Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  More likely it was because the boy Isaac had spoken a few words in a language he couldn’t possibly have known.

  That is to say: because she was afraid of him.

  “You make much of that,” Turk asked, “what the lady said about earthquakes?”

  He rode in the lead vehicle with Dvali, who had taken the wheel. The wind still pushed snaketrails of dust across the road, but most of the ash seemed to have been blown away—or had been absorbed into the earth, the same way that flapping thing had been absorbed into Isaac’s skin.

  Another day of driving and they would reach the outskirts of the oil concessions. The target they had triangulated was a couple hundred miles west of there.

  “I don’t disbelieve her,” Dr. Dvali said evenly. “Was there anything in the news?”

  Turk had been keeping Dr. Dvali’s radio plugged into one ear, though reception was intermittent. They were a long way from the aerostats. “Nothing about earthquakes. But I wouldn’t rule it out.” He wouldn’t rule out munchkins or dinosaurs, at this point. “They say it could happen again, the ashfall. You think that’s possible?”

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Dvali said. “No one knows.”

  Except maybe Isaac, Turk thought.

  They stopped for the night at a gas-food-lodging complex that had once catered to tanker drivers but was now deserted.

  There was no mystery about why it had been abandoned. Alien growths were festooned across the building’s roof. These were gaudy tubular things, turned to lacework by their own decomposition. But they must once have been heavy, because pieces of the roof had collapsed under their weight. And that wasn’t all: a filigree of blue tendrils had invaded the restaurant, covering everything within a few yards of the door (floor, ceiling, tables, chairs, a busboy’s cart) in randomly interwoven ropes and strings. These, too, were decaying. Touch them and they turned to rancid powder.

  Turk located room keys and opened doors until he found enough undamaged rooms to allow them all some welcome privacy. Turk and Lise took one room, Dvali another. Sulean Moi consented to share a suite with Diane, Mrs. Rebka, and the boy Isaac.

  Sulean wasn’t unhappy with the room arrangements. She couldn’t bring herself to like Mrs. Rebka, but she hoped to be allowed a few moments alone with the boy.

  The opportunity came that evening. Dvali summoned everyone for what he called “a community meeting.” Isaac, of course, couldn’t participate, and Sulean volunteered to stay with him—she had nothing to contribute to the talking, she said.

  Mrs. Rebka agreed, reluctantly. As soon as she had left the room, Sulean went to the boy’s bedside.

  He wasn’t feverish, he was even alert at times, and he could sit up, walk, take food. He had been blessedly quiet in the car, as if some of the dreadful inhuman neediness had passed from him since the flying thing attacked him. Dvali was loathe to discuss that event, since he didn’t understand it, but it was the boy’s first deeply personal contact with the semiliving creations of the Hypotheticals. Sulean wondered what it had felt like. Was the thing still in his body even now, had it disassembled itself into molecular fragments in order to circulate through his blood? And if so, why? Was there even a reason, or was it just another mindless tropism evolved over uncountable millions of years?

  She wished she could ask Isaac. But there was only time for the most pressing questions.

  She forced herself to smile at the boy. Isaac smiled back as readily as he ever had. I’m his friend, she thought. His Martian friend. “I knew someone like you,” she said, “a long time ago.”

  “I remember,” Isaac said.

  Sulean felt a fluttering in her chest.

  “Do you know who I’m talking about?”

  One word. “Esh.”

  “You know about Esh?”

  Isaac nodded solemnly, his gold-flecked eyes gone distant.

  “What do you know about him?”

  Isaac began to tell the story of Esh’s brief childhood at Bar Kea Station, and Sulean was astonished to hear the boy speaking Esh’s Martian dialect again.

  She felt dizzy. “Esh,” she whispered.

  Isaac said, in English, “He can’t hear you.”

  “But you can hear him?”

  “He can’t talk, Sulean. He’s dead. You know that.”

  Of course she knew that. She had held his dying body in her arms, sick with the knowledge that she had helped him escape to the desert, to the thing he had so desperately wanted, the same thing Isaac wanted, which was the Hypotheticals, which was death.

