Vortex

1.

You want to know what it was like, what happened to Vox and afterward?

Well, here it is.

Something to leave behind, you might say.

Something for the wind and the stars to read.

2.

I was born to the name Treya and a five-syllable suffix I won’t repeat here, but it might be better to think of me as Allison Pearl Mark II. I had a ten-year gestation, a painful eight-day labor, and a traumatic birth. From my first full day of life I knew I was a fraud, and I knew just as truly that I had no choice in the matter.

I was born seven days before Vox was due to cross the Arch to ancient Earth. I was born into the custody of rebel Farmers, born with my own blood weeping down my back. By the time I remembered how to speak the blood had mostly dried.

The Farmers had crushed and carved out of my body and subsequently destroyed my personal limbic implant, my Network interface, my node. Because the node had been attached to my spine at the third vertebra almost since birth, the pain was intense. I woke up from the trauma with waves of agony sparking up my neck and into my skull, but the worst part was what I didn’t feel, which was the rest of my body. I was numb from the shoulders down—numb, helpless, hurt and frightened beyond thought. Eventually the Farmers poked me with some kind of crude anesthetic from their primitive pharmacopoeia… not out of kindness, I suspect, but simply because they were tired of hearing me scream.

The next time I came to myself my body was tingling and itching unbearably, but that was okay because it meant I was recovering my physical functions. Even without the node, my augmented body systems were busy splicing damaged nerves and repairing bone. Which meant I would eventually be able to sit up, stand up, even walk. So I began to take a greater interest in my surroundings.

I was in the back of a cart, lying on a sort of bed of dried vegetable matter. The cart was moving along at a brisk pace. The walls of the cart were too high to see over, but it was open to daylight. I could see the cloud-flecked sky and the occasional treetop swaying past. There was no way of knowing how much time had passed since I was captured, and that was the question that preyed on my mind above all others. How close were we to Vox Core, and how close was Vox to the Arch of the Hypotheticals?

My mouth was dry but my voice worked well enough. “Hey!” I called out a couple of times before I realized I was speaking English. So I switched to Voxish: “Vech-e! Vech-e mi!”

All that yelling was painful, and I shut up when I realized nobody was paying attention.

It was dusk when the cart finally jostled to a stop. The first stars were coming out. The sky was a shade of blue that reminded me of the stained glass in the church back in Champlain. I’m not a big fan of churches but I always liked stained glass, the way it looked when the Sunday morning sun lit it up. I could hear the sound of Farmer voices. Farmers speak Voxish with an accent, as if they all went around carrying stones in their mouths. I could smell their cooking, which was torture because I hadn’t been given anything to eat.

Eventually a face appeared above the side of the cart. It was a man’s face. His skin was dark and wrinkly, but that was true of all the Farmers. He was bald except for his bushy eyebrows. His eyes were yellow around the iris and he looked at me with undisguised distaste.

“You,” he said. “Can you sit up?”

“I need to eat.”

“If you can sit up you can eat.”

I spent the next few minutes forcing my still-unwieldy body into a sitting position. The Farmer didn’t offer to help. He watched me with a kind of clinical disinterest. When I finally had my back braced against the wall of the cart, I said, “I did what you wanted. Please feed me.”

He glowered and went away. I didn’t really expect to see him again. But he came back with a bowl of something green and glutinous, which he put down next to me. “If you can use your hands,” he said, “it’s yours.”

He turned away.

“Wait!”

He sighed and looked back. “Well?”

“Tell me your name.”

“Why, what does it matter?”

“It doesn’t matter. I just want to know.”

He said his name was Choi. He said his family was Digger, Level Three, Harvest Quarter. In my head I translated it into English as Digger Choi.

“And you’re Treya, Worker, Outrider Therapeutics.” Sneering at the Core honorifics.

I heard myself say, “My name is Allison Pearl.”

“We read your internal tags. You can’t lie.”

