Axis

"The thing in me remembers Esh and I remember what Esh remembered. I look at you and I see both."

"Both?"

"The way you are now. And the way you were then."

Quite a contrast, Sulean imagined.

"And Esh can see me, too?"

"No, I told you, he's dead, he can't see anything. He's not here. But I know what he would say if he was here."

"And what would he say, Isaac?"

"He would say," and Isaac slipped into the Martian language again, his inflections shockingly familiar even after all these long and arduous years: "He would say, Hello, big sister."

Esh's voice, undeniably.

"And he would say…"

"What? Tell me."

"He would say, Don't be afraid."

Oh, but that I ca

"How long have you known this about him?"

Dvali had insisted on walking a short distance from the truck stop, away from the others, into the intimidating landscape that had surrounded them for days, as if the deserts of Mars had been re-created on this hotter alien world. A huge sky domed the evening emptiness, and of the works of man there was only the most tawdry.

Esh, Esh, she thought. Such a distance to come to hear his voice again. "A few weeks," she managed to say.

"Weeks! And were you pla

"There was never any information. Only a possibility."

"The significant possibility that Isaac is somehow sharing memories with your Martian experiment, this Esh—"

"Esh wasn't an experiment. He was a child, Dr. Dvali. And he was my friend."

"You're evading the issue."

"I'm evading nothing. I'm not an accessory to your work. Had it been possible, I would have prevented you from begi

"But you didn't, and you're here now. I think you should examine your own motives, Ms. Moi. I think you're here for the same reason we created Isaac. Because you've spent a lifetime trying to understand the Hypotheticals, and after—what, eighty years? Ninety?—you're no farther ahead than you were when you were young."

Certainly the Hypotheticals had never been far from her thoughts, not since they devoured Esh. An obsession, yes, maybe, but it had never influenced her judgment—had it?

As to whether she understood the Hypotheticals… "They don't exist," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"The Hypotheticals. They don't exist, not the way you imagine them. What do you picture when you think about them? Some great wise ancient presence? Beings of infinite wisdom inscrutable to our petty minds? That was the mistake the Martian Fourths made. What risk would not be justified by the possibility of conversing with God? But they don't exist! There is nothing in all the starry sky but some vast operative logic co

"If that's so," Dvali said, "then who were you just talking to?"

Sulean opened her mouth and then closed it.

That night, for the first time in many days, Lise and Turk made love. The privacy of a separate room was an instant aphrodisiac. They didn't discuss it, didn't need to discuss it; in the candlelit darkness Lise had undressed and watched Turk undress, and then she had blown out the candle and found him by the faint light of the dust-dimmed moon. He smelled rank, and so did she. It didn't matter. Here was the communication at which they always excelled. Briefly she wondered whether, elsewhere in this ruin, the Fourths could hear the creak of the bedsprings. Probably, she thought. Probably good for them if they did hear it. It might enliven their old, juiceless lives.

Turk eventually fell asleep with his arm across her ribs and she was content to lie with him in the fading glow.

At last, though, she had to shift herself out of the embrace. Despite everything, she couldn't sleep. She thought about how far they had come, and she remembered a line she had read in some old book: The thin end of nowhere, whittled down to a fine point.

The night was cold. She curled against Turk again, seeking his warmth.

She was still awake when the building began to tremble.

Diane Dupree was awake in the room she shared with Sulean Moi, Mrs. Rebka, Isaac.

She focused her attention on the sound of Isaac's breathing, thinking how strange life must have been for Isaac, raised motherless—Mrs. Rebka had been something less than a mother—and fatherless—unless you counted Dr. Dvali's sinister hoverings—but indifferent, by all accounts, to affection. A difficult, refractory child.

She had overheard a little of Sulean Moi's argument with Dr. Dvali earlier today. It had raised uneasy questions in her mind.

The Martian woman was right, of course. Dr. Dvali and Mrs. Rebka weren't scientists, studying the Hypothetical by unconventional means. They were on a pilgrimage. And at the end of it they expected something holy, something redemptive.

The same longing—years and years ago now—had carried her almost to her death. Diane had wrapped herself in her first husband's faith, and he had taken her to a religious retreat where she contracted an illness that nearly killed her. The cure had been her conversion to what the Martian Wun Ngo Wen had called the Fourth state, the adulthood beyond adulthood.

She thought she had left that longing behind her when she became a Fourth. It was as if, after the longevity treatment, something cool and methodically rational had risen up and taken control of her life. Something soothing, if a little deadening. No more reckless storming of Heaven. She had lived a steady, useful life.

Could she have been wrong, though, about how much she had left behind and how much she still carried with her, unsuspected? When the lines had intersected on the map, the triangulation of Isaac's urges, Diane had felt a familiar longing for the first time in… oh, many years.

She felt it again when she found out that Isaac could gain access to the memories of a long-dead Martian child he had never known.

The Hypotheticals had remembered Esh, Diane thought.

What else might the Hypotheticals have remembered?

Her brother Jason had died in a state of attempted communion with the Hypotheticals. Did they remember that! Did they in fact remember Jason?

And if she asked, would Isaac speak with Jason's voice?

She sat upright, almost guiltily, when the building began to tremble and shake. Fortifications breached, she thought dazedly: the walls of Heaven tumbling down.

By the time Turk managed to light a candle, the shaking had stopped.

The old Chinese lady was right, he thought. Earthquakes!

He turned back to Lise, who sat up in bed with the blanket pooled around her waist. He said, "You okay? It's just a tremor."

"Promise we won't stop," she said.

Turk blinked. Her skin by candlelight was pale, unearthly. "Stop?"

"When they get where they're going," and he understood by a toss of her head that she meant the Fourths, "we don't stop, right? We keep on heading for the west coast? Like you said?"

"Of course. What are you worried about? This was just a tremor, Lise. You lived in California, you must have felt little quakes like that."

"Because they're crazy, Turk. They sound rational, but they have this big carnival of craziness pla

Turk went to the window just to make sure the stars hadn't exploded or anything, because she was right, lunacy was on the march. But there was only the central Equatorian desert stretched out under its meager moon. That was a sight to make you feel small, he thought, that desert.