the room was authentic, but the vial he leaves on the dresser contains only powdered sugar.
Orrin Mather’s existence is compromised from the moment of his inglorious conception. His anorexic mother delivers him prematurely. His infant body suffers the agonies of drug withdrawal. He survives, but his mother’s malnutrition and multiple addictions have taken a toll. Orrin will never be able to make and enact plans as easily as others do. He will often be surprised—usually unpleasantly—by the consequences of his actions.
I cannot make him a more perfect human being. That isn’t within my power. All I can give him are words. And by writing these words into the cerebellum of a child, I dissolve myself and make a shadow world real.
He lies sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a rented trailer home. His sister Ariel sits on a plastic chair a few feet away, eating cereal without milk from a chipped bowl, watching television with the sound turned down. Orrin dreams he is walking on a beach, though he has only seen beaches in movies. In his dream he sees something rolling in the surf—a bottle, its green glass faded by years of sunlight and salt water. He picks it up. The bottle is tightly sealed, but it opens, somehow, at his touch.
Papers tumble out and unfold themselves in his hand. Orrin hasn’t yet learned to read, but, magically, he can read these words. He reads them all, page after page. What he reads here, he will never forget.
And:
And:
My name is Isaac Dvali and
I can’t write this anymore.
My name is Orrin Mather. That’s what my name is.
My name is Orrin Mather, and I work in a greenhouse in Laramie, Wyoming.
In the greenhouse at this nursery where I work, there are paths between the plants and the seedling tables. That’s so you can get from one place to another. Also so you can work on the plants without stepping on them. Those paths all connect with one another. You can go this way or you can go that. It all has the same beginning and the same ending. Though you can only ever stand in one place at once.
I believe I was born with these dreams or memories about Turk Findley and Allison Pearl and Isaac Dvali. They troubled me much when I was younger. They came to me like visions. They blew through me like a wind, as my sister Ariel liked to say.
That’s why I went to Houston on the bus so suddenly. That’s why I wrote down my dreams in my notebooks.
Things in Houston didn’t happen the way I expected. (As you know, Dr. Cole, and I expect you’ll be the only one to read these pages… unless you show them to Officer Bose, which is all right with me if you do so.) I suppose I took a different path from how I dreamed it. I never robbed any stores, for instance. I guess I could have. God knows I was hungry and angry enough from time to time. But whenever I felt like hurting someone I thought about Turk Findley and the burning man (which was me!), and how terrible it would be to carry around the weight of another man’s death.
I work in the greenhouse mainly at night but they keep the big lights on all the time. It’s like a house where it’s always noon on a sunny day. I like the wetness in the air and the smell of growing things, even the sharp smell of the chemical fertilizer. Do you remember those flowers outside my room at State Care, Dr. Cole? Bird of paradise you said they were called. They look like one thing but they’re really another. But they didn’t choose to look like that. They’re just what time and nature made of them.
We don’t grow that kind of flower in the greenhouse where I work. But I remember how pretty they were. They really do look like birds, don’t they?
I don’t believe I will write to you again, Dr. Cole. Please don’t take that the wrong way. It’s only that I want to put these troublesome things behind me.
The people Officer Bose introduced me to have been real kind. They found me this job, and a place for Ariel and me to live. They are good people, even if what they do is outside of the law. They are not criminals exactly. They just think they can invent a better way of living.
Maybe they will succeed at their work. If they do then maybe the world won’t turn barren and poisonous, like in the dreams I wrote down. I hope that is the case.
I don’t know, of course. But you can trust these people, Dr. Cole.
And I know you trust Officer Bose. He helped me when he didn’t have to. He’s a good man, I believe.
I thank him, and I thank you for the same reason.
Well, that is all I have to say. I have to go to work pretty soon.
Don’t expect to hear from me again.
Ariel sends her kind regards, and asks me to tell you that Houston is too damn hot.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book couldn’t have been written without the help and patience of friends and family members too numerous to mention; needless to say, I thank them all. Thanks also to Glenn Harper, who generously answered a technical question (about the relative size of a human being vis-a-vis the Planck length and the limits of the observable universe)—the answer didn’t make it into the final text of
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
VORTEX
Copyright © 2011 by Robert Charles Wilson
All rights reserved.
Edited by Teresa Nielsen Hayden
A Tor® eBook
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