“Allison,” I insisted. “Pearl.”

“Call yourself whatever you want.”

I put my disobedient hand into the bowl of food and cupped it to my mouth. It was a globby green muck that tasted like mown grass, and I lost about half of every handful, but my body accepted it hungrily. Digger Choi stuck around until I was finished, then took the bowl. I was still hungry. Digger Choi refused my request for seconds.

“Is this how you treat your prisoners?”

“We don’t take prisoners.”

“What am I, then?”

“A hostage.”

“You think I’m that valuable?”

“You might be. If not, it will be simple enough to kill you.”

Because I could move my body again, the Farmers took the precaution of tying my arms behind me. They left me like that all night—in some ways it was worse that being paralyzed. And in the morning they pulled me out of the cart and frog-marched me to another one, identical in all ways except that it contained Turk Findley.

During the transfer I was able to survey the Farmers’ encampment. We had reached the island that contained Vox Core, but here at the periphery it still looked like an out-island—an uncultivated wilderness. Locally, all the fruit-bearing trees had been stripped to feed the marching Farmers.

There were a lot of them. An army of them. I estimated maybe a thousand warm bodies in this meadow alone, and I could see the smoke from other encampments. The Farmers were armed with makeshift blades and machine parts filched from harvesters and threshing machines… weapons that would have been laughable in the face of a fully Networked Core militia; but under the present circumstances who could say? The Farmers themselves were all dark and wrinkled, descendents of the long-ago Martian diaspora. Digger Choi escorted me through a mob of his Farmer compatriots, who gave me hard looks and shouted a few hard words.

The cart he dragged me to was larger than the one I’d been dumped in. From the outside it was basically a box on two wheels, with long poles out front so an animal or a robot or an able-bodied Farmer could drag it. Simple tech, but not as primitive as it appeared. The Farmers’ carts were made of a smart material that transformed random bounces into forward momentum. They were self-balancing and could adapt to rough terrain. They also made a suitable prison, if your prisoners were securely bound.

Turk was securely bound and so was I. Digger Choi lowered the rear wall of the cart, pushed me inside, and locked the barricade behind me. I rolled up against Turk Findley, whose hands were also tied behind his back, and we spent an awkward moment sorting ourselves out and bracing our legs so we could face each other. Turk was badly bruised—he had put up a serious fight when the Farmers took him. The skin over his left cheekbone was cloudy black, fading to green. His left eye was swollen shut. He looked at me sidelong and with unconcealed astonishment. Probably he had thought I was dead, killed when they tore out my limbic implant.

I wanted to say something reassuring but I wasn’t sure where to start. He remembered me as Treya of Vox Core. And that was true enough: I continued to be Treya, in a sense. But only in a sense.

I had two histories. Treya had described Allison Pearl as the virtual mentor who had acculturated her to twenty-first-century American customs and language. “Allison Pearl” wasn’t real, the way most people use that word. But I was Allison now, fully installed, fully functional; it was Allison who was running the show—I was, as the Managers used to say, psychologically annealed.

And anyway that wasn’t the biggest problem we were facing.

“You’re alive,” he said.

“Obviously.”

He gave me a curious look, probably because it wasn’t the kind of thing Treya would have said.

“I thought they killed you. All that blood.” It had dried to a brown bib on my tunic.

“It wasn’t me they killed, it was my Network interface. The node sits over my spine so it can talk to my brain. The Farmers have implants too, but they must have disabled theirs as soon as the Network failed. They hate the nodes because the nodes keep them docile and useful.”

“So they’re, what, slaves? This is a slave rebellion?”

“No—it’s not as simple as that.” Being Allison Pearl, I held no brief for the social structure of Vox. But I had a powerful secondary memory of Treya’s fierce loyalty. Treya wasn’t a bad person, even if she was a drone. I didn’t want him thinking of her as some kind of slave overseer. “These people’s ancestors were taken captive centuries ago. They were radical bionormatives, part of the Martian diaspora. They refused to be assimilated, so they made a bargain, their lives in exchange for agricultural labor.”

