Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The wind was unceasing, and she passed in and out of consciousness, somehow remaining braced where she was, coming to herself time and again as if awaking not from but into a bad dream: and did the night pass? A day, another night?

  Eventually it did stop. The wind died to a breeze, the world righted itself, and Sulean Moi was calling her name: “Lise Adams! Are you hurt?”

  There were a thousand ways to answer that question, but she couldn’t speak.

  She must have slept at least some of the time. The impossible Arch in the west was gone, and most of the Dark Forest with it. All that remained were broken buildings, raw foundations, cracked and tumbled pavement, and the stumps of Hypothetical trees. Here was the desert again, Lise thought. And the intolerable ache of cramping muscles, and the infinitely deeper throb of grief.

  Days later she sat at the side of a barren road, hungry and gaunt, in filthy clothing, next to Sulean Moi and not far from a dozen other bone-weary men and women—mostly men—who had weathered the crisis in abandoned buildings or the crevices of the ruined oil facilities. They were waiting for a bus the rescue workers had said would be along any hour now. The bus was supposed to take them to a recovery area on the northeast coast, but Lise and Sulean planned to slip away before that, maybe at Bustee, and make their own way over the mountains.

  She turned to Sulean, who sat with her chin on the heels of her hands. “Are you thirsty?”

  “Only tired,” the Martian woman said, in that ancient voice that made Lise think of a badly-rosined bow abusing the E-string of a violin. “And I was thinking about Dr. Dvali.”

  Avram Dvali. Dead beyond redemption. “What about him?”

  “He was wrong about so many things. But he may have been right about the Hypotheticals.” The Martian woman’s expression became even more mournful. “I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents—conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.”

  Lise at this moment couldn’t bring herself to care, but it mattered to Sulean, and Sulean had been kind to her, so she said, “Well, isn’t that right? What happened here—you’re saying it was planned?”

  “Not planned. There was never any sort of Galactic Council that sat down and decided to put a temporal gateway in the middle of Equatoria. I expect it grew there over countless millions of years, the unpredicted outcome of whatever preceded it, like every other act of evolution.”

  “So Dvali was wrong.”

  “But only in the most literal sense.” Isaac had explained this to her, she said, back in the ruined mall. “Millions of highly evolved self-reproducing machines collect and collate information about a volume of space. That information is periodically brought here to be compiled. The temporal Arch feeds it forward, ten thousand years into the future, and at the same time a similar body of ancient information is released into the present to be reabsorbed and to restore what has been lost to entropy. That isn’t memory in the passive sense. It’s an act of remembering. And organisms remember in order to preserve or usefully alter their behavior.”

  “It’s how the Hypothetical network remembers, okay, I get that, but—”

  “But if the network remembers then it must have some kind of volition, at least a rudimentary sense of itself as separate from the rest of the natural world. In other words, taken as a whole, it’s exactly what Dr. Dvali imagined it to be—a transcendent being so immense that even a detailed record of a human life is only an infinitesimal fraction of its smallest component part.”

  A detailed record of a human life. Like Esh’s, for instance. Like . . .

  “And that implies something else,” Sulean Moi said. “Something perhaps even more dreadful. Consider Jason Lawton. Because he is remembered by the network of the Hypotheticals, he has achieved a sort of existence beyond death. Passive, perhaps, but still meaningful. And what will we make of that, Miss Adams, once the truth is out? Put it in the simplest terms: there is a god, and this god can enable immortality, and that immortality can be mediated by a drug: the drug that Jason Lawton took, the one that connected him to the Hypotheticals before it killed him.”

  Lise said, “But if it’s deadly—”

  “Physically quite deadly, but if one is remembered, if one passes from death directly into the mind of a very real god—”

  “People will be tempted by it.”

  “More than tempted. They’ll call it a Fifth Age. Mark my words. They’ll call it a Fifth Age, not an adulthood beyond adulthood but a birth beyond death. They’ll worship it, they’ll fight over it, they’ll create their Departments of Spiritual Security, and what that will make of us, in the long run, I dread to think.”

  The Martian woman closed her eyes as if against this intolerable vision of the future.

