Vortex s-3

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “But all he found was death.”

  I smiled. “Peut-être.”

  She smiled in return, though I think she felt sorry for me.

  * * *

  I said good-bye to Allison and Turk. Allison begged me to take up the offer the ambassador had made and stay here, embodied or not. She wept when I refused, but I was adamant. I didn’t want another incarnation. I hadn’t sought or wanted this one.

  Turk stayed a while after Allison left the room. He said, “I sometimes wonder whether something singled us out for all this—for everything that happened to us. It all seems so strange, doesn’t it? Not like other people’s lives.”

  Not much like, I agreed. But I didn’t think we had been singled out. “It all could have happened countless other ways. There’s nothing special about us.”

  “You think you’ll find something at the end of it? Something that makes it all make sense?”

  “I don’t know.” Peut-être. “We all fall. We all land somewhere.”

  “You have a long trip ahead of you.”

  “It won’t seem long to me. I’m traveling light.”

  “You carry what you carry,” Turk Findley said.

  * * *

  I enclosed the city in its bubble of slowtime and borrowed sunlight for acceleration. Vox Core soared beyond the orbit of the system’s outermost planet, out into the interstellar vacuum and far from Cloud Harbor. From my vantage point this took only a moment. The city’s clocks ticked seconds for centuries.

  I had no destination. Occasional brushes with massive stars skewed my trajectory in unpredictable vectors, a drunkard’s walk through the galaxy. Apart from avoiding obstacles, I did nothing to intervene.

  In the physical body of Isaac Dvali I often wandered the tiers and passageways of Vox Core. The city persisted in its daily rhythms, regulating its atmosphere, tending its empty parks and gardens. On these walks I occasionally passed robotic maintenance machines as they rolled down public passageways, steel monks hurrying to their matins. They resembled people but they lacked moral agency, and I resisted the unreasonable urge to speak to them.

  It was a pointless anachronism to preserve the cycle of day and night, but my mortal body preferred it. Days, I basked in artificial sunlight. Evenings, I read ancient books reproduced from the Voxish archives, or reread the memoirs Turk and Allison had left me.

  Nights, while my body slept, I expanded my sense of self to include all of Vox Core. I modeled the aging galaxy and my place in it. I tapped trickles of information from the ever more complex skein of the Hypothetical ecology. Stars that had been young only moments ago exhausted their nuclear fuel and decayed into simmering embers: brown dwarfs, neutron stars, singularities in their bottomless graves. Compared to the passage of time in the exterior universe, my consciousness was vast and slow. This would have been the true viewpoint of the Hypotheticals, I imagined, had the Hypotheticals possessed a unitary consciousness.

  Signals propagating at the speed of light passed between stars as quickly as one neuron communicated with the next in Isaac Dvali’s mortal brain. I began to become aware of the galaxy as a whole form, not just a collation of stellar oases separated by light-years of emptiness. Hypothetical networks ran through it like fungal hyphae through a rotten tree. In my night vision I saw this activity as threads of multicolored light, revealing a complex and otherwise invisible galactic structure. Thriving world-rings stood out like the closed chains of carbon atoms in an organic molecule. Ancient, dead rings shimmered like pale ghosts as the Hypothetical machines associated with them died for lack of resources or scattered to nearby stellar nurseries.

  The living galaxy pulsed with exhaustion and renewal. New technologies and energy sources were discovered, exploited, shared.

  And as the universe aged and expanded, other galaxies, already immensely distant, fled toward the limits of perceptibility. But even these faint, far structures had begun to reveal a hidden life of their own, emissions of stray signals suggesting they had evolved their own Hypothetical-like networks. They sang like unintelligible voices in the darkness, fading.

  * * *

  It was inevitable that I would have to abandon my mortal body and live exclusively in the processors of the Coryphaeus and in the cloud of Hypothetical nanotechnology surrounding Vox Core. But I still wanted to be able to move about the city in a physical way. So—as I allowed the body of Isaac Dvali to lie in a self-induced coma, dying of starvation—I fashioned a more durable substitute, a robotic body equipped with equivalent senses, in which I could instantiate my consciousness. When this project was complete I gathered the remains of my organic self in my inorganic arms and carried the corpse to a recycling station, feeding its useful proteins into the closed biochemical loops of Vox Core. I felt no remorse or grief, and why should I? I was what I had become. The fragile meat in which the message of myself had first traveled to the stars, the old somatic galaxy in its border of skin, I gladly fed to the city’s forests.

  Vox Core wasn’t an entirely self-sufficient system. I was forced to harvest trace elements from stellar nebulae in order to replenish what couldn’t be recycled. Of course, in the long run, Vox Core was as mortal as all baryonic matter, even inside its temporal fortress. It was only a question of time.

  * * *

  I courted the end of all things.

  Vox Core fell into a long elliptical orbit of the galactic core. I began to divide my awareness into saccades, moments of perception separated by long periods of inactivity, so that experiential time passed more quickly, even inside the temporal bubble surrounding Vox Core.

