Vortex s-3 Read online

  “If Officer Bose says so, I think it’s probably true. Are the notebooks important to you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I suppose they are.”

  “May I ask you what’s written in them?”

  “Well, that’s hard to say.”

  “Is it a story?”

  “You could call it that I guess.”

  “What’s the story about, Orrin?”

  “Well, it’s hard for me to keep in my mind. That’s why I like to have the notebooks, so I can refresh my memory. It has to do with a certain man and a certain woman. More than that. It’s about… you could say God? Or at least the Hypotheticals.” Hah-poe- thet -ickles.

  “Did you write the story yourself?”

  Peculiarly, Orrin blushed.

  “I wrote it down, ” he said finally, “but I don’t know I can say for sure I wrote it. I’m not much of a writer. Never was. A teacher at Park Valley school—that’s back in North Carolina—told me I don’t know a noun from a verb and never will. And I guess that’s true. Words don’t come easy to me, except—”

  “Except what, Orrin?”

  “Except those words.”

  Sandra didn’t want to push it any harder. “I understand,” she said, though she didn’t. One more stab at it: “Turk Findley… is that someone in your story, or is he a real person?”

  Orrin’s blush deepened. “I don’t guess he exists, ma’am. I guess I made him up.”

  It was obvious he was lying. But Sandra left it at that. She smiled and nodded.

  When she stood up to leave, Orrin asked her about the flowers growing in the small garden outside the window of his cinderblock room: did she know by what name they were called?

  “Those? They’re called ‘bird of paradise.’”

  His eyes widened; he grinned. “That’s their real name?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Huh! Because those flowers surely do look like birds, don’t they?”

  The yellow beak, the rounded head, the single drop of crystalline sap that glinted like an eye. “Yes, they do.”

  “It’s like a flower that has the idea of a bird inside it. Only nobody put it there. Unless you could say God did.”

  “God or nature.”

  “Maybe comes to the same thing. You have a nice day, Dr. Cole.”

  “Thank you, Orrin. You too.”

  * * *

  Bose finally returned her call midafternoon, though his voice was hard to hear, coming through a background of what sounded like mass chanting. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m down at the ship channel. It’s some kind of environmental demonstration. We have about fifty people sitting on the railroad tracks in front of a string of tanker cars.”

  “More power to them.” Sandra’s sympathies were entirely with the demonstrators. The environmentalists wanted to ban the import of fossil fuels from beyond the Arch of the Hypotheticals, in an attempt to keep global warming under five degrees Celsius. Sufficient unto the planet are the carbon resources thereof, they believed, and to Sandra it was ridiculously obvious that they were right. As far as she could tell, the exploitation of the vast oil reserves under the Equatorian desert was a disaster in progress, enabling a mad prosperity purchased at the price of redoubled CO2 emissions. The generation that had grown up in the wake of the Spin wanted cheap gas and boom times and no cavilling voices at the table, and the whole world was (or would be) paying the piper.

  Bose said, “I’m not sure having an activist crushed by a freight train would be absolutely helpful. You got the document I sent?”

  “Yes,” she said, wondering how to proceed.

  “You read it?”

  “Yes. Officer Bose—”

  “You can just call me Bose. My friends do.”

  “Okay, but look, I still don’t know what you want from me. Do you honestly believe Orrin Mather wrote the text you sent me?”

  “I know, it hardly seems plausible. Even Orrin is a reluctant to take credit for it.”

  “I asked him about that. He told me he wrote it down, but he wasn’t sure he actually wrote it. As if somebody dictated it to him. Which I guess would explain a few things. Anyway, what do you want from me exactly? Literary criticism? Because I’m not much of a science fiction fan.”

  “There’s more to the document than what you’ve seen. I’m hoping I can send you another batch of pages today and maybe we can get together face-to-face, like say lunch tomorrow, to talk about the details.”

