Vortex s-3 Read online

* * *

  We set up a fresh camp back in the forest. I watched Treya take another hit from her drug syringe. I said, “Is that thing bottomless?”

  “It refills itself. It has its own metabolism. It draws a little blood during the injections and uses that as raw material to catalyze active molecules. It runs on body heat and ambient light. For you, it fabricated a drug to suppress anxiety. What it gives me is something different.”

  I had stopped taking doses when she offered them—I had decided to live with my anxiety, for better or worse. “How does it know what to synthesize?”

  She frowned the way she did whenever she tripped over a concept for which her ghostly tutor Allison Pearl didn’t have a ready word. “It samples blood chemistry and makes an educated guess. But no, it isn’t bottomless. It needs to be refreshed, and this one is getting tired.” She added, “If you want to use it, though, that’s all right.”

  “No. What’s it giving you?”

  “A kind of… you could call it a cognitive enhancer. It helps maintain the boundary between my real and my virtual memories. But it’s only a temporary solution.” She shivered in the firelight. “What I really need is the Network.”

  “Tell me about the Network. It’s what, some kind of internal wireless interface?”

  “Not exactly what you mean by that, but yes, in a sense. Except that the signals I receive are expressed as biological and neurological regulators. Everybody on Vox wears a node, and we’re all linked by the Network. The Network helps us formulate a limbic consensus. I don’t know why it hasn’t been repaired. Even if the transponders at Vox Core were destroyed, workers should have been able to restore basic functionality by now. Unless the processors themselves were damaged… but they were built to sustain anything short of a direct hit from a high-yield weapon.”

  “Maybe that’s what happened—a direct hit.”

  She shrugged unhappily by way of response.

  “Which means there’s a good chance we’re marching toward a radioactive ruin.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” she said.

  * * *

  I sat up after she fell asleep, nursing the fire.

  Without the calming drugs, my own recent memories had begun to firm up. Just days ago I had been trying to survive a series of earthquakes generated by the temporal Arch as it rose from its dormant state in the Equatorian desert. Now I was here on Vox. You can’t really comprehend events like that, I thought. You can only endure them.

  I let the fire burn down to a glow of embers. The Arch of the Hypotheticals glimmered overhead, an ironic smile among the stars, and the rush of the sea was amplified by the echo from the nearby cliffs. I wondered about the people who had nuked Vox Core, the “cortical democracies,” and why had they done it, and whether their reasons were as superficial as Treya had suggested.

  I was a neutral in the conflict, insofar as that was possible. It wasn’t my fight. And I wondered whether Allison Pearl, the Champlain Ghost, might be similarly neutral. Maybe that was what Treya found so disconcerting: “Allison” and I were both shades of a disinterested past, both potentially disloyal to Vox Core.

  6.

  We broke camp at dawn and followed the curving cliff until we came to what Treya had called “stairs,” broad declivities cut into the face of the granite. Time had beveled the steps into sloping ledges separated by giddy ten-foot drops. Every surface was slick with mossy growths and bird dung, and the deeper we descended the louder the roar of the ocean became. Eventually the high edges of the two adjoining islands closed off all of the sky apart from a few slanting rays of sunlight. We made slow progress, and twice we paused while Treya took hits from her high-tech syringe. Her expression was grim and, under that, terrified. She kept glancing backward and up, as if she was afraid we were being followed.

  By the angle of the light I guessed it was past noon when I helped her down the last vertical gap to the roof of the tunnel itself. The roof of the tunnel was broader than it had looked from above and we were able to stand on it safely enough, though it was unnerving to walk on a surface that rounded away on both sides to a sheer drop. It was maybe a half mile to the opposite anchor point, now concealed by mist, where we would have to do another round of serious climbing, with any luck before darkness set in. Night would come fast down here.

  For the sake of distraction I asked Treya what she (or Allison Pearl) remembered about Champlain.

