Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  It had. A few dozen pages. Pages Orrin Mather had supposedly written, but she saw at once how unlikely that was.

  She printed the pages and settled down in a comfortable chair to read them.

  My name is Turk Findley, the document began.

  Chapter Two

  Turk Findley’s Story

  1.

  My name is Turk Findley, and this is the story of the life I lived long after everything I knew and loved was dead and gone. It begins in the desert of a planet we used to call Equatoria, and it ends—well, that’s hard to say.

  These are my memories. This is what happened.

  2.

  Ten thousand years, more or less, is how long I was away from the world. That was a terrible thing to know, and for a span of time it was nearly all I knew.

  I woke up dizzy and naked in the open air. The sun was hammering out of an empty blue sky. I was radically, painfully thirsty. My body ached and my tongue felt thick and dead in my mouth. I tried to sit up and nearly toppled over. My vision was blurred. I didn’t know where I was or how I had got here. Nor could I really remember where I had come from. All I had of knowledge was the sickening conviction that almost ten thousand years (but who had counted them?) had passed.

  I forced myself to sit absolutely still, eyes closed, until the worst of the vertigo passed. Then I raised my head and tried to make sense of what I saw.

  I was outdoors in what appeared to be a desert. There was no one on the ground for miles, as far as I could tell, but I wasn’t exactly alone: a number of aircraft were passing overhead at low speed. The aircraft were peculiarly shaped and it wasn’t obvious what was keeping them aloft, since they seemed to have no wings or rotors.

  I ignored them for the time being. The first thing I needed to do was to get out of the sunlight—my skin was burned red and there was no telling how long I’d been exposed.

  The desert was hardpacked sand all the way to the horizon, but it was littered with fragments of what looked like gigantic broken toys: a smoothly curved half-eggshell, at least ten feet tall and dusty green, a few yards away; and in the distance other similar shapes in bright but fading colors, as if a giant’s tea party had come to grief. Beyond all this there was a range of mountains like a blackened jawbone. The air smelled of mineral dust and hot rock.

  I crawled a few yards into the shadow of the fractured eggshell, where the shade was blissfully cool. What I needed next was water. And maybe something to cover myself up. But the effort of moving had made me dizzy again. One of the strange aircraft seemed to be hovering overhead; I tried to wave my arms to attract its attention but my strength had deserted me, and I closed my eyes and passed out.

  3.

  The next time I woke I was being lifted into some kind of stretcher.

  The bearers were dressed in yellow uniforms and wore dust masks over their mouths and noses. A woman in the same yellow clothing walked beside me. When our eyes met she said, “Please try to stay calm. I know you’re frightened. We have to hurry, but trust me, we’ll get you to a safe place.”

  Several of the aircraft had landed, and I was carried into one of them. The woman in yellow said a few words to her companions in a language I didn’t recognize. My captors or saviors set me on my feet and I discovered I could stand without falling. A door came down, cutting off the view of the desert and the sky. Softer light suffused the interior of the aircraft.

  Men and women in yellow jumpers bustled around me, but I kept my eye on the woman who had spoken English. “Steady,” she said, taking my arm. She wasn’t much taller than five feet and change, and when she pulled off her mask she looked reassuringly human. Her skin was brown, her features were vaguely Asian, her dark hair was cut short. “How do you feel?”

  That was a complicated question. I managed to shrug.

  We were in a large room and she escorted me to one corner of it. A surface like a bed slid out of the wall, along with a rack of what might have been medical equipment. The woman in yellow told me to lie down. The other soldiers or airmen—I didn’t know how to think of them—ignored us and went about their business, working control surfaces along the walls or hurrying off to other chambers of the aircraft. I felt a rising-elevator sensation and I guessed we had lifted off, though there was no noise apart from the sound of voices speaking a language I didn’t recognize. No bounce, no chop, no turbulence.

  The woman in yellow pressed a blunt metallic tube against my forearm and then against my rib cage, and I felt my anxiety ease into numbness. I guessed I had been drugged but I didn’t really mind. My thirst had vanished. “Can you tell me your name?” the woman asked.

  I croaked out the fact that I was Turk Findley. I told her I was an American by birth but that I had been living in Equatoria lately. I asked her who she was where she was from. She smiled and said, “My name is Treya, and the place I’m from is called Vox.”

  “Is that where we’re going now?”

  “Yes. We’ll be there soon. Try to sleep, if you can.”

  * * *

  So I closed my eyes and tried to take inventory of myself.

  My name is Turk Findley.

  Turk Findley, born in the last years of the Spin. Variously a day laborer, sailor, small-plane pilot. Worked my way across the Arch to Equatoria on a coastal freighter and lived in Port Magellan some years. Met a woman named Lise Adams who was searching for her father, a search that took us among the kind of people who liked to experiment with Martian drugs—took us deep into the oil lands of the Equatorian desert at a time when ash began to fall from the sky and strange things grew out of the ground. I had loved Lise Adams well enough to know I wasn’t good for her. We had been separated in the desert… and I believed it was then that the Hypotheticals had taken me. Had picked me up and carried me the way a wave carries a grain of sand. And dropped me on this beach, this shoal, this sandbar, ten thousand years downcurrent.

