“There is no Allison, and this woman can’t function as a liaison—she has no connection to the Network … she doesn’t have a working neural node!”

“She speaks English well enough.”

“Like a native,” I said.

“There you go.”

“But—!”

“So I’m appointing her as my translator,” Turk said. “From now on, any interaction I have with Vox goes through her. And we’re both finished with doctors for the time being. No knives, no drugs. Can you arrange that?”

Oscar hesitated. Then he addressed me directly, in Voxish: “If you were a whole human being you would recognize your behavior as an act of treason, not just against the administrative class but against the Coryphaeus.”

They were weighty words. Treya would have trembled. “Thank you, but I know what I’m doing,” I said in the same language. “Oscar.”

*   *   *

It was during this time that Vox began its lumbering, hopeless journey to Antarctica.

Getting any kind of hard information out of Oscar (who continued to pop up with annoying regularity) was impossible; but the nurses who still hovered around us, bringing meals or inquiring about our health like nosy parents, could occasionally be coaxed to talk. Through them I learned that the Voxish consensus had evolved from jubilation (“We transited to Earth, the prophecies are fulfilled”) to dismay (“But the Earth is a ruin and the Hypotheticals continue to ignore us”) to a stoic rededication to the ancient cause (“The Hypotheticals won’t come to us, we’ll have to seek them out”).

Seeking them out was the hard part. Fleets of drone aircraft were dispatched to survey the landmasses of what had once been Indonesia and southern India, but all they found was an unrelieved wasteland. There was nothing alive there—or at least, nothing larger than a bacterium.

The oceans were anoxic. Back in Champlain, I had done a lot of reading about ocean toxicity. All the CO2 we were pumping into the air back then—the fossil carbon reserves of not one but two planets—had been the trigger event, though it had taken centuries for the full effect to be felt. Rapid warming had stratified the seas and fed huge blooms of sulfate-reducing bacteria, which in turn spewed clouds of poisonous hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere. The word for this process was “eutrophocation.” It had happened before, without human intervention; eutrophication episodes had been blamed for some of the planet’s prehistoric mass extinctions.

Vox’s administrative class had studied the few surviving records of the Terrestrial Diaspora and concluded that we ought to proceed to the site of the last known human habitation, near the southern pole, on the shore of what used to be called the Ross Sea. In the meantime, robotic craft would extend the aerial survey as far as Eurasia and the Americas.