake and not entirely asleep, was a vision of a man on fire—a burning man dancing in a pool of flame, staring at me through ripples of superheated air.

The vision had all the qualities of a nightmare. But it wasn’t a dream. It was a memory.

* * *

The medical team had shown me the limbic implant before they installed it. I believe they interpreted my horror as preoperative anxiety.

The node was a flexible black disk a few centimeters wide and less than a centimeter thick. It was covered with nubs the size of pinheads from which fibers of artificial nervous tissue would grow, once the node established a suitable blood supply from the surrounding capillaries. Almost as soon as it was installed the implant would power up its link to the Network; within days its artificial nerves would have bonded to the spinal medulla and begun to infiltrate the targeted areas of my brain.

The medics asked me if I understood all this. I told them I did.

Then: the prick of an anesthetic injection, a cold swab at the back of my neck, oblivion while the surgeon wielded his knife.

* * *

The burning man had been a night watchman at my father’s warehouse in Houston.

He was a stranger to me. The killing was unpremeditated, and in a court of law the charge might have been reduced from murder to manslaughter. But I never went before a court.

Twice in my life I had told some version of that story to another person—once when I was drunk, once when I was sober; once to a stranger, once to a woman with whom I had fallen in love. In both cases the story I told was incomplete and partially fabricated. Even my best attempts at confession inevitably foundered on lies.

The people I had confessed to were all ten thousand years gone, but the dead man was locked in my conscience, where he had never stopped burning. And now I had given the keys to my conscience to the Coryphaeus, and I didn’t know what that might mean.

2.

The first change I noticed after the surgery wasn’t in myself but in other people, especially their faces.

I felt some of the side effects I had been warned about—transient dizziness, loss of appetite—but the