Lise sat stunned on the floor, not sure exactly what had happened.
The thing, the flying thing, the thing she had thought was about to attack Turk, had come inside the room. For a single dazed moment she heard the sound of it subside to a moist fluttering. Then the sound stopped altogether, and Mrs. Rebka began shouting.
Lise struggled to her feet.
"Shut the door!" Dr. Dvali roared.
But no. Not yet. She waited for Turk, who came barreling in along with a cloud of dust. Then she slammed the door and looked around warily for the flying creature. Idiotically, she was thinking of the summer her parents had taken her on vacation to a cabin in the Adirondacks: one night a bat had come down the chimney and fluttered around in the darkness, terrifying her. She recalled with supernatural clarity the feeling that at any moment something hot and alive would tangle itself in her hair and begin to bite.
But the flapping thing had already alighted, she realized.
The Fourths gathered around the bed where Isaac lay, because—
Because the flying creature had landed on the boy's face.
The terrified boy had turned his head against the pillow. The animal, or creature or whatever it was called or ought to be called, covered his left cheek like a fleshy red poultice. One corner of it matted the hair above his temple while another enclosed his neck and shoulder. Isaac's mouth and nose remained free, although the gelid body of the thing had adhered to his trembling lower lip. His left eye was dimly visible through the creatures translucent body. His other eye was wide open.
Mrs. Rebka went on calling the boy's name. She reached for the creature as if to pull it away, but Dvali caught her hand. "Don't touch it, Anna," he said.
Anna. Mrs. Rebka's name was Anna. Some idiotically calm fraction of Lise's mind filed that fact away. Anna Rebka, who was also the boy's mother.
"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 concessions.
They intersected in the Rub al-Khali, the sandy tableland that comprised the western quarter of Equatoria.
"That's what he's pointing at?"
"That's what he's been pointing at all summer—more urgently in the last few weeks."
"So what is it? What's there?"
"As far as I know, nothing. Nothing's there."
"But it's where he wants to go."
"Yes." Dr. Dvali looked past Lise at the other Fourths. "And that's where we're going to take him."
The Fourth women said nothing, only stared.
It was Mrs. Rebka who finally, reluctantly, nodded her consent.
* * * * *
Lise couldn't sleep that night. She tossed on her mattress listening to the sounds the others made. Whatever else the Fourth treatment might cure, it did nothing for snoring. And yet they slept. And she did not.
Eventually, well past midnight, she got up, stepped over sleeping bodies on her way to the bathroom, and splashed her face with lukewarm water. Instead of going back to bed she went to the window, where Turk was sitting in a chair keeping the night watch.
"Can't sleep," she whispered.
Turk kept his gaze fixed on the street outside, a ghostly void by the light of the dust-dimmed moon. Nothing was happening. The peculiar eruptions from the ashfall showed no sign of resuming. Finally he said, "You want to talk?"
"I don't want to wake anybody up."
"Come out to the car." Turk and Dr. Dvali had moved the car closer to the room, where it would be easier to keep an eye on. "We can sit there awhile. It's safe enough now."
Lise had not left the room since they arrived and the idea appealed to her. She was wearing her only pair of jeans and an oversized shirt she had borrowed from the Fourth compound. She pulled her shoes onto her bare feet.
Turk opened the door and eased it shut when they had stepped outside. The smell of the ash was instantly stronger. Sulfur, or something bitter like that—why did the ash smell like sulfur? Hypothetical machines grew in cold places, or so Lise had learned in school: distant asteroids, the frozen moons of frozen planets. Was there sulfur out there? She had heard of sulfur on the moons of, was it, Jupiter? The New World's solar system had a planet like that, a cold radioactive giant, far from the sun.
The wind had died with nightfall. The sky was hazy but she could see a few stars. Even when she was very young her father had loved to show her the stars. The stars need names, he would say, and together they would name them. Big Blue. Point of the Triangle. Or silly names. Belinda. Grapefruit. Antelope.
She slid into the front seat next to Turk.
"We need to talk about what happens next," he said.
Yes. That was undeniably true. She said, "The Fourths are taking Isaac west."
"Right. I don't know what they hope to accomplish."
"They think he can talk to the Hypothetical."
"Great—what's he going to say? Greetings from the human race? Please stop dropping shit on us from outer space?"
"They're hoping to learn something profound."
"You believe that?"
"No. But they do. Dvali does, at least."
"Fourths are generally pretty reasonable people, but would you put a bet on that outcome? I wouldn't."
It was like religion, Lise supposed. You didn't lay odds on the sacred, you just looked for it with an open heart and hoped for the best. But she didn't say that to Turk. "So what do we do when they take off for the desert?"
He said, "I'm thinking of going with them."
"You're—what?"
"Wait, it makes sense. You saw the map, right? The place they're headed is three-quarters of the way to the west coast. From there there's a decent road all the way to the sea. The west coast, Lise, that's nothing but fishing villages and research outposts. Catch a boat on the southern route back to Port Magellan and by the time I get there nobody's looking for me anymore, the whole Fourth thing is over and Genomic Security has probably figured that out. I have enough friends in the Fourth community that I can probably get myself a whole new set of identity documents."
Nights got chilly in the desert this time of year. The upholstery was cold and their talk had made condensation on the window. "I can see a couple of problems with that."
"So can I—what's your list?"
She tried to be logical. "Well, the ashfall. Even if the roads are passable, even with a good vehicle, you could get stalled, run out of gas, have engine problems."
"It's a risk," he admitted, "but you can plan for it, carry tools and parts and fuel and so on."
"And the Fourths aren't a free ride. They expect to find something out there. What if they're right? I mean, look at the way that flying thing went after Isaac. Maybe he is special, maybe he has some special attraction to the, uh, whatever grows out of the ash, and, if so, that could be a major obstacle."
"I thought about that too. But I haven't heard of anyone being seriously hurt by those things, except accidentally. Even Isaac. Whatever happened to him, it doesn't seem to have made him worse."
"It landed on his face, Turk. It sank into his skin."
"He's sitting up, he's not feverish, he's no sicker than he was before."
"You wouldn't say that if it had been you."
"That's the point—it wasn't me; whatever that thing was, I'm not what it wanted."
"So we just tag along and when they're finished with Isaac—whatever that means—we go on to the coast? That's the plan?"
He said with an embarrassment Lise could feel even in the shadows of the car, "Doesn't have to be both of us. If you want you can stick here and try to catch a ride over the pass when the ash clears. You have options I don't have. Probably safer to do that, from the objective point of view."
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 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.