Axis (12 page)

Please don’t misunderstand, Lise. I’m just worried about you in the usual motherly way. I can’t help thinking of you alone in that city
—

Alone. Yes. Trust her mother to strike at her vulnerable place. Alone—because it was so hard to make anyone else understand what she wanted here and why it was so important to her.

—
putting yourself in danger
—

A danger that seemed so much more real when you were, as she said,
alone
…

—
when you could be here at home, safe, or even with Brian, who
—

Who would show the same puzzled condescension that radiated from her mothers message.

—would surely
agree
—

No doubt.

—
that there’s no
use
digging up the dead past
.

But what if the past wasn’t dead? What if she simply lacked the courage or callousness to put the past behind her, had no choice but to pursue it until it yielded its last dividend of pain or satisfaction?

“Pause,” she said to the media node. She couldn’t take too much of this at one time. Not with everything else that was happening. Not when an alien dust had dropped out of the sky. Not when she was being tracked and possibly bugged by DGS, for reasons not even Brian would explain. Not when she was, yes, thanks Mom for that little reminder,
alone.

She checked her other text messages.

They were junk, except for one, which turned out to be gold. It was a note and an attachment sent by one Scott Cleland, whom she had been trying to contact for months. Scott Cleland was the only one of her father’s old university associates she hadn’t yet succeeded in talking to. He was an astronomer, working with the Geophysical Survey at the observatory on Mt. Mahdi. She had just about given up on him. But here at last was a response to her mail, and a friendly one: the node read it to her, adopting a male voice to suit the given name.

Dear Lise Adams: I’m sorry to have been so slow in responding to your queries. The reason far this is not just procrastination. It took a little searching to find the attached document, which may interest you.

I wasn’t close to Dr. Adams but we respected each other’s work. As for the details of his life at that time, and the other questions you asked, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Our connection was purely professional.

At the time of his disappearance, however, and as you probably know, he had begun work on a book to be called
Planet as Artifact.
He asked me to read the brief introduction he had written, which I did, but I found no errors and could suggest no significant improvements (apart from a catchier title).

In case there was no copy of this among his papers, I enclose the one he sent me.

Robert Adams’ disappearance was a great loss to all of us at the university. He often spoke affectionately about his family, and I hope your research brings you some comfort.

Lise had the household node print the document. Contrary to what Cleland suspected, her father had not left a copy of the introduction with his papers. Or, if he had, Lise’s mother had shredded it. Susan Adams had shredded or discarded all of her husband’s papers and had donated his books to the university. Part of what Lise had come to think of as the Ritual Cleansing of the Adams Household.

She turned off her phone and poured a glass of wine and took the wine and the six pages of printed text out to the balcony. The night was warm, she had swept away the ash this morning, and the indoor lamps cast enough light to read by.

After a few minutes she went back inside to fetch a pen, came out again and began to underline certain phrases. She underlined them not because they were new to her but because they were familiar.

Many things
changed
during
the
interval we call
the
Spin,
but perhaps
the
most far-reaching change
is
also the most overlooked. The Earth was held in stasis for more than four billion years, which means we now live in a universe vastly more ancient
—
and more complexly evolved
—
than the one to which we were accustomed.

Familiar because, in more polished prose, these were the things he had often said to her when they sat on the veranda and looked out at the darkness and the stars.

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. Since they cannot be observed directly, we must make our deductions about them based on their work in the universe, by the clues they leave behind them, by their vast and abiding footprints.

Here was the excitement she learned from him at an early age, an outward-looking curiosity that contrasted with her mother’s habitual caution and timidity. She could hear his voice in the words.

Of their works, one of the most immediately obvious is the Indian Ocean Arch that links the Earth to the New World
—
and the Arch that connects the New World to another less
hospitable
planet, and so on, as far as we have been able to explore: a chain of increasingly hostile environments made available to us for reasons we do not yet understand.

Sail to the other side of this world, he had told Lise, and you’ll find a second Arch, and beyond it a rocky, stormy planet with barely breathable air; and beyond that—a journey that had to be undertaken on ocean vessels sealed and pressurized as if they were spaceships—a third world, its atmosphere poisoned with methane, the oceans oily and acidic.

But the Arch is not the only artifact at hand. The planet “next door to Earth,” from which I write these words, is also an artifact. There is evidence that it was constructed or at least modified over the
course
of many
millions
of years with the objective of making it a congenial environment for human beings.

Planet as artifact.

Many have speculated about the purpose of this eons-long work. Is the New World a gift or is it a trap? Have we entered a maze, as laboratory mice, or have we been offered a new and splendid destiny? Does the fact that our own Earth is still protected from the deadly radiation of its expanded sun mean that the Hypotheticals take an interest in our survival as a species, and if so, why?

I cannot claim to have answered any of these questions, but I mean to give the reader an overview of the work that has already been done and of the thoughts and speculations oj the men and women who are devoting their professional lives to that work…

And, later in the piece, this:

We are in the position of a coma patient waking from a sleep as long as the lifetime of a star. What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

She underlined that twice. She wished she could text it to her mother, wished she could write it on a banner and wave it in Brian’s face. This was all she had ever meant to say to them: an answer to their genteel silences, to the almost surgical elision of Robert Adams from the lives of his survivors, to the gently troubled poor-Lise expressions they wore on their faces whenever she insisted on mentioning her vanished father. It was as if Robert Adams himself had stepped out of obscurity to whisper a reassuring word.
What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

She had put the pages aside and was heading for bed when she checked her phone one last time.

Three messages were stacked there, all tagged urgent, all from Turk. A fourth came in while the phone was still in her hand.

