Axis (37 page)

The rising wind had begun to keen through the ruins with the urgency of a siren.

He took another step into the shadows and wrinkled his nose at the dismaying smell. Unmistakably, something had died here. His heart sank. “Isaac!” he called out. The dim ambient light showed him nothing until his eyes adjusted to it. Then certain shapes became apparent.

The Martian woman, Sulean Moi: was she dead? No. She looked up at him from the floor of this half-collapsed room with an expression of shock, her own eyes perhaps blinded by the sudden daylight. What a hell this imprisonment must have been, Dvali thought. She scrabbled on hands and knees toward the opening, and he wanted to help her, but his thoughts remained focused on Isaac. He wished he had a lamp, a flashlight, anything.

The wind howled like a wounded dog. A dust of plaster shook loose from the ceiling. Dvali pressed on into the stink and muck.

The next body he encountered belonged to Diane Dupree. The Fourth woman from the coast was dead, and as soon as he was sure of that he moved past her. The ceiling was low. He stooped as he walked. But in the deeper darkness he was able at last to see Isaac—thrillingly, Isaac alive, Isaac kneeling over the prostrate form of Anna Rebka.

Isaac inched away as Dvali approached. The boy’s eyes were luminous, the golden flecks in his irises prominently aglow. Even his skin seemed faintly alight. He looked inhuman—
was
inhuman, Dvali reminded himself.

Anna Rebka remained inert. He asked, “Is she dead?”

“No,” Isaac said.

“Leave her!” Sulean Moi called from the fading daylight just beyond the entrance to the buried stockroom. “Isaac, leave her, come out, it isn’t safe!”

But her throat was dry, and the command emerged as a feeble plea.

Dvali put his fingers on Anna’s throat, feeling for a pulse but knowing as soon as he touched her that he wouldn’t find one. Isaac was wrong, or was denying an obvious truth. “No, Isaac,” he said gently. “She’s dead.”

“That’s just her body,” Isaac said.

“What do you mean?”

Haltingly, and to Dvali’s astonishment, the boy began to explain.

This wind, Sulean Moi thought: it will kill us yet.

She saw Turk and Lise hurrying toward her through the accumulation of alien growths, a kind of forest—it was almost too much for her to register after hours of blindness in the buried stockroom. Overhead, a canopy of strangely glittering globes were attached to these… should she call them trees? And a sort of bramble of ocular flowers had grown nearby, and some of them had turned their mindless eyes in her direction.

The world was obscenely transformed.

And the wind: where had it come from? Its intensity increased almost by the second. It tugged at the ruins behind her, lofting kites of tattered drywall and tar paper high among the alien trees.

She turned her head back and called out, more audibly this time, “Isaac!”

It was the boy who mattered, not the foolish Avram Dvali.

“Isaac, come out!”

As the unstable debris shifted and groaned.

Dvali grasped immediately what the boy was telling him. It was little more than he had long imagined—Isaac had become a conduit to the Hypothetical, but with this astonishing difference: Isaac had been able to acquire the memories of Anna Rebka before she died. She lived in him. As did the Martian child Esh.

He whispered, “Anna?”

As if he could summon her from the boy like a conjurer summoning a ghost. But the boys eyes changed in some indefinable way, the corners of his lips turned down as if with distaste, and it was exactly the way Anna had been looking at him lately.

Then Dvali said a thing he had not anticipated saying, though the words were as logical and as inevitable as the last step on a long road:

“Take me with you,” he said.

The boy stepped back from him, shaking his head.

“Take me with you, Isaac. Wherever you are, wherever you’re going, take me with you.”

Stressed timbers creaked as if the weight of the world was balanced on them. There was a sound like gunshots as the wood fractured.

“No,” the boy said calmly, firmly.

And this was maddening. Maddening, because he was so close. So close! And because the voice that denied him sounded so much like Anna’s voice.

Sulean Moi was sprawled on the ground by the hedge of eyeball flowers. Lise swallowed her dread of the Hypothetical growths and pulled her a safer distance from the wind-torn debris field.

Turk leaned over the Martian woman and said, “Where are the others?”

For a moment Sulean seemed unable to answer. She opened her mouth, closed it. She was in shock, Lise thought. “Dead,” the Martian woman finally managed. “Diane is dead. Anna Rebka…”

“What about Isaac?”

“Alive. Dvali is with him—inside, in there. Why won’t they come out? It’s not safe!”

Turk stood and surveyed the rubble and the small opening the digging trees had made.

Lise held his arm. Because he must not go in there, not into that teetering cavern: no.

