Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson

document I sent?”
    “Yes,” she said, wondering how to proceed.
    “You read it?”
    “Yes. Officer Bose—”
    “You can just call me Bose. My friends do.”
    “Okay, but look, I still don’t know what you want from me. Do you honestly believe Orrin Mather wrote the text you sent me?”
    “I know, it hardly seems plausible. Even Orrin is a reluctant to take credit for it.”
    “I asked him about that. He told me he wrote it down, but he wasn’t sure he actually wrote it. As if somebody dictated it to him. Which I guess would explain a few things. Anyway, what do you want from me exactly? Literary criticism? Because I’m not much of a science fiction fan.”
    “There’s more to the document than what you’ve seen. I’m hoping I can send you another batch of pages today and maybe we can get together face-to-face, like say lunch tomorrow, to talk about the details.”
    Was she willing to take another step into this strangeness? Oddly, she discovered she was. Put it down to curiosity. And maybe compassion for the bashful child-man she had discovered in Orrin Mather. And the fact that she had found Bose to be reasonably pleasant company. She told him he could send along more pages but she felt compelled to add, “There’s a complication you ought to know about. I’m not Orrin’s case physician anymore. My boss turned him over to a trainee.”
    Now it was Bose’s turn to pause. Sandra tried to make out the chanting in the background. Something-something our children’s children . “Well, damn,” Bose said.
    “And I doubt my boss would be willing to take you into his confidence, no offense. He’s—”
    “You’re talking about Congreve? People at HPD say he’s a bureaucratic prick.”
    “No comment.”
    “Okay … but you still have access to Orrin?”
    “I can talk to him, if that’s what you mean. What I don’t have is any kind of decision-making authority.”
    “Complicates things,” Bose admitted. “But I’d still like your opinion.”
    “Again, it would help if I knew what’s so important to you about Orrin and these notebooks of his.”
    “Better if we discuss it tomorrow.”
    Sandra negotiated the lunch details, a place reasonably close to State Care but slightly more upscale than the strip mall alternatives; then Bose said, “Gotta go. Thanks, Dr. Cole.”
    “Sandra,” she said.

CHAPTER FOUR
    TREYA’S STORY / ALLISON’S STORY

1.

    You want to know what it was like, what happened to Vox and afterward?
    Well, here it is.
    Something to leave behind, you might say.
    Something for the wind and the stars to read.

2.
    I was born to the name Treya and a five-syllable suffix I won’t repeat here, but it might be better to think of me as Allison Pearl Mark II. I had a ten-year gestation, a painful eight-day labor, and a traumatic birth. From my first full day of life I knew I was a fraud, and I knew just as truly that I had no choice in the matter.
    I was born seven days before Vox was due to cross the Arch to ancient Earth. I was born into the custody of rebel Farmers, born with my own blood weeping down my back. By the time I remembered how to speak the blood had mostly dried.
    The Farmers had crushed and carved out of my body and subsequently destroyed my personal limbic implant, my Network interface, my node. Because the node had been attached to my spine at the third vertebra almost since birth, the pain was intense. I woke up from the trauma with waves of agony sparking up my neck and into my skull, but the worst part was what I didn’t feel, which was the rest of my body. I was numb from the shoulders down—numb, helpless, hurt and frightened beyond thought. Eventually the Farmers poked me with some kind of crude anesthetic from their primitive pharmacopoeia … not out of kindness, I suspect, but simply because they were tired of hearing me scream.
    The next time I came to myself my body was tingling and itching unbearably, but that was okay because it meant I was