Vortex (5 page)

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. It explained the song she had been compulsively humming, her fits of absentmindedness, the way she stared into space with her head cocked 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 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 for a living 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 obdurate, artificial 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 precise 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. Each island in the archipelago contained its own drive system, slaved to a central controller at Vox Core. Still, 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.

“Automated freight carriers pass through the tunnel carrying raw biomass to Vox Core and refined goods back to the farmers,” Treya said. “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 cliff,” she added. “You can’t see them from this angle. But they were cut during the original construction, so they’re probably somewhat eroded.” Even the foamed-granite composite the islands were made of couldn’t resist wind and salt water indefinitely. “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, for better or worse. “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 boundary 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.”

“Tell me about the Network. It’s what, 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. The Network helps us formulate a limbic consensus. 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.”

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

She shrugged unhappily by way of response.

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

“We don’t have a choice,” she said.

*   *   *

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

Without the calming drugs, my own recent memories had begun to firm up. Just days ago I had been trying to survive a series of earthquakes generated by the temporal Arch as it rose from its dormant state in the Equatorian desert. Now I was here on Vox. You can’t really comprehend events like that, I thought. 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 from the nearby cliffs. I wondered about the people who had nuked Vox Core, the “cortical democracies,” and why had they done it, and whether their reasons were as superficial as Treya had suggested.

I was a neutral in the conflict, insofar as that was possible. It wasn’t my fight. And I wondered whether Allison Pearl, the Champlain Ghost, might be similarly neutral. Maybe that was what Treya found so disconcerting: “Allison” and I were both shades of a disinterested past, both potentially disloyal to Vox Core.

6.

We broke camp at dawn and followed the curving cliff until we came to what Treya had called “stairs,” broad declivities cut into the face of the granite. Time had beveled the steps into sloping ledges separated by giddy ten-foot drops. Every surface was slick with mossy growths and bird dung, and the deeper we descended the louder the roar of the ocean became. Eventually the high edges of the two adjoining islands closed off all of the sky apart from a few slanting rays 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. She kept glancing backward and up, as if she was afraid we were being followed.

By the angle of the light I guessed it was past noon when I helped her down the last vertical gap to the roof of the tunnel itself. The roof of the tunnel was broader than it had looked 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 darkness set in. Night 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.” But she sighed and went on: “Champlain. Cold winters. Hot summers. Swimming in the lake 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.” And 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. Before long 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, 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 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 appeared to question his authority. He carried a metallic rod the length of a walking stick, tapered at the end to a fine point. Like the people behind him, he was tall. His dark skin was finely wrinkled.

Before he could open his mouth Treya said something in her native language. He listened impatiently. 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 and gave her a shove so that she sprawled onto her stomach. Her cheekbone grazed the rock and began to bleed. She closed her eyes in pain.

I had been in my share of fights. I wasn’t 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, holding me back. They forced me to my knees.

The boss farmer put his foot on Treya’s shoulder, 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.

Then the farmer drove the point down hard.

CHAPTER THREE

SANDRA AND BOSE

Sandra went to bed convinced the document was a fake—a bad joke, though it was too late to call Bose and accuse him of it. Although, if it
was
a joke, it was a pointlessly elaborate one. She couldn’t believe that Orrin Mather, the shy and inarticulate young man she had interviewed at State, had written any of this. Her best guess was that he had copied the text from some science fiction novel and pretended it was his own work … though she couldn’t imagine why.