Axis

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Before he could say anything more—in Martian or in English—the boy Isaac stopped speaking and fell into a sleep from which he could not be aroused. The Fourths continued to tend to his needs but were unable to treat or diagnose his condition. His vital signs were stable and he seemed to be in no immediate danger.

Sulean Moi sat with the child in his room as the sun shone on the desert beyond the window, clocking shadows across the alkaline grit. Two days passed. One morning, as occasionally happened this time of year, a storm blew out of the mountains, a shelf of coal-black clouds that produced much lightning and thunder but only a little rain. By sunset the storm had gone and the sky in its wake was a radiant, purified turquoise. The air smelled fresh and astringent. Still the boy slept.

Out in the western wastes spindly plants were provoked by the brief rain to flower. Perhaps other things, too, bloomed in the emptiness. Things like Isaac's ocular rose.

Outwardly calm, Sulean was terrified.

The boy had spoken with Esh's voice.

She wondered if this was what religious texts meant when they talked about trembling in the presence of God. The Hypothetical weren't gods—if she understood what that simple but strangely elastic word meant—but they were just as powerful and just as inscrutable. She didn't believe they possessed conscious intent, and even the word "they" was a misnomer, a crude anthropomorphism. But when "they" manifested themselves, the natural human response was to cower and hide—the instinctive reaction of the rabbit to the fox, the fox to the hunter.

Twice in a lifetime, Sulean thought: that's my special burden, to witness this twice in a lifetime.

At times she napped in the chair next to the bed where Isaac lay, his chest rising and falling with the cadence of his breath. Often she dreamed—more fiercely and deeply than she had dreamed since she was a child—and in her dreams she was in a different desert, where the horizon was close and the sky a dark and penetrating blue. In this desert there were rocks and sand and also a number of brightly-colored tubular or angular growths, like a madman's hallucinations come to life. And of course there was the boy. Not Isaac. The other boy, the first one. He was more frail than Isaac, his skin was darker, but his eyes, like Isaac's, had become gold-flecked and strange. He was lying where he had fallen in a stupor of exhaustion, and although Sulean was in the company of a number of grown men she was the first who dared approach him.

The boy opened his eyes. He could not otherwise move, because his legs, arms, and torso had been bound with pliant ropes or vines. The strange growths had pinned him there, and some of them had pierced his body.

Surely he must be dead. How could anyone survive such an impalement?

But he opened his eyes. He opened his eyes and whispered, "Sulean —''

She woke in the chair next to Isaac's bed, sweating in the dry heat. Mrs. Rebka had come into the room and was staring at her.

"We're having a meeting in the common room," Mrs. Rebka said. "We would like you to be there, Ms. Moi."

"All right Yes."

"Has his condition changed?"

"No," Sulean said. Thinking: Not yet.

It wasn't really a coma. It was only sleep, though a profound one that lasted many days. Isaac woke from it that evening, and when he did, he was alone in his room.

He felt… different.

More alert than usual: not only awake but more awake than he had ever been. His vision seemed sharper and more focused. He felt as if he could count the dust motes in the air, if he wanted, even though there was only the light of his bedside lamp to see by.

He wanted to go west. He felt the attraction of what was out there, although there was no word for it, no word he knew. A presence, rising; and it wanted him, and he wanted it, with an urgency akin to love or lust.

But he wouldn't leave the compound, not tonight. Isaac's first and purely instinctive long walk had come to nothing—apart from the discovery of the rose—and there was no use repeating it. Not until he was stronger. Still, he did need to get away from the narrow confinement of his room. To smell the air and feel it on his skin.

He stood, dressed, and walked downstairs past the closed doors of the large central room from which emanated the solemn voices of adults. He went out to the courtyard. A guard had been posted at the far gate, presumably to keep him from wandering away again. But he stayed on the other side of the houses, in the walled garden.

The air was cool tonight and the garden was lush. He stepped in among the plants, following the gardener's cobbled path. The night-blooming succulents had put out blossoms, richly colorful even in the faint moonlight.

Other things, small things, stirred in the soil where the ash had been driven down by the rain.

Isaac put his hand palm-down on a bare patch of earth. The soil was warm, retaining what it had conserved of the day's heat.

Overhead, the stars were crystal-bright. Isaac looked a long time at the stars. They were symbols hovering on the brink of intelligibility, letters that made words that made sentences he could almost (not quite) read.

Something touched his hand where it rested on the rich garden loam, and Isaac looked down again. When he pulled his hand away he saw the earth swell and crumble minutely—a worm, he thought; but it wasn't a worm. It wasn't anything he had ever seen before. It shrugged itself slowly from the soil like a knuckled, fleshy finger. Maybe some kind of root, but it grew too quickly to be natural. It extended itself toward Isaac's hand as if it sensed his warmth.

He wasn't afraid of it. Well, no, that wasn't true. Part of him was afraid of it, almost paralyzed with terror. The everyday part of him wanted to recoil and run back to the safety of his room. But above and enclosing the everyday part of him was this new sense of himself, bold and confident, and to the new Isaac the pale green finger wasn't frightening or even unfamiliar. He recognized it, although he couldn't name it.

He allowed it to touch him. Slowly, the green finger encircled his wrist. Isaac drew a curious strength from it, and it from him, he suspected, and he looked back at the sky where the stars which were suns glimmered brightly. Now each star seemed as familiar as a face, each with its own color and weight and distance and identity, known but not named. And like an animal scenting the air, he faced once more to the west.

Two things were obvious to Sulean as she entered the common room. One was that much discussion had taken place in her absence—she had been called here to testify, not to deliberate.

The second obvious thing was an atmosphere of collective sadness, almost mourning, as if these people understood that the life they had created for themselves was coming to an end. And that was no doubt true. This community couldn't exist much longer. It had been created for the purpose of birthing and nurturing Isaac, and that process would soon be finished… one way or another.

The majority of these people must have been born before the Spin, Sulean thought. Like other Terrestrial Fourths, a large percentage of them had come from the academic community, but not all; there were technicians who helped maintain the cryogenic incubators; there was a mechanic, a gardener. Like Martian Fourths, these people had separated themselves from the general community. They were not like the Fourths among whom Sulean had been raised… but they were Fourths; they stank of Fourthness. So glum, so self-important, so blind to their own arrogance.

Avram Dvali, of course, was chairing the meeting. He waved Sulean to a chair at the front of the room. "We'd like you to explain a few things, Ms. Moi, before the crisis proceeds any further."

Sulean sat primly erect. "Of course I'm happy to help in any way I can."

Mrs. Rebka, who sat at Dr. Dvali's right at the head table, gave her a sharply skeptical look. "I hope that's true. You know, when we took on the task of raising Isaac thirteen years ago we faced some opposition—"

" Raising him, Mrs. Rebka, or creating him?"

Mrs. Rebka ignored the remark. "Opposition from other members of the Fourth community. We acted on convictions not everyone shared. We know we're a minority, a minority within a minority. And we knew you were out there, Ms. Moi, doing whatever work you do for the Martians. We knew you might eventually find us, and we were prepared to be frank and open with you. We respect your connection to a community far older than our own."

"Thank you," Sulean said, not concealing her own skepticism.

"But we had hoped you would be as frank with us as we were with you."

"If you have a question, please ask it."

"The procedure that created Isaac has been attempted before."

"It has been," Sulean admitted, "yes."

"And is it true that you have some personal experience of that?"

This time she wasn't quite so quick to answer. "Yes." The story of her upbringing had circulated widely among the Terrestrial Fourths.

"Would you share that experience with us?"

"If I'm reluctant to talk about it, the reasons are largely personal. The memory isn't pleasant."

"Nevertheless," Mrs. Rebka said.

Sulean closed her eyes. She didn't want to recall these events. The memory came to her, unbidden, all too often. But Mrs. Rebka was right, as much as Sulean hated to admit it. The time had come.

The boy.

The boy in the desert. The boy in the Martian desert.

The boy had died in the dry southern province of Bar Kea, some distance from the biological research station where he had been born and where he had lived all his life.

Sulean was the same age as the boy. She had not been born at the Bar Kea Desert Station but she could remember no other home. Her life before Bar Kea was little more than a story she had been told by her teachers: a story about a girl who had been washed away, along with her family, by a flood along the Paia River, and who had been rescued from the intake filter of a dam three miles downstream. Her parents had died and the small girl, this unremembered Sulean, had been so grievously wounded that she could only be saved by profound biotechnical intervention.

Specifically, the child Sulean had to be rebuilt using the same process that was used to extend life and create Fourths.

The treatment was more or less successful. Her damaged body and brain were reconstructed according to templates written in her DNA. For obvious reasons, she remembered nothing of her life before the accident. Her salvation was a second birth, and Sulean had relearned the world the way an infant learns it, acquiring language a second time and crawling before she took her first (or second) tentative steps.

But there was a drawback to the treatment, which was why it was so rarely used as a medical intervention. It conferred its customary longevity, but it also interrupted the natural cycle of her life. At puberty, every Martian child developed the deep wrinkles that made Martians appear so distinctive to Terrestrials. But that didn't happen to Sulean. She remained, by Martian standards, sexless and grotesquely smooth-skinned, an overgrown infant. When she looked in a mirror, even today, Sulean was inevitably reminded of something pink and unformed: a grub writhing in a rotten stump. To protect her from humiliation she had been sheltered and nurtured by the Fourths who saved her life, the Fourths of Bar Kea Desert Station. At the Station she had a hundred indulgent, caring parents, and she had the dry hills of Bar Kea for a playground.

The only other child at the Station was the boy named Esh.

They had not given him any other name, only Esh.

Esh had been built to communicate with the Hypotheticals, though it seemed to Sulean he could barely communicate even with the people around him. Even with Sulean, whose company he obviously enjoyed, he seldom spoke more than a few words. Esh was kept apart, and Sulean was allowed to see him only at appointed times.

Nevertheless she was his friend. It didn't matter to Sulean that the boy's nervous system was supposedly receptive to the obscure signals of alien beings, any more than it mattered to Esh that she was as pink as a stillborn fetus. Their uniquenesses made them alike and had thus become irrelevant.

The Fourths at Bar Kea Desert Station encouraged the friendship. They had been disappointed by Esh's refractory silences and his outward display of dull-normal intelligence. He was studious but incurious. He sat wide-eyed in the classrooms the adults had designed for him, and he absorbed a reasonable amount of information, but he was indifferent to it all. The sky was full of stars and the desert was full of sand, but stars and sand might have traded places for all it mattered to Esh. Whether he spoke to the Hypotheticals, or they to him, no one could say. He was stubbornly silent on the subject.

Esh was at his liveliest when he was alone with Sulean. They were allowed to leave the station on certain days to explore the nearby desert. They were supervised, of course—an adult was always within sight—but compared to the closeted spaces of the Station this was wild freedom. Bar Kea was formidably dry, but the scarce spring rains sometimes pooled among the rocks, and Sulean delighted in the small creatures that swam in these short-lived ponds. There were tiny fish that encased themselves in hibematory cysts, like seeds, when the water dried, and sprang back to life during the rare rains. She liked to cup the populated water in her hands, Esh watching with silent wonder as the wriggling things slipped between her fingers.

Esh never asked questions, but Sulean pretended he did. At the Station she was always being taught, always being encouraged to listen; alone with Esh she became the teacher, he the rapt and silent audience. Often she would explain to him what she had learned that day or week.

People had not always lived on Mars, she told him one day as they wandered among sunlit, dusty rocks. Years and centuries ago their ancestors had come from Earth, a planet closer to the sun. You couldn't see Earth directly, because the Hypotheticals had enclosed it in a lightless barrier—but you knew it was there, because it had a moon that circled it.

She mentioned the Hypotheticals (called by Martians Ab-ashken, a word compounded of the root-words for "powerful" and "remote"), cautiously at first, wondering how Esh would react. She knew he was part Hypothetical himself and she didn't want to offend him. But the name provoked no special response, only his usual blank indifference. So Sulean was free to lecture, imagine, dream. Even then the Hypotheticals had fascinated her.

They live among the stars, as far as anyone knows, she told the boy.

Esh, of course, said nothing in return.

They're not exactly animals, they're more like machines, but they grow and reproduce themselves.

They do things for no apparent reason, she told him. They put the Earth inside a slow-time bubble millions of years ago, but no one knows why.

No one has talked to them, she said, unless you have, I suppose, and no one has seen them. But pieces of them fall out of the sky from time to time, and strange things happen…

Pieces of them fall from the sky: this last piece of information caused considerable consternation among Dr. Dvali's Fourths.

Dvali cleared his throat and said, "There's nothing about such an event in the Martian Archives."

"No," Sulean admitted. "Nor did we ever mention it in direct communication with the Earth. Even on Mars it's a rare occurrence—something that happens once every two or three hundred years."

Mrs. Rebka said, "Excuse me, but what happens? I don't understand."

"The Hypotheticals exist in a kind of ecology, Mrs. Rebka. They bloom, flourish, and die back, only to repeat the cycle again, over and over."

"By the Hypotheticals," Dr. Dvali said, "I presume you mean their machines."

"That may not be a meaningful distinction. There's no evidence that their self-reproducing machines are under the control of anything but their own networked intelligence and their own contingent evolution.

Naturally, the detritus of their lives circulates through the solar system. Periodically the debris is captured by the gravitation of an inner planet."

"Why haven't these things fallen on the Earth?"

"Before the Spin the Earth existed in a much younger solar system Five billion years ago the Hypotheticals had barely established themselves in the Kuiper Belt. If their machines did occasionally enter the Earths atmosphere it would have been an isolated, rare event. There are enough reports of hovering lights or strange aerial objects to suggest that perhaps it did happen, now and then, though no one recognized it as such. When the Spin barrier was put in place it excluded any such fall-through, and even now the Earth is protected from the excessive radiation of the sun by a different kind of membrane. Mars, for good or ill, is more exposed. Martians didn't arrive in the modern day as strangers, Dr. Dvali. We've grown and evolved for millennia with the knowledge that the Hypotheticals exist and that the solar system is, in effect, their property."

"The ash that fell on us," Mrs. Rebka said, her voice throaty with a kind of hostile urgency, "was that the same phenomenon?"

"Presumably. And the growths in the desert. It's only natural to assume that this solar system has also hosted Hypotheticals for countless centuries. The annual meteor showers are more likely their detritus than the simple remains of ancient rocks. The ashfall was just a particularly dense example, perhaps from a recent exfoliation. As if we had passed through a cloud of, of—"

"Of their discarded cells," Dr. Dvali said.

"Cells, in a sense, shed, perhaps discarded, but not necessarily inert or entirely dead. Some partial metabolism persists." Hence the ocular rose and the other abortive, short-lived growths.

"Your people must have studied these remains."

"Oh yes," Sulean said. "In fact we cultivated them. Much of our biological technology was derived from the study of them. Even the longevity treatment is remotely derived from Hypothetical sources. Most of our pharmaceuticals entail some element of Hypothetical technology—that's why we grow them at cryogenic temperatures, simulating the outer solar system."

