Vortex

“Can you tell me your name?” the woman asked.

I croaked out the fact that I was Turk Findley. I told her I was an American by birth but that I had been living in Equatoria lately. I asked her who she was where she was from. She smiled and said, “My name is Treya, and the place I’m from is called Vox.”

“Is that where we’re going now?”

“Yes. We’ll be there soon. Try to sleep, if you can.”

* * *

So I closed my eyes and tried to take inventory of myself.

My name is Turk Findley.

Turk Findley, born in the last years of the Spin. Variously a day laborer, sailor, small-plane pilot. Worked my way across the Arch to Equatoria on a coastal freighter and lived in Port Magellan some years. Met a woman named Lise Adams who was searching for her father, a search that took us among the kind of people who liked to experiment with Martian drugs—took us deep into the oil lands of the Equatorian desert at a time when ash began to fall from the sky and strange things grew out of the ground. I had loved Lise Adams well enough to know I wasn’t good for her. We had been separated in the desert… and I believed it was then that the Hypotheticals had taken me. Had picked me up and carried me the way a wave carries a grain of sand. And dropped me on this beach, this shoal, this sandbar, ten thousand years downcurrent.

That was my history, as much as I could reconstruct of it.

* * *

When I came to myself again I was in a smaller and more private cabin of the aircraft. Treya, my guard or my doctor (I didn’t know exactly how to think of her), was sitting at my bedside humming a tune in a minor key. She or someone else had dressed me in a simple tunic and trousers.

Night had fallen. A narrow window to the left of me showed scattered stars that turned like points on a wheel whenever the aircraft made a banking turn. The small Equatorian moon was on the horizon (which meant I was still in Equatoria, however much it might have changed). Down below, whitecapped waves glistened with phosphorescence. We were flying over the sea, far from land.

“What’s that song you’re humming?” I asked.

Treya gave a little start, surprised to find me awake. She was young—I guessed twenty or twenty-five years old. Her eyes were attentive but cautious, as if she were subtly afraid of me. But she smiled at the question. “Just a tune…”

A familiar tune. It was one of those lamentations in waltz time that had been so popular in the aftermath of the Spin. “Reminds me of a song I used to know. It was called…”

“‘Apres Nous.’”

Yes. I had heard it in a bar in Venezuela when I was young and alone in the world. Not a bad tune, but I couldn’t imagine how it had survived ten centuries. “How do you know it?”

“Well, that’s not easy to explain. In a way, I grew up with that song.”

“Really? How old are you exactly?”

Another smile. “Not as old as you, Turk Findley. I have some memories, though. That’s why they assigned me to you. I’m not just your nurse. I’m your translator, your guide.”

“Then maybe you can explain—”

“I can explain a lot, but not right now. You need to rest. I can give you something to make you sleep.”

“I’ve been asleep.”

“Is that how it felt when you were with the Hypotheticals—like sleep?”

The question startled me. I knew I had been “with the Hypotheticals” in some sense, but I had no real memory of it. She appeared to know more about the subject than I did.

“Perhaps the memories will come back,” she said.

“Do you want to tell me what we’re running from?”

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“You all seemed in a hurry to get away from the desert.”

“Well… this world has changed since you were taken up. Wars were fought here. The planet was radically depopulated and has never really recovered. In a way, a war is still being fought here.”

As if to confirm this statement, the aircraft banked sharply. Treya gave the window a nervous glance. A burst of white light obscured the stars and lit the rolling waves below. I sat up to get a better view and I thought I saw something on the horizon as the flash faded, something like a distant continent or (because it was almost geometrically flat) an enormous ship. Then it was gone in the darkness.

“Stay down,” she said. The aircraft went into an even steeper curve. She ducked into a chair attached to the nearest wall. More light bloomed in the window. “We’re out of range of their seagoing vessels, but their aircraft… It took us time to find you,” she said. “The others should be safe by now. The room will protect you if our vehicle is damaged, but you need to lie down.”

It happened almost before the words were out of her mouth.

* * *

There were five aircraft (I learned later) in our formation. We were the last flight out of the Equatorian desert. The attack came sooner and more powerfully than expected: four escort craft went down protecting us, and after that we were defenseless.

I remember Treya reaching for my hand. I wanted to ask her what kind of war this was; I wanted to ask her what she meant by “the others.” But there wasn’t time. Her grip was fiercely tight and her skin was cold. Then there was sudden heat and a blinding light, and we began to fall.

4.

A combination of programmed emergency maneuvers and sheer luck carried our piece of the broken aircraft as far as the nearest island of Vox.

Vox was a seagoing vessel—a ship, in the broadest sense—but it was much more than that word implies. Vox was an archipelago of floating islands, vastly larger than anything that had ever put to sea in my lifetime. It was a culture and a nation, a history and a religion. For nearly five hundred years it had sailed the oceans of the Ring of Worlds—Treya’s name for the planets that had been linked together by the Archways of the Hypotheticals. Its enemies were powerful, Treya explained, and they were close. Equatoria was an empty world now, but “an alliance of cortical democracies” had sent pursuit vessels. They were determined to prevent Vox from reaching the Arch that connected Equatoria to Earth.

She didn’t believe they could succeed. But the latest attack had been crippling, and one of the casualties had been the aircraft in which we were traveling.

We survived because the compartment in which Treya was treating me had been rigged with elaborate survival mechanisms: aerogels to cushion us from catastrophic deceleration, deployable wing surfaces to glide us to a landing place. We had come to rest on one of the out-islands of the Vox archipelago, currently uninhabited and far from the city Treya called Vox Core.

Vox Core was the hub of the Vox Archipelago, and it had been the primary target of the attack. By the light of dawn we could see a pillar of smoke rising from below the windward horizon. “There,” Treya said in a traumatized voice. “That smoke… that must be from Vox Core.”

We left the smoldering lifeship and stood in a grassy meadow as the sun cleared the horizon. “The Network is silent,” she said. It wasn’t clear to me what this meant or how she knew it. Her face was rigid with grief. Apart