Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Well, I figured that’s how you wanted it.”

  “There’s a difference between what you want and what’s practical.”

  “Tell me about it.” He smiled ruefully. “How are things with you and Brian?”

  “Over.”

  “Really?”

  “Officially. Finally.”

  “And that book you’re working on?”

  “It’s the research that’s slow, not the writing.” She hadn’t written a word, never would write a word.

  “But it’s why you decided to stay.”

  In the New World, he meant. She nodded.

  “And what happens when you’re done? You go back to the States?”

  “Possibly.”

  “It’s funny,” he said. “People come to the Port for all kinds of reasons. Some of them find reasons to stay, some don’t. I think people just cross a certain line. You get off the boat for the first time and you realize you’re literally on another planet—the air smells different, the water tastes different, the moon’s the wrong size and it rises too fast. The day’s still divided into twelve hours but the hours run long. After a few weeks or a few months people get disoriented on some deep level. So they turn around and go home. Or else it snaps into place and starts to feel normal. That’s when they have second thoughts about going back to the anthill cities and bad air and septic oceans and all that stuff they used to take for granted.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “In part, I guess,” he said. “Sure.”

  Their meals arrived, and they ate and talked about nothing in particular for a while. The sky darkened, the city glittered, the waiter came back to clear the table. Turk ordered coffee. Lise summoned her courage and said, “Will you look at a photograph for me? Before they dim the lights.”

  “Sure. What kind of photograph?”

  “A picture of someone who might have chartered a flight with you. This would have been a few months ago.”

  “You’ve been looking at my passenger manifests?”

  “No! I mean, not me . . . you file manifests with the PG, right?”

  “What’s this about, Lise?”

  “There’s a lot I can’t explain right now. Will you look at the picture first?”

  He was frowning. “Show me.”

  Lise took her bag into her lap and withdrew the envelope. “But you said you had a favor to ask, too—”

  “You first.”

  She passed the envelope across the linen tablecloth. He pulled out the picture. His expression didn’t change. Finally he said, “I assume there’s a story goes with this?”

  “It was taken by a security camera at the docks late last year. The image has been enlarged and enhanced.”

  “You have access to security camera downloads, too?”

  “No, but—”

  “So you got these from someone else. One of your friends at the consulate. Brian, or one of his buddies.”

  “I can’t go into that.”

  “Can you at least tell me why you’re curious about—” He gestured at the image. “An old lady?”

  “You know I’ve been trying to interview people who were connected with my father. She’s one of them. Ideally, I’d like to make contact with her.”

  “Any particular reason? I mean, why this woman?”

  “Well . . . I can’t go into that.”

  “The conclusion I’m drawing here is that all roads lead back to Brian. What’s his interest in this woman?”

  “Brian works for the Department of Genomic Security. I don’t.”

  “But someone there is doing you favors.”

  “Turk, I—”

  “No, never mind. Don’t ask, don’t tell, right? Obviously, somebody knows I flew with this person. Which means somebody besides yourself would like to find her.”

  “That’s a reasonable inference. But I’m not asking you on behalf of anyone else. What you choose to say or not say to anyone at the consulate is your own business. What you say to me stays with me.”

  He looked at her as if he were evaluating this statement. But, Lise thought, why should he trust her? What had she ever done to instill trust in him, besides sleep with him during the course of one exceptional weekend?

  “Yeah,” he said finally, “I flew with her.”

  “Okay . . . can you tell me anything about her? Where she is, what she talked about?”

  He sat back in his chair. True to his prediction, the lights in the restaurant began to dim. A couple of waiters rolled back the glass wall that separated the indoor dining room from the patio. The sky was starry and deep, slightly washed out by the lights of the Port but still crisper than any sky Lise had known back in California. Had the meteor shower begun? She saw what looked like a few bright flashes across the meridian.

  Turk hadn’t spared it a glance. “I’ll have to think about this.”

  “I’m not asking you to violate any confidences. Just—”

  “I know what you’re asking. And it’s probably not unreasonable. But I’d like to think it over, if that’s okay with you.”

  “All right.” She couldn’t push it any farther. “But you mentioned a quid pro quo?”

  “Just something I’m curious about—I thought you might have picked up a word or two from one of those sources you don’t like to discuss. Arundji got a memo this morning from the air regs department of the Provisional Government. I filed a flight plan for the far west, and all else being equal I probably would have been in the air by the time you drove up this afternoon. But they disallowed the flight. So I called around to find out what’s happening. Seems like nobody’s being allowed to fly into the Rub al-Khali.”

  “How come?”

  “They won’t say.”

  “This flight ban, is it temporary?”

  “Also a question I can’t get an answer to.”

  “Who imposed it? Under what authorization?”

  “Nobody at the PG will own up to anything. I’ve been shuffled between a dozen departments and so has every other pilot who’s affected by this. I’m not saying there’s anything sinister about it, but it’s kinda surprising. Why turn the western half of the continent into a no-fly zone? There are still regular flights to and from the oil allotments, and past that there’s nothing but rocks and sand. Hikers and wilderness types go there—that’s who had my charter. I don’t understand it.”

