Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “As is Isaac’s?” Mrs. Rebka asked.

  “Possibly.”

  “Your people must have asked these questions.”

  “Without finding any answers, unfortunately.”

  Dvali said, “You told us the boy died.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell us how.”

  Sulean thought: Must I? Must I endure this yet again?

  Of course she must. Today, as every other day.

  He had been gone from the Station for hours and it was well after dark when Sulean’s resolve broke. Frightened by the thought of Esh alone in the night, and shaken by the anxiety and alarms that ran through the Station like electricity in the absence of the boy, she sought out the man she considered the kindest of her mentors, her astronomy instructor, who used the single name Lochis. She had seen Esh this afternoon, she told him through a gush of guilty tears. When Lochis finally understood, he ordered her to stay where she was while he assembled a search party.

  A group of five men and three women, all experienced in the hazards and geography of the desert, left the Station at dawn. They rode in a cart pulled by one of the Station’s few large machines—large machines were a luxury on a resource-poor planet—and Sulean was allowed to ride along to point out where she had last seen Esh and perhaps to help convince him to return to the Station, should they find him.

  More sophisticated machines, lighter-than-air remote viewing devices and the like, had already been sent from the nearest large city, but they wouldn’t arrive for another day. Until then, Lochis told her, it would be a labor of eyesight and intuition. Fortunately Esh had not been able to conceal his tracks, and it was obvious that he was heading for the most concentrated infall of Ab-ashken remains.

  As the expedition crossed a line of low hills into the low basinland of the southern desert, Sulean saw the decaying evidence of that infall. The machine-drawn cart passed close to a clump of dried and decaying . . . well, things, was the only word Sulean could apply to it. A wide-mouthed tube, yellowish-white and more than two people high, towered over a cluster of orbs, pyramids, and slivered mirrors. All these things had simply grown out of the pebbly desert floor and died. Or almost died. A few feathery tendrils, like enormous bird feathers, stirred feebly amidst the surrealistic rubble. Or maybe it was the faint dry wind that made them move.

  Sulean’s first confrontation with the Hypotheticals had been when she looked into Esh’s altered eyes. This was her second. She shivered despite the heat and shrank back against Lochis’s protective bulk.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “There’s nothing dangerous here.”

  But she wasn’t afraid, not exactly. It was a different emotion that had overtaken her. Fascination, dread—some dizzying combination of the two. Here were pieces of the Ab-ashken, fragments of things that had overgrown the stars themselves, bone and sinew from the body of a god.

  “It’s as if I can feel them,” she whispered.

  Or perhaps it was her own future she felt, bearing down on her like the waters of a swollen river.

  “Again, Ms. Moi,” Dr. Dvali said sternly. “How did the boy die?”

  Sulean allowed a few moments to tick away in the silence of the common room. It was late. All was quiet. She imagined she could hear the sound of the desert wind pulsing in her ears.

  “It was probably exhaustion that brought him to a stop. We found him at last in a small depression, invisible until we came very close. He was prostrate, barely breathing. All around him . . .”

  She hated this image. It had haunted her all her long life.

  “Go on,” Dvali said.

  “All around him, things had grown. He was enclosed in a sort of grove of Hypothetical remnants. They were spiky, dangerous-looking things, spears of some brittle green substance, incomplete, of course, obviously not sustainable, but still motile . . . still alive, if you accept that description.”

  “And they had surrounded him?” Mrs. Rebka asked, her voice gentler now.

  “Or they had grown up around him while he slept, or he had deliberately gone to them. Some of them had . . . pierced him.” She touched her ribs, her abdomen, to show them where.

  “Killed him?”

  “He was still conscious when we found him.”

  Sulean had torn herself away from Lochis and run thoughtlessly toward Esh, who was impaled on the picket of alien growths. She ignored the frightened voices calling her back.

  Because this was her fault. She should never have helped Esh escape the Station. As unhappy as he had been there, he had at least been safe. Now something dreadful had overtaken him.

  She felt no particular fear of the Ab-ashken growths, peculiar as they were. They had grown around the boy’s body like a ring of sharpened fenceposts. She could smell them, although she was barely aware of it—a sharply chemical smell, sulfurous and rank. The growths were not healthy; they were mazed with cracks and fissures and in places blackened with something like rot. Their stalks shifted slightly when she moved among them, as if they were aware of her presence. And maybe they were.

  They were certainly aware of Esh. Several of the tallest growths had arched into half-circles and pierced the boy with their sharpened tips. They had penetrated his chest and abdomen in three places, leaving little circles of dry blood on his clothing. Sulean couldn’t tell at first whether he was dead or, somehow, still alive.

  Then he opened his eyes and looked at her and—impossibly—smiled.

  “Sulean,” he said. “I found it.”

  Then he closed his eyes for the last time.

  The silence in the common room was interrupted by a timid knock.

  There was only one person at the commune who hadn’t attended this meeting. Mrs. Rebka hurried to open the door.

