Axis (36 page)

“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 connected…

“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…

“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.

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 canned food he could find among the excavated debris while he and Lise “scouted.” Dvali gave him a suspicious glare—as a Fourth he probably recognized a half-truth when he heard one—but nodded tersely and waved them away.

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.

“I was thinking about Dvali,” Lise said as they walked back to camp. She knew she shouldn’t be saying this out loud, but the combined effect of exhaustion and the twilight glitter of the forest (not entirely dark, she had to admit) and Turk’s peculiar gift had made her reckless. “About Dvali putting together his commune in the desert. Sulean Moi said there were other attempts to do the same thing, but they’d been stopped in time. Dvali must have known that, right?”

“I would guess so.”

“But it seemed like he was pretty free with his information. He took a lot of people into his confidence. Including my father.”

“Couldn’t have been too reckless or they would have caught up with him.”

“He changed his plans. That’s what he told me. He was supposed to establish his compound out on the west coast, but he changed his mind after he left the university.”

“He’s not stupid, Lise.”

“I don’t think he’s stupid. I think he’s lying. He never intended to go to the west coast. The west coast plan was bullshit. It was
designed
to be bullshit.”

“Maybe,” Turk said. “Does it matter?”

“The story was supposed to derail anyone who came after him. But do you see what that means? Dvali knew Genomic Security was looking for him, and he must have known they would come after my father. Turk, he sat not a foot away from me and told me he knew my father was principled and loyal and wouldn’t tell DGS what they wanted to know—except under extreme duress. Dvali could have warned him as soon as he heard DGS was in Port Magellan, if not before. But that’s not what he wanted to do. My father disapproved of Dvali’s project on moral grounds, so Dvali hung him out like a red flag.”

“He couldn’t have known your father would be killed.”

“But he must have known it was a possibility, and he certainly would have expected him to be tortured. If it isn’t murder it’s the next best thing.” Murder by indirection—the only kind of murder a Fourth could commit.

She didn’t know what she could do with this thought, which had begun to burn like a brushfire in her mind. Could she face Dvali again? Should she tell him what she’d guessed or pretend innocence until they escaped this place? And what then? Was there any real justice for Fourths? She thought Diane Dupree might be able to answer that question, or Sulean Moi…

If they were still alive.

“Listen,” Turk said.

All Lise could hear was the canopy of the Dark Forest rattling in the rising wind. She and Turk were back at the loading bays now, back where the creepy hedge of eyeball flowers had grown, but there wasn’t even that maddening
scratch-tap
sound, because—

Her eyes widened.

“It stopped,” Turk said.

The digging had stopped.

Avram Dvali was collecting canned food and worrying about the rising wind when the sound of digging abruptly ceased. He stood upright, chilled.

His first thought was: the boy is dead. The Hypothetical trees had stopped digging because the boy was dead. And for one long heartbeat it seemed not just an idea but a black-bordered truth. Then he thought: or they found him.

He dropped what he was holding and ran for the dig.

In his haste he almost blundered into the hedge of ocular roses. One of the tallest of them turned to inspect him, its eye as indifferent as a dark pearl. He ignored it.

He was startled by how much the digging trees had accomplished since the last time he’d looked. The spatulate roots were slow, but the sum of their groping and picking had exposed an intact wall and, beyond it, leading inside, an opening in the banked rubble.

He pushed past the ocular roses, pushed aside their fleshy stems, because somewhere in that cloistered darkness Isaac must still be alive, alive and in conversation with the forces Dvali had loved and feared ever since they embraced the Earth and stole it out of time: the Hypotheticals.

The roots of the Hypothetical trees had pulled back from the excavation they had made and lay in a motionless tangle at the entrance to the buried room. Dvali hesitated at the brink of that hole, which was just large enough to allow him to pass through, knowing it was unwise to go farther—the weight of the debris must be immense, tons of it balanced on the partially-intact ceiling with nothing to support it but a few joists and groaning timbers—and knowing at the same time that he couldn’t stop himself.