Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  They had not given him any other name, only Esh.

  Esh had been built to communicate with the Hypotheticals, though it seemed to Sulean he could barely communicate even with the people around him. Even with Sulean, whose company he obviously enjoyed, he seldom spoke more than a few words. Esh was kept apart, and Sulean was allowed to see him only at appointed times.

  Nevertheless she was his friend. It didn’t matter to Sulean that the boy’s nervous system was supposedly receptive to the obscure signals of alien beings, any more than it mattered to Esh that she was as pink as a stillborn fetus. Their uniquenesses made them alike and had thus become irrelevant.

  The Fourths at Bar Kea Desert Station encouraged the friendship. They had been disappointed by Esh’s refractory silences and his outward display of dullnormal intelligence. He was studious but incurious. He sat wide-eyed in the classrooms the adults had designed for him, and he absorbed a reasonable amount of information, but he was indifferent to it all. The sky was full of stars and the desert was full of sand, but stars and sand might have traded places for all it mattered to Esh. Whether he spoke to the Hypotheticals, or they to him, no one could say. He was stubbornly silent on the subject.

  Esh was at his liveliest when he was alone with Sulean. They were allowed to leave the station on certain days to explore the nearby desert. They were supervised, of course—an adult was always within sight—but compared to the closeted spaces of the Station this was wild freedom. Bar Kea was formidably dry, but the scarce spring rains sometimes pooled among the rocks, and Sulean delighted in the small creatures that swam in these short-lived ponds. There were tiny fish that encased themselves in hibernatory cysts, like seeds, when the water dried, and sprang back to life during the rare rains. She liked to cup the populated water in her hands, Esh watching with silent wonder as the wriggling things slipped between her fingers.

  Esh never asked questions, but Sulean pretended he did. At the Station she was always being taught, always being encouraged to listen; alone with Esh she became the teacher, he the rapt and silent audience. Often she would explain to him what she had learned that day or week.

  People had not always lived on Mars, she told him one day as they wandered among sunlit, dusty rocks. Years and centuries ago their ancestors had come from Earth, a planet closer to the sun. You couldn’t see Earth directly, because the Hypotheticals had enclosed it in a lightless barrier—but you knew it was there, because it had a moon that circled it.

  She mentioned the Hypotheticals (called by Martians Ab-ashken, a word compounded of the root-words for “powerful” and “remote”), cautiously at first, wondering how Esh would react. She knew he was part Hypothetical himself and she didn’t want to offend him. But the name provoked no special response, only his usual blank indifference. So Sulean was free to lecture, imagine, dream. Even then the Hypotheticals had fascinated her.

  They live among the stars, as far as anyone knows, she told the boy.

  Esh, of course, said nothing in return.

  They’re not exactly animals, they’re more like machines, but they grow and reproduce themselves.

  They do things for no apparent reason, she told him. They put the Earth inside a slow-time bubble millions of years ago, but no one knows why.

  No one has talked to them, she said, unless you have, I suppose, and no one has seen them. But pieces of them fall out of the sky from time to time, and strange things happen. . . .

  Pieces of them fall from the sky: this last piece of information caused considerable consternation among Dr. Dvali’s Fourths.

  Dvali cleared his throat and said, “There’s nothing about such an event in the Martian Archives.”

  “No,” Sulean admitted. “Nor did we ever mention it in direct communication with the Earth. Even on Mars it’s a rare occurrence—something that happens once every two or three hundred years.”

  Mrs. Rebka said, “Excuse me, but what happens? I don’t understand.”

  “The Hypotheticals exist in a kind of ecology, Mrs. Rebka. They bloom, flourish, and die back, only to repeat the cycle again, over and over.”

  “By the Hypotheticals,” Dr. Dvali said, “I presume you mean their machines.”

  “That may not be a meaningful distinction. There’s no evidence that their self-reproducing machines are under the control of anything but their own networked intelligence and their own contingent evolution. Naturally, the detritus of their lives circulates through the solar system. Periodically the debris is captured by the gravitation of an inner planet.”