  She said, “But you can speak in his voice.”

  “Because I remember him.”

  “You remember him?”

  “That is, he—I don’t know how to explain!”

  The boy was becoming anxious. Sulean suppressed her own terror and forced what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “You don’t have to explain. It’s a mystery. I don’t understand it either. Just tell me how it feels.”

  “I know what I am, I know what they made me to be, Dr. Dvali, Mrs. Rebka, they want me to talk to the Hypotheticals, but I can’t do that. I’m sorry, but I can’t. But there’s something in me—” He pointed to his ribs. “And out there—” The desert. “—something that remembers a million things and Esh is only one of them, but because he’s like me it remembers him to me—I mean—”

  Sulean stroked the boy’s head. His hair was lank and gritty. All this traveling and no water for baths. Poor child. “Please don’t be upset.”

  “The thing in me remembers Esh and I remember what Esh remembered. I look at you and I see both.”

  “Both?”

  “The way you are now. And the way you were then.”

  Quite a contrast, Sulean imagined.

  “And Esh can see me, too?”

  “No, I told you, he’s dead, he can’t see anything. He’s not here. But I know what he would say if he was here.”

  “And what would he say, Isaac?”

  “He would say,” and Isaac slipped into the Martian language again, his inflections shockingly familiar even after all these long and arduous years: “He would say, Hello, big sister.”

  Esh’s voice, undeniably.

  “And he would say . . .”

  “What? Tell me.”

  “He would say, Don’t be afraid.”

  Oh, but that I cannot do, Sulean thought, and she retreated from the bed, almost to the door where, although she had not heard him arrive, Dr. Dvali was standing and listening, his face red with an emotion that was as much jealousy as anger.

  “How long have you known this about him?”

  Dvali had insisted on walking a short distance from the truck stop, away from the others, into the intimidating landscape that had surrounded them for days, as if the deserts of Mars had been re-created on this hotter alien world. A huge sky domed the evening emptiness, and of the works of man there was only the most tawdry.

  Esh, Esh, she thought. Such a distance to come to hear his voice again. “A few weeks,” she managed to say.

  “Weeks! And were you planning to share this information with us?”

  “There was never any information. Only a possibility.”

  “The significant possibility that Isaac is somehow sharing memories with your Martian experiment, this Esh—”

  “Esh wasn’t an experiment. He was a child, Dr. Dvali. And he was my friend.”

  “You’re evading the issue.”

  “I’m evading nothing. I’m not an accessory to your work. Had it been possible, I would have prevented you from beginning it.”

  “But you didn’t, and you’re here now. I think you should examine your own motives, Ms. Moi. I think you’re here for the same reason we created Isaac. Because you’ve spent a lifetime trying to understand the Hypotheticals, and after—what, eighty years? Ninety?—you’re no farther ahead than you were when you were young.”

  Certainly the Hypotheticals had never been far from her thoughts, not since they devoured Esh. An obsession, yes
, maybe, but it had never influenced her judgment—had it?

  As to whether she understood the Hypotheticals . . . “They don’t exist,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Hypotheticals. They don’t exist, not the way you imagine them. What do you picture when you think about them? Some great wise ancient presence? Beings of infinite wisdom inscrutable to our petty minds? That was the mistake the Martian Fourths made. What risk would not be justified by the possibility of conversing with God? But they don’t exist! There is nothing in all the starry sky but some vast operative logic connecting one thoughtless machine to the next. It’s ancient, it’s complex, but it isn’t a mind.”

  “If that’s so,” Dvali said, “then who were you just talking to?”

  Sulean opened her mouth and then closed it.

  That night, for the first time in many days, Lise and Turk made love. The privacy of a separate room was an instant aphrodisiac. They didn’t discuss it, didn’t need to discuss it; in the candlelit darkness Lise had undressed and watched Turk undress, and then she had blown out the candle and found him by the faint light of the dust-dimmed moon. He smelled rank, and so did she. It didn’t matter. Here was the communication at which they always excelled. Briefly she wondered whether, elsewhere in this ruin, the Fourths could hear the creak of the bedsprings. Probably, she thought. Probably good for them if they did hear it. It might enliven their old, juiceless lives.

