Axis (18 page)

“A child like Isaac,” Mrs. Rebka said.

“In some ways like him. A boy. He was Isaac’s age when he—”

“When he died.”

“Yes.”

“Died of his… condition?”

Sulean didn’t answer immediately. She hated calling up these memories, instructive as they inevitably were. “He died in the desert.” A different desert. The Martian desert. “He was trying to find his way, but he got lost.” She closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids the world was an infinite redness, thanks to this insufferably bright sunlight. “I would have stopped you if I could. You know that. But I came too late, and you were all very clever about concealing yourselves. Now I’m as helpless as you are, Mrs. Rebka.”

“I won’t let you hurt him.” The fervor in Mrs. Rebka’s voice was as startling as the accusation.

“I wouldn’t do anything to harm him!”

“Possibly not. But I think, on some level, you’re frightened of him.”

“Mrs. Rebka, have you misunderstood so completely? Of course I’m afraid of him! Aren’t you?”

Mrs. Rebka didn’t answer, only stood up and walked slowly back into the compound.

That night Isaac was still feverish and was confined to his room. Sulean lay awake in her own room, gazing past the sand-scuffed windowpane at the stars.

At the Hypotheticals, to use that wonderfully ambiguous name bestowed upon them by English-speaking people. They had been called that even before their existence was well-established: the hypothetical entities who had enclosed the Earth in a strange temporal barrier, so that a million years might pass while a man walked his dog or a woman brushed her hair. They were a network of self-reproducing semibiological machines distributed throughout the galaxy. They intervened in human affairs, and perhaps the affairs of innumerable other sentient civilizations, for reasons not well-understood. Or for no reason at all.

She was looking at them, though they were of course invisible. They permeated the night sky. They contained worlds. They were everywhere.

Beyond that, what could one say? A network so vast it spanned a galaxy was indistinguishable from a natural force. It could not be bargained with. It could not even be spoken to. It interacted with humanity over inhuman spans of time. Its words were decades and its conversations were indistinguishable from the process of evolution.

Did it think, in any meaningful sense? Did it wonder, did it argue with itself, did it fabricate ideas and act on them? Was it an
entity,
in other words, or just a huge and complex
process?

The Martians had argued over this for centuries. Sulean had spent much of her childhood listening to elderly Fourths debate the question. Sulean didn’t have a conclusive answer—no one did—but her suspicion was that the Hypotheticals had no center, no operative intelligence. They did complex, unpredictable things-—but so did evolution. Evolution had produced vastly complex and interdependent biological systems without any central direction. Once self-reproducing machines had been unleashed on the galaxy (by some long lost ancient species, perhaps, long before Earth or Mars had condensed from stellar dust), they had been subject to the same inexorable logic of competition and mutation. What might that not have bred, over billions of years? Machines of immense scale and power, semi-autonomous, “intelligent” in a certain sense—the Arch, the temporal barrier that had surrounded the Earth—all that, yes. But a central motivating consciousness? A mind? Sulean had come to doubt it. The Hypotheticals were not one entity. They were just what happened when the logic of self-reproduction engulfed the vastnesses of space.

The dust of ancient machines had fallen on the desert, and from that dust had grown strange, abortive fragments. A wheel, a hollow tube, a rose with a coal-dark eye. And Isaac was interested in the west, the far west. What did that mean? Did it have a discernible meaning?

It meant, Sulean thought, that Isaac was being sacrificed to a force as mindless and indifferent as the wind.

In the morning Mrs. Rebka allowed Sulean to visit the boy’s room. “You’ll see,” she said grimly, “why we’re all so concerned.”

Isaac was limp under a tangle of blankets. His eyes were closed. Sulean touched his forehead and felt the radiant heat of fever.

“Isaac,” she sighed, as much to herself as to the boy. His pale inertness provoked too many memories. There had been another boy, yes, another fever, another desert.

“The rose,” Isaac said, startling her.

“What’s that?” she said.

“I remember the rose. And the rose, the rose remembers.”

