Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The dead homeless man must have been there for days, undiscovered. He looked both bloated, a tattered red cotton shirt stretched taut across his enormous belly, and shrunken, as if something essential had been sucked out of him. The exposed parts of him had been nibbled by animals, there were bugs on his milky-white eyes, and when the wind came around the smell was so bad that Brian’s friend Kev turned and promptly vomited into the glassy water of the creek.

  The three of them ran back to the friendly part of the park and told Pastor Carlysle what they’d found, and that was the end of the picnic. The police were called, an ambulance came to retrieve the body, and the suddenly somber gathering broke up.

  Kev and Lyle, over the course of the next six months, stopped showing up for Sunday services, as if the church and dead man had become associated one with the other, but Brian had the opposite reaction. He believed in the protective power of the chapel, precisely because he had seen what lay beyond it. He had seen unhallowed death.

  He had seen death, and death shouldn’t have surprised him: nevertheless he was shocked by what popped out of his mailbox twenty years later, within the sanctified walls of his office and the carefully-defined if crumbling boundaries of his adult life.

  Two days before he had received the brief, aborted phone call from Lise.

  It had come late in the late evening. Brian had been on his way home from one of those tedious consulate social nights, drinks at the ambassador’s residence and small talk with the usual suspects. Brian didn’t drink much but what he did drink went to his head, and he let his car do the driving on the way home. Slowly, then—the car was idiotically literal-minded about speed limits and restricted to the few streets with automated driving grids—but safely, he came back to the apartment he had once shared with Lise, with its attendant atmosphere of claustrophobia and something that might have been desperation had it been less comfortably furnished. He showered before bed, and as he toweled off he listened to the silence of the city night and thought: am I inside the circle or out of it?

  The phone rang as he turned out the lights. He put the slate wedge to his ear and registered her distant voice.

  He tried to warn her. She said things he didn’t immediately understand.

  And then the connection was broken.

  Probably he should have gone to Sigmund and Weil with this, but he didn’t. Couldn’t. The message was personal. It was meant for him and for him alone. Sigmund and Weil could get along without it. Early the next day he sat in his office thinking about Lise, his failed marriage. Then he picked up the phone and called Pieter Kirchberg, his contact at the Security and Law Enforcement Division of the UN Provisional Government.

  Kirchberg had done him a number of small favors in the past and Brian had done more than a few in return. The settled eastern coast of Equatoria was a United Nations protectorate, at least nominally, with a complicated set of laws established and constantly revised by international committees. The closest thing to a fullyestablished police force was Interpol, though blue-helmeted soldiers did most of the daily enforcement. The result was a bureaucracy that created more paperwork than justice and existed mainly to smooth over conflicts between hostile national interests. To get anything done, you had to know people. Kirchberg was one of the people Brian knew.

  Kirchberg answered promptly and Brian listened to his inevitable complaints—the weather, the bullying oil cartels, his boneheaded underlings—before getting down to business. Finally, as Kirchberg wound down, he said, “I want to give you a name.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Just what I need. More work. Whose name?”

  “Tomas Ginn.” He spelled it.

  “And why are you interested in this person?”

  “Departmental matter,” Brian said.

  “Some desperate American criminal? A better-baby salesman, a renegade organ-vendor?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’ll run it when I can. You owe me a drink.”

  “Anytime,” Brian said.

  He didn’t tell Sigmund and Weil about that, either.

  It was the following morning that the photograph rolled out of his printer, along with an unsigned note from Kirchberg.

  Brian looked at the photograph, then put it face down on his desk, then picked it up again.

  He had seen worse things. What he thought about immediately and involuntarily was the body he had discovered beyond the outer limits of the church picnic a quarter of a century ago, the body which had lain among the exposed roots of two trees with its eyes gone milky white and its skin traversed by feckless ants. He felt the same involuntary lurch of his stomach.

  The photograph was of an old man’s body broken on a salt-encrusted rock. The marks on the body might have been massive bruises or simply the effects of decomposition. But there was no mistaking the bullet wound in the forehead.

  Kirchberg’s unsigned note said: Washed up near South Point two days ago; no papers but identified as Tomas W. Ginn (U.S. Merchant Marine DNA database). One of yours?

  Mr. Ginn had wandered outside the boundaries of the picnic, it seemed. And so, he thought with sickly dismay, had Lise.

  In the afternoon he called Pieter Kirchberg again. This time Kirchberg was less chatty.

  “I got what you sent me,” Brian said.

  “No need to thank me.”

  “One of ours, you said. What did you mean by that?”

  “I’d just as soon not discuss it.”

  “An American, you mean?”

  No answer. One of yours. So, yes, an American, or was Pieter suggesting that Tomas Ginn belonged to Genomic Security? Or that his death did? Maybe he meant one of your killings.

  “Is there anything else?” Kirchberg asked. “Because I have a lot of work waiting for me. . . .”

  “One more favor,” Brian said. “If you don’t mind, Pieter. Another name.”

