Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  What made this unquestionable, Lise thought, was the woman’s obvious sincerity. That, and the wind rattling the blinds, and the human noise of the villagers going about their business, a dog barking aimlessly in the distance, Turk sipping his ice water as if these assertions were old news.

  “That was how Jason Lawton died?” In the books Lise had read, Jason Lawton had been a casualty of the anarchic last days of the Spin. Hundreds of thousands had died in the panic.

  “The process,” Diane said calmly, “is deadly in an adult. It rebuilds much of the human nervous system and it renders it vulnerable to further manipulation by the networked intelligences of the Hypotheticals. There is—well, a sort of communication can take place. But it kills the communicant. Theoretically, the procedure might be more stable if it was applied to a human fetus in vivo. An unborn child in the womb.”

  “But that would be—”

  “Indefensible,” Diane said. “Morally and ethically monstrous. But it’s been a terrible temptation for one faction of our community. It holds out the possibility of a real understanding of the mystery of the Hypotheticals, what they want from us and why they’ve done what they’ve done. And maybe something more, not just communication but a sort of communion. Commingling the human and the divine, if I can use those words.”

  “And the Martians want to stop this from happening?”

  Diane looked subtly ashamed. “The Martian Fourths were the first to try it.”

  “What—they modified a human fetus?”

  “The project was unsuccessful. The child didn’t survive past puberty. The experiment was conducted by the same group of ascetic Fourths who raised Sulean Moi—she was there when the child died.”

  “The Martians allowed this?”

  “Only once. Sulean Moi meant to prevent the same thing happening among our own Fourths, who are even less constrained by law and custom—or to interrupt the process if it had already begun.”

  The breeze was warm, but Lise shivered. “And has it? Begun, I mean?”

  “The technology and the pharmaceuticals were distributed by Jason along with everything else Wun Ngo Wen brought to Earth. We’ve had the capability for decades, but there was no real interest in pursuing it except among a few . . . you might say, rogue groups.”

  “I thought Fourths had some kind of built-in inhibition,” Turk said. “For instance, Tomas. Once he took the treatment he stopped drinking anything stronger than beer and he quit picking bar fights.”

  “We’re inhibited against obvious aggression, but not so much so that we lack the capacity for moral choice—or self-defense. And this isn’t aggression, exactly, Turk. It’s callous, it’s inexcusable, but it’s also, in a sense, abstract. Pushing a needle into the vein of a pregnant volunteer isn’t a perceived act of violence, especially if you’re convinced of the necessity of it.”

  Lise said, “And that’s why Genomic Security is interested in Sulean Moi.”

  “Yes. Genomic Security and every similar agency. It isn’t just Americans who fear Fourths, you know. In the Islamic world the prejudice is especially strong. Nowhere is safe. For decades Genomic Security has been attempting to track down and secure every extant trace of forbidden Martian biotechnology. Probably less to destroy it than to monopolize it. They haven’t succeeded and probably never will succeed. The genie is out of the bottle. But they’ve learned a few things in the course of their work. They learned about Sulean Moi, obviously. And the idea of Fourths interceding with the Hypotheticals scares the hell out of them.”

  “For the same reason you’re afraid of it?”

  “Some of the same reasons,” Diane said. She drank from her glass of ice water. “Some.”

  The village muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Diane ignored the sound.

  Lise said, “Sulean was in Port Magellan at least once before. Twelve years ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “Going about the same business?”

  “Yes.”

  “Successfully? I mean, did she stop—whoever was involved—from doing this thing?”

  Ibu Diane looked at Lise, looked away. “No, she was not successful.”

  “My father knew her.”

  “Sulean Moi knows a lot of people. What was your father’s name?”

  “Robert Adams,” Lise said, her heart beating harder.

  Diane shook her head. “The name isn’t familiar. But you said you were looking for one of his colleagues in the town of Kubelick’s Grave?”

  “A man named Avram Dvali.”

