Axis s-2

by Robert Charles Wilson

  They intersected in the Rub al-Khali, the sandy tableland that comprised the western quarter of Equatoria.

  "That's what he's pointing at?"

  "That's what he's been pointing at all summer—more urgently in the last few weeks."

  "So what is it? What's there?"

  "As far as I know, nothing. Nothing's there."

  "But it's where he wants to go."

  "Yes." Dr. Dvali looked past Lise at the other Fourths. "And that's where we're going to take him."

  The Fourth women said nothing, only stared.

  It was Mrs. Rebka who finally, reluctantly, nodded her consent.

  * * * * *

  Lise couldn't sleep that night. She tossed on her mattress listening to the sounds the others made. Whatever else the Fourth treatment might cure, it did nothing for snoring. And yet they slept. And she did not.

  Eventually, well past midnight, she got up, stepped over sleeping bodies on her way to the bathroom, and splashed her face with lukewarm water. Instead of going back to bed she went to the window, where Turk was sitting in a chair keeping the night watch.

  "Can't sleep," she whispered.

  Turk kept his gaze fixed on the street outside, a ghostly void by the light of the dust-dimmed moon. Nothing was happening. The peculiar eruptions from the ashfall showed no sign of resuming. Finally he said, "You want to talk?"

  "I don't want to wake anybody up."

  "Come out to the car." Turk and Dr. Dvali had moved the car closer to the room, where it would be easier to keep an eye on. "We can sit there awhile. It's safe enough now."

  Lise had not left the room since they arrived and the idea appealed to her. She was wearing her only pair of jeans and an oversized shirt she had borrowed from the Fourth compound. She pulled her shoes onto her bare feet.

  Turk opened the door and eased it shut when they had stepped outside. The smell of the ash was instantly stronger. Sulfur, or something bitter like that—why did the ash smell like sulfur? Hypothetical machines grew in cold places, or so Lise had learned in school: distant asteroids, the frozen moons of frozen planets. Was there sulfur out there? She had heard of sulfur on the moons of, was it, Jupiter? The New World's solar system had a planet like that, a cold radioactive giant, far from the sun.

  The wind had died with nightfall. The sky was hazy but she could see a few stars. Even when she was very young her father had loved to show her the stars. The stars need names, he would say, and together they would name them. Big Blue. Point of the Triangle. Or silly names. Belinda. Grapefruit. Antelope.

  She slid into the front seat next to Turk.

  "We need to talk about what happens next," he said.

  Yes. That was undeniably true. She said, "The Fourths are taking Isaac west."

  "Right. I don't know what they hope to accomplish."

  "They think he can talk to the Hypothetical."

  "Great—what's he going to say? Greetings from the human race? Please stop dropping shit on us from outer space?"

  "They're hoping to learn something profound."

  "You believe that?"

  "No. But they do. Dvali does, at least."

  "Fourths are generally pretty reasonable people, but would you put a bet on that outcome? I wouldn't."

  It was like religion, Lise supposed. You didn't lay odds on the sacred, you just looked for it with an open heart and hoped for the best. But she didn't say that to Turk. "So what do we do when they take off for the desert?"

  He said, "I'm thinking of going with them."

  "You're—what?"

  "Wait, it makes sense. You saw the map, right? The place they're headed is three-quarters of the way to the west coast. From there there's a decent road all the way to the sea. The west coast, Lise, that's nothing but fishing villages and research outposts. Catch a boat on the southern route back to Port Magellan and by the time I get there nobody's looking for me anymore, the whole Fourth thing is over and Genomic Security has probably figured that out. I have enough friends in the Fourth community that I can probably get myself a whole new set of identity documents."

  Nights got chilly in the desert this time of year. The upholstery was cold and their talk had made condensation on the window. "I can see a couple of problems with that."

  "So can I—what's your list?"

  She tried to be logical. "Well, the ashfall. Even if the roads are passable, even with a good vehicle, you could get stalled, run out of gas, have engine problems."

