Only Isaac saw it happening, because only Isaac had eyes that could see it. He could see many things, few of which he had described even to Mrs. Rebka or Sulean Moi, his most trusted friends.
For instance, he could see himself. He saw himself more clearly than ever before in the absolute darkness of the buried stockroom. Not his body exactly, but when he looked down he could see the silver skein of the Hypothetical presence inside him. It shared his nervous system, made glowing traceries of ever-finer filaments joined in bundles to the shimmering rod of his spine. Had the others been able to see him this way they probably would have been horrified. Some fraction of Isaac, the merely human part, was also horrified. But that voice was a diminishing presence, and a dissenting voice thought he was beautiful. He looked like electricity. He looked like fireworks.
The women—Mrs. Rebka, Sulean Moi, Diane—were also visible to him, but they shone with a much fainter light. Isaac guessed the Fourth treatment had done that to them, that it had infected them with a little bit (but only a little bit) of Hypothetical life. It was as if they were timid lamps in a fog, while Isaac… Isaac was a searchlight, glaring.
And he could see other things, too, beyond the walls.
He saw the ashfall. To Isaacs eyes it was a storm of stars, each grain distinctly bright and merging into a general brightness, an atmosphere of luminosity. Bright, yes, but also, somehow, transparent: he could see through it—especially to the west.
The infinitely tiny Hypothetical machines weren't falling at random. Taken together, their trajectories were focused on the place where something old was rising from the bedrock of the desert. It had stirred in its sleep like a lazy behemoth and the ground had trembled, canting the oil derricks and shattering pumps and pipelines. It had stirred and stirred again as more ash fell, triggered by unknowable cues into new activity.
And it stirred again now, ferociously. The earth didn't just shake this time, it roared, and although the merely human part of Isaac was blind in the darkness he heard quite clearly the groan of deep rock stressed to the fracturing point, the slap and crack of collapsing walls. He felt a rush of foul air, and his breath became labored and painful again.
But none of that mattered to the part of him that could see.
This is a machine, he thought, watching the great device heave itself out of the night desert a hundred and more miles to the west. Machine, yes, but it was alive… it was both. The words did not exclude one another. The voice in him that had been Jason Lawton's voice said: a living cell is a machine made of protein. What falls from the sky and what rises from the earth is just life by other means.
The giant structure shouldering itself out of the ground in the west resembled the Arch, or at least the pictures Isaac had seen of the Arch. It was a huge half-ring made of the same stuff as the dust that was falling from beyond the sky, condensed and differently arranged, its molecules and its unusual atoms subverting natural laws for which Isaac had no name but to which Jason Lawton's memory attached words like "strong force" and "weak force." It was lovely in its intrinsic glow, a rainbow shining in colors without names. It was an Arch for things to pass through; but it didn't lead to another planet.
Things were passing through it now. From the utter blackness inside it, where even Isaac couldn't see, luminous clouds ascended to the stars.
The thought of Jason lingered in Diane's mind even after she was hurt.
The earthquake happened in a series of jolting shocks, almost unbearable in the darkness. That much she understood, and she had been able to suppress her fear at least for the first few moments. Then the building began to collapse.
Or so she intuited from the fact that she felt a sharp blow to her right shoulder and neck, followed by dazed unconsciousness, followed by an awakening to pain, nausea, and a terrifying inability to draw breath. She gasped. A little air entered her lungs, but not enough. Not nearly enough.
"Lie still." The voice was a gutteral croak. Mrs. Rebka? No, she thought it must be Sulean Moi. Diane tried to answer but couldn't. Her lungs wouldn't do anything but spasm in feeble attempts to draw air. She tried to sit up, or at least turn to one side, in order to avoid vomiting on herself.
That was when she discovered that the left side of her body was numb, dead, useless.
"Part of the ceiling came down on you," Sulean Moi said.
Diane gagged and retched, but nothing came up, for which she was thankful. And the tremors in the earth had stopped, that was good. She tried to evaluate her own injuries but couldn't think clearly enough to do so, not when her body was pulling so hard for air. She hurt. And she was frightened. She had no particular fear of death, but this, oh, this was less bearable than death itself: this was why people elected to die, to make an end to this kind of suffering.
She thought of Jason again—why had she been thinking of Jason?—and then of Tyler, her lost husband. Then even these thoughts became too weighty to sustain, and she passed out again.
* * * * *
Isaac could see that Diane had been badly hurt. Even in the dark it was possible to see that. Her dim glow had been nearly extinguished. Compared to Sulean Moi, Diane was a guttering candle.
It was hard to pay attention. He was mesmerized by the invisible landscape all around him. Mesmerized because he was a part of it, he was becoming it… but that could wait. Now that the new Arch had assembled itself in the west—from Hypothetical molecules, granite, magma, memory—there was a kind of pause. All around him for many miles the fresh blanket of dust began to undergo a new stage of metabolism. That would take time. Isaac could afford to be patient.
He surprised Sulean Moi and Mrs. Rebka by crawling over fallen beams, fragments of drywall, scattered foam insulation and collapsed aluminum venting to the place where Diane Dupree lay trapped beneath a heavy joist. His lungs labored and his mouth was foul with dust, but he could breathe, at least, which Diane apparently could not, not easily. And he could tell when he reached out to touch her that the falling debris had hurt her head. He meant to stroke her hair, the way Mrs. Rebka stroked his hair when he was ill, but the place above Diane's left ear yielded to his touch, and his hand came away sticky.
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.