Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  From this place above the canopy of the Dark Forest the ruins of human structures were easy to discern. The long line of the collapsed mall lay across the body of the forest like a train wreck. The building where they had sheltered last night projected from the trees like the prow of a grounded ship, and farther off she could see the silhouettes of drill rigs and cracking towers and storage. Something was burning in the oil fields: the wind scrawled a line of black smoke across the horizon. Hypothetical growths carpeted the desert in every direction, reflecting the light of the setting sun and radiating their own, a sea of dark jewels, she thought. She wondered how much mass these things must have extracted from the ash or the ground or the air in order to grow themselves, wondered if the whole inland basin of Equatoria had been hollowed out to build them. And in the west, against the glare of the sun—

  “Hold on,” Turk said as a brisk wind rattled the platform, but her grip on the railing was already painfully tight.

  In the west, something immense had arisen. A kind of Arch.

  Lise had sailed under the Arch of the Hypotheticals three times: twice as an adolescent, coming to Port Magellan with her parents (and leaving without her father), and once as an adult. That Arch, awe-inspiring as it was, had been too large to be perceived as a single thing: what you saw was the nearest leg, soaring beyond the atmosphere, or the part of it that continued to reflect sunlight in the hours after dark, a silvery blaze suspended over the sea.

  What she saw now was less immense—she could see all of it at once, an inverted U against the sunset—but that only made its size more starkly obvious. It must have been twenty or fifty miles high, high enough that a haze of cloud paled its uppermost curve. But at the same time it seemed delicate, almost fragile: how did it sustain its own weight? More importantly, why was it here? What was it meant to do?

  An even stronger gust of wind bounced the platform and carried Turk’s matted hair into his eyes. She didn’t like the expression on his face as he stared at the thing in the west. For the first time since she had known him he looked lost. Lost and a little scared.

  “We shouldn’t stay up here,” he said. “This wind.”

  She agreed. The view was in an unearthly way beautiful, but it was also unendurable. It implied too much. She followed him down.

  They rested at the foot of the stairs, back under the canopy of globes, like mice in a mushroom patch, she thought, protected from the wind. For a moment they didn’t speak.

  Then Turk reached into the left-hand pocket of his grimy jeans and brought out his compass, the same military-surplus compass in a battered brass case he had been carrying the day he first flew her into the mountains. He opened the case and looked at the gently swinging needle as if to confirm its alignment. Then he reached for Lise’s hand and put the compass in her palm.

  “What’s this for?”

  “I don’t know if there’s an edge to this fucking forest, but if there is you’ll probably need a compass to find your way out.”

  “So? I’ll just follow you. Keep it.”

  “I want you to have it.”

  “But—”

  “Come on, Lise. All the time we’ve been together, what did I ever give you? I’d like to give you something. It would make me happy. Just take it.”

  Gratefully but uneasily, she closed her hand on the chilly brass case.

  “I was thinking about Dvali,” Lise said as they walked back to camp. She knew she shouldn’t be saying this out loud, but the combined effect of exhaustion and the twilight glitter of the forest (not entirely dark, she had to admit) and Turk’s peculiar gift had made her reckless. “About Dvali putting together his commune in the desert. Sulean Moi said there were other attempts to do the same thing, but they’d been stopped in time. Dvali must have known that, right?”

  “I would guess so.”

  “But it seemed like he was pretty free with his information. He took a lot of people into his confidence. Including my father.”

  “Couldn’t have been too reckless or they would have caught up with him.”

  “He changed his plans. That’s what he told me. He was supposed to establish his compound out on the west coast, but he changed his mind after he left the university.”

  “He’s not stupid, Lise.”

  “I don’t think he’s stupid. I think he’s lying. He never intended to go to the west coast. The west coast plan was bullshit. It was designed to be bullshit.”

  “Maybe,” Turk said. “Does it matter?”

  “The story was supposed to derail anyone who came after him. But do you see what that means? Dvali knew Genomic Security was looking for him, and he must have known they would come after my father. Turk, he sat not a foot away from me and told me he knew my father was principled and loyal and wouldn’t tell DGS what they wanted to know—except under extreme duress. Dvali could have warned him as soon as he heard DGS was in Port Magellan, if not before. But that’s not what he wanted to do. My father disapproved of Dvali’s project on moral grounds, so Dvali hung him out like a red flag.”

  “He couldn’t have known your father would be killed.”

  “But he must have known it was a possibility, and he certainly would have expected him to be tortured. If it isn’t murder it’s the next best thing.” Murder by indirection—the only kind of murder a Fourth could commit.

  She didn’t know what she could do with this thought, which had begun to burn like a brushfire in her mind. Could she face Dvali again? Should she tell him what she’d guessed or pretend innocence until they escaped this place? And what then? Was there any real justice for Fourths? She thought Diane Dupree might be able to answer that question, or Sulean Moi . . .

  If they were still alive.

  “Listen,” Turk said.

  All Lise could hear was the canopy of the Dark Forest rattling in the rising wind. She and Turk were back at the loading bays now, back where the creepy hedge of eyeball flowers had grown, but there wasn’t even that maddening scratch-tap sound, because—

  Her eyes widened.

  “It stopped,” Turk said.

  The digging had stopped.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Avram Dvali was collecting canned food and worrying about the rising wind when the sound of digging abruptly ceased. He stood upright, chilled.

  His first thought was: the boy is dead. The Hypothetical trees had stopped digging because the boy was dead. And for one long heartbeat it seemed not just an idea but a black-bordered truth. Then he thought: or they found him.

  He dropped what he was holding and ran for the dig.

  In his haste he almost blundered into the hedge of ocular roses. One of the tallest of them turned to inspect him, its eye as indifferent as a dark pearl. He ignored it.

  He was startled by how much the digging trees had accomplished since the last time he’d looked. The spat-ulate roots were slow, but the sum of their groping and picking had exposed an intact wall and, beyond it, leading inside, an opening in the banked rubble.

  He pushed past the ocular roses, pushed aside their fleshy stems, because somewhere in that cloistered darkness Isaac must still be alive, alive and in conversation with the forces Dvali had loved and feared ever since they embraced the Earth and stole it out of time: the Hypotheticals.

  The roots of the Hypothetical trees had pulled back from the excavation they had made and lay in a motionless tangle at the entrance to the buried room. Dvali hesitated at the brink of that hole, which was just large enough to allow him to pass through, knowing it was unwise to go farther—the weight of the debris must be immense, tons of it balanced on the partially-intact ceiling with nothing to support it but a few joists and groaning timbers—and knowing at the same time that he couldn’t stop himself.

  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 was 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 Hypotheticals, 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 boy’s 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  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.

  PART SIX

  * * *

  THE

  ORDINANCE

  OF TIME

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  When 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 for
ty 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 34th, 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, yet, 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.