Axis

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

They had reached the outskirts of the oil concessions—the desolate, thin end of nowhere—when the third and most intense ashfall began.

There had been some warning, conveyed by Dr. Dvalis intermittently-functional telecom receiver. The precipitation had been relatively light in Port Magellan, but dense waves of it were falling in the west, as if focused there.

By the time Dr. Dvali announced this news, the threat was ominously visible. Lise, looking through the back window of the vehicle as it sped down the highway between two equally flat horizons, saw clouds the color of boiling slate materialize from a chalk-blue sky.

"We'll need to get under cover again," she heard Turk say.

To the southwest Turk could just make out the silver-black silhouettes of the Aramco drilling and pumping complex. Evacuated, presumably—a couple of the far towers seemed to be leaning off vertical, though that could be an illusion—but Turk guessed the site would still be guarded, both by machines and by armed men.

Fortunately they didn't need to head in that direction. The oil concessions had grown a ring of commerce around them, businesses run by lonely men for lonely men, strip clubs and bars and porn vendors, which meant that not far down the road they would find more respectable commercial concessions and housing for the hired workers. Which appeared as the two cars raced the black cloud flowing from the east: a gated side road, the gate unchained; a mall (grocery store, media retailers, a multi-mart); and a number of sturdy concrete buildings in which one- or two-room utility apartments were stacked like boxes.

Turk, in the lead car with Lise and Dr. Dvali, looked back and saw the second vehicle pulling into the mall lot. Dvali swung around and intercepted them in front of the grocer)? store.

"Supplies," Diane explained.

"We don't have time," Dvali said sternly. "We need to get under cover."

"Such as the building up ahead? I would suggest you break in or whatever you need to do, and we'll follow as soon as we find food."

Dvali clearly didn't like this idea, but just as clearly, Turk thought, it made sense: they had been running low on essentials and the ash storm might maroon them for a good long time. "Be quick about it," Dvali said unhappily.

Whoever designed this workers' barracks had made no attempt to disguise the institutional nature of the project. On the outside the building was weathered concrete and cracked pavement and an empty parking lot adjoining a tennis court enclosed in a chain-link fence, its net slumped in disarray. The door Turk approached was hollow steel painted industrial yellow, no doubt battered by the boots of hundreds of shit-drunk oil-riggers over the years, and it was locked, but the lock was fragile and gave way after some leverage with a tire-iron. Dvali fidgeted while Turk performed this task, glancing back at the approaching storm. The light was thinning already, the disc of the sun growing weak and obscure.

The door sprang loose and Turk stepped into the interior darkness, followed by Dr. Dvali and finally Lise.

"Uck!" Lise said. "God, it stinks!"

The evacuation must have been hurried. In many of the apartments that opened onto this hallway—more like cells, with their small high windows and cubicle bathrooms—food had been left to rot, toilets had been abandoned unflushed. They set about finding the most presentable first-floor residences and settled on three spaces, two adjoining and one cross-hall, from which the previous residents had removed the most obvious perishables. Lise reached up to swing open a window, but Dvali said, "No, not with the dust coming. We'll have to live with the stench."

There was no electricity, and the light was fading fast. Turk and Dvali unloaded their gear from the car, by which time the afternoon had turned into a smudgy twilight and the ash had begun to fall like snow. Dvali said, "Where are the others?"

"I could go hurry them up," Turk offered.

"No… they know where to find us."

Diane and Sulean Moi left Mrs. Rebka in the car with Isaac while they scrounged for groceries. The store had been nearly stripped, but in a stockroom in the back they discovered a few boxes of canned soups, not especially appetizing but possibly vital if the storm locked them indoors for any length of time. They ferried a few of these cartons out to the vehicle as the sky darkened. "One more box," Diane said at last, assessing the oncoming ash cloud, "and then we should get under cover."

A skylight above the aisles of the grocery store cast pale illumination on the empty shelves, some of which had been tumbled down by a previous tremor. Diane and Sulean each picked up a final carton and headed for the door, feet crunching on glass and litter.

As soon they reached the sidewalk they heard Isaac's screams. Diane dropped her carton instantly, spilling cans of creamed this-and-that down the sidewalk, and yanked open the passenger-side door and then craned her head back. "Help me!"

The boy's screaming was interrupted only by gasps for breath, and Diane couldn't help thinking that it must hurt simply to make such a noise, that a child's lungs shouldn't be capable of this awful sound. He thrashed and kicked and she grabbed his wrists and pinned them, which required more strength than she would have imagined. Mrs. Rebka was up front, fumbling the keycard into its slot. "He just started screaming—I can't calm him down!"

The important thing now was to get under shelter. "Start the car," Diane said.

"I tried! It won't!"

Now the storm was on top of them: not just a few ominous dust-flakes anymore but a roiling front that came out of the desert with shocking speed and solidity. It broke before Diane could say another word, and as quick as that they were engulfed in it, choking in it.

Literally choking. She gagged, and even Isaac fell silent as soon as he drew a deep breath full of the dust. All light faded and the air became impenetrably dark and dense. Diane spat out a gagging mouthful of foulness and managed to shout, "We have to take him inside!"

Had Mrs. Rebka heard? Had Sulean? Evidently she had; Sulean, little more than a dimly-perceptible shape, helped Diane lift the boy and take him from the car into the grocery store, while Mrs. Rebka followed, her hand on Diane's back.

Being inside the store wasn't much improvement. The broken skylight admitted huge gusts of ash. They managed to get Isaac upright between them and he even supported his own weight as they groped for the stockroom. And found it, and closed themselves inside, in absolute darkness now, waiting for the dust to settle enough to allow a decent breath, registering how much worse this was than they had anticipated, Diane thinking: After all these years, is this where I've come to die?

