Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

Isaac could see that Diane had been badly hurt. Even in the dark it was possible to see that. Her dim glow had been nearly extinguished. Compared to Sulean Moi, Diane was a guttering candle.

  It was hard to pay attention. He was mesmerized by the invisible landscape all around him. Mesmerized because he was a part of it, he was becoming it . . .but that could wait. Now that the new Arch had assembled itself in the west—from Hypothetical molecules, granite, magma, memory—there was a kind of pause. All around him for many miles the fresh blanket of dust began to undergo a new stage of metabolism. That would take time. Isaac could afford to be patient.

  He surprised Sulean Moi and Mrs. Rebka by crawling over fallen beams, fragments of drywall, scattered foam insulation and collapsed aluminum venting to the place where Diane Dupree lay trapped beneath a heavy joist. His lungs labored and his mouth was foul with dust, but he could breathe, at least, which Diane apparently could not, not easily. And he could tell when he reached out to touch her that the falling debris had hurt her head. He meant to stroke her hair, the way Mrs. Rebka stroked his hair when he was ill, but the place above Diane’s left ear yielded to his touch, and his hand came away sticky.

  Tyler Dupree had died one day in August, the long Equatorian August, two years ago, the long Equatorian years.

  Diane had hiked with him up one of the steep, rolling ridges of the coast, for no other reason than to sit at its summit and watch the forest drop like a deep green broadcloth to the sea.

  Neither of them was young; both had lived out most of their extended lives as Fourths. Lately Tyler complained from time to time of fatigue, but he had gone on seeing patients, mainly the young men who worked as breakers (their injuries could be horrendous) and the Minang villagers among whom she and Tyler had settled. Today he had said he felt fine, and he had insisted on the long hike—he called it “the closest thing to a vacation I’m likely to get.” So Diane had gone with him, relishing the dimness beneath the trees and the brightness of the high meadows, but also vigilant, watching him.

  The Fourth metabolism was powerful but finely balanced. It could be pushed hard, but like any other physical thing it had a breaking point. Age couldn’t be indefinitely deferred because the treatment itself aged. When Fourths failed, they tended to fail all at once.

  Which was how Tyler had failed.

  She thought he might have known it was happening. That was why he had insisted on this hike. They came to a place he loved but seldom had time to visit, a broad swath of granite and mountain grass. They put out a blanket, and Diane opened her backpack and withdrew the treasures she had stored for this occasion: Australian wine, bread from the bakeries of Port Magellan, cold roast beef, things foreign to the Minang diet to which they had become accustomed. But Tyler wasn’t hungry. He lay down on his back and pillowed his head against a bump of moss. He was thin these days, his skin was pale despite exposure to the sun, and he looked, Diane thought, almost elfin.

  “I think I’ll sleep,” he said. And it was at that moment, in the August sunlight and surrounded by the smell of rock and water and black earth, that she had known he was dying.

  Some atavistic part of her wanted to rescue him, to carry him down the mountain the way he had once carried her across much of the continental United States when she was mortally ill. But there was no cure; the Fourth treatment could be taken only once.

  Time later for grief. She knelt beside him and stroked his head. She said, “Can I get you anything?” And he said, “I’m happy right here.”

  So she lay down beside him and held him in her arms as the afternoon waned. Much later, much too soon, the sun went down, and it was time to go home, but only Diane stood up.

  I’m happy right here.

  But was this Jason with her in the darkness? Her brother Jason who had died so many years ago? No: it was the strange boy Isaac, but he sounded so much like Jason . . .

  “I can remember you, Diane. If that’s what you want, I can do it.”

  She understood what he was offering. The Hypotheticals remembered Jason, and so did she, but the long slow memory of the Hypotheticals was less perishable; it persisted over billions of years. Did she want to join him in that immensity?

