Esh had come up to the parapet too, and although he watched the green and golden glow of the infalling debris he betrayed no reaction.
Back in bed Sulean found her sleepiness had evaporated. She lay awake for a long time thinking of what she had seen. She thought about the accumulated debris of Ab-ashken devices, things that ate ice and rock and lived and died over the course of long millennia in lonely places far from the sun, the remnants of them burning as they fell through the atmosphere. In some of these events enough of the debris had survived that it began a kind of abortive new life—the history books described curious growths of an incomplete and oddly mechanical nature, unsuited to the heat and (to them) corrosive air of this planet. Would that happen again? If so, would she witness it? Astronomers said the bulk of the material would fall not terribly far from Bar Kea Station. Fascinated as she was by the Hypotheticals, Sulean longed to see a living example.
So, apparently, did Esh.
There was considerable excitement in the station the next morning. Esh was in an agitated state—had cried for the first time since infancy, and one of his tenders had found him knocking his head against the southern wall of his sleeping chamber. Some invisible influence had shattered his customary complacency.
Sulean wanted to see him—demanded to be allowed to see him, when she heard the news—but she was refused, for days on end. Doctors were called in to examine Esh. The boy slipped in and out of fevers and deep, impenetrable sleeps. Whenever he was awake he demanded to be allowed to go outside.
He had stopped eating, and by the time Sulean was allowed into his chamber she hardly recognized him. Esh had been chubby, round-cheeked, young for his age. Now he had grown gaunt, and his eyes, strangely flecked with gold, had retreated into the bony contours of his skull.
She asked him what was wrong, not expecting an answer, but he startled her by saying, "I want to go see them."
"What? Who? Who do you want to see?"
"The Ab-ashken."
The boy's timid voice made the word sound even stranger than it otherwise might have. Sulean felt a chill creep up from the small of her spine to the crown of her head.
"What do you mean, you want to go see them?"
"Out in the desert," Esh said.
"There's nothing out there."
"Yes, there is. The Ab-ashken."
Then he began to cry, and Sulean had to leave the room. The nurse who had been attending Esh followed her into the corridor and said. "He's been asking for days to leave the building. But this is the first time he mentioned the Ab-ashken."
Were they really out there, the Hypotheticals, the Ab-ashken, or at least the fragmentary remains of them? Sulean posed the question to one of her caretakers, a fragile elder who had been an astronomer before he became a Fourth. Yes, he said, there had been some activity to the south, and he showed her a set of aerial photographs that had been taken over the previous few days.
Here was a wasteland not very different from the landscape beyond the gates of Bar Kea Station—sand, dust, and rocks. But cradled in a broad declivity was a clump of objects so unnatural as to defy description. Half-built, crazily incomplete things, it seemed to Sulean—brightly-colored pipes, silvered hexagonal mirrors, chambered spheres, many of these things linked to one another like the parts of an enormous, impossible insect.
"This must be where he wants to go," Sulean said.
"Possibly. But we can't allow that. The risk is too great. He might come to harm."
"He's coming to harm here. He looks like he's dying!"
Her tutor shrugged. "The decision's neither mine nor yours."
Perhaps not. But Sulean was afraid for Esh. As a friend he wasn't much, but he was all she had. He shouldn't be held captive against his will, and Sulean longed to release him. She tried to imagine how she might do that, how she might sneak into his room and smuggle him outside… but the corridors of Bar Kea Station were never empty, and Esh was always under guard.
Nor was she often allowed to see him, and Sulean's life seemed empty without his mute presence. Sometimes she walked past his room and winced when she heard him crying or shouting.
The situation remained unchanged for more endless, sunny days. Out in the wasteland, her tutor said, the Ab-ashken growths had bloomed and were beginning to wither, unsuited as they were to this environment. But Esh's frantic anxiety only increased.
* * * * *
Dr. Dvali said, "These growths, were they dangerous?"
"No. There was never anything more than a temporary kind of life to them."
Like hothouse flowers, Sulean thought, transplanted to the wrong climate and soil.
* * * * *
The last time she saw Esh alive was a day later.
Sulean was outside that morning, walking where she used to walk with him. Her minder stood at a discreet distance, mindful that Sulean was troubled and might want time to herself.
It was another sunny day. The rocks cast deep shadows across the sand. Sulean wandered aimlessly near the Station's gates, not really thinking about anything—in fact trying hard not to think about Esh—when she saw him, as startling as a mirage, squatting in the shade of a boulder looking south.
This was inexplicable. Sulean glanced back at her minder, another venerable Fourth. He had paused to rest in the shade of Bar Kea Station's southern wall. The old Fourth had not seen Esh, and Sulean did nothing to betray his presence.
She walked slowly closer, careful not to hurry and make herself conspicuous. Esh looked up plaintively from his hiding place.
She bent down as if examining a piece of shale or a scuttling sandbug and whispered, "How did you get away?"
"Don't tell," Esh demanded.
"I won't, of course I won't. But how—"
"No one was looking. I stole a robe," he added, lifting his arms in the voluminous whiteness of some larger person's desert garb. "I came over the north parapet where it touches the rock wall and climbed down."
