Axis (32 page)

Turk eventually fell asleep with his arm across her ribs and she was content to lie with him in the fading glow.

At last, though, she had to shift herself out of the embrace. Despite everything, she couldn’t sleep. She thought about how far they had come, and she remembered a line she had read in some old book: The
thin end of nowhere, whittled down to a fine point
.

The night was cold. She curled against Turk again, seeking his warmth.

She was still awake when the building began to tremble.

Diane Dupree was awake in the room she shared with Sulean Moi, Mrs. Rebka, Isaac.

She focused her attention on the sound of Isaac’s breathing, thinking how strange life must have been for Isaac, raised motherless—Mrs. Rebka had been something less than a mother—and fatherless—unless you counted Dr. Dvali’s sinister hoverings—but indifferent, by all accounts, to affection. A difficult, refractory child.

She had overheard a little of Sulean Moi’s argument with Dr. Dvali earlier today. It had raised uneasy questions in her mind.

The Martian woman was right, of course. Dr. Dvali and Mrs. Rebka weren’t scientists, studying the Hypothetical by unconventional means. They were on a pilgrimage. And at the end of it they expected something holy, something redemptive.

The same longing—years and years ago now—had carried her almost to her death. Diane had wrapped herself in her first husband’s faith, and he had taken her to a religious retreat where she contracted an illness that nearly killed her. The cure had been her conversion to what the Martian Wun Ngo Wen had called the Fourth state, the adulthood beyond adulthood.

She thought she had left that longing behind her when she became a Fourth. It was as if, after the longevity treatment, something cool and methodically rational had risen up and taken control of her life. Something soothing, if a little deadening. No more reckless storming of Heaven. She had lived a steady, useful life.

Could she have been wrong, though, about how much she had left behind and how much she still carried with her, unsuspected? When the lines had intersected on the map, the triangulation of Isaac’s urges, Diane had felt a familiar longing for the first time in… oh, many years.

She felt it again when she found out that Isaac could gain access to the memories of a long-dead Martian child he had never known.

The Hypotheticals had remembered Esh, Diane thought.

What else might the Hypotheticals have remembered?

Her brother Jason had died in a state of attempted communion with the Hypotheticals. Did they remember
that
! Did they in fact remember Jason?

And if she asked, would Isaac speak with Jason’s voice?

She sat upright, almost guiltily, when the building began to tremble and shake. Fortifications breached, she thought dazedly: the walls of Heaven tumbling down.

By the time Turk managed to light a candle, the shaking had stopped.

The old Chinese lady was right, he thought. Earthquakes!

He turned back to Lise, who sat up in bed with the blanket pooled around her waist. He said, “You okay? It’s just a tremor.”

“Promise we won’t stop,” she said.

Turk blinked. Her skin by candlelight was pale, unearthly. “Stop?”

“When they get where they’re going,” and he understood by a toss of her head that she meant the Fourths, “we don’t
stop
, right? We keep on heading for the west coast? Like you said?”

“Of course. What are you worried about? This was just a tremor, Lise. You lived in California, you must have felt little quakes like that.”

“Because they’re crazy, Turk. They sound rational, but they have this big carnival of craziness planned. I don’t want any part of it.”

Turk went to the window just to make sure the stars hadn’t exploded or anything, because she was right, lunacy was on the march. But there was only the central Equatorian desert stretched out under its meager moon. That was a sight to make you feel small, he thought, that desert.

And another little tremor rattled the useless lamp on the side table.

Isaac felt the tremor but it didn’t quite wake him. He had been sleeping a lot lately. He had lost some of his ability to distinguish between sleeping and waking.

The clock of the stars turned relentlessly inside him. In the darkness he dreamed things for which he had no words. There were many things for which he had no words. And there were words he knew but didn’t understand and couldn’t define: for instance,
love
.

I love you
, Mrs. Rebka had whispered to him when no one but Isaac could hear.

He hadn’t known what to say in return. But that was all right. She didn’t seem to need an answer. I
love you, Isaac, my only son
, she had whispered, and then turned her face away.