After the fall of the luminous dust—after the skies had cleared and the courtyard had been swept and the desert or the wind had absorbed what was left behind—news of another mystery came to the compound where the boy Isaac lived.

The ash had been terrifying when it fell and had been a topic for endless talk and speculation when it stopped. The newer mystery arrived more prosaically, as a news report relayed from the city across the mountains. It was less immediately frightening, but it touched uneasily on one of Isaac’s secrets.

He had overheard two of the adults, Mr. Nowotny and Mr. Fisk, discussing it in the corridor outside the dining hall. Commercial flights to the oil wastes of the Rub al-Khali had been canceled or re-routed for days even before the ashfall, and now the Provisional Government and the oil powers had issued an explanation: there had been an earthquake.

This was a mystery, Mr. Nowotny went on to say, because there were no known faults beneath that part of the Rub al-Khali: it was a geologically stable desert craton that had persisted unchanged for millions of years. There should never have been even a minor tremor so deep in the Rub al-Khali.

But what had happened was more than a tremor. Oil production had been shut down for more than a week, and the wells and pipelines had been expensively damaged.

“We know less about this planet than we thought we did,” Mr. Nowotny said.

It was slightly less mysterious to Isaac. He knew, though he could not say how, that something was stirring under the sedate sands of the deep western desert. He felt it in his mind, his body. Something was stirring, and it spoke in cadences he didn’t understand, and he could point to it with his eyes closed even though it was hundreds of miles away, still only half-waking from a slumber as long as the lives of mountains.

For two days during and after the ashfall everyone had stayed inside, doors closed and windows locked, until Dr. Dvali announced that the ash wasn’t particularly harmful. Eventually Mrs. Rebka told Isaac he could go out at least as far as the courtyard gardens, as long as he wore a cloth mask. The courtyard had been cleaned but there might still be remnant dust in the air, and she didn’t want him inhaling particulate matter. He must not put himself at risk, she said.

Isaac agreed to wear the mask even though it was sweatily warm across his mouth and nose. All that remained of the dust was a grainy residue silted against the brick walls and the rail fences made of never-green wood. Under a relentless afternoon sun, Isaac stooped over one of these small windrows and sifted the ash with his hand.

The ash, according to Dr. Dvali, contained tiny fragments of broken machines.

Not much remained of these machines, to Isaac’s eyes, but he liked the grittiness of the ash and the way it pooled in his palm and slipped like talc between his fingers. He liked the way it compressed into a flaky lump when he squeezed it and dissolved into the air when he opened his fist.

The ash glittered. In fact it glowed. That wasn’t exactly the right word, Isaac knew. It wasn’t the sort of glow you could see with your eyes, and he understood that no one else in the compound could see it the way he did. It was a different kind of glow, differently perceived. He thought perhaps Sulean Moi would be able to explain, if he could find a way to pose the question.

Isaac had a lot of questions he wanted to ask Sulean. But she had been busy since the ashfall, often in conference with the adults, and he had to wait his turn.

At dinner Isaac noticed that when the adults discussed the ashfall or its origins they tended to direct their questions to Sulean Moi, which surprised him, because for years he had assumed the adults with whom he lived were more or less all-knowing.

Certainly they were wiser than average people. He could not say this by direct experience—Isaac had never met any average people—but he had seen them in videos and read about them in books. Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely. Here in the compound, the talk was occasionally intense but the arguments never drew blood. Everyone was wise (or seemed to be), everyone was calm (or struggled to give that impression), and, except for Isaac, everyone was old.

Sulean Moi was apparently not an average person either. Somehow, she knew
more
than the other adults. She was smarter than the people to whom Isaac had always deferred, and—even more perplexing—she didn’t seem to like them very much. But she tolerated their questions politely.

Dr. Dvali said, “Of course it implicates the Hypotheticals,” talking about the ashfall, and asked Sulean, “Don’t you agree?”

“It’s an obvious conclusion to draw.” The old woman probed the contents of her bowl with a fork. The adults theoretically took turns cooking, though a handful volunteered more often than the rest. Tonight Mr. Posell had taken kitchen duty. Mr. Posell was a geologist, but as a chef he was more enthusiastic than talented. Isaac’s vegetable bowl tasted of garlic, gulley-seed oil, and something dreadfully burnt.

“Have you seen or heard of anything like it,” Dr. Dvali asked, “in your own experience?”

There was no formal hierarchy among the adults at the commune, but it was usually Dr. Dvali who took the lead when large issues arose, Dr. Dvali whose pronouncements, when he made them, were considered final. He had always paid close attention to Isaac. The hair on his head was white and silky-fine. His eyes were large and brown, his eyebrows wild as abandoned hedges. Isaac had always tolerated him indifferently. Lately, however, and for reasons he didn’t understand, Isaac had begun to dislike him.

Sulean said, “Nothing exactly like this. But my people have had a little more experience with the post-Spin world than yours, Dr. Dvali. Unusual things do fall out of the sky from time to time.”

And who were “my people,” and what sky was she talking about?

“One of these things conspicuously absent from the Martian Archives,” Dr. Dvali said, “is any discussion of the nature of the Hypotheticals.”

“Perhaps there was nothing substantive to say.”

“You must have an opinion, Ms. Moi.”

“The self-replicating devices that constitute the Hypothetical are equivalent in many ways to living creatures. They process their environment. They build complicated structures out of rock and ice and perhaps even empty space. And their byproducts aren’t immune to the process of decay. Their physical structures grow old and corrupt and are systematically replaced. That would explain the detritus in the dust.”