Axis

"He's never been sick before," Mrs. Rebka said. "Not once. But since you arrived… he's not the same. He wanders, he eats less. He's taken a ferocious interest in books, and at first I thought that was a good thing. But I wonder if it isn't just another symptom."

"Symptom of what?"

"Don't be evasive." Mrs. Rebka was a large woman. To Sulean all these people seemed large—Sulean herself barely topped five foot three—but Mrs. Rebka was especially large and seemed to want to appear intimidating. "I know who you are, as well as anyone does. Everyone in the community has been aware of you for years. We weren't surprised when you knocked at the door. Only surprised that it had taken so long. We're prepared to let you observe Isaac and even interact with him. The only condition is that you don't interfere."

" Have I interfered?"

"He's changed since you got here. You can't deny that."

"That has nothing to do with me."

"Doesn't it? I hope you're right. But you've seen this before, haven't you? Before you came to Earth."

Sulean had never made a secret of it. The story had spread among these Terrestrial Fourths—especially those, like Dvali, who were obsessed with the Hypotheticals. She nodded.

"A child like Isaac," Mrs. Rebka said.

"In some ways like him. A boy. He was Isaac's age when he—"

"When he died."

"Yes."

"Died of his… condition?"

Sulean didn't answer immediately. She hated calling up these memories, instructive as they inevitably were. "He died in the desert." A different desert. The Martian desert. "He was trying to find his way, but he got lost." She closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids the world was an infinite redness, thanks to this insufferably bright sunlight. "I would have stopped you if I could. You know that. But I came too late, and you were all very clever about concealing yourselves. Now I'm as helpless as you are, Mrs. Rebka."

"I won't let you hurt him." The fervor in Mrs. Rebka's voice was as startling as the accusation.

"I wouldn't do anything to harm him!"

"Possibly not. But I think, on some level, you're frightened of him."

"Mrs. Rebka, have you misunderstood so completely? Of course I'm afraid of him! Aren't you?"

Mrs. Rebka didn't answer, only stood up and walked slowly back into the compound.

That night Isaac was still feverish and was confined to his room. Sulean lay awake in her own room, gazing past the sand-scuffed windowpane at the stars.

At the Hypotheticals, to use that wonderfully ambiguous name bestowed upon them by English-speaking people. They had been called that even before their existence was well-established: the hypothetical entities who had enclosed the Earth in a strange temporal barrier, so that a million years might pass while a man walked his dog or a woman brushed her hair. They were a network of self-reproducing semibiological machines distributed throughout the galaxy. They intervened in human affairs, and perhaps the affairs of i

She was looking at them, though they were of course invisible. They permeated the night sky. They contained worlds. They were everywhere.

Beyond that, what could one say? A network so vast it spa

Did it think, in any meaningful sense? Did it wonder, did it argue with itself, did it fabricate ideas and act on them? Was it an entity, in other words, or just a huge and complex process?

The Martians had argued over this for centuries. Sulean had spent much of her childhood listening to elderly Fourths debate the question. Sulean didn't have a conclusive answer—no one did—but her suspicion was that the Hypotheticals had no center, no operative intelligence. They did complex, unpredictable things-—but so did evolution. Evolution had produced vastly complex and interdependent biological systems without any central direction. Once self-reproducing machines had been unleashed on the galaxy (by some long lost ancient species, perhaps, long before Earth or Mars had condensed from stellar dust), they had been subject to the same inexorable logic of competition and mutation. What might that not have bred, over billions of years? Machines of immense scale and power, semi-autonomous, "intelligent" in a certain sense—the Arch, the temporal barrier that had surrounded the Earth—all that, yes. But a central motivating consciousness? A mind? Sulean had come to doubt it. The Hypotheticals were not one entity. They were just what happened when the logic of self-reproduction engulfed the vastnesses of space.

The dust of ancient machines had fallen on the desert, and from that dust had grown strange, abortive fragments. A wheel, a hollow tube, a rose with a coal-dark eye. And Isaac was interested in the west, the far west. What did that mean? Did it have a discernible meaning?

It meant, Sulean thought, that Isaac was being sacrificed to a force as mindless and indifferent as the wind.

In the morning Mrs. Rebka allowed Sulean to visit the boy's room. "You'll see," she said grimly, "why we're all so concerned."

Isaac was limp under a tangle of blankets. His eyes were closed. Sulean touched his forehead and felt the radiant heat of fever.

"Isaac," she sighed, as much to herself as to the boy. His pale inertness provoked too many memories. There had been another boy, yes, another fever, another desert.

"The rose," Isaac said, startling her.

"What's that?" she said.

"I remember the rose. And the rose, the rose remembers."

As if asleep, eyes still shut, he pulled himself into a sitting position, his pillow compressed under the small of his back and his head knocking the backboard of the bed. His hair was lank with sweat. How immortal human beings seem when they can walk, run, jump, Sulean thought. And how fragile when they can't.

Then the boy did something that shocked even Sulean.

He opened his eyes and the irises were newly discolored, as if their pale uniform blue had been spattered with gold paint. He looked at her directly and he smiled.

Then he spoke, and he spoke a language Sulean had not heard for decades, a Martian dialect from the sparsely inhabited southern wastes.

He said, "It's you, big sister! Where have you been?"

Then, just as quickly, he slept again, and Sulean was left shivering in the terrible echo of his words.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The next morning a helicopter flew low over the Minang village, and while that might have been i

"Where are we going?" Lise asked.

"Over the mountains. Kubelick's Grave. Turk will fly us there, won't you, Turk?"

He appeared to think about it. "I might need a crowbar," he said, cryptically. "But yeah."

"We'll take one of the village cars back to the city," Ibu Diane said. "Something inconspicuous. The car you came in is a liability. I'll ask one of the villagers to drive it up the coast road and leave it somewhere."

"Do I get it back when all this is finished?"

"I doubt it."

"Well, that figures," Turk said.

The authorities had ways of tracking people in whom they were interested, Lise knew. Tiny RF tags could be planted on a vehicle or even in an item of clothing. And there were more arcane, even subtler devices available. The Minang villager who drove their car north also took with him their clothing and other possessions. Lise changed into a floral-print blouse and muslin pants from the village store, Turk into a pair of jeans and a white shirt. Both of them showered in Ibu Diane's clinic. "Be especially careful of your hair," Diane had instructed them. "Things can be hidden in hair."