listening, maybe. Then he shook his head and looked at Turk. “You were there when I was in pain. Not because you thought I was a god. Not because you could use me. Not like the doctors, hovering over me like crows over carrion.”
“That’s little enough,” Turk said.
“If you can save yourselves, I want to help. That’s also
“What about you?” I asked.
A trace of a smile returned to his face, but it was bitter. “If I can’t leave, I might be able to hide. I’ve been trying to create a protected space inside the Network. Not for my body but for my
As Treya I hadn’t given the Coryphaeus much thought. Few of us did. The Coryphaeus was an abstraction, a name for the processors that quietly and invisibly mediated between Network and node. Our teachers had shown us a diagram to explain it:
—and that was as much as we had ever wanted or needed to know. The system was stable, self-protecting, self-perpetuating, and it had worked flawlessly for five centuries. What could it mean, then, to say that the Coryphaeus had gone mad?
The problem was the Voxish prophecies. Our founders had written them into the Coryphaeus as unalterable axioms—embedded truths, permanently exempt from debate or revision. That hadn’t mattered when the rapture of the Hypotheticals was a distant goal toward which we moved in gradual increments. But now we had come to the blunt end of the question. Prophecy had collided with reality, and the obvious inference—that the prophecies might have been mistaken—was a possibility the Coryphaeus was forbidden to consider.
That conflict was being played out in the surveillance and infrastructure systems that bound together our lives and our technology; it was being played out in the limbic interfaces and private emotions of everyone who wore a node. “What makes it especially dangerous,” Isaac said, “is that we can’t predict the result. The most likely outcome is an asymptotic trend toward self-destructive behavior in both the organic and inanimate aspects of the system.” He added, “It’s already happening… more quickly than I anticipated.”
I asked him what he meant, then wished I hadn’t.
“The end of Vox is days away. That means there’s no need for a surplus food supply. Or surplus people, if they’re not a willing part of the process.” He looked away, as if he couldn’t bear to meet our eyes. “The Coryphaeus is killing the last of the Farmers.”
I refused to believe it until I had seen evidence. As soon as Isaac left I rode vertical transit to one of the high towers and found a panoramic window. It was night, but the sky was unusually clear and the moon was bright on the northern horizon.
The Farmers had lived in the hollow spaces under the outlying islands of the Vox archipelago. They had numbered about thirty thousand souls before the rebellion—fewer, but at least half that many, after.
Now: none.
The out-islands were sinking. The Coryphaeus had cut them loose from the central island and opened their ancient accessways to the sea.
Any Farmers who survived the initial flooding, perhaps by climbing to the highest tiers of their enclosures, were dying as I watched. The Ross Sea drew the islands down in great upwellings of violet-colored froth. Geysers of water erupted from severed transit tunnels and ports. Cliffs of salt-encrusted granite heaved up dripping from the poisonous sea, then turned and settled beneath it forever, leaving oily residue and the tangled branches of dead forests.
I stood there for most of an hour, too shocked even to weep.
Chapter Twenty-three
Sandra and Bose
Bose took her past the place where Orrin had once rented a room. It was a five-story walk-up in a part of town you drove through with your doors locked: windows like eyes shut against the sullen indifference of the heat- stricken street, a doorway littered with broken syringes. Up in one of those rooms, Sandra thought, in the long afternoons before the night shift began, Orrin must have patiently filled his notebooks, page by page, day after day. “You think he came back here?”
“No,” Bose said. “But I don’t know how well Orrin knows the rest of the city. He has forty dollars in his pocket and I doubt he ever hailed a cab in his life. He’s taking transit and he might have decided to stick to the route he knows.”
“Route to where?”
“To the Findley warehouse,” Bose said.
So they followed the bus routes Orrin once would have taken to work, hot streets clotted with traffic under a sky dark with thunderheads. The afternoon light was fading by the time Bose turned off into a neighborhood of single-story industrial buildings set back in lifeless yellow lawns. The buildings housed small manufacturers and regional distributors, none of which seemed especially prosperous.
Bose parked in the lot of a corner gas station with a coffee-and-doughnut shop attached to it. Sandra said, “Are we close to the warehouse?”
“Close enough.”
Bose suggested coffee. The restaurant, if she could dignify it with that name, held a dozen small tables, all vacant. The windowsills were dusty and the green linoleum was peeling where the floor met the walls, but at least the place was air-conditioned. “Better get something to eat,” Bose said. “We might be here a while.” She ended up carrying a muffin and coffee to a corner table. From this angle she could see the street, the long row of anonymous buildings on the far side, the threatening sky. Was one of these buildings the Findley warehouse?
Bose shook his head: “The Findley warehouse is around the corner and a couple of long blocks down, but the nearest bus stop is just across the street—see it?”
A rusty transit sign bolted to a light standard, a concrete bench tagged with ancient graffiti. “Yes.”
“If Orrin comes by bus, that’s where he’ll get off.”
“So we’re just going to sit here and wait for him?”
“You’re going to sit here. I’m going to scout around the neighborhood in case he got here ahead of us, though I doubt that. I don’t really expect him until after dark.”
“You’re basing this on what, intuition?”
“Did you finish reading Orrin’s document?”
“Not all of it. Not yet.”
“You have it with you?”
“A printout. In my bag.”
“Why don’t you read the rest of it, and we’ll talk about it when I get back.”