  Isaac stood outside, still wearing his night clothes, the knees of his pajamas soiled, his hands dirty, his expression somber.

  “Someone’s coming,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The door to Brian Gately’s office opened just as a news summary popped up on his desktop. The visitor was the chubby DGS man named Weil. The press release was something about the recent ashfall.

  Weil had left his sullen friend Sigmund elsewhere, and he was grinning—though his cheerfulness, under the circumstances, struck Brian as vaguely obscene.

  “You forwarded this?” Brian asked, gesturing at the release.

  “Read it. I’ll wait.”

  Brian tried to focus on the document, but his mind’s eye insisted on reviewing the photograph Pieter Kirchberg had sent. The corpse of Tomas Ginn on a rocky beach, much worse for wear. He wondered whether Weil had seen the photo. Or ordered the killing.

  He was tempted to ask. He dared not. He blinked and read the press service release.

  PORT MAGELLAN / REUTERS.ET: Scientists at the Mt. Mahdi Observatory today made the startling announcement that the recent Equatorian “ashfall,” which affected the eastern coast and desert inland of that continent, was “not entirely inert.”

  The ashes and the microscopic structures the ash contained, believed to be the degraded remnants of Hypothetical structures from the outer reaches of the local solar system, have apparently shown signs of life.

  In a joint press conference held today at the Observatory, representatives of the American University, the United Nations Geophysical Survey, and the Provisional Government displayed photographs and samples of “incompletely self-replicating and self-assembling quasi-organic objects” recovered from the western extremes of the dry inland basin that stretches from the coastal mountains to the western sea.

  These objects, ranging from a pea-sized hollow sphere to an assembly of what appeared to be tubes and wires as large as a man’s head, were said to be unstable in a planetary environment and hence posed no threat to human life.

  “The ‘space-plague’ scenario is a non-starter,” senior astronomer Scott Cleland said. “The infalling material was ancient and probably already corrupted by wear and tear before it en
tered the atmosphere. The vast majority of it was sterilized by a violent passage that left only a few nano-scale elements intact. A very few of these retained enough molecular integrity to re-initiate the process of growth. But they were designed to flourish in the extreme cold and vacuum of deep space. In a hot, oxygen-rich desert they simply can’t survive for long.”

  Asked whether any of these structures remained active today, Dr. Cleland said, “None that we’ve sampled. By far the greatest number of active clusters occurred deep in the Rub al-Khali,” the oil-rich far western desert. “Residents of the coastal cities are unlikely to find alien plants in their gardens.”

  Because harmful effects cannot be entirely ruled out, however, a loose quarantine has been established between the oil concessions and the western coast of Equatoria. This formidable terrain has attracted no substantial settlements, although tourists occasionally visit the canyonlands and the oil consortia maintain a constant presence. “Travel is being monitored and alerts have been issued,” said Paul Nissom of the Provisional Government’s Territorial Authority. “We want to keep out the casually curious and facilitate the work of the researchers who need to study and understand this important phenomenon.”

  There were a couple of further paragraphs with trivial details and contact numbers, but Brian figured he had the gist. He gave Weil a well-what-about-it look.

  “Works out nicely for us,” Weil said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ordinarily the Provisional Government isn’t much more than a half-assed nanny. Since the ashfall, and especially this weird shit out west, they finally started paying attention to who goes where. Monitoring air traffic, especially.”

  There were more private planes per capita in Equatoria than anywhere back on Earth, most of them small craft, and an equally large number of casual airstrips. For years the traffic had been unregulated, ferrying passengers between bush communities or oil geologists to the desert.

  “The bad news,” Weil continued, “is that Turk Findley made it to his plane, along with Lise Adams and an unidentified third party. They flew out last night.”

  Brian felt an expanding hollowness in his chest. Some of it was jealousy. Some of it was fear for Lise, who was digging herself into deeper trouble by the hour.

  “The good news,” Weil said, his smile broadening, “is that we know where they went. And we’re going there. And we want you to come with us.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Turk had expected to land his aircraft at a familiar strip a couple of miles outside of Kubelick’s Grave, west of the foothills on the highway to the oil allotments. His plane might be confiscated if Mike Arundji had called ahead and was prepared to press charges. But that was probably inevitable anyway.

  Diane surprised him, as the plane began the long glide down the western slopes of the divide toward the desert, by suggesting a different destination. “Do you remember where you took Sulean Moi?”

  “More or less.”

  “Take us there, please.”

  Lise craned her head to look back at Diane. “You know where to find Dvali?”

  “I’ve heard a few things over the years. These foothills are riddled with little utopian communities and religious retreats of every imaginable kind. Avram Dvali disguised his compound as one of those.”

  “But if you knew where he was—”

  “We didn’t, not at first. But even a community like Dvali’s is porous. People arrive, people leave. He was hidden from us when it was critical for him to hide, before the child was born.”

  It meant another half hour in the air. After yet more simmering silence Turk said, “I’m sorry about that phone thing back in the city. What were you doing, trying to get a message to your mom back in the States, something like that?”

