Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The periodicity of the ashfall and the truncated grotesqueries it generated were proof enough, she thought. What had been installed in Esh—and in Isaac—was nothing more than a tragic susceptibility to alien tropisms. Esh could not be a “communicant” because there was no one with whom to communicate.

  Evolution did, demonstrably, produce minds, and she supposed it was possible that the long interstellar evolution of the Hypothetical machines had also produced minds—locally, temporarily. But such minds, if they existed, were the byproduct, not the process. They controlled nothing but themselves. They couldn’t be “the Hypotheticals” as Dr. Dvali imagined them to be.

  She remained unnerved, however, by the obvious fact that Isaac remembered Esh, who had died many years before Isaac was born. If Esh had become a memory in the networked ecology of the Hypotheticals, could such a memory possess volition? And who or what was the rememberer?

  “Sulean—”

  This was Mrs. Rebka, who wouldn’t leave Isaac’s side. Her voice came out of the darkness of their sealed tomb as if from an infinite distance. “Yes, what?”

  “Do you hear that?”

  Sulean hushed her own thoughts and listened.

  An intermittent scraping. The tack-tack-tack of something solid tapping stone. Followed by more tentative scraping.

  “Someone’s trying to dig us out,” Mrs. Rebka said. “It must be Avram and the others, they must know we’re here!”

  Tick-scratch-tick. Yes, maybe, Sulean thought. But then Isaac said, very suddenly and with startling clarity, “No, Mrs. Rebka. It isn’t the other people who want in. It isn’t people at all. It’s them.”

  Sulean turned toward the place from which Isaac’s voice had come. She quelled her own fear and said, “Isaac, do you really know what’s happening?”

  “Yes.” His tone was unexcited. “I can see them.”

  “The Hypotheticals?”

  A pause. “You could call them that.”

  “Then explain it to me, please, Isaac. You’re part of it now, aren’t you? In a way Esh never was. Tell me what’s happening.”

  For a moment there was only the tick-scratch-tick at the walls of the fallen building in which they were trapped.

  Then Isaac began to speak.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Turk navigated by the fractured remnants of pavement and sidewalk through the alien forest that had lately been a settlement for oil riggers. He managed to find the parking lot of the workers’ mall—white lines, cracked blacktop—and from there it was a short hike to the complex where they had left Diane Dupree, Sulean Moi, Mrs. Rebka, and Isaac.

  Except it wasn’t there anymore. He came upon rubble where the trees had grown more densely, further obscuring the dim light of what was, by now, afternoon. Here was an embankment of broken tile, wallboard, wood, sheet aluminum twisted into unlikely shapes. Beyond that, in the dimness, steel beams stood in skeletal rectangles. Some of these beams and pillars had been entwined by the rootlike extensions of the trees.

  “We’ll angle toward the south end of the mall,” he said. Where the food store was or had been. “Might be something still standing there.”

  The haunted forest, Lise thought.

  Boy, was it ever.

  She found herself silently reciting a line from a storybook her father had read to her when she was small, book and story all forgotten except (in her father’s melodramatic drawl) Into the dark forest they stepped. Into the dark forest they stepped. Into the dark forest of trees that harbored birds that resembled sheets of torn paper, the forest from which (another fragment of the same story) they must escape, but that was easier said than done. Because here there were wolves, or worse, and night was coming, and she didn’t know the way out. She wanted to lunge up from under the covers and grab her father’s hand. Wanted it more than anything.

  But couldn’t. She scolded herself, in her mother’s voice this time: Don’t be stupid, Elise. Straighten up. Fly right, girl.

  She nearly flew right past a heap of plaster-specked metal, until Turk pointed it out: it was the car Mrs. Rebka had been driving when the two groups separated. She recognized the steel-mesh tires, on prominent display because a rod-like tree trunk had sprung up from the cracked pavement and tumbled the vehicle on its side. Useless now, the car, but any car would be useless until this forest shrank back into the ground, and that seemed unlikely to happen soon. If we leave here, Lise thought, we’ll have to leave on foot. And that was a daunting prospect. The good news was that the car was empty: Isaac and the women weren’t inside, hence might still be alive elsewhere.

