Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Here was the excitement she learned from him at an early age, an outward-looking curiosity that contrasted with her mother’s habitual caution and timidity. She could hear his voice in the words.

  Of their works, one of the most immediately obvious is the Indian Ocean Arch that links the Earth to the New World—and the Arch that connects the New World to another less hospitable planet, and so on, as far as we have been able to explore: a chain of increasingly hostile environments made available to us for reasons we do not yet understand.

  Sail to the other side of this world, he had told Lise, and you’ll find a second Arch, and beyond it a rocky, stormy planet with barely breathable air; and beyond that—a journey that had to be undertaken on ocean vessels sealed and pressurized as if they were spaceships—a third world, its atmosphere poisoned with methane, the oceans oily and acidic.

  But the Arch is not the only artifact at hand. The planet “next door to Earth,” from which I write these words, is also an artifact. There is evidence that it was constructed or at least modified over the course of many millions of years with the objective of making it a congenial environment for human beings.

  Planet as artifact.

  Many have speculated about the purpose of this eonslong work. Is the New World a gift or is it a trap? Have we entered a maze, as laboratory mice, or have we been offered a new and splendid destiny? Does the fact that our own Earth is still protected from the deadly radiation of its expanded sun mean that the Hypotheticals take an interest in our survival as a species, and if so, why?

  I cannot claim to have answered any of these questions, but I mean to give the reader an overview of the work that has already been done and of the thoughts and speculations of the men and women who are devoting their professional lives to that work. . . .

  And, later in the piece, this:

  We are in the position of a coma patient waking from a sleep as long as the lifetime of a star. What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

  She underlined that twice. She wished she could text it to her mother, wished she could write it on a banner and wave it in Brian’s face. This was all she had ever meant to say to them: an answer to their genteel silences, to the almost surgical elision of Robert Adams from the lives of his survivors, to the gently troubled poor-Lise expressions they wore on their faces whenever she insisted on mentioning her vanished father. It was as if Robert Adams himself had stepped out of obscurity to whisper a reassuring word. What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

  She had put the pages aside and was heading for bed when she checked her phone one last time.

  Three messages were stacked there, all tagged urgent, all from Turk. A fourth came in while the phone was still in her hand.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  THE

  OCULAR

  ROSE

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After the fall of the luminous dust—after the skies had cleared and the courtyard had been swept and the desert or the wind had absorbed what was left behind—news of another mystery came to the compound where the boy Isaac lived.

  The ash had been terrifying when it fell and had been a topic for endless talk and speculation when it stopped. The newer mystery arrived more prosaically, as a news report relayed from the city across the mountains. It was less immediately frightening, but it touched uneasily on one of Isaac’s secrets.

  He had overheard two of the adults, Mr. Nowotny and Mr. Fisk, discussing it in the corridor outside the dining hall. Commercial flights to the oil wastes of the Rub al-Khali had been canceled or re-routed for days even before the ashfall, and now the Provisional Government and the oil powers had issued an explanation: there had been an earthquake.

  This was a mystery, Mr. Nowotny went on to say, because there were no known faults beneath that part of the Rub al-Khali: it was a geologically stable desert craton that had persisted unchanged for millions of years. There should never have been even a minor tremor so deep in the Rub al-Khali.

  But what had happened was more than a tremor. Oil production had been shut down for more than a week, and the wells and pipelines had been expensively damaged.

  “We know less about this planet than we thought we did,” Mr. Nowotny said.

  It was slightly less mysterious to Isaac. He knew, though he could not say how, that something was stirring under the sedate sands of the deep western desert. He felt it in his mind, his body. Something was stirring, and it spoke in cadences he didn’t understand, and he could point to it with his eyes closed even though it was hundreds of miles away, still only half-waking from a slumber as long as the lives of mountains.