  “Something like that.” She was pleased that he had apologized and she didn’t want to make it worse by admitting she’d called Brian Gately, even in an attempt to get Tomas Ginn out of custody. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How come you had to steal your own plane?”

  “I owed some money to the guy who owns the airstrip. The business hasn’t been going too well.”

  “You could have told me that.”

  “Didn’t seem like a good way to impress a rich American divorcée.”

  “Hardly rich, Turk.”

  “Looked that way from where I stood.”

  “So how were you planning to get out of hock?”

  “Didn’t have what you could call an actual plan. Worst case, I figured I’d sell the plane and bank whatever I didn’t owe and find a berth on one of those research ships that sail out past the Second Arch.”

  “There’s nothing past the Second Arch but rocks and bad air.”

  “Thought I’d like to see for myself. That, or—”

  “Or what?”

  “Or if something worked out between you and me, I thought I’d stay in the Port and get a job. There’s always pipeline work.”

  She was briefly startled. Also pleased.

  “Not that it matters now,” he added. “Once we’re done here—and whether you find out anything about your father or not—you’re going to have to head back to the States. You’ll be okay there. You come from a respectable family and you’re well-connected enough that they won’t arrest and interrogate you.”

  “What about you?”

  “I can disappear on my own terms.”

  “You could, you know, come back with me. Come back to the States.”

  “Wouldn’t be safe, Lise. The trouble we’re in right now isn’t the first trouble I’ve had. There are good reasons why I can’t go back.”

  Tell me, she thought. Don’t make me ask. Did he tell you he’s a criminal? That’s why he fled the States. So tell me. She said, “Legal problems?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  He was flying low across the desert, the moonlit foothills hanging off his right wing. He said, “I burned down a building. My father’s warehouse.”

  “You told me your father was in the oil business.”

  “He was, at one time. But he didn’t like being overseas. When we left Turkey he went into my uncle’s import business. They brought in nickel-and-dime shit from Middle Eastern factories, rugs and souvenirs and things like that.”

  “Why’d you burn down the warehouse?”

  “I was nineteen years old, Lise. I was pissed off and I wanted to do some damage to my old man.”

  She said as gently as possible, “How come?”

  He allowed another silent moment to pass, looking at the desert, his instruments, anywhere but at her. “There was this girl I’d been seeing. We were going to get married. It was that serious. But my old man and my uncle didn’t want it to happen. They were old-fashioned about, you know, race.”

  “Your girlfriend wasn’t white?”

  “Hispanic.”

  “Did you really care what your father thought?”

  “Not at that point, no. I hated him. He was a brutal little shit, frankly. Drove my mother to her grave, in my opinion. I didn’t give a fuck what he thought. But he knew that. So he didn’t say a word to me. What he did was, he went to my girlfriend’s family and offered to pay a year’s tuition on her college education if she would stay away from me. I guess it sounded like a good deal. I never saw her again. But she felt bad enough to send me a letter and explain what happened.”

  “So you burned his warehouse.”

  “Took a couple cans of paint stripper out of the garage and went down to the industrial district and dumped it on the truck bay doors. It was after midnight. The place was three-quarters in flames by the time the fire department got there.”

  “So you had your revenge.”

  “What I didn’t know was that there was a night guard in the building. He spent six months in a burn ward because of me.”

  Lise said nothing.

  “What made it
worse,” Turk said, “was that my old man covered it up. Cooked up some arrangement with the insurance company. He tracked me down and told me that. How he’d taken this huge financial hit in order to save me from legal action. He said it was because I was family, that was why he did what he did about my girlfriend, because family mattered, whether I knew it or not.”

  “He expected you to be grateful?”

  “Hard as that is to believe, yeah, I think he honestly expected me to be grateful.”

  “Were you?”

  “No,” Turk said. “I was not grateful.”

  He landed the Skyrex where he had landed it for Sulean Moi some months before, on a little strip of pavement that appeared to be in the middle of nowhere but was, Diane insisted, less than a mile from Dvali’s compound, a hikeable distance.

  They hiked, carrying flashlights.

  He could smell the commune before he could see it. It smelled like water and flowers against the flat mineral essence of the desert. Then they crossed a little hill and there it was, a few lights still burning: four buildings and a courtyard, terracotta roofs like some kind of transplanted hacienda. There was a garden, and a gate, and Turk saw what looked like a young boy standing behind the ornate ironwork. As soon as the boy spotted them he ran inside, and by the time they reached the gate many more lights had come on and a crowd of ten or fifteen people was waiting for them.

  “Let me talk to them,” Diane said, a suggestion Turk was happy to accept. He stood a few paces back with Lise while the old woman approached the fence. Turk tried to study the crowd of Fourths, but the light was behind them and they weren’t much more than silhouettes.

  Diane shaded her eyes. “Mrs. Rebka?” she said abruptly.

  A woman stepped out of the crowd. All Turk could see of this Mrs. Rebka was that she was a little plump and that her hair was fine and made a white halo around her head.