  “So we’re near the food store,” Turk said, and Dr. Dvali ran recklessly a few yards ahead, where the remains of the storefront were vaguely visible behind a picket of alien growths.

  The quake hadn’t spared this part of the mall, and if the others had taken shelter here they might be dead. This was so obvious it didn’t need saying. Dr. Dvali wanted to start digging immediately—futile as that might be, the three of them versus a few tons of debris—but Turk said, “Let’s circle around back first. The structure looks maybe a little more intact back that way.”

  Dvali stood slump-shouldered at the brink of the rubble field a moment longer, and for the first time Lise felt a degree of sympathy for him. All night, all morning, Lise had been imagining the women and Isaac huddled in some safe place; the group would be reunited, and then she and Turk could set out for some safe harbor even if the mad Fourths insisted on staying here in Freakland. That was her best-case scenario.

  Now it looked like that might not happen. The story might end tragically. There might be no way to escape from the dark forest. Maybe, she thought, for Isaac and the women, the story was already over.

  The rear of the mall seemed at first glance more intact than the front, but that was only because the concrete loading bays had been left undamaged by the quake. Structurally, everything was a mess. Lise felt heartsick, and Dr. Dvali seemed to be suppressing tears.

  It was Turk who continued to pick his way along the border of the rubble field with grim determination, and it was Turk who finally turned and held up his palm in a stop-here gesture and said quietly, “Listen.”

  Lise stood still. She heard the usual flutterings of the forest, to which she had almost grown accustomed. The wind was up, and the luminous globes made their muted wooden music. But beneath that? Faintly?

  A sound like scratching, a sound like digging.

  Dvali said, “They’re alive! They must be!”

  “Let’s not rush to judgment,” Turk said. “Follow me and try to keep quiet.”

  Dvali was Fourth enough to suppress his surge of renewed optimism. The three of them walked within an arm’s length of one another, Turk up front, following the sound. The digging-scratching sound grew more clearly audible with each step, and Lise’s own optimism began to falter. There was something not right about that sound. The relentless gentle rhythm of it, somehow too patient to be completely human. . . .

  Then Turk made his halt gesture again and beckoned them forward to look.

  There was activity at one of the fractured loading bays. But as Lise had begun to suspect, it was Hypothetical activity. A dense hedge of the growths Dvali called “ocular roses” had grown here, their petaled eyes all focused on the debris. Around them the trees had expressed a thick and writhing mat of motile roots, some sharply pointed and some flattened into spatulate blades. It was this mass of roots that was doing the digging. Surreal, Lise thought giddily, especially since the debris included not just concrete and steel and plastic but crumpled cereal boxes, milk jugs, canned food. She watched an inky blue tendril wrap itself around an industrial-sized soup can, puckering the red and white paper label, lift it so the nearest eye-flower could examine it, then relay it to another tentacle that passed it on seriatim until it was deposited on a rubbish tip of previously cleared debris.

  The process was so perversely methodical that she found herself wanting to laugh. Instead she stared,
for what seemed like an immensely long time. If the ocular roses were aware of their presence they displayed no reaction. The patient digging went on and on. Scratching, probing, tapping, sifting . . .

  She stifled a scream when Turk suddenly put his hand on her shoulder. “We ought to back off a ways,” he whispered. Which struck her as an excellent idea.

  Was the sun already setting? Lise had lost her watch somewhere along the trail or back in the riggers’ dorm. She hated the idea of the coming night.

  As soon as they felt free to speak (but still whispering, as if the ocular roses could overhear them, and for all she knew they could) Turk said to Dvali, “I’m sorry it wasn’t the women we heard—”

  But Dvali was still bright-eyed with hope. “Don’t you see what this means? They must be alive under there—Isaac, at least, must be alive!”