  "It's a risk," he admitted, "but you can plan for it, carry tools and parts and fuel and so on."

  "And the Fourths aren't a free ride. They expect to find something out there. What if they're right? I mean, look at the way that flying thing went after Isaac. Maybe he is special, maybe he has some special attraction to the, uh, whatever grows out of the ash, and, if so, that could be a major obstacle."

  "I thought about that too. But I haven't heard of anyone being seriously hurt by those things, except accidentally. Even Isaac. Whatever happened to him, it doesn't seem to have made him worse."

  "It landed on his face, Turk. It sank into his skin."

  "He's sitting up, he's not feverish, he's no sicker than he was before."

  "You wouldn't say that if it had been you."

  "That's the point—it wasn't me; whatever that thing was, I'm not what it wanted."

  "So we just tag along and when they're finished with Isaac—whatever that means—we go on to the coast? That's the plan?"

  He said with an embarrassment Lise could feel even in the shadows of the car, "Doesn't have to be both of us. If you want you can stick here and try to catch a ride over the pass when the ash clears. You have options I don't have. Probably safer to do that, from the objective point of view."

  The objective point of view. Doubtless Turk imagined he was giving her the latitude to back out graciously from a reckless plan. He led the kind of life that allowed for sudden reversals of fortune and heavy wagers against fate. She didn't. That was the implication, and it was, of course, true, by and large—though not lately.

  "I'll think about it," she said, and stepped out of the car into the moonlit night, wishing she had been able to sleep.

  * * * * *

  Come morning there was a degree of near-normality in Bustee: a few pedestrians in the street, a few capable vehicles beginning to head toward the larger towns to the south. Locals gawked at the remains of alien life clinging to the facades of buildings or littering the sidewalks like broken, once-brightly-colored toys. Life reassembling itself, Lise thought, despite the strangeness. Her own life, more deeply unraveled, was slower to knit.

  The Fourths, now that they had reached a consensus, set out to procure supplies. A party of four—Dr. Dvali, Sulean Moi, Diane Dupree, and Turk—went to see what money could still buy at the local shops. Turk was even talking about a second vehicle, if they could procure one.

  Lise stayed in the motel room with Mrs. Rebka and Isaac, hoping to catch another couple of hours of sleep. Which turned out to be difficult, because Isaac was agitated again. Not because of the flying thing that had attacked him—that seemed to have passed from his mind as promptly as a bad dream—but out of a new sense of urgency, a need to hurry to the heart of whatever was happening out west. Mrs. Rebka had asked a few tentative questions. What did he mean when he talked about something "underground"? But Isaac couldn't answer and grew frustrated when he tried.

  So Mrs. Rebka told him they were going west, they were going west, as soon as they possibly could; and eventually Isaac accepted this consolation and fell back to sleep.

  Mrs. Rebka left the bedside and moved to a chair. Lise pulled her own chair closer.

  Mrs. Rebka looked about fifty years old. Lise had assumed she was older. She was a Fourth, and Fourths could appear "about fifty" for decades. But if Isaac was hers, she couldn't be much older than she looked. And anyway, Lise thought, wasn't it true that Fourths were biologically unable to conceive? So Mrs. Rebka's pregnancy must have begun bef
ore her conversion.

  The obvious question was difficult but Lise was determined to ask it, and she wasn't likely to have a better opportunity. "How did it happen, Mrs. Rebka? The boy, I mean. How did he… I mean, if this isn't too personal."

  Mrs. Rebka closed her eyes. Fatigue was written all over her face, fatigue or some deep, intractable despair. "What are you asking, Miss Adams? How he was altered or why he was conceived?"

  Lise fumbled for an answer but Mrs. Rebka waved it off. "A brief and not especially interesting story. My husband was a lecturer temporarily seconded to the American University. Not a Fourth, but friendly toward them. He might have considered the treatment himself except that he was a devout, orthodox Jew—his religious principles forbade it. And he died for the lack of it. He had an aneurism in his brain, inoperable. The treatment was the only thing that might have saved him. I begged him to take it, but he refused. In my grief I hated him a little for that. Because…"

  "Because you were pregnant."