"And the Martian boy—and Isaac as well, I suppose—"

"The treatment they received is much more closely related to the raw matter of Hypothetical devices. I suppose you thought it was some purely human pharmaceutical? Another example of marvelous Martian biotech? And in a sense it is. But it's something more, too. Something inhuman, inherently uncontrollable."

"And yet Wun Ngo Wen brought the seed stock to Earth."

"If Wun had discovered the older, wiser culture we all assumed must exist on Earth, I'm sure he would have been frank about the origins of it. But he found something quite different, unfortunately. He entrusted many of our secrets to Jason Lawton, who rashly experimented on himself—and Jason Lawton circulated the secrets to people he trusted, who proved no more prudent."

Sulean was aware of the shock in the room. These were names, Wun Ngo Wen and Jason Lawton, reverently spoken among Terrestrial Fourths. But they were mortal men, after all. Susceptible to doubt, fear, greed, and hasty decisions repented at leisure.

"Still," Dr. Dvali said at last, "your people could have told us—"

"These are Fourth things!" Sulean was surprised by the vehemence in her own voice. "You don't understand. It's not zuret—" She couldn't exactly translate the word and all its nuances. "It's not correct, it's not proper, to share them with the unaltered. The unaltered don't want to know; these things are for the very old to worry about; by accepting the burden of longevity they accept this burden too. But I would have shared them with you, Dr. Dvali, before you began this project, if you hadn't hidden yourself so well."

But the people she was addressing, born in the raucous jungle that was Earth, couldn't be expected to understand. Even their Fourthness was alien. The last estate of life, the elective decades, meant nothing more to them than a few more years in which to draw breath. On Mars all Fourths were ritually separated from the rest of the population. When you entered the Fourth Age—unless you entered it, as Sulean had, under exceptional circumstances—you accepted its constraints and agreed to live according to its cloistered traditions. The Terrestrial Fourths had attempted to re-create some of those traditions, and this group had even withdrawn to a kind of desert sanctuary, but it wasn't the same… they didn't understand the burden of it; they hadn't been initiated into the sacral knowledge.

They lacked, perversely, the terrible dry monasticism of the Martian Fourths. It was what Sulean had hated about the Fourths who raised her. On Mars the Fourths moved as if through the invisible corridors of some ancient labyrinth. They had traded joy for a dusty gravitas. But even that was better than this anarchic recklessness—all the vices of terrestrial humanity, needlessly prolonged.

Dr. Dvali, perhaps sensing her agitation, said, "But what about the child? Tell us what happened to Esh, Ms. Moi."

What happened to the boy was both simple and terrible. It began with an infall of Hypothetical debris from the outer system.

This was not entirely unexpected. Martian astronomers had tracked the movement of the dust cloud for days before its arrival. There was some general excitement about the event. Sulean had been granted permission to climb the stairs to a high parapet of Bar Kea Desert Station, which had served as a fortress in the last of the wars five hundred years ago, to watch the fiery infall.

There had been no such event in two lifetimes, and Sulean wasn't the only one who climbed up on the walls to watch. Bar Kea Station had been built with its back to the spine of the Omod Mountains, and the dry southern plains, where much of the debris would fall, stretched roadless and mysterious in the starlight. That night the sky was shot through with falling stars like threaded fire, and Sulean stared at the show with rapt attention until an unwelcome sleepiness overcame her and one of her minders put a hand on her shoulder and escorted her back to bed.

Esh had come up to the parapet too, and although he watched the green and golden glow of the infalling debris he betrayed no reaction.

Back in bed Sulean found her sleepiness had evaporated. She lay awake for a long time thinking of what she had seen. She thought about the accumulated debris of Ab-ashken devices, things that ate ice and rock and lived and died over the course of long millennia in lonely places far from the sun, the remnants of them burning as they fell through the atmosphere. In some of these events enough of the debris had survived that it began a kind of abortive new life—the history books described curious growths of an incomplete and oddly mechanical nature, unsuited to the heat and (to them) corrosive air of this planet. Would that happen again? If so, would she witness it? Astronomers said the bulk of the material would fall not terribly far from Bar Kea Station. Fascinated as she was by the Hypotheticals, Sulean longed to see a living example.

So, apparently, did Esh.

There was considerable excitement in the station the next morning. Esh was in an agitated state—had cried for the first time since infancy, and one of his tenders had found him knocking his head against the southern wall of his sleeping chamber. Some invisible influence had shattered his customary complacency.

Sulean wanted to see him—demanded to be allowed to see him, when she heard the news—but she was refused, for days on end. Doctors were called in to examine Esh. The boy slipped in and out of fevers and deep, impenetrable sleeps. Whenever he was awake he demanded to be allowed to go outside.

He had stopped eating, and by the time Sulean was allowed into his chamber she hardly recognized him. Esh had been chubby, round-cheeked, young for his age. Now he had grown gaunt, and his eyes, strangely flecked with gold, had retreated into the bony contours of his skull.

She asked him what was wrong, not expecting an answer, but he startled her by saying, "I want to go see them."

"What? Who? Who do you want to see?"

"The Ab-ashken."

The boy's timid voice made the word sound even stranger than it otherwise might have. Sulean felt a chill creep up from the small of her spine to the crown of her head.

"What do you mean, you want to go see them?"

"Out in the desert," Esh said.

"There's nothing out there."

"Yes, there is. The Ab-ashken."

Then he began to cry, and Sulean had to leave the room. The nurse who had been attending Esh followed her into the corridor and said. "He's been asking for days to leave the building. But this is the first time he mentioned the Ab-ashken."

Were they really out there, the Hypotheticals, the Ab-ashken, or at least the fragmentary remains of them? Sulean posed the question to one of her caretakers, a fragile elder who had been an astronomer before he became a Fourth. Yes, he said, there had been some activity to the south, and he showed her a set of aerial photographs that had been taken over the previous few days.

Here was a wasteland not very different from the landscape beyond the gates of Bar Kea Station—sand, dust, and rocks. But cradled in a broad declivity was a clump of objects so unnatural as to defy description. Half-built, crazily incomplete things, it seemed to Sulean—brightly-colored pipes, silvered hexagonal mirrors, chambered spheres, many of these things linked to one another like the parts of an enormous, impossible insect.

"This must be where he wants to go," Sulean said.

"Possibly. But we can't allow that. The risk is too great. He might come to harm."

"He's coming to harm here. He looks like he's dying!"

Her tutor shrugged. "The decision's neither mine nor yours."

Perhaps not. But Sulean was afraid for Esh. As a friend he wasn't much, but he was all she had. He shouldn't be held captive against his will, and Sulean longed to release him. She tried to imagine how she might do that, how she might sneak into his room and smuggle him outside… but the corridors of Bar Kea Station were never empty, and Esh was always under guard.

Nor was she often allowed to see him, and Sulean's life seemed empty without his mute presence. Sometimes she walked past his room and winced when she heard him crying or shouting.

The situation remained unchanged for more endless, sunny days. Out in the wasteland, her tutor said, the Ab-ashken growths had bloomed and were beginning to wither, unsuited as they were to this environment. But Esh's frantic anxiety only increased.

Dr. Dvali said, "These growths, were they dangerous?"

"No. There was never anything more than a temporary kind of life to them."

Like hothouse flowers, Sulean thought, transplanted to the wrong climate and soil.

The last time she saw Esh alive was a day later.

Sulean was outside that morning, walking where she used to walk with him. Her minder stood at a discreet distance, mindful that Sulean was troubled and might want time to herself.

It was another sunny day. The rocks cast deep shadows across the sand. Sulean wandered aimlessly near the Station's gates, not really thinking about anything—in fact trying hard not to think about Esh—when she saw him, as startling as a mirage, squatting in the shade of a boulder looking south.

This was inexplicable. Sulean glanced back at her minder, another venerable Fourth. He had paused to rest in the shade of Bar Kea Station's southern wall. The old Fourth had not seen Esh, and Sulean did nothing to betray his presence.

She walked slowly closer, careful not to hurry and make herself conspicuous. Esh looked up plaintively from his hiding place.

She bent down as if examining a piece of shale or a scuttling sandbug and whispered, "How did you get away?"

"Don't tell," Esh demanded.

"I won't, of course I won't. But how—"

"No one was looking. I stole a robe," he added, lifting his arms in the voluminous whiteness of some larger person's desert garb. "I came over the north parapet where it touches the rock wall and climbed down."

"But what are you doing out here? It'll be dark in a couple of hours."

"I'm doing what I have to."

"You need food and water."

"I can do without."

"No you can't." Sulean insisted on giving him her water bottle, which she always carried when she left the shelter of the Station, and a bar of pressed meal she had been saving for herself.

"They'll know I'm gone," Esh said. "Don't tell them you saw me."

This was more conversation than Sulean had ever had with Esh, a comparative flood of words. She said, "I will. I mean, I won't. I won't tell anyone."

"Thank you, Sulean."

Another startling novelty: the first time he had ever said her name, maybe the first time he had said anyone's name. This wasn't just Esh crouching in the sand in front of her, this was Esh plus something else.

The Ab-ashken, Sulean thought.

The Hypotheticals were inside him, looking out through his altered eyes.

Somewhere in the Station a bell began to ring, and Sulean's sleepy minder looked alert and called her name. "Run," she whispered.

But she didn't wait to see if the boy took her advice. She turned back to the Station, pretending nothing had happened, and went to her keeper, and said nothing at all, as if the silence in which Esh had dwelt for so many years had entered her throat and stilled her voice.

"What was it he wanted?" Dvali asked. "To find the fallen artifacts, presumably—but what then?"

"I don't know," Sulean said. "I suppose like calls to like. The same instinct or programming that causes the Hypothetical replicators to cluster and share information and reproduce may have operated equally on the boy Esh. The crisis was caused by his proximity to these devices."

"As is Isaac's?" Mrs. Rebka asked.

"Possibly."

"Your people must have asked these questions."

"Without finding any answers, unfortunately."

Dvali said, "You told us the boy died."

"Yes."

"Tell us how."

Sulean thought: Must I? Must I endure this yet again?

Of course she must. Today, as every other day.

He had been gone from the Station for hours and it was well after dark when Suleans resolve broke. Frightened by the thought of Esh alone in the night, and shaken by the anxiety and alarms that ran through the Station like electricity in the absence of the boy, she sought out the man she considered the kindest of her mentors, her astronomy instructor, who used the single name Lochis. She had seen Esh this afternoon, she told him through a gush of guilty tears. When Lochis finally understood, he ordered her to stay where she was while he assembled a search party.

A group of five men and three women, all experienced in the hazards and geography of the desert, left the Station at dawn. They rode in a cart pulled by one of the Station's few large machines—large machines were a luxury on a resource-poor planet—and Sulean was allowed to ride along to point out where she had last seen Esh and perhaps to help convince him to return to the Station, should they find him.

More sophisticated machines, lighter-than-air remote viewing devices and the like, had already been sent from the nearest large city, but they wouldn't arrive for another day. Until then, Lochis told her, it would be a labor of eyesight and intuition. Fortunately Esh had not been able to conceal his tracks, and it was obvious that he was heading for the most concentrated infall of Ab-ashken remains.

As the expedition crossed a line of low hills into the low basinland of the southern desert, Sulean saw the decaying evidence of that infall. The machine-drawn cart passed close to a clump of dried and decaying… well, things, was the only word Sulean could apply to it. A wide-mouthed tube, yellowish-white and more than two people high, towered over a cluster of orbs, pyramids, and slivered mirrors. All these things had simply grown out of the pebbly desert floor and died. Or almost died. A few feathery tendrils, like enormous bird feathers, stirred feebly amidst the surrealistic rubble. Or maybe it was the faint dry wind that made them move.

Suleans first confrontation with the Hypothetical had been when she looked into Esh's altered eyes. This was her second. She shivered despite the heat and shrank back against Lochis's protective bulk.

"Don't be afraid," he said. "There's nothing dangerous here."

But she wasn't afraid, not exactly. It was a different emotion that had overtaken her. Fascination, dread—some dizzying combination of the two. Here were pieces of the Ab-ashken, fragments of things that had overgrown the stars themselves, bone and sinew from the body of a god.

"It's as if I can feel them," she whispered.

Or perhaps it was her own future she felt, bearing down on her like the waters of a swollen river.

"Again, Ms. Moi," Dr. Dvali said sternly. "How did the boy die?"

Sulean allowed a few moments to tick away in the silence of the common room. It was late. All was quiet. She imagined she could hear the sound of the desert wind pulsing in her ears.

"It was probably exhaustion that brought him to a stop. We found him at last in a small depression, invisible until we came very close. He was prostrate, barely breathing. All around him…"

She hated this image. It had haunted her all her long life.

"Go on," Dvali said.

"All around him, things had grown. He was enclosed in a sort of grove of Hypothetical remnants. They were spiky, dangerous-looking things, spears of some brittle green substance, incomplete, of course, obviously not sustainable, but still motile… still alive, if you accept that description."

"And they had surrounded him?" Mrs. Rebka asked, her voice gentler now.

"Or they had grown up around him while he slept, or he had deliberately gone to them. Some of them had… pierced him." She touched her ribs, her abdomen, to show them where.

"Killed him?"

"He was still conscious when we found him."

Sulean had torn herself away from Lochis and run thoughtlessly toward Esh, who was impaled on the picket of alien growths. She ignored the frightened voices calling her back.

Because this was her fault. She should never have helped Esh escape the Station. As unhappy as he had been there, he had at least been safe. Now something dreadful had overtaken him.

She felt no particular fear of the Ab-ashken growths, peculiar as they were. They had grown around the boy's body like a ring of sharpened fenceposts. She could smell them, although she was barely aware of it—a sharply chemical smell, sulfurous and rank. The growths were not healthy; they were mazed with cracks and fissures and in places blackened with something like rot. Their stalks shifted slightly when she moved among them, as if they were aware of her presence. And maybe they were.

They were certainly aware of Esh. Several of the tallest growths had arched into half-circles and pierced the boy with their sharpened tips. They had penetrated his chest and abdomen in three places, leaving little circles of dry blood on his clothing. Sulean couldn't tell at first whether he was dead or, somehow, still alive.

Then he opened his eyes and looked at her and—impossibly—smiled.

"Sulean," he said. "I found it."

Then he closed his eyes for the last time.

The silence in the common room was interrupted by a timid knock.

There was only one person at the commune who hadn't attended this meeting. Mrs. Rebka hurried to open the door.

Isaac stood outside, still wearing his night clothes, the knees of his pajamas soiled, his hands dirty, his expression somber.

"Someone's coming," he said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The door to Brian Gately's office opened just as a news summary popped up on his desktop. The visitor was the chubby DGS man named Weil. The press release was something about the recent ashfall.

Weil had left his sullen friend Sigmund elsewhere, and he was grinning—though his cheerfulness, under the circumstances, struck Brian as vaguely obscene.

"You forwarded this?" Brian asked, gesturing at the release.

"Read it. I'll wait."

