Axis (28 page)

Then there was, to Lise’s horror, more motion in the dust, bumped-up rills and puffs of ash converging on the flower. Something—several things—leaped onto the stalk of it with frightening speed. They moved continuously and she could only form a vague impression of their nature, things crab-like, sea-green, many-legged, and what they did to the sunflower was—

They ate it.

They nipped at its stalk until the writhing thing toppled; then they were on it like piranhas on a carcass, and when the manic flurry of their devouring was finished they disappeared, or became inert once more, camouflaged in the fallen ash.

Nothing was left behind. No evidence whatsoever.

“This,” Dr. Dvali said, “is why we’re reluctant to leave the room.”

Turk spent the rest of the morning at the window, cataloging the varieties of peculiar life that sprang out of the dust. Know your enemy, he thought. Lise stood next to him much of the time, asking brief but pertinent questions about what he had seen before she woke up. Dr. Dvali had switched on their little wireless telecom receiver and was drawing down sporadic reports from Port Magellan, a useful activity in Turk’s opinion, but the other Fourths did nothing but talk: endlessly and to little purpose. It was one of the failings of Fourths, Turk decided. They might occasionally be wise. But they were incurably talky.

Right now they were picking on the Martian woman, Sulean Moi, who seemed to know more than the rest of them about the ashfall but who was reluctant to share her knowledge. Mrs. Rebka was particularly insistent. “Your taboos aren’t relevant here,” she said. “We need all the information we can get. You owe it to us… to the boy, at least.”

Temperate as it sounded, this was, by Fourth standards, nearly a fist-fight.

The Martian woman, dressed in oversized denim pants that made her look like some implausibly skinny oil-rig jock, sat on the floor hugging her knees. “If you have a question,” she said sullenly, “ask it.”

“You said the ashfall on Mars generated peculiar forms of, of—”

“Of life, Mrs. Rebka. Call it by its name. Why not?”

“Lifeforms like what we’re seeing outside?”

“I don’t recognize the flowers or the predators that consume them. In that sense, there’s no similarity. But that’s to be expected. A forest in Ecuador doesn’t look like a forest in Finland. But both are forests.”

“The purpose of it, though,” Mrs. Rebka said.

“I’ve studied the Hypotheticals since childhood and I’ve listened to a lot of highly-informed speculation and I still can’t guess the ‘purpose’ of it. The Martian ashfalls are isolated events. The life they generate is vegetative, always short-lived, and unstable in the long term. What conclusions can be drawn from such isolated examples? Very few.” She hesitated, frowning. “The Hypotheticals—whatever else they are—are almost certainly not discreet entities but a collation of vastly many interconnected processes. They are an ecology, in other words. These manifestations either play some explicit role in that process or are an unintended consequence of it. I don’t believe they represent any kind of deliberate strategy on the part of a higher consciousness.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Rebka said impatiently, “but if your people understood enough to engineer Hypothetical technology into human beings—”

“You possess that ability too.” Sulean Moi looked pointedly at Isaac.

“Because it was given to us by Wun Ngo Wen.”

“Our work on Mars has always been purely pragmatic. We were able to culture samples from the ashfall and observe their ability to interact with human protein at the cellular level. Centuries of that kind of observation produced some insight into the ways human biology might be manipulated.”

“But you engineered what you admit is Hypothetical technology.”

“Technology or biology—in this case I’m not sure the distinction is meaningful. Yes, we cultured alien life, or technology if you prefer that word, at the microscopic level. Because it grows, reproduces, and dies, we were able to select and manipulate certain strains for certain traits. Over the course of a great many years we generated the modified cultures that enhance human longevity. And other germ lines as well. One of the most radical of which is the treatment you applied to Isaac while he was still in the womb. In
your
womb, Mrs. Rebka.”

Mrs. Rebka reddened.

Turk understood the significance of what they were discussing, and he guessed it was important, but it seemed ridiculously remote at a time when real problems were percolating so close to hand. Right outside the door, in fact. Was it safe to go outside? That was the question they ought to be asking. Because sooner or later they would have to leave this room. Because they had very little in the way of food.

