AXIS

Robert Charles Wilson

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

v1.0 Proofed by the NERDs

CONTENTS

PART ONE - THE 34th OF AUGUST

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

PART TWO - THE OCULAR ROSE

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

PART THREE - INTO THE WEST

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

PART FOUR - RUB AL-KHALI

23 24

PART FIVE - IN THE COMPANY OF THE UNSPEAKABLE

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

PART SIX - THE ORDINANCE OF TIME

35

It is necessary that things should pass away into that from which they are born. For things must pay one another the penalty and compensation for their injustice according to the ordinance of time.—Anaximander

PART ONE

THE 34th OF AUGUST

CHAPTER ONE

In the summer of his twelfth year—the summer the stars began to fall from the sky—the boy Isaac discovered that he could tell east from west with his eyes closed.

Isaac lived at the edge of the Great Inland Desert, on the continent of Equatoria, on the planet that had been appended to the Earth by the inscrutable beings called the Hypotheticals. People had given the planet a whole panoply of grandiose or mythological or coolly scientific names, but most simply called it the New World, in any of a hundred or more languages, or Equatoria, after its most widely settled continent. These were things Isaac had learned in what passed for school.

He lived in a compound of brick and adobe, far from the nearest town. He was the only child at the settlement. The adults with whom he lived preferred to keep a careful distance between themselves and the rest of the world. They were special, in ways they were reluctant to discuss. Isaac, too, was special.

They had told him so, many times. But he wasn't sure he believed them. He didn't feel special. Often he felt much less than special.