Vortex

1.

I waited for Turk among the aircraft on the docking level high above the city.

I had taken a twisty route to get here, up the quiet starboard terraces and along the shaded parkland corridors Treya had loved as a child. Every garden and gateway along the way was freighted with memory (her memory). It was hard not to grieve. Vox was dying and there was nothing I could do about it—nothing I could do for lost friends or the family that had ostracized me or the city I had once loved. Nothing except carry my memories and misgivings to a safer place, worlds away.

The aircraft bay was an open terrace, protected from the toxic atmosphere by an electrostatic roof. Voxish aircraft were aligned across this vast flat acreage as if they had been planted there, silvery crops in a mechanical garden. The maintenance and flight crews had all gone home to be with their families. My footsteps sounded like water dripping in a vacant room.

I found an inconspicuous place at the base of a light tower and sat down and waited. An uncomfortable amount of time passed. I began to think Turk might not show up. That he might have been prevented from showing up. That he might have chosen not to show up. The node had finally infiltrated the parts of his brain that governed love, loyalty, needs, and desires, and with every passing moment the neural webwork grew more subtle and efficient. The Coryphaeus was singing a soft, sweet refrain in the echo chamber of his medial prefrontal cortex.

What if he didn’t come? But it was an easy question to answer: I would die here. In all likelihood the Hypothetical machines would dismantle and consume Vox Core the way they had dismantled and consumed the vanguard expedition out on the Antarctic plain, and that would be the end of it. I felt an uncontrollable upwelling of fear. Not the predictable fear of dying but the special and very Voxish fear of dying alone …

Then I heard a door slide open in one of the transport pods some distance away. I hid myself and waited until I was sure it was Turk. He walked out of the vertical transport stiffly, maybe reluctantly. His expression was hollow and haggard. I called his name and ran to him.

Because Vox was a peaceful and crime-free community it had little use for internal security beyond the routine vigilance of the Network. But for much of its history Vox had been at war with external powers, chiefly the bionormative communities of the Middle and Elder Worlds. Our aircraft were weapons of war, and they were secured as weapons of war.

I chose us a large but lightly armed craft of the kind used to transport weapons or troops. The entry hatch was a Network-enabled interface like the ones Turk had lately taught himself to use. When I was Treya I could have opened it effortlessly just by putting my hand against the control surface and working the options in my head. But I had lost that ability when I lost my node. As Allison, I was locked out of all but the simplest Voxish appliances and applications. The problem was that Turk was a novice, and he was obviously having a hard time focusing his intentions. He may, at this point, have been uncertain about what he really wanted. A long breathless moment passed; then the hatch slid open.

We stepped into the vehicle as the interior lights winked on. I quickly checked to see that the aircraft had its full complement of supplies, including food and water to last us through the Arch to Equatoria. The stasis lockers were stocked and complete. There were no warning lights or sounds, which meant we were good to go. Turk took a seat in the forward compartment of the aircraft. It was possible to fly the vehicle from any of its control surfaces, and you didn’t need visuals to know where you were going. But Turk had been a pilot in his past life, flying by eye and hand. The first thing he did after he established an interface was to create a window display in the front wall, as if he were sitting in an old-fashioned cockpit. Suddenly I could see the wide expanse of the hangar deck in front of us—it made me feel defenseless; I would have preferred a blank wall.

But if it helped Turk, so be it. I took a seat beside him and watched the deck for any sign that we’d been noticed. Which came immediately. Yellow lights blinked on over the transit pods. Company was coming. I was surprised it hadn’t come sooner, but that might have been Isaac running interference for us. “We have to leave,” I said, “now.” The ship’s controls couldn’t be overridden from outside the vehicle… at least I didn’t think so; but if a second vehicle came after us we could theoretically be intercepted or shot down.

The aircraft didn’t move. “Having a hard time keeping the menu in front of me,” Turk whispered, visualizing a display I couldn’t see. Sweat beaded on his forehead.

“It’s just like the training interfaces. All we need is to go up.”

Outside, the nearest transit pod slid open and disgorged a company of soldiers.

“Now, Turk. Or else we stay.”

He gave me a helpless look.

I said, “I don’t want to die here.”

He nodded. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. Abruptly, the deck fell away beneath us.

2.

Our aircraft pushed through the electrostatic barrier into murky daylight.

