Axis

"What do you think it is?" Lise asked.

Dr. Dvali's face was bathed in the reflected colors. He said, a little breathlessly, "I think we're as close as anyone has come to seeing the face of the Hypothetical"

Turk said, "So what are they doing out there?"

But even Dr. Dvali couldn't answer that question.

Come dawn, it was apparent that they had been lucky.

Most of the north wing of the building had collapsed. Corridors ended in masses of rubble or open air. If we'd turned left instead of right, Turk thought, we'd be buried in there.

As soon as there was enough light to navigate they made their way downstairs. The structure wouldn't survive another shaking—"And we need to find Isaac," Dvali said.

But Turk was a little uncertain about how to proceed, because another thing was obvious by daylight: the situation on the ground had changed.

Where there had been desert, there was a forest.

Or something like a forest.

Dvali was limping conspicuously by the time they descended the stairwell to the door at the intact end of the building, though he refused to stop and rest. It was essential, he said, that they find Isaac and the others. "The others" being a sort of footnote in Dvali's mind, Lise suspected. For Dvali there was only Isaac, Isaac and the apotheosis of the Hypotheticals, whatever that might turn out to mean.

"Go on, open it," Dvali said, waving at the door.

Lise and Turk had agreed that the most useful thing they could do was to try to reach the local mall where they had left Isaac and the Fourth women. How to get there was an open question. When Lise had looked out into the light of dawn she had seen a landscape utterly transformed—had seen what she might have called a canopy of trees, if trees were made of glossy tubes and iridescent beach balls.

And she asked the same stupid, irrepressible question: "Why? What's it for? Why now, why here?"

"We may yet find out," Dr. Dvali said.

If the past was any guide, Turk thought, the Hypothetical growths would ignore human beings (with the obvious exception of Isaac, who was only partly human)—but was that still true?

He cracked the door a narrow inch, and when nothing came rushing in he risked a look outside.

Cool air touched his face. The sulfuric stench of the ashfall was gone. So was the ash itself. It had all turned into a Technicolor forest. Compared to this, the growths in Bustee had been daffodils withering in a cold breeze. This was high summer. This was some kind of Hypothetical Eden.

He drew the door fully open and waited. Lise and Dr. Dvali crowded him from behind.

The ash had turned itself into a forest of stalks bearing globular fruit instead of leaves. The stalks, of several colors but predominantly a cyanotic blue, lofted up twenty or thirty feet into the air and were so closely spaced that a person would have to turn sideways to pass between them. The globes that comprised the canopy ranged in size from goldfish bowl to beach ball to something a man might climb inside and stand upright in without bumping his head. They pressed up against each other, gently yielding where they touched, to make a nearly solid but translucent mass. The sunlight that came through was dim and shiftingly iridescent.

Turk took a tentative step. From here he could see along the wall of the workers' barracks to the point at which it had collapsed, the three floors of the north wing pancaked into something less than one. God help us if we'd been in there, he thought. And God help Isaac and the women, wherever they might have found shelter.

The trunks (as he began to think of them) of the strange trees (though you could call them lampposts just as accurately) were rooted in the ground—where there had been pavement they had cracked and penetrated it—and Turk couldn't see far enough in any direction to really get his bearings. Everything faded, forty or fifty yards out, to a shimmering blue vagueness. To find the mall where the women and Isaac had last been seen they would have to navigate by compass and the clues directly under their feet.

"What do they live on?" Lise asked in a hushed voice. "There's no water here."

"Maybe more water than they're used to getting out where they usually grow," Turk said.

Dvali said, "Or they're using some catalytic process that doesn't need water, a completely different kind of metabolism. They must have evolved for billion of years in an environment far harsher than this."

A billion years of evolution. If that was true, Turk thought, then these things, as a species, if that word applied, were older than the human race itself.

They moved in silence through the Hypothetical forest, though it was not entirely a silent place. No wind reached them at street level, but there must have been a wind blowing, Turk guessed, because the iridescent globes that crowned the tubular trunks occasionally bumped against each other and made a gentle sound that suggested a rubber mallet on a wooden xylophone. And there was motion at ground level, too. Small blue tubes, like roots, periodically snaked between the trees, ru

Lise walked close behind him. He could hear her indrawn breath every time something rattled or fluttered in the dim and shifting light. He felt bad about that, about the fear she was enduring and whatever else she might have to endure before they were finished here. He turned and said, "I'm sorry I got you into this."

She wouldn't let him finish. "Do you really think you're somehow responsible for what happened?"

"For taking you on this half-assed trip west, maybe."

"I made that choice."

Which was true. But still, Turk thought. She's here because of me. The chorus of his biography appeared to him as if conjured by the untrustworthy light: lost or purloined lovers, friends become enemies, friends damaged or killed in bar fights or shipboard accidents. See my bridges burning, he thought. See my trail of tears. He didn't want that for Lise. He didn't want to drag her beyond the boundaries of the kind of life she might still make for herself, a life in which kindness was not fleeting and there was the possibility of something more meaningful than nights sealed in the cockpit of an aircraft, months bunking below the deck of some stinking freighter, years locked in the castle of his own head while she waited for what he could not provide and grew disappointed and finally bitter.

He would find her a way out of this jungle, he thought, and then, if he could summon the requisite courage or cruelty, he would find a way to leave her.

It is a communication, Avram Dvali thought.

He thought: There is no denying it. The Hypotheticals were all around him, a small but significant fraction of the network that comprised their incomprehensibly vast intelligence. All process, the dogmatic Martian woman had said during one of their arguments, of no more significance than the flowering of club moss or periwinkles; put it together any way you liked, it was only evolution, mindless as the sea. But she was wrong. He felt it. He did not, could not, understand how these organisms grew or what nourishment they derived from the parched earth, but communication passed between, of that he was sure; they had not grown randomly, but at some precipitative signal.

He had been watching the canopy of the forest. The clustered globes shifted color constantly, and it seemed to him that each globe's color was affected by the changes in its immediate neighbors, perhaps according to some rule or set of rules, so that patterns traveled through the forest like flocks of intangible birds. This was communication in the sense that cells in the human brain communicated one with another and in concert produced the emergent phenomenon of mind. He was walking through the physical architecture, perhaps, of some great thought, a thought he could never comprehend…