Axis

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