  "Yes."

  "Did he know?"

  "By the time I was certain of it the aneurism had burst. He lived a few days but he was comatose."

  "That child was Isaac?"

  Mrs. Rebka closed her eyes. "That was fetal tissue that became Isaac. I know how brutal that sounds. But I couldn't tolerate the idea of raising the child alone. I meant to have an abortion. It was Dr. Dvali who convinced me otherwise. He had been one of my husbands closest friends and he became mine. He admitted that he was a Fourth. He talked to me about the controversies in the Fourth community, what it was like being—at least in some sense—a better kind of human being. And he talked to me about the Hypothetical, a subject that had always interested me. He introduced me to others in his community. They were supportive."

  "They talked you into doing what they wanted you to do."

  "Nothing as crude as that. They didn't feed me propaganda. I liked these people—I liked them better than all the unchanged people who visited me out of a sense of duty, who were relentlessly sympathetic and secretly indifferent. The Fourths were authentic. They said what they believed. And one of the things Avram Dvali believed in was the possibility of communicating with the Hypotheticals. He led me very gradually to the idea that I might have something to contribute to that very important work, because I was unchanged. And pregnant."

  "So you gave him Isaac?"

  "Not Isaac! I gave him the possibility of Isaac. Otherwise I would never have carried the child to term." She breathed in, breathed out, and the sound, to Lise's ears, was like the sound of the tide retreating from an ancient beach. "It wasn't any more complicated than the ordeal of becoming a Fourth. The customary injection, and then, when the process was underway, an intrauterine injection to keep the altered infant from being rejected by my body. I was tranquilized much of the time. I honestly remember very little of the pregnancy itself. He came to term in seven months."

  "And afterward."

  Mrs. Rebka looked away. "Avram was adamant that he should be raised by the community, not exclusively by me. He said it would be better if I didn't bond too closely with the child."

  "Better for you or better for Isaac?"

  "Both. We weren't sure he would survive to maturity. Isaac was—is—an experiment, Miss Adams. Avram was protecting me from what could have been an even more traumatic episode of grief. And beyond that… as much as I wanted to be a parent to Isaac, the boy has a difficult personality. He refused close contact with anyone. As a baby he wouldn't consent to be held. It really was as if he belonged to some new species, as if on the most fundamental biological level he knew he wasn't one of us."

  "Because you made him that way," Lise could not help saying.

  "True. The responsibility is all ours. And the guilt, of course. All I can say is that we hoped his contribution to our understanding of the universe would redeem the ugliness of his creation."

  "Was that something you believed, or something they told you to believe?"

  "Thank you for making excuses for me, Miss Adams, but yes, I believed it; all of us believed in it to one degree or another. That's why we came together in the first place. But none of us believed it as confidently and as—I'm tempted to say as heroically—as Avram Dvali. We had doubts, of course we did; we had moments of remorse. It isn't a pleasant story, is it? I'm sure you're asking yourself how we could have contemplated such a thing, much less carried it out. But people are capable of all kinds of acts, Miss Adams. Even Fourths. You ought to remember that." Mrs. Rebka closed her eyes. "And now I'm tired, and I don't have anything further to say."

  * * * * *

  The others came back with food, bottled water, spare parts, and (miraculously) a second vehicle—another big-tired utility vehicle purchased, Turk said, at ridiculous expense from a larcenous local dealer. The Fourths had more cash than good sense, Turk said, or maybe the sense to know when cash was no good.

  She helped Turk load supplies into the vehicles. He moved with easy muscularity, loose-hipped and unself-conscious. There was a certain pleasure in doing the work with him, not thinking about Mrs. Rebka or Isaac or Dr. Dvali or what might be waiting out in the Rub al-Khali.