  That was my history, as much as I could reconstruct of it.

  * * *

  When I came to myself again I was in a smaller and more private cabin of the aircraft. Treya, my guard or my doctor (I didn’t know exactly how to think of her), was sitting at my bedside humming a tune in a minor key. She or someone else had dressed me in a simple tunic and trousers.

  Night had fallen. A narrow window to the left of me showed scattered stars that turned like points on a wheel whenever the aircraft made a banking turn. The small Equatorian moon was on the horizon (which meant I was still in Equatoria, however much it might have changed). Down below, whitecapped waves glistened with phosphorescence. We were flying over the sea, far from land.

  “What’s that song you’re humming?” I asked.

  Treya gave a little start, surprised to find me awake. She was young—I guessed twenty or twenty-five years old. Her eyes were attentive but cautious, as if she were subtly afraid of me. But she smiled at the question. “Just a tune…”

  A familiar tune. It was one of those lamentations in waltz time that had been so popular in the aftermath of the Spin. “Reminds me of a song I used to know. It was called…”

  “‘Après Nous.’”

  Yes. I had heard it in a bar in Venezuela when I was young and alone in the world. Not a bad tune, but I couldn’t imagine how it had survived ten centuries. “How do you know it?”

  “Well, that’s not easy to explain. In a way, I grew up with that song.”

  “Really? How old are you exactly?”

  Another smile. “Not as old as you, Turk Findley. I have some memories, though. That’s why they assigned me to you. I’m not just your nurse. I’m your translator, your guide.”

  “Then maybe you can explain—”

  “I can explain a lot, but not right now. You need to rest. I can give you something to make you sleep.”

  “I’ve been asleep.”

  “Is that how it felt when you were with the Hypotheticals—like sleep?”

  The question startled me. I knew I had been “with the Hypotheticals�
�� in some sense, but I had no real memory of it. She appeared to know more about the subject than I did.

  “Perhaps the memories will come back,” she said.

  “Do you want to tell me what we’re running from?”

  She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “You all seemed in a hurry to get away from the desert.”

  “Well… this world has changed since you were taken up. Wars were fought here. The planet was radically depopulated and has never really recovered. In a way, a war is still being fought here.”

  As if to confirm this statement, the aircraft banked sharply. Treya gave the window a nervous glance. A burst of white light obscured the stars and lit the rolling waves below. I sat up to get a better view and I thought I saw something on the horizon as the flash faded, something like a distant continent or (because it was almost geometrically flat) an enormous ship. Then it was gone in the darkness.

  “Stay down,” she said. The aircraft went into an even steeper curve. She ducked into a chair attached to the nearest wall. More light bloomed in the window. “We’re out of range of their seagoing vessels, but their aircraft… It took us time to find you,” she said. “The others should be safe by now. The room will protect you if our vehicle is damaged, but you need to lie down.”

  It happened almost before the words were out of her mouth.

  * * *

  There were five aircraft (I learned later) in our formation. We were the last flight out of the Equatorian desert. The attack came sooner and more powerfully than expected: four escort craft went down protecting us, and after that we were defenseless.

  I remember Treya reaching for my hand. I wanted to ask her what kind of war this was; I wanted to ask her what she meant by “the others.” But there wasn’t time. 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 programmed emergency maneuvers 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 that word implies. Vox was an archipelago of floating islands, vastly larger than anything that had ever put to sea in my lifetime. It was a culture and a nation, a history and a religion. For nearly five hundred years it had sailed the oceans of the Ring of Worlds—Treya’s name for the planets that had been linked together by the Archways of the Hypotheticals. Its enemies were powerful, Treya explained, and they were close. Equatoria was an empty world now, but “an alliance of cortical democracies” had sent pursuit vessels. They were determined to prevent Vox from reaching the Arch that connected Equatoria to Earth.

  She didn’t believe they could succeed. But 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 had come to rest on one of the out-islands of the Vox archipelago, currently uninhabited and far from the city Treya called Vox Core.

  Vox Core was the hub of the Vox Archipelago, and it had been the primary target of the attack. By the light of dawn we could see a pillar of smoke rising from 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,” she 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. I asked Treya how it happened that we had been singled out to survive.

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

  “Why me?”

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

  I didn’t understand. But she was dazed and bruised and I didn’t press the question. Rescue would come, she said. Her people would find us. They would send out aircraft, even if Vox Core had been damaged. They wouldn’t leave us in the wilderness.

  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 even as 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 packages Treya identified as 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 outside was warm, the sky 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 inclined to dwell on the dangers at hand. Treya dabbed some sort of ointment on her cuts and scratches, which closed 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 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 r
everent. “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.”