  “Why haven’t these things fallen on the Earth?”

  “Before the Spin the Earth existed in a much younger solar system. Five billion years ago the Hypotheticals had barely established themselves in the Kuiper Belt. If their machines did occasionally enter the Earth’s atmosphere it would have been an isolated, rare event. There are enough reports of hovering lights or strange aerial objects to suggest that perhaps it did happen, now and then, though no one recognized it as such. When the Spin barrier was put in place it excluded any such fall-through, and even now the Earth is protected from the excessive radiation of the sun by a different kind of membrane. Mars, for good or ill, is more exposed. Martians didn’t arrive in the modern day as strangers, Dr. Dvali. We’ve grown and evolved for millennia with the knowledge that the Hypotheticals exist and that the solar system is, in effect, their property.”

  “The ash that fell on us,” Mrs. Rebka said, her voice throaty with a kind of hostile urgency, “was that the same phenomenon?”

  “Presumably. And the growths in the desert. It’s only natural to assume that this solar system has also hosted Hypotheticals for countless centuries. The annual meteor showers are more likely their detritus than the simple remains of ancient rocks. The ashfall was just a particularly dense example, perhaps from a recent exfoliation. As if we had passed through a cloud of, of—”

  “Of their discarded cells,” Dr. Dvali said.

  “Cells, in a sense, shed, perhaps discarded, but not necessarily inert or entirely dead. Some partial metabolism persists.” Hence the ocular rose and the other abortive, short-lived growths.

  “Your people must have studied these remains.”

  “Oh yes,” Sulean said. “In fact we cultivated them. Much of our biological technology was derived from the study of them. Even the longevity treatment is remotely derived from Hypothetical sources. Most of our pharmaceuticals entail some element of Hypothetical technology—that’s why we grow them at cryogenic temperatures, simulating the outer solar system.”

  “And the Martian boy—and Isaac as well, I suppose—”

  “The treatment they received is much more closely related to the raw matter of Hypothetical devices. I suppose you thought it was some purely human pharmaceutical? Another example of marvelous Martian biotech? And in a sense it is. But it’s something more, too. Something inhuman, inherently uncontrollable.”

  “And yet Wun Ngo Wen brought the seed stock to Earth.”

  “If Wun had discovered the older, wiser culture we all assumed must exist on Earth, I’m sure he would have been frank about the origins of it. But he found something quite different, unfortunately. He entrusted many of our secrets to Jason Lawton, who rashly experimented on himself—and Jason Lawton circulated the secrets to people he trusted, who proved no more prudent.”

  Sulean was aware of the shock in the room. These were names, Wun Ngo Wen and Jason Lawton, reverently spoken among Terrestrial Fourths. But they were mortal men, after all. Susceptible to doubt, fear, greed, and hasty decisions repented at leisure.

  “Still,” Dr. Dvali said at last, “your people could have told us—”

  “These are Fourth things!” Sulean was surprised by the vehemence in her own voice. “You don’t understand. It’s not zuret—” She couldn’t exactly translate the word and all its nuances. “It’s not correct, it’s not proper, to share them with the unaltered. The unaltered don’t want to know; these things are for the very old
to worry about; by accepting the burden of longevity they accept this burden too. But I would have shared them with you, Dr. Dvali, before you began this project, if you hadn’t hidden yourself so well.”

  But the people she was addressing, born in the raucous jungle that was Earth, couldn’t be expected to understand. Even their Fourthness was alien. The last estate of life, the elective decades, meant nothing more to them than a few more years in which to draw breath. On Mars all Fourths were ritually separated from the rest of the population. When you entered the Fourth Age—unless you entered it, as Sulean had, under exceptional circumstances—you accepted its constraints and agreed to live according to its cloistered traditions. The Terrestrial Fourths had attempted to re-create some of those traditions, and this group had even withdrawn to a kind of desert sanctuary, but it wasn’t the same . . . they didn’t understand the burden of it; they hadn’t been initiated into the sacral knowledge.