  Lise was still trying to grasp what Sulean had said about the Hypotheticals; how if they were capable of remembering they must be a thing with some sense of itself, a sort of mind. A mind made out of countless millions of mindless parts, but wasn’t that the definition of any mind? Her own, for instance?

  The afternoon sun was merciless. Lise took a long drink from the bottled water the rescue workers had handed out and adjusted the brim of her hat, also a handout. She said, “If it has a memory, what else does it have? Does that mean it has compassion, say, or imagination?”

  Sulean gave this a moment’s thought. Then she smiled, which must have been painful, Lise thought, because her ancient lips were cracked and in places bleeding. “I don’t know. Maybe we have our own role to play. As a species, I mean. The intervention of the Hypotheticals is making something unpredictable of us. Wouldn’t you call that an act of imagination?”

  So the network of the Hypotheticals remembered and maybe it even dreamed and factored humanity into its dreams. But did it feel grief? Did it wonder at the galaxies beyond its own boundaries? Did it speak to them, and did they answer?

  These were questions her father would have asked.

  Her shadow lay before her like a dark twin. She squinted into the distance. That speck in the shadeless desert might be the approaching bus.

  If it lived, she thought, did that mean it would it die? And did it know it would die?

  And did it want to live forever?

  Much of what Lise had seen first-hand—the alien forest, the eruption and ultimate collapse of the temporal Arch—had been captured on video by drone cameras and relayed back to Port Magellan. By now the images had been broadcast all over this world and into the more crowded one next door. Commentators had taken to calling it “a Hypothetical event of unknown significance.” She told Brian she had been close to it when it happened and that she had been lucky to survive, but she refused to be drawn out on specifics. Not because she distrusted him but because the memory was too vividly present to put into words.

  Brian seemed to accept that, but then he asked—with all the tact he could muster—what had happened to Turk Findley. And Lise closed her eyes and wondered what she could say.

  All she could think of (and she couldn’t speak of this) was the sound of his voice coming out of the wind and the night.

  Out of the darkness lit by the glow of the fruit still clinging to the Hypothetical trees. The globes on their stalks shed a collective, ethereal starlight even as the wind howled around them and carried them off in increasing numbers. Their endlessly shifting colors played over the face of Sulean Moi, who had wrapped a tarpaulin around herself and crawled into the meager shelter of the concrete pier. In the morning, Lise promised herself, when the wind stopped (if it stopped), as soon as it was possible to stand upright, she would dig; she would dig where the Hypothetical trees were digging; she would dig out Turk and Isaac and even Dr. Dvali. But so much time had passed since the building had collapsed—hours—and the wind had grown steadily more fierce, bending the Hypothetical trees like penitents at prayer. Shrieking gusts came through the gaps in the concrete pier, and Lise could hear wallboard and sheet metal singing as it
caught the air. The radiant globes rattled on their stiff limbs or broke loose and were carried upward. She saw or dreamed she saw them massing in the sky, a river of them above the now-naked branches of the Hypothetical trees, a flock, like luminous birds in migration, flowing into the temporal Arch.

  “Lise,” said a voice from behind her—loud enough to hear over the screeching of the wind, impossibly loud, but it was Turk’s voice, and in her astonishment she sat up and tried to turn to face him. He was somewhere behind these concrete slabs, somehow enduring the galeforce wind. “Turk!”

  “Don’t look at me, Lise. It’s better if you don’t.”

  This frightened her so badly that she couldn’t look. She imagined him hurt or horribly wounded. So she looked at the ground, but that was no better because she could tell by the shadows that there was a vivid light coming from the place where Turk must be standing—possibly from Turk himself. Which threatened to drive her into an even deeper chasm of terror; so she closed her eyes altogether. Closed them tight. And clenched her hands into fists. And let him speak.

  “Lise?” Brian said. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. There was a wineglass in front of her and Mahmud was filling it. Refilling it. She pushed it away. “Sorry.”

  Turk had said a few things.

  Things that were private. Things she would carry with her to her grave. Words meant exclusively for her.

