Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  * * *

  I kept my troubles to myself, mainly because I didn’t want to give Oscar more leverage to use against me. More important, I didn’t want to raise any doubt in Turk’s mind that I was Allison Pearl, that I preferred to be Allison Pearl, and that I would remain Allison Pearl until the day they strapped me down and forced a Network node into my brain stem.

  But the situation wasn’t as simple as that.

  So, the question I woke up with every day and went to bed with every night: was I really Allison Pearl?

  In the most obvious sense, no. How could I be? Allison Pearl had lived and (presumably) died on Earth ten thousand years ago, back when Earth was a habitable planet. All that remained of her were a few gigs of diary entries that had somehow survived to the present day. The diary began in Allison Pearl’s tenth year of life and ended for no apparent reason in her twenty-third. Treya had absorbed all those diary entries (and thousands of ancillary details about twenty-first-century life) both cortically and limbically, as data and as identity. Certainly Treya had never believed herself to “be” Allison Pearl. But she had carried Allison Pearl like a copybook deep in the meat of her brain. The Network had installed Allison Pearl in Treya’s psyche, and the Network had built and maintained rigorous barriers between Allison and Treya.

  Rigorous, but not rigorous enough. Because here was a secret I had told no one: even before the Network went down, even before the rebel Farmers destroyed my node, Allison had been bleeding into Treya. And Treya had never objected, nor had she complained to her administrative handlers. Instead Treya had kept the steady drip of Allison Pearl into her daily life a secret—a guilty secret, because there were qualities in Allison that Treya had coveted for herself.

  Treya was obedient. Allison was defiant. Treya was willing to submerge her identity in the greater identity of Vox. Allison would sooner have died. Treya believed everything she was told by duly anointed authorities. Allison distrusted all authority, on principle.

  But even that distinction falls short of absolute truth. Better to say that, through Allison, Treya had begun to discover the possibilities of skepticism, defiance, rebellion.

  So ask again. What was I, now that the door between Treya and Allison had been thrown wide open? Was I Allison, or was I Treya being Allison?

  No! Neither. I was a third thing.

  I was what I had made of myself from all these incompatible parts, and I was entitled to all my memories, real and virtual. Vox had cultivated both Treya and Allison, but Vox hadn’t counted on the consequences of the mixture. And fuck Vox, anyway! There it was, the heresy Treya had always resisted and for which the voice of Allison had silently begged: Fuck Vox, fuck its quiet tyranny, fuck its frozen dream religion, and fuck its craven obsession with the Hypotheticals.

  Fuck especially the madness that had brought Vox to this ruined Earth, and fuck the more profound madness I believed was about to break loose aboard her.

  Fuck Vox! And bless Allison Pearl for making it possible to say so.

  * * *

  Though Oscar had agreed to withdraw the surgical knives, he hadn’t abandoned the project of convincing me to submit to surgery. He conducted the campaign secondhand, confronting me with people I couldn’t refuse to speak to, people who were or had been Treya’s friends and family.

  They were my friends and family, too, in a real sense, though I wasn’t the person they had known, much less the person they wanted and expected me to be. And I was human enough to be hurt by their incomprehension and their grief.

  One day Oscar brought my mother (Treya’s mother) to see me. My father (my Vox-father) was an engineering worker who had been killed in the collapse of an exchange tunnel not long after I was born. As a child I had been cared for by my mother and a crew of aunts, all of whom loved me and whom I had loved. And enough of Treya remained in me that I couldn’t help reaching out to the woman whose arms had so often comforted me, couldn’t help looking into her terrified eyes while I told her no, her daughter wasn’t dead, only transformed, freed from a harsh but invisible bondage. She understood none of it. “Don’t you want to be useful?” she asked me. “Don’t you remember what it means to be part of a family?”