As if asleep, eyes still shut, he pulled himself into a sitting position, his pillow compressed under the small of his back and his head knocking the backboard of the bed. His hair was lank with sweat. How immortal human beings seem when they can walk, run, jump, Sulean thought. And how fragile when they can’t.

Then the boy did something that shocked even Sulean.

He opened his eyes and the irises were newly discolored, as if their pale uniform blue had been spattered with gold paint. He looked at her directly and he smiled.

Then he spoke, and he spoke a language Sulean had not heard for decades, a Martian dialect from the sparsely inhabited southern wastes.

He said, “It’s you, big sister! Where have you been?”

Then, just as quickly, he slept again, and Sulean was left shivering in the terrible echo of his words.

The next morning a helicopter flew low over the Minang village, and while that might have been innocuous—logging companies had been surveying these hills for the past couple of months—it unsettled the villagers and caused
Ibu
Diane to suggest that they move quickly. Staying was riskier than leaving, she said.

“Where are we going?” Lise asked.

“Over the mountains. Kubelick’s Grave. Turk will fly us there, won’t you, Turk?”

He appeared to think about it. “I might need a crowbar,” he said, cryptically. “But yeah.”

“We’ll take one of the village cars back to the city,”
Ibu
Diane said. “Something inconspicuous. The car you came in is a liability. I’ll ask one of the villagers to drive it up the coast road and leave it somewhere.”

“Do I get it back when all this is finished?”

“I doubt it.”

“Well, that figures,” Turk said.

The authorities had ways of tracking people in whom they were interested, Lise knew. Tiny RF tags could be planted on a vehicle or even in an item of clothing. And there were more arcane, even subtler devices available. The Minang villager who drove their car north also took with him their clothing and other possessions. Lise changed into a floral-print blouse and muslin pants from the village store, Turk into a pair of jeans and a white shirt. Both of them showered in
Ibu
Diane’s clinic. “Be especially careful of your hair,” Diane had instructed them. “Things can be hidden in hair.”

Feeling simultaneously purified and paranoid, Lise climbed into the rust-spackled vehicle Diane had arranged for them to drive. Turk took the drivers seat, Lise buckled in next to him, and they waited while Diane said goodbye to a dozen villagers who had gathered around her.

“Popular woman,” Lise observed.

“She’s known in every village up the north coast,” Turk said. “She moves between a whole bunch of these communities, expat Malays and Tamils and Minang, season by season, helping out. They all keep a place for her and they’re all protective of her.”

“They know she’s a Fourth?”

“Sure. And she’s not the only one. A bunch of these village elders are more elderly than you might think.”

The world was changing, Lise thought, and no amount of rhetoric about the sanctity of the human genome was going to stop it. She pictured herself trying to communicate that truth to Brian. A truth he would no doubt refuse or deny. Brian was adept at patching cracks in the foundation of his faith in the good works of Genomic Security. But the cracks kept coming. The edifice trembled.

Ibu
Diane Dupree levered herself into the car with elaborate caution and fastened her threadbare seat belt. Turk drove slowly, and the crowd of villagers followed for a few yards, filling the narrow street.

“They don’t like to see me go,” Diane said. “They’re afraid I might not come back.”

Lise shrank a little every time they passed another vehicle, but Turk drove cheerfully once they were back on the paved roads, a cloth cap pulled low over his eyes, humming to himself.
Ibu
Diane sat patiently, watching the world scroll past.

Lise decided to break Diane’s silence. She turned her head and said, “Tell me about Avram Dvali.”

“It might be easier if you told me what you already know.”

“Well—he taught at the American University, but he was secretive and not especially well-liked by the faculty. He left his teaching position without an explanation less than a year before my father vanished. Someone at the chancery office told me his last paycheck had been forward by letter mail to a box address in Kubelick’s Grave. According to my mother,” at least on the rare and emotionally difficult occasions when Lise had pressed her to talk about the past, “he visited the house several times before he quit his job. There’s no listed address for him in Kubelick’s Grave, but a search on his name didn’t turn up any contemporary address, anywhere. I meant to go to Kubelick’s Grave and see if the box address still worked or if there was any record of who had rented it. But it seemed like a long shot.”