  "So are you riding with us," he finally asked, "or are you waiting for a bus back to the Port?"

  She didn't grace him with an answer. He didn't deserve one.

  Because of course she was going with him. Into the big unknown, or wherever it was good people went when they disappeared.

  PART FOUR — RUB AL-KHALI

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Brian Gately was safely back in Port Magellan when the second ash-fall struck.

  Sigmund and Weil had done something remarkable as they flew with Brian across the Bodhi Pass and down to the coastal plain: they had admitted defeat. The Fourths were scattered, Weil said, and the burned compound had yielded no evidence beyond the charred remains of a bioreactor hidden in a basement. Nothing incriminating had been discovered in Turk Findley's purloined aircraft, and the four captives were obviously decoys, elderly even by the standards of Fourths.

  "So what, then," Brian asked as their aircraft overflew a canyon along which, far below, a lone oil tanker was navigating the switchbacks, "you just go home?"

  "Of course we don't give up. We do what we've been doing for years, monitor communications, run software on strategic surveillance sites. Sooner or later something turns up. And in the meantime there's one less bioreactor to worry about. If nothing else, somebody's plans have been seriously fucked with."

  "For this," Brian asked, "people die?"

  "Who died, Brian? I don't remember anyone dying."

  * * * * *

  So he came at last to his small apartment in the polyglot city and was alone there when for the second time the sky filled with the luminous debris of ancient, incomprehensible machines.

  He watched the local news broadcasts with a vague indifference. The newscasters used words like "strange" and "unprecedented," but Brian wasn't impressed: it was only a kind of celestial rot, the rubble of a vast disintegration. The Hypotheticals had built their intelligences in the cold places around and between countless stars, and they built them to last, no doubt, but any made thing had a lifetime. The pyramids of Egypt eroded; the Roman aqueducts were stumps of broken stone. So must the constructions of the Hypotheticals break down once they had served their dozen or their million allotted years.

  The ashes birthed monstrosities, some of which he could see from his own window. A dozen yards down the road, where the Arabic commercial district declined into a structureless maze of souks and tea shops, a green tubule as big as a sewer pipe writhed as if in a strong wind and then tumbled over to barricade the street.

  In his mind he played back Lise's final phone call. Where was she now? Not even Sigmund and Weil had been able to answer that question. She had fled with the rogue Fourths, victim of her own wild sympathies. Free, perhaps, in some distasteful sense of the word. Unbroken. Not yet fallen to earth like an ancient machine.


  The ashfall took longer to clean up than it had the first time. And because it had happened twice, the people on television were asking themselves somber questions. Was this the end of it or would it happen again? Would the effects follow some exponential curve, each time more peculiar and disastrous, until Port Magellan was entirely buried under a mass of what looked like enormous children's toys?

  Part of Brian wanted to deny the possibility while another part of him relished it. This was, after all, an alien planet, and how credulous we were, he thought, to imagine we could simply move in unmolested and conduct our lives as if it were a second Earth.

  But the civil authorities, ant-like, methodically cleared the debris and reestablished their pheromonic lines of communication. When he could no longer avoid it Brian drove from his apartment along the smudged avenues to the American district, to the consulate building, to the offices of the Department of Genomic Security, Port Magellan Branch.

  He walked past his own office to the door of his immediate superior, a consular legate named Larry Diesenhall. Diesenhall was a fifty-five-year-old career man with a shaved head and eyes so delicately colored they appeared to have been drawn in crayon. Diesenhall looked up at Brian and smiled. "Good to see you back, Brian."

  Back at last. The prodigal son. Brian took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and dropped it on Diesenhalls immaculate desktop.

  "What's this?"

  "Have a look."

  The envelope contained a pair of photographs—the photographs Pieter Kirchberg had sent him, extra copies of which Brian had run off on his printer this morning. He averted his eyes while Diesenhall opened the envelope.

  "Jesus!" Diesenhall said. "Christ! What am I looking at here?"