There was a dreamlike (or nightmare-like) aspect to these reports. A "pink cylinder" fifty feet in length was blocking traffic at a downtown intersection. "Something witnesses describe as an immense spiky bubble, like a piece of coral," had sprouted from the roof of the Chinese consulate. Reports of small motile forms were yet to be officially confirmed.
Terrifying as this was, the manifestations were dangerous only if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—if one of them fell on you, for example. Still, residents were advised to stay indoors and keep windows closed. The ash had stopped falling, an offshore breeze was dispersing the lightest of the particles, and work crews were prepped to hose down the streets again ("growths" and all, Turk supposed) as soon as that was practical.
Unless this began to happen repeatedly, the city would recover. But the city was on the far side of a chain of mountains pierced by a few currently useless passes, and Bustee, like every other tin-and-tarpaper road town between the foothills and the Rub al-Khali, depended on the coast for supplies. How long till the passes were cleared? Weeks, minimum, Turk guessed. The last ashfall had been hard on these towns but this one had been worse, locally much denser, and the weird-ass plant life (or whatever it was) would surely impede the work necessary to get commerce up and running. So food would run short: what about water? He wasn't sure how these desert settlements were supplied. You turned on the tap, but where was the reservoir? Up in the foothills? Was the water still potable, and would it stay that way?
At least there was food and bottled water in the car, enough to last them a while. What Turk didn't like was that the vehicle was sitting out in the parking lot of this motel where someone might be tempted to break in and share the wealth. Here, at least, was a problem he could confront. He stood up and said, "I'm going outside."
The others turned to look goggle-eyed at him. Dvali said, "What are you talking about?"
He explained about the food. "Even if no one else is hungry, I am."
"It might not be safe," Dvali said.
Turk had seen a couple of other people out in the street with handkerchiefs tied over their mouths. One of them had been within fifteen feet of a "lifeform" when it sprouted from the dust, but the flower hadn't interfered with the man and the man had shown absolutely no inclination to fuck with the flower. Which jibed with what the news was saying about Port Magellan. "Just to the car and back. But I'd like somebody in the doorway watching out for me, and I need something to use for a mask."
There was no debate, to Turk's relief. Dr. Dvali used a pocketknife to cut off a corner of the bedsheet, which Turk tied over his nose and mouth. Turk took the vehicle's keycard from Mrs. Rebka while Lise volunteered for door duty.
"Don't stay out any longer than you need to," she said.
"Don't worry," he said.
* * * * *
The sky was blue, made chalky by the ash that gave the air a sour, sulfuric tang. No telling what this was doing to everybody's lungs. If the dust contained alien spores—which was what all the talk seemed to imply—might they not take root in the moist interior of a human body? But they didn't seem to need much moisture, Turk thought, if they could grow on the paved street of a desert town in a dry September. In any case, there had been no reports of purely ash-related deaths. He shook off these concerns and tried to concentrate on the task at hand.
He felt lonely as soon as he stepped outside. The motel parking lot was a paved half-moon with an empty ceramic fountain in the middle of it. Beyond it was the main street, really just a stretch of Highway 7 heading into the Rub al-Khali. Across the street there was a row of one-story brick commercial buildings. All of this was ash-coated, windows dust-encrusted, traffic signs and billboards rendered illegible. The silence was unbroken.
The Fourths' vehicle, recognizable by its boxy shape and sprung-steel wheels, was parked a dozen yards to Turk's left. He stood a moment and looked back at Lise, who was holding the door open a crack. He gave her a little wave and she nodded. All clear. Onward.
He took long deliberate steps, trying not to stir up too much dust. His shoes impacted the drifted ash and left finely-detailed prints under chalky clouds.
He reached the car without incident and was only slightly unnerved by the distance that had opened up between himself and the room where Lise was waiting. He used his forearm to brush a layer of ash off the rear of the vehicle, the baggage compartment where the groceries were stored. He took Dr. Dvali's keycard out of his pocket and applied it to the security slot. Tendrils of dust rose up around his hands.
He paused and lifted the cloth that covered his mouth long enough to spit. The spittle plopped inelegantly on the surface of the ash-covered sidewalk, and he half expected something to rise up from beneath, like a fish rising to bait, and snatch it away.
He opened the cargo door and selected a cooler full of bottled water and a box of canned goods—the kind of thing you could eat without cooking if you had to—and that, plus a few stacks of flatbread, was all he could carry. Enough for now. Or he could get in the car and drive it closer to the room: but that would block the route around the courtyard and maybe attract unwanted attention…
"Turk!" Lise yelled from the doorway. He looked back at her. The door was wide open and she was leaning forward, her hair framing her face. She pointed with obvious urgency: "Turk! In the street—"
He saw it at once.
It didn't look threatening. Whatever it was. In fact it looked like nothing more than a scrap of loose paper or sheet plastic caught in a gust of wind, fluttering at head level above the dust-duned highway by the diner. It flapped, but you couldn't really say it was flying, not in the purposeful way a bird flies.