  Was she willing to take another step into this strangeness? Oddly, she discovered she was. Put it down to curiosity. And maybe compassion for the bashful child-man she had discovered in Orrin Mather. And the fact that she had found Bose to be reasonably pleasant company. She told him he could send along more pages but she felt compelled to add, “There’s a complication you ought to know about. I’m not Orrin’s case physician anymore. My boss turned him over to a trainee.”

  Now it was Bose’s turn to pause. Sandra tried to make out the chanting in the background. Something-something our children’s children. “Well, damn,” Bose said.

  “And I doubt my boss would be willing to take you into his confidence, no offense. He’s—”

  “You’re talking about Congreve? People at HPD say he’s a bureaucratic prick.”

  “No comment.”

  “Okay… but you still have access to Orrin?”

  “I can talk to him, if that’s what you mean. What I don’t have is any kind of decision-making authority.”

  “Complicates things,” Bose admitted. “But I’d still like your opinion.”

  “Again, it would help if I knew what’s so important to you about Orrin and these notebooks of his.”

  “Better if we discuss it tomorrow.”

  Sandra negotiated the lunch details, a place reasonably close to State Care but slightly more upscale than the strip mall alternatives; then Bose said, “Gotta go. Thanks, Dr. Cole.”

  “Sandra,” she said.

  Chapter Four

  Treya’s Story / Sllison’s Story

  1.

  You want to know what it was like, what happened to Vox and afterward?

  Well, here it is.

  Something to leave behind, you might say.

  Something for the wind and the stars to read.

  2.

  I was born to the name Treya and a five-syllable suffix I won’t repeat here, but it might be better to think of me as Allison Pearl Mark II. I had a ten-year gestation, a painful eight-day labor, and a traumatic birth. From my first full day of life I knew I was a fraud, and I knew just as truly that I had no choice in the matter.

  I was born seven days before Vox was due to cross the Arch to ancient Earth. I was born into the custody of rebel Farmers, born with my own blood weeping down my back. By the time I remembered how to speak the blood had mostly dried.

  The Farmers had crushed and carved out of my body and subsequently destroyed my personal limbic implant, my Network interface, my node. Because the node had been attached to my spine at the third vertebra almost since birth, the pain was intense. I woke up from the trauma with waves of agony sparking up my neck and into my skull, but the worst part was what I didn’t feel, which was the rest of my body. I was numb from the shoulders down—numb, helpless, hurt and frightened beyond thought. Eventually the Farmers poked me with some kind of crude anesthetic from their primitive pharmacopoeia… not out of kindness, I suspect, but simply because they were tired of hearing me scream.

  The next time I came to myself my body was tingling and itching unbearably, but that was okay because it meant I was recovering my physical functions. Even without the node, my augmented body systems were busy splicing damaged nerves and repairing bone. Which meant I would eventually be able to sit up, stand up, even walk. So I began to take a greater interest in my surroundings.

  I was in the back of a cart, lying on a sort of bed of dried vegetable matter. The cart was moving along at a brisk pace. The walls of the cart were too high to see over, but it was o
pen to daylight. I could see the cloud-flecked sky and the occasional treetop swaying past. There was no way of knowing how much time had passed since I was captured, and that was the question that preyed on my mind above all others. How close were we to Vox Core, and how close was Vox to the Arch of the Hypotheticals?

  My mouth was dry but my voice worked well enough. “Hey!” I called out a couple of times before I realized I was speaking English. So I switched to Voxish: “Vech-e! Vech-e mi!”

  All that yelling was painful, and I shut up when I realized nobody was paying attention.

  * * *

  It was dusk when the cart finally jostled to a stop. The first stars were coming out. The sky was a shade of blue that reminded me of the stained glass in the church back in Champlain. I’m not a big fan of churches but I always liked stained glass, the way it looked when the Sunday morning sun lit it up. I could hear the sound of Farmer voices. Farmers speak Voxish with an accent, as if they all went around carrying stones in their mouths. I could smell their cooking, which was torture because I hadn’t been given anything to eat.