  They lacked, perversely, the terrible dry monasticism of the Martian Fourths. It was what Sulean had hated about the Fourths who raised her. On Mars the Fourths moved as if through the invisible corridors of some ancient labyrinth. They had traded joy for a dusty gravitas. But even that was better than this anarchic recklessness—all the vices of terrestrial humanity, needlessly prolonged.

  Dr. Dvali, perhaps sensing her agitation, said, “But what about the child? Tell us what happened to Esh, Ms. Moi.”

  What happened to the boy was both simple and terrible. It began with an infall of Hypothetical debris from the outer system.

  This was not entirely unexpected. Martian astronomers had tracked the movement of the dust cloud for days before its arrival. There was some general excitement about the event. Sulean had been granted permission to climb the stairs to a high parapet of Bar Kea Desert Station, which had served as a fortress in the last of the wars five hundred years ago, to watch the fiery infall.

  There had been no such event in two lifetimes, and Sulean wasn’t the only one who climbed up on the walls to watch. Bar Kea Station had been built with its back to the spine of the Omod Mountains, and the dry southern plains, where much of the debris would fall, stretched roadless and mysterious in the starlight. That night the sky was shot through with falling stars like threaded fire, and Sulean stared at the show with rapt attention until an unwelcome sleepiness overcame her and one of her minders put a hand on her shoulder and escorted her back to bed.

  Esh had come up to the parapet too, and although he watched the green and golden glow of the infalling debris he betrayed no reaction.

  Back in bed Sulean found her sleepiness had evaporated. She lay awake for a long time thinking of what she had seen. She thought about the accumulated debris of Ab-ashken devices, things that ate ice and rock and lived and died over the course of long millennia in lonely places far from the sun, the remnants of them burning as they fell through the atmosphere. In some of these events enough of the debris had survived that it began a kind of abortive new life—the history books described curious growths of an incomplete and oddly mechanical nature, unsuited to the heat and (to them) corrosive air of this planet. Would that happen again? If so, would she witness it? Astronomers said the bulk of the material would fall not terribly far from Bar Kea Station. Fascinated as she was by the Hypotheticals, Sulean longed to see a living example.

  So, apparently, did Esh.

  There was considerable excitement in the station the next morning. Esh was in an agitated state—had cried for the first time since infancy, and one of his tenders had found him knocking his head against the southern wall of his sleeping chamber. Some invisible influence had shattered his customary complacency.

  Sulean wanted to see him—demanded to be allowed to see him, when she heard the news—but she was refused, for days on end. Doctors were called in to examine Esh. The boy slipped in and out of fevers and deep, impenetrable sleeps. Whenever he was awake he demanded to be allowed to go outside.

  He had stopped eating, and by the time Sulean was allowed into his chamber she hardly recognized him. Esh had been chubby, round-cheeked, young for his age. Now he had grown gaunt, and his eyes, strangely flecked with gold, had retreated into the bony contours of his skull.

  She asked him what was wrong, not expecting an answer, but he startled her by saying, “I want to go see them.”

  “What? Who? Who do you want to see?”

  “The Ab-ashken.”

  The boy’s timid voice made the word sound even stranger than it otherwise might have. Sulean felt a chill creep up from the small of her spine to the crown of her head.

  “What do you mean, you want to go see them?”

  “Out in the desert,” Esh said.

  “There’s nothing out there.”

  “Yes, there is. The Ab-ashken.”

  Then he began to cry, and Sulean had to leave the room. The nurse who had been attending Esh followed her into the corridor and said, “He’s been asking for days to leave the building. But this is the first time he mentioned the Ab-ashken.”

  Were they really out there, the Hypotheticals, the Ab-ashken, or at least the fragmentary remains of them? Sulean posed the question to one of her caretakers, a fragile elder who had been an astronomer before he became a Fourth. Yes, he said, there had been some activity to the south, and he showed her a set of aerial photographs that had been taken over the previous few days.

  Here was a wasteland not very different from the landscape beyond the gates of Bar Kea Station—sand, dust, and rocks. But cradled in a broad declivity was a clump of objects so unnatural as to defy description. Half-built, crazily incomplete things, it seemed to Sulean—brightly-colored pipes, silvered hexagonal mirrors, chambered spheres, many of these things linked to one another like the parts of an enormous, impossible insect.

