Robert Wilson: Vortex

As the sun cleared the horizon it was possible to see more of the place where we had landed. It was a sumptuous landscape. When I was little my mother used to read to me from an illustrated children’s Bible, and the island reminded me of watercolor pictures of Eden before the Fall. Rolling meadows carpeted with small cloverlike plants merged into thickets of fruit-bearing trees in every direction. No lambs or lions, though. Or people or roads. Not even a path.

“It would help,” I said, “if you could explain a little of what’s going on.”

“That’s what I was trained for—to help you understand. But without the Network it’s hard to know where to start.”

“Just tell me what a complete stranger might like to know.”

She looked up at the sky, at the ominous pillar of smoke to windward. Her eyes reflected clouds.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I can. While we wait to be rescued.”

Vox had been built and populated by a community of men and women who believed it was their destiny to travel to Earth and enter into direct communication with the Hypotheticals.

That was four worlds and five centuries ago, Treya said. Since then Vox had held steadfastly to her purpose. She had traversed three Arches, making temporary alliances, fighting her declared enemies, accreting new communities and new artificial out-islands, until she reached her current configuration as the Vox Archipelago.

Her enemies (“the cortical democracies”) believed any attempt to attract the attention of the Hypotheticals was not only doomed but suicidally dangerous, and not just for Vox itself. The disagreement had occasionally escalated to the point of open warfare, and twice in the last five hundred years Vox had nearly been destroyed. But her population had proven to be more disciplined and clever than her enemies. Or so Treya declared.

When Treya’s slightly breathless narrative began to slow down I said, “How did you come to pluck me out of the desert?”

“That was planned from the beginning, long before I was born.”

“You expected to find me there?”

“We know from experience and observation how the body of the Hypotheticals repairs and restores itself. We know from geological evidence that the cycle repeats every nine thousand eight hundred and seventy-five years. And we knew from historical records that certain people had been taken up into the renewal cycle in the Equatorian desert—including you. What goes in comes out. It was predicted almost to the hour.” Her voice became reverent. “You’ve been in the presence of the Hypotheticals. That makes you special. That’s why we need you.”

“Need me for what?”

“The Arch that joins Equatoria to Earth stopped functioning centuries ago. No one has been to Earth in all that time. But we believe we can make the transit, as long as you and the others are with us. Do you understand?”

No—but I let it pass. “You said ‘the others’—what others?”

“The others who were taken up into the Hypothetical renewal cycle. You were there, Turk Findley. You must have seen it, even if you don’t remember it. An Arch, smaller than the ones that connect the worlds but still very large, rising out of the desert.”

I remembered it the way you might remember a nightmare by the light of morning. The earthquakes it caused had been deadly. Hypothetical machines had been drawn to it from across the solar system, falling from the sky like toxic ash. It had killed friends of mine. Treya called it “a temporal Arch” and implied that it was part of some cycle in the life of the Hypotheticals. But we hadn’t known that at the time.

I shivered, despite the warm air and the comforting pharmaceuticals coursing through my bloodstream.

“It took you up,” she said, “and held you in stasis for almost ten thousand years. It marked you, Turk Findley. The Hypotheticals know you. That’s why you’re important. You and the others.”

“Tell me their names.”

“I don’t know their names. I was assigned to you in particular. If the Network was working properly… but it’s not.” She hesitated. “They were probably in Vox Core at the time of the attack. You might be the only survivor. So someone has to come for us. They’ll come as soon as they can. They’ll find us and they’ll take us home.”

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.