  Entropy—in the form of broken chemical bonds, irreparable system failures, radioactive decay—gnawed at the city’s vitals. Blight and drought decimated the forests and rubble began to obstruct the public walkways. Maintenance robots expired for lack of maintenance. Atmospheric regulators—the city’s lungs—gasped and finally failed. The air of Vox Core would have been toxic, had there been anyone alive to breathe it.

  The quantum processors of the Coryphaeus continued to function, protected by multiple redundancies. But that, too, was only temporary.

  The universe grew colder. The galaxy’s stellar nurseries, the concentrations of dust and gas that gave birth to stars, had grown too thin to be fecund. Old stars guttered and died and were not replaced. The Hypothetical ecology retreated from this encroaching darkness to the galaxy’s dense core, harvesting the gravitational gradients of massive dark holes for energy.

  And something else happened to the Hypothetical ecology as it sheltered in the galaxy’s still-beating heart: its information-processing mechanisms were co-opted and dominated by sentient species seeking to outlive their organic mortality. These rogue virtualities grew, encountered one another, and in some cases merged. (The human species was the source of one such sentient bloom, though its virtual descendents could hardly be called “human” in the classic sense.) Pools of post-mortal sentience began to cooperate in a collective decision-making process—a kind of cortical democracy, on a scale of light-years. The dying galaxy began to generate unitary thought.

  None of these thoughts could be rendered in conventional language, though my larger self understood them, at least approximately.

  I took a last walk in my robotic body through the ruins of Vox Core, its towers fractured and askew, its vast tiers dark or tremblingly half-lit. Vox had sailed the seas of several worlds, and was sailing now on the largest sea of all, but soon I would have to abandon it. I had already begun relocating my memories and identity to the cloud of Hypothetical nanodevices, which was linked in turn to the remaining Hypothetical networks, all powered by the dynamos of ancient singularities.

  And even that last redoubt of order and meaning was doomed. Soon enough, the same phantom energy that had inflated the universe would unravel matter itself, leaving nothing but a dust of unbound subatomic particles. Then, I thought, the darkness would be absolute. And I could sleep.

  But for now, Vox Core sailed on. V
acuum invaded its faltering defenses. Empty, it succumbed to emptiness. In the absence of induced gravity, its contents began to spill through breached walls into space.

  Beyond it, outside of it, my somatic boundaries expanded disconcertingly.

  * * *

  The Hypothetical network grew denser and more complex as its virtual polities applied immense calculating power to the problem of survival. Gravitational anomalies suggested the existence of megastructures larger than the event horizon of the universe itself—shallow gradients of ghostly energy that might serve as a medium to carry organized intelligence out of the entropic desert. But how, and at what cost?

  I didn’t participate in these debates. My own consciousness, though now totally incorporeal, was too limited to fully comprehend them. In any case the arguments could never have been rendered in words—the preamble to a single thought would have required thousands of volumes, a legion of interpreters, a vocabulary that had never existed.

  The three-dimensional macrostructure of the universe began its ultimate collapse. Collapsing, it revealed new horizons. Hidden dimensions of space-time unfurled as new particles and forces crystallized from quantum foam. The ultimate darkness I had hoped for never arrived. The entity that had been the Hypothetical network—to which I was inextricably bound—expanded suddenly and exponentially.

  But I can’t describe the realm we entered. We were forced to invent new senses to perceive it, new modes of thought to comprehend it.

  We emerged into a vast fractal space of many dimensions and discovered we were not alone there. Multidimensional structures hosted entities that had subsumed the four-dimensional space-time that once contained us. As old as we were, these entities were older. As large as we had become, they were larger. We passed among them unnoticed or ignored.

  From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states—the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. “Reality”—history as we had known or inferred it—was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.

  * * *

  Putting a message in a bottle and setting it adrift is a quixotic act, sublimely human. What would you write, if you wanted to write such a message? An equation? A confession? A poem?

  This is my confession. This is my poem.

  Deep in that cloud of unlived histories were unlived lives, infinitesimally small, buried in eons of time and light-centuries of space, unreal only because they had never been enacted or observed. I understood that it was within my power to touch them and thus to realize them. What followed, if I made such an intervention, would be a new and unpredictable tributary of time: not obliterating the old history but lying alongside it. The price would be my own awareness.

  I could never enter that four-dimensional space-time. Any intervention I made would create a new history from that point forward… at the expense of my continued existence.

  * * *

  What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.

  I wished I could say these things to Turk Findley.

  I could have intervened in my own potential history, but I felt no urge or need to do so. I wanted my last act to be a gift, even if I couldn’t calculate its ultimate consequences.