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

It was obvious as soon as the storm broke that Isaac and the Fourth women had been stranded elsewhere. Because "storm" was not just an abstraction this time. This wasn't a loose fall of dust, Lise thought, like some early-autumn snow shower in Vermont. Nor was it a puzzling astrophysical phenomenon that could be swept away by morning light. If this had happened in Port Magellan the city would have been shut down for months. It was a deluge, an inundation, no less so because it was taking place in the evacuated far west, where there were few eyes to see and no one to send help.

The darkness was the worst of it. Because the expedition was divided, they had only the two flashlights from the vehicle Dvali had been driving. The flashlights were fully-charged and guaranteed (the label said) for a hundred hours, but even their cumulative power made for a dismally small zone of light in a large and stifling darkness. Turk and Dr. Dvali insisted on combing through all three stories of the residence to make sure the accessible windows were sealed against the dust. It was a scary, arduous task, an ongoing reminder of how alone they were in this hollow wind-screaming building. And even after that the ash managed to get inside, invading the inevitable chinks and gaps, spilling out of the stairwells. Particles of it hovered in the flashlight beams, and the stink infused the air, their clothes, their bodies.

Finally they settled down in a room on the third floor, with a window from which they could assess the situation outside (if morning ever came, Lise thought; if the suns light reached them ever again), and Turk opened a can of corned beef with his pocketknife and served it out on some plastic dishes he found in one of the kitchen cupboards.

Oil riggers lived like university freshmen, Lise had concluded. Angry, depressive university freshmen. Exhibits A, B, C: the empty bottles randomly scattered, the heaps of clothes abandoned in corners, the stripped mattresses and tattered paper shrines to the World's Biggest Breasts.

Dvali was talking about Isaac. He had been talking about Isaac for hours, it seemed to Lise, fretting over his absence and what this fresh starfall might mean "to his status as a communicant." It all began to sound more than slightly mad, until she was moved to ask, "If you care so much about him, couldn't you have given him a last name?"

Dvali looked sideways at her. "We raised him communally. Mrs. Rebka named him Isaac, and that seemed sufficient."

"You could have called him Isaac Hypothetical," Turk said. "Given his paternity."

"I don't find that funny," Dvali said. But at least he shut up.

The ash was falling thicker than ever. She could see it outside the window when she pointed a flashlight that way, but only as an undifferentiated wash of glittery gray. More than in Port Magellan, she thought. More than in Bustee.

She didn't care to consider what might be growing in it.

It took a long while for the air in the poorly-sealed grocery store stockroom to settle, and it never settled completely, but eventually Diane noticed that her lungs were less painful, her throat less raw, her vertigo slowly becoming bearable.

How much time had passed since the storm began? Two hours, a dozen? She couldn't be sure. There was no sunlight anymore, in fact no light whatsoever. There hadn't been time to rescue flashlights from the vehicle, or anything else for that matter. There had only been time to search the narrow stockroom (by touch and from memory) for something to rinse the ash out of their mouths: a cache of carbonated soft drinks in plastic bottles. Warm, the liquid foamed on the tongue and mixed with the inhaled particles until it tasted like charred flannel. But drink enough of it and you could speak, at least.

The three women were gathered around Isaac, who lay on the concrete floor breathing noisily. Isaac had become their touchstone, Diane thought. He had sipped several times from one of the bottles, but he was feverish—a new, frightening heat baked off his skin—and since the ash-fall began he hadn't spoken or been able to speak.

We're like the witches in Macbeth, Diane thought, and Isaac is our cauldron, boiling.

"Isaac," Anna Rebka said. "Isaac, can you hear me?"

Isaacs response was a stirring in his limbs, a faint murmur that might have been assent.

Diane knew they might die here, all of them. The thought wasn't extraordinarily troubling to her, though she dreaded the pain and discomfort. One of the benefits of Fourthness (and they were all Fourths in this room, even, in his way, Isaac), was this muting of the anxiety about one's death. She had lived, after all, a very long time. She carried memories of the Spinless world, the vanished Earth as she had seen it as a child and on its last night: a house, a lawn, the sky. Back when she had believed in god, a god who made sense of the world by loving it.

The god she missed, perhaps even the god Dr. Dvali had been unconsciously invoking when he created Isaac. Oh, she had seen it all before, the fractured longing for redemption: she had lived with it, lived it. It had driven her brother Jason just as it had driven Diane. Jason's obsession had not been very different from Dvali's—the difference being that Jason, in the end, had offered himself on the altar, not a child.

Isaac's breathing began to deepen and his body cooled slightly. Diane wondered about his reaction to the ashfall. The link, of course, was through the Hypothetical machines, the half-living things that generated and inhabited and arose from the fallen dust. But what did that mean, what was the point of it, what was it meant to accomplish?

She must have spoken that last aloud—her mind was still a little muddled—because Sulean Moi said, "Nothing, it's meant to accomplish nothing." Her voice was a raw croak. "That's the truth Dr. Dvali wants to deny. The Hypotheticals are comprised of a network of self-reproducing machines. That much we all more or less agree upon. But they aren't a mind, Diane. They can't talk to Isaac, not the way I'm talking to you."

"That's smug," Mrs. Rebka said from her corner of the darkness. "And not true. You talked to the dead boy, Esh, through Isaac. Wouldn't you call that communication?"

The Martian woman was silent. How strange it was to be having this conversation in the absolute darkness, Diane thought. And how Fourth of us. How would she have reacted to this predicament before her own treatment? Probably the fear would have overwhelmed her. Fear, and claustrophobia, and the steady awful sifting sound of ash (but it was so much more than ash) settling on the roof and stressing the building's beams and timbers.