What did that mean?

What did it mean when he closed his eyes and saw the cycling stars or the banked fires of an invisible thing deep in the western desert? What did it mean that he felt its liveliness and power?

What did it mean that he could hear a million voices, more voices than there were stars in the sky? What did it mean that out of that multitude he could call up the voice of Esh, a dead Martian boy? Was he remembering Esh or was something remembering Esh
through him
—remembering Esh’s voice with the air in Isaac’s lungs?

Because—and here was something Isaac
did
know—the act to which he had been summoned, to which all the tumbling fragments of Hypothetical machinery had been summoned from their lazy courses in the sky, was a remembering.

A remembering larger than the world itself.

He felt it coming. The crust of the planet trembled, its shivering rose up through the foundation of this old building, through the floor, the joists, the beams, through the bed frame and the mattress, until Isaac trembled along with it, the motion filling him with a heatless joy, memory and annihilation advancing with giant steps, with strides as long as continents, until at last he asked himself:

They had reached the outskirts of the oil concessions—the desolate, thin end of nowhere—when the third and most intense ashfall began.

There had been some warning, conveyed by Dr. Dvalis intermittently-functional telecom receiver. The precipitation had been relatively light in Port Magellan, but dense waves of it were falling in the west, as if focused there.

By the time Dr. Dvali announced this news, the threat was ominously visible. Lise, looking through the back window of the vehicle as it sped down the highway between two equally flat horizons, saw clouds the color of boiling slate materialize from a chalk-blue sky.

“We’ll need to get under cover again,” she heard Turk say.

To the southwest Turk could just make out the silver-black silhouettes of the Aramco drilling and pumping complex. Evacuated, presumably—a couple of the far towers seemed to be leaning off vertical, though that could be an illusion—but Turk guessed the site would still be guarded, both by machines and by armed men.

Fortunately they didn’t need to head in that direction. The oil concessions had grown a ring of commerce around them, businesses run by lonely men for lonely men, strip clubs and bars and porn vendors, which meant that not far down the road they would find more respectable commercial concessions and housing for the hired workers. Which appeared as the two cars raced the black cloud flowing from the east: a gated side road, the gate unchained; a mall (grocery store, media retailers, a multi-mart); and a number of sturdy concrete buildings in which one- or two-room utility apartments were stacked like boxes.

Turk, in the lead car with Lise and Dr. Dvali, looked back and saw the second vehicle pulling into the mall lot. Dvali swung around and intercepted them in front of the grocer)? store.

“Supplies,” Diane explained.

“We don’t have time,” Dvali said sternly. “We need to get under cover.”

“Such as the building up ahead? I would suggest you break in or whatever you need to do, and we’ll follow as soon as we find food.”

Dvali clearly didn’t like this idea, but just as clearly, Turk thought, it made sense: they had been running low on essentials and the ash storm might maroon them for a good long time. “Be quick about it,” Dvali said unhappily.

Whoever designed this workers’ barracks had made no attempt to disguise the institutional nature of the project. On the outside the building was weathered concrete and cracked pavement and an empty parking lot adjoining a tennis court enclosed in a chain-link fence, its net slumped in disarray. The door Turk approached was hollow steel painted industrial yellow, no doubt battered by the boots of hundreds of shit-drunk oil-riggers over the years, and it was locked, but the lock was fragile and gave way after some leverage with a tire-iron. Dvali fidgeted while Turk performed this task, glancing back at the approaching storm. The light was thinning already, the disc of the sun growing weak and obscure.

The door sprang loose and Turk stepped into the interior darkness, followed by Dr. Dvali and finally Lise.

“Uck!” Lise said. “God, it stinks!”

The evacuation must have been hurried. In many of the apartments that opened onto this hallway—more like cells, with their small high windows and cubicle bathrooms—food had been left to rot, toilets had been abandoned unflushed. They set about finding the most presentable first-floor residences and settled on three spaces, two adjoining and one cross-hall, from which the previous residents had removed the most obvious perishables. Lise reached up to swing open a window, but Dvali said, “No, not with the dust coming. We’ll have to live with the stench.”

