Read Online Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson - Free Book Online

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