Robert Wilson - Vortex

More footsteps down the alley behind them: the lookouts had been called in.

“We need to get out of here,” Bose said. He added, “We might need a distraction.”

The kid turned up a near-tearful face. “What are you talking about? What distraction?”

Bose said, “You happen to be carrying anything flammable?”

Our aircraft could have flown days more without exhausting its supply of fuel, but there was no point in circling aimlessly. Turk found a small, steep island off the southern flank of what had once been the Indonesian archipelago and landed us there. The island was far enough south to be out of range of the falling fragments of the Arch and high enough to protect us from any resulting tsunami. The aircraft came to ground on a fairly gentle slope. The land around us was as blank and poisoned as any other part of the planet, but we could see the ocean to the southwest of us. We could have left the ship and gone outside—there were masks and protective gear in the storage lockers—but there was no reason to do so and it might have been dangerous to attempt it: gale-force winds were blowing steadily, maybe as a result of the monstrous impacts farther north.

We discussed the possibility that the Arch might still be functional, that even in its fractured condition it might still be able to detect Turk and allow us passage to Equatoria. That was almost certainly wishful thinking, however, and it would have been insanely risky to try an approach. As soon as we had landed, the ship detected two more fragments inbound from orbit. We couldn’t see them through the cloud deck, but the impacts created a shock wave that rattled the vessel’s hull even these many hundreds of miles away. An hour later the sea receded from the shore of the island, revealing ancient dead corals and black sand, then came rushing back in a surge that would have been catastrophic had there been any living thing in the path of it.

We could go back to Vox, I pointed out. The aircraft would do that anyway, automatically, once its fuel supply was nearly exhausted.

“There might be nothing left of Vox,” Turk said. The Hypothetical machines would have reached it by now.

Maybe. Probably. But we didn’t know what had caused the Arch to fail—maybe the same thing was happening to the Hypothetical machines; maybe they were disintegrating at the shore of the Ross Sea. If Vox was intact, it would still be capable of harvesting enough protein from the ocean’s bacterial blooms to support a small population.

“In that case they’ll be fighting each other for food,” Turk said. “And if all the Hypothetical mechanisms are breaking down, that’s still not good news.”

He was right, of course. The one Hypothetical technology we all took for granted was the intangible barrier that protected Earth from her swollen, aging sun. If that failed, the oceans would boil, the atmosphere would cook off into space, and Vox would end up as a dispersed cloud of superheated molecules.

But I was still in favor of heading for Vox Core when the time came. It was where (as Treya) I had been born. It would be a suitable place to die.

That night we witnessed the biggest impact yet. The ship alerted us to a large incoming object, and Turk adjusted the window so we could monitor the northwest quadrant of the sky. Despite the heavy cloud cover we could see the fireball as a moving blur of red light, followed by a sunset glow on the horizon. A substantial shock wave was inevitable, so we instructed the ship to anchor itself to the island by means of high-tensile cables fired into the bedrock.

The shock arrived as a solid wall of wind and hot rain. Our aircraft was pressure-tight and well anchored, but I could hear it straining against its cables—an agonized groaning, as if the Earth itself were in pain.

I went to bed when the winds had calmed some, and that night I dreamed of Champlain—Allison’s Champlain. In my dream I walked Allison’s streets and I shopped at the mall where Allison had shopped and I made conversation with Allison’s mother and Allison’s father. All this seemed intimately real, but it took place in a world drained of color and texture. Allison’s mother served chicken pot pie and baked beans for dinner and I was Allison and I loved chicken pot pie, but the meal she put in front of me was indistinct, a diagram of itself, and it tasted of nothing at all.

Because these weren’t really memories. They were details extracted from a dead woman’s diaries. I had learned a lot about myself and the world I lived in by masquerading as Allison, but in truth I had never stopped being Treya. Oscar had been right about that. Allison was simply the tool I had used to pry Treya away from the tyranny of Vox. For whatever that was now worth.

I climbed out of my cot and went forward. Turk was still awake, keeping a pointless vigil. The wind continued to rage but had lost some of its ferocity. According to our sensors, the rain beating against the hull was as hot as steam.

I told Turk about my dream and what it meant. I told him I was tired of pretending to be Allison. I didn’t have a name worth wearing, I told him. I was going to die on an empty planet, and nobody would know who I was or had been.

He said, “I know who you are.”

We sat together on a bench opposite the window-wall. He put his arms around me and held me until I was calm.

That was when he told me what had happened back at Vox Core before we escaped. He said he had talked to Oscar and, through Oscar, to the Coryphaeus. He had confessed a truth about himself.

“What truth?”

I thought I knew the answer. I thought he meant the truth he had been evading ever since we had plucked him out of the Equatorian desert, the terrible and obvious truth about himself.

But he told me a different story. He told me how he’d killed someone, back when he was a young man on the living Earth. He spoke stiffly and with a grim restraint, his face turned away and his fists clenched. I listened carefully and let him finish.

Maybe he didn’t want me to say anything in response. Maybe silence would have served him better. But there was no real future ahead of us now and I didn’t want to die with an important truth unspoken.

After he had composed himself I said, “Can I tell you a story in return?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“This is an Allison story,” I said. “It happened back on Old Earth. Otherwise it’s not much like your story at all. But it’s something that weighed on her conscience for a long time.”

He nodded, waited.

I said, “Allison’s father was a soldier as a young man. He served overseas in the years before the Spin. He was forty years old when Allison was born, fifty the year she turned ten. On her tenth birthday, he gave her a present—a painting in a cheap wooden frame. She was disappointed when she unwrapped it—what had made him think she wanted an amateur oil-color portrait of a woman holding a baby? Then he told her, almost bashfully, that he’d painted it himself. He’d done it a few years ago, working nights in his study. He said the woman in the picture was Allison’s mother and the child was Allison herself. Allison was surprised, because her father had never seemed artistic—he made a living managing a shoe store in a strip mall, and she’d never heard him mention literature or art. But having a baby daughter, he explained, was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and he had wanted to remember that feeling, so he’d made the painting to remind himself of it. Now he wanted Allison to have it. So Allison decided it was a pretty good gift after all, maybe the best she’d ever gotten.

“Eight years later he was diagnosed with lung cancer—no big surprise; he’d been a pack-a-day smoker since he was twelve years old. And for a few months he tried to behave as if nothing was wrong. But he got steadily weaker, and eventually he was spending most of the day in bed. When it got to be too hard for Allison’s mother to look after him—when he couldn’t eat, when he couldn’t get up even to use the bathroom—he had to go to the hospital, and by then Allison understood he wouldn’t be coming home. He was in for what they called palliative care. Basically, the doctors were helping him die. They gave him drugs for the pain, more every day, but he was pretty clear-headed up until the last week, although he cried a lot—the doctors said he was ‘emotionally labile.’ And one day when Allison was visiting he asked her to bring him that painting, so he could look at it and call back the old memories.