Axis (33 page)

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 datum 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.

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.

For instance, he could see himself. He saw himself more clearly than ever before in the absolute darkness of the buried stockroom. Not his body exactly, but when he looked down he could see the silver skein of the Hypothetical presence inside him. It shared his nervous system, made glowing traceries of ever-finer filaments joined in bundles to the shimmering rod of his spine. Had the others been able to see him this way they probably would have been horrified. Some fraction of Isaac, the merely human part, was also horrified. But that voice was a diminishing presence, and a dissenting voice thought he was beautiful. He looked like electricity. He looked like fireworks.

The women—Mrs. Rebka, Sulean Moi, Diane—were also visible to him, but they shone with a much fainter light. Isaac guessed the Fourth treatment had done that to them, that it had infected them with a little bit (but only a little bit) of Hypothetical life. It was as if they were timid lamps in a fog, while Isaac… Isaac was a searchlight, glaring.

And he could see other things, too, beyond the walls.

He saw the ashfall. To Isaacs eyes it was a storm of stars, each grain distinctly bright and merging into a general brightness, an atmosphere of luminosity. Bright, yes, but also, somehow, transparent: he could see
through
it—especially to the west.

The infinitely tiny Hypothetical machines weren’t falling at random. Taken together, their trajectories were focused on the place where something old was rising from the bedrock of the desert. It had stirred in its sleep like a lazy behemoth and the ground had trembled, canting the oil derricks and shattering pumps and pipelines. It had stirred and stirred again as more ash fell, triggered by unknowable cues into new activity.

And it stirred again now, ferociously. The earth didn’t just shake this time, it roared, and although the merely human part of Isaac was blind in the darkness he heard quite clearly the groan of deep rock stressed to the fracturing point, the slap and crack of collapsing walls. He felt a rush of foul air, and his breath became labored and painful again.

But none of that mattered to the part of him that could see.

This is a machine, he thought, watching the great device heave itself out of the night desert a hundred and more miles to the west. Machine, yes, but it was alive… it was both. The words did not exclude one another. The voice in him that had been Jason Lawton’s voice said: a living cell is a machine made of protein. What falls from the sky and what rises from the earth is just life by other means.

The giant structure shouldering itself out of the ground in the west resembled the Arch, or at least the pictures Isaac had seen of the Arch. It was a huge half-ring made of the same stuff as the dust that was falling from beyond the sky, condensed and differently arranged, its molecules and its unusual atoms subverting natural laws for which Isaac had no name but to which Jason Lawton’s memory attached words like “strong force” and “weak force.” It was lovely in its intrinsic glow, a rainbow shining in colors without names. It was an Arch for things to pass through; but it didn’t lead to another planet.

Things were passing through it now. From the utter blackness inside it, where even Isaac couldn’t see, luminous clouds ascended to the stars.

The thought of Jason lingered in Diane’s mind even after she was hurt.

The earthquake happened in a series of jolting shocks, almost unbearable in the darkness. That much she understood, and she had been able to suppress her fear at least for the first few moments. Then the building began to collapse.

Or so she intuited from the fact that she felt a sharp blow to her right shoulder and neck, followed by dazed unconsciousness, followed by an awakening to pain, nausea, and a terrifying inability to draw breath. She gasped. A little air entered her lungs, but not enough. Not nearly enough.

“Lie still.” The voice was a gutteral croak. Mrs. Rebka? No, she thought it must be Sulean Moi. Diane tried to answer but couldn’t. Her lungs wouldn’t do anything but spasm in feeble attempts to draw air. She tried to sit up, or at least turn to one side, in order to avoid vomiting on herself.

That was when she discovered that the left side of her body was numb, dead, useless.

“Part of the ceiling came down on you,” Sulean Moi said.

Diane gagged and retched, but nothing came up, for which she was thankful. And the tremors in the earth had stopped, that was good. She tried to evaluate her own injuries but couldn’t think clearly enough to do so, not when her body was pulling so hard for air. She hurt. And she was frightened. She had no particular fear of death, but this, oh, this was less bearable than death itself: this was why people
elected
to die, to make an end to this kind of suffering.

She thought of Jason again—why had she been thinking of Jason?—and then of Tyler, her lost husband. Then even these thoughts became too weighty to sustain, and she passed out again.

Isaac could see that Diane had been badly hurt. Even in the dark it was possible to see that. Her dim glow had been nearly extinguished. Compared to Sulean Moi, Diane was a guttering candle.

It was hard to pay attention. He was mesmerized by the invisible landscape all around him. Mesmerized because he was a part of it, he was
becoming
it… but that could wait. Now that the new Arch had assembled itself in the west—from Hypothetical molecules, granite, magma, memory—there was a kind of pause. All around him for many miles the fresh blanket of dust began to undergo a new stage of metabolism. That would take time. Isaac could afford to be patient.

He surprised Sulean Moi and Mrs. Rebka by crawling over fallen beams, fragments of drywall, scattered foam insulation and collapsed aluminum venting to the place where Diane Dupree lay trapped beneath a heavy joist. His lungs labored and his mouth was foul with dust, but he could breathe, at least, which Diane apparently could not, not easily. And he could tell when he reached out to touch her that the falling debris had hurt her head. He meant to stroke her hair, the way Mrs. Rebka stroked his hair when he was ill, but the place above Diane’s left ear yielded to his touch, and his hand came away sticky.

Tyler Dupree had died one day in August, the long Equatorian August, two years ago, the long Equatorian years.

Diane had hiked with him up one of the steep, rolling ridges of the coast, for no other reason than to sit at its summit and watch the forest drop like a deep green broadcloth to the sea.