"But what are you doing out here? It'll be dark in a couple of hours."
"I'm doing what I have to."
"You need food and water."
"I can do without."
"No you can't." Sulean insisted on giving him her water bottle, which she always carried when she left the shelter of the Station, and a bar of pressed meal she had been saving for herself.
"They'll know I'm gone," Esh said. "Don't tell them you saw me."
This was more conversation than Sulean had ever had with Esh, a comparative flood of words. She said, "I will. I mean, I won't. I won't tell anyone."
"Thank you, Sulean."
Another startling novelty: the first time he had ever said her name, maybe the first time he had said anyone's name. This wasn't just Esh crouching in the sand in front of her, this was Esh plus something else.
The Ab-ashken, Sulean thought.
The Hypotheticals were inside him, looking out through his altered eyes.
Somewhere in the Station a bell began to ring, and Sulean's sleepy minder looked alert and called her name. "Run," she whispered.
But she didn't wait to see if the boy took her advice. She turned back to the Station, pretending nothing had happened, and went to her keeper, and said nothing at all, as if the silence in which Esh had dwelt for so many years had entered her throat and stilled her voice.
* * * * *
"What was it he wanted?" Dvali asked. "To find the fallen artifacts, presumably—but what then?"
"I don't know," Sulean said. "I suppose like calls to like. The same instinct or programming that causes the Hypothetical replicators to cluster and share information and reproduce may have operated equally on the boy Esh. The crisis was caused by his proximity to these devices."
"As is Isaac's?" Mrs. Rebka asked.
"Possibly."
"Your people must have asked these questions."
"Without finding any answers, unfortunately."
Dvali said, "You told us the boy died."
"Yes."
> "Tell us how."
Sulean thought: Must I? Must I endure this yet again?
Of course she must. Today, as every other day.
* * * * *
He had been gone from the Station for hours and it was well after dark when Suleans resolve broke. Frightened by the thought of Esh alone in the night, and shaken by the anxiety and alarms that ran through the Station like electricity in the absence of the boy, she sought out the man she considered the kindest of her mentors, her astronomy instructor, who used the single name Lochis. She had seen Esh this afternoon, she told him through a gush of guilty tears. When Lochis finally understood, he ordered her to stay where she was while he assembled a search party.
A group of five men and three women, all experienced in the hazards and geography of the desert, left the Station at dawn. They rode in a cart pulled by one of the Station's few large machines—large machines were a luxury on a resource-poor planet—and Sulean was allowed to ride along to point out where she had last seen Esh and perhaps to help convince him to return to the Station, should they find him.
More sophisticated machines, lighter-than-air remote viewing devices and the like, had already been sent from the nearest large city, but they wouldn't arrive for another day. Until then, Lochis told her, it would be a labor of eyesight and intuition. Fortunately Esh had not been able to conceal his tracks, and it was obvious that he was heading for the most concentrated infall of Ab-ashken remains.
As the expedition crossed a line of low hills into the low basinland of the southern desert, Sulean saw the decaying evidence of that infall. The machine-drawn cart passed close to a clump of dried and decaying… well, things, was the only word Sulean could apply to it. A wide-mouthed tube, yellowish-white and more than two people high, towered over a cluster of orbs, pyramids, and slivered mirrors. All these things had simply grown out of the pebbly desert floor and died. Or almost died. A few feathery tendrils, like enormous bird feathers, stirred feebly amidst the surrealistic rubble. Or maybe it was the faint dry wind that made them move.
Suleans first confrontation with the Hypothetical had been when she looked into Esh's altered eyes. This was her second. She shivered despite the heat and shrank back against Lochis's protective bulk.
"Don't be afraid," he said. "There's nothing dangerous here."
But she wasn't afraid, not exactly. It was a different emotion that had overtaken her. Fascination, dread—some dizzying combination of the two. Here were pieces of the Ab-ashken, fragments of things that had overgrown the stars themselves, bone and sinew from the body of a god.
"It's as if I can feel them," she whispered.
Or perhaps it was her own future she felt, bearing down on her like the waters of a swollen river.
* * * * *
"Again, Ms. Moi," Dr. Dvali said sternly. "How did the boy die?"
Sulean allowed a few moments to tick away in the silence of the common room. It was late. All was quiet. She imagined she could hear the sound of the desert wind pulsing in her ears.
"It was probably exhaustion that brought him to a stop. We found him at last in a small depression, invisible until we came very close. He was prostrate, barely breathing. All around him…"
She hated this image. It had haunted her all her long life.
"Go on," Dvali said.
"All around him, things had grown. He was enclosed in a sort of grove of Hypothetical remnants. They were spiky, dangerous-looking things, spears of some brittle green substance, incomplete, of course, obviously not sustainable, but still motile… still alive, if you accept that description."
"And they had surrounded him?" Mrs. Rebka asked, her voice gentler now.
"Or they had grown up around him while he slept, or he had deliberately gone to them. Some of them had… pierced him." She touched her ribs, her abdomen, to show them where.