"He told me he remembers Esh," Sulean said. "Memory is also an attribute of machines. A modern telephone has a larger memory than some mammals. I suspect the first Hypothetical machines were sent out into the universe for the purpose of gathering data, and I suspect they still do that, in infinitely subtler ways. Somehow, Esh's memory became available to the machines that killed him. He became a datum, which Isaac is able to access."

"Then I suppose Isaac will become a datum too," Mrs. Rebka said, suddenly meek, and here, Diane thought, was the heart of her revealed. Mrs. Rebka knew that Isaac would die, that there was no other possible outcome of his transaction with the Hypotheticals, and some part of her had accepted that dreadful truth.

"As he probably remembers Jason Lawton," Sulean Moi said. "Isn't that the question on your mind, Diane?"

Hateful in her perceptiveness, this Martian hag. Doomed to exile from her planet, her people, even her Fourthness. She was steeped in bitterness. Worse, she was right. It was the question Diane had dared not ask. "Maybe I'd rather not know."

"And Dr. Dvali wouldn't stand for it. He would prefer to keep Isaac's epiphanies to himself. But Dr. Dvali isn't here."

"That doesn't matter," Diane said, faintly panicky.

"Isaac," Sulean Moi said.

"Stop," Mrs. Rebka said.

"Isaac, can you hear me?"

Mrs. Rebka said Stop again, but Isaac's voice came faintly, a whisper: "Yes."

"Isaac," Sulean Moi said, "do you remember Jason Lawton?"

Please, no, Diane thought.

But the boy said, "Yes."

"And what would he say, if he were here?"

Isaac cleared his throat, a moist, froggy sound.

"He would say, 'Hello, Diane.' He would say—"

"No more," Diane begged. "Please."

"He would say, 'Be careful, Diane.' Because it's about to happen. The last thing."

What last thing? But there wasn't even time to pose the question before the last thing came up from the limestone and bedrock far underground. It shook the building, it rocked the floor, it quenched all thought, and it didn't stop.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Only Isaac saw it happening, because only Isaac had eyes that could see it. He could see many things, few of which he had described even to Mrs. Rebka or Sulean Moi, his most trusted friends.

For instance, he could see himself. He saw himself more clearly than ever before in the absolute darkness of the buried stockroom. Not his body exactly, but when he looked down he could see the silver skein of the Hypothetical presence inside him. It shared his nervous system, made glowing traceries of ever-finer filaments joined in bundles to the shimmering rod of his spine. Had the others been able to see him this way they probably would have been horrified. Some fraction of Isaac, the merely human part, was also horrified. But that voice was a diminishing presence, and a dissenting voice thought he was beautiful. He looked like electricity. He looked like fireworks.

The women—Mrs. Rebka, Sulean Moi, Diane—were also visible to him, but they shone with a much fainter light. Isaac guessed the Fourth treatment had done that to them, that it had infected them with a little bit (but only a little bit) of Hypothetical life. It was as if they were timid lamps in a fog, while Isaac… Isaac was a searchlight, glaring.

And he could see other things, too, beyond the walls.

He saw the ashfall. To Isaacs eyes it was a storm of stars, each grain distinctly bright and merging into a general brightness, an atmosphere of luminosity. Bright, yes, but also, somehow, transparent: he could see through it—especially to the west.

The infinitely tiny Hypothetical machines weren't falling at random. Taken together, their trajectories were focused on the place where something old was rising from the bedrock of the desert. It had stirred in its sleep like a lazy behemoth and the ground had trembled, canting the oil derricks and shattering pumps and pipelines. It had stirred and stirred again as more ash fell, triggered by unknowable cues into new activity.

And it stirred again now, ferociously. The earth didn't just shake this time, it roared, and although the merely human part of Isaac was blind in the darkness he heard quite clearly the groan of deep rock stressed to the fracturing point, the slap and crack of collapsing walls. He felt a rush of foul air, and his breath became labored and painful again.

But none of that mattered to the part of him that could see.

This is a machine, he thought, watching the great device heave itself out of the night desert a hundred and more miles to the west. Machine, yes, but it was alive… it was both. The words did not exclude one another. The voice in him that had been Jason Lawton's voice said: a living cell is a machine made of protein. What falls from the sky and what rises from the earth is just life by other means.

The giant structure shouldering itself out of the ground in the west resembled the Arch, or at least the pictures Isaac had seen of the Arch. It was a huge half-ring made of the same stuff as the dust that was falling from beyond the sky, condensed and differently arranged, its molecules and its unusual atoms subverting natural laws for which Isaac had no name but to which Jason Lawton's memory attached words like "strong force" and "weak force." It was lovely in its intrinsic glow, a rainbow shining in colors without names. It was an Arch for things to pass through; but it didn't lead to another planet.

Things were passing through it now. From the utter blackness inside it, where even Isaac couldn't see, luminous clouds ascended to the stars.

The thought of Jason lingered in Diane's mind even after she was hurt.

The earthquake happened in a series of jolting shocks, almost unbearable in the darkness. That much she understood, and she had been able to suppress her fear at least for the first few moments. Then the building began to collapse.

Or so she intuited from the fact that she felt a sharp blow to her right shoulder and neck, followed by dazed unconsciousness, followed by an awakening to pain, nausea, and a terrifying inability to draw breath. She gasped. A little air entered her lungs, but not enough. Not nearly enough.

"Lie still." The voice was a gutteral croak. Mrs. Rebka? No, she thought it must be Sulean Moi. Diane tried to answer but couldn't. Her lungs wouldn't do anything but spasm in feeble attempts to draw air. She tried to sit up, or at least turn to one side, in order to avoid vomiting on herself.

That was when she discovered that the left side of her body was numb, dead, useless.

"Part of the ceiling came down on you," Sulean Moi said.

