Turk had family in Austin, Texas. But they hadn’t heard from him lately and wouldn’t expect to.
On the bookshelf by Lise’s desk was a three-volume bound copy of the Martian Archives, sometimes called the Martian Encyclopedia, the compendium of history and science brought to Earth by Wun Ngo Wen thirty years ago. The blue dust jackets were tattered at their spine ends. He took down the first volume and leafed through it. When she finally put down the phone, he said, “Do you believe in this?”
“It’s not a religion. It’s not something you have to believe in it.”
Back during the freakish years of the Spin, the technologically advanced nations of the Earth had assembled the necessary resources to terraform and colonize the planet Mars. The most useful resource had already been put in place by the Hypotheticals, and that was time. For every year on Earth under the Spin membrane, thousands of years had passed in the universe at large. The biological transformation of Mars—scientists called it “the ecopoiesis”—had been relatively easy to accomplish, given that generous temporal disconnect. The human colonization of the planet had been an altogether riskier venture.
Isolated from Earth for millennia, the Martian colonists had created a technology suited to their water-poor and nitrogen-starved environment. They were masters of biological manipulation but chronically wary of large-scale mechanical engineering. Sending a manned expedition to Earth had been a last, desperate strategy when the Hypotheticals appeared to be about to enclose Mars in a Spin membrane of its own.
Wun Ngo Wen, the so-called Martian ambassador—Turk found a photograph of him as he leafed through an appendix to the book: a small, wrinkled, dark-skinned man—had arrived during the last years of the Spin. He had been feted by Earthly governments, until it became clear that he possessed no magic solution to their problems. But Wun had advocated and helped set in motion the launch of Martian-designed quasi-biological probes into the outer solar system—self-replicating robotic devices that were supposed to broadcast back information that might shed useful light on the nature of the Hypotheticals, and in a way they had succeeded—the network of probes had been absorbed into a preexisting, previously unsuspected ecology of self-replicating devices living in deep space, which was the physical “body” of the Hypotheticals, or so some people believed. But Turk had no opinion about that.
The version of the Archives Lise possessed was an authorized redaction, published in the States. It had been vetted and organized by a panel of scientists and government officials and it was acknowledged to be incomplete. Before his death Wun had arranged for unedited copies of the text to be privately circulated, along with something even more valuable—Martian “pharmaceuticals,” including the drug that would add some thirty or more years to an average human life span, the so-called Fourth treatment by which Lise’s father had presumably been tempted.
There were supposedly lots of native Fourths on Earth now, though they lacked the elaborate social structures that constrained the lives of their Martian cousins. Taking the treatment was illegal under a UN accord signed by virtually every member nation. Most of what the Department of Genomic Security did back in the States was shutting down Fourth cults both genuine and fraudulent—that, and policing the booming trade in human and animal genetic enhancements. These were the folks Lise’s ex-husband worked for.
“You know,” she said, “we haven’t talked much about this.”
“We haven’t talked nearly enough about anything at all, seems to me.”
Her smile, though brief, was pleasing.
She said, “Do you know any Fourths?”
“Wouldn’t recognize one if I saw one.” And if that was an evasion, she didn’t appear to notice.
“Because it’s different here in the Port,” she said, “here in the New World. The laws aren’t enforced the way they are back on Earth.”
“That’s changing, I hear.”
“Which is why I want to look at what my father was interested in before it all gets erased. People say there’s a Fourth underground in the city. Maybe more than one.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that. I’ve heard a lot of things. Not all true.”
“I can do all the secondhand research I want, but what I really need is to talk to someone who’s had direct experience with the Fourth community here.”
“Right. Maybe Brian can arrange it for you, next time DGS arrests somebody.”
He was immediately sorry he’d said it, or said it so bluntly. She tightened up. “Brian and I are divorced, and I’m not responsible for what Genomic Security does.”
“But he’s looking for the same people you’re looking for.”
“For different reasons.”
“Do you ever wonder about that? Whether he might be using you as some kind of cat’s paw? Riding on your research?”