  “I’m not sure it’s safe to answer that question.” But she sighed and went on: “Champlain. Cold winters. Hot summers. Swimming in the lake at Catfish Point. My family was broke most of the time. Those were the years after the Spin, when everybody was talking about how the Hypotheticals might actually be benevolent, protecting us. But I never believed that. Walking down those Champlain sidewalks, you know the way concrete glitters in the summer sun? I couldn’t have been more than ten years old but I remember thinking that was how we must look to the Hypotheticals—not just us but our whole planet, just a glimmer underfoot, something you notice and then forget.”

  “That’s not how Treya talks about the Hypotheticals.”

  She gave me an angry look. “I am Treya.” And walked a few paces more. “Allison was wrong. The Hypotheticals—they’re gods by any reasonable definition, but they’re not indifferent. ” She stopped and squinted at me, wiping salt mist from her eyes. “You ought to know that!”

  Maybe so. Before long we reached the midpoint of the transit, where the wind came roaring between the chasm walls in a focused gale and we had to crawl on our hands and knees like ants clinging to a rainy clothesline. Conversation was impossible. Intermittent vibrations came through the palms of my hands from the tunnel, as of metal groaning under incalculable stress. I wondered what it would take to tear this damaged archipelago apart—another nuclear attack? Or something as simple as a high sea and a strong wind, given what had already happened? I pictured cables the size of subway trains snapping, island-ships like battered piñatas spilling their contents into the sea. It wasn’t a reassuring thought. If not for Treya I might have turned back. But if not for Treya I wouldn’t have been here in the first place.

  Finally we came into the shadow of the opposing cliff wall, where the wind eased to a low moan and we could stand upright again. The stairs that had been cut into the granite cliff were identical to those across the gorge: eroded and mossy, steep and stinking of the sea. We had climbed about a dozen of them when Treya gasped and came to a dead halt.

  The ledge above us was full of people.

  * * *

  They must have seen us coming, must have hidden until they were ready to show themselves. It didn’t look like a welcoming committee.

  “ Farmers, ” Treya whispered.

  There were thirty or so of them, male and female, all staring at us with grim expressions. Many of them carried implements that might have been weapons. Treya cast a quick look back at the bridge we had just crossed. But it was too late and too dark to run. We were outnumbered and effectively cornered.

  She reached for my hand and took it. Her skin was cold. I felt the beat of her pulse. “Let me talk to them,” she said.

  I boosted her up the next ledge and she pulled me after and then we were level with the crowd. The farmers surrounded us. Treya held out her hands in a conciliatory gesture. Then the head man stepped up.

  At least I guessed he was the head man. He wasn’t wearing any insignia to mark his rank, but no one appeared to question his authority. He carried a metallic rod the length of a walking stick, tapered at the end to a fine point. Like the people behind him, he was tall. His dark skin was finely wrinkled.

  Before he could open his mouth Treya said something in her native language. He listened impatiently. In English Treya whispered, “I told him you’re one of the Uptaken. If that matters to him at all—”

  But it didn’t. He barked a few words at Treya. She said something hesitant in return. He barked again. She bowed her head and trembled.

  “Whatever ha
ppens,” she whispered, “don’t interfere.”

  The head man put his hands on her shoulders. He pushed her down to the slick surface of the granite tier and gave her a shove so that she sprawled onto her stomach. Her cheekbone grazed the rock and began to bleed. She closed her eyes in pain.

  I had been in my share of fights. I wasn’t a particularly good fighter. But I couldn’t stand passively and watch. I lunged at the farmer. Before I could reach him his friends had their hands on me, holding me back. They forced me to my knees.

  The boss farmer put his foot on Treya’s shoulder, holding her down. Then he raised his weapon and slowly lowered it.

  The sharp end touched a knob of Treya’s spine just below the neck. Her body stiffened at the pressure of it.

  Then the farmer drove the point down hard.