  Turk eventually fell asleep with his arm across her ribs and she was content to lie with him in the fading glow.

  At last, though, she had to shift herself out of the embrace. Despite everything, she couldn’t sleep. She thought about how far they had come, and she remembered a line she had read in some old book: The thin end of nowhere, whittled down to a fine point.

  The night was cold. She curled against Turk again, seeking his warmth.

  She was still awake when the building began to tremble.

  Diane Dupree was awake in the room she shared with Sulean Moi, Mrs. Rebka, Isaac.

  She focused her attention on the sound of Isaac’s breathing, thinking how strange life must have been for Isaac, raised motherless—Mrs. Rebka had been something less than a mother—and fatherless—unless you counted Dr. Dvali’s sinister hoverings—but indifferent, by all accounts, to affection. A difficult, refractory child.

  She had overheard a little of Sulean Moi’s argument with Dr. Dvali earlier today. It had raised uneasy questions in her mind.

  The Martian woman was right, of course. Dr. Dvali and Mrs. Rebka weren’t scientists, studying the Hypotheticals by unconventional means. They were on a pilgrimage. And at the end of it they expected something holy, something redemptive.

  The same longing—years and years ago now—had carried her almost to her death. Diane had wrapped herself in her first husband’s faith, and he had taken her to a religious retreat where she contracted an illness that nearly killed her. The cure had been her conversion to what the Martian Wun Ngo Wen had called the Fourth state, the adulthood beyond adulthood.

  She thought she had left that longing behind her when she became a Fourth. It was as if, after the longevity treatment, something cool and methodically rational had risen up and taken control of her life. Something soothing, if a little deadening. No more reckless storming of Heaven. She had lived a steady, useful life.

  Could she have been wrong, though, about how much she had left behind and how much she still carried with her, unsuspected? When the lines had intersected on the map, the triangulation of Isaac’s urges, Diane had felt a familiar longing for the first time in . . . oh, many years.

  She felt it again when she found out that Isaac could gain access to the memories of a long-dead Martian child he had never known.

  The Hypotheticals had remembered Esh, Diane thought.

  What else might the Hypotheticals have remembered?

  Her brother Jason had died in a state of attempted communion with the Hypotheticals. Did they remember that? Did they in fact remember Jason?

  And if she asked, would Isaac speak with Jason’s voice?

  She sat upright, almost guiltily, when the building began to tremble and shake. Fortifications breached, she thought dazedly: the walls of Heaven tumbling down.

  By the time Turk managed to light a candle, the shaking had stopped.

  The old Chinese lady was right, he thought. Earthquakes!

  He turned back to Lise, who sat up in bed with the blanket pooled around her waist. He said, “You okay? It’s just a tremor.”

  “Promise we won’t stop,” she said.

  Turk blinked. Her skin by candlelight was pale, unearthly. “Stop?”

  “When they get where they’re going,” and he understood by a toss of her head that she meant the Fourths, “we don’t stop, right? We keep on heading for the west coast? Like you said?”

  “Of course. What are you worried about? This was just a tremor, Lise. You lived in California, you must have felt little quakes like that.”

  “Because they’re crazy, Turk. They sound rational, but they have this big carnival of craziness planned. I don’t want any part of it.”

  Turk went to the window just to make sure the stars hadn’t exploded or anything, because she was right, lunacy was on the march. But there was only the central Equatorian desert stretched out under its meager moon. That was a sight to make you feel small, he thought, that desert.

  And another little tremor rattled the useless lamp on the side table.

  Isaac felt the tremor but it didn’t quite wake him. He had been sleeping a lot lately. He had lost some of his ability to distinguish between sleeping and waking.