  “This must be where he wants to go,” Sulean said.

  “Possibly. But we can’t allow that. The risk is too great. He might come to harm.”

  “He’s coming to harm here. He looks like he’s dying!”

  Her tutor shrugged. “The decision’s neither mine nor yours.”

  Perhaps not. But Sulean was afraid for Esh. As a friend he wasn’t much, but he was all she had. He shouldn’t be held captive against his will, and Sulean longed to release him. She tried to imagine how she might do that, how she might sneak into his room and smuggle him outside . . . but the corridors of Bar Kea Station were never empty, and Esh was always under guard.

  Nor was she often allowed to see him, and Sulean’s life seemed empty without his mute presence. Sometimes she walked past his room and winced when she heard him crying or shouting.

  The situation remained unchanged for more endless, sunny days. Out in the wasteland, her tutor said, the Ab-ashken growths had bloomed and were beginning to wither, unsuited as they were to this environment. But Esh’s frantic anxiety only increased.

  Dr. Dvali said, “These growths, were they dangerous?”

  “No. There was never anything more than a temporary kind of life to them.”

  Like hothouse flowers, Sulean thought, transplanted to the wrong climate and soil.

  The last time she saw Esh alive was a day later.

  Sulean was outside that morning, walking where she used to walk with him. Her minder stood at a discreet distance, mindful that Sulean was troubled and might want time to herself.

  It was another sunny day. The rocks cast deep shadows across the sand. Sulean wandered aimlessly near the Station’s gates, not really thinking about anything—in fact trying hard not to think about Esh—when she saw him, as startling as a mirage, squatting in the shade of a boulder looking south.

  This was inexplicable. Sulean glanced back at her minder, another venerable Fourth. He had paused to rest in the shade of Bar Kea Station’s southern wall. The old Fourth had not seen Esh, and Sulean did nothing to betray his presence.

  She walked slowly closer, careful not to hurry and make herself conspicuous. Esh looked up plaintively from his hiding place.

&n
bsp; She bent down as if examining a piece of shale or a scuttling sandbug and whispered, “How did you get away?”

  “Don’t tell,” Esh demanded.

  “I won’t, of course I won’t. But how—”

  “No one was looking. I stole a robe,” he added, lifting his arms in the voluminous whiteness of some larger person’s desert garb. “I came over the north parapet where it touches the rock wall and climbed down.”

  “But what are you doing out here? It’ll be dark in a couple of hours.”

  “I’m doing what I have to.”

  “You need food and water.”

  “I can do without.”

  “No you can’t.” Sulean insisted on giving him her water bottle, which she always carried when she left the shelter of the Station, and a bar of pressed meal she had been saving for herself.

  “They’ll know I’m gone,” Esh said. “Don’t tell them you saw me.”

  This was more conversation than Sulean had ever had with Esh, a comparative flood of words. She said, “I will. I mean, I won’t. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Thank you, Sulean.”

  Another startling novelty: the first time he had ever said her name, maybe the first time he had said anyone’s name. This wasn’t just Esh crouching in the sand in front of her, this was Esh plus something else.

  The Ab-ashken, Sulean thought.

  The Hypotheticals were inside him, looking out through his altered eyes.

  Somewhere in the Station a bell began to ring, and Sulean’s sleepy minder looked alert and called her name. “Run,” she whispered.

  But she didn’t wait to see if the boy took her advice. She turned back to the Station, pretending nothing had happened, and went to her keeper, and said nothing at all, as if the silence in which Esh had dwelt for so many years had entered her throat and stilled her voice.

  “What was it he wanted?” Dvali asked. “To find the fallen artifacts, presumably—but what then?”

  “I don’t know,” Sulean said. “I suppose like calls to like. The same instinct or programming that causes the Hypothetical replicators to cluster and share information and reproduce may have operated equally on the boy Esh. The crisis was caused by his proximity to these devices.”