Spin

by Wilson, Robert Charles Charles

  The primary source was a woman named Allison Pearl. Allison Pearl had been born in Champlain, New York, at the end of the Spin. Her diary had survived as an historical document, and the Network had synthesized Treya’s impersona from those diary entries. “When I need an English word I get it from Allison. She loved words. She loved writing them. Words like ‘orange,’ the fruit. A fruit I’ve never seen or tasted. Allison loved oranges. What I have from her is the word and the concept, the roundness and brightness and the color of an orange, though not the taste… But memories like that are dangerous. They have to be held within boundaries. Without the Network to keep her contained, Allison’s personality is beginning to metastasize. I reach for my memories and I come up with hers. And that can’t go on. The drugs, the drugs help, but only temporarily…”

  Treya said all that and more. Insofar as I understood it, I believed she was telling the truth. I believed her because her voice had taken on an American twang, colored with phrases that might have been lifted directly from Allison Pearl’s diary. Which explained the song she had been humming, her fits of absent-mindedness, the way she cocked her head now and then as if she were listening to a voice I couldn’t hear.

  “I know these memories aren’t real—they’re made of Network inferences and collations of ancient data—but even talking about it this way feels strange, as if—”

  “As if what?”

  She turned and stared at me. Probably she hadn’t realized she was talking out loud. I shouldn’t have interrupted her.

  “As if I don’t belong here. As if I this is all some peculiar future.” She scuffed her heel into the damp earth. “As if I’m a stranger here. Like you.”

  Not long before sunset we reached the edge of the island. Edge, not shore. Here the island’s artificiality was obvious. The forest gave way to a slope of scrub grass and exposed rock that fell away almost vertically, a drop of some few hundred feet to the sea. Across that gap was the next island in the Vox archipelago, separated from this one by a chasm half a mile wide. “Pity there isn’t a bridge,” I said.

  “There is,” Treya said tersely “A sort of bridge. We ought to be able to see it from here.”

  She got down on her belly and scooted to the edge of the cliff, motioning for me to do the same. Heights don’t bother me particularly—I had flown airplanes in the world before this one—but inching over that vertical drop wasn’t the most comfortable thing I had ever done. “Down there,” Treya said, pointing. “Do you see it?”

  The sun was sinking and the chasm was already in shadow. Seabirds nested where centuries of wind and rain had carved hollows in the rock. Far to the left, I could see what she was pointing at. An enclosed tunnel connected this artificial island to the next, though only the far end of it was visible around the curvature of the island’s wall. The tunnel was a salt-rimed shade of black, the same color as the sea below. Vertigo and the odd perspective made it hard to judge its true size, but I guessed you could have put a dozen semi trucks abreast and driven them from one end to the other with room to spare. Even so, there were no spars, ropes, wires or girders supporting it—somehow the structure carried its own weight. I couldn’t help wondering about the physical stress born by the link between these two enormous floating masses, even if the tunnel itself was bearing only a fraction of the load.

  “Ordinarily,” Treya said, “automated freight-carriers pass through the tunnel carrying raw biomass to Vox Core and refined goods back to the farmers. It’s not meant to be crossed on foot, but it’ll have to do.”

  “How do we get inside?”

  “We don’t. We might be able to do that from down in the farmholds, but not from here. We’ll have to cross on the outside.”

  I held that thought for a moment, trying to keep it at a reassuring distance.

  “There are stairs carved into the cliffside,” she added. “You can’t see them from this angle. But they were cut during the construction, so they’re probably badly eroded. It won’t be an easy climb.”

  “The top of the tunnel is a curved surface, and it looks pretty slick.”

  “It may be wider than you think.”

  “Or it may not.”

  “We don’t have a choice.”

  But it was too late to begin the attempt, with only a couple of hours of daylight left.

  We set up a fresh camp back in the forest. I watched Treya take another hit from her drug syringe. I said, “Is that thing bottomless?”

  “It refills itself. It has its own metabolism. It draws a little blood during the injections and uses that as raw material to catalyze active molecules. It runs on body heat and ambient light. For you, it fabricated a drug to suppress anxiety. What it gives me is something different.”

  I had stopped taking doses when she offered them—I had decided to live with my anxiety. “How does it know what to synthesize?”

  She frowned the way she did whenever she tripped over a concept for which her ghostly tutor Allison Pearl didn’t have a ready word. “It samples blood chemistry and makes an educated guess. But no, it isn’t bottomless. It needs to be refreshed, and this one is getting tired.” She added, “If you want to use it, though, that’s all right.”

  “No. What’s it giving you?”

  “A kind of… you could call it a cognitive enhancer. It helps maintain the border between my real and my virtual memories. But it’s only a temporary solution.” She shivered in the firelight. “What I really need is the Network.”

  “This Network is what exactly, some kind of internal wireless interface?”

  “Not exactly what you mean by that, but yes, in a sense. Except that the signals I receive are expressed as biological and neurological regulators. Everybody on Vox wears a node, and we’re all linked by the Network. I don’t know why it hasn’t been repaired. Even if the transponders at Vox Core were destroyed, workers should have been able to restore basic functionality by now. Unless the processors themselves were damaged. But they were built to sustain anything short of a direct hit from a high-yield weapon.”

  “So maybe that’s what happened—a direct hit.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Which means there’s a good chance we’re marching toward a radioactive ruin.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” she said flatly.

  I sat up after she fell asleep, nursing the fire.

  I had learned a long time ago that emergencies operate by their own rules. You do what you have to do, you do what’s possible, and you ignore what you can’t change. New rules now for sure. And my only guide was a drug-popping drone who also happened to be the ghost of a female diarist from Champlain, New York.