Suddenly Vox was a dark patch on the surface of the Ross Sea far below us, the scuttled islands of the Farmers surrounding it like a sunken reef. We rose at a vertiginous speed until the sea was lost in mist, rose until we soared above a deck of clouds that ran to every horizon.

Turk confirmed our destination with the aircraft’s onboard protocols and managed to lock out any signals coming from Vox. Which also isolated his node from the activity of the Coryphaeus—he shuddered once, then shook his head as if to clear it. He instructed the vehicle to alert us in the event of pursuit (there was none, probably thanks to Isaac) and sat back, drained and pale, from the control surfaces. The clouds below us looked as forbidding as a range of wild mountains.

He looked at me with his eyes narrowed. I remembered that feeling—the way Treya had felt when the Network shut down, as if all the color and sense had been drained from the world. “Promise me something,” he said.

“What?”

“The thing they attached to my spine—once we get where we’re going, promise you’ll cut it out of me.”

Solemnly, I promised I would.

Once we get where we’re going. We hadn’t been able to talk much about that.

Back at Vox Core I had spent a lot of time viewing material from the Voxish archives (using only manual interfaces, a slow and frustrating process) and reading the histories that had been prepared for Turk. Vox had been persecuted for centuries by jealous cortical democracies, or so I had been taught. But without the cheerleading of the Coryphaeus, those familiar stories seemed ambiguous and even disturbing. The founders of Vox had been the activist wing of a radical belief system, ostracized by the bionormative majorities of the Middle Worlds for their experiments with banned Hypothetical biotechnology. In response the founders had chosen to create their own closed polity, a limbic democracy with a built-in metaphysics.

Vox must have seemed, at least at first, just a slightly more eccentric example of the many artificial island communities that grew and thrived in the oceans of Ester, a watery Middle World. The founders had abandoned experiments with Hypothetical biotech in favor of their belief in an eventual human-Hypothetical union, which was why they made saints of everyone who had ever been touched by the Hypotheticals—beginning with Jason Lawton at the dawn of the Spin era and including countless longevity cultists, ancient Martian Fourths, and the reckless or unlucky souls who had been taken up by temporal Arches.

The bionormative majority was the recurring villain in Voxish history. Ester had banned limbic neural collectives soon after the tragedies of Hyum and Loi, and Vox had been forced to raise anchor and set off on its centuries-long pilgrimage to Old Earth. But today, on most planets up the Ring—Ester and Cloud Harbor, especially—the cortical democracies were still thriving. Once we get where we’re going meant, in the long term, one of those prosperous, peaceful Middle Worlds.

I thought about that after sunset, as we traveled north. Turk ate listlessly, alternating his gaze between the barren moon above and the toxic clouds below. His mind had wandered to old griefs. He said, “We fucked up this planet pretty good, didn’t we?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘we.’”

“People in general. I guess, my generation in particular.”

The view from the forward cabin was ample testimony to human failure. The clouds were oddly beautiful, but the moonlight that reflected from them was tinted a poisonous green. “Maybe so,” I said. “But that’s not the end of the story. What was the population of Earth when you left it? Six, seven billion people?”

“Something like that.”

“But we don’t just live on Earth anymore. We live on all the worlds of the Ring. You know how many people are alive in the Ring of Worlds right now? Almost fifty billion. And that’s not a toxic bloom, like the population on Old Earth. That’s fifty billion people living in a sustainable relationship with their environment—fifty billion reasonably happy human beings. We’re not a failed species. We’re a success story.”

“That’s what Vox was running from? A success story?”

“Well, Vox… Vox wasn’t running away from the Middle Worlds. It was running toward the Hypotheticals.”

“It wasn’t the Hypotheticals who nuked Vox Core.”

“The Middle Worlds aren’t paradise. People are still people—greedy and shortsighted, often enough. But they’ve learned how to make better decisions.”

“By putting wires in their heads?”

His hand stroked the lump at the back of his skull, perhaps unconsciously. “Not exactly,” I said. But it wasn’t the concept of cortical democracy he was struggling with. “Turk—did something happen? After I left you, before you came up to the aircraft docks…”

“No… nothing important.”

I didn’t need to be Networked to know that for a lie. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Not now,” he said. “Maybe when we get where we’re going.”

We were still a couple of hours away from the Indian Ocean when the aircraft’s alarm sounded.

I had been asleep. Turk had insisted on standing watch in the forward compartment—he didn’t trust the ship to pilot itself without supervision—but I was too exhausted to keep him company. So I had crawled into a crew cot and closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the alarm was chiming.

