Axis s-2

by Robert Charles Wilson

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Isaac woke to see the clouds billowing through the passes behind the moving car, clouds shot through with luminous particles, clouds like the clouds of August 34th . But the sudden and breathtaking hurt obscured all that.

  What he felt wasn't pain, exactly, but something very much like it, a sensitivity that made light and noise intolerable, as if the exposed blade of the world had been thrust into his skull.

  Isaac understood his own specialness. He knew he had been created in an attempt to communicate with the Hypothetical, and he knew he had been a disappointment to the adults around him. He knew other things, too. He knew the vacuum of space wasn't empty: it was populated by ghost particles that existed too briefly to interact with the world of tangible things; but the Hypothetical could manipulate these ephemeral particles and use them to send and receive information. The Martian technology embedded in Isaac had attuned his nervous system to this kind of signaling. But it never resolved into anything like the comfortable linearity of words. Most of the time it was a sense of distant, inexpressible urgency. Sometimes—now—it was more like pain. And the pain was connected with the approaching cloud of dust and ash: the unseen world heaved with an invisible tumult, and Isaac's mind and body vibrated in concert.

  He was aware, too, of being lifted into the rear seat of the car, of being strapped in by hands not his own, of the voices and concerns of his old and new friends. They were afraid for him. And they were afraid for themselves. He was aware of Dr. Dvali ordering everyone into the car, the slamming doors, the revving engine. And he was glad it was not Dr. Dvali who held his head and soothed him (it was Mrs. Rebka), because he had come to dislike Dr. Dvali, almost to hate Dr. Dvali, for reasons he didn't understand.

  * * * * *

  Mrs. Rebka wasn't a physician but she had trained herself in basic medicine, as had the other Fourths, and Lise watched as she administered a sedative, pricking the boy's arm with an old-fashioned syringe. Isaac began to breathe more deeply and his screaming eventually ebbed to a sigh.

  They drove. The vehicle's headlights cut columns of light into the falling dust. Turk was doing the driving on behalf of the Fourths, trying to get out of the foothills before the roads became impassable. Lise had asked whether they shouldn't take Isaac to a hospital, but Mrs. Rebka shook her head: "There's nothing a hospital can do for him. Nothing we can't do for him ourselves."

  Diane Dupree watched the boy with wide, anxious eyes. Sulean Moi also watched him, but her expression was more inscrutable—some combination, it seemed to Lise, of resignation and terror.

  But it was Mrs. Rebka who allowed Isaac to rest his head on her shoulder, who reassured him with a word or the silent pressure of her hand when the bounce and rattle of the car disturbed him. She smoothed his hair and dabbed his forehead with a damp cloth. Before long the sedative put him to sleep.

  There was an obvious question Lise had been wanting to ask since they arrived at the Fourth compound, and since no one else had anything to say—and because the noise of the windshield wipers scraping dust across glass was driving her slightly crazy—she drew a breath and asked, "Is Isaacs mother still alive?"

  "Yes," Mrs. Rebka said.

  Lise turned to face her. "Are you his mother?"

  "I am," Mrs. Rebka said.

  * * * * *

  What do you see, Isaac?

  Much later, as he was waking up from the sleep they had injected into him, Isaac pondered the question.

  Mrs. Rebka was the one who had asked it. He tried to formulate an answer before the pain came back and stole his words. But the question was hard to answer because he was having a hard time seeing anything at all. He was aware of the vehicle and the people in it, the ash falling beyond the windows, but they all seemed vague and unreal. Was it daytime yet? But now the car had stopped, and before he answered Mrs. Rebka's question he asked one of his own: "Where are we?"

  Up front, the man named Turk Findley said, "Little town called Bustee. We might be staying here a while."

  Outside there were small buildings visible through the fog of dust. He could see them plainly enough. But that wasn't what Mrs. Rebka had meant by her question.

  "Isaac? Can you walk?"

  Yes, he could, for now, though the sedative was wearing off and the blade of the world was beginning to draw blood again. He climbed out of the car with one hand on Mrs. Rebka's arm. Dust sifted across his face. The dust smelled like something burned. Mrs. Rebka steered him toward the nearest small building, which was one wing of a motel. Isaac heard Turk say he had rented the last available room, for more money than it was worth. Lots of people were sheltering in Bustee tonight, Turk said.

