Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “No. But you can smell it.”

  He could, now that she mentioned it—a mineral smell, slightly acrid, a little sulfuric.

  Tyrell said, “You think it’s dangerous?”

  “Nothing we can do about it if it is.”

  “Except stay indoors,” Lise said. But Turk doubted that was practical. Even now, through the glittering ashfall, he could make out traffic on Rue de Madagascar, pedestrians scurrying down the sidewalks covering their heads with jackets or handkerchiefs or newspapers. “Unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless,” she said, “this goes on too long. There’s not a roof in Port Magellan built to bear much weight.”

  “And it isn’t just dust,” Tyrell said.

  “What?”

  “Well, look.” He gestured at the window.

  Absurdly, impossibly, something the shape of a starfish drifted past the glass. It was gray but speckled with light. It must have weighed nearly nothing because it floated in the weak breeze like a balloon, and when it reached the deck of the patio it crumbled into powder and a few larger fragments.

  Turk gave Lise a glance. She shrugged, incredulous.

  “Get me a tablecloth,” Turk said.

  Tyrell said, “What do you want with a tablecloth?”

  “And one of those linen napkins.”

  “You don’t want to mess with the linen,” Tyrell said. “Management’s very strict about that.”

  “Go get the manager, then.”

  “Mr. Darnell’s off tonight. I guess that makes me the manager.”

  “Then get a tablecloth, Tyrell. I want to check this out.”

  “Don’t mess up my place.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Tyrell went to undress a table. Lise said, “You’re going out there?”

  “Just long enough to retrieve a little of whatever’s coming down.”

  “What if it’s toxic?”

  “Then I guess we’re all fucked.” She flinched, and he added, “But we’d probably know by now if it was.”

  “Can’t be good for your lungs, whatever it is.”

  “So help me tie that napkin over my face.”

  The remaining diners and waiters watched curiously but made no effort to help. Turk took the tablecloth to the nearest exit to the patio and gestured to Tyrell to slide open the glass door. The smell immediately intensified—it was something like wet, singed animal hair—and Turk hurriedly spread the tablecloth on the patio floor and backed inside.

  “Now what?” Tyrell said.

  “Now we let it sit a few minutes.”

  He rejoined Lise, and, bereft of conversation, they watched the dust come down for a quarter of an hour more. Lise asked him how he planned to get home. He shrugged. He lived in what was essentially a trailer a few miles downcoast from the airfield. There was already a good half inch of ash on the ground and traffic was crawling.

  “I’m only a couple of blocks from here,” she said. “The new building on Rue Abbas by the Territorial Authority compound? It ought to be fairly sturdy.”

  It was the first time she had invited him home. He nodded.

  But he was still curious. He waved down Tyrell, who had been serving coffee to everyone still present, and Tyrell slid open the patio door one more time. Turk gripped the open tablecloth, now burdened with a layer of ash, and pulled it gently, trying not to disturb whatever fragile structures it might have captured. Tyrell closed the door promptly. “Phew! Stinks.”

  Turk brushed off the few flakes of gray ash that clung to his shirt and hair. Lise joined him as he squatted to examine the debris-covered tablecloth. A couple of curious diners pulled their chairs a little closer, though they wrinkled their noses at the smell.

  Turk said, “You have a pen or a pencil on you?”

  Lise rummaged in her purse and came up with a pen. Turk took it from her and used it to probe the layer of dust that had collected on the tablecloth.

  “What’s that?” Lise asked over his shoulder. “To your left. Looks like, I don’t know, an acorn . . .”

  Turk hadn’t seen an acorn in years. Oaks didn’t grow in Equatoria. The object in the ashfall was about the size of his thumb. It was saucer-shaped at one end and tapered to a blunt point at the other—an acorn, or maybe a tiny egg wearing a minuscule sombrero. It appeared to be made of the same stuff as the fallen ash, and when he touched it with the tip of the pen it dissolved as if it possessed no particular substance at all.

  “And over there,” Lise said, pointing. Another shaped object, this one resembling a gear out of an old mechanical clock. It, too, crumbled when he touched it.

  Tyrell went to the staff room and came back with a flashlight. When he played the beam over the tablecloth at a raking angle it showed up a number of these objects, if you could call them “objects”—the faintly structured remains of things that appeared to have been manufactured. There was a tube about a centimeter long, perfectly smooth; another about the same size, but knobbed like a length of spine from some small animal, a mouse, say. There was a six-pronged thorn; there was a disk with miniature, crumbling spokes, like a bicycle wheel; there was a beveled ring. Some of these things glinted with a faint remnant light.

  “All burned,” Lise observed.

  Burned or otherwise decomposed. But how could something so completely cremated remain even partially intact after falling from the sky? What had these things been made of?

  Also present in the ashfall were a few luminous specks. Turk hovered his hand over one of them.

  “Careful,” Lise said.

  “It’s not hot. It’s not even warm.”

  “Could be, I don’t know, radioactive.”

  “Could be.” If so, it was another doomsday scenario. Everyone outside was inhaling this stuff. Everyone inside soon would be. None of these buildings was airtight, none of them filtered its air.

