Axis s-2

by Robert Charles Wilson

  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."

  Corrupt machines have fallen on us, Isaac thought.

  "But the sheer tonnage of it," Dr. Dvali said, "distributed over so many square kilometers—"

  "Is that so surprising? Given the great age of the Hypotheticals, it's no more surprising that decomposed mechanisms should fall out of the sky than that your garden should generate organic mulch."

  She sounded so sure of herself. But how did Sulean know such things? Isaac was determined to find out.

  * * * * *

  That night the quick southern winds grew even quicker, and Isaac lay in bed listening to his window rattle in its casement. Beyond the glass the stars were obscured by fine sand blown aloft from the wastelands of the Rub al-Khali.

  Old, old, old: the universe was old. It had generated many miracles, including the Hypotheticals, but not least Isaac himself—his body, his very thoughts.

  Who was his father? Who was his mother? His teachers had never really answered the question. Dr. Dvali would say, You're not like other children, Isaac. You belong to all of us. Or Mrs. Rebka would say, We're all your parents now, even though it was inevitably Mrs. Rebka who tucked him into bed, who made sure he was fed and bathed. It was true that everyone at the commune had taken a hand in raising him, but it was Dr. Dvali and Mrs. Rebka he pictured when he imagined what it might be like to have a particular mother and father.

  Was that what made him feel different from the people around him? Yes, but not just that. He didn't think the way other people thought. And although he had many keepers, he had no friends. Except, perhaps, Sulean Moi.

  Isaac tried to sleep but couldn't. He was restless tonight. It wasn't an ordinary restlessness, more like an appetite without an object, and after he had lain in bed for long hours listening to the hot wind rattle and whisper, he dressed and left his room.

  Midnight had come and gone. The commune was quiet, the corridors and wooden stairs echoing the sound of his footsteps. Probably there was no one awake except Dr. Taira, the historian, who did her best reading (he had heard her say) late at night. But Dr. Taira was a pale, skinny woman who kept to herself, and if she happened to be awake she didn't notice when Isaac shuffled past her door. From the lower commons room he entered the open courtyard, unobserved.

  His shoes crunched on the wind-blown grit underfoot. The small moon hung over the eastern mountains and cast a diffuse light through the dust-obscured darkness. Isaac could see well enough to walk, at least if he was careful, and he knew the environment around the commune so completely that he could have navigated blind. He opened the squeaky gate in the courtyard fence and headed west. He let his wordless impulses lead him and the wind carry away his doubts.

  There was no road here, just pebbly desert and a series of shallow, serpentine ridges. The moon aimed his shadow like an arrow in front of him. But he was headed in the right direction: he felt the Tightness of it in the center of himself, like the sense of relief he felt when he solved some vexing mathematical problem. He deliberately set aside the noise of his own thinking and gave his attention to the sounds that came out of the darkness—his feet on the sandpaper gravel and the wind and the sounds of small nocturnal creatures foraging in the creviced landscape. He walked in a state of blissful emptiness.

  He walked for a long time. He could not have said how long or far he had walked when he came at last to the rose. The rose startled him into a sudden awareness.

  Had he had been walking in his sleep? The moon, which had been above the mountains when he left home, now lit the flat western horizon like a watchman's lantern. Although the night air was relatively cool he felt hot and exhausted.

  He looked away from the moon and back at the rose, which grew from the desert at his feet.

  "Rose" was his own word. It was what came to mind when he saw the thick stem rooted in the dry ground, the glassy crimson bulb that could pass in the moonlight for a flower.

  Of course it wasn't really a flower. Flowers didn't grow in isolation in arid deserts, and their petals weren't made of what appeared to be translucent red crystals.

  "Hello," Isaac said, his voice sounding small and foolish in the darkness. "What are you doing here?"

  The rose, which had been leaning toward the moonlit west, promptly swiveled to face him. There was an eye in the middle of the bloom, a small eye black as obsidian, and it regarded him coolly.

  * * * * *

  Perhaps not surprisingly—Isaac wasn't surprised—it was Sulean Moi who eventually found him.

  It was a still, hot morning by the time she arrived, and he sat on the ground as if the desert were a vast curved bowl and he had slid to the center of it. He cradled his head in his hands and rested his elbows on his knees. He heard the sound of her shuffling approach but he didn't look up. He didn't have to. He had hoped she would come for him.

  "Isaac," Sulean Moi said, her voice dry but gentle.

  He didn't answer.

  "People are worried about you," she said. "They've been looking everywhere."

  "I'm sorry."

