Robert Wilson - Vortex

They were designed to seek out any evidence of human activity, past or present. At first, all they found were lifeless ruins. I talked Oscar into letting me see some of the images the aircraft had relayed to Vox, but the video was bland and uninformative. Many of the last human cities had been built in the boreal lands of the northern hemisphere (places I still thought of as Russia or Scandinavia or Canada), but they had been abandoned now for more than a thousand years. All that remained were faint suggestions of roads and foundations, blemishes on the otherwise trackless uniformity of the circumpolar deserts.

I had read in the history books about the Terrestrial exodus. Calling it that made it sound as if the Earth had been systematically evacuated, but the truth was much uglier. Even the vast number of refugees who flooded across the Arch to Equatoria had constituted only a fraction of the planet’s population. The rest had simply died, over a grueling few centuries of progressive impoverishment. They died of starvation as crops failed and arable land shrank, died of asphyxia as anaerobic blooms choked the oceans and poisoned the air. Hydrogen sulfide seeping from the seas had sterilized the coastal plains and river deltas; then, inexorably, over decades, the hinterlands had also succumbed. Massive fires swept through ravaged forests, adding tons of liberated carbon to the thickening atmosphere. Decades of lightless cold were followed by decades of rising heat as the climate began to oscillate like a cracked bell.

The trigger had been pulled back in my day, Oscar said. Human beings had burned much of the carbon stored on Earth as oil, coal, and natural gas, and the consequences of that would have been bad enough. But it was the discovery of oil deposits in the Equatorian desert, a bounty of light sweet crude, easily extracted and imported by sea across the Arch of the Hypotheticals, that had signed the planet’s death sentence. Maybe we could have burned all our own carbon and survived the consequences, but pumping two worlds’ worth of CO 2into the atmosphere had overwhelmed any conceivable coping mechanism.

I told Oscar that made us sound pretty stupid. No, he said. It was sad but completely understandable. Ten billion human beings without any cortical or limbic augmentation had simply acted to maximize their individual well-being. They hadn’t given much thought to long-term consequences, but how could they? They had no reliable mechanism by which they could think or act collectively. Blaming those people for the death of the ecosphere made as much sense as blaming water molecules for a tsunami.

Maybe so. But it was depressing all the same, and I didn’t hide my reaction. If I wanted Oscar to trust me I had to let him see my feelings. Some of them.

He said I should try to look at it through the lens of time. All this world’s death, all its grief, was finished now. And when the destiny of Vox was fulfilled, a new era would begin: an age in which humanity would consort with its masters on an equitable basis. “Much will be made clear, Mr. Findley. Miracles will become possible. You’ll see. You’re lucky to be aboard Vox at such a time.”

“You really believe that?”

“Of course I do.”

“On the basis of a few prophecies?”

“On the basis of the calculations and inferences of the founders of Vox. Those calculations were sound enough to carry us across the oceans of a half dozen worlds. And sound enough to get us to Earth.”

“A dead planet.”

He smiled. Oscar had held back a nugget of information, like a stage magician waiting for the right moment to pull a paper flower out of his sleeve. “Not entirely dead. We have new images from Antarctica. Look.”

He showed me another video segment. Like the rest, it had been shot from high in the troposphere; like the rest, it was hard to interpret. At first glance it appeared to show one more stretch of generic desert, from a part of the world that in my day had been buried in ice. I might have been looking at boulders or pebbles: the scale was marked in characters I couldn’t read. But at the center of the image was a blip of regularity, and the image stabilized and resolved as the aircraft moved closer. There was something structural there, for sure. Mist-obscured squares and rectangles in dusty pastel colors. Some of these objects, Oscar said, were nearly the size of Vox Core. And they weren’t ruined or abandoned buildings, not in the ordinary sense. It was increasingly obvious as the view honed down to a narrow field that some of the structures had left long, linear trails in the Antarctic dust. They were mobile.

“We believe these are the work of the Hypotheticals,” Oscar said mildly.

I guessed he was right. The structures didn’t look like anything human beings would build. But the image abruptly faded to a staticky blank. The drone aircraft’s sensors had failed, Oscar explained. More drones had been sent to the same site, but they had failed too. Oscar chose to interpret the failures optimistically. “Clearly, the Hypotheticals still have a presence on Earth. Just as clearly, they registered the presence of the unmanned vehicles and reacted to them. Which means—I think the conclusion is inescapable—that they’re aware of us. ” His smile was fixed and unworried. “They know we’re coming, Mr. Findley. And I believe they’re waiting for us to arrive.”

The institution where Sandra’s brother Kyle Cole lived was called the Live Oaks Polycare Residential Complex. It was located on a broad expanse of land that had once been a ranch. A creek ran nearby, and there was, in fact, a grove of live oaks on the property.

When she first arranged to have Kyle committed to this place Sandra had been curious enough to run a search on the term “live oaks”—why “live”? Live as opposed to what ? But it turned out the trees were called live oaks because they stayed green in winter, prosaically enough. In Texas, she had read, a grove of live oaks was called a “mott.”

She had tried out the term on the receptionist once, back when she was new in the state and still bashful about her New England accent. “I’d like to take Kyle out to that mott of live oaks by the creek.” The receptionist had given her a blank stare. “I mean the grove of trees,” Sandra added, blushing. Oh. Well, surely.

Mott or not, it had become a ritual, weather permitting. Most of the day staff recognized her by now; Sandra knew the majority of them by name. “Another hot one today,” the attending nurse said, helping Sandra help her brother out of bed and into a wheelchair. “But Kyle likes the warm weather, I think.”

“He likes the shade of the trees.”

That was, of course, a surmise. Kyle hadn’t expressed a preference for the shade of the trees or for anything else. Kyle couldn’t walk or control his bowels or speak a coherent sentence. When he was distressed he scrunched up his face and made a hooting sound. When he was happy—or at least not un happy—he grimaced in a way that showed his teeth and gums: an animal’s smile. His happy-sounds were soft sighs, formed deep in his throat. Ah, ah, ah, ah.

Today he seemed happy to see Sandra. Ah. He turned his face toward her as she wheeled him down the stone-paved pathway and across the green lawn to the live oaks. The nurse had put an Astros cap on him, to keep the sun out of his eyes. The baseball cap threatened to fall off as he craned his neck. Sandra straightened it for him.

There was a picnic table in the grove, more for visitors than for the patients, most of whom weren’t ambulatory. Today she and Kyle had the grove to themselves. The shade, and a moist coolness that seemed to rise up from the creek, made the heat tolerable and almost pleasant. There was, thank God, a breeze. The oak leaves trembled and seined the light.