  Then he was inside, on a bed, on his back, and the air was less dusty, though it still stank, and Mrs. Rebka brought a fresh cloth and began to dab the grime from his face. "Isaac," she said again gently, "what are you looking at? What do you see?"

  Because he kept turning his head in one direction—west, of course—and staring.

  What did he see?

  "A light."

  "Here in the room?"

  No. "A long way away. Farther than the horizon."

  "But you can see it from here? You can see it through the walls?"

  He nodded.

  "What does it look like?"

  Many words crowded Isaac's mind, many answers. A fire in a faraway place. An explosion. Sunrise. Sunset. The place where the stars fall and burn in their eagerness to live. And the thing deep underground that knows and welcomes them.

  But what he said was simply, truthfully, "I don't know."

  * * * * *

  Only Turk had been to Bustee before. The name, he said, was derived from a Hindi word for "slum." It wasn't a slum, but it was a greasy little road town on the edge of the Rub al-Khali, catering to traffic along the northernmost route to and from the oil lands. Cinderblock buildings and a few timber-framed houses; a store that sold tire gauges, maps and compasses, sunblock, cheap novels, disposable phones. Three gas stations and four restaurants.

  None of which Lise could see from the window of the motel room. The ashfall sifted down in gray, stinking curtains. Power lines down or transformers shorted by dust, she guessed, and repairs wouldn't be quick, not out here in low-priority-land. It was a miracle they had made it here at all, even in their big all-terrain all-weather vehicle. Someone from the motel office knocked at the door and handed out flashlights and a warning not to attempt candles or any kind of open flame. But the Fourths had packed their own flashlights, and there was nothing to see anyway, only dingy walls and patchwork wallpaper. Lise kept a flashlight at hand for navigating her way to the bathroom when the need arose.

  The boy Isaac slept, driven more by exhaustion than sedatives now, Lise guessed. The adults had huddled for conversation. Dr. Dvali was speculating about the ashfall in his persuasive and gently-modulated voice. "It might be a cyclical event. There's evidence in the geological record—this was some of your father's work, Miss Adams, though we never knew how to interpret it. Very thin ash layers compressed into the rock at intervals of ten thousand years or so."

  "What does that mean," Turk asked, "it happens every ten thousand years? Everything gets buried in ash?"

  "Not everything. Not everywhere. You find evidence of it mainly in the far west."

  "Wouldn't it have to be a pretty thick layer to leave traces like that?"

  "Thick, or persistent over a long period of time."

  "Because these buildings aren't built to hold up anything much more than their own weight."

  Roofs crushed, dust entombing the survivors: a cold Pompeii, Lise thought. That was chilling. But she had another thought. She said, "And Isaac—is the dustfall connected with what's happening to Isaac?"

  Sulean Moi gave her a sad look. "Of course it is," she said.

  Isaac understood it best in his dreams, where knowledge was rendered in wordless shapes and colors and textures.

  In his dreams, planets and species arose
like vagrant thoughts, were dismissed or committed to memory, evolved as thoughts evolved. His sleeping mind worked the way the universe worked—how could it be otherwise?

  Half-heard phrases filtered into his floating awareness. Ten thousand years. The dust had fallen before, ten thousand years before and ten thousand years before that. Vast structures seeded space with their residue, feeding cyclical processes that turned and turned like faceted diamonds. The dust fell in the west because the west was calling it, as the west called Isaac. This planet wasn't Earth. It was older, it existed in an older universe, old things lived inside it. Things lived inside it: things that were not mindful but listened and spoke and pulsed in slow, millennial rhythms.

  He could hear their voices. Some were close to him. Closer than they had ever been before.

  The groan of the hotel's stressed beams and timbers continued after dusk and through the night—management sent a crew up to shovel the roof—but the ashfall tapered off, and by dawn the air had cleared to a gritty semitransparency. Lise had fallen asleep despite her best efforts to stay awake, curled on a foam mattress with the stink of the dust in her nostrils and sweat streaking her face.

  She was the last to wake. She opened her eyes and saw that the Fourths were up and had gathered at the rooms two windows. The light coming in was less bright than a rainy autumn glow, but it was more than she had dared hope for while the dust was still falling.