  “You learning anything from this?” Tyrell asked.

  Turk stood up and brushed his hands. “Yeah. I’m learning that I know even less than I thought I did.”

  He accepted Lise’s offer of temporary shelter. They borrowed spare kitchen clothing from Tyrell, chef’s jackets to protect their clothes from the falling ash, and they shuffled as fast as they could across the gray dunes in the parking lot to Lise’s car. The ash cloud had turned the sky dark, obscured the meteor shower, dimmed the streetlights.

  Lise drove a Chinese car, smaller than Turk’s vehicle but newer and probably more reliable. He shook himself off as he climbed into the shotgun seat.

  She steered the vehicle out the back exit from the parking lot onto a narrow but less crowded avenue that connected Rue de Madagascar to Rue Abbas. She maneuvered the car with a kind of cautious grace, nursing it over the accumulations of dust, and Turk let her concentrate on her driving. But as the traffic slowed she said, “You think this is connected with the meteor shower?”

  “It seems like more than a coincidence. But who knows.”

  “This is definitely not volcanic ash.”

  “Guess not.”

  “It could have come from outside the atmosphere.”

  “Could have, I guess.”

  “So it might be connected to the Hypotheticals.”

  During the Spin, people had speculated endlessly about the Hypotheticals, the still-mysterious entities that had bounced the Earth a few billion years into the galactic future and opened a gateway between the Indian Ocean and the New World. Without reaching any reliable conclusions, as far as Turk could tell. “Could be. But that doesn’t explain anything.”

  “My father used to talk about the Hypotheticals a lot. One of the things he said was, we tend to forget how much older the universe is now than it was before the Spin. It might have changed in ways we don’t understand. Any textbook you pick says comets and meteors are junk falling in from the far edge of the solar system—here, or on Earth, or anywhere in the galaxy. But that was never more than a local observation and it’s four billion years ou
t of date. There’s a theory that the Hypotheticals aren’t biological organisms and never were—”

  He waited while she turned a corner, the car’s tires fighting for traction. Lise’s father had been a college professor. Before he disappeared.

  “That they’re a system of self-replicating machines living out in the cold parts of the galaxy, at the fringes of planetary systems, with this really slow metabolism that eats ice and generates information . . .”

  “Like those replicators we sent out during the Spin.”

  “Right. Self-replicating machines. But with billions of years of evolution behind them.”

  Was this how college profs talked to their daughters? Or was she just talking to ward off panic? “So what are you saying?”

  “Maybe whatever falls into the atmosphere this time every year isn’t just comet dust. Maybe it’s—”

  She shrugged.

  “Dead Hypotheticals,” he finished.

  “Well, it sounds inane when you put it that way.”

  “It’s as good a theory as any. I don’t mean to be skeptical. But we don’t have any evidence that whatever’s falling out of the sky is from space.”

  “Cogs and tubes made of ash? Where would it be from?”

  “Look at it another way. People have only been on this planet for three decades. We tell ourselves it’s all surveyed and reasonably well understood. But that’s bullshit. It would be wrong to jump to a conclusion—any conclusion. Even if this is caused by the Hypotheticals, that doesn’t really explain anything. We’ve had a meteor shower every summer for thirty years and never anything like this.”

  The wipers piled dust at the margins of the windshield. Turk saw people on the sidewalks, some of them running, others sheltering in doorways, faces peering anxiously from windows. A Provisional Government police car passed them with its lights and siren on.

  “Might be something unusual’s happening out where we can’t see it.”

  “Might be the Celestial Dog shaking off fleas. Too soon to say, Lise.”

  She nodded unhappily and pulled into the parking garage of the building where she lived, a concrete tower that looked as if it had been transplanted from Dade County. In the underground parking shelter there was no evidence of what was going on outside, only a mote or two hanging in the motionless air.

  Lise slid her security card through the elevator call slot. “We made it.”

  So far, Turk thought, yeah.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lise found Turk a robe big enough to decently fit him and told him to put his clothes in the washer, in case the dust clinging to them was in any way toxic. While he did that she took a turn in the shower. When she rinsed her hair, gray water pooled around the drain. An omen, she thought, a portent: maybe the ashfall wouldn’t stop until Port Magellan was entombed like Pompeii. She stood under the shower until the water ran clear.

  The lights flickered twice before she was done. The electrical grid in Port Magellan was still fairly crude; probably it wouldn’t take much to put a local transformer out of commission. She tried to imagine what would happen if this storm (if you could call it that) went on for another day, or two, or more. A whole population trapped in the dark. UN relief ships arriving in the harbor. Soldiers evacuating the survivors. No, better not to imagine it.

  She changed into fresh jeans and a cotton shirt, and the lights were still on when she joined Turk in the living room. In her old flannel robe he looked deeply embarrassed but dangerously sexy. Those ridiculously long legs, scarred in places by the life he had led before he started flying passengers over the mountains. He had told her he was a merchant seaman when he arrived here, that his first work in the New World had been on the Saudi-Aramco pipeline. Big blunt hands, well-used.

