Axis

She didn't grace him with an answer. He didn't deserve one.

Because of course she was going with him. Into the big unknown, or wherever it was good people went when they disappeared.

PART FOUR — RUB AL-KHALI

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Brian Gately was safely back in Port Magellan when the second ash-fall struck.

Sigmund and Weil had done something remarkable as they flew with Brian across the Bodhi Pass and down to the coastal plain: they had admitted defeat. The Fourths were scattered, Weil said, and the burned compound had yielded no evidence beyond the charred remains of a bioreactor hidden in a basement. Nothing incriminating had been discovered in Turk Findley's purloined aircraft, and the four captives were obviously decoys, elderly even by the standards of Fourths.

"So what, then," Brian asked as their aircraft overflew a canyon along which, far below, a lone oil tanker was navigating the switchbacks, "you just go home?"

"Of course we don't give up. We do what we've been doing for years, monitor communications, run software on strategic surveillance sites. Sooner or later something turns up. And in the meantime there's one less bioreactor to worry about. If nothing else, somebody's plans have been seriously fucked with."

"For this," Brian asked, "people die?"

"Who died, Brian? I don't remember anyone dying."

So he came at last to his small apartment in the polyglot city and was alone there when for the second time the sky filled with the luminous debris of ancient, incomprehensible machines.

He watched the local news broadcasts with a vague indifference. The newscasters used words like "strange" and "unprecedented," but Brian wasn't impressed: it was only a kind of celestial rot, the rubble of a vast disintegration. The Hypotheticals had built their intelligences in the cold places around and between countless stars, and they built them to last, no doubt, but any made thing had a lifetime. The pyramids of Egypt eroded; the Roman aqueducts were stumps of broken stone. So must the constructions of the Hypotheticals break down once they had served their dozen or their million allotted years.

The ashes birthed monstrosities, some of which he could see from his own window. A dozen yards down the road, where the Arabic commercial district declined into a structureless maze of souks and tea shops, a green tubule as big as a sewer pipe writhed as if in a strong wind and then tumbled over to barricade the street.

In his mind he played back Lise's final phone call. Where was she now? Not even Sigmund and Weil had been able to answer that question. She had fled with the rogue Fourths, victim of her own wild sympathies. Free, perhaps, in some distasteful sense of the word. Unbroken. Not yet fallen to earth like an ancient machine.

The ashfall took longer to clean up than it had the first time. And because it had happened twice, the people on television were asking themselves somber questions. Was this the end of it or would it happen again? Would the effects follow some exponential curve, each time more peculiar and disastrous, until Port Magellan was entirely buried under a mass of what looked like enormous children's toys?

Part of Brian wanted to deny the possibility while another part of him relished it. This was, after all, an alien planet, and how credulous we were, he thought, to imagine we could simply move in unmolested and conduct our lives as if it were a second Earth.

But the civil authorities, ant-like, methodically cleared the debris and reestablished their pheromonic lines of communication. When he could no longer avoid it Brian drove from his apartment along the smudged avenues to the American district, to the consulate building, to the offices of the Department of Genomic Security, Port Magellan Branch.

He walked past his own office to the door of his immediate superior, a consular legate named Larry Diesenhall. Diesenhall was a fifty-five-year-old career man with a shaved head and eyes so delicately colored they appeared to have been drawn in crayon. Diesenhall looked up at Brian and smiled. "Good to see you back, Brian."

Back at last. The prodigal son. Brian took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and dropped it on Diesenhalls immaculate desktop.

"What's this?"

"Have a look."

The envelope contained a pair of photographs—the photographs Pieter Kirchberg had sent him, extra copies of which Brian had run off on his printer this morning. He averted his eyes while Diesenhall opened the envelope.

"Jesus!" Diesenhall said. "Christ! What am I looking at here?"

The dead, Brian thought. The dead, who are customarily absent from church picnics and polite offices. He sat down and explained about Tomas Gi

By the time he finished Diesenhall was staring at him, gap-jawed.

"Brian… this is upsetting."

One way of describing it, Brian thought.

"I mean, wow. Do you realize how tenuous your position is here? You come to me with these complaints about Sigmund and Weil, but I don't have anything to do with them. What the Executive Action Committee does is outside the public mandate. Neither you nor I are members of that committee, Brian. And that community isn't answerable to the likes of us. You had a relationship with a woman who was apparently deeply involved with known Fourths, and for you, and I hope you realize this, the outcome could have been much worse. Questions were asked about you. About your loyalty. And I stood up for you. I was happy to do that. So now you come to me with these allegations and with this—" The photographs. "This obscenity. What do you expect me to do?"

"I don't know. Get upset. Complain. File a report."

"Really? Do you really want me to do any of that? Do you have any idea what that would mean for both of us? And do you think it would make any kind of difference? That any good would come of it? That anything would change, except for us?"

Brian thought about that. He didn't have a counter-argument. Probably Diesenhall was right.

He took a second envelope from his jacket and dropped it on Diesenhall's desktop. Diesenhall promptly recoiled, his hands scuttling back to the edge of the desk. "Christ, what's this?"

"My resignation," Brian said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The last human being they saw west of Bustee was a stout woman who was locking up a Sinopec gas station. She had already shut down the pumps, but she opened them long enough to refuel both vehicles while she lectured Dr. Dvali in a Cantonese accent about the foolishness of heading deeper into the desert. Nobody left out there, she said. Even the riggers and pipeline workers, even the hired men with no money but what they hoped to be paid, they had all gone east after the first ashfall. "It was worse out there," she said.

"Worse in what way?"

"Just worse. And the earthquakes."

"Earthquakes?"

"Little earthquakes. Damaged things. All that has to be fixed, when it's safe to come back, if."

Dr. Dvali frowned. Turk said, "We're on our way to the west coast, actually, other side of the desert."

"Stupid way to get there," the Cantonese woman said, to which Turk could only nod and shrug.

Extraterrestrial dust mixed with ordinary sand had duned against the sun-white planking of the depot. The wind came from the south, hot and dry. A talcum-powdered world, Lise thought. She thought of what Turk had said about the west coast, the other side of the desert. She imagined waves breaking on a beach, a few adventurous fishing trawlers anchored in some natural harbor. Rainfall and gree