Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  I remember Treya reaching for my hand. Her grip was fiercely tight and her skin was cold. Then there was sudden heat and a blinding light, and we began to fall.

  4.

  A combination of emergency protocols 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 the word implies. Vox was an archipelago of floating islands made of foamed granite, vastly larger than anything that had ever put to sea in my lifetime. It was also a culture and a nation, a history and a religion. For nearly five hundred years it had traveled the oceans of the Ring of Worlds. Its enemies were powerful (Treya explained), and they were close. Vox was racing them to the Archway that connected Equatoria to Earth.

  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 came to rest on one of the out-islands of the Vox archipelago, currently uninhabited and far from what Treya called Vox Core.

  Vox Core was the hub of the Vox Archipelago, and it had been the main target of the attack. By the light of dawn we could see a pillar of smoke rising from somewhere 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,” Treya 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… we had been saved, and I asked her why we were so important.

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

  “Why me?”

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

  I didn’t understand. But she was dazed and bleeding and I didn’t press the question. Rescue would come, she said. Her people would find us soon. They wouldn’t leave us out in the wilderness for long.

  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 as even 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 what Treya said was 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 was warm, the sky was 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 especially inclined to dwell on the dangers at hand. Treya dabbed some sort of ointment on her wound, which closed it 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.

  As the sun cleared the horizon it was possible to see more of the place 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 the book’s watercolor pictures of Eden before the Fall. Rolling meadows carpeted with small clover-like 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 by a community of men and women who believed it was their destiny to travel to the forbidden 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, fighting her enemies, accreting new communities and new artificial out-islands, until she reached her current configuration as the Vox Archipelago.

  Her enemies (Treya called them “Bionormatives” or “the cortical democracies”) believed any attempt to attract the attention of the Hypotheticals was not only doomed but suicidally dangerous. There had been battles, 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. When Treya’s 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 how the body of the Hypotheticals repairs and restores itself. We knew from historical records that certain people had been taken up into the ten-thousand-year renewal cycle in the Equatorian desert. 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’s why we need you.”

  “Need me for what?”

  “The Arch that joins Equatoria to Earth has been closed to human passage for centuries. Without you we can’t make the transit. Do you understand?”

  No, but I let it pass. “You mentioned other people like me.”

  “The others who came through the temporal Arch. You’re the last one we retrieved. I don’t know what happened to your friends. The Network could tell me but it’s still disabled. The others had already come aboard—they were probably at Vox Core during the attack.” She let that thought hang in the air for a while. “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. All 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, even in the midst of what had begun to feel like a prolonged bad dream. Apart from an occasional bird call and the rustling of leaves in the wind, the only sound was the rhythm of my own breathing. 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 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 Vo
x Core. We may be rudderless.”

  I didn’t know what that meant (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 had expected. 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. 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 and 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 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.

  “Maybe both.”

  “Can you translate it?”

  “It’s a poem 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.”

  “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 happened to me that way—my loss. But it was true. I was ten irrevocable centuries away from home. I was anchorless. I was bereft. And, strangely, I was free.

  Come morning she 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.

  5.

  “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 stick near 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?

  “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’re not a cure. 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 sky was blue and empty. 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 require 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 that made traditional agriculture impossible. Its food sources had to be protected. Everything growing aboveground was wild nature. Originally these islands had been slabs of bare granite; the topsoil had accumulated over centuries and had been colonized by escaped cultivars and windblown seed stock.

  “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.”

  “So the farmers get rowdy when they’re off their leash?”

  “Please don’t make facile judgments about things you don’t understand.”

  Treya adjusted her pack and walked a few paces ahead of me, her way of 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 crossed an open ridge.

  The weather turned on us that afternoon. Clouds blew in from seaward, 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 tent. 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 know I was bothering you.”

  “You’re not. I know that song. First time I heard it I was in Belize, waiting for a tanker assignment in a bar 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.

&n
bsp; 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.

  Treya was talkative by daylight, probably because she was fairly heavily medicated. (She had applied the ampoule to her arm twice already.) Obviously she was leaning on the drug as a way of compensating for the loss of “the Network,” whatever that meant to her. And just as obviously, her problem was getting worse. She started talking almost as soon as we broke camp, and it wasn’t a conversation but a nervy, absent-minded monologue—a cocaine monologue, I would have thought in another time and place. I listened closely and didn’t interrupt, though half of what she said made no sense. In the odd moments when she paused, the wind in the trees seemed suddenly loud.

  She told me she had been born to a family of drone workers in the far leeward quarter of Vox Core. “Drone” was the word she used, but it had some kind of special definition: drone work was prestigious in Treya’s world. Drones were equipped with neural interfaces that allowed them to perform any of dozens of skilled jobs, “overseeing infrastructure or implementing novel instrumentalities.” They were a lower caste than the managers but they were proud of their versatility. Treya had been trained from birth to join a group of therapists and medics whose sole purpose was to interact with survivors of the Hypothetical activity when they were plucked from the Equatorian desert. As a “liaison therapist” she needed to speak colloquial English as it had been spoken ten centuries ago.

  She had learned it from the Network. But the Network had given her more than a vocabulary: it had given her an entire secondary identity—a set of implanted memories, synthesized from 21st-century documents and channeled through the interactive node that had been attached to her spinal cord at birth. She called this secondary personality an “impersona”—not just a lexicon but a life, with all its context of places and people, thoughts and feelings.