  She tried to turn her head but could not. She drew a breath, just enough to force out a single word:

  “No,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Turk was asleep when the earthquake struck. He and Lise and Dr. Dvali had spread mattresses on the concrete floor and slept, or tried to sleep, and at some point in the darkness Lise had scooted up next to him, both of them still wearing the reeking clothes they had worn for days, not that it mattered. She curled against the small of his back and cupped her knees to his knees, her breath warming his neck and raising the small hairs there. Then the floor heaved like a live thing and the air filled with a clamorous roar, the only distinguishable element of which was Lise’s scream, audible because it was next to his ear. He managed somehow to roll over and hold her—they held each other—while the noise reached an unthinkable crescendo and the room’s carefully-sealed window kicked out of its flanges and shattered on the floor. Nothing to do but hold on as the floor itself slanted away from horizontal, bucking like a car that had slipped its gears.

  They held each other until it stopped. How long a time that was Turk couldn’t say. A medium-sized eternity. It left his ears ringing, his body bruised. He drew enough good air to ask Lise whether she was okay, and she drew enough good air to say, “I guess.” So Turk called out to Dr. Dvali, who answered belatedly: “My leg’s hurt. Other than that I’m all right.”

  The noise and vertigo went on well after the shaking ceased, but Turk began to recover some composure. He thought about aftershocks. “Maybe we should try to get outside,” he said, but Dvali said no, not in the ash storm.

  Turk separated himself from Lise and began to grope through the litter on the floor, finally locating the flashlight he had left beside the mattress: it had rolled all the way to the window-side wall. Switched on, it lit up a column of dust motes and debris. The room was intact, but barely. Lise huddled on the mattress, ghost-white, and Dvali, just as pale, sat propped in a corner. His left leg was bleeding where something sharp had fallen on it, but the wound didn’t seem serious.

  “So what do we do?” Lise asked.

  Dvali said, “Wait until dawn and hope it doesn’t happen again.”

  If dawn ever came, Turk thought. If anything like sunlight ever again reached this godforsaken badland.

  Lise said, “I hate to be practical here, but I have to pee. Really badly.”

  Turk swung the flashlight beam toward the adjoining bathroom. “Looks like the throne’s intact, but I wouldn’t try to flush. And the door’s off entirely.”

  “So look the other way,” Lise said, gathering her blankets around her, and Turk thought how much easier all this would be if he didn’t love her so much.

  “There’s light coming in the window,” she said an hour or so later, and Turk made his way over there, treading cautiously on the broken glass.

  The ash had stopped falling: that much was obvious. Had the dustfall been as thick as it was yesterday they would have choked on it. But only a few stray flakes had drifted in, and Turk thought the air smelled fresher and less sulfurous, unless he was just getting used to it.

  The light to which Lise had drawn his attention was real enough—it became obvious when he switched off the flashlight. But it was too early for dawn, and this light wasn’t coming from the sky. It was coming from down below.

  From the streets of this little corporate outpost, from the roofs of damaged buildings, the desert, anywhere the ash had fallen. He called Lise and Dvali over to look.

  A few nights when he was at sea Turk had seen his vessel’s wake glowing where bioluminescent algae had been stirred up by the passage of the ship. Always an eerie thing to see, and this reminded him of it, but what was happening here was stranger still. The desert, or the interplanetary dust that had fall
en on it, was aglow with a phosphorescence of many colors: gemstone reds, glassy yellows, glistening blues. And the colors weren’t stationary but constantly shifting, like a polar aurora.

  “What do you think it is?” Lise asked.

  Dr. Dvali’s face was bathed in the reflected colors. He said, a little breathlessly, “I think we’re as close as anyone has come to seeing the face of the Hypotheticals.”

  Turk said, “So what are they doing out there?”

  But even Dr. Dvali couldn’t answer that question.

  Come dawn, it was apparent that they had been lucky.

  Most of the north wing of the building had collapsed. Corridors ended in masses of rubble or open air. If we’d turned left instead of right, Turk thought, we’d be buried in there.