Brian tried to focus on the document, but his mind's eye insisted on reviewing the photograph Pieter Kirchberg had sent. The corpse of Tomas Ginn on a rocky beach, much worse for wear. He wondered whether Weil had seen the photo. Or ordered the killing.

He was tempted to ask. He dared not. He blinked and read the press service release.

PORT MAGELLAN / REUTERS.ET: Scientists at the Mt. Mahdi Observatory today made the startling announcement that the recent Equatorian "ashfall," which affected the eastern coast and desert inland of that continent, was "not entirely inert."

The ashes and the microscopic structures the ash contained, believed to be the degraded remnants of Hypothetical structures from the outer reaches of the local solar system, have apparently shown signs of life.

In a joint press conference held today at the Observatory, representatives of the American University, the United Nations Geophysical Survey, and the Provisional Government displayed photographs and samples of "incompletely self-replicating and self-assembling quasi-organic objects" recovered from the western extremes of the dry inland basin that stretches from the coastal mountains to the western sea.

These objects, ranging from a pea-sized hollow sphere to an assembly of what appeared to be tubes and wires as large as a man's head, were said to be unstable in a planetary environment and hence posed no threat to human life.

"The 'space-plague' scenario is a non-starter," senior astronomer Scott Cleland said. "The infalling material was ancient and probably already corrupted by wear and tear before it entered the atmosphere. The vast majority of it was sterilized by a violent passage that left only a few nano-scale elements intact. A very few of these retained enough molecular integrity to re-initiate the process of growth. But they were designed to flourish in the extreme cold and vacuum of deep space. In a hot, oxygen-rich desert they simply can't survive for long."

Asked whether any of these structures remained active today, Dr. Cleland said, "None that we've sampled. By far the greatest number of active clusters occurred deep in the Rub al-Khali," the oil-rich far western desert. "Residents of the coastal cities are unlikely to find alien plants in their gardens."

Because harmful effects cannot be entirely ruled out, however, a loose quarantine has been established between the oil concessions and the western coast of Equatoria. This formidable terrain has attracted no substantial settlements, although tourists occasionally visit the canyonlands and the oil consortia maintain a constant presence. "Travel is being monitored and alerts have been issued," said Paul Nissom of the Provisional Government's Territorial Authority. "We want to keep out the casually curious and facilitate the work of the researchers who need to study and understand this important phenomenon."

There were a couple of further paragraphs with trivial details and contact numbers, but Brian figured he had the gist. He gave Weil a well-what-about-it look.

"Works out nicely for us," Weil said.

"What are you talking about?"

"Ordinarily the Provisional Government isn't much more than a harassed nanny. Since the ashfall, and especially this weird shit out west, they finally started paying attention to who goes where. Monitoring air traffic, especially."

There were more private planes per capita in Equatoria than anywhere back on Earth, most of them small craft, and an equally large number of casual airstrips. For years the traffic had been unregulated, ferrying passengers between bush communities or oil geologists to the desert.

"The bad news," Weil continued, "is that Turk Findley made it to his plane, along with Lise Adams and an unidentified third party. They flew out last night."

Brian felt an expanding hollowness in his chest. Some of it was jealousy. Some of it was fear for Lise, who was digging herself into deeper trouble by the hour.

"The good news," Weil said, his smile broadening, "is that we know where they went. And we're going there. And we want you to come with us."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Turk had expected to land his aircraft at a familiar strip a couple of miles outside of Kubelick's Grave, west of the foothills on the highway to the oil allotments. His plane might be confiscated if Mike Arundji had called ahead and was prepared to press charges. But that was probably inevitable anyway.

Diane surprised him, as the plane began the long glide down the western slopes of the divide toward the desert, by suggesting a different destination. "Do you remember where you took Sulean Moi?"

"More or less."

"Take us there, please."

Lise craned her head to look back at Diane. "You know where to find Dvali?"

"I've heard a few things over the years. These foothills are riddled with little Utopian communities and religious retreats of every imaginable kind. Avram Dvali disguised his compound as one of those."

"But if you knew where he was—"

"We didn't, not at first. But even a community like Dvali's is porous. People arrive, people leave. He was hidden from us when it was critical for him to hide, before the child was born."

It meant another half hour in the air. After yet more simmering silence Turk said, "I'm sorry about that phone thing back in the city. What were you doing, trying to get a message to your mom back in the States, something like that?"

"Something like that." She was pleased that he had apologized and she didn't want to make it worse by admitting she'd called Brian Gately even in an attempt to get Tomas Ginn out of custody. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Go ahead."

"How come you had to steal your own plane?"

"I owed some money to the guy who owns the airstrip. The business hasn't been going too well."

"You could have told me that."

"Didn't seem like a good way to impress a rich American divorcee."

"Hardly rich, Turk."

"Looked that way from where I stood."

"So how were you planning to get out of hock?"

"Didn't have what you could call an actual plan. Worst case, I figured I'd sell the plane and bank whatever I didn't owe and find a berth on one of those research ships that sail out past the Second Arch."

"There's nothing past the Second Arch but rocks and bad air."

"Thought I'd like to see for myself. That, or—"

"Or what?"

"Or if something worked out between you and me, I thought I'd stay in the Port and get a job. There's always pipeline work."

She was briefly startled. Also pleased.

"Not that it matters now," he added. "Once we're done here—and whether you find out anything about your father or not—you're going to have to head back to the States. You'll be okay there. You come from a respectable family and you're well-connected enough that they won't arrest and interrogate you."

"What about you?"

"I can disappear on my own terms."

"You could, you know, come back with me. Come back to the States."

"Wouldn't be safe, Lise. The trouble we're in right now isn't the first trouble I've had. There are good reasons why I can't go back."

Tell me, she thought. Don't make me ask. Do you know he's a criminal? That's why he fled the States . So tell me. She said, "Legal problems?"

"You don't want to know."

"Yeah, I do."

He was flying low across the desert, the moonlit foothills hanging off his right wing. He said, "I burned down a building. My father's warehouse."

"You told me your father was in the oil business."

"He was, at one time. But he didn't like being overseas. When we left Turkey he went into my uncle's import business. They brought in nickel-and-dime shit from Middle Eastern factories, rugs and souvenirs and things like that."

"Why'd you burn down the warehouse?"

"I was nineteen years old, Lise. I was pissed off and I wanted to do some damage to my old man."

She said as gently as possible, "How come?"

He allowed another silent moment to pass, looking at the desert, his instruments, anywhere but at her. "There was this girl I'd been seeing. We were going to get married. It was that serious. But my old man and my uncle didn't want it to happen. They were old-fashioned about, you know, race."

"You're girlfriend wasn't white?"

"Hispanic."

"Did you really care what your father thought?"

"Not at that point, no. I hated him. He was a brutal little shit, frankly. Drove my mother to her grave, in my opinion. I didn't give a fuck what he thought. But he knew that. So he didn't say a word to me. What he did was, he went to my girlfriend's family and offered to pay a year's tuition on her college education if she would stay away from me. I guess it sounded like a good deal. I never saw her again. But she felt bad enough to send me a letter and explain what happened."

"So you burned his warehouse."

"Took a couple cans of paint stripper out of the garage and went down to the industrial district and dumped it on the truck bay doors. It was after midnight. The place was three-quarters in flames by the time the fire department got there."

"So you had your revenge."

"What I didn't know was that there was a night guard in the building. He spent six months in a burn ward because of me."

Lise said nothing.

"What made it worse," Turk said, "was that my old man covered it up. Cooked up some arrangement with the insurance company. He tracked me down and told me that. How he'd taken this huge financial hit in order to save me from legal action. He said it was because I was family, that was why he did what he did about my girlfriend, because family mattered, whether I knew it or not."

"He expected you to be grateful?"

"Hard as that is to believe, yeah, I think he honestly expected me to be grateful."

"Were you?"

"No," Turk said. "I was not grateful."

He landed the Skyrex where he had landed it for Sulean Moi some months before, on a little strip of pavement that appeared to be in the middle of nowhere but was, Diane insisted, less than a mile from Dvali's compound, a hikeable distance.

They hiked, carrying flashlights.

He could smell the commune before he could see it. It smelled like water and flowers against the flat mineral essence of the desert. Then they crossed a little hill and there it was, a few lights still burning: four buildings and a courtyard, terracotta roofs like some kind of transplanted hacienda. There was a garden, and a gate, and Turk saw what looked like a young boy standing behind the ornate ironwork. As soon as the boy spotted them he ran inside, and by the time they reached the gate many more lights had come on and a crowd of ten or fifteen people was waiting for them.

"Let me talk to them," Diane said, a suggestion Turk was happy to accept. He stood a few paces back with Lise while the old woman approached the fence. Turk tried to study the crowd of Fourths, but the light was behind them and they weren't much more than silhouettes.

Diane shaded her eyes. "Mrs. Rebka?" she said abruptly.

A woman stepped out of the crowd. All Turk could see of this Mrs. Rebka was that she was a little plump and that her hair was fine and made a white halo around her head.

"Diane Dupree," the woman named Mrs. Rebka said.

"I'm afraid I've brought uninvited guests."

"And you're one yourself. What brings you here, Diane?"

"Do you have to ask?"

"I suppose not."

"Turn us away, then, or let us in. I'm tired. And I doubt we'll have much time to talk before we're disturbed again."

Isaac wanted to stay and see the visitors—unexpected visitors being as rare a phenomenon in Isaac's life as the ashfall had been—but his fever had returned and he was escorted back to bed, where he lay sleepless and sweating for several hours more.

He knew that the tendril that had reached up from the garden and touched his hand was a Hypothetical device. A biological machine. It was incomplete and unsuited to this environment, but Isaac had experienced a deep and thrilling sense of rightness as it circled his wrist. Some fraction of the unfulfilled need inside him had been briefly satisfied.

But that contact was over, and the need was worse for its absence. He wanted the western desert, and he wanted it badly. He was, of course, also afraid—afraid of the vast dry land and of what he might find there, afraid of the need that had overtaken him with such compulsive force. But it was a need that could be sated. He knew that now.

He watched the dawn as it drove the stars away, the planet turning like a flower to the sun.

Two of the Fourths escorted Lise and Turk to a dormitory room in which several bunks had been set up. The bedclothes were clean enough but had the smell of long-undisturbed linen.

The Fourths who accompanied them were aloof but seemed reasonably friendly, given the circumstances. Both were women. The younger of them said, "The bathroom is down the hall when you want it."

Lise said, "I need to talk to Dr. Dvali—will you tell him I want to see him?"

The Fourths exchanged glances. "In the morning," the younger one said.

Lise lay down on the nearest bunk. Turk stretched out on another, and almost immediately his breathing settled into long snores.

She tried to suppress her resentment.

Her head was full of thoughts, all raucous, all screaming for attention. She was a little shocked that she had come this far, that she had been party to what amounted to a theft and was accepting the hospitality of a community of rogue Fourths. Avram Dvali was only a few rooms away, and she might be exactly that close to understanding the mystery that had haunted her family for a dozen years.

Understanding it, she thought, or being trapped in it. She wondered how close her father had actually gotten to these dangerous truths.

She left her bunk, tiptoed across the room, and slipped under Turk's blanket. She curled against him, one hand on his shoulder and the other snaked under his pillow, hoping his audacity or his anger would seep into her and make her less afraid.

Diane sat with Mrs. Rebka—Anna Rebka, whose husband Joshua had died before she became a Fourth—in a room full of tables and chairs recently abandoned by the community's residents. Water glasses had been left on the rough wooden tabletops to marinate in their own condensation. It was late, and the night air of the desert moved through the room and chilled her feet.

So this is their compound, Diane thought. Comfortable enough, if austere. But there was an atmosphere of monasticism about it. A sacral hush. It was uneasily familiar—she had spent much of her youth among the intemperately religious.

She knew or could imagine much of what went on here. The compound no doubt functioned like other such communities, apart from their experiment with the child. Hidden somewhere, probably underground, were the ultra-low-temperature bioreactors in which Martian "pharmaceuticals" were propogated and stored. She had already seen the pottery kilns that functioned as camouflage: an uninvited visitor would be offered crude crockery and Utopian tracts and sent away none the wiser.

Diane had known or met most of the founding members. Only one of the original founders had not been a Fourth, and that was Mrs. Rebka herself. Presumably she had taken the treatment since.

"What I have to tell you," Diane said, "is that Genomic Security is in Port Magellan, apparently in force. And they'll find you before long. They've been following the Martian woman."

Mrs. Rebka maintained a steely calm. "Haven't they always been following the Martian woman?"

"Apparently they're getting better at it."

"Do they know she's here?"

"If they don't, they soon will."

"And your coming here might have led them to us. Did you think about that, Diane?"

"They've already connected Sulean Moi with Kubelick's Grave. They have Dvali's name. From there, how hard would it be for them to locate this place?"

"Not hard," Mrs. Rebka admitted, staring at the tabletop. "We're modest about our presence here, but still…"

"Still," Diane said, dryly. "Have you planned for this contingency?"

"Of course we have. We can be gone within hours. If we must."

"What about the boy?"

"We'll keep him safe."

"And how's the experiment going, Anna? Are you in touch with the Hypotheticals? Do they talk to you?"

"The boy is sick." Mrs. Rebka raised her head and frowned. "Spare me your disapproval."

"Did you ever consider what you were creating here?"

"With due respect, if what you say is true, we don't have time to debate."

Diane said—more gently—"Has it been what you hoped?"

Anna Rebka stood, and Diane thought she wasn't going to answer. But she paused at the door and looked back.

"No," she said flatly. "It hasn't."

Lise woke when sunlight from the window touched her cheek like a feverish hand.

She was alone in the room. Turk had gone off somewhere, probably taking a pee or inquiring about breakfast.

She dressed in the generic shirt and jeans the Fourths had provided for her, thinking about Avram Dvali, framing the questions she wanted to ask him. She needed to talk to him as soon as possible, as soon as she washed up and had something to eat. But there were hurried footsteps from the corridor beyond her door, and when she looked out the window she saw a dozen vehicles being loaded with supplies. She drew the obvious conclusion: these people were getting ready to abandon the compound. Lise could think of dozens of good reasons why they might want to. But she was suddenly afraid Dvali would be gone before she could talk to him; she hurried into the corridor and asked the first person who passed where she could find him.

Probably the common room, the passing Fourth advised her, down the corridor and left off the courtyard—but he might also be supervising the loading. She finally located him by the garden gate, where he was consulting some kind of written list.

Avram Dvali. She must have glimpsed him at the faculty parties her parents used to hold in Port Magellan, but she had seen so many unin-troduced adults at those events that their faces had been blenderized by memory. Did he look familiar? No. Or only vaguely, from photographs. Because he had taken the Fourth treatment he probably looked much as he had twelve years ago: a bearded man, big eyes in a rounded face. His eyes were shaded by a broad-brimmed desert hat. Easy to imagine him circulating through the Adams living room, one more middle-aged professor of something-or-other, a drink in one hand and the other prospecting in the pretzel bowl.