I hurried forward. Turk had already synced himself up with the ship’s interface, and by the frustrated look on his face I could tell he was having trouble working the controls. The wall was still a window; the moon had set; the sky was dark except for the high tip of the Arch, close to zenith now, reflecting a reddish glow that in another couple of hours would be our sunrise.

I put my hand on his shoulder. He looked up and said, “I’ve got a warning display but I don’t know how to read it.”

“Okay. Can you put it into the wall so I can see it too?”

He managed to do that. The display appeared superimposed on the night sky. It was a radar signature with tracking details. Turk said, “It’s seeing something, but I can’t read range or trajectory.”

Were we being chased? But no: the object the ship had detected was high and to the northeast. I said, “The ship pinged us because there shouldn’t be anything in that airspace. Whatever it is, it looks like it’s not on a controlled course. It’s ballistic.”

It was falling, in other words. Probably a natural phenomenon, some piece of ancient debris tumbling out of orbit. But then the alarm chimed and chimed again, and two more targets popped up on the display.

By the end of an hour we had detected five such falling objects, all traveling east to west and roughly parallel to the equator. They were impacting close enough to our charted course that Turk instructed the aircraft to hold and circle until we could figure out what was going on. There was a lull of twenty minutes or so, then the alarm chimed yet again. According to the vector display it had detected an even bigger target this time, maybe big enough to be visible to the naked eye. Turk instructed the ship to aim its window at the appropriate quadrant of the sky.

We looked out into darkness, a few stars beginning to dim behind the first light of the dawn. “There,” Turk said.

The object streaked across the horizon a couple of degrees above the cloud deck. It was as bright as burning phosphorous and it left a luminous trail that quickly faded. The glare of it tracked across the cloudscape and made hectic, moving shadows. Once it had passed out of sight darkness fell again, but only briefly. The next burst of light came from beyond the horizon. That was the impact.

“Ask the ship to calculate its trajectory backward,” I said. “See where it came from.”

Easier said than done, with only a rough estimate of the object’s size and mass to work with. But the ship calculated a cone of possible trajectories and matched it against the other objects it had monitored, then superimposed the likely paths. The result was inconclusive, but Turk saw what I saw: the most likely trajectories all intersected at the Arch of the Hypotheticals.

“What’s that mean?” Turk asked.

I didn’t know. But the sun was coming up and the nearest leg of the Arch would soon be visible from where we hovered. Turk aimed the window so we could see it.

The Arch of the Hypotheticals had been and would forever be the largest artificial structure ever to contact the surface of the Earth. Its apex was higher than the atmosphere and the base of it was embedded deep in the planet’s mantle. It straddled the Indian Ocean like a wedding band dropped edge-up into a shallow pond. The fraction of it we could see from where we circled above the clouds looked like a silver thread laced into the yellow fabric of the dawn. “Focus on the peak of it,” I told Turk, “and amplify the image.”

He struggled with the interface but eventually succeeded. Because he had configured the display as a window, we seemed to zoom suddenly and dangerously close to the upper reaches of the Arch. The image wavered, distorted by the intervening atmosphere; then the one-dimensional thread acquired width and became a ribbon. In reality it was many miles wide.

The most detailed telescopic images of the Arch, beginning back in Turk’s day, had never revealed even the slightest imperfection in its surface. Until now. Now the ribbon was visibly flawed. The smoothly curving edge of it was ragged and sawtoothed. “Amplify it another times-ten,” I said, though we were approaching the limits of the aircraft’s optical functions.

Another vertiginous leap forward. The image writhed and twisted until the ship applied corrective algorithms.

And I gasped. The Arch was worse than merely imperfect. Visible cracks ran across it. There were gaps where immense pieces of it had calved away.

That was what had been coming out the sky: pieces of the Arch the size of small islands, some of them moving at only a little less than orbital velocity, burning on re-entry and spending their enormous kinetic energy in the Earth’s dead oceans or on its lifeless continents.

It should have been impossible. But it happened again as we watched. A dark crack widened and expanded and intersected another, and suddenly a piece of the Arch separated and began to fall. It moved with the elephantine grace of its own inertia, and I guessed it might circle the planet a couple more times before it began its final burn and tumble.

I looked at Turk, he looked at me. We didn’t have to say anything. We both knew what it meant. It meant the door to Equatoria had been closed forever. It meant our plan had failed. It meant we had nowhere to go.