  Lise desperately wished she had a factoid or two to barter with, but this was the first she’d heard of the flight ban. It was true she had contacts at the U.S. Consulate, her ex-husband chief among them. But the Americans were only advisory members of the Provisional Government. And Brian wasn’t even a diplomat, just a DGS functionary.

  “All I can do is ask,” she said.

  “Appreciate it if you would. So. Business attended to? At least for now?”

  “For now,” she said reluctantly.

  “Then what do you say we take our coffee out on the patio while we can still find a table?”

  Three months ago she had hired Turk to fly her across the Mohindar Range to a pipeline outpost called Kubelick’s Grave. Strictly a business arrangement. She had been trying to track down an old colleague of her father’s, a man named Dvali, but she never reached Kubelick’s Grave: a squall had forced the plane down in one of the high mountain passes. Turk had landed his aircraft on a nameless lake while clouds like cannon smoke billowed between granite peaks north and south of them. He had moored the plane on a pebbly beach and set up a surprisingly comfortable camp under a stand of trees that looked to Lise like bulbous, mutant pines. The wind had whistled down that pass for three days while visibility declined to nothing. Set foot outside the canvas tent and you’d be lost within a couple of meters. But Turk was a passable woodsman and had packed for emergencies, and even canned food was delicious when you were barricaded against nature and equipped with a camp stove and a hurricane lantern. Under other circumstances it might have been a three-day endurance contest, but Turk turne
d out to be good company. She had not meant to seduce him and she believed he had not set out to seduce her. The attraction had been sudden and mutual and utterly explicable.

  They had exchanged stories and warmed each other when the wind turned cold. At the time it had seemed to Lise that she would be happy to wrap Turk Findley around herself like a blanket and shut out the rest of the world forever. And if you had asked her whether she was on the verge of something more meaningful than an unexpected tryst, she might have said yes, maybe.

  She had meant to keep up the relationship when they arrived back in the Port. But the Port had a way of subverting your best intentions. Problems that had seemed featherweight from the inside of a tent in the Mohindar Range regained their customary mass and inertia. Her separation from Brian was an established fact by that time, at least in her mind, though Brian was still liable to spasms of let’s-work-it-out, well meant, she supposed, but humiliating for both of them.

  She had told him about Turk, and while that stonewalled Brian’s attempts at reconciliation it introduced a whole new vector of guilt: she began to suspect herself of using Turk as a lever—a sort of emotional crowbar against Brian’s attempts to rekindle a dead fire. So, after a few uneasy meetings, she had let the relationship lapse. Better not to complicate what was already a complicated situation.

  But now there was a decree nisi in the glove compartment of her car: her future was a blank page, and she was tempted to write on it.

  The crowd on the patio began to react to the meteor shower. She looked up as three scaldingly-bright white lines scribed across the meridian. The meteors emanated from a point well above the horizon and almost directly due east, and before she could look away there were more of them—two, then one, then a spectacular cluster of five.

  She was reminded of a summer in Idaho when she had gone stargazing with her father—she couldn’t have been more than ten years old. Her father had grown up before the Spin and he had talked to her about the stars “the way they used to be,” before the Hypotheticals dragged the Earth a few billion years down the river of time. He missed the old constellations, he said, the old star names. But there had been meteors that night, dozens of them, the largest intercepted by the invisible barrier that protected the Earth from the swollen sun, the smallest incinerated in the atmosphere. She had watched them arc across the heavens with a speed and brilliance that left her breathless.

  As now. The fireworks of God. “Wow,” she said, lamely.

  Turk pulled his chair around to her side of the table so they were both facing the sea. He didn’t make any kind of an overt move and she guessed he probably wouldn’t. Navigating the high mountain passes must have been simple compared to this. She didn’t make any moves either, was careful not to, but she couldn’t help feeling the heat of his body inches from hers. She sipped her coffee without tasting it. There was another flurry of falling stars. She wondered aloud whether any of them ever reached the ground.

  “It’s just dust,” Turk said, “or that’s what the astronomers say. What’s left of some old comet.”

  But something new had caught her attention. “So what about that?” she asked, pointing east, lower on the horizon, where the dark sky met the darker sea. It looked to Lise like something was actually falling out there—not meteors but bright dots that hung in the air like flares, or what she imagined flares would look like. The reflected light of them colored the ocean a streaky orange. She didn’t remember anything like that from her previous time in Equatoria. “Is that part of it?”

  Turk stood up. So did a few others among the crowd on the patio. A puzzled hush displaced the talk and laughter. Here and there, phones began to buzz or chatter.

  “No,” Turk said. “That’s not part of it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was like nothing Turk had seen during his ten years in the New World.

  But, in a way, that was exactly typical. The New World had a habit of reminding you it wasn’t Earth. Things happened differently here. It ain’t Kansas, as people liked to say, and they probably said the same thing in a dozen different languages. It ain’t the Steppes. It ain’t Kandahar. It ain’t Mombassa.

  “Do you think it’s dangerous?” Lise asked.

  Some of the restaurant’s clientele evidently thought so. They settled their bills with barely-disguised haste and made for their cars. Within a few minutes there were only a few stalwarts left on the broad wooden patio. “You want to leave?” Turk asked.