“I don’t show my work to Brian—to anyone.”
“Not even when he’s baiting you with the woman who maybe took away your father?”
“I’m not sure you have the right—”
“Forget it. I’m just, you know, concerned.”
She was obviously on the verge of handing that right back to him, but she cocked her head and thought about it first. That was one of the things Turk had noticed about her right away, the habit she had of stepping outside the moment before she rendered a verdict.
She said, “Don’t make assumptions about me and Brian. Just because we’re still on speaking terms doesn’t mean I’m doing him favors.”
“Just so we know where we are,” he said.
The sky was gray again by noon, but the clouds were rain clouds, nothing exotic, and they brought a drenching, unseasonable downpour. Turk guessed the rain might ultimately be a boon—it would wash some of this ash into the soil or out to sea, maybe help salvage the season’s crops, if that was possible. But it did nothing to ease the drive south from the Port, once he recovered his car from the parking lot at Harley’s. Glistening washes of gray ash made the pavement treacherous. Creeks and rivers had turned the color of clay and ran turgidly in their beds. When the road crossed the high ridges Turk could see a bloom of silt tailing into the sea from a dozen muddy deltas.
He left the coast road at an unmarked exit toward a place most English-speakers called New Delhi Flats, a shanty settlement on a plateau between two creeks, under a sheer bluff that crumbled a little every rainy season. The alleys between the rows of cheap Chinese-branded prefab housing were unpaved, and the fair-weather huts had been improved with tarpaper roofing and sheets of insulation hauled in from cheapjack factories up-coast. There were no police in the Flats, no real authority beyond what could be leveraged by the churches, temples, and mosques. The earthmovers hadn’t been anywhere near the Flats, and the narrower alleys were congested with sloggy wet dunes. But a passage had been shoveled along the main avenue, and it took Turk only a few extra minutes to reach Tomas Ginn’s undistinguished home—an arsenic-green hovel squeezed between two just like it.
He parked and waded through a thin gruel of wet ash to Tomas’s door. He knocked. When there was no answer he knocked again. A lined face appeared briefly at the small curtained window to his left. Then the door swung open.
“Turk!” Tomas Ginn had a voice that sounded as if it had been filtered through bedrock, an old man’s voice, but firmer than it had been when Turk first encountered him. “Didn’t expect to see you. Specially in the middle of all this trouble. Come on in. Place is a fuckin’ mess but I can pour you a drink, anyhow.”
Turk stepped inside. Tomas’s home was little more than a single thin-walled room with a raggedy sofa and table at one end and a miniature kitchen at the other, all dimly lit. The Port Magellan Power Authority hadn’t strung any cables out this way. The only electricity came from an array of Sinotec photovoltaics on the roof, and their efficiency had been slashed by the dustfall. The place had a lingering aroma of sulfur and talc, but that was mostly the ash Turk had tracked in with him. Tomas was a fastidious housekeeper, in his own way.
A “fuckin’ mess,” in Tomas’s vocabulary, meant there were a couple of empty beer bottles undisposed-of on a narrow counter.
“Sit on down,” Tomas said, settling himself on a chair with a dent in the seat that had been worn into a mirror image of his bony ass. Turk selected the least-tattered cushion on his friend’s ancient sofa. “Can you believe this shit falling out of the sky? I mean, who asked for that? I had to shovel my way out of the house yesterday just to go out and get groceries.”
Pretty unbelievable, Turk acknowledged.
“So what brings you here? Something more than neighborliness, I expect, given the weather. If you can call it weather.”
“Got a question to ask,” Turk said.
“A question or a favor?”
“Well—starts with a question, anyway.”
“Serious?”
“It might be.”
“So you want a beer? Get the dust out of your throat?”
“Not a bad idea,” Turk said.
Turk had met Tomas aboard an ancient single-hulled tanker bound for Breaker Beach on its final voyage.
