Axis

No… that wasn't quite true.

The dust moved.

Beyond the courtyard, in the gray emptiness of the road, something like a whirlpool began to form as she watched. A region of ash the size of a di

"What is that?"

Dr. Dvali, standing next to Turk, said, "Watch."

Turk put a hand on her left shoulder and her own right hand moved to cover it. The ash turned more quickly, dimpled at the center of the vortex, slowed again. Lise didn't like what she was seeing. It was u

Then the dust exploded—like a geyser, Lise thought. It shot a plume about ten feet into the air. She gasped and took an involuntary step back.

The ejected dust became a rooster-tail in the wind and eventually faded into the general miasma of the air, but as it cleared it became obvious that the geyser had left something behind… something shiny.

It looked like a flower. A ruby-colored flower, Lise marveled, smooth-stemmed and with a texture that made her think of the skin of a newborn infant. Stem and head were the same shade of deep, hypnotic red.

Turk said, "That's the closest one yet."

The flower—a word to which Lise's frantic thoughts automatically defaulted, because it really did look like a flower, with a gargantuan stem and a crown of petals, and she realized she was thinking of the sunflowers in her mothers garden in California, which had been just about this tall when they went to seed—began to arch and twist, turning its convex head to some rhythmless, inaudible tune.

She said, "There are more of these?"

"There were."

"Where? What happened to them?"

"Wait," Turk said.

The flower turned its head toward the hotel. Lise stifled another small gasp, because in the center of the bloom there was something that looked like an eye. It was round, and it glittered wetly and it contained a sort of pupil, obsidian-black. For one awful moment it appeared to look directly at her.

"Is this what it was like on Mars?" Dr. Dvali said to Sulean Moi.

"Mars is countless light-years away. Where we are now, the Hypothetical have been active for much longer. The things that grew on Mars were much less active, different in appearance. But if you're asking me whether this is a similar phenomenon, then yes, probably it is."

The ocular sunflower abruptly stopped moving. The inundated town of Bustee was still and silent, as if holding its breath.

Then there was, to Lise's horror, more motion in the dust, bumped-up rills and puffs of ash converging on the flower. Something—several things—leaped onto the stalk of it with frightening speed. They moved continuously and she could only form a vague impression of their nature, things crab-like, sea-green, many-legged, and what they did to the sunflower was—

They ate it.

They nipped at its stalk until the writhing thing toppled; then they were on it like piranhas on a carcass, and when the manic flurry of their devouring was finished they disappeared, or became inert once more, camouflaged in the fallen ash.

Nothing was left behind. No evidence whatsoever.

"This," Dr. Dvali said, "is why we're reluctant to leave the room."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Turk spent the rest of the morning at the window, cataloging the varieties of peculiar life that sprang out of the dust. Know your enemy, he thought. Lise stood next to him much of the time, asking brief but pertinent questions about what he had seen before she woke up. Dr. Dvali had switched on their little wireless telecom receiver and was drawing down sporadic reports from Port Magellan, a useful activity in Turk's opinion, but the other Fourths did nothing but talk: endlessly and to little purpose. It was one of the failings of Fourths, Turk decided. They might occasionally be wise. But they were incurably talky.

Right now they were picking on the Martian woman, Sulean Moi, who seemed to know more than the rest of them about the ashfall but who was reluctant to share her knowledge. Mrs. Rebka was particularly insistent. "Your taboos aren't relevant here," she said. "We need all the information we can get. You owe it to us… to the boy, at least."

Temperate as it sounded, this was, by Fourth standards, nearly a fist-fight.

The Martian woman, dressed in oversized denim pants that made her look like some implausibly ski

"You said the ashfall on Mars generated peculiar forms of, of—"

"Of life, Mrs. Rebka. Call it by its name. Why not?"

"Lifeforms like what we're seeing outside?"

"I don't recognize the flowers or the predators that consume them. In that sense, there's no similarity. But that's to be expected. A forest in Ecuador doesn't look like a forest in Finland. But both are forests."

"The purpose of it, though," Mrs. Rebka said.

"I've studied the Hypotheticals since childhood and I've listened to a lot of highly-informed speculation and I still can't guess the 'purpose' of it. The Martian ashfalls are isolated events. The life they generate is vegetative, always short-lived, and unstable in the long term. What conclusions can be drawn from such isolated examples? Very few." She hesitated, frowning. "The Hypotheticals—whatever else they are—are almost certainly not discreet entities but a collation of vastly many interco

"Yes," Mrs. Rebka said impatiently, "but if your people understood enough to engineer Hypothetical technology into human beings—"

"You possess that ability too." Sulean Moi looked pointedly at Isaac.

"Because it was given to us by Wun Ngo Wen."

"Our work on Mars has always been purely pragmatic. We were able to culture samples from the ashfall and observe their ability to interact with human protein at the cellular level. Centuries of that kind of observation produced some insight into the ways human biology might be manipulated."

"But you engineered what you admit is Hypothetical technology."

"Technology or biology—in this case I'm not sure the distinction is meaningful. Yes, we cultured alien life, or technology if you prefer that word, at the microscopic level. Because it grows, reproduces, and dies, we were able to select and manipulate certain strains for certain traits. Over the course of a great many years we generated the modified cultures that enhance human longevity. And other germ lines as well. One of the most radical of which is the treatment you applied to Isaac while he was still in the womb. In your womb, Mrs. Rebka."

Mrs. Rebka reddened.

Turk understood the significance of what they were discussing, and he guessed it was important, but it seemed ridiculously remote at a time when real problems were percolating so close to hand. Right outside the door, in fact. Was it safe to go outside? That was the question they ought to be asking. Because sooner or later they would have to leave this room. Because they had very little in the way of food.

He begged the loan of Dr. Dvali's little radio and pushed the nodes into his ears, blocking out the querulous Fourths and inducing other voices.

The available broadcast was a narrowband thing from Port Magellan, two guys from one of the local media collectives reading UN advisories and updated reports. This ashfall had been only a little worse than the first, at least in terms of weight and duration. A few roofs had collapsed to the south of the city. Most roads were currently impassable. People with respiratory problems had been sickened by ash inhalation, and even healthy people were spitting gray residue, but that wasn't what had everybody scared. What had everybody scared were the peculiar things growing out of the ash. The a