  She sat up. She was wearing yesterdays clothes and her skin was encrusted with yesterday's dirt. Also her throat. Turk had noticed her movement; he handed her a bottle of water and she gulped it gratefully. "What time is it?"

  "About eight." Eight o'clock by the long Equatorian reckoning of the hours. "Sun's been up for a while now. The dust stopped falling but it's still settling. A lot of fine powder in the air."

  "How's Isaac?"

  "He's not screaming, anyway. We're okay… but you might want to take a look outside."

  Mrs. Rebka stepped back to tend to Isaac and allowed Lise to take her place at the window. Lise looked outside reluctantly.

  But there seemed to be nothing unexpected. Just a road drifted over with ash, the same road they had crept along yesterday, pushing their vehicle to the limit of its endurance. The car was where they had left it, dust duned on the windward side. Its webbed steel wheels were still dilated, as big as the tires on the industrial rigs parked in sheltering rows beyond it. The daylight was dim and gritty, but she could see all the way to the gas station some hundred or so yards to the south. The road was empty of pedestrians, but other faces peered from other windows. Nothing moved.

  No… that wasn't quite true.

  The dust moved.

  Beyond the courtyard, in the gray emptiness of the road, something like a whirlpool began to form as she watched. A region of ash the size of a dinner table began to turn a slow clockwise circle.

  "What is that?"

  Dr. Dvali, standing next to Turk, said, "Watch."

  Turk put a hand on her left shoulder and her own right hand moved to cover it. The ash turned more quickly, dimpled at the center of the vortex, slowed again. Lise didn't like what she was seeing. It was unnatural, threatening, or maybe that was just the vibe she was picking up from the others: they knew what to expect, they had seen this before. Whatever it was.

  Then the dust exploded—like a geyser, Lise thought. It shot a plume about ten feet into the air. She gasped and took an involuntary step back.

  The ejected dust became a rooster-tail in the wind and eventually faded into the general miasma of the air, but as it cleared it became obvious that the geyser had left something behind… something shiny.

  It looked like a flower. A ruby-colored flower, Lise marveled, smooth-stemmed and with a texture that made her think of the skin of a newborn infant. Stem and head were the same shade of deep, hypnotic red.

  Turk said, "That's the closest one yet."

  The flower—a word to which Lise's frantic thoughts automatically defaulted, because it really did look like a flower, with a gargantuan stem and a crown of petals, and she realized she was thinking of the sunflowers in her mothers garden in California, which had been just about this tall when they went to seed—began to arch and twist, turning its convex head to some rhythmless, inaudible tune.

  She said, "There are more of these?"

  "There were."

  "Where? What happened to them?"

  "Wait," Turk said.

  The flower turned its head toward the hotel. Lise stifled another small gasp, because in the center of the bloom there was something that looked like an eye. It was round, and it glittered wetly and it contained a sort of pupil, obsidian-black. For one awful moment it appeared to look directly at her.

  "Is this what it was like on Mars?" Dr. Dvali said to Sulean Moi.

  "Mars is countless light-years away. Where we are now, the Hypothetical have been active for much longer. The things that grew on Mars were much less active, different in appearance. But if you're asking me whether this is a similar phenomenon, then yes, probably it is."

  The ocular sunflower abruptly stopped moving. The inundated town of Bustee was still and silent, as if holding its breath.

  Then there was, to Lise's horror, more motion in the dust, bumped-up rills and puffs of ash converging on the flower. Something—several things—leaped onto the stalk of it with frightening speed. They moved continuously and she could only form a vague impression of their nature, things crab-like, sea-green, many-legged, and what they did to the sunflower was—

  They ate it.

  They nipped at its stalk until the writhing thing toppled; then they were on it like piranhas on a carcass, and when the manic flurry of their devouring was finished they disappeared, or became inert once more, camouflaged in the fallen ash.

  Nothing was left behind. No evidence whatsoever.

