Axis

"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 to

"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, ski

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 answer. 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."