Axis

It was Turk who continued to pick his way along the border of the rubble field with grim determination, and it was Turk who finally turned and held up his palm in a stop-here gesture and said quietly, "Listen."

Lise stood still. She heard the usual flutterings of the forest, to which she had almost grown accustomed. The wind was up, and the luminous globes made their muted wooden music. But beneath that? Faintly?

A sound like scratching, a sound like digging.

Dvali said, "They're alive! They must be!"

"Let's not rush to judgment," Turk said. "Follow me and try to keep quiet."

Dvali was Fourth enough to suppress his surge of renewed optimism. The three of them walked within an arm's length of one another, Turk up front, following the sound. The digging-scratching sound grew more clearly audible with each step, and Lise's own optimism began to falter. There was something not right about that sound. The relentless gentle rhythm of it, somehow too patient to be completely human…

Then Turk made his halt gesture again and beckoned them forward to look.

There was activity at one of the fractured loading bays. But as Lise had begun to suspect, it was Hypothetical activity. A dense hedge of the growths Dvali called "ocular roses" had grown here, their petaled eyes all focused on the debris. Around them the trees had expressed a thick and writhing mat of motile roots, some sharply pointed and some flattened into spatulate blades. It was this mass of roots that was doing the digging. Surreal, Lise thought giddily, especially since the debris included not just concrete and steel and plastic but crumpled cereal boxes, milk jugs, ca

The process was so perversely methodical that she found herself wanting to laugh. Instead she stared, for what seemed like an immensely long time. If the ocular roses were aware of their presence they displayed no reaction. The patient digging went on and on. Scratching, probing, tapping, sifting…

She stifled a scream when Turk suddenly put his hand on her shoulder. "We ought to back off a ways," he whispered. Which struck her as an excellent idea.

Was the sun already setting? Lise had lost her watch somewhere along the trail or back in the riggers' dorm. She hated the idea of the coming night.

As soon as they felt free to speak (but still whispering, as if the ocular roses could overhear them, and for all she knew they could) Turk said to Dvali, "I'm sorry it wasn't the women we heard—"

But Dvali was still bright-eyed with hope. "Don't you see what this means? They must be alive under there—Isaac, at least, must be alive!"

Because it was Isaac the Hypotheticals wanted. These growths might not be sentient, singly or collectively, but they knew something of their own had been separated from them by rock and ruin.

They wanted Isaac. But what would they do with him when they found him?

"We can only watch," Dr. Dvali said. "Camp here and watch until the boy comes out alive."

Comes out to meet his fate, Lise thought.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

In the darkness of the buried stockroom, Isaac struggled to cling to what was left of himself. Beyond the debris that enclosed him he could see the luminous forest, a vast meadow of light, and at the center of it the unbearably beautiful structure that had erupted from the fractured sandstone and bedrock of the desert, a thing the memory of Jason Lawton wanted to call a "temporal Arch." Inert for ten thousand years in its hibernatory sleep, caverned in rock, it had called to him from the westernmost point of the compass, and now it had broken its bonds and shaken free of the earth, and grown immensely large and powerful, and if he could only pass through these walls he would go to it. "Isaac—"

The Martian woman's voice came to him as if from far away. He tried to ignore it.

He could see the temporal Arch and he could see other things, too. He could see, unfortunately, the body of Diane Dupree. She was dead, but the not-entirely-human part of her, her Fourthness, was still faintly alive, struggling to repair her corpse, which of course it could not do. Her light guttered like a candle burned down to a puddle of wax and a final thread of wick. The part of Isaac that was Jason Lawton mourned for her.

These memories, the memories that belonged to Jason and Esh, had taken on an independent life in Isaac's mind, so much so that Isaac was afraid he might lose himself in them. I remember, he would think, but the memories were endless and only a fraction of them were his own. Even the word "I" had divided into double or triple meanings. I lived on Mars. I lived on Earth. I live in Equatoria. All these statements were true.

And he didn't want to suppress the contending memories completely, because they comforted him as much as they frightened him. Who would come with him into the vortex of the temporal Arch, if not Jason and Esh?

"Isaac, do you really know what's happening?"

Yes, he did, in part, at least.

"Then," and he registered that it was the voice of Sulean Moi, Esh's friend, Isaac's friend, "explain it to me, please."

These words had to come from Jason Lawton. He turned to Sulean, moved toward her, reached out from the darkness and took her hand as Esh or Isaac might have done, and spoke with Jason's voice:

"It's an embedded loop in the cycles and seasons of the… the Hypothetical…" Seasons, he felt the appropriateness of the word: seasons within epochal seasons, the ebb and flood of the galaxy's ocean of life… "In a… in what you might call a mature solar system, the elements of the Hypotheticals expand their mass, accumulate information, reproduce, until at some critical moment the oldest surviving specimens undergo a kind of sporulation… produce compact elisions of themselves that resemble clouds of dust or ash… and those clouds follow long elliptical orbits that intersect with planets where they gather…"

"Have they gathered here?" Sulean asked.

Here, yes, he said or thought, on this rocky planet made habitable for the potential civilization to which it had ultimately been co

"Do they know us, then?" Sulean Moi asked sharply.

Isaac was bewildered by the question, but the memory of Jason Lawton seemed to understand it. "The network processes information over light-years and centuries, but some biological civilizations survive long enough to be perceptible to it, yes, and civilizations are useful because they generate new machine life, to be absorbed and understood or, or—"

"Or devoured," Sulean Moi said.

"Or, in a sense, devoured. And civilizations generate something else that interests the network."

"What?"

"Ruins," the memory of Jason Lawton said. "They generate ruins."

Outside, beyond the walls of concrete and debris impenetrable to human vision, the ballet of memory proceeded at a quickening pace.

Memory, he told Sulean Moi, was what was happening here: ten thousand years of relentlessly gathered and shared knowledge was compressed into the spheres that made the canopy of the Hypothetical forest, information to be collated and carried forward, Isaac said, through the temporal Arch, which was opening its mouth to inhale all that knowledge: representations of the orbits and climates and evolution of local planets, of the millions of interlaced trajectories of icy cometary bodies from which the Hypothetical machines had drawn and would continue to draw their mass, of signals received from elsewhere in the galaxy and absorbed and re-emitted…