But it wasn't a sheet of paper; it was something stranger than that. It was colored glassy blue at the center, red at its four extremities. And although it was clumsy in the air, it appeared to move by design, slip-sliding up the center of the road.
Then it seemed to hesitate, its four wing-tips pumping simultaneously to loft it a few feet higher. The next time it moved, it moved in a new direction.
It moved toward Turk.
"Get the fuck back here!" Lise was screaming.
They said these things weren't dangerous. Turk hoped that was true. He dropped everything but the carton of canned goods and began to run. About halfway to the door he glanced back over his shoulder. The flapping thing was right behind him, a yard to his right—way too close. He dropped the last carton and broke into a full-out sprint.
The thing was bigger than it had looked from a distance. And louder: it sounded like a bedsheet on a laundry line in a windstorm. He didn't know whether it could hurt him but it was clearly interested in him. He ran, and because the ash here was six inches deep, in places deeper, it was like running on a sandy beach. Or in a nightmare.
Lise threw the door wide open.
Soon Turk could see the flapping thing in his peripheral vision, beating the air like a piston. All it had to do was veer right and it would be on him. But it kept its steady if erratic course, paralleling him, almost as if it was racing him. Racing him—
To the open door.
He slowed down. The flapper rattled past him.
"Turk!"
Lise was still posed in the doorway. Turk ripped the cloth from his mouth and took a deep breath: bad move, because his throat was instantly clogged. "Close it," he croaked, but she couldn't hear him. He gagged and spat. "The door, dammit, close the fuckin' door!"
Whether or not she heard him, the danger dawned on Lise. She stepped back and simultaneously made a grab for the doorknob, missed, lost her balance and fell. The flapping thing, no longer awkward in the air, homed in on her as if it were laser-guided. Turk began sprinting again, but she was too far away.
She sat halfway up, balanced on an elbow, eyes wide, and Turk felt a stab of fear under his ribs sharp as a thorn to the heart. She raised an arm to fend off the thing. But it ignored her as it had ignored Turk. It slid past her into the room.
CHAPTER TWEWTY-TWO
Lise sat stunned on the floor, not sure exactly what had happened.
The thing, the flying thing, the thing she had thought was about to attack Turk, had come inside the room. For a single dazed moment she heard the sound of it subside to a moist fluttering. Then the sound stopped altogether, and Mrs. Rebka began shouting.
Lise struggled to her feet.
"Shut the door!" Dr. Dvali roared.
But no. Not yet. She waited for Turk, who came barreling in along with a cloud of dust. Then she slammed the door and looked around warily for the flying creature. Idiotically, she was thinking of the summer her parents had taken her on vacation to a cabin in the Adirondacks: one night a bat had come down the chimney and fluttered around in the darkness, terrifying her. She recalled with supernatural clarity the feeling that at any moment something hot and alive would tangle itself in her hair and begin to bite.
But the flapping thing had already alighted, she realized.
The Fourths gathered around the bed where Isaac lay, because—
Because the flying creature had landed on the boy's face.
The terrified boy had turned his head against the pillow. The animal, or creature or whatever it was called or ought to be called, covered his left cheek like a fleshy red poultice. One corner of it matted the hair above his temple while another enclosed his neck and shoulder. Isaac's mouth and nose remained free, although the gelid body of the thing had adhered to his trembling lower lip. His left eye was dimly visible through the creatures translucent body. His other eye was wide open.
Mrs. Rebka went on calling the boy's name. She reached for the creature as if to pull it away, but Dvali caught her hand. "Don't touch it, Anna," he said.
Anna. Mrs. Rebka's name was Anna. Some idiotically calm fraction of Lise's mind filed that fact away. Anna Rebka, who was also the boy's mother.
"We need to get it off him!"
"Something to handle it with," Dvali said. "Gloves, a stick, a piece of paper—"
Turk yanked a pillowcase from one of the spare pillows and wrapped it around his right hand.
Strange, Lise thought, how the flying thing had ignored Turk in the street, how it had ignored Lise, for that matter, and the other adults, all easy targets, but had lighted without hesitation on Isaac. Did that mean something? Whatever the flying thing truly was—and she did not doubt that it had sprung from the ash, like the ocular flower or the host of carnival objects the news was reporting from Port Magellan—was it possible it had chosen Isaac?
The others stood back from the bed as Turk reached toward the creature with his wrapped hand. But then another strange thing happened:
The flying thing disappeared.
* * * * *
"The hell?" Turk said.
Isaac gasped and sat suddenly upright, put his hand to his face and felt the freshly revealed skin.
Lise blinked and tried to replay the memory in her mind's eye. The flapping thing had dissolved—or at least that's how it had looked. It had turned to liquid all at once and instantly evaporated. Or, no, it had seeped away, like a puddle of water drawn into moist earth. There wasn't even a wisp of vapor where it had been. It was as if it had drained directly into Isaac's flesh.
She set aside that troubling thought.
Mrs. Rebka pushed past Turk and reached for the boy—fell on the bed beside him and took him into her arms. Isaac, still gasping, bent his body against her and ducked his head into her shoulder. He began to sob.