She suppressed her anxiety and walked straight toward him. He looked up as she approached.

"Miss Adams," he said.

He had been warned. She nodded. "Call me Lise," she said—to quell his suspicions, not because she wanted to be on a first-name basis with a man who had created and confined a human child for purposes of scientific research.

"Diane Dupree said you wanted to speak to me. Unfortunately, at the moment—"

"You're busy," she said. "What's going on?"

"We're leaving."

"Where are you going?"

"Here and there. It's not safe to stay, for reasons I imagine you understand."

"I really just need a few minutes. I want to ask you about—"

"Your father. And I'd be happy to talk to you, Miss Adams—Lise—but do you understand what's happening here? Not only do we have to leave with all deliberate speed, we need to destroy much of what we've built. The bioreactors and their contents, documents and cultures, anything we don't want to fall into the hands of our persecutors." He consulted a printed paper, then made a checkmark as two men dragged a dolly of cardboard boxes to one of the trucks. "Once we're ready to go, you and your friends can ride with me for a while. We'll talk. But for now I need to attend to business." He added, "Your father was a brave and principled man, Miss Adams. We disagreed about some things, but I held him in the highest regard."

That was something, at least, Lise thought.

Turk had gotten up early.

The sound of hurried footsteps in the hall woke him, and he was careful to roll out of bed without disturbing Lise, who had climbed in with him sometime during the night. She was half-wrapped in a blanket and softly snoring, tender as the creation of some benevolent god. He wondered how she would react to what he had told her about himself. Not the CV she'd been hoping for. More than enough to chase her back to her family in California, maybe.

He went to find Ibu Diane, meaning to offer his help if help was needed: everybody seemed to be carrying something. The Fourths were obviously getting ready to abandon the place. But Diane, when he found her in the common room, told him all the duties had been assigned and were being performed in some meticulous order by the Fourths, so he made himself breakfast. When he figured it was time to wake up Lise, if she wasn't up already, he headed back to their room.

He was intercepted by a young boy peering out of a doorway down the corridor. It could only be the boy Diane was so worked up about—the half-Hypothetical boy. Turk had pictured some freakish hybrid, but what stood in front of him was just a babyfaced twelve-year-old, his face flushed and his eyes a little wide.

"Hey there," Turk said cautiously.

"You're new," the boy said.

"Yeah, I got here last night. My name's Turk."

"I saw you from the garden. You and the other two." The boy added, "I'm Isaac."

"Hi, Isaac. Looks like everybody's pretty busy this morning."

"Not me. They didn't give me anything to do."

"Me neither," Turk said.

"They're going to blow up the bioreactors," the boy confided.

"Are they?"

"Yes. Because—"

But suddenly the boy stiffened. His eyes widened until Turk could see the small uncanny flecks of gold around the irises. "Whoa, hey—you all right?"

A terrified whisper: "Because I remember—"

The boy began to topple over. Turk caught him in his arms and called for help.

"Because I remember—"

"What, Isaac? What do you remember?"

"Too much," the boy said, and wept.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

By dawn Brian Gately was on a transport plane lofting out of Port Magellan's major airport, strapped into a bench seat with Weil on one side of him and Sigmund on the other. Elsewhere in the plane was a group of armed men—not quite soldiers, since they wore no insignia on their flak jackets. The interior of the plane was stripped-down and possessed all the homely comfort of an industrial warehouse. Brian could tell day was breaking by the red glow coming through the porthole-sized windows.

Weil had ordered him to the airport well before dawn. "In the event that we get involved in negotiations," he had said, "or in any other talking-type situation—a post-event interrogation, say—we'd like you to be the one who interacts with Lise Adams. We think you'd be better than someone she doesn't know. How do you feel about that?"

How did he feel about that? Shitty basically. But he could hardly say no. He might be in a position to protect her. He certainly didn't want her questioned by some hostile DGS functionary or one of these mercenaries. She was in the wrong place for the wrong reasons, but that didn't make her a criminal, and with luck Brian might be able to defend her from the threat of prison. Or worse. His memory of the photo of Tomas Ginn's body throbbed in his head like a fragile aneurysm.

What he told Weil was, "I'll help if I can."

"Thank you. We appreciate that. I know it's not what you signed up for."

Not what he had signed up for. That was becoming a joke. He had signed up with Genomic Security because he possessed a talent for administration and because one of his father's cousins, a DGS bureau chief in Kansas City, had opened the door for him. He had believed in the work of Genomic Security, at least to the degree to which it was professionally necessary to believe. The Department's mission statement had made sense to him, the idea of preserving the human biological heritage against black-market cloning, unlicensed human modification, and imported Martian biotech. Most nations had similar bureaus and they followed the broad guidelines set down by the United Nations under the Stuttgart Accords. All clean and above board.

And if there were bureaucratic nooks at the more carefully classified levels of DGS, hidden aeries in which less politically palatable attacks on the enemies of human genetic continuity were planned and carried out—was that so surprising? Those who were required to know, knew. Brian had never been required to know. Ignorance was his preferred mode of consciousness, at least when it came to the Executive Action Committee. Of course not everything could be done legally or visibly. As an adult, one understood this.

But he didn't like it. It was Brian's nature to prefer rules to anarchy. Law was the gardener of human behavior, and what lay beyond was brutal, red in tooth and claw. What lay beyond the garden was Sigmund and Weil and their uncommunicative smiles and their cadres of armed men. What lay beyond, fundamentally, was the battered body of Tomas Ginn.

The aircraft lurched as it rose to cross the coastal mountains that absorbed most of Equatoria's rainfall and made the inland a desert. "We'll be in Kubelick's Grave in an hour," Weil said. Brian had passed through Kubelick's Grave once before, part of an orientation tour he had taken when he was newly-arrived from the States. It was a nothing town, an adobe armpit that existed for the sole purpose of refueling land traffic bound for the oil sands of the Rub al-Khali or back through the Mahdi Pass to the coast. Weil said there was a community of robed eccentrics living in the desert foothills north and east of Kubelick's Grave: rogue Fourths, in fact, since aerial photographs taken in the past few hours showed Turk Findley's little bush plane nearby.

And now the site would be seized and secured, Brian thought, and would the seizure be violent? There was a large number of weapons on hand, he hoped, mainly for show. To make a plausible threat. Because Fourths were supposed to be nonviolent, gentled by the same tech that granted them longevity. No killing would be necessary surely. And if there was any killing involved, it wouldn't involve Lise. He would see to that. In his intentions, at least, he was brave.

It all happened quickly.

The airport at Kubelick's Grave was barely large enough to accommodate the transport. As soon as it had settled at the end of a cracked concrete runway, the rear cargo door dropped and the armed men trooped off in military order. A handful of lightly armored vehicles waited in the coppery morning sunlight. Brian joined Sigmund and Weil in one of those open-topped desert vehicles the locals called "roosters" for the way they bounced over the landscape like flightless birds. Sigmund took the driver's seat and they drove off at the back of the convoy. Not a comfortable ride. The heat and sun were oppressive even at this hour. All he saw of Kubelick's Grave was a garage and gas depot where rusty automobile parts lay scattered, the drive train of an ancient truck abandoned on the gravel like the spine of some Jurassic creature. Then they were off the main road, rattling over a hardpan trail parallel to the mountains.

An hour passed, broken only by the hoarse shouting of Sigmund as he attempted to converse with someone over a field radio. The talk, what Brian could hear of it, consisted of codewords and incomprehensible commands. Then the convoy came over the peak of a small rill and the Fourth compound was suddenly dead ahead. The military vehicles put on a burst of speed, big tires kicking up geysers of dust, but Weil pulled up short and killed the engine, leaving Brian's ears ringing in the relative silence.

Sigmund began yelling again, first into his radio and then at Weil: something about "too late" and an order to "abort."

"They abandoned the compound," Weil said to Brian. "Fresh tracks. Must have been a good two dozen vehicles."

"Can't you secure the site, at least?"

"Not until we can defuse whatever ordnance they left behind. What happens in these cases, they—"

He was interrupted by a burst of distant light.

Brian looked at the Fourth compound. A moment before it had been a cluster of small buildings around a central courtyard. Now it was an expanding cloud of dust and smoke.

"Shit," Weil had time to say. The concussion reached them a fraction of a second later, a noise that seemed to swell his lungs until his chest hurt. Brian closed his eyes. A second shockwave, like the beat of a hot wing, washed over him.

The compound was gone. Brian told himself that Lise wasn't inside: no one had been inside.

"… rig it…" Weil was saying.

"What?"

"They rig it to destroy their technical gear and keep us from taking samples. We got here late." Weil's complexion had turned pale with dust kicked up by the explosion. Sigmund's assault team had turned back, hastily.

"Is Lise—?"

"We have to assume she left with the others."

"Going where?"

"They won't all be traveling together. From the tracks it looks like a couple dozen vehicles headed in different directions. We'll run down a few of them. With luck we'll pick up Lise and the other major targets. With a little more warning we would have had drones in the air to keep watch. But we didn't have time and anyway every drone on the continent has been shipped to the far west, surveying the fucking oil allotments for earthquake damage."

Sigmund was still growling into his handset. Then he switched it off and said to Weil, "The plane's gone."

Turk Findley's bush plane, presumably. Gone. Escaped. Should he be pleased about that?

"The aircraft, at least, we can track," Weil said.

And Lise along with it.

Brian looked back at the ruins of the compound. Black smoke gushed from collapsed foundations and small fires burned fitfully in the surrounding desert. Of the brick and adobe buildings that had once stood there, nothing remained.

They spent the night in what passed for public accommodations in Kubelick's Grave, a tile-roofed motel in which Brian shared a unit with Sigmund and Weil. Two beds and a cot—Brian got the cot.

Most of the afternoon and evening he spent listening to Sigmund make and take calls. The name of the Executive Action Committee was frequently invoked.

That night, unable to sleep in his cot, cold despite the banging antique electric heater, it occurred to Brian to wonder whether they had found out about Lise's last call to him.

Were his calls tapped for audio? Lise's callback code had been unfamiliar to him, probably a disposable loaded with anonymous minutes, so they wouldn't have been able to trace it. And there hadn't been anything really incriminating about the call. Apart from the fact that Brian had failed to report it. Which would suggest that his loyalties were divided. That he might not be a trustworthy DGS man.

He wanted to be angry with Lise. Hated her pointless personal involvement in this fucking mess, her obsessive need to sort out her father's disappearance and turn the story into some kind of memoir.

He wanted to be angry with her, and he was angry with himself when he didn't succeed.

Reports on the round-up of fugitive Fourths began to come in before dawn, Sigmund shouting into his phone while Brian hurriedly dressed.

Success had been mixed, he gathered.

"At least half the population of the compound is still at large," Weil said. "Our guys intercepted three vehicles carrying a total of fifteen people, none of them the major players. The good news—"

Brian braced himself.

"The good news is, a small plane registered to Turk Findley attempted to refuel at a little utility airport a couple of hundred miles west of here. The airport manager recognized the plane from a legal bulletin—Mr. Findley's former employer wants it impounded for back rent. He called the Provisional Government and somebody there was kind enough to refer the matter to us. Our guys arrived and detained the pilot and passengers. One male, three females, all refusing to identify themselves."

"And one of them is Lise?" Brian asked.

"Maybe. That's not confirmed. And there may be higher-value targets along with her."

"She's not a target. I wouldn't call her a target."

"She made herself a target when she ran."

But not high value, he thought, clinging to that. "Can I see her?"

"We can be there by noon if we get a move on," Weil said.

It occurred to Brian to wonder, as the town of Kubelick's Grave vanished behind them, who Kubelick might have been and why he was buried out here in the badlands; but nobody in the car had an answer to that question. Then the little cluster of buildings was behind them, Sigmund driving away from the mountains toward the razor-flat western horizon. The road ahead quivered in the morning heat like a figment of the imagination.

Sigmund couldn't make his phone work, though he kept banging it with one hand while he steered with the other. Even communication between the widely-spaced cars of the convoy—this vehicle plus three heavy trucks containing hired soldiers—was intermittent and unreliable. Weil couldn't explain it: "A half-dozen aerostats anchored between here and the west coast and not one of the fucking things doing what it's supposed to do. Lucky we got the news from the airfield when we did. Jesus!"

And it was not only the ruptured communication that seemed remarkable to Brian. He called attention to the steady flow of traffic in the opposite direction, not just oil-company traffic but a number of private vehicles, some so sand-pitted and sun-scarred that they looked barely functional. As if they were evacuating the inhabited outposts of the Rub al-Khali, and maybe they were—some new tremor, maybe.

Sixty miles farther on the convoy pulled onto the gravel verge and stopped. Sigmund and Weil went forward to talk to the leader of the paramilitary company. It looked more like an argument than a conversation, but Brian couldn't make out the words. He stood at the roadside watching the eastbound traffic. Eerie, he thought, how much this part of Equatoria looked like Utah: the same dusty blue horizon, the same torpid daytime heat. Had the Hypothetical designed this desert when they assembled the planet, and if so, why? But Brian doubted they paid that kind of attention to details—the Hypothetical, it seemed to him, were firm believers in the long result. Plant a seed (or seed a planet) and let nature do the rest. Until the harvest… whatever that meant or might one day mean.

Not much grew out here, just the peculiar woody tufts the locals called cactus grass, and even this looked dehydrated to Brians eye. But among the umber patches of cactus grass at his feet he spotted a place where something more colorful had taken root. He crouched to look, for lack of anything better to do. What had caught his attention was a red flower: he was no botanist, but the bloom looked out of place in this barren scrub. He put out his hand and touched it. The plant was cold, fleshy… and it seemed almost to cringe. The stem bent away from him; the flower, if it was a flower, lowered its head.

Was that normal?

He hated this fucking planet, its endless strangeness. It was a nightmare, he thought, masquerading as normalcy.

They came at last to the airfield off the highway, a couple of quonset-hut structures and two paved landing strips at contrary angles to one another, a bank of fuel pumps, a two-story adobe control tower with a radar bubble. Ordinarily the airstrips customers would have been oil company planes ferrying executives to and from the Rub al-Khali. Today there was just one plane visible on the tarmac: Turk Findley's aircraft, a sturdy little blue-and-white Skyrex baking in the sun.

The Genomic Security caravan parked in front of the nearest pavilion. Brian was a little shaky getting out of the car, his fears surfacing again. Fear for Lise, and under that a fear of Lise—of what she might say to him and what she might deduce, correctly or not, about his presence in the company of men such as Sigmund and Weil.

Maybe he could help her. He clung to that thought. She was in trouble, deep and perilous trouble, but she could still keep herself afloat if she said the right things, denied complicity, shifted the blame, and cooperated with the inquiry. If she was willing to do that, Brian might be able to keep her out of prison. She would have to go back home, of course, forget about Equatoria and her little journalistic hobby. Given the events of the last few days, though, she might not be so haughty at the prospect of a trip back to the States. She might even learn to appreciate what he had done, and was willing to do, on her behalf.