  PART THREE

  * * *

  INTO

  THE

  WEST

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Before he could say anything more—in Martian or in English—the boy Isaac stopped speaking and fell into a sleep from which he could not be aroused. The Fourths continued to tend to his needs but were unable to treat or diagnose his condition. His vital signs were stable and he seemed to be in no immediate danger.

  Sulean Moi sat with the child in his room as the sun shone on the desert beyond the window, clocking shadows across the alkaline grit. Two days passed. One morning, as occasionally happened this time of year, a storm blew out of the mountains, a shelf of coal-black clouds that produced much lightning and thunder but only a little rain. By sunset the storm had gone and the sky in its wake was a radiant, purified turquoise. The air smelled fresh and astringent. Still the boy slept.

  Out in the western wastes spindly plants were provoked by the brief rain to flower. Perhaps other things, too, bloomed in the emptiness. Things like Isaac’s ocular rose.

  Outwardly calm, Sulean was terrified.

  The boy had spoken with Esh’s voice.

  She wondered if this was what religious texts meant when they talked about trembling in the presence of God. The Hypotheticals weren’t gods—if she understood what that simple but strangely elastic word meant—but they were just as powerful and just as inscrutable. She didn’t believe they possessed conscious intent, and even the word “they” was a misnomer, a crude anthropomorphism. But when “they” manifested themselves, the natural human response was to cower and hide—the instinctive reaction of the rabbit to the fox, the fox to the hunter.

  Twice in a lifetime, Sulean thought: that’s my special burden, to witness this twice in a lifetime.

  At times she napped in the chair next to the bed where Isaac lay, his chest rising and falling with the cadence of his breath. Often she dreamed—more fiercely and deeply than she had dreamed since she was a child—and in her dreams she was in a different desert, where the horizon was close and the sky a dark and penetrating blue. In this desert t
here were rocks and sand and also a number of brightly–colored tubular or angular growths, like a madman’s hallucinations come to life. And of course there was the boy. Not Isaac. The other boy, the first one. He was more frail than Isaac, his skin was darker, but his eyes, like Isaac’s, had become gold-flecked and strange. He was lying where he had fallen in a stupor of exhaustion, and although Sulean was in the company of a number of grown men she was the first who dared approach him.

  The boy opened his eyes. He could not otherwise move, because his legs, arms, and torso had been bound with pliant ropes or vines. The strange growths had pinned him there, and some of them had pierced his body.

  Surely he must be dead. How could anyone survive such an impalement?

  But he opened his eyes. He opened his eyes and whispered, “Sulean—”

  She woke in the chair next to Isaac’s bed, sweating in the dry heat. Mrs. Rebka had come into the room and was staring at her.

  “We’re having a meeting in the common room,” Mrs. Rebka said. “We would like you to be there, Ms. Moi.”

  “All right. Yes.”

  “Has his condition changed?”

  “No,” Sulean said.

  Thinking: Not yet.

  It wasn’t really a coma. It was only sleep, though a profound one that lasted many days. Isaac woke from it that evening, and when he did, he was alone in his room.

  He felt . . . different.

  More alert than usual: not only awake but more awake than he had ever been. His vision seemed sharper and more focused. He felt as if he could count the dust motes in the air, if he wanted, even though there was only the light of his bedside lamp to see by.

  He wanted to go west. He felt the attraction of what was out there, although there was no word for it, no word he knew. A presence, rising; and it wanted him, and he wanted it, with an urgency akin to love or lust.

  But he wouldn’t leave the compound, not tonight. Isaac’s first and purely instinctive long walk had come to nothing—apart from the discovery of the rose—and there was no use repeating it. Not until he was stronger. Still, he did need to get away from the narrow confinement of his room. To smell the air and feel it on his skin.

  He stood, dressed, and walked downstairs past the closed doors of the large central room from which emanated the solemn voices of adults. He went out to the courtyard. A guard had been posted at the far gate, presumably to keep him from wandering away again. But he stayed on the other side of the houses, in the walled garden.

  The air was cool tonight and the garden was lush. He stepped in among the plants, following the gardener’s cobbled path. The night-blooming succulents had put out blossoms, richly colorful even in the faint moonlight.

  Other things, small things, stirred in the soil where the ash had been driven down by the rain.

  Isaac put his hand palm-down on a bare patch of earth. The soil was warm, retaining what it had conserved of the day’s heat.

  Overhead, the stars were crystal-bright. Isaac looked a long time at the stars. They were symbols hovering on the brink of intelligibility, letters that made words that made sentences he could almost (not quite) read.

  Something touched his hand where it rested on the rich garden loam, and Isaac looked down again. When he pulled his hand away he saw the earth swell and crumble minutely—a worm, he thought; but it wasn’t a worm. It wasn’t anything he had ever seen before. It shrugged itself slowly from the soil like a knuckled, fleshy finger. Maybe some kind of root, but it grew too quickly to be natural. It extended itself toward Isaac’s hand as if it sensed his warmth.

