The objective point of view. Doubtless Turk imagined he was giving her the latitude to back out graciously from a reckless plan. He led the kind of life that allowed for sudden reversals of fortune and heavy wagers against fate. She didn’t. That was the implication, and it was, of course, true, by and large—though not lately.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, and stepped out of the car into the moonlit night, wishing she had been able to sleep.
Come morning there was a degree of near-normality in Bustee: a few pedestrians in the street, a few capable vehicles beginning to head toward the larger towns to the south. Locals gawked at the remains of alien life clinging to the facades of buildings or littering the sidewalks like broken, once-brightly-colored toys. Life reassembling itself, Lise thought, despite the strangeness. Her own life, more deeply unraveled, was slower to knit.
The Fourths, now that they had reached a consensus, set out to procure supplies. A party of four—Dr. Dvali, Sulean Moi, Diane Dupree, and Turk—went to see what money could still buy at the local shops. Turk was even talking about a second vehicle, if they could procure one.
Lise stayed in the motel room with Mrs. Rebka and Isaac, hoping to catch another couple of hours of sleep. Which turned out to be difficult, because Isaac was agitated again. Not because of the flying thing that had attacked him—that seemed to have passed from his mind as promptly as a bad dream—but out of a new sense of urgency, a need to hurry to the heart of whatever was happening out west. Mrs. Rebka had asked a few tentative 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 husband’s 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 Hypotheticals, 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 wh
en the second ashfall 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 over-flew 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?”
“Who died, Brian? I don’t remember anyone dying.”
So he came at last to his small apartment in the polyglot city and was alone there when for the second time the sky filled with the luminous debris of ancient, incomprehensible machines.
He watched the local news broadcasts with a vague indifference. The newscasters used words like “strange” and “unprecedented,” but Brian wasn’t impressed: it was only a kind of celestial rot, the rubble of a vast disintegration. The Hypotheticals had built their intelligences in the cold places around and between countless stars, and they built them to last, no doubt, but any made thing had a lifetime. The pyramids of Egypt eroded; the Roman aqueducts were stumps of broken stone. So must the constructions of the Hypotheticals break down once they had served their dozen or their million allotted years.
The ashes birthed monstrosities, some of which he could see from his own window. A dozen yards down the road, where the Arabic commercial district declined into a structureless maze of souks and tea shops, a green tubule as big as a sewer pipe writhed as if in a strong wind and then tumbled over to barricade the street.
In his mind he played back Lise’s final phone call. Where was she now? Not even Sigmund and Weil had been able to answer that question. She had fled with the rogue Fourths, victim of her own wild sympathies. Free, perhaps, in some distasteful sense of the word. Unbroken. Not yet fallen to earth like an ancient machine.
The ashfall took longer to clean up than it had the first time. And because it had happened twice, the people on television were asking themselves somber questions. Was this the end of it or would it happen again? Would the effects follow some exponential curve, each time more peculiar and disastrous, until Port Magellan was entirely buried under a mass of what looked like enormous children’s toys?
Part of Brian wanted to deny the possibility while another part of him relished it. This was, after all, an alien planet, and how credulous we were, he thought, to imagine we could simply move in unmolested and conduct our lives as if it were a second Earth.
But the civil authorities, ant-like, methodically cleared the debris and reestablished their pheromonic lines of communication. When he could no longer avoid it Brian drove from his apartment along the smudged avenues to the American district, to the consulate building, to the offices of the Department of Genomic Security, Port Magellan Branch.
He walked past his own office to the door of his immediate superior, a consular legate named Larry Diesenhall. Diesenhall was a fifty-five-year-old career man with a shaved head and eyes so delicately colored they appeared to have been drawn in crayon. Diesenhall looked up at Brian and smiled. “Good to see you back, Brian.”
Back at last. The prodigal son. Brian took an envelope out of his jacket pocket and dropped it on Diesenhall’s immaculate desktop.
“What’s this?”
“Have a look.”
The envelope contained a pair of photographs—the photographs Pieter Kirchberg had sent him, extra copies of which Brian had run off on his printer this morning. He averted his eyes while Diesenhall opened the envelope.
“Jesus!” Diesenhall said. “Christ! What am I looking at here?”
The dead, Brian thought. The dead, who are customarily absent from church picnics and polite offices. He sat down and explained about Tomas Ginn and about Sigmund and Weil and the burning compound in the desert and the four unlucky Fourths who had been found in Turk Findley’s aircraft and might or might not have been tortured in an attempt to extract their confessions. On several occasions Diesenhall tried to interrupt, but Brian talked over him, compulsively, a flood of words too powerful to be dammed.