Diane gagged and retched, but nothing came up, for which she was thankful. And the tremors in the earth had stopped, that was good. She tried to evaluate her own injuries but couldn't think clearly enough to do so, not when her body was pulling so hard for air. She hurt. And she was frightened. She had no particular fear of death, but this, oh, this was less bearable than death itself: this was why people elected to die, to make an end to this kind of suffering.

She thought of Jason again—why had she been thinking of Jason?—and then of Tyler, her lost husband. Then even these thoughts became too weighty to sustain, and she passed out again.

Isaac could see that Diane had been badly hurt. Even in the dark it was possible to see that. Her dim glow had been nearly extinguished. Compared to Sulean Moi, Diane was a guttering candle.

It was hard to pay attention. He was mesmerized by the invisible landscape all around him. Mesmerized because he was a part of it, he was becoming it… but that could wait. Now that the new Arch had assembled itself in the west—from Hypothetical molecules, granite, magma, memory—there was a kind of pause. All around him for many miles the fresh blanket of dust began to undergo a new stage of metabolism. That would take time. Isaac could afford to be patient.

He surprised Sulean Moi and Mrs. Rebka by crawling over fallen beams, fragments of drywall, scattered foam insulation and collapsed aluminum venting to the place where Diane Dupree lay trapped beneath a heavy joist. His lungs labored and his mouth was foul with dust, but he could breathe, at least, which Diane apparently could not, not easily. And he could tell when he reached out to touch her that the falling debris had hurt her head. He meant to stroke her hair, the way Mrs. Rebka stroked his hair when he was ill, but the place above Diane's left ear yielded to his touch, and his hand came away sticky.

Tyler Dupree had died one day in August, the long Equatorian August, two years ago, the long Equatorian years.

Diane had hiked with him up one of the steep, rolling ridges of the coast, for no other reason than to sit at its summit and watch the forest drop like a deep green broadcloth to the sea.

Neither of them was young; both had lived out most of their extended lives as Fourths. Lately Tyler complained from time to time of fatigue, but he had gone on seeing patients, mainly the young men who worked as breakers (their injuries could be horrendous) and the Minang villagers among whom she and Tyler had settled. Today he had said he felt fine, and he had insisted on the long hike—he called it "the closest thing to a vacation I'm likely to get." So Diane had gone with him, relishing the dimness beneath the trees and the brightness of the high meadows, but also vigilant, watching him.

The Fourth metabolism was powerful but finely balanced. It could be pushed hard, but like any other physical thing it had a breaking point. Age couldn't be indefinitely deferred because the treatment itself aged. When Fourths failed, they tended to fail all at once.

Which was how Tyler had failed.

She thought he might have known it was happening. That was why he had insisted on this hike. They came to a place he loved but seldom had time to visit, a broad swath of granite and mountain grass. They put out a blanket, and Diane opened her backpack and withdrew the treasures she had stored for this occasion: Australian wine, bread from the bakeries of Port Magellan, cold roast beef, things foreign to the Minang diet to which they had become accustomed. But Tyler wasn't hungry. He lay down on his back and pillowed his head against a bump of moss. He was thin these days, his skin was pale despite exposure to the sun, and he looked, Diane thought, almost elfin.

"I think I'll sleep," he said. And it was at that moment, in the August sunlight and surrounded by the smell of rock and water and black earth, that she had known he was dying.

Some atavistic part of her wanted to rescue him, to carry him down the mountain the way he had once carried her across much of the continental United States when she was mortally ill. But there was no cure; the Fourth treatment could be taken only once.

Time later for grief. She knelt beside him and stroked his head. She said, "Can I get you anything?" And he said, "I'm happy right here."

So she lay down beside him and held him in her arms as the afternoon waned. Much later, much too soon, the sun went down, and it was time to go home, but only Diane stood up.

I'm happy right here.

But was this Jason with her in the darkness? Her brother Jason who had died so many years ago? No: it was the strange boy Isaac, but he sounded so much like Jason…

"I can remember you, Diane. If that's what you want, I can do it."

She understood what he was offering. The Hypotheticals remembered Jason, and so did she, but the long slow memory of the Hypotheticals was less perishable; it persisted over billions of years. Did she want to join him in that immensity?

She tried to turn her head but could not. She drew a breath, just enough to force out a single word:

"No," she said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Turk was asleep when the earthquake struck. He and Lise and Dr. Dvali had spread mattresses on the concrete floor and slept, or tried to sleep, and at some point in the darkness Lise had scooted up next to him, both of them still wearing the reeking clothes they had worn for days, not that it mattered. She curled against the small of his back and cupped her knees to his knees, her breath warming his neck and raising the small hairs there. Then the floor heaved like a live thing and the air filled with a clamorous roar, the only distinguishable element of which was Lise's scream, audible because it was next to his ear. He managed somehow to roll over and hold her—they held each other—while the noise reached an unthinkable crescendo and the room's carefully-sealed window kicked out of its flanges and shattered on the floor. Nothing to do but hold on as the floor itself slanted away from horizontal, bucking like a car that had slipped its gears.

They held each other until it stopped. How long a time that was Turk couldn't say. A medium-sized eternity. It left his ears ringing, his body bruised. He drew enough good air to ask Lise whether she was okay, and she drew enough good air to say, "I guess." So Turk called out to Dr. Dvali, who answered belatedly: "My leg's hurt. Other than that I'm all right."

The noise and vertigo went on well after the shaking ceased, but Turk began to recover some composure. He thought about aftershocks. "Maybe we should try to get outside," he said, but Dvali said no, not in the ash storm.

Turk separated himself from Lise and began to grope through the litter on the floor, finally locating the flashlight he had left beside the mattress: it had rolled all the way to the window-side wall. Switched on, it lit up a column of dust motes and debris. The room was intact, but barely. Lise huddled on the mattress, ghost-white, and Dvali, just as pale, sat propped in a corner. His left leg was bleeding where something sharp had fallen on it, but the wound didn't seem serious.