  He gazed around in a way that made her conscious of her apartment, the wide east-facing window, the video panel and her small library of books and recordings. She wondered how it seemed to him. A little upscale, probably, compared to what he called “his trailer,” a little too back-home, too obviously an imported fragment of North America, though it was still new to her, still slightly uninhabited—the place she had brought her stuff after she split from Brian.

  Not that he showed any sign of such thoughts. He was watching the local news channel. There were three daily papers in Port Magellan but only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them. But now there was something substantial to talk about. A camera crew had gone out in the ashfall to get views from street level, while two commentators read advisories from various departments of the Provisional Government.

  “Turn it up,” Lise said.

  The big intersection at Portugal and Tenth was shut down, stranding a busful of tourists desperate to get back to their cruise ship. Radio transmission had been compromised by the gunk in the atmosphere and communication with vessels at sea was intermittent. A government lab was doing hasty chemical analysis of the fallen ash, but no results had been announced. Some respiratory problems had been reported but nothing to suggest that the ash was immediately harmful to human health. Loose talk suggested a link between the ashfall and the annual meteor shower, but that was impossible to confirm. Best advice from local authorities was to hunker down, keep doors and windows closed, wait it out.

  Everything after that was more of the same. Lise didn’t need a reporter to tell her the city was shutting down. The usual night noises had gone silent, apart from the periodic wail of emergency-vehicle sirens.

  Turk muted the display and said, “My clothes are probably clean by now.” He walked to the laundry alcove and took his T-shirt and jeans into the bathroom to dress. He had been more brazen out in the lake country. But then, so had she. Lise made up the sofa as a bed for him. Then she said, “How about a nightcap?”

  He nodded.

  In the kitchen she drained what was left of her last bottle of white wine into two glasses. When she came back to the living room Turk had opened the blinds and was peering out into the darkness. A deepening wind swept falling ash past the window. She could smell it, faintly. That sulfurous reek.

  “Reminds me of diatoms,” Turk said, accepting a glass.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know. Out in the ocean there’s plankton? Microscopic animals? They grow a shell. Then the plankton dies and the shells drift down through the sea and make a kind of silt, and if you dredge it up and look at it under a microscope you see all these plankton skeletons—diatoms, little stars and spikes and so forth.”

  Lise watched the ash drift and thought about Turk’s analogy. The remains of things once living settling through the turbulent atmosphere. The shells of dead Hypotheticals.

  It would not have surprised her father, she thought.

  She was still contemplating that when her phone buzzed again. This time she picked up: she couldn’t exclude the exterior world forever—she’d have to reassure friends that she was all right. She briefly and guiltily hoped that it wouldn’t be Brian on the other end; but, of course, it was.

  “Lise?” he said. “I was worried sick about you. Where are you?”

  She walked to the kitchen as if to put some symbolic space between Brian and Turk. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m home.”

  “Well, good. Lot of people aren’t.”

  “How about you?”

  “I’m in the consulate compound. There’s a lot of us here. We thought we’d stick it out, sleep on cots. The building has a generator if the power goes down. You have power?”

  “At the moment.”

  “About half the Chinese district is in the dark. The city’s having trouble getting repair crews out.”

  “Anybody there know what’s going on?”

  Brian’s voice came through the phone with a stressed reediness, the way he sounded when he was nervous or upset. “No, not really . . .”

  “Or when it’s going to stop?”

  �
�No. It can’t go on forever, though.”

  That was a nice thought, but Lise doubted she could convince herself of the truth of it, at least not tonight. “Okay, Brian. Appreciate the call but I’m fine.”

  There was a pause. He wanted to say more. Which was what he always seemed to want these days. A conversation, if not a marriage.

  “Let me know if you have a problem there.”

  She thanked him and cut the connection, left the phone on the kitchen counter and walked back into the living room.

  “Was that your ex?” Turk asked.

  Turk knew about her problems with Brian. In the mountains, by the side of a stormy lake, she had shared a number of difficult truths about herself and her life. She nodded.

  “Am I creating a problem for you here?”

  “No,” she said. “No problem.”

  She sat up with Turk watching more sporadic news, but fatigue caught up with her around three in the morning and she finally staggered off to bed. Even so she was awake for a while in the dark, curled under a cotton sheet as if it could protect her from whatever was falling out of the sky. It isn’t doomsday, she told herself. It’s just something inconvenient and unexpected.

  Diatoms, she thought: sea shells, ancient life, another reminder that the universe had shifted radically during and after the Spin, that the kind of world she had been born into was not the world her parents or her grandparents had ever expected to see. She remembered an old astronomy book of her grandfather’s that had fascinated her as a child. The last chapter was called Are We Alone? and it had been full of what seemed like naive, silly speculation. Because that question had been answered. No, we are not alone. No, we can never again think of the universe as our private property. Life, or something like life, had been here long before the evolution of human beings. We’re on their turf, Lise thought, and because we don’t understand them we can’t predict their behavior. Even today no one knew with any certainty why the Earth had been preserved down four billion years of galactic history like a tulip bulb wintering in a dark cellar, or why a seaway to this new planet had been installed in the Indian Ocean. What was falling outside the window was just more evidence of humanity’s gross ignorance.