  I remembered altogether too well. I ignored the question and told her I still loved her. And truly, I did. But she wasn’t consoled. Why should she be? She had lost her daughter. Treya was gone, and I was just some stubborn golem who had taken her place. And in the moment I told her I loved her, I saw from her frozen expression that she hated me in return, actually hated me; that the person she loved wasn’t me but a shadow I had ceased to cast.

  Well, maybe she was right. I would never be the daughter she had known. I was what I had become. I was the thing I was and the name of the thing I was was Allison, Allison, Allison Pearl. I whispered it to myself long after she had left the room.

  I didn’t mean to take these troubles to Turk. Turk had troubles of his own. He wore his stoic come-what-may attitude proudly, and I guessed he had earned it, but fundamentally, inescapably, he was alone here, a stranger in what must have seemed to him a terrifyingly strange land. Our rooms adjoined, and some nights I woke to hear him pacing or mumbling to himself, confronting fears I couldn’t imagine. It seemed to me that he must feel like a man trapped in a dream, aware of the lunacy of it but helpless to break through to a saner reality.

  I tried not to pin my own hopes and fears on him. But I couldn’t help thinking that for all our differences we were more alike than not. I found myself wondering whether he might have crossed paths with Allison Pearl back in the impossibly distant twenty-first century, some chance encounter in a faceless American crowd. Surely if anyone in Vox Core was equipped to understand Allison Pearl, it was Turk. So maybe it wasn’t surprising that on one of those nights when neither of us could sleep I went into his room for comfort. We talked at first, the kind of talk we could have with no one but ourselves, intimacies shared not because of but despite what we knew about each other. “I am the thing most like you in the world,” I said, “and you’re the thing most like me,” at which point it was inevitable that we would go to bed and take some solace there, and in the end I didn’t care what the walls might hear or to whom they might whisper their dangerous secrets.

  2.

  In the morning I toured him through Vox Core, heel to head.

  Of course he couldn’t see all of it, or even more than a representative fraction. Vox Core above ground was the size of a modest twenty-first-century city. Below ground, in the hollow of the island, it was bigger: unravel all those complex spaces onto a two-dimensional grid and it would have been the size of Connecticut or maybe even California. We avoided the damaged zones that were still being decontaminated and rode vertical transit downward. We paused whenever the tube walls allowed a broad perspective, so Turk could see the plazas and terraces and tiers, the wide agricultural levels bathed in artificial daylight, the dormitory complexes set like alabaster chips in forested wildspaces.

  Then I took him to the lowest levels of Vox, the engineering decks. The engines that drove Vox were immense—more a territory than an object—but I showed him reactor units the size of small towns, bathed in an eternal wash of desalinated water; I showed him a shadowy acreage of mu-metal chambers in which magnetic fields directed flows of molten iron; I led him past superconductive field coils around which moisture condensed like snow and was swept away in gales of forced air. Turk was awed, which would play well with the administrators who were no doubt monitoring us. There were ears in the walls even here.

  But there were no ears where I took him next. We rode a transit stem up as far as it would go, then transferred to a smaller transport that slid up the spine of Vox’s tallest tower. Two more transfers and we arrived at the highest accessible public platform in Vox Core, essentially a roof with a view.

  Back when Vox had sailed the oceans of habitable worlds, this platform had not been enclosed. Now an osmotic perimeter had been established—I told Turk it was a “
force field,” a quaint and inaccurate term but one he more or less understood. “It doesn’t seem to be working too well,” he said. “Smells a little like a pig farm out here.”

  I guessed it did. The air was rank and windless, though we could see clouds speeding past aloft, seemingly close enough to touch. I felt sick with vertigo even before we approached the rim. For the first time I almost regretted the loss of my node: missed its calming presence, an invisible anchor. I felt as if a brisk wind would carry me away.

  Vox was moving steadily south by southeast, out of the Indian Ocean and into the South Pacific. The sea here was faintly purple to every horizon, the sky a poisonous shade of ocher. I hated the look of it.

  Turk peered into the misty distance. “The whole world’s like this?”