  The clock of the stars turned relentlessly inside him. In the darkness he dreamed things for which he had no words. There were many things for which he had no words. And there were words he knew but didn’t understand and couldn’t define: for instance, love.

  I love you, Mrs. Rebka had whispered to him when no one but Isaac could hear.

  He hadn’t known what to say in return. But that was all right. She didn’t seem to need an answer. I love you, Isaac, my only son, she had whispered, and then turned her face away.

  What did that mean?

  What did it mean when he closed his eyes and saw the cycling stars or the banked fires of an invisible thing deep in the western desert? What did it mean that he felt its liveliness and power?

  What did it mean that he could hear a million voices, more voices than there were stars in the sky? What did it mean that out of that multitude he could call up the voice of Esh, a dead Martian boy? Was he remembering Esh or was something remembering Esh through him—remembering Esh’s voice with the air in Isaac’s lungs?

  Because—and here was something Isaac did know—the act to which he had been summoned, to which all the tumbling fragments of Hypothetical machinery had been summoned from their lazy courses in the sky, was a remembering.

  A remembering larger than the world itself.

  He felt it coming. The crust of the planet trembled, its shivering rose up through the foundation of this old building, through the floor, the joists, the beams, through the bed frame and the mattress, until Isaac trembled along with it, the motion filling him with a heatless joy, memory and annihilation advancing with giant steps, with strides as long as continents, until at last he asked himself:

  Is this love?

  PART FIVE

  * * *

  IN THE

  COMPANY OF THE

  UNSPEAKABLE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  They had reached the outskirts of the oil concessions—the desolate, thin end of nowhere—when the third and most intense ashfall began.

  There had been some warning, conveyed by Dr. Dvali’s intermittently-functional telecom receiver. The precipitation had been relatively light in Port Magellan, but dense waves of it were falling in the west, as if focused there.

  By the time Dr. Dvali announced this news, the threat was ominously visible. Lise, looki
ng through the back window of the vehicle as it sped down the highway between two equally flat horizons, saw clouds the color of boiling slate materialize from a chalk-blue sky.

  “We’ll need to get under cover again,” she heard Turk say.

  To the southwest Turk could just make out the silver-black silhouettes of the Aramco drilling and pumping complex. Evacuated, presumably—a couple of the far towers seemed to be leaning off vertical, though that could be an illusion—but Turk guessed the site would still be guarded, both by machines and by armed men.

  Fortunately they didn’t need to head in that direction. The oil concessions had grown a ring of commerce around them, businesses run by lonely men for lonely men, strip clubs and bars and porn vendors, which meant that not far down the road they would find more respectable commercial concessions and housing for the hired workers. Which appeared as the two cars raced the black cloud flowing from the east: a gated side road, the gate unchained; a mall (grocery store, media retailers, a multi-mart); and a number of sturdy concrete buildings in which one- or two-room utility apartments were stacked like boxes.

  Turk, in the lead car with Lise and Dr. Dvali, looked back and saw the second vehicle pulling into the mall lot. Dvali swung around and intercepted them in front of the grocery store.

  “Supplies,” Diane explained.

  “We don’t have time,” Dvali said sternly. “We need to get under cover.”

  “Such as the building up ahead? I would suggest you break in or whatever you need to do, and we’ll follow as soon as we find food.”

  Dvali clearly didn’t like this idea, but just as clearly, Turk thought, it made sense: they had been running low on essentials and the ash storm might maroon them for a good long time. “Be quick about it,” Dvali said unhappily.

  Whoever designed this workers’ barracks had made no attempt to disguise the institutional nature of the project. On the outside the building was weathered concrete and cracked pavement and an empty parking lot adjoining a tennis court enclosed in a chain-link fence, its net slumped in disarray. The door Turk approached was hollow steel painted industrial yellow, no doubt battered by the boots of hundreds of shit-drunk oil-riggers over the years, and it was locked, but the lock was fragile and gave way after some leverage with a tire-iron. Dvali fidgeted while Turk performed this task, glancing back at the approaching storm. The light was thinning already, the disc of the sun growing weak and obscure.