Robert Wilson: Vortex

That was my history, as much as I could reconstruct of it.

When I came to myself again I was in a smaller and more private cabin of the aircraft. Treya, my guard or my doctor (I didn’t know exactly how to think of her), was sitting at my bedside humming a tune in a minor key. She or someone else had dressed me in a simple tunic and trousers.

Night had fallen. A narrow window to the left of me showed scattered stars that turned like points on a wheel whenever the aircraft made a banking turn. The small Equatorian moon was on the horizon (which meant I was still in Equatoria, however much it might have changed). Down below, whitecapped waves glistened with phosphorescence. We were flying over the sea, far from land.

“What’s that song you’re humming?” I asked.

Treya gave a little start, surprised to find me awake. She was young—I guessed twenty or twenty-five years old. Her eyes were attentive but cautious, as if she were subtly afraid of me. But she smiled at the question. “Just a tune…”

A familiar tune. It was one of those lamentations in waltz time that had been so popular in the aftermath of the Spin. “Reminds me of a song I used to know. It was called…”

“‘Après Nous.’”

Yes. I had heard it in a bar in Venezuela when I was young and alone in the world. Not a bad tune, but I couldn’t imagine how it had survived ten centuries. “How do you know it?”

“Well, that’s not easy to explain. In a way, I grew up with that song.”

“Really? How old are you exactly?”

Another smile. “Not as old as you, Turk Findley. I have some memories, though. That’s why they assigned me to you. I’m not just your nurse. I’m your translator, your guide.”

“Then maybe you can explain—”

“I can explain a lot, but not right now. You need to rest. I can give you something to make you sleep.”

“I’ve been asleep.”

“Is that how it felt when you were with the Hypotheticals—like sleep?”

The question startled me. I knew I had been “with the Hypotheticals” in some sense, but I had no real memory of it. She appeared to know more about the subject than I did.

“Perhaps the memories will come back,” she said.

“Do you want to tell me what we’re running from?”

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“You all seemed in a hurry to get away from the desert.”

“Well… this world has changed since you were taken up. Wars were fought here. The planet was radically depopulated and has never really recovered. In a way, a war is still being fought here.”

As if to confirm this statement, the aircraft banked sharply. Treya gave the window a nervous glance. A burst of white light obscured the stars and lit the rolling waves below. I sat up to get a better view and I thought I saw something on the horizon as the flash faded, something like a distant continent or (because it was almost geometrically flat) an enormous ship. Then it was gone in the darkness.

“Stay down,” she said. The aircraft went into an even steeper curve. She ducked into a chair attached to the nearest wall. More light bloomed in the window. “We’re out of range of their seagoing vessels, but their aircraft… It took us time to find you,” she said. “The others should be safe by now. The room will protect you if our vehicle is damaged, but you need to lie down.”

It happened almost before the words were out of her mouth.

There were five aircraft (I learned later) in our formation. We were the last flight out of the Equatorian desert. The attack came sooner and more powerfully than expected: four escort craft went down protecting us, and after that we were defenseless.

I remember Treya reaching for my hand. I wanted to ask her what kind of war this was; I wanted to ask her what she meant by “the others.” But there wasn’t time. Her grip was fiercely tight and her skin was cold. Then there was sudden heat and a blinding light, and we began to fall.

A combination of programmed emergency maneuvers and sheer luck carried our piece of the broken aircraft as far as the nearest island of Vox.

Vox was a seagoing vessel—a ship, in the broadest sense—but it was much more than that word implies. Vox was an archipelago of floating islands, vastly larger than anything that had ever put to sea in my lifetime. It was a culture and a nation, a history and a religion. For nearly five hundred years it had sailed the oceans of the Ring of Worlds—Treya’s name for the planets that had been linked together by the Archways of the Hypotheticals. Its enemies were powerful, Treya explained, and they were close. Equatoria was an empty world now, but “an alliance of cortical democracies” had sent pursuit vessels. They were determined to prevent Vox from reaching the Arch that connected Equatoria to Earth.

She didn’t believe they could succeed. But the latest attack had been crippling, and one of the casualties had been the aircraft in which we were traveling.

We survived because the compartment in which Treya was treating me had been rigged with elaborate survival mechanisms: aerogels to cushion us from catastrophic deceleration, deployable wing surfaces to glide us to a landing place. We had come to rest on one of the out-islands of the Vox archipelago, currently uninhabited and far from the city Treya called Vox Core.

Vox Core was the hub of the Vox Archipelago, and it had been the primary target of the attack. By the light of dawn we could see a pillar of smoke rising from below the windward horizon. “There,” Treya said in a traumatized voice. “That smoke… that must be from Vox Core.”

We left the smoldering lifeship and stood in a grassy meadow as the sun cleared the horizon. “The Network is silent,” she said. It wasn’t clear to me what this meant or how she knew it. Her face was rigid with grief. Apart from our survival compartment, the rest of the aircraft must have fallen into the sea. Everyone aboard had died except us. I asked Treya how it happened that we had been singled out to survive.

“Not us, ” she said. “ You. The aircraft acted to preserve you. I just happened to be nearby.”

“Why me?”

“We waited centuries for you. For you and the others like you.”

I didn’t understand. But she was dazed and bruised and I didn’t press the question. Rescue would come, she said. Her people would find us. They would send out aircraft, even if Vox Core had been damaged. They wouldn’t leave us in the wilderness.

She was wrong about that, as it turned out.

The exterior wall of the downed survival chamber was still steaming—it had scorched the meadow grass it landed on—and the interior was too hot to use even as a temporary shelter. Treya and I ferried out a few armloads of salvageable material. The survival room had been liberally stocked with what I guessed were pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, less generously with packages Treya identified as food. I grabbed any box she pointed at and we stacked the salvage under a nearby tree (not a species I recognized). The tree was all we needed for shelter at the moment. The air outside was warm, the sky clear.

Despite all this physical effort I felt reasonably good, much better than I had when I first woke up in the desert. I wasn’t tired or even especially anxious, no doubt because of the drugs Treya had pumped into me. I didn’t feel sedated, just calm and energetic and not inclined to dwell on the dangers at hand. Treya dabbed some sort of ointment on her cuts and scratches, which closed immediately. Then she applied a blue glass tube to the inside of her arm. A few minutes later she appeared to be as functional as I felt, though she still wore her grief like a mask.