  "This," Dr. Dvali said, "is why we're reluctant to leave the room."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Turk spent the rest of the morning at the window, cataloging the varieties of peculiar life that sprang out of the dust. Know your enemy, he thought. Lise stood next to him much of the time, asking brief but pertinent questions about what he had seen before she woke up. Dr. Dvali had switched on their little wireless telecom receiver and was drawing down sporadic reports from Port Magellan, a useful activity in Turk's opinion, but the other Fourths did nothing but talk: endlessly and to little purpose. It was one of the failings of Fourths, Turk decided. They might occasionally be wise. But they were incurably talky.

  Right now they were picking on the Martian woman, Sulean Moi, who seemed to know more than the rest of them about the ashfall but who was reluctant to share her knowledge. Mrs. Rebka was particularly insistent. "Your taboos aren't relevant here," she said. "We need all the information we can get. You owe it to us… to the boy, at least."

  Temperate as it sounded, this was, by Fourth standards, nearly a fist-fight.

  The Martian woman, dressed in oversized denim pants that made her look like some implausibly skinny oil-rig jock, sat on the floor hugging her knees. "If you have a question," she said sullenly, "ask it."

  "You said the ashfall on Mars generated peculiar forms of, of—"

  "Of life, Mrs. Rebka. Call it by its name. Why not?"

  "Lifeforms like what we're seeing outside?"

  "I don't recognize the flowers or the predators that consume them. In that sense, there's no similarity. But that's to be expected. A forest in Ecuador doesn't look like a forest in Finland. But both are forests."

  "The purpose of it, though," Mrs. Rebka said.

  "I've studied the Hypotheticals since childhood and I've listened to a lot of highly-informed speculation and I still can't guess the 'purpose' of it. The Martian ashfalls are isolated events. The life they generate is vegetative, always short-lived, and unstable in the long term. What conclusions can be drawn from such isolated examples? Very few." She hesitated, frowning. "The Hypotheticals—whatever else they are—are almost c
ertainly not discreet entities but a collation of vastly many interconnected processes. They are an ecology, in other words. These manifestations either play some explicit role in that process or are an unintended consequence of it. I don't believe they represent any kind of deliberate strategy on the part of a higher consciousness."

  "Yes," Mrs. Rebka said impatiently, "but if your people understood enough to engineer Hypothetical technology into human beings—"

  "You possess that ability too." Sulean Moi looked pointedly at Isaac.

  "Because it was given to us by Wun Ngo Wen."

  "Our work on Mars has always been purely pragmatic. We were able to culture samples from the ashfall and observe their ability to interact with human protein at the cellular level. Centuries of that kind of observation produced some insight into the ways human biology might be manipulated."

  "But you engineered what you admit is Hypothetical technology."

  "Technology or biology—in this case I'm not sure the distinction is meaningful. Yes, we cultured alien life, or technology if you prefer that word, at the microscopic level. Because it grows, reproduces, and dies, we were able to select and manipulate certain strains for certain traits. Over the course of a great many years we generated the modified cultures that enhance human longevity. And other germ lines as well. One of the most radical of which is the treatment you applied to Isaac while he was still in the womb. In your womb, Mrs. Rebka."

  Mrs. Rebka reddened.

  Turk understood the significance of what they were discussing, and he guessed it was important, but it seemed ridiculously remote at a time when real problems were percolating so close to hand. Right outside the door, in fact. Was it safe to go outside? That was the question they ought to be asking. Because sooner or later they would have to leave this room. Because they had very little in the way of food.

  He begged the loan of Dr. Dvali's little radio and pushed the nodes into his ears, blocking out the querulous Fourths and inducing other voices.

  The available broadcast was a narrowband thing from Port Magellan, two guys from one of the local media collectives reading UN advisories and updated reports. This ashfall had been only a little worse than the first, at least in terms of weight and duration. A few roofs had collapsed to the south of the city. Most roads were currently impassable. People with respiratory problems had been sickened by ash inhalation, and even healthy people were spitting gray residue, but that wasn't what had everybody scared. What had everybody scared were the peculiar things growing out of the ash. The announcers called these things "growths" and reported that they had appeared randomly across the city, but especially where the ash was deep or had drifted. They sprang from the dust, in other words, like seedlings from mulch. Although they lived only briefly and were quickly "reabsorbed" into the local environment, a few of them—"objects resembling trees or enormous mushrooms"—had erupted to impressive heights.