  She put her small hand on his shoulder. "What caused you to come all this way from home? What were you after?"

  "I don't know." He gestured at the rose. "But I found this."

  Now Sulean knelt to look at it—slowly, slowly, her old knees crackling.

  The rose had suffered by daylight. Its dark green stem had buckled at dawn. The crystalline bulb was no longer radiant and the eye had lost its luster. Last night, Isaac thought, it had been something like alive. Now it was something like dead.

  Sulean gazed at it thoughtfully a long while before she asked, "What is it, Isaac?"

  "I don't know."

  "Is this what you came out here for?"

  "No… I don't think so." That was an incomplete answ
er. The rose, yes, but not only the rose… something the rose represented.

  "It's remarkable," she said. "Shall we tell anyone about this, Isaac? Or shall we keep it secret?"

  He shrugged.

  "Well. We do have to go back, you know."

  "I know."

  He didn't mind leaving—the rose wouldn't last much longer.

  "Will you walk with me?"

  "Yes," Isaac said. "If I can ask you some questions."

  "All right. I hope I can answer them. I'll try."

  So they turned away from the ocular rose and began to walk eastward at the old woman's pace, and Sulean was patient while Isaac began to assemble all the uncertainties that had come into his head, not least the question of the rose itself. Although he hadn't slept, he wasn't tired. He was wide awake—as awake as he had ever been, and more curious.

  "Where are you from?" he finally asked.

  There was a brief hitch in the rhythm of her footsteps. He thought for a moment she might not answer. Then:

  "I was born on Mars," she said.

  That felt like a true answer. It wasn't the answer he had expected and he had the feeling it was a truth she would have preferred not to reveal. Isaac accepted it without comment. Mars, he thought.

  A moment later he asked, "How much do you know about the Hypotheticals?"

  "That's odd," the old woman said, smiling faintly and regarding him with what he took to be affection. "That's exactly what I came all this way to ask you."

  They talked until noon, when they reached the compound, and Isaac learned a number of new things from their conversation. Then, before stepping past the gate, he paused and looked back the way he had come. The rose was out there, but not just the rose. The rose was only—what? An incomplete fragment of something much larger.

  Something that interested him deeply. And something that was interested in him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Turk drove through one of the older parts of the city, frame houses painted firetruck-red by Chinese settlers, squat three- and four-story apartment buildings of ochre brick quarried from the cliffs above Candle Bay. It was late enough now that the streets were empty. Overhead, an occasional shooting star wrote lines against the dark.

  Half an hour ago he had finally gotten through to Lise. He couldn't say what he needed to say over the phone, but she seemed to catch on after a couple of awkward questions. "Meet me where we met," he said. "Twenty minutes."

  Where they had met was a 24-hour bar-and-grill called La Rive Gauche, located in the retail district west of the docks. Lise had shown up there six months ago with a crowd from the consulate. A friend of Turk's had spotted a friend at the table and hauled him over for introductions. Turk noticed Lise because she was unescorted and because she was attractive in the way he found women attractive at first glance, based on the depth and availability of her laughter as much as anything else. He was wary of women who laughed too easily and unnerved by women who never laughed at all. Lise laughed gently but wholeheartedly, and when she joked there was nothing mean or competitive in it. And he liked her eyes, the way they turned up at the corners, the pale aqua of the irises, what they looked at and lingered on.

  Later she started talking about a trip she was planning across the mountains to Kubelick's Grave, and Turk gave her one of his business cards. "Makes more sense than driving," he said. "Really. You'd have to go by way of the Mahdi Pass, but the road isn't a hundred percent reliable this time of year. There's a bus, but it's crowded and it slides into a gully every now and then."

  He asked her what she wanted in a crapped-out little filling-station town like Kubelick's Grave, and she said she was trying to locate an old colleague of her father's, a man named Dvali, but she wouldn't elaborate. And that was probably the end of it, Turk thought, strangers in the night, passing ships, et cetera, but she had called a couple of days later and booked a flight.

  He hadn't been looking for a lover—no more than he ever was. He just liked the way she smiled and the way he felt when he smiled back, and when they were forced to wait out that off-season storm on the shore of a mountain lake it was as if they had been granted a free pass from God.

  Which had been revoked, apparently. Karma had come calling.

  * * * * *

  There was only the night staff at the bar and all the tables were empty, and the waitress who brought Turk a menu looked irritable and eager to go off-shift.

  Lise showed up a few minutes later. Turk immediately wanted to tell her about Tomas's disappearance and what that might mean, the possibility that his connection with Lise had led someone nasty to Tomas. But he hadn't started to rehearse the words when she launched into the story of her run-in with her ex-husband Brian Gately—which was also pertinent.