  “Avram Dvali.” Ibu Diane’s expression became somber. Lise felt her excitement peak.

  “Dvali was a Fourth?”

  “He was. He is. He’s also, in my opinion, just slightly insane.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After walking Isaac back to the compound Sulean Moi told Dr. Dvali about the flower.

  The story seemed so improbable that it became necessary to mount an expedition and set out in search of the thing. Sulean didn’t participate but she gave explicit directions. Dr. Dvali took three other men and one of the commune’s vehicles and drove off into the desert. Dvali’s excitement was predictable, Sulean thought. He was in love with the Hypotheticals—with what he imagined them to be. He could hardly resist the gift of an alien flower.

  They were back by late afternoon. Dvali hadn’t been able to find the sighted rose, but the expedition wasn’t fruitless. There had been other unusual things growing in the dry wastes. He had collected three samples in a cotton bag, and he displayed them to Sulean and several other observers on a table in the common room.

  One of his prizes was a spongy green disk shaped like a miniature bicycle wheel, with twig-like spokes and a gnarl of roots still attached to the hub. One was a translucent tube a centimeter in diameter and as long as Sulean’s forearm. The last was a viscid, knobby lump resembling a clenched fist, blue veined with red.

  None of these things looked healthy, although arguably they might once have been alive. The bicycle wheel was blackened and crumbling in places. The hollow tube had fractured along its axis. The fist was pallid and had begun to emit an unpleasant odor.

  Mrs. Rebka said, “Did these things fall with the ash?”

  Dvali shook his head. “They were all rooted.”

  “They grew out there? Out in the desert?”

  “I can’t explain it. I would guess they’re associated with the ashfall in some way.”

  Dvali looked expectantly at Sulean.

  Sulean had nothing to say.

  In the morning Sulean went to see Isaac, but his door was closed and Mrs. Rebka stood outside, her arms crossed. “He’s not well,” she said.

  “I’ll speak to him briefly,” Sulean said.

  “I’d prefer to let him rest. He’s running a fever. I think you and I have to talk, Ms. Moi.”

  The two women walked out into the courtyard. They kept to the shade of the main building and sat together on a stone bench with a view of the garden. The air was hot and still, and sunlight fell on the fenced flowerbed as if it had an immense invisible weight. Sulean waited for Mrs. Rebka to speak. In fact Sulean had expected something hostile from Mrs. Rebka sooner or later. She was the closest thing Isaac had to a mother, though Isaac’s nature had precluded any real emotional warmth, at least on his part.

  “He’s never been sick before,” Mrs. Rebka said. “Not once. But since you arrived . . . he’s not the same. He wanders, he eats less. He’s taken a ferocious interest in books, and at first I thought that was a good thing. But I wonder if it isn’t just another symptom.”

  “Symptom of what?”

  “Don’t be evasive.” Mrs. Rebka was a large woman. To Sulean all these people seemed large—Sulean herself barely topped five foot three—but Mrs. Rebka was especially large and seemed to want to appear intimidating. “I know who you are, as well as anyone does. Everyone in the community has been aware of you for years. We weren’t surprised when you knocked at the door. Only surprised that it ha
d taken so long. We’re prepared to let you observe Isaac and even interact with him. The only condition is that you don’t interfere.”

  “Have I interfered?”

  “He’s changed since you got here. You can’t deny that.”

  “That has nothing to do with me.”

  “Doesn’t it? I hope you’re right. But you’ve seen this before, haven’t you? Before you came to Earth.”

  Sulean had never made a secret of it. The story had spread among these Terrestrial Fourths—especially those, like Dvali, who were obsessed with the Hypotheticals. She nodded.

  “A child like Isaac,” Mrs. Rebka said.

  “In some ways like him. A boy. He was Isaac’s age when he—”

  “When he died.”

  “Yes.”

  “Died of his . . . condition?”

