Axis

"Why memory?" Sulean Moi demanded. "To what end? Isaac—what is it that remembers?"

What remembered was the thing he couldn't see, though he saw much else. Not even Jason Lawton could answer the question Sulean Moi had posed. What was happening here was only a trivial event in the network, in the mind of—of—oh, Diane, has it really grown out there among the stars, the thing you used to want so badly to believe in?

"Isaac! Can you hear me?"

He fell back into the abyss of his own thoughts.

Because Isaac remembered Jason, it was also true that Jason remembered Isaac. Jason's adult understanding of the world had been overlaid on Isaac's raw experience, and that created a kind of double vision that was deeply discomforting.

It reflected his life as in a funhouse mirror. For instance Mrs. Rebka. She was someone close to him, someone he trusted. But when Jason inspected those same memories she became cold, distant, something much less than a real mother. To Isaac, she existed in a realm beyond judgment. To Jason, she was guilty of a profound moral recklessness.

Likewise his memories of Dr. Dvali, the aloof god who had defined Isaac's world, and whom Jason perceived as an obsessive monster.

Isaac desperately wanted not to hate these people. And even the part of him that was Jason Lawton

retained some sympathy for Mrs. Rebka. She had loved Isaac, as much as she attempted to conceal it, and Isaac understood with some shame how difficult he had been to love. He had returned her studied indifference, and he hadn't been wise enough to recognize her pain and her perseverance.

He recognized it now. She hadn't spoken for more than an hour, and when Isaac went to her side and sat with her, when he looked at her with what he had begun to think of as his Hypothetical eyes, he knew why.

She had not been spared when the building collapsed during the earthquake. She was hurt—hurt inside, where it didn't show, but hurt so badly that her Fourthness was failing to repair the damage. She was bleeding internally. There was a coppery aura of blood around her. She whispered his name. Her voice was less loud than the sound of the Hypothetical digging and scratching at the rubble—which had itself grown louder over the last few hours.

"I can take you with me," Isaac said.

Sulean Moi, overhearing, said, "What do you mean?"

But Isaac's mother only nodded.

Then there was a gust of quick cool air, and the darkness was dispelled by the light of the alien forest.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Lise said, "We need to get our bearings before the sun sets."

Turk gave her a puzzled look—he had just finished helping Dr. Dvali assemble a rough shelter under the lee of a concrete loading pier, close (but not too close) to the digging trees—then he interpreted her frowning glances at Dvali and said, "Yeah, you're right, we'll do that." He asked Dvali to gather up any intact ca

So he walked with Lise back along the perimeter of the tumbled mall, steering wide of the dig, and as soon as they were out of earshot Turk said, "Get our bearings?"

She confessed that she had mainly wanted to get away from Dvali, if only briefly. "And I thought we could get above these trees and have a look around."

"How do you propose to do that?"

She showed him. At the south end of the mall there was a quadrangle of intact exterior walls where a steel fire escape was bolted in place. She had noticed it earlier in the day, she said. Turk surveyed it and decided it was sturdy enough to carry their weight, and yeah, maybe it was a good idea to look around while there was still some daylight left, if they were careful. So they climbed as far as the roof and stood on a steel mesh platform above the canopy of globes, in the simple light of the fading afternoon, and marveled at what they saw.

The view was similar to what Lise had seen this morning from the riggers' dorm, but it extended in every direction including the west—Isaac's direction, she thought dizzily—where something monstrous had grown out of the ground.

From this place above the canopy of the Dark Forest the ruins of human structures were easy to discern. The long line of the collapsed mall lay across the body of the forest like a train wreck. The building where they had sheltered last night projected from the trees like the prow of a grounded ship, and farther off she could see the silhouettes of drill rigs and cracking towers and storage. Something was burning in the oil fields: the wind scrawled a line of black smoke across the horizon. Hypothetical growths carpeted the desert in every direction, reflecting the light of the setting sun and radiating their own, a sea of dark jewels, she thought. She wondered how much mass these things must have extracted from the ash or the ground or the air in order to grow themselves, wondered if the whole inland basin of Equatoria had been hollowed out to build them. And in the west, against the glare of the sun—

"Hold on," Turk said as a brisk wind rattled the platform, but her grip on the railing was already painfully tight.

In the west, something immense had arisen. A kind of Arch.

Lise had sailed under the Arch of the Hypothetical three times: twice as an adolescent, coming to Port Magellan with her parents (and leaving without her father), and once as an adult. That Arch, awe-inspiring as it was, had been too large to be perceived as a single thing: what you saw was the nearest leg, soaring beyond the atmosphere, or the part of it that continued to reflect sunlight in the hours after dark, a silvery blaze suspended over the sea.

What she saw now was less immense—she could see all of it at once, an inverted U against the sunset—but that only made its size more starkly obvious. It must have been twenty or fifty miles high, high enough that a haze of cloud paled its uppermost curve. But at the same time it seemed delicate, almost fragile: how did it sustain its own weight? More importantly, why was it here? What was it meant to do?

An even stronger gust of wind bounced the platform and carried Turk's matted hair into his eyes. She didn't like the expression on his face as he stared at the thing in the west. For the first time since she had known him he looked lost. Lost and a little scared.

"We shouldn't stay up here," he said. "This wind."

She agreed. The view was in an unearthly way beautiful, but it was also unendurable. It implied too much. She followed him down.

They rested at the foot of the stairs, back under the canopy of globes, like mice in a mushroom patch, she thought, protected from the wind. For a moment they didn't speak.

Then Turk reached into the left-hand pocket of his grimy jeans and brought out his compass, the same military-surplus compass in a battered brass case he had been carrying the day he first flew her into the mountains. He opened the case and looked at the gently swinging needle as if to confirm its alignment. Then he reached for Lise's hand and put the compass in her palm.

"What's this for?"

"I don't know if there's an edge to this fucking forest, but if there is you'll probably need a compass to find your way out."

"So? I'll just follow you. Keep it."

"I want you to have it."

"But—"

"Come on, Lise. All the time we've been together, what did I ever give you? I'd like to give you something. It would make me happy. Just take it."

Gratefully but uneasily, she closed her hand on the chilly brass case.