Turk was still giving me uneasy looks—the blood on my clothes, the way I was talking—and I figured it would be best to explain as bluntly as possible. “They cut out my node,” I said. “Treya was a translator, right? For years she accessed Allison Pearl as a secondary personality. She ran me like a junior mind, if you understand what I’m saying. And a lot of her own memories and personality got sourced out to the Network. We were all tangled up, me and Treya, but the node always made sure Treya was the controlling entity. But now the node’s gone and I’m dominant. She must have ceded a whole bunch of neural real estate to me over the last decade. Big mistake, from her point of view, though she could hardly have expected a tribe of insurgent Farmers to cut out her Network interface.”

“Excuse me,” Turk said slowly, “but who am I talking to again?”

“Allison. I’m Allison Pearl now.”

“Allison,” he said. “And Treya’s, what, dead?”

“The Network can still embody her if it wants to. She’s potential, but she’s not incarnate.” Technical terms, crudely translated.

Turk thought this over. “The future seems like a pretty fucked-up place sometimes.”

“If you can just take it on faith that I’m Allison now, maybe we can get on with the business of trying to save ourselves.”

“You know how to do that?”

“The point is, we’ll die unless we get somewhere safe before Vox crosses the Arch.”

“That might not be possible. You saw the sky before dawn? The Arch is at zenith, a straight line across the meridian. That means—”

“I know what it means.” It meant we were dangerously close to the crossing.

“So what’s safe, Allison Pearl, and how do we get there?”

The Farmers had eaten their breakfast and gathered their gear, and now they were ready to resume their march on Vox Core. A couple of men picked up the draw-poles of the cart, which had the effect of rolling us around like peas in a skillet. It made conversation awkward. But I told Turk what he needed to know. He was almost up to speed by the time we caught our first glimpse of the ruins of Vox Core.

3.

Turk was a quick learner, though the ten thousand years he had spent among the Hypotheticals hadn’t taught him much. Well, how could it have? In fact he had never really been “among” them, even though it was conventional to talk about the people who passed through the temporal Arch as if they had been touched by vast hyperintelligent powers. Treya believed he had spent those years in glorious communion with the Hypotheticals, whether he remembered it or not, but now that I was Allison Pearl it sounded like so much quasi-religious BS. If you’ve traveled through any of the Arches that connect the Eight Worlds you’ve been “among the Hypotheticals” to just the same degree as Turk had been. Lots of people even in my day (Allison’s day) crossed the Arch from the Indian Ocean to Equatoria, which meant they had been taken up and carried across the stars by Hypothetical forces. That didn’t make them gods or even godlike—it didn’t make them anything at all, except unusually well traveled. But time is a different dimension, supposedly. Spookier.

There were temporal Arches elsewhere in the Worlds, of course. They’re a common Hypothetical construct. We knew from geological evidence that temporal Arches appeared and disappeared every ten thousand or so years. They were part of some Hypothetical feedback mechanism, storing and dispensing information. But the first temporal Arch to engulf living human beings was the one that had popped up in the Equatorian desert and swallowed, among others, Turk Findley. Which meant it would be the first to disgorge its human cargo… which it had done, precisely on schedule, a couple of weeks ago.

So Turk was one of the first people to exit a temporal Arch alive. But oh, the bullshit that had accrued around that simple fact! It was an article of Voxish faith that the survivors would emerge transformed, conduits between mere humanity and the forces that had engineered the Ring of Worlds. And that those survivors would be able to shepherd us through a dysfunctional Arch back to Old Earth.

Treya had never questioned that dogma, and maybe it was even true, to some degree. But if we did successfully manage the transit to Earth, that was liable to be more a problem than a solution. Because in all likelihood Earth was no longer a habitable planet.

