Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  There were temporal Arches elsewhere in the Worlds, of course. They’re a common Hypothetical construct. We knew from geological evidence that temporal Arches appeared and disappeared every ten thousand or so years. They were part of some Hypothetical feedback mechanism, storing and dispensing information. But the first temporal Arch to engulf living human beings was the one that had popped up in the Equatorian desert and swallowed, among others, Turk Findley. Which meant it would be the first to disgorge its human cargo… which it had done, precisely on schedule, a couple of weeks ago.

  So Turk was one of the first people to exit a temporal Arch alive. But oh, the bullshit that had accrued around that simple fact! It was an article of Voxish faith that the survivors would emerge transformed, conduits between mere humanity and the forces that had engineered the Ring of Worlds. And that those survivors would be able to shepherd us through a dysfunctional Arch back to Old Earth.

  Treya had never questioned that dogma, and maybe it was even true, to some degree. But if we did successfully manage the transit to Earth, that was liable to be more a problem than a solution. Because in all likelihood Earth was no longer a habitable planet.

  I said some of this to Turk. He asked me whether the people of Vox were entirely sane, believing what they did. I felt the ghost of Treya take offense at the question. “Sane compared to what? Vox has been a functioning community for hundreds of years. It’s survived a lot of battles. It’s a limbic democracy modulated by the Network, and all this stuff about the Hypotheticals and Old Earth is written into the code. Might even be some truth in it, I don’t know.”

  “But Vox has enemies,” Turk pointed out, “who went to the trouble of bombing it.”

  “They would have finished us by now, if they had anything left to throw.”

  “So we’ll pass under the Arch, one way or another?”

  “Two possible outcomes,” I told him. “If nothing happens we’ll be left adrift and defenseless on the Equatorian ocean. Probably invaded and occupied by the bionormatives, if they get their act together.”

  “And if we do make it to Earth?”

  “No way of knowing, but Earth was barely habitable when the Arch stopped working, and that was a thousand years ago, give or take. The oceans were going bad, huge bacterial blooms emitting massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide into the air. We have to assume an atmosphere poisonous enough to kill any unprotected living thing. Which is why it would be a very bad idea to be out of doors if we cross.”

  “So where do we find protection?”

  “The only real safe place is Vox Core. It can seal itself and recycle its air. That’s where the Farmers are heading. With the Network and other systems down, they can’t count on protection for the out-islands. They want to get inside the walls before the transit. But there isn’t room in Core for every outlier community in the Archipelago. The Farmers will have to fight their way in.”

  4.

  At the end of another day’s march the Farmer militia halted for the night. Digger Choi lowered the gate of the cart, pushed two bowls of green gruel inside, and untied our hands so we could eat. Turk stood up for the first time today, rubbing his wrists and legs. He balanced himself against the wall of the cart and turned his head to see where we were. That was when he got his first look at Vox Core.

  The expression on his face was interesting—awe and fear, mixed together.

  Vox Core was mostly underground, but the fraction of it that showed was impressive enough. The Farmers had camped in the lee of a low hill, and from this angle Vox Core looked like a jewelry box abandoned by a spendthrift god. Its half-mile-high defensive walls were the box; the jewels were the hundreds of faceted towers still standing: communications and energy-distribution points, light-gathering surfaces, aircraft bays, managerial residences. To Turk I suppose it looked improbably gaudy, but I knew (because Treya had known) that every material and every surface served a purpose—black or white facades to sink or radiate heat, blue-green panels doing photosynthetic work, ruby-red or smoky indigo windows to block or enhance particular frequencies of visible light. The setting sun gave it all a soft, seductive sheen.

  The part of it that was intact, at least. There was enough of Treya in me to ache at the damage that had been done.

  Most of what I recognized as the starboard quadrant of the city was gone. That was bad, because what lay beneath that part of the visible city was some of Vox Core’s essential infrastructure. Vox was complexly interconnected, and in the past it had sustained major damage without loss of function. But even the most decentralized network will fail if it loses too much connectivity, and that was what must have happened when the nuke penetrated our defenses. It was as if Vox’s brain had suffered a massive stroke, the damage spreading and compounding itself until the whole organism lost function. Tendrils of smoke still wafted up from the impact point. A hole had been punched in the starboard wall of the city, which might have provided an entry point for Farmer forces, except that radioactive and still-smoldering rubble had barred the gap.

  Treya had spent the whole of her life in this city, and her shock welled up in me and made my eyes water.

  Turk—once he made sure Digger Choi was out of earshot—said, “Tell me about the people who did this.”

  “Built the city or dropped the bomb?”

  “Dropped the bomb.”

  “An alliance of cortical democracies and radical bionormatives. They were determined not to let us cross the Arch. Scared we’ll call down some kind of doom by attracting the attention of the Hypotheticals.”

  “You think that might happen?”

  It was a question Treya would never have entertained. Treya had been a good Voxish citizen, blithely convinced that the Hypotheticals were benevolent and that human beings could aspire to some kind of intercourse with them. But as Allison I could be agnostic about it. “I don’t actually know.”

  “Sooner or later we might have to pick sides in one of these fights.”