He pulled away. She would remember that sensation of his forearm slipping out of her grasp. Like the best and worst memories, it would become indelible. It would haunt her on long nights for the rest of her life.

But she couldn’t stop him, and she couldn’t bring herself to follow him.

It was dark in the buried stockroom. Turk almost tripped over the body of Diane Dupree before he registered Isaac and Dr. Dvali confronting one another against a wall of broken shelves and fissured cinderblocks. Dvali was grabbing for the boy and Isaac was retreating by steps, not wanting to be touched but not yet willing to run, and Turk could hear Dvali’s low begging voice under the roar of this fucking wind that had come out of nowhere and seemed about ready to tip the continent off its hinges. He had seen enough weirdness today to last him a lifetime, but he registered one more eerie miracle: the boy’s skin had gone milky white and was faintly luminous, his face a candle-glow around his golden eyes, his body a sort of jack-o‘-lantern where his ribs showed through his torn and filthy shirt.

“Isaac,” Turk said, and the boy turned to him. “It’s okay. The door’s open. You can go.”

Isaac looked at him gratefully.

Then the wind made a sound like the horn of some monster ship leaving harbor, and all the ruin that had hung suspended above them began to fall.

Sulean Moi held Lise Adams in her arms as the building shifted and compacted. A wave of concrete dust and atomized plaster spilled over them and was carried off by the terrible wind. “Stay down,” Sulean said. “You can’t help them now.”

Lise fought a little longer. Then all the strength spilled out of her, and Sulean held the girl against her shoulder, rocking her gently. There had been a terrible finality about the last collapse, Sulean thought. No one could have survived it.

Then she revised her opinion.

The ocular roses, bent by the wind, refocused their solemn attention.

“Look,” Sulean said.

Patiently, the Hypothetical trees had begun once more to dig.

Then it was over—when there was nothing left of the great glittering forest but a few palsied and rapidly decomposing stems, when the towering Arch had finished its work and turned to dust, when the desert basin of the Rub al-Khali had gone to sleep for another ten thousand years—Lise came back to Port Magellan.

The skies were fair and half a hundred ships lay at anchor in the harbor, though not as many as there used to be, or as there would be again, perhaps, when the oil industry had been reconstructed and the tourist trade revived.

She took a room in a hotel. Genomic Security seemed to have lost interest in her after Dvali’s Fourths detonated their bioreactors at Kubelick’s Grave, but her name might still be on someone’s list. So she rented a room under an assumed name and thought about how she might begin to reassemble her life. And finally, a week after she had arrived—not by trawler, as she had once imagined, but on a bus with forty or fifty other refugees from the Rub al-Khali—she had gathered up her courage, what remained of it, and called Brian Gately.

When his exclamations of surprise and disbelief subsided she agreed to meet him on neutral turf: Harley’s, in the mild afternoon, at a table overlooking the hills where the white city tumbled down to the bay.

She showed up early and spent the hiatus considering what she wanted to say to him, but her mind refused to focus. A waiter brought ice water and bread to the table as if to distract her. The waiter’s nametag said mahmud, and she asked Mahmud if Tyrell still worked at the restaurant—she remembered Tyrell from the night of the first ashfall, August 34
^th
, when she had brought Turk here to look at the photograph of Sulean Moi. No: Tyrell had gone back to the States, Mahmud said. Many people had left Port Magellan after the strange things fell from the sky. Everything the same, Lise thought, yes, everything different. And as Mahmud left the table she saw Brian come through the door. He smiled tentatively when he spotted her. She nodded.

He came and sat at the table. Brian Gately, no longer of the Department of Genomic Security. That was one of the first things he had told her when she called.
I don’t work for them anymore
, he said, as if establishing his bona fides, solemnly. I
quit
. He hadn’t said why.

“You caught me just in time,” he said. “Next week I’m out of the apartment. All I own right now is four packed bags and a ticket home.”

“You’re going back to the States?”

“No reason to stay. I’ll tell you a secret, Lise. I hate this city. By extension, this entire planet.”

Because he was no longer with DGS he couldn’t help her. But neither could he hurt her. As a threat, he was more or less neutered. So the question was, would she tell him what had happened in the desert? Because he was going to ask. She was certain he would ask.

Hold on
, Sulean Moi had told her and that was what Lise had done, even when it seemed like the entire world was tilting under her. All around her the brightly fluorescing globes shook loose from the Hypothetical trees and were drawn toward the central vortex of the temporal Arch. The wind became a gale and the gale became a hurricane, and she braced herself against a concrete pier, too terrified even to scream. She was only vaguely aware of Sulean Moi curled under the same ledge of stone not far away.

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.”