I said some of this to Turk. He asked me whether the people of Vox were entirely sane, believing what they did. I felt the ghost of Treya take offense at the question. “Sane compared to what? Vox has been a functioning community for hundreds of years. It’s survived a lot of battles. It’s a limbic democracy modulated by the Network, and all this stuff about the Hypotheticals and Old Earth is written into the code. Might even be some truth in it, I don’t know.”

“But Vox has enemies,” Turk pointed out, “who went to the trouble of bombing it.”

“They would have finished us by now, if they had anything left to throw.”

“So we’ll pass under the Arch, one way or another?”

“Two possible outcomes,” I told him. “If nothing happens we’ll be left adrift and defenseless on the Equatorian ocean. Probably invaded and occupied by the bionormatives, if they get their act together.”

“And if we do make it to Earth?”

“No way of knowing, but Earth was barely habitable when the Arch stopped working, and that was a thousand years ago, give or take. The oceans were going bad, huge bacterial blooms emitting massive amounts of hydrogen sulfide into the air. We have to assume an atmosphere poisonous enough to kill any unprotected living thing. Which is why it would be a very bad idea to be out of doors if we cross.”

“So where do we find protection?”

“The only real safe place is Vox Core. It can seal itself and recycle its air. That’s where the Farmers are heading. With the Network and other systems down, they can’t count on protection for the out-islands. They want to get inside the walls before the transit. But there isn’t room in Core for every outlier community in the Archipelago. The Farmers will have to fight their way in.”

4.

At the end of another day’s march the Farmer militia halted for the night. Digger Choi lowered the gate of the cart, pushed two bowls of green gruel inside, and untied our hands so we could eat. Turk stood up for the first time today, rubbing his wrists and legs. He balanced himself against the wall of the cart and turned his head to see where we were. That was when he got his first look at Vox Core.

The expression on his face was interesting—awe and fear, mixed together.

Vox Core was mostly underground, but the fraction of it that showed was impressive enough. The Farmers had camped in the lee of a low hill, and from this angle Vox Core looked like a jewelry box abandoned by a spendthrift god. Its half-mile-high defensive walls were the box; the jewels were the hundreds of faceted towers still standing: communications and energy-distribution points, light-gathering surfaces, aircraft bays, managerial residences. To Turk I suppose it looked improbably gaudy, but I knew (because Treya had known) that every material and every surface served a purpose—black or white facades to sink or radiate heat, blue-green panels doing photosynthetic work, ruby-red or smoky indigo windows to block or enhance particular frequencies of visible light. The setting sun gave it all a soft, seductive sheen.

The part of it that was intact, at least. There was enough of Treya in me to ache at the damage that had been done.

Most of what I recognized as the starboard quadrant of the city was gone. That was bad, because what lay beneath that part of the visible city was some of Vox Core’s essential infrastructure. Vox was complexly interconnected, and in the past it had sustained major damage without loss of function. But even the most decentralized network will fail if it loses too much connectivity, and that was what must have happened when the nuke penetrated our defenses. It was as if Vox’s brain had suffered a massive stroke, the damage spreading and compounding itself until the whole organism lost function. Tendrils of smoke still wafted up from the impact point. A hole had been punched in the starboard wall of the city, which might have provided an entry point for Farmer forces, except that radioactive and still-smoldering rubble had barred the gap.

Treya had spent the whole of her life in this city, and her shock welled up in me and made my eyes water.

Turk—once he made sure Digger Choi was out of earshot—said, “Tell me about the people who did this.”

“Built the city or dropped the bomb?”

“Dropped the bomb.”

“An alliance of cortical democracies and radical bionormatives. They were determined not to let us cross the Arch. Scared we’ll call down some kind of doom by attracting the attention of the Hypotheticals.”

“You think that might happen?”

