Vortex s-3 Read online

  So she said, though the sky remained blue and vacant.

  * * *

  That afternoon I scouted the area where we’d landed, keeping within sight of camp and collecting kindling for a fire. Many of the trees on this island of the Vox Archipelago produced edible fruit, Treya had said, and I collected some of that, too. I bundled together the kindling with a length of ribbony twine salvaged from the lifeship, and I tucked the fruit—yellow pods the size of bell peppers—into a cloth sack, also salvaged. It felt good to be doing something useful. Apart from an occasional bird call and the rustling of leaves, the only sound was the rhythm of my breathing, my feet moving through the meadow grass. The rolling landscape would have been soothing if not for the column of smoke still smudging the horizon.

  The smoke was on my mind when I came back to camp. I asked Treya whether the attack had been nuclear and whether we ought to worry about fallout or radiation. She didn’t know about that—there hadn’t been a thermonuclear attack on Vox “since the First Orthodoxy Wars,” more than two hundred years before she was born. The history she had learned hadn’t discussed the effects.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s not like we can do anything about it. And it looks like the wind is favoring us.” The plume of smoke had begun to feather out parallel to our position.

  Treya frowned, shielding her eyes and looking to windward. “Vox is a ship under power,” she said. “We’re at the stern of it—we should be downwind of Vox Core.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “We may be rudderless.”

  I didn’t know what that might imply (or what might constitute a “rudder” on a vessel the size of a small continent), but it was confirmation that the damage to Vox Core had been extensive and that help might not reach us as soon as Treya hoped. I guessed she had come to the same conclusion. She helped me dig a shallow pit for the fire, but she was moody and uncommunicative.

  * * *

  We didn’t have a clock to count the hours of the day. I slept a little when the stimulants wore off, and when I woke the sun was just touching the horizon. The air was cooler now. Treya showed me how to use one of the salvaged tools to light the kindling I had gathered.

  Once the fire was crackling I gave some thought to our position—that is, the physical position of Vox relative to the coast of Equatoria. In my day Equatoria had been a settled outpost in the New World, the planet you reached when you sailed from Sumatra through the Arch of the Hypotheticals. If Vox was making for Earth she would have been headed toward the Equatorian side of that same Arch, aiming to make the transverse journey. So I wasn’t surprised when the peak of the Arch began to glitter in the darkening sky just after sunset.

  The Arch was a Hypothetical construct, built to their incomprehensible scale. Back home, its legs were embedded in the floor of the Indian Ocean and its apex extended beyond the atmosphere of the Earth. Its Equatorian twin was the same size and may even have been, in some sense, the same physical object. One Arch, two worlds. Long after sunset the peak of it still reflected the light of the sun, a thread of silver high overhead. Ten thousand years hadn’t changed it. Treya looked up steadily and whispered something quiet in her own language. When she had finished I asked her whether the words had been a song or a prayer.

  “Maybe both. You might call it a poem.”

  “Can you translate it?”

  “It’s about the cycles of the sky, the life of the Hypotheticals. The poem says there’s no such thing as a beginning or an ending.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “I’m afraid there’s a lot you don’t know.”

  The unhappiness in her face was unmistakable. I told her I didn’t understand what had happened to Vox Core but I was sorry for her loss.

  She gave me back a sad smile. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

  I hadn’t thought of what had happened to me that way—as a loss, something to be mourned. It was true: I was ten irrevocable centuries away from home. Everything known and familiar was gone.

  But I had been trying for most of my life to put a wall between myself and my past, and I hadn’t succeeded yet. Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind—and some you carry with you, world without end.

  * * *

  Come morning Treya gave me another hit from the apparently inexhaustible supply of pharmaceuticals she carried. It was all the consolation she could offer, and I accepted it gladly.

  5.

  “If help was coming it would have come by now. We can’t wait forever. We have to walk.”

  To Vox Core, she meant: to the burning capital of her floating nation.

  “Is that possible?”

  “I think so.”

  “We have all the food we need right here. And if we stay close to the wreckage we’ll be easier to find.”

  “No, Turk. We have to get to Core before Vox crosses the Arch. But it’s not just that. The Network is still down.”

  “How is that a problem?”

  She frowned in a way I had begun to recognize, struggling to find English words for an unfamiliar concept. “The Network isn’t just a passive connection. There are parts of my body and mind that depend on it.”

  “Depend on it for what? You seem to be doing okay.”

  “The drugs I’ve been giving myself are helpful. But they won’t last forever. I need to get back to Vox Core—take my word for it.”

  So she insisted, and I was in no position to argue with her. It was probably true about the drugs. She had dosed herself twice that morning, and it was obvious she was getting less mileage out of the pharmaceuticals than she had the day before. So we bundled up all the useful salvage we could carry and began to walk.

