Axis

As opposed to this merciless, sun-stricken horizon.

Stupid way to get there. Well, yes, no doubt.

During the long drive, Sulean Moi watched the way Avram Dvali and A

Mrs. Rebka, the boy's mother almost despite herself, was the most attentive. Dvali was less directly involved—Isaac had begun to shrink from his touch—but his attention always circled back to the child.

Dvali was an idolater, Sulean thought. He worshipped a monstrosity. He believed Isaac held the key to—what? Not "communication with the Hypotheticals." That neat and linear goal had been abandoned long ago. A leap of cognition, an intimacy with the immense forces that had shaped the mundane and celestial worlds. Dvali wanted Isaac to be a god, or at least god-touched, and he wanted to touch the hem of his robes in turn and be enlightened.

And me, Sulean thought. What do I want with Isaac? Above all she had wanted to forestall his birth. It was to prevent such tragedies that she had left the Martian embassy in New York. She had made herself a dark, often unwelcome presence in the community of Terrestrial Fourths, subsisting on their charity while scolding them for their hubris. Don't worship the Hypotheticals: they are not gods. Don't contrive to bridge the divide between the Hypotheticals and the human: that gap ca

Twice in her wanderings on Earth she had forestalled such a project. Two rogue communities of Fourths, one in Vermont and one in rural Denmark, had been on the verge of attempting to create a hybrid child. In both cases Sulean had alerted more conservative Fourths and exerted the moral weight they accorded her as a Martian Fourth. In both cases she had succeeded in preventing tragedies. Here she had failed. She was a dozen years too late.

And yet she insisted on accompanying the child on what was no doubt his final journey, when she could have walked away and continued her work elsewhere. Why? She allowed herself to wonder whether she might be as susceptible as Dr. Dvali to the seductive lure of contact… even though she knew it was impossible and absurd.

More likely it was because the boy Isaac had spoken a few words in a language he couldn't possibly have known.

That is to say: because she was afraid of him.

"You make much of that," Turk asked, "what the lady said about earthquakes?"

He rode in the lead vehicle with Dvali, who had taken the wheel. The wind still pushed snaketrails of dust across the road, but most of the ash seemed to have been blown away—or had been absorbed into the earth, the same way that flapping thing had been absorbed into Isaac's skin.

Another day of driving and they would reach the outskirts of the oil concessions. The target they had triangulated was a couple hundred miles west of there.

"I don't disbelieve her," Dr. Dvali said evenly. "Was there anything in the news?"

Turk had been keeping Dr. Dvali's radio plugged into one ear, though reception was intermittent. They were a long way from the aerostats. "Nothing about earthquakes. But I wouldn't rule it out." He wouldn't rule out munchkins or dinosaurs, at this point. "They say it could happen again, the ashfall. You think that's possible?"

"I don't know," Dr. Dvali said. "No one knows."

Except maybe Isaac, Turk thought.

They stopped for the night at a gas-food-lodging complex that had once catered to tanker drivers but was now deserted.

There was no mystery about why it had been abandoned. Alien growths were festooned across the building's roof. These were gaudy tubular things, turned to lacework by their own decomposition. But they must once have been heavy, because pieces of the roof had collapsed under their weight. And that wasn't all: a filigree of blue tendrils had invaded the restaurant, covering everything within a few yards of the door (floor, ceiling, tables, chairs, a busboy's cart) in randomly interwoven ropes and strings. These, too, were decaying. Touch them and they turned to rancid powder.

Turk located room keys and opened doors until he found enough undamaged rooms to allow them all some welcome privacy. Turk and Lise took one room, Dvali another. Sulean Moi consented to share a suite with Diane, Mrs. Rebka, and the boy Isaac.

Sulean wasn't unhappy with the room arrangements. She couldn't bring herself to like Mrs. Rebka, but she hoped to be allowed a few moments alone with the boy.

The opportunity came that evening. Dvali summoned everyone for what he called "a community meeting." Isaac, of course, couldn't participate, and Sulean volunteered to stay with him—she had nothing to contribute to the talking, she said.

Mrs. Rebka agreed, reluctantly. As soon as she had left the room, Sulean went to the boy's bedside.

He wasn't feverish, he was even alert at times, and he could sit up, walk, take food. He had been blessedly quiet in the car, as if some of the dreadful inhuman neediness had passed from him since the flying thing attacked him. Dvali was loathe to discuss that event, since he didn't understand it, but it was the boy's first deeply personal contact with the semiliving creations of the Hypotheticals. Sulean wondered what it had felt like. Was the thing still in his body even now, had it disassembled itself into molecular fragments in order to circulate through his blood? And if so, why? Was there even a reason, or was it just another mindless tropism evolved over uncountable millions of years?

She wished she could ask Isaac. But there was only time for the most pressing questions.

She forced herself to smile at the boy. Isaac smiled back as readily as he ever had. I'm his friend, she thought. His. Martian friend. "I knew someone like you," she said, "a long time ago."

"I remember," Isaac said.

Sulean felt a fluttering in her chest.

"Do you know who I'm talking about?"

One word. "Esh."

"You know about Esh?"

Isaac nodded solemnly, his gold-flecked eyes gone distant.

"What do you know about him?"

Isaac began to tell the story of Esh's brief childhood at Bar Kea Station, and Sulean was astonished to hear the boy speaking Esh's Martian dialect again.

She felt dizzy. "Esh," she whispered.

Isaac said, in English, "He can't hear you."

"But you can hear him?"

"He can't talk, Sulean. He's dead. You know that."

Of course she knew that. She had held his dying body in her arms, sick with the knowledge that she had helped him escape to the desert, to the thing he had so desperately wanted, the same thing Isaac wanted, which was the Hypotheticals, which was death.

She said, "But you can speak in his voice."

"Because I remember him."

"You remember him?"

"That is, he—I don't know how to explain!"

The boy was becoming anxious. Sulean suppressed her own terror and forced what she hoped was a reassuring smile. "You don't have to explain. It's a mystery. I don't understand it either. Just tell me how it feels."

"I know what I am, I know what they made me to be, Dr. Dvali, Mrs. Rebka, they want me to talk to the Hypotheticals, but I can't do that. I'm sorry, but I can't. But there's something in me—" He pointed to his ribs. "And out there—" The desert. "—something that remembers a million things and Esh is only one of them, but because he's like me it remembers him to me—I mean—"

Sulean stroked the boy's head. His hair was lank and gritty. All this traveling and no water for baths. Poor child. "Please don't be upset."