“May I ask why?”
“Because of his obvious interest. Because he was trustworthy. Because he understood the nature of the world.” Dvali smiled. “Basically, because I liked him.”
“He was okay with that, with your—Fourthness?”
“He was curious about it.”
“Did he talk about taking the treatment himself?”
“I won’t say he didn’t consider it. But he never made the request to me or, so far as I know, anyone else. He loved his family, Miss Adams—I don’t need to tell you that. I was as shocked as anyone else when I heard about his disappearance.”
“Did you confide in him about this project of yours, too? About Isaac?”
“When it was in the planning stage, yes, I talked to him about it.” Dvali sipped his coffee. “He hated the idea.”
“But he didn’t inform on you. He didn’t do anything to stop it.”
“No, he didn’t inform on us, but we argued bitterly over it—the friendship was strained at that point.”
“Strained, but not broken.”
“Because despite our disagreement, he understood why the work seemed necessary. Urgently necessary.” Dvali leaned closer to her and for a moment Lise was afraid he would reach out and take her hands. She wasn’t sure she could stand that. “The idea of any tangible contact with the Hypotheticals—with the motivating spirit behind their vast network of machines—fascinated him as much as it fascinated me. He knew how important it was, not just for our generation but for generations to come, for humanity as a species.”
“You must have been disappointed when he wouldn’t cooperate.”
“I didn’t need his cooperation. I would have liked his approval. I was disappointed when he withheld it. After a time we simply stopped talking about it—we talked about other things. And when the project began in earnest I left Port Magellan. I never saw your father again.”
“That was six months before he disappeared.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know anything about that?”
“About his disappearance? No. Genomic Security was in the Port at the time—looking for me, among others, since rumors of the project had reached them—and when I heard Robert Adams had gone missing I assumed he’d been picked up and interrogated by Genomic Security. But I don’t know that for certain. I wasn’t there.”
“Most of the people who are interrogated by Genomic Security walk away from it, Dr. Dvali.” Although she knew better.
“Not all,” Dvali said.
“He wasn’t a Fourth. Why would they hurt him?” Kill him, she couldn’t bring herself to say.
“He would have resisted on principle and out of personal loyalty.”
“You knew him well enough to say that?”
“I took the treatment in Bangalore, Miss Adams, twenty years ago. I’m not omniscient, but I’m a good judge of human character. Not that there was anything especially occult about Robert Adams. He wore his sincerity on his sleeve.”
He was murdered. That had always been the most likely explanation, though the details might be uglier than Lise had imagined. Robert Adams had been murdered and the men who murdered him would never come to trial for it. But there was another story inside the story. The story of his curiosity, his idealism, the strength of his convictions.
Some of these thoughts must have shown on her face. Dvali was radiating a sympathetic concern. “I know that isn’t much help. I’m sorry.”
Lise stood up. All she felt at the moment was cold. “May I ask you one more thing?”
“If you like.”
“How do you justify it? The fate of humanity aside, how do you justify putting an innocent child in Isaac’s position?
Dvali turned up his cup and emptied the last of his coffee on the ground. “Isaac was never an innocent child. Isaac has never been anything other than what he is now. And I would trade places with him, Miss Adams, if I could. Eagerly.”
She came across the campground to the circle of light in which Turk was sitting, fiddling with a pocket telecom receiver. Turk, her avatar of disappearances: Turk, who had vanished from many lives. “Radio broken?”
“Nothing coming in over the aerostats. Nothing from Port Magellan. Last I heard they were talking about another tremor out west.” Oil revenue, of course, being the Port’s perennial obsession. In the Trusts we trust. Turk gave her a second look. “Are you all right?”
“Just tired,” she said.
She brewed another pot of coffee and drank enough to keep her alert, even as the others began to settle in for the night. At last—as she had hoped—there was no one up and moving except herself and the Martian woman, Sulean Moi.
Lise was intimidated by Sulean Moi, even though she looked like the kind of elderly woman you might help across the street at a stoplight. She wore her age and the distance she had traveled as a kind of invisible aura. It took a certain amount of courage to join her at the guttering campfire, where the logs had worn down to radiant hollows and red chambers.
“Don’t be afraid,” the old woman said.
Lise was startled. “Are you reading my mind?”
“Reading your face.”
“I’m not really afraid.” Not much.
Sulean smiled, exposing her small white teeth. “I think I would be, in your position—given what you must have heard about me. I know the stories they tell. The grim elder Martian, victim of a childhood injury.” She tapped her skull. “My supposed moral authority. My unusual history.”
“Is that how you see yourself?”
“No, but I recognize the caricature. You spent a good deal of time and energy looking for me, Miss Adams.”
“Call me Lise.”
“Lise, then. Do you still have that photograph you’ve been showing around?”
“No.” She had destroyed it back in the Minang village, at Diane’s urging.
“Just as well. So here we are. No one to overhear us. We can talk.”
“When I started looking for you I had no idea—”
“That it would inconvenience me? Or that it would attract the attention of Genomic Security? Don’t apologize. You knew what you knew, and what you didn’t know could hardly enter into your calculations. You want to ask me about Robert Adams and how and why he died.”