  He wasn’t afraid of it. Well, no, that wasn’t true. Part of him was afraid of it, almost paralyzed with terror. The everyday part of him wanted to recoil and run back to the safety of his room. But above and enclosing the everyday part of him was this new sense of himself, bold and confident, and to the new Isaac the pale green finger wasn’t frightening or even unfamiliar. He recognized it, although he couldn’t name it.

  He allowed it to touch him. Slowly, the green finger encircled his wrist. Isaac drew a curious strength from it, and it from him, he suspected, and he looked back at the sky where the stars which were suns glimmered brightly. Now each star seemed as familiar as a face, each with its own color and weight and distance and identity, known but not named. And like an animal scenting the air, he faced once more to the west.

  Two things were obvious to Sulean as she entered the common room. One was that much discussion had taken place in her absence—she had been called here to testify, not to deliberate.

  The second obvious thing was an atmosphere of collective sadness, almost mourning, as if these people understood that the life they had created for themselves was coming to an end. And that was no doubt true. This community couldn’t exist much longer. It had been created for the purpose of birthing and nurturing Isaac, and that process would soon be finished . . . one way or another.

  The majority of these people must have been born before the Spin, Sulean thought. Like other Terrestrial Fourths, a large percentage of them had come from the academic community, but not all; there were technicians who helped maintain the cryogenic incubators; there was a mechanic, a gardener. Like Martian Fourths, these people had separated themselves from the general community. They were not like the Fourths among whom Sulean had been raised . . . but they were Fourths; they stank of Fourthness. So glum, so self-important, so blind to their own arrogance.

  Avram Dvali, of course, was chairing the meeting. He waved Sulean to a chair at the front of the room. “We’d like you to explain a few things, Ms. Moi, before the crisis proceeds any further.”

  Sulean sat primly erect. “Of course I’m happy to help in any way I can.”

  Mrs. Rebka, who sat at Dr. Dvali’s right at the head table, gave her a sharply skeptical look. “I hope that’s true. You know, when we took on the task of raising Isaac thirteen years ago we faced some opposition—”

  “Raising him, Mrs. Rebka, or creating him?”

  Mrs. Rebka ignored the remark. “Opposition from other members of the Fourth community. We acted on convictions not everyone shared. We know we’re a minority, a minority within a minority. And we knew you were out there, Ms. Moi, doing whatever work you do for the Martians. We knew you might eventually find us, and we were prepared to be frank and open with you. We respect your connection to a community far older than our own.”

  “Thank you,” Sulean said, not concealing her own skepticism.

  “But we had hoped you would be as frank with us as we were with you.”

  “If you have a question, please ask it.”

  “The procedure that created Isaac has been attempted before.”

  “It has been,” Sulean admitted, “yes.”

  “And is it true that you have some personal experience of that?”

  This time she wasn’t quite so quick to answer. “Yes.” The story of her upbringing had circulated widely among the Terrestrial Fourths.

  “Would you share that experience with us?”

  “If I’m reluctant to talk about it, the reasons are largely personal. The memory isn’t pleasant.”

  “Nevertheless,” Mrs. Rebka said.

  Sulean closed her eyes. She didn’t want to recall these events. The memory came to her, unbidden, all too often. But Mrs. Rebka was right, as much as Sulean hated to admit it. The time had come.

  The boy.

  The boy in the desert. The boy in the Martian desert.

  The boy had died in the dry southern province of Bar Kea, some distance from the biological research station where he had been born and where he had lived all his life.

  Sulean was the same age as the boy. She had not been born at the Bar Kea Desert Station but she could remember no other home. Her life before Bar Kea was little more than a story she had been told by her teachers: a story about a girl who had been washed away, along with her family, by a flood along the Paia River, and who had been rescued from the intake filter of a dam three miles down
stream. Her parents had died and the small girl, this unremembered Sulean, had been so grievously wounded that she could only be saved by profound biotechnical intervention.

  Specifically, the child Sulean had to be rebuilt using the same process that was used to extend life and create Fourths.

  The treatment was more or less successful. Her damaged body and brain were reconstructed according to templates written in her DNA. For obvious reasons, she remembered nothing of her life before the accident. Her salvation was a second birth, and Sulean had relearned the world the way an infant learns it, acquiring language a second time and crawling before she took her first (or second) tentative steps.

  But there was a drawback to the treatment, which was why it was so rarely used as a medical intervention. It conferred its customary longevity, but it also interrupted the natural cycle of her life. At puberty, every Martian child developed the deep wrinkles that made Martians appear so distinctive to Terrestrials. But that didn’t happen to Sulean. She remained, by Martian standards, sexless and grotesquely smooth-skinned, an overgrown infant. When she looked in a mirror, even today, Sulean was inevitably reminded of something pink and unformed: a grub writhing in a rotten stump. To protect her from humiliation she had been sheltered and nurtured by the Fourths who saved her life, the Fourths of Bar Kea Desert Station. At the Station she had a hundred indulgent, caring parents, and she had the dry hills of Bar Kea for a playground.

  The only other child at the Station was the boy named Esh.