  I nodded. It was the decline and death of these oceans that had spurred the great Terrestrial exodus, which in turn had fed the bitter rivalries and conflicts of the previously settled Middle Worlds. “And the Hypotheticals did nothing to prevent it. Doesn’t that seem strange? That they would protect the planet from the expanding sun but do nothing to prevent a catastrophic human die-off? Apparently they’re happy with an Earth populated exclusively by bacteria. No one knows why.”

  “Your people expected to find something different.”

  They weren’t my people. But I didn’t correct him. “They expected to enter into direct communion with the Hypotheticals as soon as they arrived on Earth. It’s a religious idea, really. The people who founded Vox were fanatics by any rational measure. The history books won’t tell you so, but it’s true. Vox is a cult. Its beliefs were built into its Network and scripted into its limbic democracy. When you’re Networked all these doctrines feel reasonable, they feel like common sense…”

  “But not to you.”

  Not anymore. “And not to the Farmers. The Farmers are something less than citizens. They were Networked into compliance but not into communion.”

  “They were slaves, in other words.”

  “I suppose you could say that. They were taken as prisoners back in the Middle Worlds, generations ago. They refused to accept full citizenship, so they were modified into cooperation.”

  “Harnessed and put to work.”

  “That’s why they destroyed their nodes as soon as the Network crashed.” Though the survivors—the ones who had stayed in their environmentally sealed farmlands under the out-islands—would have been reyoked by now. The rebels, of course, were all dead. Including Digger Choi, whose life Turk had attempted to save. Saved him for all of half an hour, maybe. If the warplanes hadn’t got him, he would have died choking on the poisonous air.

  Turk pressed up against the security railing that followed the edge of the roof, surveying what had become of the exterior land of Vox. The island was unprotected from the atmosphere and looked as if it had entered some grim and final autumn. The forests were dead. Leaves were brown and scattered, fruit rotted. Even the limbs of the trees looked leprous and fragile. The wind of passage was dismantling the woodlands branch by branch.

  “Vox,” I said, “I mean the collective Vox, limbic Vox, considered itself redeemed when we managed to pass through the Arch. But you’re right, what they found isn’t what they expected, and disappointment is setting in. That’s what we need to talk about, up here where no one can hear us. We need to make a plan.”

  He stood a moment gazing over the ruined lands. Then he said, “How bad do you expect it to get?”

  “Assuming Vox fails to find a door into Paradise down in Antarctica, it could get—well, really bad. The idea of merging Vox with the Hypotheticals is a foundational faith. It’s the reason Vox exists. It’s the promise we were all given at birth, along with our nodes. No dissent from it has ever been possible, nor would it have been tolerated. But now—”

  “You’re up against an awkward truth.”

  “ They are. I’m not one of them anymore.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Sailing to Antarctica is an act of desperation, and it’s only postponing the inevitable.”

  “Okay, so reality sets in sooner or later—then what? Chaos, anarchy, blood in the streets?”

  I was Voxish enough to feel a trace of shame at the answer to that question. “There have been other limbic cult communities in the past, and when they fail… well, it’s ugly. Fear and frustration are amplified by the Network to the point of self-destruction. People turn on their neighbors, their families, ultimately themselves.” There was no one to hear us, but I lowered my voice. “Social breakdown, maybe communal suicide. Eventually starvation when the food supply fails. And no one can opt out. You can’t just reconfigure the prophecies or choose to believe something else—the contradiction is built into the Coryphaeus.”

  I had seen hints of it even today, as we traveled through the city—a general sullenness too subtle for Turk to pick up on but plain enough to me, like the sound of thunder on a rising wind.

  “And there’s no way to protect ourselves?”

  “Not if we stay here, no.”

  “And nowhere to go even if we had a way out. Christ, Allison.” He couldn’t stop staring at the mottled horizon, the rotting forest. “This was a pretty nice planet, once upon a time.”