“You were very close to something you didn’t understand. I’m not surprised Genomic Security took an interest in you.”

“So Dvali was involved in one of these communicant cults.”

“Not
involved
in it. It was
his
. He created it.”

Dvali, she said, had taken his Fourth treatment in New Delhi years before he emigrated to the New World. “I met him not long after he was hired by the university. There are literally thousands of Fourths in the area around Port Magellan—not including those who choose to live out their extended lives quietly and in isolation. Some of us are more organized than others. We don’t hold conventions, for obvious reasons, but I meet most of the known Fourths, sooner or later, and I can sort out the cliques and subgroups.”

“Dvali had his own group?”

“So I gather. Like-minded people. A few of them.” She hesitated.

“We’re called Fourths, you know, because on Mars the treatment is equivalent to entering a fourth stage of life, an adulthood beyond adulthood. But the treatment doesn’t guarantee any special maturity. That’s built into the institutions surrounding it as much as into the treatment itself. Avram Dvali brought his own obsession into his Fourthness.”

“What obsession?”

“With the Hypothetical. With the transcendent forces of the universe. Some people chafe at their humanity. They want to be redeemed by something larger than themselves, to ratify their sense of their own unique value. They want to touch God. The paradox of Fourthness is that it’s a magnet for such people. We try to contain them, but—” She shrugged. “We don’t have the tools the Martians put in place.”

“So he organized around the idea of creating a, a—”

“A communicant, a human interface with the Hypotheticals. He was very serious about it. He recruited his group from among our community and then did his best to seal them away from us. They became much more secretive once the process was underway.”

“You couldn’t stop him?”

“We tried, of course. Dvali’s project wasn’t the first such attempt. In the past, the intervention of other Fourths was enough to quell the effort—abetted, when necessary, by Sulean Moi, whose authority among
most
Fourths is unquestionable. But Dr. Dvali was immune to moral suasion, and by the time Sulean Moi arrived, he and his group were in hiding. We’ve had very sporadic contact with them since—too little and too late to stop them.”

“You mean there’s a child?”

“Yes. His name, I’m told, is Isaac. He would be twelve years old by now.”

“My father disappeared twelve years ago. You think he might have joined this group?”

“No—from your description of him and my knowledge of Dvali’s recruiting, no, I’m sorry, he’s not among them.”

“Then maybe he knew something dangerous about them—maybe they abducted him.”

“As Fourths we’re inhibited against that kind of violence. What you’re suggesting isn’t
impossible,
but it’s extremely unlikely. I’ve never heard even a rumor that Dvali was capable of such a thing. If anything like that happened to your father, it was more likely the work of Genomic Security. They were sniffing at Dvali’s heels even then.”

“Why would DGS kidnap my father?”

“Presumably to interrogate him. If he resisted—” Diane shrugged unhappily.

“Why would he resist?”

“I don’t know. I never met your father. I can’t answer that.”

“They interrogated him and then, what, killed him?”

“I don’t know.”

Turk said, “They have what they call Executive Action Committees in DGS, Lise. They write their own legal ticket and they do what they want. I’m pretty sure that’s who took Tomas Ginn. Tomas is a Fourth, and Fourths are notoriously hard to interrogate—they’re not especially afraid of death and they have a high tolerance to pain. Getting any information out of a stubborn Fourth means putting him through a process that’s usually, in the end, fatal.”

“They killed Tomas?”

“I expect so. Or transported him to some secret prison to kill him a little more slowly.”

Could Brian have known about this, learned about it at work? Lise had a brief but horrifying vision of the DGS staff at the consulate laughing at her, at her naive quest to uncover the truth about her father. She had been walking over an abyss on a skin of thin ice, nothing to protect her but her own ignorance.

But—no. As an institution, Genomic Security might be capable of that; Brian was not. Unhappy as she had been in her marriage, she knew Brian intimately. Brian was many things. But he was not a murderer.