  Turk had met Brian Gately a couple of times. That was the interesting thing about docklands places like La Rive Gauche: you saw American businessmen sitting next to merchant sailors, Saudi oil executives sharing gossip with Chinese salarymen or unwashed artists from the arrondissements. Brian Gately had seemed like one of those temporary transplants common enough in this part of town, a guy who could travel around the world—two worlds—without really leaving Dubuque, or wherever it was he had been raised. Nice enough, in a bland way, as long as you didn't challenge any of his preconceptions.

  But tonight Lise said Brian had threatened her. She described her meeting with him and finished, "So yes, it was a threat, not from Brian directly, but he was communicating what he'd been told, and it adds up to a threat."

  "So there are DGS people in town who have a particular interest in Fourths. Especially the woman in the photo."

  "And they know where I've been and who I've talked to. The implications of that are fairly obvious. I mean, I don't think anyone followed me here. But they might have. Or planted a locator in my car or something. I have no way of knowing."

  All that was possible, Turk thought.

  "Lise," he said gently, "it might be worse."

  "Worse?"

  "There's a friend of mine, a guy I've known a long time. His name is Tomas Ginn. He's a Fourth. That's not public information, but he's pretty upfront about it if he trusts a person. I thought you might like to talk to him. But I had to clear that with him first. I visited him this morning; he promised to think about it. But when I called him tonight I couldn't get hold of him, and when I went to his place he was gone. Abducted. Apparently some people in a white van took him away."

  She looked at him wide-eyed and said, "Oh, Christ." She shook her head. "He was what, arrested?"

  "Not formally arrested, no. Only the Provisional Government has the power to make an arrest, and they don't do plainclothes warrantless raids—not to my knowledge."

  "So he was kidnapped? That's a reportable crime."

  "I'm sure it is, but the police are never going to hear about it. Tomas is vulnerable because of what he is. A blood test would prove he's a Fourth, and that in itself is enough to get him shipped back to the States and put on permanent probation or worse. A neighbor told me about the men in the van, but she'd never say any of that to a government official. Where my friend lives, his neighbors are generally people with a lot of exposure on legal grounds—a lot of what people do for a living in Tomas's neighborhood is prohibited under the Accords, and most of them are squatting on land they don't have title to."

  "You think Brian knows something about this?"

  "Maybe. Or maybe not. It sounds like Brian's pretty far down the pecking order."

  "The Genomic Security office at the consulate is kind of a joke compared to what they do back home. They run facial-recognition software at the ports and occasionally serve a warrant on some fugitive dog-cloner or black-market gene-enhancer, but that's about it. At least until now." She paused. "What he told me was that it would be smart for me to go home. Back to the States."

  "Maybe he's right."

  "You think I should leave?"

  "If you're concerned about your safety. And probably you ought to
be."

  She sat up straighter. "Obviously I'm concerned about my safety. But I'm concerned about other things, too. I'm here for a reason."

  "Clearly these people don't fuck around, Lise. They followed you, and it would be wise to assume they're the people who kidnapped Tomas."

  "And they're interested in the woman in the photograph, Sulean Moi."

  "So they might imagine you're involved in some way. That's the danger. That's what Brian was trying to tell you."

  "I am involved."

  Turk registered her determination and decided he wouldn't press her on it, at least not tonight. "Well, maybe you don't have to leave. Maybe you just need to lay low for a little while."

  "If I hide, I can't do my work."

  "If you mean talking to people who knew your father and asking questions about Fourths, no, you can't do that, obviously. But there's no disgrace in keeping quiet until we figure this out."

  "Is that what you'd do?"

  Fuck no, Turk thought. What I would do is pack my case and catch the next bus out of town. Which was what he had always done when he felt threatened. No point in saying that to Lise, though.

  Briefly, he wondered if that was why Lise's father had vanished.

  Maybe the idea of Fourthness had seemed like a door out of whatever secret sin he couldn't endure. Or maybe he didn't take up the offer of artificial longevity at all. Maybe he just walked. People did.

  Turk shrugged.

  Lise was looking at him with a sad intensity he felt in his throat. "So you're telling me Brian's right and I ought to go back to the States."

  "I regret every minute we're not together. But I hate the idea of you getting hurt."

  She looked at him a while longer. Two more couples had just come through the door—probably tourists, but who could tell? Their privacy was compromised. She reached across the table and touched his hand. "Let's go for a walk," she said.