  For two days during and after the ashfall everyone had stayed inside, doors closed and windows locked, until Dr. Dvali announced that the ash wasn’t particularly harmful. Eventually Mrs. Rebka told Isaac he could go out at least as far as the courtyard gardens, as long as he wore a cloth mask. The courtyard had been cleaned but there might still be remnant dust in the air, and she didn’t want him inhaling particulate matter. He must not put himself at risk, she said.

  Isaac agreed to wear the mask even though it was sweatily warm across his mouth and nose. All that remained of the dust was a grainy residue silted against the brick walls and the rail fences made of nevergreen wood. Under a relentless afternoon sun, Isaac stooped over one of these small windrows and sifted the ash with his hand.

  The ash, according to Dr. Dvali, contained tiny fragments of broken machines.

  Not much remained of these machines, to Isaac’s eyes, but he liked the grittiness of the ash and the way it pooled in his palm and slipped like talc between his fingers. He liked the way it compressed into a flaky lump when he squeezed it and dissolved into the air when he opened his fist.

  The ash glittered. In fact it glowed. That wasn’t exactly the right word, Isaac knew. It wasn’t the sort of glow you could see with your eyes, and he understood that no one else in the compound could see it the way he did. It was a different kind of glow, differently perceived. He thought perhaps Sulean Moi would be able to explain, if he could find a way to pose the question.

  Isaac had a lot of questions he wanted to ask Sulean. But she had been busy since the ashfall, often in conference with the adults, and he had to wait his turn.

  At dinner Isaac noticed that when the adults discussed the ashfall or its origins they tended to direct their questions to Sulean Moi, which surprised him, because for years he had assumed the adults with whom he lived were more or less all-knowing.

  Certainly they were wiser than average people. He could not say this by direct experience—Isaac had never met any average people—but he had seen them in videos and read about them in books. Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely. Here in the compound, the talk was occasionally intense but the arguments never drew blood. Everyone was wise (or seemed to be), everyone was calm (or struggled to give that impression), and, except for Isaac, everyone was old.

  Sulean Moi was apparently not an average person either. Somehow, she knew more than the other adults. She was smarter than the people to whom Isaac had always deferred, and—even more perplexing—she didn’t seem to like them very much. But she tolerated their questions politely.

  Dr. Dvali said, “Of course it implicates the Hypotheticals,” talking about the ashfall, and asked Sulean, “Don’t you agree?”

  “It’s an obvious conclusion to draw.” The old woman probed the contents of her bowl with a fork. The adults theoretically took turns cooking, though a handful volunteered more often than the rest. Tonight Mr. Posell had taken kitchen duty. Mr. Posell was a geologist, but as a chef he was more enthusiastic than talented. Isaac’s vegetable bowl tasted of garlic, gulley-seed oil, and something dreadfully burnt.

  “Have you seen or heard of anything like it,” Dr. Dvali asked, “in your own experience?”

  There was no formal hierarchy among the adults at the commune, but it was usually Dr. Dvali who took the lead
when large issues arose, Dr. Dvali whose pronouncements, when he made them, were considered final. He had always paid close attention to Isaac. The hair on his head was white and silky-fine. His eyes were large and brown, his eyebrows wild as abandoned hedges. Isaac had always tolerated him indifferently. Lately, however, and for reasons he didn’t understand, Isaac had begun to dislike him.

  Sulean said, “Nothing exactly like this. But my people have had a little more experience with the post-Spin world than yours, Dr. Dvali. Unusual things do fall out of the sky from time to time.”

  And who were “my people,” and what sky was she talking about?

  “One of these things conspicuously absent from the Martian Archives,” Dr. Dvali said, “is any discussion of the nature of the Hypotheticals.”

  “Perhaps there was nothing substantive to say.”

  “You must have an opinion, Ms. Moi.”

  “The self-replicating devices that constitute the Hypotheticals are equivalent in many ways to living creatures. They process their environment. They build complicated structures out of rock and ice and perhaps even empty space. And their byproducts aren’t immune to the process of decay. Their physical structures grow old and corrupt and are systematically replaced. That would explain the detritus in the dust.”