He begged the loan of Dr. Dvali’s little radio and pushed the nodes into his ears, blocking out the querulous Fourths and inducing other voices.

The available broadcast was a narrowband thing from Port Magellan, two guys from one of the local media collectives reading UN advisories and updated reports. This ashfall had been only a little worse than the first, at least in terms of weight and duration. A few roofs had collapsed to the south of the city. Most roads were currently impassable. People with respiratory problems had been sickened by ash inhalation, and even healthy people were spitting gray residue, but that wasn’t what had everybody scared. What had everybody scared were the peculiar things growing out of the ash. The announcers called these things “growths” and reported that they had appeared randomly across the city, but especially where the ash was deep or had drifted. They sprang from the dust, in other words, like seedlings from mulch. Although they lived only briefly and were quickly “reabsorbed” into the local environment, a few of them—“objects resembling trees or enormous mushrooms”—had erupted to impressive heights.

There was a dreamlike (or nightmare-like) aspect to these reports. A “pink cylinder” fifty feet in length was blocking traffic at a downtown intersection. “Something witnesses describe as an immense spiky bubble, like a piece of coral,” had sprouted from the roof of the Chinese consulate. Reports of small motile forms were yet to be officially confirmed.

Terrifying as this was, the manifestations were dangerous only if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—if one of them fell on you, for example. Still, residents were advised to stay indoors and keep windows closed. The ash had stopped falling, an offshore breeze was dispersing the lightest of the particles, and work crews were prepped to hose down the streets again (“growths” and all, Turk supposed) as soon as that was practical.

Unless this began to happen repeatedly, the city would recover. But the city was on the far side of a chain of mountains pierced by a few currently useless passes, and Bustee, like every other tin-and-tarpaper road town between the foothills and the Rub al-Khali, depended on the coast for supplies. How long till the passes were cleared? Weeks, minimum, Turk guessed. The last ashfall had been hard on these towns but this one had been worse, locally much denser, and the weird-ass plant life (or whatever it was) would surely impede the work necessary to get commerce up and running. So food would run short: what about water? He wasn’t sure how these desert settlements were supplied. You turned on the tap, but where was the reservoir? Up in the foothills? Was the water still potable, and would it stay that way?

At least there was food and bottled water in the car, enough to last them a while. What Turk didn’t like was that the vehicle was sitting out in the parking lot of this motel where someone might be tempted to break in and share the wealth. Here, at least, was a problem he could confront. He stood up and said, “I’m going outside.”

The others turned to look goggle-eyed at him. Dvali said, “What are you talking about?”

He explained about the food. “Even if no one else is hungry, I am.”

“It might not be safe,” Dvali said.

Turk had seen a couple of other people out in the street with handkerchiefs tied over their mouths. One of them had been within fifteen feet of a “lifeform” when it sprouted from the dust, but the flower hadn’t interfered with the man and the man had shown absolutely no inclination to fuck with the flower. Which jibed with what the news was saying about Port Magellan. “Just to the car and back. But I’d like somebody in the doorway watching out for me, and I need something to use for a mask.”

There was no debate, to Turk’s relief. Dr. Dvali used a pocketknife to cut off a corner of the bedsheet, which Turk tied over his nose and mouth. Turk took the vehicle’s keycard from Mrs. Rebka while Lise volunteered for door duty.

“Don’t stay out any longer than you need to,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

The sky was blue, made chalky by the ash that gave the air a sour, sulfuric tang. No telling what this was doing to everybody’s lungs. If the dust contained alien spores—which was what all the talk seemed to imply—might they not take root in the moist interior of a human body? But they didn’t seem to need much moisture, Turk thought, if they could grow on the paved street of a desert town in a dry September. In any case, there had been no reports of purely ash-related deaths. He shook off these concerns and tried to concentrate on the task at hand.

