Axis

The air was cool tonight and the garden was lush. He stepped in among the plants, following the gardener's cobbled path. The night-blooming succulents had put out blossoms, richly colorful even in the faint moonlight.

Other things, small things, stirred in the soil where the ash had been driven down by the rain.

Isaac put his hand palm-down on a bare patch of earth. The soil was warm, retaining what it had conserved of the day's heat.

Overhead, the stars were crystal-bright. Isaac looked a long time at the stars. They were symbols hovering on the brink of intelligibility, letters that made words that made sentences he could almost (not quite) read.

Something touched his hand where it rested on the rich garden loam, and Isaac looked down again. When he pulled his hand away he saw the earth swell and crumble minutely—a worm, he thought; but it wasn't a worm. It wasn't anything he had ever seen before. It shrugged itself slowly from the soil like a knuckled, fleshy finger. Maybe some kind of root, but it grew too quickly to be natural. It extended itself toward Isaac's hand as if it sensed his warmth.

He wasn't afraid of it. Well, no, that wasn't true. Part of him was afraid of it, almost paralyzed with terror. The everyday part of him wanted to recoil and run back to the safety of his room. But above and enclosing the everyday part of him was this new sense of himself, bold and confident, and to the new Isaac the pale green finger wasn't frightening or even unfamiliar. He recognized it, although he couldn't name it.

He allowed it to touch him. Slowly, the green finger encircled his wrist. Isaac drew a curious strength from it, and it from him, he suspected, and he looked back at the sky where the stars which were suns glimmered brightly. Now each star seemed as familiar as a face, each with its own color and weight and distance and identity, known but not named. And like an animal scenting the air, he faced once more to the west.

Two things were obvious to Sulean as she entered the common room. One was that much discussion had taken place in her absence—she had been called here to testify, not to deliberate.

The second obvious thing was an atmosphere of collective sadness, almost mourning, as if these people understood that the life they had created for themselves was coming to an end. And that was no doubt true. This community couldn't exist much longer. It had been created for the purpose of birthing and nurturing Isaac, and that process would soon be finished… one way or another.

The majority of these people must have been born before the Spin, Sulean thought. Like other Terrestrial Fourths, a large percentage of them had come from the academic community, but not all; there were technicians who helped maintain the cryogenic incubators; there was a mechanic, a gardener. Like Martian Fourths, these people had separated themselves from the general community. They were not like the Fourths among whom Sulean had been raised… but they were Fourths; they stank of Fourthness. So glum, so self-important, so blind to their own arrogance.

Avram Dvali, of course, was chairing the meeting. He waved Sulean to a chair at the front of the room. "We'd like you to explain a few things, Ms. Moi, before the crisis proceeds any further."

Sulean sat primly erect. "Of course I'm happy to help in any way I can."

Mrs. Rebka, who sat at Dr. Dvali's right at the head table, gave her a sharply skeptical look. "I hope that's true. You know, when we took on the task of raising Isaac thirteen years ago we faced some opposition—"

" Raising him, Mrs. Rebka, or creating him?"

Mrs. Rebka ignored the remark. "Opposition from other members of the Fourth community. We acted on convictions not everyone shared. We know we're a minority, a minority within a minority. And we knew you were out there, Ms. Moi, doing whatever work you do for the Martians. We knew you might eventually find us, and we were prepared to be frank and open with you. We respect your co

"Thank you," Sulean said, not concealing her own skepticism.

"But we had hoped you would be as frank with us as we were with you."

"If you have a question, please ask it."

"The procedure that created Isaac has been attempted before."

"It has been," Sulean admitted, "yes."

"And is it true that you have some personal experience of that?"

This time she wasn't quite so quick to answer. "Yes." The story of her upbringing had circulated widely among the Terrestrial Fourths.

"Would you share that experience with us?"

"If I'm reluctant to talk about it, the reasons are largely personal. The memory isn't pleasant."

"Nevertheless," Mrs. Rebka said.

Sulean closed her eyes. She didn't want to recall these events. The memory came to her, unbidden, all too often. But Mrs. Rebka was right, as much as Sulean hated to admit it. The time had come.

The boy.

The boy in the desert. The boy in the Martian desert.

The boy had died in the dry southern province of Bar Kea, some distance from the biological research station where he had been born and where he had lived all his life.

Sulean was the same age as the boy. She had not been born at the Bar Kea Desert Station but she could remember no other home. Her life before Bar Kea was little more than a story she had been told by her teachers: a story about a girl who had been washed away, along with her family, by a flood along the Paia River, and who had been rescued from the intake filter of a dam three miles downstream. Her parents had died and the small girl, this unremembered Sulean, had been so grievously wounded that she could only be saved by profound biotechnical intervention.

Specifically, the child Sulean had to be rebuilt using the same process that was used to extend life and create Fourths.

The treatment was more or less successful. Her damaged body and brain were reconstructed according to templates written in her DNA. For obvious reasons, she remembered nothing of her life before the accident. Her salvation was a second birth, and Sulean had relearned the world the way an infant learns it, acquiring language a second time and crawling before she took her first (or second) tentative steps.

But there was a drawback to the treatment, which was why it was so rarely used as a medical intervention. It conferred its customary longevity, but it also interrupted the natural cycle of her life. At puberty, every Martian child developed the deep wrinkles that made Martians appear so distinctive to Terrestrials. But that didn't happen to Sulean. She remained, by Martian standards, sexless and grotesquely smooth-ski

The only other child at the Station was the boy named Esh.

They had not given him any other name, only Esh.

Esh had been built to communicate with the Hypotheticals, though it seemed to Sulean he could barely communicate even with the people around him. Even with Sulean, whose company he obviously enjoyed, he seldom spoke more than a few words. Esh was kept apart, and Sulean was allowed to see him only at appointed times.

Nevertheless she was his friend. It didn't matter to Sulean that the boy's nervous system was supposedly receptive to the obscure signals of alien beings, any more than it mattered to Esh that she was as pink as a stillborn fetus. Their uniquenesses made them alike and had thus become irrelevant.