  Corrupt machines have fallen on us, Isaac thought.

  “But the sheer tonnage of it,” Dr. Dvali said, “distributed over so many square kilometers—”

  “Is that so surprising? Given the great age of the Hypotheticals, it’s no more surprising that decomposed mechanisms should fall out of the sky than that your garden should generate organic mulch.”

  She sounded so sure of herself. But how did Sulean know such things? Isaac was determined to find out.

  That night the quick southern winds grew even quicker, and Isaac lay in bed listening to his window rattle in its casement. Beyond the glass the stars were obscured by fine sand blown aloft from the wastelands of the Rub al-Khali.

  Old, old, old: the universe was old. It had generated many miracles, including the Hypotheticals, but not least Isaac himself—his body, his very thoughts.

  Who was his father? Who was his mother? His teachers had never really answered the question. Dr. Dvali would say, You’re not like other children, Isaac. You belong to all of us. Or Mrs. Rebka would say, We’re all your parents now, even though it was inevitably Mrs. Rebka who tucked him into bed, who made sure he was fed and bathed. It was true that everyone at the commune had taken a hand in raising him, but it was Dr. Dvali and Mrs. Rebka he pictured when he imagined what it might be like to have a particular mother and father.

  Was that what made him feel different from the people around him? Yes, but not just that. He didn’t think the way other people thought. And although he had many keepers, he had no friends. Except, perhaps, Sulean Moi.

  Isaac tried to sleep but couldn’t. He was restless tonight. It wasn’t an ordinary restlessness, more like an appetite without an object, and after he had lain in bed for long hours listening to the hot wind rattle and whisper, he dressed and left his room.

  Midnight had come and gone. The commune was quiet, the corridors and wooden stairs echoing the sound of his footsteps. Probably there was no one awake except Dr. Taira, the historian, who did her best reading (he had heard her say) late at night. But Dr. Taira was a pale, skinny woman who kept to herself, and if she happened to be awake she didn’t notice when Isaac shuffled past her door. From the lower commons room he entered the open courtyard, unobserved.

  His shoes crunched on the wind-blown grit underfoot. The small moon hung over the eastern mountains and cast a diffuse light through the dust-obscured darkness. Isaac could see well enough to walk, at least if he was careful, and he knew the environment around the commune so completely that he could have navigated blind. He opened the squeaky gate in the courtyard fence and headed west. He let his wordless impulses lead him and the wind carry away his doubts.

  There was no road here, just pebbly desert and a series of shallow, serpentine ridges. The moon aimed his shadow like an arrow in front of him. But he was headed in the right direction: he felt the rightness of it in the center of himself, like the sense of relief he felt when he solved some vexing mathematical problem. He deliberately set aside the noise of his own thinking and gave his attention to the sounds that came out of the darkness—his feet on the sandpaper gravel and the wind and the sounds of small nocturnal creatures foraging in the creviced landscape. He walked in a state of blissful emptiness.

  He walked for a long time. He could not have said how long or far he had walked when he came at last to the rose. The rose startled him into a sudden awareness.

  Had he had been walking in his sleep? The moon, which had been above the mountains when he left home, now lit the flat western horizon like a watchman’s lantern. Although the night air was relatively cool he felt hot and exhausted.

  He looked away from the moon and back at the rose, which grew from the desert at his feet.

  “Rose” was his own word. It was what came to mind when he saw the thick stem rooted in the dry ground, the glassy crimson bulb that could pass in the moonlight for a flower.

  Of course it wasn’t really a flower. Flowers didn’t grow in isolation in arid deserts, and their petals weren’t made of what appeared to be translucent red crystals.

  “Hello,” Isaac said, his voice sounding small and foolish in the darkness. “What are you doing here?”

  The rose, which had been leaning toward the moonlit west, promptly swiveled to face him. There was an eye in the middle of the bloom, a small eye black as obsidian, and it regarded him coolly.