"So what do we do?" Lise asked.

Dvali said, "Wait until dawn and hope it doesn't happen again."

If dawn ever came, Turk thought. If anything like sunlight ever again reached this godforsaken badland.

Lise said, "I hate to be practical here, but I have to pee. Really badly."

Turk swung the flashlight beam toward the adjoining bathroom. "Looks like the throne's intact, but I wouldn't try to flush. And the door's off entirely."

"So look the other way," Lise said, gathering her blankets around her, and Turk thought how much easier all this would be if he didn't love her so much.

"There's light coming in the window," she said an hour or so later, and Turk made his way over there, treading cautiously on the broken glass.

The ash had stopped falling: that much was obvious. Had the dust-fall been as thick as it was yesterday they would have choked on it. But only a few stray flakes had drifted in, and Turk thought the air smelled fresher and less sulfurous, unless he was just getting used to it.

The light to which Lise had drawn his attention was real enough—it became obvious when he switched off the flashlight. But it was too early for dawn, and this light wasn't coming from the sky. It was coming from down below.

From the streets of this little corporate outpost, from the roofs of damaged buildings, the desert, anywhere the ash had fallen. He called Lise and Dvali over to look.

A few nights when he was at sea Turk had seen his vessel's wake glowing where bioluminescent algae had been stirred up by the passage of the ship. Always an eerie thing to see, and this reminded him of it, but what was happening here was stranger still. The desert, or the interplanetary dust that had fallen on it, was aglow with a phosphorescence of many colors: gemstone reds, glassy yellows, glistening blues. And the colors weren't stationary but constantly shifting, like a polar aurora.

"What do you think it is?" Lise asked.

Dr. Dvali's face was bathed in the reflected colors. He said, a little breathlessly, "I think we're as close as anyone has come to seeing the face of the Hypothetical"

Turk said, "So what are they doing out there?"

But even Dr. Dvali couldn't answer that question.

Come dawn, it was apparent that they had been lucky.

Most of the north wing of the building had collapsed. Corridors ended in masses of rubble or open air. If we'd turned left instead of right, Turk thought, we'd be buried in there.

As soon as there was enough light to navigate they made their way downstairs. The structure wouldn't survive another shaking—"And we need to find Isaac," Dvali said.

But Turk was a little uncertain about how to proceed, because another thing was obvious by daylight: the situation on the ground had changed.

Where there had been desert, there was a forest.

Or something like a forest.

Dvali was limping conspicuously by the time they descended the stairwell to the door at the intact end of the building, though he refused to stop and rest. It was essential, he said, that they find Isaac and the others. "The others" being a sort of footnote in Dvali's mind, Lise suspected. For Dvali there was only Isaac, Isaac and the apotheosis of the Hypotheticals, whatever that might turn out to mean.

"Go on, open it," Dvali said, waving at the door.

Lise and Turk had agreed that the most useful thing they could do was to try to reach the local mall where they had left Isaac and the Fourth women. How to get there was an open question. When Lise had looked out into the light of dawn she had seen a landscape utterly transformed—had seen what she might have called a canopy of trees, if trees were made of glossy tubes and iridescent beach balls.

And she asked the same stupid, irrepressible question: "Why? What's it for? Why now, why here?"

"We may yet find out," Dr. Dvali said.

If the past was any guide, Turk thought, the Hypothetical growths would ignore human beings (with the obvious exception of Isaac, who was only partly human)—but was that still true?

He cracked the door a narrow inch, and when nothing came rushing in he risked a look outside.

Cool air touched his face. The sulfuric stench of the ashfall was gone. So was the ash itself. It had all turned into a Technicolor forest. Compared to this, the growths in Bustee had been daffodils withering in a cold breeze. This was high summer. This was some kind of Hypothetical Eden.

He drew the door fully open and waited. Lise and Dr. Dvali crowded him from behind.

The ash had turned itself into a forest of stalks bearing globular fruit instead of leaves. The stalks, of several colors but predominantly a cyanotic blue, lofted up twenty or thirty feet into the air and were so closely spaced that a person would have to turn sideways to pass between them. The globes that comprised the canopy ranged in size from goldfish bowl to beach ball to something a man might climb inside and stand upright in without bumping his head. They pressed up against each other, gently yielding where they touched, to make a nearly solid but translucent mass. The sunlight that came through was dim and shiftingly iridescent.

Turk took a tentative step. From here he could see along the wall of the workers' barracks to the point at which it had collapsed, the three floors of the north wing pancaked into something less than one. God help us if we'd been in there, he thought. And God help Isaac and the women, wherever they might have found shelter.

The trunks (as he began to think of them) of the strange trees (though you could call them lampposts just as accurately) were rooted in the ground—where there had been pavement they had cracked and penetrated it—and Turk couldn't see far enough in any direction to really get his bearings. Everything faded, forty or fifty yards out, to a shimmering blue vagueness. To find the mall where the women and Isaac had last been seen they would have to navigate by compass and the clues directly under their feet.

"What do they live on?" Lise asked in a hushed voice. "There's no water here."

"Maybe more water than they're used to getting out where they usually grow," Turk said.

Dvali said, "Or they're using some catalytic process that doesn't need water, a completely different kind of metabolism. They must have evolved for billion of years in an environment far harsher than this."

A billion years of evolution. If that was true, Turk thought, then these things, as a species, if that word applied, were older than the human race itself.