He hurried to keep up with Sigmund and Weil, who brushed past a cluster of airstrip employees and hurried down a makeshift corridor to the door of a tiny office guarded by an airport security guy in a dusty blue uniform. "The suspects are inside?" Sigmund asked.

"All four of 'em."

"Let's see them."

The guard opened the door, Sigmund went through first, Weil behind him, Brian in the rear. The two DGS men stopped short and Brian had to crane to see over their shoulders.

"Fuck!" Sigmund said.

Three women and one man sat at a stained conference table in the middle of the room. Each of them had been handcuffed to a chair.

The male was maybe sixty years old, judging by his looks. Probably older, since he was a Fourth. He was white-haired, he was skinny, he was dark-complexioned… what he was not was Turk Findley.

The three women were of similar age. None of them looked like Sulean Moi. And certainly none of them was Lise Adams.

"Decoys," Weil said, his voice turgid with disgust.

"Find out who they are and what they know," Sigmund told the armed men waiting in the corridor.

Weil pulled Brian out after him. "Are you all right?"

"Just… yes," Brian managed. "I mean, I'm fine."

He wasn't fine. He was picturing the four prisoners with bullet-raddled skulls, washed up, perhaps, on some distant beach, or just buried in the desert, bodies shriveled under a layer of grit, paying the butcher's bill for their longevity.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

D'vali drove the car that took them north until nightfall, and in her less distracted moments Lise made a study of him.

He was—above all else—protective of the child, Isaac.

Lise and Turk had been hustled into a big utility vehicle, the kind with sprung-metal wheels that could cope with all kinds of terrain. The car had been built to accommodate six people comfortably but they had squeezed in seven: Lise and Turk, Diane, Mrs. Rebka, Sulean Moi—and Isaac.

Turk had advocated taking the Skyrex, but Dvali and Mrs. Rebka argued him out of it. An aircraft would be easier to trace and harder to hide than one land vehicle among many. They would use the plane as a diversion, Dr. Dvali said. Four of the compound's eldest Fourths, one of whom was a qualified pilot, volunteered to take it west. Probably they would be captured. But they knew what they were doing, Dr. Dvali had insisted. They weren't afraid to die, if it came to that. One of the ironies of the Martian treatment was that it quelled the fear of death even as it extended life. Turk asked if they had a cure for the fear of insolvency.

So they drove away, and a dozen or so land vehicles left the compound after them, scattering in multiple directions on the available roads or across the raw desert. The compound had been rigged with explosives to keep it from falling into the hands of the authorities and to destroy any evidence that might lead to their eventual capture. Lise and company had been too far down the road to see the actual explosion, but at one point she had spotted a plume of smoke on the horizon. She asked Dr. Dvali whether anyone might have been hurt—if DGS agents had arrived before the timed detonation, wouldn't they have been killed?

"DGS knows what to expect in situations like this. If they found the compound deserted they would have known it was rigged to detonate."

But if they'd been careless, or the timing had been bad?

Dvali shrugged. "Nothing is guaranteed in this life."

"I thought Fourths were supposed to be nonviolent."

"We're more sensitive than unaltered people to the suffering of others. That makes us vulnerable. It doesn't make us stupid, and it doesn't prevent us from taking risks."

"Even risks with other people's lives?"

Sulean Moi—who was, according to Diane, a deformed Martian, but who looked to Lise like a skinny Appalachian apple doll—had smiled sardonically at that. "We aren't saints. That should be obvious by now. We make moral choices. Often the wrong ones."

Dvali wanted to drive through the night, but Turk convinced him to stop and make camp in a glade of the scrubby finger pines that forested the western slope of the mountainous Equatorian divide. Because of the elevation rain fell fairly regularly here, and there was even a clean-running creek from which they could draw potable water. The water was cold and Lise guessed it came from the glaciers that clung to the valleys of the highest passes. The chill provoked a pleasant memory of the time (she had been ten years old) when her father took her skiing at Gstaadt.

Sunlight on snow, the mechanical groan of the lifts and the sound of laughter cutting the cold air: far away now, worlds and years away.

She helped Turk warm up a canned meat and vegetable stew over a propane stove. He wanted to have dinner ready and the stove cooled off by nightfall in case there were drones overhead looking for their heat signature. Dr. Dvali said he doubted their pursuers would go to such lengths, especially since most such surveillance equipment had been co-opted for use in the crisis in the oilpatch. Turk nodded but said it was better to take a useless precaution than give themselves away.

On the road north along the foothills they had discussed their plans. Turk, at least, had discussed his plans; the Fourths were less forthcoming. Turk and Lise would ride as far north as the town of New Cumberland; from there they would catch a bus over the Pharoah Pass to the coast. The Fourths would continue on to—well, to wherever it was they meant to go.

Someplace where they could take care of the boy, Lise hoped. He was a strange-looking child. His hair was rusty red, cut short by whoever passed for the compounds barber, probably Mrs. Rebka with a pair of kitchen scissors. His eyes were widely spaced, giving him a birdlike aspect, and the pupils were flecked with gold. He hadn't said much all day, and most of that had been in the morning, but he was uncomfortable in some way Lise couldn't quite understand: whenever the road curved he would either frown and moan or sigh with relief. By late afternoon he was feverish—"again," she heard Mrs. Rebka say.

Now Isaac was sleeping'in one of the rear seats of the car, windows open to let the alpine air flow through. Hot day, but the sunlight had grown horizontal, and she had been told the air might turn uncomfortably cold during the night. There were only six sleeping bags in the vehicle but they were the expensive kind, thermally efficient, and someone could sleep in the car if necessary. It didn't seem likely to rain but Turk had already strung a tarp among the trees for what meager protection or concealment it could offer.

She stirred the pot of stew while Turk made coffee. "It's too bad about the plane."

"I would have lost it anyway."

"What are you going to do when you get back to the coast?"

"Depends," he said.

"On what?"

"A lot of things." He looked at her as if from a distance, squinting. "Probably go back to sea… if nothing else turns up."

"Or we could go back to the States," she said, wondering how he'd read that we. "The legal trouble you were in, that's essentially over, right?"

"It could heat up again."

"So we'll do something else." The pronoun hanging in the air like an unbroken pinata.

"Guess we have to."

We.

They served out dinner while the sun met the horizon in a reddening haze. Turk ate quickly and said little. Diane Dupree sat on a distant log with the Martian woman Sulean Moi, conversing intently but inaudibly while Mrs. Rebka hovered over Isaac, who had to be coaxed to eat.

Which left Dr. Dvali, and Lise's first real opportunity to speak to him with any degree of privacy. She abandoned Turk to the camp stove and the pots and went to sit next to him. Dvali looked at her querulously, like a large brown bird, but made no objection when she joined him. "You want to talk about your father," he said.

She could only nod.

"We were friends." It was as if Dvali had rehearsed this speech. "What I admired most about your father was that he loved his work, but not in a narrow way. He was in love with it because he saw it in the broader context. Do you know what I mean?"

"No." Yes. But she wanted to hear it from him. "Not exactly"

Dvali reached down and scooped a handful of dirt. "What do I have in my hand?"

"Topsoil. Old leaves. Probably a few bugs."

"Topsoil, mineral residue, silts, decaying biomass broken down to elemental nutrients, feeding itself back to itself. Bacteria, fungal spores—and no doubt some insects." He brushed it away. "Much like Earth, but subtly different in the details. On the geological level the resemblance between the two planets is even more obvious. Granite is granite, schist is schist, but they exist here in different proportions. There's less vulcanism here than on Earth. The continental plates drift and erode at a different speed, the thermocline between the equator and the poles is less steep. But what's really distinctive about this world is how fundamentally similar it is to Earth."

"Because the Hypotheticals built this planet for us."

"Maybe not for us, exactly, but yes, they built it, or at least modified it, and that turns our study of this world into a whole new discipline—not just biology or geology but a kind of planetary archaeology. This world was profoundly influenced by the Hypotheticals long before modern human beings evolved, millions of years before the Spin, millions of years before the Arch was put in place. That tells us something about their methods and their extraordinary capacity for very long-term planning. It may also tell us something about their ultimate goals, if we ask the right question. That was the context in which your father worked. He never lost sight of that larger truth, never ceased to marvel at it."

"Planet as artifact," Lise said.

"The book he was writing." Dvali nodded. "Have you read it?"

"All I've seen of it is the introduction." And a few notes, salvaged from one of her mother's convulsive fits of radical housecleaning.

"I wish there had been more. It would have been an important work."

"Is that what you talked about with him?"

"Often enough, yes."

"But not always."

"Obviously, we talked about the Martians and what they might know about the Hypotheticals. He knew I was a Fourth—"

"You told him?"

"I took him into my confidence."

"May I ask why?"

"Because of his obvious interest. Because he was trustworthy. Because he understood the nature of the world." Dvali smiled. "Basically, because I liked him."

"He was okay with that, with your—Fourthness?"

"He was curious about it."

"Did he talk about taking the treatment himself?"

"I won't say he didn't consider it. But he never made the request to me or, so far as I know, anyone else. He loved his family, Miss Adams—I don't need to tell you that. I was as shocked as anyone else when I heard about his disappearance."

"Did you confide in him about this project of yours, too? About Isaac?"

"When it was in the planning stage, yes, I talked to him about it." Dvali sipped his coffee. "He hated the idea."

"But he didn't inform on you. He didn't do anything to stop it."

"No, he didn't inform on us, but we argued bitterly over it—the friendship was strained at that point."

"Strained, but not broken."

"Because despite our disagreement, he understood why the work seemed necessary. Urgently necessary." Dvali leaned closer to her and for a moment Lise was afraid he would reach out and take her hands. She wasn't sure she could stand that. "The idea of any tangible contact with the Hypotheticals—with the motivating spirit behind their vast network of machines—fascinated him as much as it fascinated me. He knew how important it was, not just for our generation but for generations to come, for humanity as a species."

"You must have been disappointed when he wouldn't cooperate."

"I didn't need his cooperation. I would have liked his approval. I was disappointed when he withheld it. After a time we simply stopped talking about it—we talked about other things. And when the project began in earnest I left Port Magellan. I never saw your father again."

"That was six months before he disappeared."

"Yes."

"Do you know anything about that?"

"About his disappearance? No. Genomic Security was in the Port at the time—looking for me, among others, since rumors of the project had reached them—and when I heard Robert Adams had gone missing I assumed he'd been picked up and interrogated by Genomic Security. But I don't know that for certain. I wasn't there."

"Most of the people who are interrogated by Genomic Security walk away from it, Dr. Dvali." Although she knew better.

"Not all," Dvali said.

"He wasn't a Fourth. Why would they hurt him?" Kill him, she couldn't bring herself to say.

"He would have resisted on principle and out of personal loyalty."

"You knew him well enough to say that?"

"I took the treatment in Bangalore, Miss Adams, twenty years ago. I'm not omniscient, but I'm a good judge of human character. Not that there was anything especially occult about Robert Adams. He wore his sincerity on his sleeve."

He was murdered. That had always been the most likely explanation, though the details might be uglier than Lise had imagined. Robert Adams had been murdered and the men who murdered him would never come to trial for it. But there was another story inside the story. The story of his curiosity, his idealism, the strength of his convictions.

Some of these thoughts must have shown on her face. Dvali was radiating a sympathetic concern. "I know that isn't much help. I'm sorry."

Lise stood up. All she felt at the moment was cold. "May I ask you one more thing?"

"If you like."

"How do you justify it? The fate of humanity aside, how do you justify putting an innocent child in Isaac's position?

Dvali turned up his cup and emptied the last of his coffee on the ground. "Isaac was never an innocent child. Isaac has never been anything other than what he is now. And I would trade places with him, Miss Adams, if I could. Eagerly."

She came across the campground to the circle of light in which Turk was sitting, fiddling with a pocket telecom receiver. Turk, her avatar of disappearances: Turk, who had vanished from many lives. "Radio broken?"

"Nothing coming in over the aerostats. Nothing from Port Magellan. Last I heard they were talking about another tremor out west." Oil revenue, of course, being the Port's perennial obsession. In the Trusts we trust. Turk gave her a second look. "Are you all right?"

"Just tired," she said.

She brewed another pot of coffee and drank enough to keep her alert, even as the others began to settle in for the night. At last—as she had hoped—there was no one up and moving except herself and the Martian woman, Sulean Moi.

Lise was intimidated by Sulean Moi, even though she looked like the kind of elderly woman you might help across the street at a stoplight. She wore her age and the distance she had traveled as a kind of invisible aura. It took a certain amount of courage to join her at the guttering campfire, where the logs had worn down to radiant hollows and red chambers.

"Don't be afraid," the old woman said.

Lise was startled. "Are you reading my mind?"

"Reading your face."

"I'm not really afraid." Not much.

Sulean smiled, exposing her small white teeth. "I think I would be, in your position—given what you must have heard about me. I know the stories they tell. The grim elder Martian, victim of a childhood injury."

She tapped her skull. "My supposed moral authority. My unusual history."

"Is that how you see yourself?"

"No, but I recognize the caricature. You spent a good deal of time and energy looking for me, Miss Adams."

"Call me Lise."

"Lise, then. Do you still have that photograph you've been showing around?"

"No." She had destroyed it back in the Minang village, at Diane's urging.

"Just as well. So here we are. No one to overhear us. We can talk."

"When I started looking for you I had no idea—"

"That it would inconvenience me? Or that it would attract the attention of Genomic Security? Don't apologize. You knew what you knew, and what you didn't know could hardly enter into your calculations. You want to ask me about Robert Adams and how and why he died."

"Do you know for a fact that he's dead?"

"I didn't witness the killing, but I've spoken with people who saw him abducted and I can't imagine any other outcome. If he had been able to come home he would have done so. I'm sorry if that seems blunt."

Blunt but increasingly self-evident, Lise thought. "It's true that he was taken by Genomic Security?"

"By one of what they call their Executive Action Groups."

"And they were hunting for Dr. Dvali and his group."

"Yes."

"And so were you."

"Yes. For slightly different reasons."

"You wanted to stop him from creating Isaac."

"I wanted to stop him from performing a needlessly cruel and probably useless human experiment, yes."

"Isn't that what Genomic Security wanted?"

"Only in their press releases. Do you really believe organizations like Genomic Security operate within their mission statements? If Genomic Security could acquire the tools they would have secret bunkers full of multiple Isaacs—wired to machines, under armed guard."

Lise shook her head to order her thoughts. "How did you meet my father?"

"The first useful person I met in Equatoria was Diane Dupree. There's no formal hierarchy among Terrestrial Fourths, but in every Fourth community there's some pivotal figure who figures in every major decision. Diane played that role in coastal Equatoria. I told her why I wanted to find Dvali and she gave me the names of people who might be useful—not all of them Fourths. Dr. Dvali had befriended your father. I befriended him too."

"Dr. Dvali said my father was trustworthy."

"Your father had a striking faith in fundamental human goodness. That didn't always work to his advantage."

"You think Dvali took advantage of him?"

"I think it took him a long time to see Dr. Dvali for what he was."