By the time he finished Diesenhall was staring at him, gape-jawed.
“Brian . . . this is upsetting.”
One way of describing it, Brian thought.
“I mean, wow. Do you realize how tenuous your position is here? You come to me with these complaints about Sigmund and Weil, but I don’t have anything to do with them. What the Executive Action Committee does is outside the public mandate. Neither you nor I are members of that committee, Brian. And that community isn’t answerable to the likes of us. You had a relationship with a woman who was apparently deeply involved with known Fourths, and for you, and I hope you realize this, the outcome could have been much worse. Questions were asked about you. About your loyalty. And I stood up for you. I was happy to do that. So now you come to me with these allegations and with this—” The photographs. “This obscenity. What do you expect me to do?”
“I don’t know. Get upset. Complain. File a report.”
“Really? Do you really want me to do any of that? Do you have any idea what that would mean for both of us? And do you think it would make any kind of difference? That any good would come of it? That anything would change, except for us?”
Brian thought about that. He didn’t have a counterargument. Probably Diesenhall was right.
He took a second envelope from his jacket and dropped it on Diesenhall’s desktop. Diesenhall promptly recoiled, his hands scuttling back to the edge of the desk. “Christ, what’s this?”
“My resignation,” Brian said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The last human being they saw west of Bustee was a stout woman who was locking up a Sinopec gas station. She had already shut down the pumps, but she opened them long enough to refuel both vehicles while she lectured Dr. Dvali in a Cantonese accent about the foolishness of heading deeper into the desert. Nobody left out there, she said. Even the riggers and pipeline workers, even the hired men with no money but what they hoped to be paid, they had all gone east after the first ashfall. “It was worse out there,” she said.
“Worse in what way?”
“Just worse. And the earthquakes.”
“Earthquakes?”
“Little earthquakes. Damaged things. All that has to be fixed, when it’s safe to come back, if.”
Dr. Dvali frowned. Turk said, “We’re on our way to the west coast, actually, other side of the desert.”
“Stupid way to get there,” the Cantonese woman said, to which Turk could only nod and shrug.
Extraterrestrial dust mixed with ordinary sand had duned against the sun-white planking of the depot. The wind came from the south, hot and dry. A talcum-powdered world, Lise thought. She thought of what Turk had said about the west coast, the other side of the desert. She imagined waves breaking on a beach, a few adventurous fishing trawlers anchored in some natural harbor. Rainfall and greenness and the smell of water.
As opposed to this merciless, sun-stricken horizon.
Stupid way to get there. Well, yes, no doubt.
During the long drive, Sulean Moi watched the way Avram Dvali and Anna Rebka conducted themselves around the boy.
Mrs. Rebka, the boy’s mother almost despite herself, was the most attentive. Dvali was less directly involved—Isaac had begun to shrink from his touch—but his attention always circled back to the child.
Dvali was an idolater, Su
lean thought. He worshipped a monstrosity. He believed Isaac held the key to—what? Not “communication with the Hypotheticals.” That neat and linear goal had been abandoned long ago. A leap of cognition, an intimacy with the immense forces that had shaped the mundane and celestial worlds. Dvali wanted Isaac to be a god, or at least god-touched, and he wanted to touch the hem of his robes in turn and be enlightened.
And me, Sulean thought. What do I want with Isaac? Above all she had wanted to forestall his birth. It was to prevent such tragedies that she had left the Martian embassy in New York. She had made herself a dark, often unwelcome presence in the community of Terrestrial Fourths, subsisting on their charity while scolding them for their hubris. Don’t worship the Hypotheticals: they are not gods. Don’t contrive to bridge the divide between the Hypotheticals and the human: that gap cannot be bridged. We know. We tried. We failed. And in the process we committed what can only be called a crime. We shaped a human life for our own purposes and produced, in the end, only pain, only death.
Twice in her wanderings on Earth she had forestalled such a project. Two rogue communities of Fourths, one in Vermont and one in rural Denmark, had been on the verge of attempting to create a hybrid child. In both cases Sulean had alerted more conservative Fourths and exerted the moral weight they accorded her as a Martian Fourth. In both cases she had succeeded in preventing tragedies. Here she had failed. She was a dozen years too late.
And yet she insisted on accompanying the child on what was no doubt his final journey, when she could have walked away and continued her work elsewhere. Why? She allowed herself to wonder whether she might be as susceptible as Dr. Dvali to the seductive lure of contact . . . even though she knew it was impossible and absurd.