He felt lonely as soon as he stepped outside. The motel parking lot was a paved half-moon with an empty ceramic fountain in the middle of it. Beyond it was the main street, really just a stretch of Highway 7 heading into the Rub al-Khali. Across the street there was a row of one-story brick commercial buildings. All of this was ash-coated, windows dust-encrusted, traffic signs and billboards rendered illegible. The silence was unbroken.

The Fourths’ vehicle, recognizable by its boxy shape and sprung-steel wheels, was parked a dozen yards to Turk’s left. He stood a moment and looked back at Lise, who was holding the door open a crack. He gave her a little wave and she nodded. All clear. Onward.

He took long deliberate steps, trying not to stir up too much dust. His shoes impacted the drifted ash and left finely-detailed prints under chalky clouds.

He reached the car without incident and was only slightly unnerved by the distance that had opened up between himself and the room where Lise was waiting. He used his forearm to brush a layer of ash off the rear of the vehicle, the baggage compartment where the groceries were stored. He took Dr. Dvali’s keycard out of his pocket and applied it to the security slot. Tendrils of dust rose up around his hands.

He paused and lifted the cloth that covered his mouth long enough to spit. The spittle plopped inelegantly on the surface of the ash-covered sidewalk, and he half expected something to rise up from beneath, like a fish rising to bait, and snatch it away.

He opened the cargo door and selected a cooler full of bottled water and a box of canned goods—the kind of thing you could eat without cooking if you had to—and that, plus a few stacks of flatbread, was all he could carry. Enough for now. Or he could get in the car and drive it closer to the room: but that would block the route around the courtyard and maybe attract unwanted attention…

“Turk!” Lise yelled from the doorway. He looked back at her. The door was wide open and she was leaning forward, her hair framing her face. She pointed with obvious urgency: “Turk!
In the street
—”

He saw it at once.

It didn’t look threatening. Whatever it was. In fact it looked like nothing more than a scrap of loose paper or sheet plastic caught in a gust of wind, fluttering at head level above the dust-duned highway by the diner. It flapped, but you couldn’t really say it was flying, not in the purposeful way a bird flies.

But it wasn’t a sheet of paper; it was something stranger than that. It was colored glassy blue at the center, red at its four extremities. And although it was clumsy in the air, it appeared to move by design, slip-sliding up the center of the road.

Then it seemed to hesitate, its four wing-tips pumping simultaneously to loft it a few feet higher. The next time it moved, it moved in a new direction.

It moved toward Turk.

“Get the fuck back here!” Lise was screaming.

They said these things weren’t dangerous. Turk hoped that was true. He dropped everything but the carton of canned goods and began to run. About halfway to the door he glanced back over his shoulder. The flapping thing was right behind him, a yard to his right—way too close. He dropped the last carton and broke into a full-out sprint.

The thing was bigger than it had looked from a distance. And louder: it sounded like a bedsheet on a laundry line in a windstorm. He didn’t know whether it could hurt him but it was clearly
interested
in him. He ran, and because the ash here was six inches deep, in places deeper, it was like running on a sandy beach. Or in a nightmare.

Lise threw the door wide open.

Soon Turk could see the flapping thing in his peripheral vision, beating the air like a piston. All it had to do was veer right and it would be on him. But it kept its steady if erratic course, paralleling him, almost as if it was racing him. Racing him—

To the open door.

He slowed down. The flapper rattled past him.

“Turk!”

Lise was still posed in the doorway. Turk ripped the cloth from his mouth and took a deep breath: bad move, because his throat was instantly clogged. “Close it,” he croaked, but she couldn’t hear him. He gagged and spat. “The door, dammit, close the fuckin‘ door!”

Whether or not she heard him, the danger dawned on Lise. She stepped back and simultaneously made a grab for the doorknob, missed, lost her balance and fell. The flapping thing, no longer awkward in the air, homed in on her as if it were laser-guided. Turk began sprinting again, but she was too far away.

She sat halfway up, balanced on an elbow, eyes wide, and Turk felt a stab of fear under his ribs sharp as a thorn to the heart. She raised an arm to fend off the thing. But it ignored her as it had ignored Turk. It slid past her into the room.