I didn’t know what that might imply (or what might constitute a “rudder” on a vessel the size of a small continent), but it was confirmation that the damage to Vox Core had been extensive and that help might not reach us as soon as Treya hoped. I guessed she had come to the same conclusion. She helped me dig a shallow pit for the fire, but she was moody and uncommunicative.
We didn’t have a clock to count the hours of the day. I slept a little when the stimulants wore off, and when I woke the sun was just touching the horizon. The air was cooler now. Treya showed me how to use one of the salvaged tools to light the kindling I had gathered.
Once the fire was crackling I gave some thought to our position—that is, the physical position of Vox relative to the coast of Equatoria. In my day Equatoria had been a settled outpost in the New World, the planet you reached when you sailed from Sumatra through the Arch of the Hypotheticals. If Vox was making for Earth she would have been headed toward the Equatorian side of that same Arch, aiming to make the transverse journey. So I wasn’t surprised when the peak of the Arch began to glitter in the darkening sky just after sunset.
The Arch was a Hypothetical construct, built to their incomprehensible scale. Back home, its legs were embedded in the floor of the Indian Ocean and its apex extended beyond the atmosphere of the Earth. Its Equatorian twin was the same size and may even have been, in some sense, the same physical object. One Arch, two worlds. Long after sunset the peak of it still reflected the light of the sun, a thread of silver high overhead. Ten thousand years hadn’t changed it. Treya looked up steadily and whispered something quiet in her own language. When she had finished I asked her whether the words had been a song or a prayer.
“Maybe both. You might call it a poem.”
“Can you translate it?”
“It’s about the cycles of the sky, the life of the Hypotheticals. The poem says there’s no such thing as a beginning or an ending.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“I’m afraid there’s a lot you don’t know.”
The unhappiness in her face was unmistakable. I told her I didn’t understand what had happened to Vox Core but I was sorry for her loss.
She gave me back a sad smile. “And I’m sorry for
I hadn’t thought of what had happened to me that way—as a loss, something to be mourned. It was true: I was ten irrevocable centuries away from home. Everything known and familiar was gone.
But I had been trying for most of my life to put a wall between myself and my past, and I hadn’t succeeded yet. Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind—and some you carry with you, world without end.
Come morning Treya gave me another hit from the apparently inexhaustible supply of pharmaceuticals she carried. It was all the consolation she could offer, and I accepted it gladly.
5.
“If help was coming it would have come by now. We can’t wait forever. We have to walk.”
To Vox Core, she meant: to the burning capital of her floating nation.
“Is that possible?”
“I think so.”
“We have all the food we need right here. And if we stay close to the wreckage we’ll be easier to find.”
“No, Turk. We have to get to Core before Vox crosses the Arch. But it’s not just that. The Network is still down.”
“How is that a problem?”
She frowned in a way I had begun to recognize, struggling to find English words for an unfamiliar concept. “The Network isn’t just a passive connection. There are parts of my body and mind that depend on it.”
“Depend on it for what? You seem to be doing okay.”
“The drugs I’ve been giving myself are helpful. But they won’t last forever. I need to get back to Vox Core— take my word for it.”
So she insisted, and I was in no position to argue with her. It was probably true about the drugs. She had dosed herself twice that morning, and it was obvious she was getting less mileage out of the pharmaceuticals than she had the day before. So we bundled up all the useful salvage we could carry and began to walk.
We settled into a steady rhythm as the morning unfolded. If the war was still going on, there was no sign of it. (The enemy had no permanent bases in Equatoria, Treya said, and the attack had been a flailing last-ditch attempt to keep us from attempting to cross the Arch. Vox had launched a retaliatory strike before her defenses went down; the empty blue sky was probably a sign that the counterattack had been successful.) The rolling land offered no real obstacles, and we aimed ourselves at the pillar of smoke still rising from beyond the horizon. Around noon we crested a small hill that allowed a view to the margins of the island—ocean on three sides, and to windward a hump of land that must have been the next island in the chain.
More interestingly, four towers rose above the canopy of the forest ahead of us—man-made structures, windowless and black, maybe twenty or thirty stories tall. The towers were separated from one another by many miles, and heading for any one of them would have required a serious detour—but if there were people there, I suggested, maybe we could get some help.
“No!” Treya shook her head fiercely. “No, there’s no one inside. The towers are machines, not places where people live. They collect ambient radiation and pump it down below.”
“Below?”
“Down to the hollow part of the island, where the farms are.”
“You keep your farms underground?” There was plenty of fertile land up here, not to mention sunlight.
But no, she said; Vox was designed to travel through inhospitable or changing environments all along the Ring of Worlds. All the worlds in the Ring were habitable, but conditions varied from planet to planet; the archipelago’s food sources had to be protected from changes in the length of days or seasons, wild variations in temperature, greater or lesser degrees of sunlight or ultraviolet radiation. Over the long term, aboveground agriculture would have been as impossible as raising crops on the deck of an aircraft carrier. The forest here was lush, but that was because Vox had been anchored in hospitable climates for most of the last hundred years. (“That might change,” Treya said, “if we cross to Earth.”) Originally these islands had been bare slabs of artificial granite; the topsoil had accumulated over centuries and had been colonized by escaped cultivars and windblown seed from islands and continents on two neighboring worlds.
“Can we get down to the farmland?”
“Possibly. But it wouldn’t be wise.”
“Why—are the farmers dangerous?”
“Without the Network, they might be. It’s difficult to explain, but the Network also functions as a social control mechanism. Until it’s restored we should avoid untutored mobs.”
“The farm folk get rowdy when they’re off their leash?”
She gave me a disdainful look. “Please don’t make facile judgments about things you don’t understand.” She adjusted her pack and walked a few paces ahead of me, cutting short the conversation. I followed her down the hillside, back into the shadow of the forest. I tried to gauge our progress by marking the relative positions of the black towers whenever we crossed an open ridge. I calculated that we might reach the windward shore in a day or two.
The weather turned sour that afternoon. Heavy clouds rolled in, followed by erratic winds and bursts of rain. We marched on grimly until we began to lose daylight; then we found a sheltering grove and stretched a sheet of