"Killed him?"
"He was still conscious when we found him."
* * * * *
Sulean had torn herself away from Lochis and run thoughtlessly toward Esh, who was impaled on the picket of alien growths. She ignored the frightened voices calling her back.
Because this was her fault. She should never have helped Esh escape the Station. As unhappy as he had been there, he had at least been safe. Now something dreadful had overtaken him.
She felt no particular fear of the Ab-ashken growths, peculiar as they were. They had grown around the boy's body like a ring of sharpened fenceposts. She could smell them, although she was barely aware of it—a sharply chemical smell, sulfurous and rank. The growths were not healthy; they were mazed with cracks and fissures and in places blackened with something like rot. Their stalks shifted slightly when she moved among them, as if they were aware of her presence. And maybe they were.
They were certainly aware of Esh. Several of the tallest growths had arched into half-circles and pierced the boy with their sharpened tips. They had penetrated his chest and abdomen in three places, leaving little circles of dry blood on his clothing. Sulean couldn't tell at first whether he was dead or, somehow, still alive.
Then he opened his eyes and looked at her and—impossibly—smiled.
"Sulean," he said. "I found it."
Then he closed his eyes for the last time.
* * * * *
The silence in the common room was interrupted by a timid knock.
There was only one person at the commune who hadn't attended this meeting. Mrs. Rebka hurried to open the door.
Isaac stood outside, still wearing his night clothes, the knees of his pajamas soiled, his hands dirty, his expression somber.
"Someone's coming," he said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The door to Brian Gately's office opened just as a news summary popped up on his desktop. The visitor was the chubby DGS man named Weil. The press release was something about the recent ashfall.
Weil had left his sullen friend Sigmund elsewhere, and he was grinning—though his cheerfulness, under the circumstances, struck Brian as vaguely obscene.
"You forwarded this?" Brian asked, gesturing at the release.
"Read it. I'll wait."
Brian tried to focus on the document, but his mind's eye insisted on reviewing the photograph Pieter Kirchberg had sent. The corpse of Tomas Ginn on a rocky beach, much worse for wear. He wondered whether Weil had seen the photo. Or ordered the killing.
He was tempted to ask. He dared not. He blinked and read the press service release.
PORT MAGELLAN / REUTERS.ET: Scientists at the Mt. Mahdi Observatory today made the startling announcement that the recent Equatorian "ashfall," which affected the eastern coast and desert inland of that continent, was "not entirely inert."
The ashes and the microscopic structures the ash contained, believed to be the degraded remnants of Hypothetical structures from the outer reaches of the local solar system, have apparently shown signs of life.
In a joint press conference held today at the Observatory, representatives of the American University, the United Nations Geophysical Survey, and the Provisional Government displayed photographs and samples of "incompletely self-replicating and self-assembling quasi-organic objects" recovered from the western extremes of the dry inland basin that stretches from the coastal mountains to the western sea.
These objects, ranging from a pea-sized hollow sphere to an assembly of what appeared to be tubes and wires as large as a man's head, were said to be unstable in a planetary environment and hence posed no threat to human life.
"The 'space-plague' scenario is a non-starter," senior astronomer Scott Cleland said. "The infalling material was ancient and probably already corrupted by wear and tear before it entered the atmosphere. The vast majority of it was sterilized by a violent passage that left only a few nano-scale elements intact. A very few of these retained enough molecular integrity to re-initiate the process of growth. But they were designed to flourish in the extreme cold and vacuum of deep space. In a hot, oxygen-rich desert they simply can't survive for lo
ng."
Asked whether any of these structures remained active today, Dr. Cleland said, "None that we've sampled. By far the greatest number of active clusters occurred deep in the Rub al-Khali," the oil-rich far western desert. "Residents of the coastal cities are unlikely to find alien plants in their gardens."
Because harmful effects cannot be entirely ruled out, however, a loose quarantine has been established between the oil concessions and the western coast of Equatoria. This formidable terrain has attracted no substantial settlements, although tourists occasionally visit the canyonlands and the oil consortia maintain a constant presence. "Travel is being monitored and alerts have been issued," said Paul Nissom of the Provisional Government's Territorial Authority. "We want to keep out the casually curious and facilitate the work of the researchers who need to study and understand this important phenomenon."
There were a couple of further paragraphs with trivial details and contact numbers, but Brian figured he had the gist. He gave Weil a well-what-about-it look.
"Works out nicely for us," Weil said.
"What are you talking about?"
"Ordinarily the Provisional Government isn't much more than a harassed nanny. Since the ashfall, and especially this weird shit out west, they finally started paying attention to who goes where. Monitoring air traffic, especially."
There were more private planes per capita in Equatoria than anywhere back on Earth, most of them small craft, and an equally large number of casual airstrips. For years the traffic had been unregulated, ferrying passengers between bush communities or oil geologists to the desert.
"The bad news," Weil continued, "is that Turk Findley made it to his plane, along with Lise Adams and an unidentified third party. They flew out last night."
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