  Sulean didn’t answer immediately. She hated calling up these memories, instructive as they inevitably were. “He died in the desert.” A different desert. The Martian desert. “He was trying to find his way, but he got lost.” She closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids the world was an infinite redness, thanks to this insufferably bright sunlight. “I would have stopped you if I could. You know that. But I came too late, and you were all very clever about concealing yourselves. Now I’m as helpless as you are, Mrs. Rebka.”

  “I won’t let you hurt him.” The fervor in Mrs. Rebka’s voice was as startling as the accusation.

  “I wouldn’t do anything to harm him!”

  “Possibly not. But I think, on some level, you’re frightened of him.”

  “Mrs. Rebka, have you misunderstood so completely? Of course I’m afraid of him! Aren’t you?”

  Mrs. Rebka didn’t answer, only stood up and walked slowly back into the compound.

  That night Isaac was still feverish and was confined to his room. Sulean lay awake in her own room, gazing past the sand-scuffed windowpane at the stars.

  At the Hypotheticals, to use that wonderfully ambiguous name bestowed upon them by English-speaking people. They had been called that even before their existence was well-established: the hypothetical entities who had enclosed the Earth in a strange temporal barrier, so that a million years might pass while a man walked his dog or a woman brushed her hair. They were a network of self-reproducing semibiological machines distributed throughout the galaxy. They intervened in human affairs, and perhaps the affairs of innumerable other sentient civilizations, for reasons not well-understood. Or for no reason at all.

  She was looking at them, though they were of course invisible. They permeated the night sky. They contained worlds. They were everywhere.

  Beyond that, what could one say? A network so vast it spanned a galaxy was indistinguishable from a natural force. It could not be bargained with. It could not even be spoken to. It interacted with humanity over inhuman spans of time. Its words were decades and its conversations were indistinguishable from the process of evolution.

  Did it think, in any meaningful sense? Did it wonder, did it argue with itself, did it fabricate ideas and act on them? Was it an entity, in other words, or just a huge and complex process?

  The Martians had argued over this for centuries. Sulean had spent much of her childhood listening to elderly Fourths debate the question. Sulean didn’t have a conclusive answer—no one did—but her suspicion was that the Hypotheticals had no center, no operative intelligence. They did complex, unpredictable things—but so did evolution. Evolution had produced vastly complex and interdependent biological systems without any central direction. Once self-reproducing machines had been unleashed on the galaxy (by some long lost ancient species, perhaps, long before Earth or Mars had condensed from stellar dust), they had been subject to the same inexorable logic of competition and mutation. What might that not have bred, over billions of years? Machines of immense scale and power, semi-autonomous, “intelligent” in a certain sense—the Arch, the temporal barrier that had surrounded the Earth—all that, yes. But a central motivating consciousness? A mind? Sulean had come to doubt it. The Hypotheticals were not one entity. They were just what happened when the logic of self-reproduction engulfed the vastnesses of space.

  The dust of ancient machines had fallen on the desert, and from that dust had grown strange, abortive fragments. A wheel, a hollow tube, a rose with a coaldark eye. And Isaac was interested in the west, the far west. What did that mean? Did it have a discernible meaning?

  It meant, Sulean thought, that Isaac was being sacrificed to a force as mindless and indifferent as the wind.

  In the morning Mrs. Rebka allowed Sulean to visit the boy’s room. “You’ll see,” she said grimly, “why we’re all so concerned.”

  Isaac was limp under a tangle of blankets. His eyes were closed. Sulean touched his forehead and felt the radiant heat of fever.

  “Isaac,” she sighed, as much to herself as to the boy. His pale inertness provoked too many memories. There had been another boy, yes, another fever, another desert.

  “The rose,” Isaac said, startling her.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “I remember the rose. And the rose, the rose remembers.”

  As if asleep, eyes still shut, he pulled himself into a sitting position, his pillow compressed under the small of his back and his head knocking the backboard of the bed. His hair was lank with sweat. How immortal human beings seem when they can walk, run, jump, Sulean thought. And how fragile when they can’t.