They moved in silence through the Hypothetical forest, though it was not entirely a silent place. No wind reached them at street level, but there must have been a wind blowing, Turk guessed, because the iridescent globes that crowned the tubular trunks occasionally bumped against each other and made a gentle sound that suggested a rubber mallet on a wooden xylophone. And there was motion at ground level, too. Small blue tubes, like roots, periodically snaked between the trees, running with a whipcrack motion that might be quick and powerful enough to break a leg if you ran across one at the wrong time. Twice Turk saw paperlike objects fluttering overhead, occasionally touching or merging with the globes—varieties of the thing that had attacked Isaac back in Bustee. Mistaking him for one of their own, Turk thought; or maybe it wasn't a mistake.

Lise walked close behind him. He could hear her indrawn breath every time something rattled or fluttered in the dim and shifting light. He felt bad about that, about the fear she was enduring and whatever else she might have to endure before they were finished here. He turned and said, "I'm sorry I got you into this."

She wouldn't let him finish. "Do you really think you're somehow responsible for what happened?"

"For taking you on this half-assed trip west, maybe."

"I made that choice."

Which was true. But still, Turk thought. She's here because of me. The chorus of his biography appeared to him as if conjured by the untrustworthy light: lost or purloined lovers, friends become enemies, friends damaged or killed in bar fights or shipboard accidents. See my bridges burning, he thought. See my trail of tears. He didn't want that for Lise. He didn't want to drag her beyond the boundaries of the kind of life she might still make for herself, a life in which kindness was not fleeting and there was the possibility of something more meaningful than nights sealed in the cockpit of an aircraft, months bunking below the deck of some stinking freighter, years locked in the castle of his own head while she waited for what he could not provide and grew disappointed and finally bitter.

He would find her a way out of this jungle, he thought, and then, if he could summon the requisite courage or cruelty, he would find a way to leave her.

It is a communication, Avram Dvali thought.

He thought: There is no denying it. The Hypotheticals were all around him, a small but significant fraction of the network that comprised their incomprehensibly vast intelligence. All process, the dogmatic Martian woman had said during one of their arguments, of no more significance than the flowering of club moss or periwinkles; put it together any way you liked, it was only evolution, mindless as the sea. But she was wrong. He felt it. He did not, could not, understand how these organisms grew or what nourishment they derived from the parched earth, but communication passed between, of that he was sure; they had not grown randomly, but at some precipitative signal.

He had been watching the canopy of the forest. The clustered globes shifted color constantly, and it seemed to him that each globe's color was affected by the changes in its immediate neighbors, perhaps according to some rule or set of rules, so that patterns traveled through the forest like flocks of intangible birds. This was communication in the sense that cells in the human brain communicated one with another and in concert produced the emergent phenomenon of mind. He was walking through the physical architecture, perhaps, of some great thought, a thought he could never comprehend…

Though perhaps Isaac could. If Isaac was alive, and if he understood, finally, the nature of the gift Avram Dvali had given him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

It was warm in the ruined stockroom, and although most of the dust had settled out of the air—seemed to have been absorbed, somehow, into the rubble—no fresh air flowed into the enclosed space. Sooner or later, Sulean Moi thought, and most likely sooner, that would become a problem. And there was the body of Diane Dupree to think about. If she could tolerate such thoughts.

She crawled along the accessible perimeter of the room for the second time, feeling with her hands for anything hopeful—a draft or some promisingly loose heap of rubble. And for the second time found none.

She had begun to believe she might die in this awful place on this awful planet, haunted by the ghost of Esh. Haunted, that is to say, by the Hypotheticals.

In whom she did not believe, at least not in the sense Avram Dvali believed in them. The Hypotheticals were a network of self-replicating spaceborne machines. Some long-extinct civilization must once have seeded its local environment with these devices, or perhaps it had happened more than once, a multiple genesis over many millions of years. Either way, once variable self-replication was introduced into the medium of interplanetary and interstellar space the process of evolution was engaged—different from organic evolution in every detail, but not in principle. Like organic evolution, the process had generated strange and gaudy complexities. Even such apparently "engineered" devices as the Spin barrier that surrounded the Earth, or the Arches that linked planets separated by vast distances, were ultimately no more intrinsically intelligent than such biological constructions as a coral reef or a termite hill.

The periodicity of the ashfall and the truncated grotesqueries it generated were proof enough, she thought. What had been installed in Esh—and in Isaac—was nothing more than a tragic susceptibility to alien tropisms. Esh could not be a "communicant" because there was no one with whom to communicate.

Evolution did, demonstrably, produce minds, and she supposed it was possible that the long interstellar evolution of the Hypothetical machines had also produced minds—locally, temporarily. But such minds, if they existed, were the byproduct, not the process. They controlled nothing but themselves. They couldn't be "the Hypotheticals" as Dr. Dvali imagined them to be.

She remained unnerved, however, by the obvious fact that Isaac remembered Esh, who had died many years before Isaac was born. If Esh had become a memory in the networked ecology of the Hypotheticals, could such a memory possess volition? And who or what was the rememberer?

"Sulean—"

This was Mrs. Rebka, who wouldn't leave Isaac's side. Her voice came out of the darkness of their sealed tomb as if from an infinite distance. "Yes, what?"

"Do you hear that?"

Sulean hushed her own thoughts and listened.

An intermittent scraping. The tack-tack-tack of something solid tapping stone. Followed by more tentative scraping.

"Someone's trying to dig us out," Mrs. Rebka said. "It must be Avram and the others, they must know we're here!"

Tick-scratch-tick. Yes, maybe, Sulean thought. But then Isaac said, very suddenly and with startling clarity, "No, Mrs. Rebka. It isn't the other people who want in. It isn't people at all. It's them."

Sulean turned toward the place from which Isaac's voice had come. She quelled her own fear and said, "Isaac, do you really know what's happening?"

"Yes." His tone was unexcited. "I can see them."

"The Hypotheticals?"

A pause. "You could call them that."

"Then explain it to me, please, Isaac. You're part of it now, aren't you? In a way Esh never was. Tell me what's happening."