  We settled into a steady rhythm as the morning unfolded. If the war was still going on, there was no sign of it. (The enemy had no permanent bases in Equatoria, Treya said, and the attack had been a flailing last-ditch attempt to keep us from attempting to cross the Arch. Vox had launched a retaliatory strike before her defenses went down; the empty blue sky was probably a sign that the counterattack had been successful.) The rolling land offered no real obstacles, and we aimed ourselves at the pillar of smoke still rising from beyond the horizon. Around noon we crested a small hill that allowed a view to the margins of the island—ocean on three sides, and to windward a hump of land that must have been the next island in the chain.

  More interestingly, four towers rose above the canopy of the forest ahead of us—man-made structures, windowless and black, maybe twenty or thirty stories tall. The towers were separated from one another by many miles, and heading for any one of them would have required a serious detour—but if there were people there, I suggested, maybe we could get some help.

  “No!” Treya shook her head fiercely. “No, there’s no one inside. The towers are machines, not places where people live. They collect ambient radiation and pump it down below.”

  “Below?”

  “Down to the hollow part of the island, where the farms are.”

  “You keep your farms underground?” There was plenty of fertile land up here, not to mention sunlight.

  But no, she said; Vox was designed to travel through inhospitable or changing environments all along the Ring of Worlds. All the worlds in the Ring were habitable, but conditions varied from planet to planet; the archipelago’s food sources had to be protected from changes in the length of days or seasons, wild variations in temperature, greater or lesser degrees of sunlight or ultraviolet radiation. Over the long term, aboveground agriculture would have been as impossible as raising crops on the deck of an aircraft carrier. The forest here was lush, but that was because Vox had been anchored in hospitable climates for most of the last hundred years. (“That might change,” Treya said, “if we cross to Earth.”) Originally these islands had been bare slabs of artificial granite; the topsoil had accumulated over centuries and had been colonized by escaped cultivars and windblown seed from islands and continents
on two neighboring worlds.

  “Can we get down to the farmland?”

  “Possibly. But it wouldn’t be wise.”

  “Why—are the farmers dangerous?”

  “Without the Network, they might be. It’s difficult to explain, but the Network also functions as a social control mechanism. Until it’s restored we should avoid untutored mobs.”

  “The farm folk get rowdy when they’re off their leash?”

  She gave me a disdainful look. “Please don’t make facile judgments about things you don’t understand.” She adjusted her pack and walked a few paces ahead of me, cutting short the conversation. I followed her down the hillside, back into the shadow of the forest. I tried to gauge our progress by marking the relative positions of the black towers whenever we crossed an open ridge. I calculated that we might reach the windward shore in a day or two.

  The weather turned sour that afternoon. Heavy clouds rolled in, followed by erratic winds and bursts of rain. We marched on grimly until we began to lose daylight; then we found a sheltering grove and stretched a sheet of waterproof cloth between the closely woven branches to serve as a shelter. I succeeded in getting a small fire going.

  As night fell we huddled under the tarp. The air reeked of woodsmoke and wet earth. Treya hummed to herself while I heated rations. It was the same song she had been humming in the aircraft before it was destroyed. I asked her again how she had come to know a ten-thousand-year-old popular song.

  “It was part of my training. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was bothering you.”

  “It’s not. I know that song. First time I heard it I was in Venezuela, waiting for a tanker assignment. Little bar there that played American tunes. Where’d you hear it?”

  She looked past the fire, out into the dark of the forest. “On a file server in my bedroom. My parents were out, so I cranked it up and danced.” Her voice was faint.

  “Where was this?”

  “Champlain,” she said.

  “Champlain?”

  “New York State. Up by the Canadian border.”

  “Champlain on Earth?”

  She looked at me strangely. Then her eyes widened. She put her hand to her mouth.

  “Treya? Are you all right?”

  Apparently not. She grabbed her rucksack, fumbled through it, then pulled out the pharmaceutical dispenser and pressed it against her arm.

  As soon as she was breathing normally she said, “I’m sorry. That was a mistake. Please don’t ask me about these things.”

  “Maybe I can help, if you tell me what’s going on.”

  “Not now.”

  She curled closer to the fire and closed her eyes.

  * * *

  By morning the rain had turned to mist and fog. The wind had calmed, but during the night it had blown down a bounty of ripe fruit, an easy breakfast.

  The column of smoke from Vox Core was invisible in the overcast, but two of the dark towers were close enough to serve as landmarks. By mid-morning the fog had thinned and by noon the clouds had lifted and we could hear the sound of the sea.

  Treya was talkative by daylight, probably because she was fairly heavily medicated. (She had applied the ampoule to her arm twice already.) Obviously she was leaning on the drug as a way of compensating for the loss of “the Network,” whatever that meant to her. And just as obviously, her problem was getting worse. She started talking almost as soon as we broke camp, and it wasn’t a conversation but a nervy, absentminded monologue—a cocaine monologue, I would have thought in another time and place. I listened closely and didn’t interrupt, though half of what she said made no sense. In the odd moments when she paused, the wind in the trees seemed suddenly loud.