  Chapter Three

  Sandra and Bose

  Sandra went to bed convinced the document was a fake—a bad joke, though it was too late to call Bose and accuse him of it. Although, if it was a joke, it was a pointlessly elaborate one. She couldn’t believe that Orrin Mather, the shy and inarticulate young man she had interviewed at State, had written any of this. Her best guess was that he had copied the text from some science fiction novel and pretended it was his own work… though she couldn’t imagine why.

  So she tried to shrug off the unanswerable questions and get a decent night’s rest.

  Come dawn she had managed, she reckoned, at most three hours of useful sleep, which meant she would go through the day sandy-eyed and irritable. And the day would be another hot one, judging by the haze tinting the view from her living room window. The kind of smog only August in Houston could brew up.

  She tried to call Bose from the dashboard phone in her car but the number bounced to voice mail. She left her name and work number and added, “Is it possible you sent me the wrong file? Or maybe I ought to be interviewing you for State Care. Please call as soon as you can and clear this up.”

  * * *

  Sandra had been employed at the Greater Houston Area State Care facility long enough to have a feeling for the place—the flow of its internal politics, the rhythm of daily business. She could tell, in other words, when something was up. This morning, something was up.

  The work she did had a certain moral ambiguity even at the best of times. The State Care system had been mandated by Congress in the messy aftermath of the Spin, when homelessness and mental illness had risen to epidemic levels. The legislation had been well intended, and it was still true that for anyone with a full-blown psychiatric disorder State Care was better than life on the street. The doctors were sincere, the pharmaceutical protocols were finely tuned, and the communal housing, while basic, was reasonably clean and well policed.

  Too often, however, people were swept into State Care who didn’t belong there: petty criminals, the belligerent poor, ordinary folks who had been driven to chronic bewilderment by economic hardship. And State Care, once you were given involuntary commitment status, wasn’t easy to leave. A generation of local pols had campaigned against inmates being “dumped back on the street,” and State’s halfway house program was forever under attack from NIMBY activists. Which meant the State Care population was continually rising while its budget remained fixed. Which led in turn to underpaid staff, overpopulated residential camps, and periodic scandals in the press.

  As an intake physician it was Sandra’s job to short-circuit those problems at the front end, to admit the genuinely needy while turning away (or referring to other social welfare agencies) the merely confused. In theory it was as simple as checking off a patient’s symptoms and writing a recommendation. In fact her work involved a great deal of surmise and many painful judgment calls. Turn away too many cases and the police or the courts would get testy; accept too many and management began to complain about “overinclusiveness.” Worse, her cases weren’t abstractions but people: wounded, weary, angry, sad, and occasionally violent people; people who too often saw State Care as a kind of prison sentence, which in a real sense it was.

  So there was a certain inevitable tension, a balance to be maintained, and within the institution itself there were invisible wires that vibrated to the right or wrong notes. Coming into the wing where she had her office, Sandra noticed the nurse at the reception station giving her covert looks. A vibrating wire. Wary now, she paused at the warren of plastic cubbyholes where staff kept paperwork on pending cases. The nurse, whose name was Wattmore, said, “Don’t bother looking for the Mather chart, Dr. Cole—Dr. Congreve has it.”

  “I don’t understand. Dr. Congreve took Orrin Mather’s case file?”

  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I guess you’ll have to ask him.” Nurse Wattmore turned back to her monitor and clicked a few keys dismissively.

  Sandra went to her office and put in a call to Congreve. Arthur Congreve was her superior at State. He supervised all the intake staff. Sandra didn’t like him—he struck her as aloof, professionally indifferent, and far too concerned with producing a smoothly trending flow of statistics that would impress the budget committees. Since he had been appointed last year, two of the facility’s best intake physicians had elected to quit rather than submit to his patient quotas. Sandra couldn’t imagine why he might have pulled the Mather file without warning her. Individual cases were usually far below Congreve’s personal radar.