“Do you know for a fact that he’s dead?”
“I didn’t witness the killing, but I’ve spoken with people who saw him abducted and I can’t imagine any other outcome. If he had been able to come home he would have done so. I’m sorry if that seems blunt.”
Blunt but increasingly self-evident, Lise thought. “It’s true that he was taken by Genomic Security?”
“By one of what they call their Executive Action Groups.”
“And they were hunting for Dr. Dvali and his group.”
“Yes.”
“And so were you.”
“Yes. For slightly different reasons.”
“You wanted to stop him from creating Isaac.”
“I wanted to stop him from performing a needlessly cruel and probably useless human experiment, yes.”
“Isn’t that what Genomic Security wanted?”
“Only in their press releases. Do you really believe organizations like Genomic Security operate within their mission statements? If Genomic Security could acquire the tools they would have secret bunkers full of multiple Isaacs—wired to machines, under armed guard.”
Lise shook her head to order her thoughts. “How did you meet my father?”
“The first useful person I met in Equatoria was Diane Dupree. There’s no formal hierarchy among Terrestrial Fourths, but in every Fourth community there’s some pivotal figure who figures in every major decision. Diane played that role in coastal Equatoria. I told her why I wanted to find Dvali and she gave me the names of people who might be useful—not all of them Fourths. Dr. Dvali had befriended your father. I befriended him too.”
“Dr. Dvali said my father was trustworthy.”
“Your father had
a striking faith in fundamental human goodness. That didn’t always work to his advantage.”
“You think Dvali took advantage of him?”
“I think it took him a long time to see Dr. Dvali for what he was.”
“Which is?”
“A man with grandiose ambitions, profound insecurities, and a dangerously malleable conscience. Your father was reluctant to reveal Dr. Dvali’s announced plans and whereabouts, even to me.”
“Did he, though?”
“Once we got to know each other. We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father’s unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.”
“If he told you what he knew, why couldn’t you find Dvali and stop him?”
“Because Dr. Dvali was wise enough to change his plans once he left Port Magellan. Your father believed Dvali was establishing a compound on the far west coast of Equatoria—still mostly a wilderness even today, apart from a few fishing villages. That’s what he told me, and that’s no doubt what he told Genomic Security when they interrogated him.”
“Dvali thinks my father refused to talk—that that was why they killed him.”
“I’m sure he resisted. I doubt he succeeded, given what I know about their interrogation techniques. I know it hurts you to hear that, Lise, and I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. Your father told me what he knew because he believed Dvali ought to be stopped and he believed I had the authority to intervene without doing violence to Dvali or the Fourth community in general. If he told these things to Genomic Security, he would have done so only under duress. But, Lise, it didn’t matter. Dvali wasn’t on the west coast. He never had been. Genomic Security lost track of him, and by the time I found out where he had truly gone it was far too late—years had passed. Isaac was a living child. He couldn’t be called back into the womb.”
“I see.”
In the ensuing silence Lise could hear the crackle of the smoldering fire.
“Lise,” Sulean Moi said softly. “I lost my parents when I was very young. I expect Diane told you that. I lost my parents, but, worse than that, I lost my memory of them. It was as if they had never existed at all.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not asking for sympathy. What I want to tell you is that, at a certain age, I made it my business to educate myself about them—to learn who they were, and how they had come to live beside a certain river before it flooded, and what warnings they might have heeded or ignored. I think I wanted to know whether I ought to love them for trying to rescue me or hate them for failing. I found out a lot of things, mostly irrelevant, including a number of painful truths about their personal lives, but the only important thing I learned was that they were blameless. It was a very small consolation, but it was all there would ever be, and in a way it was enough. Lise—your father was blameless.”
“Thank you,” Lise said hoarsely.
“And now we should try to sleep,” Sulean Moi said, “before the sun comes up again.”
Lise slept better than she had in several nights—even though she was in a sleeping bag, on uneven ground, in a strange forest—but it wasn’t the sun that woke her, it was Turk’s hand on her shoulder. Still dark out, she registered groggily. “We have to go,” Turk said. “Hurry up, Lise.”
“Why—?”
“The ash is falling again in Port Magellan, more and heavier, and it’ll cross the mountains before too long. We need to get under shelter.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Isaac woke to see the clouds billowing through the passes behind the moving car, clouds shot through with luminous particles, clouds like the clouds of August 34th. But the sudden and breathtaking hurt obscured all that.
What he felt wasn’t pain, exactly, but something very much like it, a sensitivity that made light and noise intolerable, as if the exposed blade of the world had been thrust into his skull.
Isaac understood his own specialness. He knew he had been created in an attempt to communicate with the Hypotheticals, and he knew he had been a disappointment to the adults around him. He knew other things, too. He knew the vacuum of space wasn’t empty: it was populated by ghost particles that existed too briefly to interact with the world of tangible things; but the Hypotheticals could manipulate these ephemeral particles and use them to send and receive information. The Martian technology embedded in Isaac had attuned his nervous system to this kind of signaling. But it never resolved into anything like the comfortable linearity of words. Most of the time it was a sense of distant, inexpressible urgency. Sometimes—now—it was more like pain. And the pain was connected with the approaching cloud of dust and ash: the unseen world heaved with an invisible tumult, and Isaac’s mind and body vibrated in concert.
