Vortex

and Sandra accepted the implied rebuke.)

“He says what I read was everything he ever wrote, except for a few pages he finished after he got to Laramie. He enclosed them with his letter. Look—I brought them with me.”

You can keep these pages, Orrin had written. I don’t need them anymore. I believe I’m finished with all that business. Maybe you will understand it better than I do. It is all bewildering to me. To be honest I would rather just get on with things.

She listened to the creek as it rippled through the grove. Today the creek was running shallow, as clean and bright as glass. She guessed this water would eventually wend its way into the Gulf—or evaporate, perhaps, to fall as rain in some cornfield in Iowa, as snow in some wintery northern town.

The sum of all paths, Sandra thought.

Then she took up the pages Orrin had sent her and began to read them aloud.

Chapter Thirty-two Isaac’s Story / Orrin’s Story / The Sum of All Paths

My name is Isaac Dvali, and this is what happened after the end of the world.

* * *

In the end, Vox was mine. Its people (whom I had hated) were dead (which I regretted), and there was no one left alive but Turk Findley and the impersona of Allison Pearl.

Do you blame me for hating Vox?

The people of Vox had resurrected me when all I wanted was to die. They had believed I was something more than human, when in fact I was something less. All I had ever received at their hands was pain and incomprehension.

I had been among the Hypotheticals, my captors insisted, the Hypotheticals had “touched” me; but that wasn’t true. Because the Hypotheticals (as Vox imagined them) simply didn’t exist.

My father had made me so that I could hear the Hypotheticals talking to themselves, the whispers they sent between stars and planets, and what I had learned was that the Hypotheticals were a process —an ecology, not an organism. I could have told my captors so… but it was a truth they would have rejected, and it would have changed nothing.

* * *

The Hypotheticals were already billions of years old when they first intervened in human history.

They had originated with the first sentient biological civilizations to arise in the galaxy, long before the Earth and its sun condensed from interstellar dust. Like the first shoots rising from a wheat field in the spring, those forerunner civilizations were fragile, vulnerable, and alone. None of them survived the exhaustion and ecological collapse of their host planets.

But before they died they launched fleets of self-replicating machines into interstellar space. The machines were designed to explore nearby stars and broadcast home whatever data they acquired, and they did that, patiently and faithfully, long after their creators had ceased to exist. They moved from star to star, competing for scarce heavy elements, exchanging behavioral templates and fractions of operating code, changing and evolving over time. They were, in a sense, intelligent, but they were never (and would never become) self-aware.

What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency—chaos, complexity, life.

* * *

I hated the people of Vox—whom I could hate collectively, because they behaved collectively—for their deeply embedded limbic superstitions, and for calling me back from the indifference of death into the pain of my physical body. But I could not hate Turk Findley or the woman who had come to call herself Allison Pearl.

Turk and Allison were broken and imperfect things—like me. Like me, they had been created or summoned by the will of Vox. And, like me, they proved to be something more and less than Vox had anticipated.

I had first met Turk in the Equatorian desert, before he or I had passed through the temporal Arch. Out of ignorance or spite, and not quite by accident, Turk had once killed a man, and he had built a life on the foundation of that guilt. His best acts were acts of atonement. His failures he accepted as a kind of punishment. He craved a forgiveness he could never earn, and he was horrified when the Coryphaeus offered him that forgiveness. Accepting it would have dishonored the man Turk had killed (who was named Orrin Mather); and the people of Vox, by submerging all such feelings in their closed limbic collectivity, had made themselves monstrous in Turk’s eyes.

Allison was a different case. She was a native of Vox whose artificial persona had allowed her a rare glimpse beyond the boundaries and limitations of her life. By adopting that persona as her own, she had successfully liberated herself from the Coryphaeus. The liberation had come at the expense of her family, her friends, and her faith.

It was a bargain I understood very well.

I wanted these two people to survive. That was why I abetted their escape. Even then, I had doubted they could successfully cross the failing Arch. But I made it possible for them to live a little longer, depending on how you measure time.

* * *

For more than a millennium the Hypothetical machines had been scouring the surface of the Earth, dismantling and interpreting and remembering the ruins of the civilization we had built on the planet that gave us birth.

There was no conscious will behind this act of scavenging, no thought, no agency. It was simply behavior that had evolved over time, like photosynthesis. The devices Turk had confronted on the Antarctic plain had accumulated a rich storehouse of data. Earth’s tangible resources—rare elements that had been refined by human activity and concentrated in the wreckage of our cities—had already been extracted and transferred to orbit and beyond, where the space-faring elements of the Hypothetical ecology had feasted on them. The Hypotheticals were very nearly finished with the Earth.

But their sensors (orbital arrays of devices no bigger than grains of dust, complexly networked) had detected Vox as soon as it crossed the Arch and directed ground-based scavengers toward it. What the Voxish prophecies had imagined as an apotheosis was just a mopping-up exercise: the last berry plucked from a barren, dying bush.

The Hypotheticals arrived not long after Turk and Allison had fled, as a cloud of insect-sized disassemblers. They were sharp-toothed and efficient. They exuded complex catalysts that unzipped chemical bonds; they came through the melting walls like smoke, followed by the toxic external atmosphere. Gusts of poison blew down the corridors and walkways of Vox Core. This was a mercy, in a way—most of the citizens succumbed to asphyxiation before they could be devoured alive.

Could I have saved them?

I hated the people of Vox for compounding my suffering by resurrecting me, but I wouldn’t have wished such a fate on them. In fact I did what I could to protect them—which was nothing.

I was lucky to be able to save myself.

* * *