  Eventually a face appeared above the side of the cart. It was a man’s face. His skin was dark and wrinkly, but that was true of all the Farmers. He was bald except for his bushy eyebrows. His eyes were yellow around the iris and he looked at me with undisguised distaste.

  “You,” he said. “Can you sit up?”

  “I need to eat.”

  “If you can sit up you can eat.”

  I spent the next few minutes forcing my still-unwieldy body into a sitting position. The Farmer didn’t offer to help. He watched me with a kind of clinical disinterest. When I finally had my back braced against the wall of the cart, I said, “I did what you wanted. Please feed me.”

  He glowered and went away. I didn’t really expect to see him again. But he came back with a bowl of something green and glutinous, which he put down next to me. “If you can use your hands,” he said, “it’s yours.”

  He turned away.

  “Wait!”

  He sighed and looked back. “Well?”

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Why, what does it matter?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I just want to know.”

  He said his name was Choi. He said his family was Digger, Level Three, Harvest Quarter. In my head I translated it into English as Digger Choi.

  “And you’re Treya, Worker, Outrider Therapeutics.” Sneering at the Core honorifics.

  I heard myself say, “My name is Allison Pearl.”

  “We read your internal tags. You can’t lie.”

  “Allison,” I insisted. “Pearl.”

  “Call yourself whatever you want.”

  I put my disobedient hand into the bowl of food and cupped it to my mouth. It was a globby green muck that tasted like mown grass, and I lost about half of every handful, but my body accepted it hungrily. Digger Choi stuck around until I was finished, then took the bowl. I was still hungry. Digger Choi refused my request for seconds.

  “Is this how you treat your prisoners?”

  “We don’t take prisoners.”

  “What am I, then?”

  “A hostage.”

  “You think I’m that valuable?”

  “You might be. If not, it will be simple enough to kill you.”

  * * *

  Because I could move my body again, the Farmers took the precaution of tying my arms behind me. They left me like that all night—in some ways it was worse that being paralyzed. And in the morning they pulled me out of the cart and frog-marched me to another one, identical in all ways except that it contained Turk Findley.

  During the transfer I was able to survey the Farmers’ encampment. We had reached the island that contained Vox Core, but here at the periphery it still looked like an out-island—an uncultivated wilderness. Locally, all the fruit-bearing trees had been stripped to feed the marching Farmers.

  There were a lot of them. An army of them. I estimated maybe a thousand warm bodies in this meadow alone, and I could see the smoke from other encampments. The Farmers were armed with makeshift blades and machine parts filched from harvesters and threshing machines… weapons that would have been laughable in the face of a fully Networked Core militia; but under the present circumstances who could say? The Farmers themselves were all dark and wrinkled, descendents of the long-ago Martian diaspora. Digger Choi escorted me through a mob of his Farmer compatriots, who gave me hard looks and shouted a few hard words.

  The cart he dragged me to was larger than the one I’d been dumped in. From the outside it was basically a box on two wheels, with long poles out front so an animal or a robot or an able-bodied Farmer could drag it. Simple tech, but not as primitive as it appeared. The Farmers’ carts were made of a smart material that transformed random bounces into forward momentum. They were self-balancing and could adapt to rough terrain. They also made a suitable prison, if your prisoners were securely bound.

  Turk was securely bound and so was I. Digger Choi lowered the rear wall of the cart, pushed me inside, and locked the barricade behind me. I rolled up against Turk Findley, whose hands were also tied behind his back, and we spent an awkward moment sorting ourselves out and bracing our legs so we could face each other. Turk was badly bruised—he had put up a serious fight when the Farmers took him. The skin over his left cheekbone was cloudy black, fading to green. His left eye was swollen shut. He looked at me sidelong and with unconcealed astonishment. Probably he had thought I was dead, killed when they tore out my limbic implant.

  I wanted to say something reassuring but I wasn’t sure where to start. He remembered me as Treya of Vox Core. And that was true enough: I continued to be Treya, in a sense. But only in a sense.