  Some of my own recent memories had begun to firm up. Just days ago (as I experienced it) I had been trying to survive a series of earthquakes generated by what Treya called the Temporal Arch as it rose from its dormant state in the Equatorian desert. Now I was here on Vox. You can’t parse events like that. You can only endure them.

  I let the fire burn down to a glow of embers. The Arch of the Hypotheticals glimmered overhead, an ironic smile among the stars, and the rush of the sea was amplified by the echo of the nearby cliffs. I wondered who had nuked Vox Core, and why had they done it, and whether their reasons were as superficial as Treya had suggested. Sooner or later I might have to choose sides.

  Maybe Allison Pearl, the Champlain Ghost, hadn’t taken sides either. Maybe that was what Treya found so disconcerting about all this: Allison and I were both shades of an ancient past, both potentially disloyal to Vox Core.

  6.

  We broke camp at dawn and followed the cliffside until we came to what Treya had called “stairs,” broad declivities cut into the face of the granite. Time had bevelled the steps into sloping ledges separated giddy ten-foot drops. Every surface was slick with moss and bird dung, and the deeper we descended the louder the roar of the ocean became. Eventually the twin cliffs of the adjoining islands closed off most of the sky above us, excluding all but a few slanting ray
s of sunlight. We made slow progress, and twice we paused while Treya took hits from her high-tech syringe. Her expression was grim and, under that, terrified.

  By the angle of the light I guessed it was noon or later when I helped her down the last vertical gap to the roof of the tunnel itself. The tunnel enclosure was broader than it had seemed from above and we were able to stand on it safely enough, though it was unnerving to walk on a surface that rounded away on both sides to a sheer drop. It was maybe a half mile to the opposite anchor point, now concealed by mist, where we would have to do another round of serious climbing, with any luck before dark. Darkness would come fast down here.

  For the sake of distraction I asked Treya what she (or Allison Pearl) remembered about Champlain.

  “I’m not sure it’s safe to answer that question.”

  “Never mind, then.”

  She sighed. “Champlain. Cold winters. Hot summers. Swimming in the lake over at Catfish Point. My family was broke most of the time. Those were the years after the Spin, when everybody was talking about how the Hypotheticals might actually be benevolent, protecting us. But I never believed that. Walking down those Champlain sidewalks, you know the way concrete glitters in the summer sun? I couldn’t have been more than ten years old but I remember thinking that was how we must look to the Hypotheticals—not just us but our whole planet, just a glimmer underfoot, something you notice and then forget.”

  “That’s not how Treya talks about the Hypotheticals.”

  She gave me an angry look. “I am Treya.” She walked a few paces more. “Allison was wrong. The Hypotheticals—they’re gods by any reasonable definition, but they’re not indifferent.” She stopped and squinted at me, wiping salt mist from her eyes. “You ought to know that!”

  Maybe so. Soon we reached the midpoint of the transit, where the wind came roaring between the chasm walls in a focused gale and we had to crawl on our hands and knees like ants clinging to a rainy clothesline. Conversation was impossible. Intermittent vibrations came through the palms of my hands from the tunnel, as of metal groaning under incalculable stress. I wondered what it would take to tear this damaged archipelago apart—another nuclear attack? Or something as simple as a high sea and a strong wind, given what had already happened? I pictured cables the size of subway trains snapping and lashing, island-ships like battered piñatas spilling their contents into the sea. It wasn’t a reassuring thought. If not for Treya I might have turned back. But if not for Treya I wouldn’t have been here in the first place.

  Finally we came into the shadow of the opposing cliff wall, where the wind eased to a low moan and we could stand upright once again. The stairs that had been cut into the granite cliff were identical to those across the gorge: eroded and mossy, steep and stinking of the sea. We had climbed about a dozen of them when Treya gasped and came to a dead halt

  The ledge above us was full of people.

  They must have seen us coming, must have hidden until they were ready to show themselves. It didn’t look like a welcoming committee.

  “Farmers,” Treya whispered.

  There were thirty or so of them, male and female, all staring at us with grim expressions. Many of them carried implements that might have been weapons. Treya cast a quick look back at the bridge we had just crossed. But it was too late and too dark to run. We were outnumbered and effectively cornered.

  She reached for my hand and took it. Her skin was cold. I felt the beat of her pulse.

  “Let me talk to them,” she said.

  I boosted her up the next ledge and she pulled me after and then we were level with the crowd. The farmers surrounded us. Treya held out her hands in a conciliatory gesture. Then the head man stepped up.

  At least I guessed he was the head man. He wasn’t wearing any insignia to mark his rank, but no one questioned his authority. He carried a metallic rod the length of a walking stick, tapered at the end to a fine point.

  Before he could open his mouth Treya said something in her native language. The head man listened impatiently. He was a big man: he had a couple of inches over me. In English Treya whispered, “I told him you’re one of the Uptaken. If that matters to him at all—”

  But it didn’t. He barked a few words at Treya. She said something hesitant in return. He barked again. She bowed her head and trembled.

  “Whatever happens,” she whispered, “don’t interfere.”

  The head man put his hands on her shoulders. He pushed her down to the slick surface of the granite tier. She sprawled onto her stomach. Her left cheekbone grazed the rock and began to bleed. She closed her eyes in pain.

  I had been in my share of fights. I was never a particularly good fighter. But I couldn’t stand passively and watch. I lunged at the farmer. Before I could reach him his friends had their hands on me, pulling me back. They forced me to my knees.

  The boss farmer put his foot in the small of Treya’s back, holding her down. Then he raised his weapon and slowly lowered it. The sharp end touched a knob of Treya’s spine just below the neck. Her body stiffened at the pressure of it.

  The farmer drove the point down hard.