  * * *

  Deep in the mirrored corridor of unenacted events, in a motel room on the outskirts of Raleigh, North Carolina, a woman performs a sexual act in exchange for a brown plastic vial containing what she believes to be a gram of methamphetamine. Her partner is an unemployed pneumatic drill operator on his way to California, where he has been offered a job in his cousin’s construction business. He doesn’t wear a condom when he penetrates the woman, and he drives away shortly after the act is consummated. The taste of meth he gave her when he rented the room was authentic, but the vial he leaves on the dresser contains only powdered sugar.

  Orrin Mather’s existence is compromised from the moment of his inglorious conception. His anorexic mother delivers him prematurely. His infant body suffers the agonies of drug withdrawal. He survives, but his mother’s malnutrition and multiple addictions have taken a toll. Orrin will never be able to make and enact plans as easily as others do. He will often be surprised—usually unpleasantly—by the consequences of his actions.

  I cannot make him a more perfect human being. That isn’t within my power. All I can give him are words. And by writing these words into the cerebellum of a child, I dissolve myself and make a shadow world real.

  He lies sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a rented trailer home. His sister Ariel sits on a plastic chair a few feet away, eating cereal without milk from a chipped bowl, watching television with the sound turned down. Orrin dreams he is walking on a beach, though he has only seen beaches in movies. In his dream he sees something rolling in the surf—a bottle, its green glass faded by years of sunlight and salt water. He picks it up. The bottle is tightly sealed, but it opens, somehow, at his touch.

  Papers tumble out and unfold themselves in his hand. Orrin hasn’t yet learned to read, but, magically, he can read these words. He reads them all, page after page. What he reads here, he will never forget.

  My name is Turk Findley, he reads.

  And: My name is Allison Pearl.

  And: My name is Isaac Dvali.

  * * *

  My name is Isaac Dvali and

  * * *

  I can’t write this anymore.

  * * *

  My name is Orrin Mather. That’s what my name is.

  * * *

  My name is Orrin Mather, and I work in a greenhouse in Laramie, Wyoming.

  In the greenhouse at this nursery where I work, there are paths between the plants and the seedling tables. That’s so you can get from one place to another. Also so you can work on the plants without stepping on them. Those paths all connect with one another. You can go this way or you can go that. It all has the same beginning and the same ending. Though you can only ever stand in one place at once.

  I believe I was born with these dreams or memories about Turk Findley and Allison Pearl and Isaac Dvali. They troubled me much when I was younger. They came to me like visions. They blew through me like a wind, as my sister Ariel liked to say.

  That’s why I went to Houston on the bus so suddenly. That’s why I wrote down my dreams in my notebooks.

  Things in Houston didn’t happen the way I expected. (As you know, Dr. Cole, and I expect you’ll be the only one to read these pages… unless you show them to Officer Bose, which is all right with me if you do so.) I suppose I took a different path from how I dreamed it. I never robbed any stores, for instance. I guess I could have. God knows I was hungry and angry enough from time to time. But whenever I felt like hurting someone I thought about Turk Findley and the burning man (which was me!), and how terrible it would be to carry around the weight of another man’s death.

  I work in the greenhouse mainly at night but they keep the big lights on all the time. It’s like a house where it’s always noon on a sunny day. I like the wetness in the air and the smell of growing things, even the sharp smell of the chemical fertilizer. Do you remember those flowers outside my room at State Care, Dr. Cole? Bird of paradise you said they were called. They look like one thing but they’re really another. But they didn’t choose to look like that. They’re just what time and nature made of them.

  We don’t grow that kind of flower in the greenhouse where I work. But I remember how pretty they were. They really do look like birds, don’t they?

  * * *

  I don’t believe I will write to you again, Dr. Cole. Please don’t take that
the wrong way. It’s only that I want to put these troublesome things behind me.

  The people Officer Bose introduced me to have been real kind. They found me this job, and a place for Ariel and me to live. They are good people, even if what they do is outside of the law. They are not criminals exactly. They just think they can invent a better way of living.

  Maybe they will succeed at their work. If they do then maybe the world won’t turn barren and poisonous, like in the dreams I wrote down. I hope that is the case.

  I don’t know, of course. But you can trust these people, Dr. Cole.

  And I know you trust Officer Bose. He helped me when he didn’t have to. He’s a good man, I believe.

  I thank him, and I thank you for the same reason.

  Well, that is all I have to say. I have to go to work pretty soon.

  Don’t expect to hear from me again.

  Ariel sends her kind regards, and asks me to tell you that Houston is too damn hot.

  Orrin Mather

  Laramie, Wyoming

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book couldn’t have been written without the help and patience of friends and family members too numerous to mention; needless to say, I thank them all. Thanks also to Glenn Harper, who generously answered a technical question (about the relative size of a human being vis-à-vis the Planck length and the limits of the observable universe)—the answer didn’t make it into the final text of Vortex, at least not explicitly, but it helped clarify my thinking about the nature of “the Hypotheticals” and their intervention in human history. On the subject of oceanic eutrophication and the fate of the Earth, I drew on Under a Green Sky and The Medea Hypothesis, by the reliably pessimistic Peter Ward, and I commend both books to the attention of curious readers.