Robert Wilson - Axis

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.

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.