  I had two histories. Treya had described Allison Pearl as the virtual mentor who had acculturated her to twenty-first-century American customs and language. “Allison Pearl” wasn’t real, the way most people use that word. But I was Allison now, fully installed, fully functional; it was Allison who was running the show—I was, as the Managers used to say, psychologically annealed.

  And anyway that wasn’t the biggest problem we were facing.

  “You’re alive,” he said.

  “Obviously.”

  He gave me a curious look, probably because it wasn’t the kind of thing Treya would have said.

  “I thought they killed you. All that blood.” It had dried to a brown bib on my tunic.

  “It wasn’t me they killed, it was my Network interface. The node sits over my spine so it can talk to my brain. The Farmers have implants too, but they must have disabled theirs as soon as the Network failed. They hate the nodes because the nodes keep them docile and useful.”

  “So they’re, what, slaves? This is a slave rebellion?”

  “No—it’s not as simple as that.” Being Allison Pearl, I held no brief for the social structure of Vox. But I had a powerful secondary memory of Treya’s fierce loyalty. Treya wasn’t a bad person, even if she was a drone. I didn’t want him thinking of her as some kind of slave overseer. “These people’s ancestors were taken captive centuries ago. They were radical bionormatives, part of the Martian diaspora. They refused to be assimilated, so they made a bargain, their lives in exchange for agricultural labor.”

  Turk was still giving me uneasy looks—the blood on my clothes, the way I was talking—and I figured it would be best to explain as bluntly as possible. “They cut out my node,” I said. “Treya was a translator, right? For years she accessed Allison Pearl as a secondary personality. She ran me like a junior mind, if you understand what I’m saying. And a lot of her own memories and personality got sourced out to the Network. We were all tangled up, me and Treya, but the node always made sure Treya was the controlling entity. But now the node’s gone and I’m dominant. She must have ceded a whole bunch of neural real estate to me over the last decade. Big mistake, from her point of view, though she could hardly have expected a tribe of insurgent Farmers to cut out her Network interf
ace.”

  “Excuse me,” Turk said slowly, “but who am I talking to again?”

  “Allison. I’m Allison Pearl now.”

  “Allison,” he said. “And Treya’s, what, dead?”

  “The Network can still embody her if it wants to. She’s potential, but she’s not incarnate.” Technical terms, crudely translated.

  Turk thought this over. “The future seems like a pretty fucked-up place sometimes.”

  “If you can just take it on faith that I’m Allison now, maybe we can get on with the business of trying to save ourselves.”

  “You know how to do that?”

  “The point is, we’ll die unless we get somewhere safe before Vox crosses the Arch.”

  “That might not be possible. You saw the sky before dawn? The Arch is at zenith, a straight line across the meridian. That means—”

  “I know what it means.” It meant we were dangerously close to the crossing.

  “So what’s safe, Allison Pearl, and how do we get there?”

  The Farmers had eaten their breakfast and gathered their gear, and now they were ready to resume their march on Vox Core. A couple of men picked up the draw-poles of the cart, which had the effect of rolling us around like peas in a skillet. It made conversation awkward. But I told Turk what he needed to know. He was almost up to speed by the time we caught our first glimpse of the ruins of Vox Core.

  3.

  Turk was a quick learner, though the ten thousand years he had spent among the Hypotheticals hadn’t taught him much. Well, how could it have? In fact he had never really been “among” them, even though it was conventional to talk about the people who passed through the temporal Arch as if they had been touched by vast hyperintelligent powers. Treya believed he had spent those years in glorious communion with the Hypotheticals, whether he remembered it or not, but now that I was Allison Pearl it sounded like so much quasi-religious BS. If you’ve traveled through any of the Arches that connect the Eight Worlds you’ve been “among the Hypotheticals” to just the same degree as Turk had been. Lots of people even in my day (Allison’s day) crossed the Arch from the Indian Ocean to Equatoria, which meant they had been taken up and carried across the stars by Hypothetical forces. That didn’t make them gods or even godlike—it didn’t make them anything at all, except unusually well traveled. But time is a different dimension, supposedly. Spookier.