He was aware, too, of being lifted into the rear seat of the car, of being strapped in by hands not his own, of the voices and concerns of his old and new friends. They were afraid for him. And they were afraid for themselves. He was aware of Dr. Dvali ordering everyone into the car, the slamming doors, the revving engine. And he was glad it was not Dr. Dvali who held his head and soothed him (it was Mrs. Rebka), because he had come to dislike Dr. Dvali, almost to hate Dr. Dvali, for reasons he didn’t understand.
Mrs. Rebka wasn’t a physician but she had trained herself in basic medicine, as had the other Fourths, and Lise watched as she administered a sedative, pricking the boy’s arm with an old-fashioned syringe. Isaac began to breathe more deeply and his screaming eventually ebbed to a sigh.
They drove. The vehicle’s headlights cut columns of light into the falling dust. Turk was doing the driving on behalf of the Fourths, trying to get out of the foothills before the roads became impassable. Lise had asked whether they shouldn’t take Isaac to a hospital, but Mrs. Rebka shook her head: “There’s nothing a hospital can do for him. Nothing we can’t do for him ourselves.”
Diane Dupree watched the boy with wide, anxious eyes. Sulean Moi also watched him, but her expression was more inscrutable—some combination, it seemed to Lise, of resignation and terror.
But it was Mrs. Rebka who allowed Isaac to rest his head on her shoulder, who reassured him with a word or the silent pressure of her hand when the bounce and rattle of the car disturbed him. She smoothed his hair and dabbed his forehead with a damp cloth. Before long the sedative put him to sleep.
There was an obvious question Lise had been wanting to ask since they arrived at the Fourth compound, and since no one else had anything to say—and because the noise of the windshield wipers scraping dust across glass was driving her slightly crazy—she drew a breath and asked, “Is Isaac’s mother still alive?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Rebka said.
Lise turned to face her. “Are you his mother?”
“I am,” Mrs. Rebka said.
What do you see, Isaac?
Much later, as he was waking up from the sleep they had injected into him, Isaac pondered the question.
Mrs. Rebka was the one who had asked it. He tried to formulate an answer before the pain came back and stole his words. But the question was hard to answer because he was having a hard time seeing anything at all. He was aware of the vehicle and the people in it, the ash falling beyond the windows, but they all seemed vague and unreal. Was it daytime yet? But now the car had stopped, and before he answered Mrs. Rebka’s question he asked one of his own: “Where are we?”
Up front, the man named Turk Findley said, “Little town called Bustee. We might be staying here a while.”
Outside there were small buildings visible through the fog of dust. He could see them plainly enough. But that wasn’t what Mrs. Rebka had meant by her question.
“Isaac? Can you walk?”
Yes, he could, for now, though the sedative was wearing off and the blade of the world was beginning to draw blood again. He climbed out of the car with one hand on Mrs. Rebka’s arm. Dust sifted across his face. The dust smelled like something burned. Mrs. Rebka
steered him toward the nearest small building, which was one wing of a motel. Isaac heard Turk say he had rented the last available room, for more money than it was worth. Lots of people were sheltering in Bustee tonight, Turk said.
Then he was inside, on a bed, on his back, and the air was less dusty, though it still stank, and Mrs. Rebka brought a fresh cloth and began to dab the grime from his face. “Isaac,” she said again gently, “what are you looking at? What do you see?”
Because he kept turning his head in one direction—west, of course—and staring.
What did he see?
“A light.”
“Here in the room?”
No. “A long way away. Farther than the horizon.”
“But you can see it from here? You can see it through the walls?”
He nodded.
“What does it look like?”
Many words crowded Isaac’s mind, many answers. A fire in a faraway place. An explosion. Sunrise. Sunset. The place where the stars fall and burn in their eagerness to live. And the thing deep underground that knows and welcomes them.
But what he said was simply, truthfully, “I don’t know.”
Only Turk had been to Bustee before. The name, he said, was derived from a Hindi word for “slum.” It wasn’t a slum, but it was a greasy little road town on the edge of the Rub al-Khali, catering to traffic along the northernmost route to and from the oil lands. Cinderblock buildings and a few timber-framed houses; a store that sold tire gauges, maps and compasses, sunblock, cheap novels, disposable phones. Three gas stations and four restaurants.
None of which Lise could see from the window of the motel room. The ashfall sifted down in gray, stinking curtains. Power lines down or transformers shorted by dust, she guessed, and repairs wouldn’t be quick, not out here in low-priority-land. It was a miracle they had made it here at all, even in their big all-terrain all-weather vehicle. Someone from the motel office knocked at the door and handed out flashlights and a warning not to attempt candles or any kind of open flame. But the Fourths had packed their own flashlights, and there was nothing to see anyway, only dingy walls and patchwork wallpaper. Lise kept a flashlight at hand for navigating her way to the bathroom when the need arose.
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