  Perhaps not surprisingly—Isaac wasn’t surprised—it was Sulean Moi who eventually found him.

  It was a still, hot morning by the time she arrived, and he sat on the ground as if the desert were a vast curved bowl and he had slid to the center of it. He cradled his head in his hands and rested his elbows on his knees. He heard the sound of her shuffling approach but he didn’t look up. He didn’t have to. He had hoped she would come for him.

  “Isaac,” Sulean Moi said, her voice dry but gentle.

  He didn’t answer.

  “People are worried about you,” she said. “They’ve been looking everywhere.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She put her small hand on his shoulder. “What caused you to come all this way from home? What were you after?”

  “I don’t know.” He gestured at the rose. “But I found this.”

  Now Sulean knelt to look at it—slowly, slowly, her old knees crackling.

  The rose had suffered by daylight. Its dark green stem had buckled at dawn. The crystalline bulb was no longer radiant and the eye had lost its luster. Last night, Isaac thought, it had been something like alive. Now it was something like dead.

  Sulean gazed at it thoughtfully a long while before she asked, “What is it, Isaac?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is this what you came out here for?”

  “No . . . I don’t think so.” That was an incomplete answer. The rose, yes, but not only the rose . . . something the rose represented.

  “It’s remarkable,” she said. “Shall we tell anyone about this, Isaac? Or shall we keep it secret?”

  He shrugged.

  “Well. We do have to go back, you know.”

  “I know.”

  He didn’t mind leaving—the rose wouldn’t last much longer.

  “Will you walk with me?”

  “Yes,” Isaac said. “If I can ask you some questions.”

  “All right. I hope I can answer them. I’ll try.”

  So they turned away from the ocular rose and began to walk eastward at the old woman’s pace, and Sulean was patient while Isaac began to assemble all the uncertainties that had come into his head, not least the question of the rose itself. Although he hadn’t slept, he wasn’t tired. He was wide awake—as awake as he had ever been, and more curious.

  “Where a
re you from?” he finally asked.

  There was a brief hitch in the rhythm of her footsteps. He thought for a moment she might not answer. Then:

  “I was born on Mars,” she said.

  That felt like a true answer. It wasn’t the answer he had expected and he had the feeling it was a truth she would have preferred not to reveal. Isaac accepted it without comment. Mars, he thought.

  A moment later he asked, “How much do you know about the Hypotheticals?”

  “That’s odd,” the old woman said, smiling faintly and regarding him with what he took to be affection. “That’s exactly what I came all this way to ask you.”

  They talked until noon, when they reached the compound, and Isaac learned a number of new things from their conversation. Then, before stepping past the gate, he paused and looked back the way he had come. The rose was out there, but not just the rose. The rose was only—what? An incomplete fragment of something much larger.

  Something that interested him deeply. And something that was interested in him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Turk drove through one of the older parts of the city, frame houses painted firetruck-red by Chinese settlers, squat three- and four-story apartment buildings of ochre brick quarried from the cliffs above Candle Bay. It was late enough now that the streets were empty. Overhead, an occasional shooting star wrote lines against the dark.

  Half an hour ago he had finally gotten through to Lise. He couldn’t say what he needed to say over the phone, but she seemed to catch on after a couple of awkward questions. “Meet me where we met,” he said. “Twenty minutes.”

  Where they had met was a 24-hour bar-and-grill called La Rive Gauche, located in the retail district west of the docks. Lise had shown up there six months ago with a crowd from the consulate. A friend of Turk’s had spotted a friend at the table and hauled him over for introductions. Turk noticed Lise because she was unescorted and because she was attractive in the way he found women attractive at first glance, based on the depth and availability of her laughter as much as anything else. He was wary of women who laughed too easily and unnerved by women who never laughed at all. Lise laughed gently but wholeheartedly, and when she joked there was nothing mean or competitive in it. And he liked her eyes, the way they turned up at the corners, the pale aqua of the irises, what they looked at and lingered on.