  Because it was Isaac the Hypotheticals wanted. These growths might not be sentient, singly or collectively, but they knew something of their own had been separated from them by rock and ruin.

  They wanted Isaac. But what would they do with him when they found him?

  “We can only watch,” Dr. Dvali said. “Camp here and watch until the boy comes out alive.”

  Comes out to meet his fate, Lise thought.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  In the darkness of the buried stockroom, Isaac struggled to cling to what was left of himself.

  Beyond the debris that enclosed him he could see the luminous forest, a vast meadow of light, and at the center of it the unbearably beautiful structure that had erupted from the fractured sandstone and bedrock of the desert, a thing the memory of Jason Lawton wanted to call a “temporal Arch.” Inert for ten thousand years in its hibernatory sleep, caverned in rock, it had called to him from the westernmost point of the compass, and now it had broken its bonds and shaken free of the earth, and grown immensely large and powerful, and if he could only pass through these walls he would go to it.

  “Isaac—”

  The Martian woman’s voice came to him as if from far away. He tried to ignore it.

  He could see the temporal Arch and he could see other things, too. He could see, unfortunately, the body of Diane Dupree. She was dead, but the not-entirely-human part of her, her Fourthness, was still faintly alive, struggling to repair her corpse, which of course it could not do. Her light guttered like a candle burned down to a puddle of wax and a final thread of wick. The part of Isaac that was Jason Lawton mourned for her.

  These memories, the memories that belonged to Jason and Esh, had taken on an independent life in Isaac’s mind, so much so that Isaac was afraid he might lose himself in them. I remember, he would think, but the memories were endless and only a fraction of them were his own. Even the word “I” had divided into double or triple meanings. I lived on Mars. I lived on Earth. I live in Equatoria. All these statements were true.

  And he didn’t want to suppress the contending memories completely, because they comforted him as much as they frightened him. Who would come with him into the vortex of the temporal Arch, if not Jason and Esh?

  “Isaac, do you really know what’s happening?”

  Yes, he did, in part, at least.

  “Then,” and he registered that it was the voice of Sulean Moi, Esh’s friend, Isaac’s friend, “explain it to me, please.”

  These words had to come from Jason Lawton. He turned to Sulean, moved toward her, reached out from the darkness and took her hand as Esh or Isaac might have done, and spoke with Jason’s voice:

  “It’s an embedded loop in the cycles and seasons of the . . . the Hypotheticals. . . .” Seasons, he felt the appropriateness of the word: seasons within epochal seasons, the ebb and flood of the galaxy’s ocean of life . . . “In a . . .in what you might call a mature solar system, the elements of the Hypotheticals expand their mass, accumulate information, reproduce, until at some critical moment the oldest surviving specimens undergo a kind of sporulation . . . produce compact elisions of themselves that resemble clouds of dust or ash . . . and those clouds follow long elliptical orbits that intersect with planets where they gather. . . .”

  “Have they gathered here?” Sulean asked.

  Here, yes, he said or thought, on this rocky planet made habitable for the potential civilization to which it had ultimately been connected. . . .

  “Do they know us, then?” Sulean Moi asked sharply.

  Isaac was bewildered by the question, but the memory of Jason Lawton seemed to understand it. “The network processes information over light-years and centuries, but some biological civilizations survive long enough to be perceptible to it, yes, and civilizations are useful because they generate new machine life, to be absorbed and understood or, or—”

  “Or devoured,” Sulean Moi said.

  “Or, in a sense, devoured. And civilizations generate something else that interests the network.”

  “What?”

  “Ruins,” the memory of Jason Lawton said. “They generate ruins.”

  Outside, beyond the walls of concrete and debris impenetrable to human vision, the ballet of memory proceeded at a quickening pace.

  Memory, he told Sulean Moi, was what was happening here: ten thousand years of relentlessly gathered and shared knowledge was compressed into the spheres that made the canopy of the Hypothetical forest, information to be collated and carried forward, Isaac said, through the temporal Arch, which was opening its mouth to inhale all that knowledge: representations of the orbits and climates and evolution of local planets, of the millions of interlaced trajectories of icy cometary bodies from which the Hypothetical machines had drawn and would continue to draw their mass, of signals received from elsewhere in the galaxy and absorbed and re-emitted . . .

