Axis

But the people she was addressing, born in the raucous jungle that was Earth, couldn't be expected to understand. Even their Fourthness was alien. The last estate of life, the elective decades, meant nothing more to them than a few more years in which to draw breath. On Mars all Fourths were ritually separated from the rest of the population. When you entered the Fourth Age—unless you entered it, as Sulean had, under exceptional circumstances—you accepted its constraints and agreed to live according to its cloistered traditions. The Terrestrial Fourths had attempted to re-create some of those traditions, and this group had even withdrawn to a kind of desert sanctuary, but it wasn't the same… they didn't understand the burden of it; they hadn't been initiated into the sacral knowledge.

They lacked, perversely, the terrible dry monasticism of the Martian Fourths. It was what Sulean had hated about the Fourths who raised her. On Mars the Fourths moved as if through the invisible corridors of some ancient labyrinth. They had traded joy for a dusty gravitas. But even that was better than this anarchic recklessness—all the vices of terrestrial humanity, needlessly prolonged.

Dr. Dvali, perhaps sensing her agitation, said, "But what about the child? Tell us what happened to Esh, Ms. Moi."

What happened to the boy was both simple and terrible. It began with an infall of Hypothetical debris from the outer system.

This was not entirely unexpected. Martian astronomers had tracked the movement of the dust cloud for days before its arrival. There was some general excitement about the event. Sulean had been granted permission to climb the stairs to a high parapet of Bar Kea Desert Station, which had served as a fortress in the last of the wars five hundred years ago, to watch the fiery infall.

There had been no such event in two lifetimes, and Sulean wasn't the only one who climbed up on the walls to watch. Bar Kea Station had been built with its back to the spine of the Omod Mountains, and the dry southern plains, where much of the debris would fall, stretched roadless and mysterious in the starlight. That night the sky was shot through with falling stars like threaded fire, and Sulean stared at the show with rapt attention until an unwelcome sleepiness overcame her and one of her minders put a hand on her shoulder and escorted her back to bed.

Esh had come up to the parapet too, and although he watched the green and golden glow of the infalling debris he betrayed no reaction.

Back in bed Sulean found her sleepiness had evaporated. She lay awake for a long time thinking of what she had seen. She thought about the accumulated debris of Ab-ashken devices, things that ate ice and rock and lived and died over the course of long mille

So, apparently, did Esh.

There was considerable excitement in the station the next morning. Esh was in an agitated state—had cried for the first time since infancy, and one of his tenders had found him knocking his head against the southern wall of his sleeping chamber. Some invisible influence had shattered his customary complacency.

Sulean wanted to see him—demanded to be allowed to see him, when she heard the news—but she was refused, for days on end. Doctors were called in to examine Esh. The boy slipped in and out of fevers and deep, impenetrable sleeps. Whenever he was awake he demanded to be allowed to go outside.

He had stopped eating, and by the time Sulean was allowed into his chamber she hardly recognized him. Esh had been chubby, round-cheeked, young for his age. Now he had grown gaunt, and his eyes, strangely flecked with gold, had retreated into the bony contours of his skull.

She asked him what was wrong, not expecting an answer, but he startled her by saying, "I want to go see them."

"What? Who? Who do you want to see?"

"The Ab-ashken."

The boy's timid voice made the word sound even stranger than it otherwise might have. Sulean felt a chill creep up from the small of her spine to the crown of her head.

"What do you mean, you want to go see them?"

"Out in the desert," Esh said.

"There's nothing out there."

"Yes, there is. The Ab-ashken."

Then he began to cry, and Sulean had to leave the room. The nurse who had been attending Esh followed her into the corridor and said. "He's been asking for days to leave the building. But this is the first time he mentioned the Ab-ashken."

Were they really out there, the Hypotheticals, the Ab-ashken, or at least the fragmentary remains of them? Sulean posed the question to one of her caretakers, a fragile elder who had been an astronomer before he became a Fourth. Yes, he said, there had been some activity to the south, and he showed her a set of aerial photographs that had been taken over the previous few days.

Here was a wasteland not very different from the landscape beyond the gates of Bar Kea Station—sand, dust, and rocks. But cradled in a broad declivity was a clump of objects so u

"This must be where he wants to go," Sulean said.

"Possibly. But we can't allow that. The risk is too great. He might come to harm."

"He's coming to harm here. He looks like he's dying!"

Her tutor shrugged. "The decision's neither mine nor yours."

Perhaps not. But Sulean was afraid for Esh. As a friend he wasn't much, but he was all she had. He shouldn't be held captive against his will, and Sulean longed to release him. She tried to imagine how she might do that, how she might sneak into his room and smuggle him outside… but the corridors of Bar Kea Station were never empty, and Esh was always under guard.

Nor was she often allowed to see him, and Sulean's life seemed empty without his mute presence. Sometimes she walked past his room and winced when she heard him crying or shouting.

The situation remained unchanged for more endless, su

Dr. Dvali said, "These growths, were they dangerous?"

"No. There was never anything more than a temporary kind of life to them."

Like hothouse flowers, Sulean thought, transplanted to the wrong climate and soil.

The last time she saw Esh alive was a day later.

Sulean was outside that morning, walking where she used to walk with him. Her minder stood at a discreet distance, mindful that Sulean was troubled and might want time to herself.

It was another su

This was inexplicable. Sulean glanced back at her minder, another venerable Fourth. He had paused to rest in the shade of Bar Kea Station's southern wall. The old Fourth had not seen Esh, and Sulean did nothing to betray his presence.