Robert Wilson - Vortex

“Maybe both. You might call it a poem.”

“Can you translate it?”

“It’s about the cycles of the sky, the life of the Hypotheticals. The poem says there’s no such thing as a beginning or an ending.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“I’m afraid there’s a lot you don’t know.”

The unhappiness in her face was unmistakable. I told her I didn’t understand what had happened to Vox Core but I was sorry for her loss.

She gave me back a sad smile. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

I hadn’t thought of what had happened to me that way—as a loss, something to be mourned. It was true: I was ten irrevocable centuries away from home. Everything known and familiar was gone.

But I had been trying for most of my life to put a wall between myself and my past, and I hadn’t succeeded yet. Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind—and some you carry with you, world without end.

Come morning Treya gave me another hit from the apparently inexhaustible supply of pharmaceuticals she carried. It was all the consolation she could offer, and I accepted it gladly.

“If help was coming it would have come by now. We can’t wait forever. We have to walk.”

To Vox Core, she meant: to the burning capital of her floating nation.

“Is that possible?”

“I think so.”

“We have all the food we need right here. And if we stay close to the wreckage we’ll be easier to find.”

“No, Turk. We have to get to Core before Vox crosses the Arch. But it’s not just that. The Network is still down.”

“How is that a problem?”

She frowned in a way I had begun to recognize, struggling to find English words for an unfamiliar concept. “The Network isn’t just a passive connection. There are parts of my body and mind that depend on it.”

“Depend on it for what? You seem to be doing okay.”

“The drugs I’ve been giving myself are helpful. But they won’t last forever. I need to get back to Vox Core—take my word for it.”

So she insisted, and I was in no position to argue with her. It was probably true about the drugs. She had dosed herself twice that morning, and it was obvious she was getting less mileage out of the pharmaceuticals than she had the day before. So we bundled up all the useful salvage we could carry and began to walk.

We settled into a steady rhythm as the morning unfolded. If the war was still going on, there was no sign of it. (The enemy had no permanent bases in Equatoria, Treya said, and the attack had been a flailing last-ditch attempt to keep us from attempting to cross the Arch. Vox had launched a retaliatory strike before her defenses went down; the empty blue sky was probably a sign that the counterattack had been successful.) The rolling land offered no real obstacles, and we aimed ourselves at the pillar of smoke still rising from beyond the horizon. Around noon we crested a small hill that allowed a view to the margins of the island—ocean on three sides, and to windward a hump of land that must have been the next island in the chain.

More interestingly, four towers rose above the canopy of the forest ahead of us—man-made structures, windowless and black, maybe twenty or thirty stories tall. The towers were separated from one another by many miles, and heading for any one of them would have required a serious detour—but if there were people there, I suggested, maybe we could get some help.

“No!” Treya shook her head fiercely. “No, there’s no one inside. The towers are machines, not places where people live. They collect ambient radiation and pump it down below.”

“Below?”

“Down to the hollow part of the island, where the farms are.”

“You keep your farms underground?” There was plenty of fertile land up here, not to mention sunlight.

But no, she said; Vox was designed to travel through inhospitable or changing environments all along the Ring of Worlds. All the worlds in the Ring were habitable, but conditions varied from planet to planet; the archipelago’s food sources had to be protected from changes in the length of days or seasons, wild variations in temperature, greater or lesser degrees of sunlight or ultraviolet radiation. Over the long term, aboveground agriculture would have been as impossible as raising crops on the deck of an aircraft carrier. The forest here was lush, but that was because Vox had been anchored in hospitable climates for most of the last hundred years. (“That might change,” Treya said, “if we cross to Earth.”) Originally these islands had been bare slabs of artificial granite; the topsoil had accumulated over centuries and had been colonized by escaped cultivars and windblown seed from islands and continents on two neighboring worlds.

“Can we get down to the farmland?”

“Possibly. But it wouldn’t be wise.”

“Why—are the farmers dangerous?”

“Without the Network, they might be. It’s difficult to explain, but the Network also functions as a social control mechanism. Until it’s restored we should avoid untutored mobs.”

“The farm folk get rowdy when they’re off their leash?”

She gave me a disdainful look. “Please don’t make facile judgments about things you don’t understand.” She adjusted her pack and walked a few paces ahead of me, cutting short the conversation. I followed her down the hillside, back into the shadow of the forest. I tried to gauge our progress by marking the relative positions of the black towers whenever we crossed an open ridge. I calculated that we might reach the windward shore in a day or two.

The weather turned sour that afternoon. Heavy clouds rolled in, followed by erratic winds and bursts of rain. We marched on grimly until we began to lose daylight; then we found a sheltering grove and stretched a sheet of waterproof cloth between the closely woven branches to serve as a shelter. I succeeded in getting a small fire going.

As night fell we huddled under the tarp. The air reeked of woodsmoke and wet earth. Treya hummed to herself while I heated rations. It was the same song she had been humming in the aircraft before it was destroyed. I asked her again how she had come to know a ten-thousand-year-old popular song.

“It was part of my training. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was bothering you.”

“It’s not. I know that song. First time I heard it I was in Venezuela, waiting for a tanker assignment. Little bar there that played American tunes. Where’d you hear it?”

She looked past the fire, out into the dark of the forest. “On a file server in my bedroom. My parents were out, so I cranked it up and danced.” Her voice was faint.

“Where was this?”

“Champlain,” she said.

“Champlain?”

“New York State. Up by the Canadian border.”

“Champlain on Earth ?”

She looked at me strangely. Then her eyes widened. She put her hand to her mouth.

“Treya? Are you all right?”

Apparently not. She grabbed her rucksack, fumbled through it, then pulled out the pharmaceutical dispenser and pressed it against her arm.

As soon as she was breathing normally she said, “I’m sorry. That was a mistake. Please don’t ask me about these things.”

“Maybe I can help, if you tell me what’s going on.”

“Not now.”

She curled closer to the fire and closed her eyes.

By morning the rain had turned to mist and fog. The wind had calmed, but during the night it had blown down a bounty of ripe fruit, an easy breakfast.

The column of smoke from Vox Core was invisible in the overcast, but two of the dark towers were close enough to serve as landmarks. By mid-morning the fog had thinned and by noon the clouds had lifted and we could hear the sound of the sea.