  “Why memory?” Sulean Moi demanded. “To what end? Isaac—what is it that remembers?”

  What remembered was the thing he couldn’t see, though he saw much else. Not even Jason Lawton could answer the question Sulean Moi had posed. What was happening here was only a trivial event in the network, in the mind of—of—oh, Diane, has it really grown out there among the stars, the thing you used to want so badly to believe in?

  “Isaac! Can you hear me?”

  He fell back into the abyss of his own thoughts.

  Because Isaac remembered Jason, it was also true that Jason remembered Isaac. Jason’s adult understanding of the world had been overlaid on Isaac’s raw experience, and that created a kind of double vision that was deeply discomforting.

  It reflected his life as in a funhouse mirror. For instance Mrs. Rebka. She was someone close to him, someone he trusted. But when Jason inspected those same memories she became cold, distant, something much less than a real mother. To Isaac, she existed in a realm beyond judgment. To Jason, she was guilty of a profound moral recklessness.

  Likewise his memories of Dr. Dvali, the aloof god who had defined Isaac’s world, and whom Jason perceived as an obsessive monster.

  Isaac desperately wanted not to hate these people. And even the part of him that was Jason Lawton retained some sympathy for Mrs. Rebka. She had loved Isaac, as much as she attempted to conceal it, and Isaac understood with some shame how difficult he had been to love. He had returned her studied indifference, and he hadn’t been wise enough to recognize her pain and her perseverance.

  He recognized it now. She hadn’t spoken for more than an hour, and when Isaac went to her side and sat with her, when he looked at her with what he had begun to think of as his Hypothetical eyes, he knew why.

  She had not been spared when the building collapsed during the earthquake. She was hurt—hurt inside, where it didn’t show, but hurt so badly that her Fourthness was failing to repair the damage. She was bleeding internally. There was a coppery aura of blood around her. She whispered his name. Her voice was less loud than the sound of the Hypotheticals digging and scratching at the rubble—which had itself grown louder over the last few hours.

  “I can take you with me,” Isaac said.

  Sulean Moi,
overhearing, said, “What do you mean?”

  But Isaac’s mother only nodded.

  Then there was a gust of quick cool air, and the darkness was dispelled by the light of the alien forest.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Lise said, “We need to get our bearings before the sun sets.”

  Turk gave her a puzzled look—he had just finished helping Dr. Dvali assemble a rough shelter under the lee of a concrete loading pier, close (but not too close) to the digging trees—then he interpreted her frowning glances at Dvali and said, “Yeah, you’re right, we’ll do that.” He asked Dvali to gather up any intact canned food he could find among the excavated debris while he and Lise “scouted.” Dvali gave him a suspicious glare—as a Fourth he probably recognized a half-truth when he heard one—but nodded tersely and waved them away.

  So he walked with Lise back along the perimeter of the tumbled mall, steering wide of the dig, and as soon as they were out of earshot Turk said, “Get our bearings?”

  She confessed that she had mainly wanted to get away from Dvali, if only briefly. “And I thought we could get above these trees and have a look around.”

  “How do you propose to do that?”

  She showed him. At the south end of the mall there was a quadrangle of intact exterior walls where a steel fire escape was bolted in place. She had noticed it earlier in the day, she said. Turk surveyed it and decided it was sturdy enough to carry their weight, and yeah, maybe it was a good idea to look around while there was still some daylight left, if they were careful. So they climbed as far as the roof and stood on a steel mesh platform above the canopy of globes, in the simple light of the fading afternoon, and marveled at what they saw.

  The view was similar to what Lise had seen this morning from the riggers’ dorm, but it extended in every direction including the west—Isaac’s direction, she thought dizzily—where something monstrous had grown out of the ground.