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Authors: Robert Charles Wilson
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happened when the nuke penetrated our defenses. It was as if Vox’s brain had suffered a massive stroke, the damage spreading and compounding itself until the whole organism lost function. Tendrils of smoke still wafted up from the impact point. A hole had been punched in the starboard wall of the city, which might have provided an entry point for Farmer forces, except that radioactive and still-smoldering rubble had barred the gap.
Treya had spent the whole of her life in this city, and her shock welled up in me and made my eyes water.
Turk—once he made sure Digger Choi was out of earshot—said, “Tell me about the people who did this.”
“Built the city or dropped the bomb?”
“Dropped the bomb.”
“An alliance of cortical democracies and radical bionormatives. They were determined not to let us cross the Arch. Scared we’ll call down some kind of doom by attracting the attention of the Hypotheticals.”
“You think that might happen?”
It was a question Treya would never have entertained. Treya had been a good Voxish citizen, blithely convinced that the Hypotheticals were benevolent and that human beings could aspire to some kind of intercourse with them. But as Allison I could be agnostic about it. “I don’t actually know.”
“Sooner or later we might have to pick sides in one of these fights.”
That would be a luxury, I thought, to pick a side.
But for now the question was moot. We ate the pea-green gunk we had been given and stood up for a last look around before Digger Choi came to tie us up for the night. The sky had gotten darker and the peak of the Arch shimmered almost directly overhead. Vox Core itself had filled with shadows.
That was the saddest thing of all, it seemed to me: the darkness of Vox Core. All my life ( Treya’s life) the Core had been ablaze with light. It leaked light like a glorious sieve. Its light was its heartbeat. And now it was gone. Not even a twinkle.
The Farmer attack, if it was going to happen at all, would have to happen soon. Until then there was nothing to do but look at the sky, and it was obvious from the dire angle of the Arch that we were at the critical point of the passage. The Vox Archipelago was big enough that some of it must already be past the midway point. But that didn’t matter—Vox would transit all at once or not at all. An Arch—and this truth had been established many centuries ago—was more like an intelligent filter than a door. Back when this Arch was working it had been able to distinguish between a bird in flight and a boat in the water: send the boat from Earth to Equatoria but leave the bird behind. That’s not a simple decision. The Arch had to be able to identify human beings and their works while ignoring the countless other living creatures who inhabited (or had once inhabited) both worlds. Crossing an Arch, in other words, wasn’t a mechanistic process. The Arch looked at you, evaluated you, accepted you or rejected you.
The most likely outcome was that we wouldn’t be admitted to Old Earth at all. But I was more afraid of the other possibility. Even before the Arch stopped working, the Earth had changed beyond anything Turk would have recognized. The last refugees from the polar cities had described drastic shifts in the oceanic chemocline, H 2 S boiling out of hopelessly eutrophied offshore dead zones, massive and sudden dry-land extinctions
I closed my eyes and drifted into the dazed semiconsciousness that passes for sleep when you’re exhausted and hungry and in pain. Periodically I opened my eyes and looked at Turk where he lay in the shadows with his arms bound behind him. He was nothing like what Treya had once pictured as an emissary from the Hypotheticals. He looked exactly like what he was—a rootless drifter, no longer young and worn almost beyond endurance.
I guessed he was dreaming, because he moaned from time to time.
Maybe I dreamed, too.
What woke me next—still deep in that long night—was a
Treya had spent the whole of her life in this city, and her shock welled up in me and made my eyes water.
Turk—once he made sure Digger Choi was out of earshot—said, “Tell me about the people who did this.”
“Built the city or dropped the bomb?”
“Dropped the bomb.”
“An alliance of cortical democracies and radical bionormatives. They were determined not to let us cross the Arch. Scared we’ll call down some kind of doom by attracting the attention of the Hypotheticals.”
“You think that might happen?”
It was a question Treya would never have entertained. Treya had been a good Voxish citizen, blithely convinced that the Hypotheticals were benevolent and that human beings could aspire to some kind of intercourse with them. But as Allison I could be agnostic about it. “I don’t actually know.”
“Sooner or later we might have to pick sides in one of these fights.”
That would be a luxury, I thought, to pick a side.
But for now the question was moot. We ate the pea-green gunk we had been given and stood up for a last look around before Digger Choi came to tie us up for the night. The sky had gotten darker and the peak of the Arch shimmered almost directly overhead. Vox Core itself had filled with shadows.
That was the saddest thing of all, it seemed to me: the darkness of Vox Core. All my life ( Treya’s life) the Core had been ablaze with light. It leaked light like a glorious sieve. Its light was its heartbeat. And now it was gone. Not even a twinkle.
The Farmer attack, if it was going to happen at all, would have to happen soon. Until then there was nothing to do but look at the sky, and it was obvious from the dire angle of the Arch that we were at the critical point of the passage. The Vox Archipelago was big enough that some of it must already be past the midway point. But that didn’t matter—Vox would transit all at once or not at all. An Arch—and this truth had been established many centuries ago—was more like an intelligent filter than a door. Back when this Arch was working it had been able to distinguish between a bird in flight and a boat in the water: send the boat from Earth to Equatoria but leave the bird behind. That’s not a simple decision. The Arch had to be able to identify human beings and their works while ignoring the countless other living creatures who inhabited (or had once inhabited) both worlds. Crossing an Arch, in other words, wasn’t a mechanistic process. The Arch looked at you, evaluated you, accepted you or rejected you.
The most likely outcome was that we wouldn’t be admitted to Old Earth at all. But I was more afraid of the other possibility. Even before the Arch stopped working, the Earth had changed beyond anything Turk would have recognized. The last refugees from the polar cities had described drastic shifts in the oceanic chemocline, H 2 S boiling out of hopelessly eutrophied offshore dead zones, massive and sudden dry-land extinctions
I closed my eyes and drifted into the dazed semiconsciousness that passes for sleep when you’re exhausted and hungry and in pain. Periodically I opened my eyes and looked at Turk where he lay in the shadows with his arms bound behind him. He was nothing like what Treya had once pictured as an emissary from the Hypotheticals. He looked exactly like what he was—a rootless drifter, no longer young and worn almost beyond endurance.
I guessed he was dreaming, because he moaned from time to time.
Maybe I dreamed, too.
What woke me next—still deep in that long night—was a
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