Axis s-2

by Robert Charles Wilson

  "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:

  Is this love?

  PART FIVE — IN THE COMPANY OF THE UNSPEAKABLE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  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!"

  N
ow 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?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  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.

  Finally they settled down in a room on the third floor, with a window from which they could assess the situation outside (if morning ever came, Lise thought; if the suns light reached them ever again), and Turk opened a can of corned beef with his pocketknife and served it out on some plastic dishes he found in one of the kitchen cupboards.

  Oil riggers lived like university freshmen, Lise had concluded. Angry, depressive university freshmen. Exhibits A, B, C: the empty bottles randomly scattered, the heaps of clothes abandoned in corners, the stripped mattresses and tattered paper shrines to the World's Biggest Breasts.

  Dvali was talking about Isaac. He had been talking about Isaac for hours, it seemed to Lise, fretting over his absence and what this fresh starfall might mean "to his status as a communicant." It all began to sound more than slightly mad, until she was moved to ask, "If you care so much about him, couldn't you have given him a last name?"

  Dvali looked sideways at her. "We raised him communally. Mrs. Rebka named him Isaac, and that seemed sufficient."

  "You could have called him Isaac Hypothetical," Turk said. "Given his paternity."

  "I don't find that funny," Dvali said. But at least he shut up.

  The ash was falling thicker than ever. She could see it outside the window when she pointed a flashlight that way, but only as an undifferentiated wash of glittery gray. More than in Port Magellan, she thought. More than in Bustee.

  She didn't care to consider what might be growing in it.

  * * * * *

  It took a long while for the air in the poorly-sealed grocery store stockroom to settle, and it never settled completely, but eventually Diane noticed that her lungs were less painful, her throat less raw, her vertigo slowly becoming bearable.

  How much time had passed since the storm began? Two hours, a dozen? She couldn't be sure. There was no sunlight anymore, in fact no light whatsoever. There hadn't been time to rescue flashlights from the vehicle, or anything else for that matter. There had only been time to search the narrow stockroom (by touch and from memory) for something to rinse the ash out of their mouths: a cache of carbonated soft drinks in plastic bottles. Warm, the liquid foamed on the tongue and mixed with the inhaled particles until it tasted like charred flannel. But drink enough of it and you could speak, at least.

  The three women were gathered around Isaac, who lay on the concrete floor breathing noisily. Isaac had become their touchstone, Diane thought. He had sipped several times from one of the bottles, but he was feverish—a new, frightening heat baked off his skin—and since the ash-fall began he hadn't spoken or been able to speak.

  We're like the witches in Macbeth, Diane thought, and Isaac is our cauldron, boiling.

  "Isaac," Anna Rebka said. "Isaac, can you hear me?"

  Isaacs response was a stirring in his limbs, a faint murmur that might have been assent.

  Diane knew they might die here, all of them. The thought wasn't extraordinarily troubling to her, though she dreaded the pain and discomfort. One of the benefits of Fourthness (and they were all Fourths in this room, even, in his way, Isaac), was this muting of the anxiety about one's death. She had lived, after all, a very long time. She carried memories of the Spinless world, the vanished Earth as she had seen it as a child and on its last night: a house, a lawn, the sky. Back when she had believed in god, a god who made sense of the world by loving it.

  The god she missed, perhaps even the god Dr. Dvali had been unconsciously invoking when he created Isaac. Oh, she had seen it all before, the fractured longing for redemption: she had lived with it, lived it. It had driven her brother Jason just as it had driven Diane. Jason's obsession had not been very different from Dvali's—the difference being that Jason, in the end, had offered himself on the altar, not a child.

  Isaac's breathing began to deepen and his body cooled slightly. Diane wondered about his reaction to the ashfall. The link, of course, was through the Hypothetical machines, the half-living things that generated and inhabited and arose from the fallen dust. But what did that mean, what was the point of it, what was it meant to accomplish?

  She must have spoken that last aloud—her mind was still a little muddled—because Sulean Moi said, "Nothing, it's meant to accomplish nothing." Her voice was a raw croak. "That's the truth Dr. Dvali wants to deny. The Hypotheticals are comprised of a network of self-reproducing machines. That much we all more or less agree upon. But they aren't a mind, Diane. They can't talk to Isaac, not the way I'm talking to you."

  "That's smug," Mrs. Rebka said from her corner of the darkness. "And not true. You talked to the dead boy, Esh, through Isaac. Wouldn't you call that communication?"

  The Martian woman was silent. How strange it was to be having this conversation in the absolute darkness, Diane thought. And how Fourth of us. How would she have reacted to this predicament before her own treatment? Probably the fear would have overwhelmed her. Fear, and claustrophobia, and the steady awful sifting sound of ash (but it was so much more than ash) settling on the roof and stressing the building's beams and timbers.

  "He told me he remembers Esh," Sulean said. "Memory is also an attribute of machines. A modern telephone has a larger memory than some mammals. I suspect the first Hypothetical machines were sent out into the universe for the purpose of gathering data, and I suspect they still do that, in infinitely subtler ways. Somehow, Esh's memory became available to the machines that killed him. He became a datum, which Isaac is able to access."

  "Then I suppose Isaac will become a da
tum too," Mrs. Rebka said, suddenly meek, and here, Diane thought, was the heart of her revealed. Mrs. Rebka knew that Isaac would die, that there was no other possible outcome of his transaction with the Hypotheticals, and some part of her had accepted that dreadful truth.

  "As he probably remembers Jason Lawton," Sulean Moi said. "Isn't that the question on your mind, Diane?"

  Hateful in her perceptiveness, this Martian hag. Doomed to exile from her planet, her people, even her Fourthness. She was steeped in bitterness. Worse, she was right. It was the question Diane had dared not ask. "Maybe I'd rather not know."

  "And Dr. Dvali wouldn't stand for it. He would prefer to keep Isaac's epiphanies to himself. But Dr. Dvali isn't here."

  "That doesn't matter," Diane said, faintly panicky.

  "Isaac," Sulean Moi said.

  "Stop," Mrs. Rebka said.

  "Isaac, can you hear me?"

  Mrs. Rebka said Stop again, but Isaac's voice came faintly, a whisper: "Yes."

  "Isaac," Sulean Moi said, "do you remember Jason Lawton?"

  Please, no, Diane thought.

  But the boy said, "Yes."

  "And what would he say, if he were here?"

  Isaac cleared his throat, a moist, froggy sound.

  "He would say, 'Hello, Diane.' He would say—"

  "No more," Diane begged. "Please."

  "He would say, 'Be careful, Diane.' Because it's about to happen. The last thing."

  What last thing? But there wasn't even time to pose the question before the last thing came up from the limestone and bedrock far underground. It shook the building, it rocked the floor, it quenched all thought, and it didn't stop.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Only Isaac saw it happening, because only Isaac had eyes that could see it. He could see many things, few of which he had described even to Mrs. Rebka or Sulean Moi, his most trusted friends.