For a moment there was only the tick-scratch-tick at the walls of the fallen building in which they were trapped.

Then Isaac began to speak.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Turk navigated by the fractured remnants of pavement and sidewalk through the alien forest that had lately been a settlement for oil riggers. He managed to find the parking lot of the workers' mall—white lines, cracked blacktop—and from there it was a short hike to the complex where they had left Diane Dupree, Sulean Moi, Mrs. Rebka, and Isaac.

Except it wasn't there anymore. He came upon rubble where the trees had grown more densely, further obscuring the dim light of what was, by now, afternoon. Here was an embankment of broken tile, wall-board, wood, sheet aluminum twisted into unlikely shapes. Beyond that, in the dimness, steel beams stood in skeletal rectangles. Some of these beams and pillars had been entwined by the rootlike extensions of the trees.

"We'll angle toward the south end of the mall," he said. Where the food store was or had been. "Might be something still standing there."

The haunted forest, Lise thought.

Boy, was it ever.

She found herself silently reciting a line from a storybook her father had read to her when she was small, book and story all forgotten except (in her father's melodramatic drawl) Into the dark forest they stepped. Into the dark forest they stepped. Into the dark forest of trees that harbored birds that resembled sheets of torn paper, the forest from which (another fragment of the same story) they must escape, but that was easier said than done. Because here there were wolves, or worse, and night was coming, and she didn't know the way out. She wanted to lunge up from under the covers and grab her father's hand. Wanted it more than anything.

But couldn't. She scolded herself, in her mother's voice this time: Don't be stupid, Elise. Straighten up. Fly right, girl.

She nearly flew right past a heap of plaster-specked metal, until Turk pointed it out: it was the car Mrs. Rebka had been driving when the two groups separated. She recognized the steel-mesh tires, on prominent display because a rod-like tree trunk had sprung up from the cracked pavement and tumbled the vehicle on its side. Useless now, the car, but any car would be useless until this forest shrank back into the ground, and that seemed unlikely to happen soon. If we leave here, Lise thought, we'll have to leave on foot. And that was a daunting prospect. The good news was that the car was empty: Isaac and the women weren't inside, hence might still be alive elsewhere.

"So we're near the food store," Turk said, and Dr. Dvali ran recklessly a few yards ahead, where the remains of the storefront were vaguely visible behind a picket of alien growths.

The quake hadn't spared this part of the mall, and if the others had taken shelter here they might be dead. This was so obvious it didn't need saying. Dr. Dvali wanted to start digging immediately—futile as that might be, the three of them versus a few tons of debris—but Turk said, "Let's circle around back first. The structure looks maybe a little more intact back that way."

Dvali stood slump-shouldered at the brink of the rubble field a moment longer, and for the first time Lise felt a degree of sympathy for him.

All night, all morning, Lise had been imagining the women and Isaac huddled in some safe place; the group would be reunited, and then she and Turk could set out for some safe harbor even if the mad Fourths insisted on staying here in Freakland. That was her best-case scenario.

Now it looked like that might not happen. The story might end tragically. There might be no way to escape from the dark forest. Maybe, she thought, for Isaac and the women, the story was already over.

The rear of the mall seemed at first glance more intact than the front, but that was only because the concrete loading bays had been left undamaged by the quake. Structurally, everything was a mess. Lise felt heartsick, and Dr. Dvali seemed to be suppressing tears.

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

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

A sound like scratching, a sound like digging.

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

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

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

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

There was activity at one of the fractured loading bays. But as Lise had begun to suspect, it was Hypothetical activity. A dense hedge of the growths Dvali called "ocular roses" had grown here, their petaled eyes all focused on the debris. Around them the trees had expressed a thick and writhing mat of motile roots, some sharply pointed and some flattened into spatulate blades. It was this mass of roots that was doing the digging. Surreal, Lise thought giddily, especially since the debris included not just concrete and steel and plastic but crumpled cereal boxes, milk jugs, canned food. She watched an inky blue tendril wrap itself around an industrial-sized soup can, puckering the red and white paper label, lift it so the nearest eye-flower could examine it, then relay it to another tentacle that passed it on seriatim until it was deposited on a rubbish tip of previously cleared debris.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comes out to meet his fate, Lise thought.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, he did, in part, at least.

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

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

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

"Have they gathered here?" Sulean asked.

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

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

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

"Or devoured," Sulean Moi said.

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

"What?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Isaac! Can you hear me?"

He fell back into the abyss of his own thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Isaac's mother only nodded.

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

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

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

Turk gave her a puzzled look—he had just finished helping Dr. Dvali assemble a rough shelter under the lee of a concrete loading pier, close (but not too close) to the digging trees—then he interpreted her frowning glances at Dvali and said, "Yeah, you're right, we'll do that." He asked Dvali to gather up any intact canned food he could find among the excavated debris while he and Lise "scouted." Dvali gave him a suspicious glare—as a Fourth he probably recognized a half-truth when he heard one—but nodded tersely and waved them away.

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

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

"How do you propose to do that?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What's this for?"

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

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

"I want you to have it."

"But—"

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

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

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

"I would guess so."

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

"Couldn't have been too reckless or they would have caught up with him."

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

"He's not stupid, Lise."

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

"Maybe," Turk said. "Does it matter?"

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

"He couldn't have known your father would be killed."

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

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

If they were still alive.

"Listen," Turk said.

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

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rising wind had begun to keen through the ruins with the urgency of a siren.

He took another step into the shadows and wrinkled his nose at the dismaying smell. Unmistakably, something had died here. His heart sank. "Isaac!" he called out. The dim ambient light showed him nothing until his eyes adjusted to it. Then certain shapes became apparent.