The ship, called Kestrel, had been Turk’s ticket to the New World. Turk had signed on as an able-bodied seaman at negligible wages. All the crew had, because it was a one-way trip. Across the Arch, in Equatoria, the market for scrap iron and steel was booming. On Earth a leviathan like the Kestrel was a liability, too old to meet international standards and useless for anything but the poorest kind of coastal trade, prohibitively expensive to scrap. But in the New World the same rusty hulk would be a source of valuable raw material, stripped and diced by the acetylene-wielding armies of Thai and Indian laborers who made their living unrestrained by environmental regulations—the professional breakers of Breaker Beach, located some hundred miles north of Port Magellan.
Turk and Tomas had shared a mess on that voyage and learned a few things about each other. Tomas claimed to have been born in Bolivia, but he had been raised, he said, in Biloxi, and had worked the docks in that city and then New Orleans as a boy and young man. He had been at sea off and on for decades, during the tumultuous years of the Spin, when the U.S. government had revived the old Merchant Marine as a gesture toward national security, and afterward, when trade across the Arch created fresh demand for new shipping.
Tomas had joined Kestrel for the same reason Turk had signed on: it was a one-way ticket to the promised land. Or what they both liked to imagine was a promised land. Tomas wasn’t naïve: he had crossed the Arch five times before, had spent months in Port Magellan, knew the town’s vices firsthand, and had seen how cruelly the town could treat newcomers. But it was a freer, more open, more casually polyglot city than any on Earth—a seaman’s town, much of it built by expatriate sailors, and it was where he wanted to spend the last years of his life, looking at a landscape on which human hands had only recently been laid. (Turk had signed on for much the same reason, though it would be his first trip cross-Arch. He had wanted to get as far from Texas as it was practical to get, for reasons he didn’t care to dwell on.)
The trouble with Kestrel was that, because it had no future, it had been poorly maintained and was barely seaworthy. Everyone aboard was aware of that fact, from the Filipino captain down to the illiterate Syrian teenager who stewarded the crew mess. It made for a dangerous transit. Bad weather had scuttled many a vessel bound for Breaker Beach, and more than one rusty keel had gone to rest under the Arch of the Hypotheticals.
But the weather in the Indian Ocean had been reassuringly benign, and because this was Turk’s first passage he had risked the derision of his shipmates by arranging to be on deck when the crossing happened. A night crossing of the Arch. He staked out a place aft of the forecastle out of the breeze, made a pillow from a hank of rag stiff with dried paint, stretched out and gazed at the stars. The stars had been scattered by the four billion years of galactic evolution that had transpired while the Earth was enclosed in its Spin membrane, and they remained nameless after thirty years, but they were the only stars Turk had ever known. He had been barely five years old when the Spin ended. His generation had grown up in the post-Spin world, accustomed to the idea that a person could ride an ocean vessel from one planet to another. Unlike some, however, Turk had never been able to make that fact seem prosaic. It was still a wonder to him.
The Arch of the Hypotheticals was a structure vastly larger than anything human engineering could have produced. By the scale of stars and planets, the scale on which the Hypotheticals were assumed to operate, it was a relatively small thing . . . but it was the biggest made thing Turk imagined he would ever encounter. He had seen it often enough in photographs, on video, in representative diagrams in schoolbooks, but none of those did justice to the real item.
He had first seen it with his own eyes from the Sumatran port where he joined the Kestrel. The Arch’s eastern leg had been visible on clear days and especially at sunset, when the last light climbed that pale thread and burnished it to a fine golden line. But now he was almost directly beneath the apex, a different view entirely. The Arch had been compared to a thousand-mile-wide wedding ring dropped into the Indian Ocean, half of it embedded in the bedrock of the planet and the other half projecting above the atmosphere into naked space. From the deck of the Kestrel he couldn’t see either leg where it entered the sea, but he could see the peak of the Arch reflecting the last light of the sun, a brushstroke of silvery-blue fading to dusky red at its eastern and western extremities. It quivered in the heat of the evening air.