When it became obvious nothing more was about to happen—nothing monstrous, at least—Dvali asked the others to step back. "Give them some room." Lise retreated and grabbed Turk's hand. His hand was sweaty and dusty but infinitely reassuring. She couldn't begin to guess what had just happened, but the aftermath was utterly comprehensible: a frightened child was being comforted by his mother. For the first time Lise began to see Mrs. Rebka as something more than a spooky, emotionally distant Fourth. For Mrs. Rebka, at least, Isaac wasn't a biology experiment. Isaac was her son.
"What the fuck," Turk repeated. "Is the kid all right?"
That remained to be seen. Sulean Moi and Diane Dupree sequestered themselves in the motel room's tiny kitchen nook, talking fervently but quietly. Dr. Dvali watched Mrs. Rebka from a careful distance. Gradually Isaac's breathing grew steadier. At last he pulled away from Mrs. Rebka and looked around. His peculiar gold-flecked eyes were large and wet, and he hiccupped a couple of times.
Diane Dupree emerged from her conference with the Martian woman and said, "Let me examine him."
She was the closest thing to a medical doctor in the room, so Mrs. Rebka reluctantly allowed Diane to sit with the boy, measuring his pulse and thumping his chest, doing these things, Lise suspected, more to reassure Isaac than to diagnose him. She did look closely at his left cheek and forehead where the creature had touched him, but there was no obvious rash or irritation. Lastly she looked into Isaac's eyes—those strange eyes—and seemed to find nothing extraordinary there.
Isaac mustered enough courage to ask, "Are you a doctor?"
"Just a nurse. And you can call me Diane."
"Am I all right, Diane?"
"You seem all right to me."
"What happened?"
"I don't know. A lot of strange things are happening right now. That was just one of them. How do you feel?"
The boy paused as if taking inventory. "Better," he said finally.
"Not scared?"
"No. Well. Not as much."
In fact he was speaking more coherently than he had for a couple of days. "May I ask you a question?"
The boy nodded.
"Last night you said you could see through the walls. You said there was a light only you could see. Do you still see it?"
He nodded again.
"Where? Can you point at it?"
Haltingly, Isaac did so.
"Turk," Diane said. "Do you have your compass?"
Turk carried a brass-encased compass in his pocket—he had refused to abandon it back in the Minang village, much to Ibu Diane's annoyance. He took it out and sighted along Isaac's arm toward his extended index finger.
"This is nothing new," Mrs. Rebka said impatiently. "He always points the same way. A little north of west."
"Just about due west now. Tending to the south, if anything." Turk looked up and registered their expressions. "Why? Is that important?"
* * * * *
By mid-afternoon the street was more nearly normal. Nothing had grown out of the ashfall for a couple of hours. There were occasional eddies in the dust, but that could have been the wind—a gusty wind had come up, clouding the air and piling gray windrows against exposed vertical surfaces. But it swept away some of the ashfall and even exposed the asphalt in places.
Only a few of the bizarre growths had lasted out the morning. Most, like the flower with an eye in its bloom, were attacked (eaten, Lise thought, might as well use the word) by smaller and more mobile entities, which then faded and vanished. Some of the larger growths were still more or less intact. She had seen a sort of technicolor tumbleweed blowing down the street, obviously the husk of something no longer vital. And there was a fretwork of brittle white tubules clinging to one of the buildings opposite the motel, obscuring a sign that had once announced auto parts but was no longer legible under the pale fretwork.
The relative calm drew people out of their hiding places. A few big-tired vehicles clanked past, more or less managing the dustfall. The motel clerk knocked on the door and asked whether everyone was okay—he had seen a little of the morning's drama. Turk said they were fine and he even ventured outside again (door firmly closed behind him, Lise at the window concealing her anxiety) and came back from the car with enough groceries to last a couple of days.
Mrs. Rebka con
tinued hovering over Isaac, who was alert and not obviously suffering. He was sitting up now, facing the western wall of the room as if he were praying to some backward Mecca. This wasn't new behavior, Lise understood, but it was still deeply spooky. When Mrs. Rebka took a bathroom break, Lise went to the boy's bedside and sat with him.
She said hello. He looked at her briefly, then turned his head back to the wall.
Lise said, "What is it, Isaac?"
"It lives underground," the boy said.
And Lise suppressed a shiver and backed away.
* * * * *
Turk and Dr. Dvali conferred over a map.
It was the standard fold-up map of the topography and sparse roads of Equatoria west of the mountains. Lise peeked over Turk's shoulder as he marked lines with a pen and a ruler. "What's this about?"
"We're triangulating," Turk said.
"Triangulating what?"
Dvali, with only slightly strained patience, pointed at a dot on the map. "This is the compound where you met us, Miss Adams. We left there and we traveled north about two hundred miles—here." A flyspeck marked Bustee. "Back at the compound Isaac's obsession was with a very specific compass point, which we've drawn out." A long line into the west. "But where we are now, his directional sense appears to have altered slightly." Another long line, not quite parallel to the first. The lines moved closer across the amber-colored vastness of the desert, deep into the marked boundaries of the international mineral-rights concessions.
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