Axis

Now the storm was on top of them: not just a few ominous dust-flakes anymore but a roiling front that came out of the desert with shocking speed and solidity. It broke before Diane could say another word, and as quick as that they were engulfed in it, choking in it.

Literally choking. She gagged, and even Isaac fell silent as soon as he drew a deep breath full of the dust. All light faded and the air became impenetrably dark and dense. Diane spat out a gagging mouthful of foulness and managed to shout, "We have to take him inside!"

Had Mrs. Rebka heard? Had Sulean? Evidently she had; Sulean, little more than a dimly-perceptible shape, helped Diane lift the boy and take him from the car into the grocery store, while Mrs. Rebka followed, her hand on Diane's back.

Being inside the store wasn't much improvement. The broken skylight admitted huge gusts of ash. They managed to get Isaac upright between them and he even supported his own weight as they groped for the stockroom. And found it, and closed themselves inside, in absolute darkness now, waiting for the dust to settle enough to allow a decent breath, registering how much worse this was than they had anticipated, Diane thinking: After all these years, is this where I've come to die?

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

It was obvious as soon as the storm broke that Isaac and the Fourth women had been stranded elsewhere. Because "storm" was not just an abstraction this time. This wasn't a loose fall of dust, Lise thought, like some early-autumn snow shower in Vermont. Nor was it a puzzling astrophysical phenomenon that could be swept away by morning light. If this had happened in Port Magellan the city would have been shut down for months. It was a deluge, an inundation, no less so because it was taking place in the evacuated far west, where there were few eyes to see and no one to send help.

The darkness was the worst of it. Because the expedition was divided, they had only the two flashlights from the vehicle Dvali had been driving. The flashlights were fully-charged and guaranteed (the label said) for a hundred hours, but even their cumulative power made for a dismally small zone of light in a large and stifling darkness. Turk and Dr. Dvali insisted on combing through all three stories of the residence to make sure the accessible windows were sealed against the dust. It was a scary, arduous task, an ongoing reminder of how alone they were in this hollow wind-screaming building. And even after that the ash managed to get inside, invading the inevitable chinks and gaps, spilling out of the stairwells. Particles of it hovered in the flashlight beams, and the stink infused the air, their clothes, their bodies.

Finally they settled down in a room on the third floor, with a window from which they could assess the situation outside (if morning ever came, Lise thought; if the suns light reached them ever again), and Turk opened a can of corned beef with his pocketknife and served it out on some plastic dishes he found in one of the kitchen cupboards.

Oil riggers lived like university freshmen, Lise had concluded. Angry, depressive university freshmen. Exhibits A, B, C: the empty bottles randomly scattered, the heaps of clothes abandoned in corners, the stripped mattresses and tattered paper shrines to the World's Biggest Breasts.

Dvali was talking about Isaac. He had been talking about Isaac for hours, it seemed to Lise, fretting over his absence and what this fresh starfall might mean "to his status as a communicant." It all began to sound more than slightly mad, until she was moved to ask, "If you care so much about him, couldn't you have given him a last name?"

Dvali looked sideways at her. "We raised him communally. Mrs. Rebka named him Isaac, and that seemed sufficient."

"You could have called him Isaac Hypothetical," Turk said. "Given his paternity."

"I don't find that fu

The ash was falling thicker than ever. She could see it outside the window when she pointed a flashlight that way, but only as an undifferentiated wash of glittery gray. More than in Port Magellan, she thought. More than in Bustee.

She didn't care to consider what might be growing in it.

It took a long while for the air in the poorly-sealed grocery store stockroom to settle, and it never settled completely, but eventually Diane noticed that her lungs were less painful, her throat less raw, her vertigo slowly becoming bearable.

How much time had passed since the storm began? Two hours, a dozen? She couldn't be sure. There was no sunlight anymore, in fact no light whatsoever. There hadn't been time to rescue flashlights from the vehicle, or anything else for that matter. There had only been time to search the narrow stockroom (by touch and from memory) for something to rinse the ash out of their mouths: a cache of carbonated soft drinks in plastic bottles. Warm, the liquid foamed on the tongue and mixed with the inhaled particles until it tasted like charred fla

The three women were gathered around Isaac, who lay on the concrete floor breathing noisily. Isaac had become their touchstone, Diane thought. He had sipped several times from one of the bottles, but he was feverish—a new, frightening heat baked off his skin—and since the ash-fall began he hadn't spoken or been able to speak.

We're like the witches in Macbeth, Diane thought, and Isaac is our cauldron, boiling.

"Isaac," A

Isaacs response was a stirring in his limbs, a faint murmur that might have been assent.

Diane knew they might die here, all of them. The thought wasn't extraordinarily troubling to her, though she dreaded the pain and discomfort. One of the benefits of Fourthness (and they were all Fourths in this room, even, in his way, Isaac), was this muting of the anxiety about one's death. She had lived, after all, a very long time. She carried memories of the Spinless world, the vanished Earth as she had seen it as a child and on its last night: a house, a lawn, the sky. Back when she had believed in god, a god who made sense of the world by loving it.

The god she missed, perhaps even the god Dr. Dvali had been unconsciously invoking when he created Isaac. Oh, she had seen it all before, the fractured longing for redemption: she had lived with it, lived it. It had driven her brother Jason just as it had driven Diane. Jason's obsession had not been very different from Dvali's—the difference being that Jason, in the end, had offered himself on the altar, not a child.

Isaac's breathing began to deepen and his body cooled slightly. Diane wondered about his reaction to the ashfall. The link, of course, was through the Hypothetical machines, the half-living things that generated and inhabited and arose from the fallen dust. But what did that mean, what was the point of it, what was it meant to accomplish?

She must have spoken that last aloud—her mind was still a little muddled—because Sulean Moi said, "Nothing, it's meant to accomplish nothing." Her voice was a raw croak. "That's the truth Dr. Dvali wants to deny. The Hypotheticals are comprised of a network of self-reproducing machines. That much we all more or less agree upon. But they aren't a mind, Diane. They can't talk to Isaac, not the way I'm talking to you."

"That's smug," Mrs. Rebka said from her corner of the darkness. "And not true. You talked to the dead boy, Esh, through Isaac. Wouldn't you call that communication?"

The Martian woman was silent. How strange it was to be having this conversation in the absolute darkness, Diane thought. And how Fourth of us. How would she have reacted to this predicament before her own treatment? Probably the fear would have overwhelmed her. Fear, and claustrophobia, and the steady awful sifting sound of ash (but it was so much more than ash) settling on the roof and stressing the building's beams and timbers.