Up close, people said, if you sailed within hailing proximity of either leg, it looked as plain as a pillar of concrete rising from the surface of the sea, except that the enormously wide pillar didn’t stop rising, simply vanished from sight. But the Arch wasn’t an inert object no matter how static it appeared. It was a machine. It communicated with a copy of itself—or the other half of itself, perhaps—set in the compatible ocean of the New World, many light-years distant. Maybe it orbited one of the stars Turk could see from the deck of the Kestrel: there was a shivery thought. The Arch might appear to be inanimate, but in fact it was watching the near surface of both worlds, conducting two-way traffic. Because that was what it did: that was its function. If a bird, a stormtossed tree limb, or an ocean current passed beneath the Arch it would continue on its way unmolested. The waters of Earth and the New World never mingled. But if a manned ocean vessel crossed under the Arch it would be picked up and translated across an unimaginable distance. By all reports the transition was so easy as to be almost anticlimactic, but Turk wanted to experience it out here in the open, not down in crew quarters where he wouldn’t even know it had happened until the ship sounded its ritual horn.
He checked his watch. Almost time. He was still waiting when Tomas stepped out of the shadows into the glare of a deck light, grinning at him.
“First time, yeah,” Turk said, forestalling the inevitable comment.
“Fuck,” Tomas said, “you don’t need to explain. I come out every time I pass. Day or night. Like paying respects.”
Respects to whom? The Hypotheticals? But Turk didn’t ask.
“And, oh my!” Tomas said, aiming his old face at the sky. “Here it comes.”
So Turk braced himself—unnecessarily—and watched the stars dim and swirl around the peak of the Arch like watery reflections stirred by the prow of a boat. Then suddenly there was fog all around the Kestrel, or a mistiness that reminded him of fog although it had no scent or taste of moisture to it—a transient dizziness, a pressure in his ears. Then the stars came back, but they were different stars, thicker and brighter in what seemed like a blacker sky; and now the air did taste and smell subtly different, and a gust of it swirled around the hard steel angles of the topdeck as if to introduce itself, air warm and salt-scented and bracingly fresh. And up on the high bridge of the Kestrel, the compass needle must have swung on its pivot, as compasses did at every crossing of the Arch, because the ship’s horn sounded one long wail—punishingly loud but soun
ding almost tentative across an ocean only lately acquainted with human beings.
“The New World,” Turk said, thinking, That’s it? As easy as that?
“Equatoria,” Tomas said, confusing the continent with the planet as most people did. “How’s it feel to be a spaceman, Turk?”
But Turk couldn’t answer, because two crewmen who had been stealthily pacing the topdeck rounded on Turk with a bucket of saltwater and doused him, laughing. Another rite of passage, a christening for the virgin sailor. He had crossed, at last, the world’s strangest meridian. And he had no intention of going back, no real home to go back to.
Tomas had been frail with age when he boarded the Kestrel, and he was injured when the beaching of the vessel went bad.
There were no docks or quays at Breaker Beach. Turk had seen it from the deck rail, his first real look at the coast of Equatoria. The continent loomed out of the horizon like a mirage, pink with morning light, though hardly untouched by human hands. The three decades since the end of the Spin had transformed the western fringe of Equatoria from a wilderness into a chaos of fishing villages, lumber camps, primitive industry, slash-and-burn farmland, hasty roads, a dozen booming towns, and one city through which most of the hinterland’s rich resources were channeled. Breaker Beach, almost a hundred nautical miles north of Port Magellan, was possibly the ugliest occupied territory on the coast—Turk could hardly say, but the Filipino cargomaster insisted it was, and the argument was plausible. The broad white beach, protected from the surf by a pebbly headland, was littered with the corpses of broken vessels and smudged with the smoke and ash of a thousand fires. Turk spotted a double-hulled tanker not unlike the Kestrel, a score of coastal tankers, even a military vessel stripped of all identifying flags and markings. These were recent arrivals, the work of their deconstruction hardly begun. For many miles more the beach was crowded with steel frames denuded of hull plating, cavernous half-ships in which the acetylene glare of the breakers’ torches made a fitful light.
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