  “Not if you don’t.”

  “I guess we’re as safe here as anywhere,” Turk said. “And the view is better.”

  The phenomenon was still hanging out at sea, though it seemed to move steadily closer. What it looked like was luminous rain, a rolling gray cloud shot with light—the way a thunderstorm looked when you saw it from a long way off, except that the glow wasn’t fitful, like lightning, but seemed to hang below the billowing darkness and illuminate it from beneath. Turk had seen storms roll in from sea often enough, and he estimated that this one was approaching at roughly the local wind speed. The brightness falling from it appeared to be composed of discrete luminous or burning particles, maybe as dense as snow, but he could be wrong about that—it didn’t snow in this part of Equatoria and the last snow he had seen was off the coast of Maine many years back.

  His first concern was fire. Port Magellan was a tinderbox, crowded with sub-code housing and shacks; the docklands housed countless storage and transport facilities and the bay was thick with oil and LNG tankers, funneling fuel to the insatiable Earth. What looked like a dense squall of lit matches was blowing in from the east, and he didn’t want to think about the potential consequences of that.

  He said nothing to Lise. He imagined she had drawn many of the same conclusions, but she didn’t suggest running—was smart enough, he guessed, to know there was no logical place to run to, not at the speed this thing was coming. But she tensed up as the phenomenon visibly approached the point of land at the southern extremity of the bay.

  “It’s not bright all the way down,” she said.

  The staff at Harley’s started dragging in tables from the patio, as if that was going to protect anything from anything, and urged the remaining diners to stay indoors until someone had some idea what was going on. But the waiters knew Turk well enough to let him alone. So he stayed out a while longer with Lise and they watched the light of the flares, or whatever they were, dancing on the distant sea.

  Not bright all the way down. He saw what she meant. The shifting, glittering curtains tailed into darkness well before they reached the surface of the ocean. Burned out, maybe. That was a hopeful sign. Lise took out her phone and punched up a local news broadcast, relaying bits of it to Turk. They were talking about a “storm,” she said, or what looked on radar like a storm, the fringes of it extending north and south for hundreds of miles, the heart of it more or less centered on the Port.

  And now the bright rain fell over the headlands and the inner harbor, illuminating the decks and superstructures of cruise ships and cargo vessels at anchor. Then the silhouettes of the cargo cranes grew misty and obscure, the tall hotels in the city dimmed in the distance, the souks and markets vanished as the shining rain moved up the hillsides and seemed to grow taller as it came, a canyon wall of murky light. But nothing burst into flame. That was good, Turk thought. Then he thought: but it could be toxic. It could be any fucking thing. “About time to move indoors,” he said.

  Tyrell, the headwaiter at Harley’s, was a guy Turk had briefly worked with on the pipelines out in the Rub al-Khali. They weren’t big buddies or anything but they were friendly, and Tyrell looked relieved when Turk and Lise finally abandoned the patio. Tyrell slid the glass doors shut and said, “You got any idea—?”

  “No,” Turk said.

  “I don’t know whether to run or just enjoy the show. I called my wife. We live down in the Flats.” A low-rent neighborhood some few miles along the coast. “She says it’s happening there, too. She says t
here’s stuff falling on the house, it looks like ash.”

  “But nothing’s burning?”

  “She said not.”

  “It could be volcanic ash,” Lise said, and Turk had to admire how she was handling all this. She was tense but not visibly afraid, not too scared to venture a theory. “It would have to have been some kind of tectonic event way out over the horizon, something at sea . . .”

  “Like a sea volcano,” Tyrell said, nodding.

  “But we would have felt something before the ash got to us if it was anywhere close—an earthquake, a tsunami.”

  “Been no report of any such thing,” Turk said, “far as I know.”

  “Ash,” Tyrell added. “Like, gray and powdery.”

  Turk asked Tyrell if there was any coffee back in the kitchen and Tyrell said yeah, not a bad idea, and went to check. There were still a few diners in the restaurant, people with nowhere better to go, though nobody was eating or celebrating. They sat at the innermost tables and talked nervously with the waitstaff.

  The coffee came and it was good and dense, and Turk added cream to his cup just as if the sky weren’t falling. Lise’s phone buzzed repeatedly, and she fended off a couple of friendly calls before shunting everything to her voice mail. Turk didn’t get any calls, though his phone was in his shirt pocket.

  Now the ash began to fall on Harley’s patio, and Turk and Lise moved closer to the window to watch.

  Gray and powdery. Tyrell’s description was on the money. Turk had never seen volcanic ash, but he imagined this was what it might look like. It sifted down over the wooden slats and boards of the patio and drifted against the window glass. It was like snow the color of an old wool suit, but here and there were flecks of something shiny, something still luminous, which dimmed as he watched.

  Lise pressed up against his shoulder, wide-eyed. He thought again of their weekend up in the Mohindar Range, marooned by weather on that nameless lake. She had been just as self-possessed back then, just as balanced, braced for whatever the situation might throw at her. “At least,” he said, “nothing’s burning.”