  Then the boy did something that shocked even Sulean.

  He opened his eyes and the irises were newly discolored, as if their pale uniform blue had been spattered with gold paint. He looked at her directly and he smiled.

  Then he spoke, and he spoke a language Sulean had not heard for decades, a Martian dialect from the sparsely inhabited southern wastes.

  He said, “It’s you, big sister! Where have you been?”

  Then, just as quickly, he slept again, and Sulean was left shivering in the terrible echo of his words.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The next morning a helicopter flew low over the Minang village, and while that might have been innocuous—logging companies had been surveying these hills for the past couple of months—it unsettled the villagers and caused Ibu Diane to suggest that they move quickly. Staying was riskier than leaving, she said.

  “Where are we going?” Lise asked.

  “Over the mountains. Kubelick’s Grave. Turk will fly us there, won’t you, Turk?”

  He appeared to think about it. “I might need a crowbar,” he said, cryptically. “But yeah.”

  “We’ll take one of the village cars back to the city,” Ibu Diane said. “Something inconspicuous. The car you came in is a liability. I’ll ask one of the villagers to drive it up the coast road and leave it somewhere.”

  “Do I get it back when all this is finished?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Well, that figures,” Turk said.

  The authorities had ways of tracking people in whom they were interested, Lise knew. Tiny RF tags could be planted on a vehicle or even in an item of clothing. And there were more arcane, even subtler devices available. The Minang villager who drove their car north also took with him their clothing and other possessions. Lise changed into a floral-print blouse and muslin pants from the village store, Turk into a pair of jeans and a white shirt. Both of them showered in Ibu Diane’s clinic. “Be especially careful of your hair,” Diane had instructed them. “Things can be hidden in hair.”

  Feeling simultaneously purified and paranoid, Lise climbed into the rust-spackled vehicle Diane had arranged for them to drive. Turk took the driver’s seat, Lise buckled in next to him, and they waited while Diane said goodbye to a dozen villagers who had gathered around her.

  “Popular woman,” Lise observed.

  “She’s known in every village up the north coast,” Turk said. “She moves between a whole bunch of these communities, expat Malays and Tamils and Minang, season by season, helping out. They all keep a place
for her and they’re all protective of her.”

  “They know she’s a Fourth?”

  “Sure. And she’s not the only one. A bunch of these village elders are more elderly than you might think.”

  The world was changing, Lise thought, and no amount of rhetoric about the sanctity of the human genome was going to stop it. She pictured herself trying to communicate that truth to Brian. A truth he would no doubt refuse or deny. Brian was adept at patching cracks in the foundation of his faith in the good works of Genomic Security. But the cracks kept coming. The edifice trembled.

  Ibu Diane Dupree levered herself into the car with elaborate caution and fastened her threadbare seat belt. Turk drove slowly, and the crowd of villagers followed for a few yards, filling the narrow street.

  “They don’t like to see me go,” Diane said. “They’re afraid I might not come back.”

  Lise shrank a little every time they passed another vehicle, but Turk drove cheerfully once they were back on the paved roads, a cloth cap pulled low over his eyes, humming to himself. Ibu Diane sat patiently, watching the world scroll past.

  Lise decided to break Diane’s silence. She turned her head and said, “Tell me about Avram Dvali.”

  “It might be easier if you told me what you already know.”

  “Well—he taught at the American University, but he was secretive and not especially well-liked by the faculty. He left his teaching position without an explanation less than a year before my father vanished. Someone at the chancery office told me his last paycheck had been forwarded by letter mail to a box address in Kubelick’s Grave. According to my mother,” at least on the rare and emotionally difficult occasions when Lise had pressed her to talk about the past, “he visited the house several times before he quit his job. There’s no listed address for him in Kubelick’s Grave, but a search on his name didn’t turn up any contemporary address, anywhere. I meant to go to Kubelick’s Grave and see if the box address still worked or if there was any record of who had rented it. But it seemed like a long shot.”