Robert Wilson - Vortex

“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 interface.”

“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.

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.

There were temporal Arches elsewhere in the Worlds, of course. They’re a common Hypothetical construct. We knew from geological evidence that temporal Arches appeared and disappeared every ten thousand or so years. They were part of some Hypothetical feedback mechanism, storing and dispensing information. But the first temporal Arch to engulf living human beings was the one that had popped up in the Equatorian desert and swallowed, among others, Turk Findley. Which meant it would be the first to disgorge its human cargo… which it had done, precisely on schedule, a couple of weeks ago.

So Turk was one of the first people to exit a temporal Arch alive. But oh, the bullshit that had accrued around that simple fact! It was an article of Voxish faith that the survivors would emerge transformed, conduits between mere humanity and the forces that had engineered the Ring of Worlds. And that those survivors would be able to shepherd us through a dysfunctional Arch back to Old Earth.

Treya had never questioned that dogma, and maybe it was even true, to some degree. But if we did successfully manage the transit to Earth, that was liable to be more a problem than a solution. Because in all likelihood Earth was no longer a habitable planet.

I said some of this to Turk. He asked me whether the people of Vox were entirely sane, believing what they did. I felt the ghost of Treya take offense at the question. “Sane compared to what? Vox has been a functioning community for hundreds of years. It’s survived a lot of battles. It’s a limbic democracy modulated by the Network, and all this stuff about the Hypotheticals and Old Earth is written into the code. Might even be some truth in it, I don’t know.”

“But Vox has enemies,” Turk pointed out, “who went to the trouble of bombing it.”

“They would have finished us by now, if they had anything left to throw.”

“So we’ll pass under the Arch, one way or another?”

“Two possible outcomes,” I told him. “If nothing happens we’ll be left adrift and defenseless on the Equatorian ocean. Probably invaded and occupied by the bionormatives, if they get their act together.”

“And if we do make it to Earth?”

“No way of knowing, but Earth was barely habitable when the Arch stopped working, and that was a thousand years ago, give or take. The oceans were going bad, huge bacterial blooms emitting massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide into the air. We have to assume an atmosphere poisonous enough to kill any unprotected living thing. Which is why it would be a very bad idea to be out of doors if we cross.”

“So where do we find protection?”

“The only real safe place is Vox Core. It can seal itself and recycle its air. That’s where the Farmers are heading. With the Network and other systems down, they can’t count on protection for the out-islands. They want to get inside the walls before the transit. But there isn’t room in Core for every outlier community in the Archipelago. The Farmers will have to fight their way in.”

At the end of another day’s march the Farmer militia halted for the night. Digger Choi lowered the gate of the cart, pushed two bowls of green gruel inside, and untied our hands so we could eat. Turk stood up for the first time today, rubbing his wrists and legs. He balanced himself against the wall of the cart and turned his head to see where we were. That was when he got his first look at Vox Core.