  He had apologized in simple words for leaving her. He didn’t have a choice, he said. There was only one door left to him.

  When she asked where he was going, all he said was, “West.”

  “He went west,” she told Brian.

  And when she finally forced herself to raise her head and look, really look, what she had seen was not Turk but Isaac. Isaac was ragged, he was hurt, one of his arms was bent twice in the wrong direction, but he was shining like a full moon. His skin had become as luminous and shiftingly colorful as the memory globes, as if he had become one of them. And she supposed he had.

  She understood this because Turk had explained it. Turk’s body was back in the ruins, but his living memory was here, with this battered remnant of Isaac that had been excavated by the Hypothetical trees. And Esh was with him, also Jason Lawton, also Anna Rebka.

  And Diane?

  Diane, he said, had preferred to stay behind.

  And, she had asked, Dr. Dvali?

  No. Not Dr. Dvali.

  Then the luminous shell of Isaac had given itself to the wind, and the wind had carried him west.

  Brian was saying something about “your book.”

  “There was never any book.”

  “You learn anything about your father?”

  “A few things.”

  “Because I did some investigation of my own. After you mentioned Tomas Ginn, I made some inquiries. Ginn is dead, Lise. He was killed in the course of a secret interrogation.”

  Lise said nothing.

  “The same thing may have happened to your father.”

  “May have?”

  “Well. No. Did, in fact.”

  “You have evidence of this?”

  “A photograph. Not exactly evidence. It’s not actionable. But that’s the truth, Lise, if the truth is what you were looking for.”

  A photograph of her father—of his corpse, Brian seemed to be implying. She didn’t want to see it. “I know what happened,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  She knew what had happened to her blameless father, and she knew something even Brian didn’t know: she knew what had killed him and she knew why. She had already sent a text message to her mother in California:

  He didn’t leave. He was taken away. I know this.

  Her mother sent back: Then you can come home.

  But that’s where I am, Lise replied, and later, walking by the dockside in a morning fog, she realized it was true.

  She had said goodbye to Sulean Moi at a rural bus stop on her way into the Port. Lise had asked the Martian woman whether she would be okay on her own, but of course she would be okay; she had lived for decades on her wits and the generosity of charitable Fourths. And she still had work to do, she said. Isaac had been her great failure. But there would be more battles. Whatever the Hypothetical network truly was, Sulean Moi still disapproved of its commerce with human beings. “I don’t want to be an element in some creature’s vast transactions,” she said. “Nor do I wish my species to be.”

  “So where will you go?” Lise had asked, and the Martian woman smiled and said, “Maybe I’ll go west. What about you? Are you all right?”

  No, of course she was not all right. Lise’s memories of the Rub al-Khali would generate sweat-drenched dreams for months if not years to come. But she shrugged and said, “I’ll survive,” and must have been sincere, because the Martian woman had taken her hand and looked into her eyes and solemnly nodded.

  “I wish it had worked out better for us,” Brian said, which was his way of acknowledging that the marriage was well and truly finished. “I wish a lot of things had worked out better.”

  Which made it easier to be grateful for everything he’d done or tried to do on her behalf. Easier to see him as blameless.

  Their lunch had gone long. It was already dusk. Down in the Port lights were starting to wink on, from the illuminated billboards along the Rue de Madagascar to the strings of multicolored diodes that glorified the souks and open markets. All that polyglot beauty, Lise thought, as if the city were a single organism, following its own diurnal rhythms and steeped in its own evolving imagination. She wondered if it would still be here in a thousand years—or ten thousand years, when Turk’s ghost came walking out of the temporal Arch to begin another cycle.

  Any real understanding of the nature of the Hypotheticals must take this into account. They were ancient when we first encountered them, and they are more ancient now.

  The introduction to her father’s book.

  Brian took her hand a final time, then turned and walked away. Lise sat at the table a while longer. The cooling air from the patio was pleasant. The stars were coming out. Mahmud poured coffee from a silver carafe.

  What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

  “I’m sorry—did you say something?”

  “I said, it’s getting dark.”

  Mahmud smiled. “It’s these sunsets. Seems like they go on forever.”