Axis

'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