  As soon as there was enough light to navigate they made their way downstairs. The structure wouldn’t survive another shaking—“And we need to find Isaac,” Dvali said.

  But Turk was a little uncertain about how to proceed, because another thing was obvious by daylight: the situation on the ground had changed.

  Where there had been desert, there was a forest.

  Or something like a forest.

  Dvali was limping conspicuously by the time they descended the stairwell to the door at the intact end of the building, though he refused to stop and rest. It was essential, he said, that they find Isaac and the others. “The others” being a sort of footnote in Dvali’s mind, Lise suspected. For Dvali there was only Isaac, Isaac and the apotheosis of the Hypotheticals, whatever that might turn out to mean.

  “Go on, open it,” Dvali said, waving at the door.

  Lise and Turk had agreed that the most useful thing they could do was to try to reach the local mall where they had left Isaac and the Fourth women. How to get there was an open question. When Lise had looked out into the light of dawn she had seen a landscape utterly transformed—had seen what she might have called a canopy of trees, if trees were made of glossy tubes and iridescent beach balls.

  And she asked the same stupid, irrepressible question: “Why? What’s it for? Why now, why here?”

  “We may yet find out,” Dr. Dvali said.

  If the past was any guide, Turk thought, the Hypothetical growths would ignore human beings (with the obvious exception of Isaac, who was only partly human)—but was that still true?

  He cracked the door a narrow inch, and when nothing came rushing in he risked a look outside.

  Cool air touched his face. The sulfuric stench of the ashfall was gone. So was the ash itself. It had all turned into a Technicolor forest. Compared to this, the growths in Bustee had been daffodils withering in a cold breeze. This was high summer. This was some kind of Hypothetical Eden.

  He drew the door fully open and waited. Lise and Dr. Dvali crowded him from behind.

  The ash had turned itself into a forest of stalks bearing globular fruit instead of leaves. The stalks, of several colors but predominantly a cyanotic blue, lofted up twenty or thirty feet into the air and were so closely spaced that a person would have to turn sideways to pass between them. The globes that comprised the canopy ranged in size from goldfish bowl to beach ball to something a man might climb inside and stand upright in without bumping his head. They pressed up against each other, gently yielding where they touched, to make a nearly solid but translucent mass. The sunlight that came through was dim and shiftingly iridescent.

  Turk took a tentative step. From here he could see along the wall of the workers’ barracks to the point at which it had collapsed, the three floors of the north wing pancaked into something less than one. God help us if we’d been in there, he thought. And God help Isaac and the women, wherever they might have found shelter.

  The trunks (as he began to think of them) of the strange trees (though you could call them lampposts just as accurately) were rooted in the ground—where there had been pavement they had cracked and penetrated it—and Turk couldn’t see far enough in any direction to really get his bearings. Everything faded, forty or fifty yards out, to a shimmering blue vagueness. To find the mall where the women and Isaac had last been seen they would have to navigate by compass and the clues directly under their feet.

  “What do they live on?” Lise asked in a hushed voice. “There’s no water here.”

  “Maybe more water than they’re used to getting out where they usually grow,” Turk said.

  Dvali said, “Or they’re using some catalytic process that doesn’t need water, a completely different kind of metabolism. They must have evolved for a billion years in an environment far harsher than this.”

  A billion years of evolution. If that was true, Turk thought, then these things, as a species, if that word applied, were older than the human race itself.

  They moved in silence through the Hypothetical forest, though it was not entirely a silent place. No wind reached them at street level, but there must have been a wind blowing, Turk guessed, because the iridescent globes that crowned the tubular trunks occasionally bumped against each other and made a gentle sound that suggested a rubber mallet on a wooden xylophone. And there was motion at ground level, too. Small blue tubes, like roots, periodically snaked between the trees, running with a whipcrack motion that might be quick and powerful enough to break a leg if you ran across one at the wrong time. Twice Turk saw paperlike objects fluttering overhead, occasionally touching or merging with the globes—varieties of the thing that had attacked Isaac back in Bustee. Mistaking him for one of their own, Turk thought; or maybe it wasn’t a mistake.