  She told me she had been born to a family of workers in the far leeward quarter of Vox Core. Both her father and her mother had been equipped with neural interfaces that allowed them to perform any of dozens of skilled jobs, “overseeing infrastructure or implementing novel instrumentalities.” They were a lower caste than “the managers” but they were proud of their versatility. Treya herself had been trained from birth to join a group of therapists, scholars, and medics whose sole purpose was to interact with the survivors plucked from the Equatorian desert. As a “liaison therapist” assigned specifically to me (knowing only as much about me as had been preserved in historical records: my name and date of birth and the fact that I had vanished into the temporal Arch), she needed to speak colloquial English as it had been spoken ten centuries ago.

  She had learned it from the Network. But the Network had given her more than a vocabulary: it had given her an entire secondary identity—a set of implanted memories synthesized from twenty-first-century documents and channeled through the interactive node that had been attached to her spinal cord at birth. She called this secondary personality an “impersona”—not just a lexicon but a life, with all its context of places and people, thoughts and feelings.

  The primary source from which her impersona had been constructed was a woman named Allison Pearl. Allison Pearl was born in Champlain, New York, a little after the end of the Spin. Allison’s diary had survived as an historical document, and the Network had synthesized Treya’s impersona from those diary entries. “When I need an English word I get it from Allison. She loved words. She loved writing them. Words like ‘orange,’ the fruit. A fruit I’ve never seen or tasted. Allison loved oranges. What I have from her is the word and the concept, the roundness and brightness and the color of an orange, though not the qualia, the taste… But memories like that are dangerous. They have to be kept within boundaries. Without the Network’s neurological constraints, Allison’s personality is beginning to metastasize. I reach for my memories and I come up with hers. It’s… confusing. And it will only get worse. The drugs, the drugs help, but only temporarily…”

  Treya said all that and more. Insofar as I understood it, I believed she was telling the truth. I believed her because her voice had taken on an American twang, colored with phrases that might have been lifted directly from Allison Pearl’s diary. It explained the song she had been compulsively humming, her fits of absentmindedness, the way she stared into space with her head cocked as if she were listening to a voice I couldn’t hear.

  “I know these memories aren’t real, they’re made of Network inferences and collations of ancient data, but even talking about it this way feels strange, as if—”

  “As if what?”

  She turned and stared at me. Probably she hadn’t realized she was talking out loud. I shouldn’t have interrupted her.

  “As if I don’t belong here. As if this is all some peculiar future. ” She scuffed her heel into the damp earth. “As if I’m a stranger here. Like you.”

  * * *

  Not long before sunset we reached the edge of the island. Edge, not shore. Here the island’s artificiality was obvious. The forest gave way to a slope of scrub grass and exposed rock that fell away almost vertically, a drop of some few hundred feet to the sea. Across that gap was the next island in the Vox archipelago, separated from this one by a chasm half a mile wide. “Pity there isn’t a bridge,” I said.

  “There is,” Treya said tersely. “A sort of bridge. We ought to be able to see it from here.”

  She got down on her belly and scooted to the edge of the cliff, motioning for me to do the same. Heights don’t bother me particularly—I had flown airplanes for a living in the world before this one—but inching over that vertical drop wasn’t the most comfortable thing I had ever done. “Down there,” Treya said, pointing. “Do you see it?”

  The sun was sinking and the chasm was already in shadow. Seabirds nested where centuries of wind and rain had carved hollows in the obdurate, artificial rock. Far to the left, I could see what she was pointing at. An enclosed tunnel connected this artificial island to the next, though only the far end of it was visible around the precise curvature of the island’s wall. The tunnel was a salt-rimed shade of black, the same color as the sea below. Vertigo and the odd
perspective made it hard to judge its true size, but I guessed you could have put a dozen semi trucks abreast and driven them from one end to the other with room to spare. Even so, there were no spars, ropes, wires, or girders supporting it—somehow the structure carried its own weight. Each island in the archipelago contained its own drive system, slaved to a central controller at Vox Core. Still, I couldn’t help wondering about the physical stress born by the link between these two enormous floating masses, even if the tunnel itself was bearing only a fraction of the load.

  “Automated freight carriers pass through the tunnel carrying raw biomass to Vox Core and refined goods back to the farmers,” Treya said. “It’s not meant to be crossed on foot, but it’ll have to do.”

  “How do we get inside?”

  “We don’t. We might be able to do that from down in the farmholds, but not from here. We’ll have to cross on the outside.”

  I held that thought for a moment, trying to keep it at a reassuring distance.

  “There are stairs carved into the cliff,” she added. “You can’t see them from this angle. But they were cut during the original construction, so they’re probably somewhat eroded.” Even the foamed-granite composite the islands were made of couldn’t resist wind and salt water indefinitely. “It won’t be an easy climb.”

  “The top of the tunnel is a curved surface, and it looks pretty slick.”

  “It may be wider than you think.”

  “Or it may not.”

  “We don’t have a choice.”

  But it was too late to begin the attempt, with only a couple of hours of daylight left.