  That would be a luxury, I thought, to pick a side.

  But for now the question was moot. We ate the pea-green gunk we had been given and stood up for a last look around before Digger Choi came to tie us up for the night. The sky had gotten darker and the peak of the Arch shimmered almost directly overhead. Vox Core itself had filled with shadows.

  That was the saddest thing of all, it seemed to me: the darkness of Vox Core. All my life (Treya’s life) the Core had been ablaze with light. It leaked light like a glorious sieve. Its light was its heartbeat. And now it was gone. Not even a twinkle.

  The Farmer attack, if it was going to happen at all, would have to happen soon. Until then there was nothing to do but look at the sky, and it was obvious from the dire angle of the Arch that we were at the critical point of the passage. The Vox Archipelago was big enough that some of it must already be past the midway point. But that didn’t matter—Vox would transit all at once or not at all. An Arch—and this truth had been established many centuries ago—was more like an intelligent filter than a door. Back when this Arch was working it had been able to distinguish between a bird in flight and a boat in the water: send the boat from Earth to Equatoria but leave the bird behind. That’s not a simple decision. The Arch had to be able to identify human beings and their works while ignoring the countless other living creatures who inhabited (or had once inhabited) both worlds. Crossing an Arch, in other words, wasn’t a mechanistic process. The Arch looked at you, evaluated you, accepted you or rejected you.

  The most likely outcome was that we wouldn’t be admitted to Old Earth at all. But I was more afraid of the other possibility. Even before the Arch stopped working, the Earth had changed beyond anything Turk would have recognized. The last refugees from the polar cities had described drastic shifts in the oceanic chemocline, H2S boiling out of hopelessly eutrophied offshore dead zones, massive and sudden dry-land extinctions.

  I closed my eyes and drifted into the dazed semiconsciousness that passes for sleep when you’re exhaust
ed and hungry and in pain. Periodically I opened my eyes and looked at Turk where he lay in the shadows with his arms bound behind him. He was nothing like what Treya had once pictured as an emissary from the Hypotheticals. He looked exactly like what he was—a rootless drifter, no longer young and worn almost beyond endurance.

  I guessed he was dreaming, because he moaned from time to time.

  Maybe I dreamed, too.

  What woke me next—still deep in that long night—was a sound so loud it cut the darkness like a knife. It was a deep-throated hooting, continuous and inhuman but familiar, familiar… dazed, I couldn’t place it at first; but when I recognized it I felt what I had not felt for many days: hope.

  I kicked at Turk to rouse him. He opened his eyes and rolled upright, blinking.

  “Listen!” I said. “You know what that is? It’s the alarm, Turk, it’s the call-in, the come-to-shelter, ” struggling to translate Voxish words into ancient English, “it’s the fucking air-raid siren!”

  The wailing was broadcast from the highest towers of Vox Core. It was a signal to get inside the walls, that some kind of attack was imminent, and surely that was true. But here was the important thing: if Vox Core was able to sound the siren, at least some of its power must have been restored.

  Vox Core was alive!

  “Means what?” asked Turk, still fighting sleep.

  “It means we have a chance of getting out of this!” I managed to wiggle upright so I could have a look. Vox Core was still mainly dark… but even as I registered that fact a searchlight rayed from the nearest watchtower and swept over the treeless meadows, lighting up the Farmers as they doused their fires and hurried to suit up for war. Then there were more lights: tower by tower, block by block, Vox Core began to reclaim itself from the darkness. Smaller lights like fireflies scattered from the high aerodromes, and those were aircraft, armed and lethal.

  It made me giddy. I heard myself shouting into the noise: Here we are! Come and get us! Something stupid like that. Treya’s old loyalties bursting out of my throat.

  Then the weapons rained down, and the Farmers began to die.

  Chapter Five

  Sandra and Bose

  Sandra booked off two hours for lunch, making creative use of a free hour she had originally scheduled for her next consultation with Orrin Mather. The restaurant where she had arranged to meet Bose was crowded with employees from the carpet wholesaler across the highway, but the table she snagged was out of the way and screened from the worst of the noise by a hedge of plastic ficus. Quiet enough for conversation. Bose nodded approvingly when he arrived.

  He wasn’t in uniform. He looked better out of police drag, Sandra thought. Jeans and a white shirt that set off his complexion. She asked him whether he was on duty today.

  He said he was. “But I don’t always wear the blues. I work out of Robbery/Homicide.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s not as impressive as it sounds. HPD went through massive reorganization after the Spin. Departments were dismantled and put back together like Lego blocks. I’m not a detective. I just do grunt work. I’m relatively new in the division.”

  “So how does that connect you to Orrin Mather?”

  He frowned. “I’ll explain, but can we talk about the document first?”

  “I notice you call it ‘the document.’ Not ‘Orrin’s document.’ So you don’t believe he wrote it?”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  “You want to hear my opinion before you give me yours, in other words. Okay, well, let’s start with the obvious. The pages you sent me appear to constitute an adventure story set in the future. The vocabulary is way beyond anything I’ve heard from Orrin. The story isn’t especially sophisticated but it displays a grasp of human behavior more nuanced than anything Orrin demonstrated in the short time I had to speak with him. And unless it was corrected in transcription, the grammar and punctuation are a big notch up on Orrin’s verbal skills.”

