Axis

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.

PART FOUR — RUB AL-KHALI

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Brian Gately was safely back in Port Magellan when the second ash-fall struck.

Sigmund and Weil had done something remarkable as they flew with Brian across the Bodhi Pass and down to the coastal plain: they had admitted defeat. The Fourths were scattered, Weil said, and the burned compound had yielded no evidence beyond the charred remains of a bioreactor hidden in a basement. Nothing incriminating had been discovered in Turk Findley's purloined aircraft, and the four captives were obviously decoys, elderly even by the standards of Fourths.

'So what, then,' Brian asked as their aircraft overflew a canyon along which, far below, a lone oil tanker was navigating the switchbacks, 'you just go home?'

'Of course we don't give up. We do what we've been doing for years, monitor communications, run software on strategic surveillance sites. Sooner or later something turns up. And in the meantime there's one less bioreactor to worry about. If nothing else, somebody's plans have been seriously fucked with.'

'For this,' Brian asked, 'people die?'