"Which is?"

"A man with grandiose ambitions, profound insecurities, and a dangerously malleable conscience. Your father was reluctant to reveal Dr. Dvali's announced plans and whereabouts, even to me."

"Did he, though?"

"Once we got to know each other. We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars."

"If he told you what he knew, why couldn't you find Dvali and stop him?"

"Because Dr. Dvali was wise enough to change his plans once he left Port Magellan. Your father believed Dvali was establishing a compound on the far west coast of Equatoria—still mostly a wilderness even today, apart from a few fishing villages. That's what he told me, and that's no doubt what he told Genomic Security when they interrogated him."

"Dvali thinks my father refused to talk—that that was why they killed him."

"I'm sure he resisted. I doubt he succeeded, given what I know about their interrogation techniques. I know it hurts you to hear that, Lise, and I'm sorry, but it's the truth. Your father told me what he knew because he believed Dvali ought to be stopped and he believed I had the authority to intervene without doing violence to Dvali or the Fourth community in general. If he told these things to Genomic Security, he would have done so only under duress. But, Lise, it didn't matter. Dvali wasn't on the west coast. He never had been. Genomic Security lost track of him, and by the time I found out where he had truly gone it was far too late—years had passed. Isaac was a living child. He couldn't be called back into the womb."

"I see."

In the ensuing silence Lise could hear the crackle of the smoldering fire.

"Lise," Sulean Moi said softly. "I lost my parents when I was very young. I expect Diane told you that. I lost my parents, but, worse than that, I lost my memory of them. It was as if they had never existed at all."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm not asking for sympathy. What I want to tell you is that, at a certain age, I made it my business to educate myself about them—to learn who they were, and how they had come to live beside a certain river before it flooded, and what warnings they might have heeded or ignored. I think I wanted to know whether I ought to love them for trying to rescue me or hate them for failing. I found out a lot of things, mostly irrelevant, including a number of painful truths about their personal lives, but the only important thing I learned was that they were blameless. It was a very small consolation, but it was all there would ever be, and in a way it was enough. Lise—your father was blameless."

"Thank you," Lise said hoarsely.

"And now we should try to sleep," Sulean Moi said, "before the sun comes up again."

Lise slept better than she had in several nights—even though she was in a sleeping bag, on uneven ground, in a strange forest—but it wasn't the sun that woke her, it was Turk's hand on her shoulder. Still dark out, she registered groggily. "We have to go," Turk said. "Hurry up, Lise."

"Why—?"

"The ash is falling again in Port Magellan, more and heavier, and it'll cross the mountains before too long. We need to get under shelter."

CHAPTER TWENTY

Isaac woke to see the clouds billowing through the passes behind the moving car, clouds shot through with luminous particles, clouds like the clouds of August 34th . But the sudden and breathtaking hurt obscured all that.

What he felt wasn't pain, exactly, but something very much like it, a sensitivity that made light and noise intolerable, as if the exposed blade of the world had been thrust into his skull.

Isaac understood his own specialness. He knew he had been created in an attempt to communicate with the Hypothetical, and he knew he had been a disappointment to the adults around him. He knew other things, too. He knew the vacuum of space wasn't empty: it was populated by ghost particles that existed too briefly to interact with the world of tangible things; but the Hypothetical could manipulate these ephemeral particles and use them to send and receive information. The Martian technology embedded in Isaac had attuned his nervous system to this kind of signaling. But it never resolved into anything like the comfortable linearity of words. Most of the time it was a sense of distant, inexpressible urgency. Sometimes—now—it was more like pain. And the pain was connected with the approaching cloud of dust and ash: the unseen world heaved with an invisible tumult, and Isaac's mind and body vibrated in concert.

He was aware, too, of being lifted into the rear seat of the car, of being strapped in by hands not his own, of the voices and concerns of his old and new friends. They were afraid for him. And they were afraid for themselves. He was aware of Dr. Dvali ordering everyone into the car, the slamming doors, the revving engine. And he was glad it was not Dr. Dvali who held his head and soothed him (it was Mrs. Rebka), because he had come to dislike Dr. Dvali, almost to hate Dr. Dvali, for reasons he didn't understand.

Mrs. Rebka wasn't a physician but she had trained herself in basic medicine, as had the other Fourths, and Lise watched as she administered a sedative, pricking the boy's arm with an old-fashioned syringe. Isaac began to breathe more deeply and his screaming eventually ebbed to a sigh.

They drove. The vehicle's headlights cut columns of light into the falling dust. Turk was doing the driving on behalf of the Fourths, trying to get out of the foothills before the roads became impassable. Lise had asked whether they shouldn't take Isaac to a hospital, but Mrs. Rebka shook her head: "There's nothing a hospital can do for him. Nothing we can't do for him ourselves."

Diane Dupree watched the boy with wide, anxious eyes. Sulean Moi also watched him, but her expression was more inscrutable—some combination, it seemed to Lise, of resignation and terror.

But it was Mrs. Rebka who allowed Isaac to rest his head on her shoulder, who reassured him with a word or the silent pressure of her hand when the bounce and rattle of the car disturbed him. She smoothed his hair and dabbed his forehead with a damp cloth. Before long the sedative put him to sleep.

There was an obvious question Lise had been wanting to ask since they arrived at the Fourth compound, and since no one else had anything to say—and because the noise of the windshield wipers scraping dust across glass was driving her slightly crazy—she drew a breath and asked, "Is Isaacs mother still alive?"

"Yes," Mrs. Rebka said.

Lise turned to face her. "Are you his mother?"

"I am," Mrs. Rebka said.

What do you see, Isaac?

Much later, as he was waking up from the sleep they had injected into him, Isaac pondered the question.

Mrs. Rebka was the one who had asked it. He tried to formulate an answer before the pain came back and stole his words. But the question was hard to answer because he was having a hard time seeing anything at all. He was aware of the vehicle and the people in it, the ash falling beyond the windows, but they all seemed vague and unreal. Was it daytime yet? But now the car had stopped, and before he answered Mrs. Rebka's question he asked one of his own: "Where are we?"

Up front, the man named Turk Findley said, "Little town called Bustee. We might be staying here a while."

Outside there were small buildings visible through the fog of dust. He could see them plainly enough. But that wasn't what Mrs. Rebka had meant by her question.

"Isaac? Can you walk?"

Yes, he could, for now, though the sedative was wearing off and the blade of the world was beginning to draw blood again. He climbed out of the car with one hand on Mrs. Rebka's arm. Dust sifted across his face. The dust smelled like something burned. Mrs. Rebka steered him toward the nearest small building, which was one wing of a motel. Isaac heard Turk say he had rented the last available room, for more money than it was worth. Lots of people were sheltering in Bustee tonight, Turk said.

Then he was inside, on a bed, on his back, and the air was less dusty, though it still stank, and Mrs. Rebka brought a fresh cloth and began to dab the grime from his face. "Isaac," she said again gently, "what are you looking at? What do you see?"

Because he kept turning his head in one direction—west, of course—and staring.

What did he see?

"A light."

"Here in the room?"

No. "A long way away. Farther than the horizon."

"But you can see it from here? You can see it through the walls?"

He nodded.

"What does it look like?"

Many words crowded Isaac's mind, many answers. A fire in a faraway place. An explosion. Sunrise. Sunset. The place where the stars fall and burn in their eagerness to live. And the thing deep underground that knows and welcomes them.

But what he said was simply, truthfully, "I don't know."

Only Turk had been to Bustee before. The name, he said, was derived from a Hindi word for "slum." It wasn't a slum, but it was a greasy little road town on the edge of the Rub al-Khali, catering to traffic along the northernmost route to and from the oil lands. Cinderblock buildings and a few timber-framed houses; a store that sold tire gauges, maps and compasses, sunblock, cheap novels, disposable phones. Three gas stations and four restaurants.

None of which Lise could see from the window of the motel room. The ashfall sifted down in gray, stinking curtains. Power lines down or transformers shorted by dust, she guessed, and repairs wouldn't be quick, not out here in low-priority-land. It was a miracle they had made it here at all, even in their big all-terrain all-weather vehicle. Someone from the motel office knocked at the door and handed out flashlights and a warning not to attempt candles or any kind of open flame. But the Fourths had packed their own flashlights, and there was nothing to see anyway, only dingy walls and patchwork wallpaper. Lise kept a flashlight at hand for navigating her way to the bathroom when the need arose.

The boy Isaac slept, driven more by exhaustion than sedatives now, Lise guessed. The adults had huddled for conversation. Dr. Dvali was speculating about the ashfall in his persuasive and gently-modulated voice. "It might be a cyclical event. There's evidence in the geological record—this was some of your father's work, Miss Adams, though we never knew how to interpret it. Very thin ash layers compressed into the rock at intervals of ten thousand years or so."

"What does that mean," Turk asked, "it happens every ten thousand years? Everything gets buried in ash?"

"Not everything. Not everywhere. You find evidence of it mainly in the far west."

"Wouldn't it have to be a pretty thick layer to leave traces like that?"

"Thick, or persistent over a long period of time."

"Because these buildings aren't built to hold up anything much more than their own weight."

Roofs crushed, dust entombing the survivors: a cold Pompeii, Lise thought. That was chilling. But she had another thought. She said, "And Isaac—is the dustfall connected with what's happening to Isaac?"

Sulean Moi gave her a sad look. "Of course it is," she said.

Isaac understood it best in his dreams, where knowledge was rendered in wordless shapes and colors and textures.

In his dreams, planets and species arose like vagrant thoughts, were dismissed or committed to memory, evolved as thoughts evolved. His sleeping mind worked the way the universe worked—how could it be otherwise?

Half-heard phrases filtered into his floating awareness. Ten thousand years. The dust had fallen before, ten thousand years before and ten thousand years before that. Vast structures seeded space with their residue, feeding cyclical processes that turned and turned like faceted diamonds. The dust fell in the west because the west was calling it, as the west called Isaac. This planet wasn't Earth. It was older, it existed in an older universe, old things lived inside it. Things lived inside it: things that were not mindful but listened and spoke and pulsed in slow, millennial rhythms.

He could hear their voices. Some were close to him. Closer than they had ever been before.

The groan of the hotel's stressed beams and timbers continued after dusk and through the night—management sent a crew up to shovel the roof—but the ashfall tapered off, and by dawn the air had cleared to a gritty semitransparency. Lise had fallen asleep despite her best efforts to stay awake, curled on a foam mattress with the stink of the dust in her nostrils and sweat streaking her face.

She was the last to wake. She opened her eyes and saw that the Fourths were up and had gathered at the rooms two windows. The light coming in was less bright than a rainy autumn glow, but it was more than she had dared hope for while the dust was still falling.

She sat up. She was wearing yesterdays clothes and her skin was encrusted with yesterday's dirt. Also her throat. Turk had noticed her movement; he handed her a bottle of water and she gulped it gratefully. "What time is it?"

"About eight." Eight o'clock by the long Equatorian reckoning of the hours. "Sun's been up for a while now. The dust stopped falling but it's still settling. A lot of fine powder in the air."

"How's Isaac?"

"He's not screaming, anyway. We're okay… but you might want to take a look outside."

Mrs. Rebka stepped back to tend to Isaac and allowed Lise to take her place at the window. Lise looked outside reluctantly.

But there seemed to be nothing unexpected. Just a road drifted over with ash, the same road they had crept along yesterday, pushing their vehicle to the limit of its endurance. The car was where they had left it, dust duned on the windward side. Its webbed steel wheels were still dilated, as big as the tires on the industrial rigs parked in sheltering rows beyond it. The daylight was dim and gritty, but she could see all the way to the gas station some hundred or so yards to the south. The road was empty of pedestrians, but other faces peered from other windows. Nothing moved.

No… that wasn't quite true.

The dust moved.

Beyond the courtyard, in the gray emptiness of the road, something like a whirlpool began to form as she watched. A region of ash the size of a dinner table began to turn a slow clockwise circle.

"What is that?"

Dr. Dvali, standing next to Turk, said, "Watch."

Turk put a hand on her left shoulder and her own right hand moved to cover it. The ash turned more quickly, dimpled at the center of the vortex, slowed again. Lise didn't like what she was seeing. It was unnatural, threatening, or maybe that was just the vibe she was picking up from the others: they knew what to expect, they had seen this before. Whatever it was.

Then the dust exploded—like a geyser, Lise thought. It shot a plume about ten feet into the air. She gasped and took an involuntary step back.

The ejected dust became a rooster-tail in the wind and eventually faded into the general miasma of the air, but as it cleared it became obvious that the geyser had left something behind… something shiny.

It looked like a flower. A ruby-colored flower, Lise marveled, smooth-stemmed and with a texture that made her think of the skin of a newborn infant. Stem and head were the same shade of deep, hypnotic red.

Turk said, "That's the closest one yet."

The flower—a word to which Lise's frantic thoughts automatically defaulted, because it really did look like a flower, with a gargantuan stem and a crown of petals, and she realized she was thinking of the sunflowers in her mothers garden in California, which had been just about this tall when they went to seed—began to arch and twist, turning its convex head to some rhythmless, inaudible tune.

She said, "There are more of these?"

"There were."

"Where? What happened to them?"

"Wait," Turk said.

The flower turned its head toward the hotel. Lise stifled another small gasp, because in the center of the bloom there was something that looked like an eye. It was round, and it glittered wetly and it contained a sort of pupil, obsidian-black. For one awful moment it appeared to look directly at her.

"Is this what it was like on Mars?" Dr. Dvali said to Sulean Moi.

"Mars is countless light-years away. Where we are now, the Hypothetical have been active for much longer. The things that grew on Mars were much less active, different in appearance. But if you're asking me whether this is a similar phenomenon, then yes, probably it is."

The ocular sunflower abruptly stopped moving. The inundated town of Bustee was still and silent, as if holding its breath.

Then there was, to Lise's horror, more motion in the dust, bumped-up rills and puffs of ash converging on the flower. Something—several things—leaped onto the stalk of it with frightening speed. They moved continuously and she could only form a vague impression of their nature, things crab-like, sea-green, many-legged, and what they did to the sunflower was—

They ate it.

They nipped at its stalk until the writhing thing toppled; then they were on it like piranhas on a carcass, and when the manic flurry of their devouring was finished they disappeared, or became inert once more, camouflaged in the fallen ash.

Nothing was left behind. No evidence whatsoever.

"This," Dr. Dvali said, "is why we're reluctant to leave the room."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Turk spent the rest of the morning at the window, cataloging the varieties of peculiar life that sprang out of the dust. Know your enemy, he thought. Lise stood next to him much of the time, asking brief but pertinent questions about what he had seen before she woke up. Dr. Dvali had switched on their little wireless telecom receiver and was drawing down sporadic reports from Port Magellan, a useful activity in Turk's opinion, but the other Fourths did nothing but talk: endlessly and to little purpose. It was one of the failings of Fourths, Turk decided. They might occasionally be wise. But they were incurably talky.