The Martian woman, Sulean Moi: was she dead? No. She looked up at him from the floor of this half-collapsed room with an expression of shock, her own eyes perhaps blinded by the sudden daylight. What a hell this imprisonment must have been, Dvali thought. She scrabbled on hands and knees toward the opening, and he wanted to help her, but his thoughts remained focused on Isaac. He wished he had a lamp, a flashlight, anything.

The wind howled like a wounded dog. A dust of plaster shook loose from the ceiling. Dvali pressed on into the stink and muck.

The next body he encountered belonged to Diane Dupree. The Fourth woman from the coast was dead, and as soon as he was sure of that he moved past her. The ceiling was low. He stooped as he walked. But in the deeper darkness he was able at last to see Isaac—thrillingly, Isaac alive, Isaac kneeling over the prostrate form of Anna Rebka.

Isaac inched away as Dvali approached. The boy's eyes were luminous, the golden flecks in his irises prominently aglow. Even his skin seemed faintly alight. He looked inhuman— was inhuman, Dvali reminded himself.

Anna Rebka remained inert. He asked, "Is she dead?"

"No," Isaac said.

"Leave her!" Sulean Moi called from the fading daylight just beyond the entrance to the buried stockroom. "Isaac, leave her, come out, it isn't safe!"

But her throat was dry, and the command emerged as a feeble plea.

Dvali put his fingers on Anna's throat, feeling for a pulse but knowing as soon as he touched her that he wouldn't find one. Isaac was wrong, or was denying an obvious truth. "No, Isaac," he said gently. "She's dead."

"That's just her body," Isaac said.

"What do you mean?"

Haltingly, and to Dvali's astonishment, the boy began to explain.

This wind, Sulean Moi thought: it will kill us yet.

She saw Turk and Lise hurrying toward her through the accumulation of alien growths, a kind of forest—it was almost too much for her to register after hours of blindness in the buried stockroom. Overhead, a canopy of strangely glittering globes were attached to these… should she call them trees? And a sort of bramble of ocular flowers had grown nearby, and some of them had turned their mindless eyes in her direction.

The world was obscenely transformed.

And the wind: where had it come from? Its intensity increased almost by the second. It tugged at the ruins behind her, lofting kites of tattered drywall and tar paper high among the alien trees.

She turned her head back and called out, more audibly this time, "Isaac!"

It was the boy who mattered, not the foolish Avram Dvali.

"Isaac, come out!"

As the unstable debris shifted and groaned.

Dvali grasped immediately what the boy was telling him. It was little more than he had long imagined—Isaac had become a conduit to the Hypothetical, but with this astonishing difference: Isaac had been able to acquire the memories of Anna Rebka before she died. She lived in him. As did the Martian child Esh.

He whispered, "Anna?"

As if he could summon her from the boy like a conjurer summoning a ghost. But the boys eyes changed in some indefinable way, the corners of his lips turned down as if with distaste, and it was exactly the way Anna had been looking at him lately.

Then Dvali said a thing he had not anticipated saying, though the words were as logical and as inevitable as the last step on a long road:

"Take me with you," he said.

The boy stepped back from him, shaking his head.

"Take me with you, Isaac. Wherever you are, wherever you're going, take me with you."

Stressed timbers creaked as if the weight of the world was balanced on them. There was a sound like gunshots as the wood fractured.

"No," the boy said calmly, firmly.

And this was maddening. Maddening, because he was so close. So close! And because the voice that denied him sounded so much like Anna's voice.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Sulean Moi was sprawled on the ground by the hedge of eyeball flowers. Lise swallowed her dread of the Hypothetical growths and pulled her a safer distance from the wind-torn debris field.

Turk leaned over the Martian woman and said, "Where are the others?"

For a moment Sulean seemed unable to answer. She opened her mouth, closed it. She was in shock, Lise thought. "Dead," the Martian woman finally managed. "Diane is dead. Anna Rebka…"

"What about Isaac?"

"Alive. Dvali is with him—inside, in there. Why won't they come out? It's not safe!"

Turk stood and surveyed the rubble and the small opening the digging trees had made.

Lise held his arm. Because he must not go in there, not into that teetering cavern: no.

He pulled away. She would remember that sensation of his forearm slipping out of her grasp. Like the best and worst memories, it would become indelible. It would haunt her on long nights for the rest of her life.

But she couldn't stop him, and she couldn't bring herself to follow him.

It was dark in the buried stockroom. Turk almost tripped over the body of Diane Dupree before he registered Isaac and Dr. Dvali confronting one another against a wall of broken shelves and fissured cinderblocks. Dvali was grabbing for the boy and Isaac was retreating by steps, not wanting to be touched but not yet willing to run, and Turk could hear Dvali's low begging voice under the roar of this fucking wind that had come out of nowhere and seemed about ready to tip the continent off its hinges. He had seen enough weirdness today to last him a lifetime, but he registered one more eerie miracle: the boy's skin had gone milky white and was faintly luminous, his face a candle-glow around his golden eyes, his body a sort of jack-o'-lantern where his ribs showed through his torn and filthy shirt.

"Isaac," Turk said, and the boy turned to him. "It's okay. The door's open. You can go."

Isaac looked at him gratefully.

Then the wind made a sound like the horn of some monster ship leaving harbor, and all the ruin that had hung suspended above them began to fall.

Sulean Moi held Lise Adams in her arms as the building shifted and compacted. A wave of concrete dust and atomized plaster spilled over them and was carried off by the terrible wind. "Stay down," Sulean said. "You can't help them now."

Lise fought a little longer. Then all the strength spilled out of her, and Sulean held the girl against her shoulder, rocking her gently. There had been a terrible finality about the last collapse, Sulean thought. No one could have survived it.

Then she revised her opinion.

The ocular roses, bent by the wind, refocused their solemn attention.

"Look," Sulean said.

Patiently, the Hypothetical trees had begun once more to dig.