It was a question Treya would never have entertained. Treya had been a good Voxish citizen, blithely convinced that the Hypotheticals were benevolent and that human beings could aspire to some kind of intercourse with them. But as Allison I could be agnostic about it. “I don’t actually know.”

“Sooner or later we might have to pick sides in one of these fights.”

That would be a luxury, I thought, to pick a side.

But for now the question was moot. We ate the pea-green gunk we had been given and stood up for a last look around before Digger Choi came to tie us up for the night. The sky had gotten darker and the peak of the Arch shimmered almost directly overhead. Vox Core itself had filled with shadows.

That was the saddest thing of all, it seemed to me: the darkness of Vox Core. All my life (Treya’s life) the Core had been ablaze with light. It leaked light like a glorious sieve. Its light was its heartbeat. And now it was gone. Not even a twinkle.

The Farmer attack, if it was going to happen at all, would have to happen soon. Until then there was nothing to do but look at the sky, and it was obvious from the dire angle of the Arch that we were at the critical point of the passage. The Vox Archipelago was big enough that some of it must already be past the midway point. But that didn’t matter—Vox would transit all at once or not at all. An Arch—and this truth had been established many centuries ago—was more like an intelligent filter than a door. Back when this Arch was working it had been able to distinguish between a bird in flight and a boat in the water: send the boat from Earth to Equatoria but leave the bird behind. That’s not a simple decision. The Arch had to be able to identify human beings and their works while ignoring the countless other living creatures who inhabited (or had once inhabited) both worlds. Crossing an Arch, in other words, wasn’t a mechanistic process. The Arch looked at you, evaluated you, accepted you or rejected you.

The most likely outcome was that we wouldn’t be admitted to Old Earth at all. But I was more afraid of the other possibility. Even before the Arch stopped working, the Earth had changed beyond anything Turk would have recognized. The last refugees from the polar cities had described drastic shifts in the oceanic chemocline, H₂S boiling out of hopelessly eutrophied offshore dead zones, massive and sudden dry-land extinctions.

I closed my eyes and drifted into the dazed semiconsciousness that passes for sleep when you’re exhausted and hungry and in pain. Periodically I opened my eyes and looked at Turk where he lay in the shadows with his arms bound behind him. He was nothing like what Treya had once pictured as an emissary from the Hypotheticals. He looked exactly like what he was—a rootless drifter, no longer young and worn almost beyond endurance.

I guessed he was dreaming, because he moaned from time to time.

Maybe I dreamed, too.

What woke me next—still deep in that long night—was a sound so loud it cut the darkness like a knife. It was a deep-throated hooting, continuous and inhuman but familiar, familiar… dazed, I couldn’t place it at first; but when I recognized it I felt what I had not felt for many days: hope.

I kicked at Turk to rouse him. He opened his eyes and rolled upright, blinking.

“Listen!” I said. “You know what that is? It’s the alarm, Turk, it’s the call-in, the come-to-shelter, ” struggling to translate Voxish words into ancient English, “it’s the fucking air-raid siren!”

The wailing was broadcast from the highest towers of Vox Core. It was a signal to get inside the walls, that some kind of attack was imminent, and surely that was true. But here was the important thing: if Vox Core was able to sound the siren, at least some of its power must have been restored.

Vox Core was alive!

“Means what?” asked Turk, still fighting sleep.

“It means we have a chance of getting out of this!” I managed to wiggle upright so I could have a look. Vox Core was still mainly dark… but even as I registered that fact a searchlight rayed from the nearest watchtower and swept over the treeless meadows, lighting up the Farmers as they doused their fires and hurried to suit up for war. Then there were more lights: tower by tower, block by block, Vox Core began to reclaim itself from the darkness. Smaller lights like fireflies scattered from the high aerodromes, and those were aircraft, armed and lethal.

It made me giddy. I heard myself shouting into the noise: Here we are! Come and get us! Something stupid like that. Treya’s old loyalties bursting out of my throat.

Then the weapons rained down, and the Farmers began to die.