Right now they were picking on the Martian woman, Sulean Moi, who seemed to know more than the rest of them about the ashfall but who was reluctant to share her knowledge. Mrs. Rebka was particularly insistent. "Your taboos aren't relevant here," she said. "We need all the information we can get. You owe it to us… to the boy, at least."

Temperate as it sounded, this was, by Fourth standards, nearly a fist-fight.

The Martian woman, dressed in oversized denim pants that made her look like some implausibly skinny oil-rig jock, sat on the floor hugging her knees. "If you have a question," she said sullenly, "ask it."

"You said the ashfall on Mars generated peculiar forms of, of—"

"Of life, Mrs. Rebka. Call it by its name. Why not?"

"Lifeforms like what we're seeing outside?"

"I don't recognize the flowers or the predators that consume them. In that sense, there's no similarity. But that's to be expected. A forest in Ecuador doesn't look like a forest in Finland. But both are forests."

"The purpose of it, though," Mrs. Rebka said.

"I've studied the Hypotheticals since childhood and I've listened to a lot of highly-informed speculation and I still can't guess the 'purpose' of it. The Martian ashfalls are isolated events. The life they generate is vegetative, always short-lived, and unstable in the long term. What conclusions can be drawn from such isolated examples? Very few." She hesitated, frowning. "The Hypotheticals—whatever else they are—are almost certainly not discreet entities but a collation of vastly many interconnected processes. They are an ecology, in other words. These manifestations either play some explicit role in that process or are an unintended consequence of it. I don't believe they represent any kind of deliberate strategy on the part of a higher consciousness."

"Yes," Mrs. Rebka said impatiently, "but if your people understood enough to engineer Hypothetical technology into human beings—"

"You possess that ability too." Sulean Moi looked pointedly at Isaac.

"Because it was given to us by Wun Ngo Wen."

"Our work on Mars has always been purely pragmatic. We were able to culture samples from the ashfall and observe their ability to interact with human protein at the cellular level. Centuries of that kind of observation produced some insight into the ways human biology might be manipulated."

"But you engineered what you admit is Hypothetical technology."

"Technology or biology—in this case I'm not sure the distinction is meaningful. Yes, we cultured alien life, or technology if you prefer that word, at the microscopic level. Because it grows, reproduces, and dies, we were able to select and manipulate certain strains for certain traits. Over the course of a great many years we generated the modified cultures that enhance human longevity. And other germ lines as well. One of the most radical of which is the treatment you applied to Isaac while he was still in the womb. In your womb, Mrs. Rebka."

Mrs. Rebka reddened.

Turk understood the significance of what they were discussing, and he guessed it was important, but it seemed ridiculously remote at a time when real problems were percolating so close to hand. Right outside the door, in fact. Was it safe to go outside? That was the question they ought to be asking. Because sooner or later they would have to leave this room. Because they had very little in the way of food.

He begged the loan of Dr. Dvali's little radio and pushed the nodes into his ears, blocking out the querulous Fourths and inducing other voices.

The available broadcast was a narrowband thing from Port Magellan, two guys from one of the local media collectives reading UN advisories and updated reports. This ashfall had been only a little worse than the first, at least in terms of weight and duration. A few roofs had collapsed to the south of the city. Most roads were currently impassable. People with respiratory problems had been sickened by ash inhalation, and even healthy people were spitting gray residue, but that wasn't what had everybody scared. What had everybody scared were the peculiar things growing out of the ash. The announcers called these things "growths" and reported that they had appeared randomly across the city, but especially where the ash was deep or had drifted. They sprang from the dust, in other words, like seedlings from mulch. Although they lived only briefly and were quickly "reabsorbed" into the local environment, a few of them—"objects resembling trees or enormous mushrooms"—had erupted to impressive heights.

There was a dreamlike (or nightmare-like) aspect to these reports. A "pink cylinder" fifty feet in length was blocking traffic at a downtown intersection. "Something witnesses describe as an immense spiky bubble, like a piece of coral," had sprouted from the roof of the Chinese consulate. Reports of small motile forms were yet to be officially confirmed.

Terrifying as this was, the manifestations were dangerous only if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—if one of them fell on you, for example. Still, residents were advised to stay indoors and keep windows closed. The ash had stopped falling, an offshore breeze was dispersing the lightest of the particles, and work crews were prepped to hose down the streets again ("growths" and all, Turk supposed) as soon as that was practical.

Unless this began to happen repeatedly, the city would recover. But the city was on the far side of a chain of mountains pierced by a few currently useless passes, and Bustee, like every other tin-and-tarpaper road town between the foothills and the Rub al-Khali, depended on the coast for supplies. How long till the passes were cleared? Weeks, minimum, Turk guessed. The last ashfall had been hard on these towns but this one had been worse, locally much denser, and the weird-ass plant life (or whatever it was) would surely impede the work necessary to get commerce up and running. So food would run short: what about water? He wasn't sure how these desert settlements were supplied. You turned on the tap, but where was the reservoir? Up in the foothills? Was the water still potable, and would it stay that way?

At least there was food and bottled water in the car, enough to last them a while. What Turk didn't like was that the vehicle was sitting out in the parking lot of this motel where someone might be tempted to break in and share the wealth. Here, at least, was a problem he could confront. He stood up and said, "I'm going outside."

The others turned to look goggle-eyed at him. Dvali said, "What are you talking about?"

He explained about the food. "Even if no one else is hungry, I am."

"It might not be safe," Dvali said.

Turk had seen a couple of other people out in the street with handkerchiefs tied over their mouths. One of them had been within fifteen feet of a "lifeform" when it sprouted from the dust, but the flower hadn't interfered with the man and the man had shown absolutely no inclination to fuck with the flower. Which jibed with what the news was saying about Port Magellan. "Just to the car and back. But I'd like somebody in the doorway watching out for me, and I need something to use for a mask."

There was no debate, to Turk's relief. Dr. Dvali used a pocketknife to cut off a corner of the bedsheet, which Turk tied over his nose and mouth. Turk took the vehicle's keycard from Mrs. Rebka while Lise volunteered for door duty.

"Don't stay out any longer than you need to," she said.

"Don't worry," he said.

The sky was blue, made chalky by the ash that gave the air a sour, sulfuric tang. No telling what this was doing to everybody's lungs. If the dust contained alien spores—which was what all the talk seemed to imply—might they not take root in the moist interior of a human body? But they didn't seem to need much moisture, Turk thought, if they could grow on the paved street of a desert town in a dry September. In any case, there had been no reports of purely ash-related deaths. He shook off these concerns and tried to concentrate on the task at hand.

He felt lonely as soon as he stepped outside. The motel parking lot was a paved half-moon with an empty ceramic fountain in the middle of it. Beyond it was the main street, really just a stretch of Highway 7 heading into the Rub al-Khali. Across the street there was a row of one-story brick commercial buildings. All of this was ash-coated, windows dust-encrusted, traffic signs and billboards rendered illegible. The silence was unbroken.

The Fourths' vehicle, recognizable by its boxy shape and sprung-steel wheels, was parked a dozen yards to Turk's left. He stood a moment and looked back at Lise, who was holding the door open a crack. He gave her a little wave and she nodded. All clear. Onward.

He took long deliberate steps, trying not to stir up too much dust. His shoes impacted the drifted ash and left finely-detailed prints under chalky clouds.

He reached the car without incident and was only slightly unnerved by the distance that had opened up between himself and the room where Lise was waiting. He used his forearm to brush a layer of ash off the rear of the vehicle, the baggage compartment where the groceries were stored. He took Dr. Dvali's keycard out of his pocket and applied it to the security slot. Tendrils of dust rose up around his hands.

He paused and lifted the cloth that covered his mouth long enough to spit. The spittle plopped inelegantly on the surface of the ash-covered sidewalk, and he half expected something to rise up from beneath, like a fish rising to bait, and snatch it away.

He opened the cargo door and selected a cooler full of bottled water and a box of canned goods—the kind of thing you could eat without cooking if you had to—and that, plus a few stacks of flatbread, was all he could carry. Enough for now. Or he could get in the car and drive it closer to the room: but that would block the route around the courtyard and maybe attract unwanted attention…

"Turk!" Lise yelled from the doorway. He looked back at her. The door was wide open and she was leaning forward, her hair framing her face. She pointed with obvious urgency: "Turk! In the street—"

He saw it at once.

It didn't look threatening. Whatever it was. In fact it looked like nothing more than a scrap of loose paper or sheet plastic caught in a gust of wind, fluttering at head level above the dust-duned highway by the diner. It flapped, but you couldn't really say it was flying, not in the purposeful way a bird flies.

But it wasn't a sheet of paper; it was something stranger than that. It was colored glassy blue at the center, red at its four extremities. And although it was clumsy in the air, it appeared to move by design, slip-sliding up the center of the road.

Then it seemed to hesitate, its four wing-tips pumping simultaneously to loft it a few feet higher. The next time it moved, it moved in a new direction.

It moved toward Turk.

"Get the fuck back here!" Lise was screaming.

They said these things weren't dangerous. Turk hoped that was true. He dropped everything but the carton of canned goods and began to run. About halfway to the door he glanced back over his shoulder. The flapping thing was right behind him, a yard to his right—way too close. He dropped the last carton and broke into a full-out sprint.

The thing was bigger than it had looked from a distance. And louder: it sounded like a bedsheet on a laundry line in a windstorm. He didn't know whether it could hurt him but it was clearly interested in him. He ran, and because the ash here was six inches deep, in places deeper, it was like running on a sandy beach. Or in a nightmare.

Lise threw the door wide open.

Soon Turk could see the flapping thing in his peripheral vision, beating the air like a piston. All it had to do was veer right and it would be on him. But it kept its steady if erratic course, paralleling him, almost as if it was racing him. Racing him—

To the open door.

He slowed down. The flapper rattled past him.

"Turk!"

Lise was still posed in the doorway. Turk ripped the cloth from his mouth and took a deep breath: bad move, because his throat was instantly clogged. "Close it," he croaked, but she couldn't hear him. He gagged and spat. "The door, dammit, close the fuckin' door!"

Whether or not she heard him, the danger dawned on Lise. She stepped back and simultaneously made a grab for the doorknob, missed, lost her balance and fell. The flapping thing, no longer awkward in the air, homed in on her as if it were laser-guided. Turk began sprinting again, but she was too far away.

She sat halfway up, balanced on an elbow, eyes wide, and Turk felt a stab of fear under his ribs sharp as a thorn to the heart. She raised an arm to fend off the thing. But it ignored her as it had ignored Turk. It slid past her into the room.

Turk couldn't see what happened next. He heard a muted scream, and then Mrs. Rebka's voice, a keening wail, more shocking because it came from a Fourth. She was calling Isaac's name.

CHAPTER TWEWTY-TWO

Lise sat stunned on the floor, not sure exactly what had happened.

The thing, the flying thing, the thing she had thought was about to attack Turk, had come inside the room. For a single dazed moment she heard the sound of it subside to a moist fluttering. Then the sound stopped altogether, and Mrs. Rebka began shouting.

Lise struggled to her feet.

"Shut the door!" Dr. Dvali roared.

But no. Not yet. She waited for Turk, who came barreling in along with a cloud of dust. Then she slammed the door and looked around warily for the flying creature. Idiotically, she was thinking of the summer her parents had taken her on vacation to a cabin in the Adirondacks: one night a bat had come down the chimney and fluttered around in the darkness, terrifying her. She recalled with supernatural clarity the feeling that at any moment something hot and alive would tangle itself in her hair and begin to bite.

But the flapping thing had already alighted, she realized.

The Fourths gathered around the bed where Isaac lay, because—

Because the flying creature had landed on the boy's face.

The terrified boy had turned his head against the pillow. The animal, or creature or whatever it was called or ought to be called, covered his left cheek like a fleshy red poultice. One corner of it matted the hair above his temple while another enclosed his neck and shoulder. Isaac's mouth and nose remained free, although the gelid body of the thing had adhered to his trembling lower lip. His left eye was dimly visible through the creatures translucent body. His other eye was wide open.

Mrs. Rebka went on calling the boy's name. She reached for the creature as if to pull it away, but Dvali caught her hand. "Don't touch it, Anna," he said.

Anna. Mrs. Rebka's name was Anna. Some idiotically calm fraction of Lise's mind filed that fact away. Anna Rebka, who was also the boy's mother.

"We need to get it off him!"

"Something to handle it with," Dvali said. "Gloves, a stick, a piece of paper—"

Turk yanked a pillowcase from one of the spare pillows and wrapped it around his right hand.

Strange, Lise thought, how the flying thing had ignored Turk in the street, how it had ignored Lise, for that matter, and the other adults, all easy targets, but had lighted without hesitation on Isaac. Did that mean something? Whatever the flying thing truly was—and she did not doubt that it had sprung from the ash, like the ocular flower or the host of carnival objects the news was reporting from Port Magellan—was it possible it had chosen Isaac?

The others stood back from the bed as Turk reached toward the creature with his wrapped hand. But then another strange thing happened:

The flying thing disappeared.

"The hell?" Turk said.

Isaac gasped and sat suddenly upright, put his hand to his face and felt the freshly revealed skin.

Lise blinked and tried to replay the memory in her mind's eye. The flapping thing had dissolved—or at least that's how it had looked. It had turned to liquid all at once and instantly evaporated. Or, no, it had seeped away, like a puddle of water drawn into moist earth. There wasn't even a wisp of vapor where it had been. It was as if it had drained directly into Isaac's flesh.

She set aside that troubling thought.

Mrs. Rebka pushed past Turk and reached for the boy—fell on the bed beside him and took him into her arms. Isaac, still gasping, bent his body against her and ducked his head into her shoulder. He began to sob.

When it became obvious nothing more was about to happen—nothing monstrous, at least—Dvali asked the others to step back. "Give them some room." Lise retreated and grabbed Turk's hand. His hand was sweaty and dusty but infinitely reassuring. She couldn't begin to guess what had just happened, but the aftermath was utterly comprehensible: a frightened child was being comforted by his mother. For the first time Lise began to see Mrs. Rebka as something more than a spooky, emotionally distant Fourth. For Mrs. Rebka, at least, Isaac wasn't a biology experiment. Isaac was her son.

"What the fuck," Turk repeated. "Is the kid all right?"

That remained to be seen. Sulean Moi and Diane Dupree sequestered themselves in the motel room's tiny kitchen nook, talking fervently but quietly. Dr. Dvali watched Mrs. Rebka from a careful distance. Gradually Isaac's breathing grew steadier. At last he pulled away from Mrs. Rebka and looked around. His peculiar gold-flecked eyes were large and wet, and he hiccupped a couple of times.

Diane Dupree emerged from her conference with the Martian woman and said, "Let me examine him."

She was the closest thing to a medical doctor in the room, so Mrs. Rebka reluctantly allowed Diane to sit with the boy, measuring his pulse and thumping his chest, doing these things, Lise suspected, more to reassure Isaac than to diagnose him. She did look closely at his left cheek and forehead where the creature had touched him, but there was no obvious rash or irritation. Lastly she looked into Isaac's eyes—those strange eyes—and seemed to find nothing extraordinary there.