  Congreve started talking as soon as he picked up. “Help you, Sandra? I’m in B Wing, by the way, about to go into a meeting, so let’s make this quick.”

  “Nurse Wattmore tells me you took the Orrin Mather file.”

  “Yeah… I thought I saw her beady little eyes light up. Look, I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you beforehand. It’s only that we have a new intake person—Dr. Abe Fein, I’ll be introducing him at the next general meeting—and I thought I should walk him through a safe case. Mather’s the least troublesome candidate we’ve got on hand, and I didn’t want to start out the new guy with a hostile subject. Don’t worry, I’ll be backstopping Fein all the way.”

  “I didn’t know we had a new hire.”

  “Check your memos. Fein did his internship at Baylor in Dallas, very promising, and as I say, I’ll keep him on a short leash until he gets a handle on what we do here.”

  “Thing is, I already put in the preliminaries with Orrin Mather. I think I established a little bit of rapport with him.”

  “I assume everything pertinent is in the file. Is there anything else, Sandra? I don’t mean to be rude, but I have people waiting.”

  She knew it would be useless to push. Despite his medical degree, Congreve had been hired by the board of directors for his managerial talents. As far as he was concerned, the intake psychiatrists were nothing more than hired help. “No, nothing else.”

  “Okay. We’ll talk later.”

  Threat or promise?

  Sandra settled behind her desk. She was disappointed, obviously, and a little angry with Congreve for his preemptive behavior, not that it was uncharacteristic.

  She thought about the file on Orrin Mather. She hadn’t entered anything into her notes about Officer Bose’s interest in the case. She’d promised Bose she would be discreet about the sci-fi narrative Mather had allegedly written. Was that promise still binding, under the circumstances?

  She was ethically required to divulge to Congreve (or the new guy, Dr. Fein) anything that might be relevant to the evaluation. But intake evaluation was a weeklong process, and she guessed there was no need for full disclosure just yet. At least not until she had a better sense of why Bose was interested and whether the document she had been reading had in fact been written by Orrin Mather. She’d have to ask Bose about that, and as soon as possible.

  As for Orrin himself… there was no rule against paying him a social visit, was there? Even if he was no longer her patient.

  * * *

  Nonviolent patients awaiting assessment were encouraged to socializ
e in the supervised lounge, but Orrin wasn’t the sociable type. Sandra guessed he would be alone in his room, which proved to be the case. She found him sitting cross-legged on his matttress like a bony Buddha, staring at the cinderblock wall opposite the window. These small rooms were pleasant enough, if you ignored the evidence that they were effectively prison cells: the shatterproof window panes threaded with fiberglass, the conspicuous absence of all hooks, hangers, and sharp edges. This one had been recently repainted, disguising the generations of obscene graffiti scratched into the walls.

  Orrin smiled when he saw her. His face was guileless, transparent to every emotion. Big head, high cheekbones, eyes pleasant but open too wide. He looked like he would be easy to lie to. “Dr. Cole, hi! They told me I wouldn’t be seeing you again.”

  “Another intake physician has been assigned to your case, Orrin. But we can still talk, if you like.”

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s fine.”

  “I spoke to Officer Bose yesterday. Do you remember Officer Bose?”

  “Yes, ma’am, of course I do. Officer Bose is the only policeman who took an interest in me.” Poe- lease -man, in Orrin’s trailer-park accent. “He’s the one who called my sister Ariel. Is she in town yet, have you heard?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll be talking to Officer Bose later—I can ask.” She added, not knowing how to approach the subject except bluntly, “He mentioned the notebooks you were carrying when the police picked you up.”

  Orrin seemed neither surprised nor upset that Sandra knew about the notebooks, though his sunny expression dimmed a little. “Officer Bose says the police have to keep them for now but I can have them back sooner or later.” He frowned, buckling a V under his high hairline. “That’s true, isn’t it? No matter what they decide about me here?”