  Lise walked close behind him. He could hear her indrawn breath every time something rattled or fluttered in the dim and shifting light. He felt bad about that, about the fear she was enduring and whatever else she might have to endure before they were finished here. He turned and said, “I’m sorry I got you into this.”

  She wouldn’t let him finish. “Do you really think you’re somehow responsible for what happened?”

  “For taking you on this half-assed trip west, maybe.”

  “I made that choice.”

  Which was true. But still, Turk thought. She’s here because of me. The chorus of his biography appeared to him as if conjured by the untrustworthy light: lost or purloined lovers, friends become enemies, friends damaged or killed in bar fights or shipboard accidents. See my bridges burning, he thought. See my trail of tears. He didn’t want that for Lise. He didn’t want to drag her beyond the boundaries of the kind of life she might still make for herself, a life in which kindness was not fleeting and there was the possibility of something more meaningful than nights sealed in the cockpit of an aircraft, months bunking below the deck of some stinking freighter, years locked in the castle of his own head while she waited for what he could not provide and grew disappointed and finally bitter.

  He would find her a way out of this jungle, he thought, and then, if he could summon the requisite courage or cruelty, he would find a way to leave her.

  It is a communication, Avram Dvali thought.

  He thought: There is no denying it. The Hypotheticals were all around him, a small but significant fraction of the network that comprised their incomprehensibly vast intelligence. All process, the dogmatic Martian woman had said during one of their arguments, of no more significance than the flowering of club moss or periwinkles; put it together any way you liked, it was only evolution, mindless as the sea. But she was wrong. He felt it. He did not, could not, understand how these organisms grew or what nourishment they derived from the parched earth, but communication passed between, of that he was sure; they had not grown randomly, but at some precipitative signal.

  He had been watching the canopy of the forest. The clustered globes shifted color constantly, and it seemed to him that each globe’s color was affected by the changes in its immediate neighbors, perhaps according to some rule or set of rules, so that patterns traveled through the forest like flocks of intangible birds. This was communication in the sense that cells in the human brain communicated one wi
th another and in concert produced the emergent phenomenon of mind. He was walking through the physical architecture, perhaps, of some great thought, a thought he could never comprehend. . . .

  Though perhaps Isaac could. If Isaac was alive, and if he understood, finally, the nature of the gift Avram Dvali had given him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  It was warm in the ruined stockroom, and although most of the dust had settled out of the air—seemed to have been absorbed, somehow, into the rubble—no fresh air flowed into the enclosed space. Sooner or later, Sulean Moi thought, and most likely sooner, that would become a problem. And there was the body of Diane Dupree to think about. If she could tolerate such thoughts.

  She crawled along the accessible perimeter of the room for the second time, feeling with her hands for anything hopeful—a draft or some promisingly loose heap of rubble. And for the second time found none.

  She had begun to believe she might die in this awful place on this awful planet, haunted by the ghost of Esh. Haunted, that is to say, by the Hypotheticals.

  In whom she did not believe, at least not in the sense Avram Dvali believed in them. The Hypotheticals were a network of self-replicating spaceborne machines. Some long-extinct civilization must once have seeded its local environment with these devices, or perhaps it had happened more than once, a multiple genesis over many millions of years. Either way, once variable self-replication was introduced into the medium of interplanetary and interstellar space the process of evolution was engaged—different from organic evolution in every detail, but not in principle. Like organic evolution, the process had generated strange and gaudy complexities. Even such apparently “engineered” devices as the Spin barrier that surrounded the Earth, or the Arches that linked planets separated by vast distances, were ultimately no more intrinsically intelligent than such biological constructions as a coral reef or a termite hill.