  I stood closer to him, because we had come to the heart of the matter. “Listen. There are aircraft on Vox that can fly from pole to pole without refueling. And because you’re Uptaken, the Arch is still open to us. We can leave. If we’re careful and lucky, we can get ourselves back to Equatoria.”

  And in Equatoria we could surrender to Vox’s ancient enemies, the people who had nuked Vox Core in an attempt to prevent us from provoking the Hypotheticals. The cortical democracies despised and feared Vox, but they wouldn’t refuse to accept a pair of earnest refugees—I hoped. They might even help us make our way from Equatoria to one of the pleasanter Middle Worlds, where we could live out our lives in peace.

  Turk was giving me a hard look. “You can fly one of these vehicles?”

  “No,” I said. “But you can.”

  * * *

  I told him all of it then. I told him the plan I’d worked out in the long nights when I couldn’t sleep, nights when Treya’s loneliness threatened to shut down Allison’s defiance, nights when it was almost impossible to find a space between those two borders of self, impossible even to name myself with any real conviction. The plan was practical, I believed, or might be. But it required a sacrifice Turk might not be willing to make.

  When he understood what I was asking, he didn’t give me an answer. He said he’d have to think about it. I accepted that. I said we could come up here in a few days and talk about it again.

  “In the meantime,” he said, “there’s something else I need to do.”

  “What?”

  “I want to see the other survivor,” he said. “I want to see Isaac Dvali.”

  Chapter Nine

  Sandra and Bose

  After she left Bose’s condo Sandra had to drive to her apartment for fresh clothes, so she was most of an hour late for work. Not that she really cared, under the circumstances. Yesterday, Orrin Mather had been accused of a violent outburst—perhaps, or probably, if what Bose had told her was true, because Congreve or someone above him had been paid (in cash or longevity) to keep Orrin locked up. Sandra tried to contain her anger during the drive, but succeeded only in damping it down to a low simmer.

  She had disliked Arthur Congreve since the day he was appointed supervisor, but it had never occurred to her that he might be as corrupt as he was unpleasant. But she knew Congreve had connections with municipal government—a cousin who was a sitting councilman—and although the street cops at HPD thought he was too stingy with admissions, the chief of police had made approving visits to State not once but twice since Congreve had been installed.

  She parked carelessly and hurried through the metal detector at the building’s entrance. As soon as she was badged up, she walked directly to the isolation wing.

&nbs
p; It looked like any other part of the State Care building. “Isolation” didn’t imply dank, sealed cells, as it might have in a federal prison. The isolation ward was just a little more generously supplied with locks and unbreakable furniture than the open wards, designed to segregate potentially violent patients from less aggressive inmates. Such cases were relatively few: the State system was empowered to deal with chronic homelessness, not outright psychosis. In a sense these were the least troublesome of the patients who passed through the system; they required little debate among the staff and were usually transferred to psychiatric hospitals in short order.

  Whatever else Orrin Mather might be, he wasn’t a psychopath. Sandra would have bet her degree on it. She wanted him out of isolation as soon as possible, and she meant to begin by getting his side of the story.

  It was sheer bad luck that Nurse Wattmore happened to be presiding over the entrance to the locked ward. She should have buzzed Sandra through without comment, but she didn’t. “Sorry, Dr. Cole, but I have my instructions,” and she proceeded to page Congreve while Sandra stood and helplessly fumed. Congreve appeared promptly. His office was only a few doors down the corridor, and he took Sandra by the arm and steered her there.

  He closed the door behind him and folded his arms. His office was at least twenty degrees cooler than the temperature outside—the air-conditioning murmured stoically in its vents—but the air smelled stale and greasy. The empty wrappers of fast-food breakfast items littered his desk. Sandra started to speak, but Congreve held up his hand: “I want you to know, first of all, that I’m really disappointed by the unprofessional behavior you’ve been displaying lately.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. What unprofessional behavior?”