Isaac mustered enough courage to ask, "Are you a doctor?"

"Just a nurse. And you can call me Diane."

"Am I all right, Diane?"

"You seem all right to me."

"What happened?"

"I don't know. A lot of strange things are happening right now. That was just one of them. How do you feel?"

The boy paused as if taking inventory. "Better," he said finally.

"Not scared?"

"No. Well. Not as much."

In fact he was speaking more coherently than he had for a couple of days. "May I ask you a question?"

The boy nodded.

"Last night you said you could see through the walls. You said there was a light only you could see. Do you still see it?"

He nodded again.

"Where? Can you point at it?"

Haltingly, Isaac did so.

"Turk," Diane said. "Do you have your compass?"

Turk carried a brass-encased compass in his pocket—he had refused to abandon it back in the Minang village, much to Ibu Diane's annoyance. He took it out and sighted along Isaac's arm toward his extended index finger.

"This is nothing new," Mrs. Rebka said impatiently. "He always points the same way. A little north of west."

"Just about due west now. Tending to the south, if anything." Turk looked up and registered their expressions. "Why? Is that important?"

By mid-afternoon the street was more nearly normal. Nothing had grown out of the ashfall for a couple of hours. There were occasional eddies in the dust, but that could have been the wind—a gusty wind had come up, clouding the air and piling gray windrows against exposed vertical surfaces. But it swept away some of the ashfall and even exposed the asphalt in places.

Only a few of the bizarre growths had lasted out the morning. Most, like the flower with an eye in its bloom, were attacked (eaten, Lise thought, might as well use the word) by smaller and more mobile entities, which then faded and vanished. Some of the larger growths were still more or less intact. She had seen a sort of technicolor tumbleweed blowing down the street, obviously the husk of something no longer vital. And there was a fretwork of brittle white tubules clinging to one of the buildings opposite the motel, obscuring a sign that had once announced auto parts but was no longer legible under the pale fretwork.

The relative calm drew people out of their hiding places. A few big-tired vehicles clanked past, more or less managing the dustfall. The motel clerk knocked on the door and asked whether everyone was okay—he had seen a little of the morning's drama. Turk said they were fine and he even ventured outside again (door firmly closed behind him, Lise at the window concealing her anxiety) and came back from the car with enough groceries to last a couple of days.

Mrs. Rebka continued hovering over Isaac, who was alert and not obviously suffering. He was sitting up now, facing the western wall of the room as if he were praying to some backward Mecca. This wasn't new behavior, Lise understood, but it was still deeply spooky. When Mrs. Rebka took a bathroom break, Lise went to the boy's bedside and sat with him.

She said hello. He looked at her briefly, then turned his head back to the wall.

Lise said, "What is it, Isaac?"

"It lives underground," the boy said.

And Lise suppressed a shiver and backed away.

Turk and Dr. Dvali conferred over a map.

It was the standard fold-up map of the topography and sparse roads of Equatoria west of the mountains. Lise peeked over Turk's shoulder as he marked lines with a pen and a ruler. "What's this about?"

"We're triangulating," Turk said.

"Triangulating what?"

Dvali, with only slightly strained patience, pointed at a dot on the map. "This is the compound where you met us, Miss Adams. We left there and we traveled north about two hundred miles—here." A flyspeck marked Bustee. "Back at the compound Isaac's obsession was with a very specific compass point, which we've drawn out." A long line into the west. "But where we are now, his directional sense appears to have altered slightly." Another long line, not quite parallel to the first. The lines moved closer across the amber-colored vastness of the desert, deep into the marked boundaries of the international mineral-rights concessions.

They intersected in the Rub al-Khali, the sandy tableland that comprised the western quarter of Equatoria.

"That's what he's pointing at?"

"That's what he's been pointing at all summer—more urgently in the last few weeks."

"So what is it? What's there?"

"As far as I know, nothing. Nothing's there."

"But it's where he wants to go."

"Yes." Dr. Dvali looked past Lise at the other Fourths. "And that's where we're going to take him."

The Fourth women said nothing, only stared.

It was Mrs. Rebka who finally, reluctantly, nodded her consent.

Lise couldn't sleep that night. She tossed on her mattress listening to the sounds the others made. Whatever else the Fourth treatment might cure, it did nothing for snoring. And yet they slept. And she did not.

Eventually, well past midnight, she got up, stepped over sleeping bodies on her way to the bathroom, and splashed her face with lukewarm water. Instead of going back to bed she went to the window, where Turk was sitting in a chair keeping the night watch.

"Can't sleep," she whispered.

Turk kept his gaze fixed on the street outside, a ghostly void by the light of the dust-dimmed moon. Nothing was happening. The peculiar eruptions from the ashfall showed no sign of resuming. Finally he said, "You want to talk?"

"I don't want to wake anybody up."

"Come out to the car." Turk and Dr. Dvali had moved the car closer to the room, where it would be easier to keep an eye on. "We can sit there awhile. It's safe enough now."

Lise had not left the room since they arrived and the idea appealed to her. She was wearing her only pair of jeans and an oversized shirt she had borrowed from the Fourth compound. She pulled her shoes onto her bare feet.

Turk opened the door and eased it shut when they had stepped outside. The smell of the ash was instantly stronger. Sulfur, or something bitter like that—why did the ash smell like sulfur? Hypothetical machines grew in cold places, or so Lise had learned in school: distant asteroids, the frozen moons of frozen planets. Was there sulfur out there? She had heard of sulfur on the moons of, was it, Jupiter? The New World's solar system had a planet like that, a cold radioactive giant, far from the sun.

The wind had died with nightfall. The sky was hazy but she could see a few stars. Even when she was very young her father had loved to show her the stars. The stars need names, he would say, and together they would name them. Big Blue. Point of the Triangle. Or silly names. Belinda. Grapefruit. Antelope.

She slid into the front seat next to Turk.

"We need to talk about what happens next," he said.

Yes. That was undeniably true. She said, "The Fourths are taking Isaac west."

"Right. I don't know what they hope to accomplish."

"They think he can talk to the Hypothetical."

"Great—what's he going to say? Greetings from the human race? Please stop dropping shit on us from outer space?"

"They're hoping to learn something profound."

"You believe that?"

"No. But they do. Dvali does, at least."

"Fourths are generally pretty reasonable people, but would you put a bet on that outcome? I wouldn't."

It was like religion, Lise supposed. You didn't lay odds on the sacred, you just looked for it with an open heart and hoped for the best. But she didn't say that to Turk. "So what do we do when they take off for the desert?"

He said, "I'm thinking of going with them."

"You're—what?"

"Wait, it makes sense. You saw the map, right? The place they're headed is three-quarters of the way to the west coast. From there there's a decent road all the way to the sea. The west coast, Lise, that's nothing but fishing villages and research outposts. Catch a boat on the southern route back to Port Magellan and by the time I get there nobody's looking for me anymore, the whole Fourth thing is over and Genomic Security has probably figured that out. I have enough friends in the Fourth community that I can probably get myself a whole new set of identity documents."

Nights got chilly in the desert this time of year. The upholstery was cold and their talk had made condensation on the window. "I can see a couple of problems with that."

"So can I—what's your list?"

She tried to be logical. "Well, the ashfall. Even if the roads are passable, even with a good vehicle, you could get stalled, run out of gas, have engine problems."

"It's a risk," he admitted, "but you can plan for it, carry tools and parts and fuel and so on."

"And the Fourths aren't a free ride. They expect to find something out there. What if they're right? I mean, look at the way that flying thing went after Isaac. Maybe he is special, maybe he has some special attraction to the, uh, whatever grows out of the ash, and, if so, that could be a major obstacle."

"I thought about that too. But I haven't heard of anyone being seriously hurt by those things, except accidentally. Even Isaac. Whatever happened to him, it doesn't seem to have made him worse."

"It landed on his face, Turk. It sank into his skin."

"He's sitting up, he's not feverish, he's no sicker than he was before."

"You wouldn't say that if it had been you."

"That's the point—it wasn't me; whatever that thing was, I'm not what it wanted."

"So we just tag along and when they're finished with Isaac—whatever that means—we go on to the coast? That's the plan?"

He said with an embarrassment Lise could feel even in the shadows of the car, "Doesn't have to be both of us. If you want you can stick here and try to catch a ride over the pass when the ash clears. You have options I don't have. Probably safer to do that, from the objective point of view."

The objective point of view. Doubtless Turk imagined he was giving her the latitude to back out graciously from a reckless plan. He led the kind of life that allowed for sudden reversals of fortune and heavy wagers against fate. She didn't. That was the implication, and it was, of course, true, by and large—though not lately.

"I'll think about it," she said, and stepped out of the car into the moonlit night, wishing she had been able to sleep.

Come morning there was a degree of near-normality in Bustee: a few pedestrians in the street, a few capable vehicles beginning to head toward the larger towns to the south. Locals gawked at the remains of alien life clinging to the facades of buildings or littering the sidewalks like broken, once-brightly-colored toys. Life reassembling itself, Lise thought, despite the strangeness. Her own life, more deeply unraveled, was slower to knit.

The Fourths, now that they had reached a consensus, set out to procure supplies. A party of four—Dr. Dvali, Sulean Moi, Diane Dupree, and Turk—went to see what money could still buy at the local shops. Turk was even talking about a second vehicle, if they could procure one.

Lise stayed in the motel room with Mrs. Rebka and Isaac, hoping to catch another couple of hours of sleep. Which turned out to be difficult, because Isaac was agitated again. Not because of the flying thing that had attacked him—that seemed to have passed from his mind as promptly as a bad dream—but out of a new sense of urgency, a need to hurry to the heart of whatever was happening out west. Mrs. Rebka had asked a few tentative questions. What did he mean when he talked about something "underground"? But Isaac couldn't answer and grew frustrated when he tried.

So Mrs. Rebka told him they were going west, they were going west, as soon as they possibly could; and eventually Isaac accepted this consolation and fell back to sleep.

Mrs. Rebka left the bedside and moved to a chair. Lise pulled her own chair closer.

Mrs. Rebka looked about fifty years old. Lise had assumed she was older. She was a Fourth, and Fourths could appear "about fifty" for decades. But if Isaac was hers, she couldn't be much older than she looked. And anyway, Lise thought, wasn't it true that Fourths were biologically unable to conceive? So Mrs. Rebka's pregnancy must have begun before her conversion.

The obvious question was difficult but Lise was determined to ask it, and she wasn't likely to have a better opportunity. "How did it happen, Mrs. Rebka? The boy, I mean. How did he… I mean, if this isn't too personal."

Mrs. Rebka closed her eyes. Fatigue was written all over her face, fatigue or some deep, intractable despair. "What are you asking, Miss Adams? How he was altered or why he was conceived?"

Lise fumbled for an answer but Mrs. Rebka waved it off. "A brief and not especially interesting story. My husband was a lecturer temporarily seconded to the American University. Not a Fourth, but friendly toward them. He might have considered the treatment himself except that he was a devout, orthodox Jew—his religious principles forbade it. And he died for the lack of it. He had an aneurism in his brain, inoperable. The treatment was the only thing that might have saved him. I begged him to take it, but he refused. In my grief I hated him a little for that. Because…"

"Because you were pregnant."

"Yes."

"Did he know?"

"By the time I was certain of it the aneurism had burst. He lived a few days but he was comatose."

"That child was Isaac?"

Mrs. Rebka closed her eyes. "That was fetal tissue that became Isaac. I know how brutal that sounds. But I couldn't tolerate the idea of raising the child alone. I meant to have an abortion. It was Dr. Dvali who convinced me otherwise. He had been one of my husbands closest friends and he became mine. He admitted that he was a Fourth. He talked to me about the controversies in the Fourth community, what it was like being—at least in some sense—a better kind of human being. And he talked to me about the Hypothetical, a subject that had always interested me. He introduced me to others in his community. They were supportive."

"They talked you into doing what they wanted you to do."

"Nothing as crude as that. They didn't feed me propaganda. I liked these people—I liked them better than all the unchanged people who visited me out of a sense of duty, who were relentlessly sympathetic and secretly indifferent. The Fourths were authentic. They said what they believed. And one of the things Avram Dvali believed in was the possibility of communicating with the Hypotheticals. He led me very gradually to the idea that I might have something to contribute to that very important work, because I was unchanged. And pregnant."

"So you gave him Isaac?"

"Not Isaac! I gave him the possibility of Isaac. Otherwise I would never have carried the child to term." She breathed in, breathed out, and the sound, to Lise's ears, was like the sound of the tide retreating from an ancient beach. "It wasn't any more complicated than the ordeal of becoming a Fourth. The customary injection, and then, when the process was underway, an intrauterine injection to keep the altered infant from being rejected by my body. I was tranquilized much of the time. I honestly remember very little of the pregnancy itself. He came to term in seven months."

"And afterward."

Mrs. Rebka looked away. "Avram was adamant that he should be raised by the community, not exclusively by me. He said it would be better if I didn't bond too closely with the child."

"Better for you or better for Isaac?"

"Both. We weren't sure he would survive to maturity. Isaac was—is—an experiment, Miss Adams. Avram was protecting me from what could have been an even more traumatic episode of grief. And beyond that… as much as I wanted to be a parent to Isaac, the boy has a difficult personality. He refused close contact with anyone. As a baby he wouldn't consent to be held. It really was as if he belonged to some new species, as if on the most fundamental biological level he knew he wasn't one of us."

"Because you made him that way," Lise could not help saying.

"True. The responsibility is all ours. And the guilt, of course. All I can say is that we hoped his contribution to our understanding of the universe would redeem the ugliness of his creation."

"Was that something you believed, or something they told you to believe?"

"Thank you for making excuses for me, Miss Adams, but yes, I believed it; all of us believed in it to one degree or another. That's why we came together in the first place. But none of us believed it as confidently and as—I'm tempted to say as heroically—as Avram Dvali. We had doubts, of course we did; we had moments of remorse. It isn't a pleasant story, is it? I'm sure you're asking yourself how we could have contemplated such a thing, much less carried it out. But people are capable of all kinds of acts, Miss Adams. Even Fourths. You ought to remember that." Mrs. Rebka closed her eyes. "And now I'm tired, and I don't have anything further to say."

The others came back with food, bottled water, spare parts, and (miraculously) a second vehicle—another big-tired utility vehicle purchased, Turk said, at ridiculous expense from a larcenous local dealer. The Fourths had more cash than good sense, Turk said, or maybe the sense to know when cash was no good.

She helped Turk load supplies into the vehicles. He moved with easy muscularity, loose-hipped and unself-conscious. There was a certain pleasure in doing the work with him, not thinking about Mrs. Rebka or Isaac or Dr. Dvali or what might be waiting out in the Rub al-Khali.

"So are you riding with us," he finally asked, "or are you waiting for a bus back to the Port?"

She didn't grace him with an answer. He didn't deserve one.

Because of course she was going with him. Into the big unknown, or wherever it was good people went when they disappeared.