  Bose nodded at this. “But you’re still reserving judgment?”

  She considered the question. “To a degree, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons. One is circumstantial. It seems obvious Orrin isn’t the author, but then why is he being cagy about that, and why are you asking for my opinion? The second reason is professional. I’ve talked to a lot of people with personality disorders of various kinds and I’ve learned not to trust first impressions. Psychopaths can be charming and paranoiacs can appear sweetly reasonable. It’s possible Orrin’s mannerisms are a learned reflex or even a deliberate deception. He may want us to think he’s less intelligent than he really is.”

  Now Bose was giving her a peculiar and annoyingly cryptic smile. “Good. Excellent. What about the text itself? What did you make of it?”

  “I don’t pretend to be a literary critic. Looking at it as a patient’s production, however, I can’t help noticing how concerned it is with identity, especially mixed identities. There are two first-person narrators—more like three, since the girl can’t decide who she really is. And even the male narrator is essentially stripped of his past. Beyond that, there’s the grandiosity of the story’s concern with the Hypotheticals and the possibility of interaction with them. In real life, when people claim they can talk to the Hypotheticals, it’s a diagnostic indicator for schizophrenia.”

  “You’re saying Orrin—if he wrote this—might be schizophrenic?”

  “No, not at all; I’m just saying it’s possible to read the document that way. Actually, my first impression of Orrin is that he might be somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Which is another reason why I can’t entirely dismiss him as the author of the text. High-functioning autistics are often eloquent and precise writers even though they’re profoundly inhibited in social interactions.”

  “Okay,” Bose said thoughtfully. “Good, that’s useful.”

  Lunch arrived. Bose had ordered a club sandwich and fries. Sandra’s Cobb salad was limp and disappointing and she slowed down after a few bites. She waited for Bose to say something more enlightening than “okay.”

  He polished a dab of mayonnaise off his upper lip. “I like what you said. It makes sense. It’s not all psychiatric jargon.”

  “Great. Thanks. But— quid pro quo. You owe me an explanation.”

  “First let me give you this.” He pushed a manila envelope across the table. “It’s another installment of the document. Not a transcript this time. A photocopy of the original. A little hard to read but maybe more revealing.”

  The envelope was dismayingly thick. Not that Sandra was reluctant to take it. Her professional curiosity had been piqued. What she resented was that Bose was still being cagy about what he wanted from her. “Thank you,” she said, “but—”

  “We can talk more freely later on. Say maybe tonight? If you’re free?”

  “I’m free now. I haven’t finished my salad yet.”

  Bose lowered his voice: “The problem is, we’re being watched.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Woman in the booth behind the plastic plants.”

  Sandra canted her head and nearly laughed out loud. “Oh, god!” Whispering now herself: “That’s Mrs. Wattmore. From State. One of the ward nurses.”

  “She followed you here?”

  “She’s a hopeless busybody, but I’m sure it’s a coincidence.”

  “Well, she’s been taking a pretty deep interest in our conversation.” He mimed a cupped-hand-to-ear.

  “Typical…”

  “So—tonight?”

  Or we could move to a different table, Sandra thought. Or just keep our voices down. She didn’t suggest it, however, because it was possible Bose was using this as an excuse to see her again. And she wasn’t sure how to interpret that. Was Bose a colleague, a collaborator, a potential friend, maybe even (as Mrs. Wattmore no doubt suspected) a potential lover? The situation was ambiguous. Perhaps exciting for that reason. Sandra hadn’t been involved with a man since she broke up with
Andy Beauton, another State physician who had been fired in last year’s downsizing. Since then, her work had eaten her alive. “Okay,” she said. “Tonight.” She was reassured by the smile he gave her. “But I still have an hour on lunch.”

  “So let’s talk about something else.”

  About each other, as it turned out.

  They laid out their life stories for inspection. Bose: Born in Mumbai during his mother’s ill-fated marriage to an Indian wind turbine engineer, raised there until the age of five. (Which explained the ghost of an accent and his manners, just a touch more genteel than the Texas average.) Brought back to Houston for grade school and subsequently imbued with what he called his mother’s “well-honed sense of injustice,” he had eventually qualified for police training at a time when HPD was in a hiring frenzy. He talked about himself with a sense of humor that struck Sandra as unusual in a cop. Or maybe she had been meeting the wrong cops. In return she gave him the pocket version—to be honest, the carefully edited version—of Sandra Cole: her family in Boston, med school, her job at State. When Bose asked about her choice of career she mentioned a desire to help people; she didn’t mention her father’s suicide or what had happened to her brother Kyle.

  The conversation evolved toward triviality as they lingered over coffee, and Sandra left the restaurant still unsure whether she ought to treat this as a professional exchange or a boy-girl size-up. Or which she wanted it to be. She found Bose at least superficially attractive. It wasn’t just his blue eyes and teak-colored skin. It was the way he talked, as if he was speaking from some calm and happily reasonable place deep inside himself. And he seemed equally interested in her, unless she was overinterpreting. Still… did she need this in her life?