There was no electricity, and the light was fading fast. Turk and Dvali unloaded their gear from the car, by which time the afternoon had turned into a smudgy twilight and the ash had begun to fall like snow. Dvali said, “Where are the others?”

“I could go hurry them up,” Turk offered.

“No… they know where to find us.”

Diane and Sulean Moi left Mrs. Rebka in the car with Isaac while they scrounged for groceries. The store had been nearly stripped, but in a stockroom in the back they discovered a few boxes of canned soups, not especially appetizing but possibly vital if the storm locked them indoors for any length of time. They ferried a few of these cartons out to the vehicle as the sky darkened. “One more box,” Diane said at last, assessing the oncoming ash cloud, “and then we should get under cover.”

A skylight above the aisles of the grocery store cast pale illumination on the empty shelves, some of which had been tumbled down by a previous tremor. Diane and Sulean each picked up a final carton and headed for the door, feet crunching on glass and litter.

As soon they reached the sidewalk they heard Isaac’s screams. Diane dropped her carton instantly, spilling cans of creamed this-and-that down the sidewalk, and yanked open the passenger-side door and then craned her head back. “Help me!”

The boy’s screaming was interrupted only by gasps for breath, and Diane couldn’t help thinking that it must hurt simply to make such a noise, that a child’s lungs shouldn’t be capable of this awful sound. He thrashed and kicked and she grabbed his wrists and pinned them, which required more strength than she would have imagined. Mrs. Rebka was up front, fumbling the keycard into its slot. “He just started screaming—I can’t calm him down!”

The important thing now was to get under shelter. “Start the car,” Diane said.

“I tried! It won’t!”

Now the storm was on top of them: not just a few ominous dust-flakes anymore but a roiling front that came out of the desert with shocking speed and solidity. It broke before Diane could say another word, and as quick as that they were engulfed in it, choking in it.

Literally choking. She gagged, and even Isaac fell silent as soon as he drew a deep breath full of the dust. All light faded and the air became impenetrably dark and dense. Diane spat out a gagging mouthful of foulness and managed to shout, “We have to take him inside!”

Had Mrs. Rebka heard? Had Sulean? Evidently she had; Sulean, little more than a dimly-perceptible shape, helped Diane lift the boy and take him from the car into the grocery store, while Mrs. Rebka followed, her hand on Diane’s back.

Being inside the store wasn’t much improvement. The broken skylight admitted huge gusts of ash. They managed to get Isaac upright between them and he even supported his own weight as they groped for the stockroom. And found it, and closed themselves inside, in absolute darkness now, waiting for the dust to settle enough to allow a decent breath, registering how much worse this was than they had anticipated, Diane thinking: After all these years, is this where I’ve come to die?

It was obvious as soon as the storm broke that Isaac and the Fourth women had been stranded elsewhere. Because “storm” was not just an abstraction this time. This wasn’t a loose fall of dust, Lise thought, like some early-autumn snow shower in Vermont. Nor was it a puzzling astrophysical phenomenon that could be swept away by morning light. If this had happened in Port Magellan the city would have been shut down for months. It was a deluge, an inundation, no less so because it was taking place in the evacuated far west, where there were few eyes to see and no one to send help.

The darkness was the worst of it. Because the expedition was divided, they had only the two flashlights from the vehicle Dvali had been driving. The flashlights were fully-charged and guaranteed (the label said) for a hundred hours, but even their cumulative power made for a dismally small zone of light in a large and stifling darkness. Turk and Dr. Dvali insisted on combing through all three stories of the residence to make sure the accessible windows were sealed against the dust. It was a scary, arduous task, an ongoing reminder of how alone they were in this hollow wind-screaming building. And even after that the ash managed to get inside, invading the inevitable chinks and gaps, spilling out of the stairwells. Particles of it hovered in the flashlight beams, and the stink infused the air, their clothes, their bodies.