Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Find—what?”

  “A buyer. A buyer, you know! People are interested. Sell the plane, pay your debts, start fresh. People do that. It happens all the time.”

  Turk said, “Not to me.”

  “Calm down. We don’t necessarily have conflicting interests here. I can help you get a premium price. I mean, if it comes to that. And shit, Turk, you’re the one who’s always talking about hiring onto a research boat and sailing somewhere. Maybe this is the time. Who knows?”

  “Your confidence is inspiring.”

  “Think about it, is what I’m saying. Talk to me in the morning.”

  “I can pay what I owe you.”

  “Can you? Okay. No problem. Bring me a certified check and we’ll forget about it.”

  To which Turk had no answer.

  “Go home,” Arundji said. “You look tired, buddy.”

  “First,” Brian said, “I know you were with Turk Findley.”

  “What the hell?” Lise said promptly.

  “Hold on, let me finish—”

  “What, you had somebody follow me?”

  “I couldn’t do that if I wanted to, Lise.”

  “What, then?”

  Brian took a breath. His pursed lips and narrowed eyes were meant to announce that he found this as unpleasant as she did. “Lise, there are other people at work here.”

  She made an effort to control her own breathing. She was already angry. And in a way the anger was not unwelcome. It beat feeling guilty, the mood in which her encounters usually left her. “What people?”

  “Let me just remind you of the larger issues,” he said. “Bear with me. It’s easy to forget what’s at stake. The nature and definition of the human genome, of what we are as a people, all of us. That’s been put at risk by everything from the cloning trade to these Martian longevity cults, and there are people in every government in the world who spend a lot of time thinking about that.”

  His credo, the same justification, Lise recalled, that he had once offered to her mother. “What does that have to do with me?” Or Turk, for that matter.

  “You came to me with an old snapshot taken at one of your dad’s faculty parties, so I ran it through the database—”

  “You offered to run it through the database.”

  “I offered, okay, and we pulled an image from the dockland security cameras. But when you run a check like that, the query gets bumped around a little bit. And I guess something rang a bell somewhere. Within the last week we’ve had people from Washington show up here—”

  “What do you mean, DGS people?”

  “DGS people, right, but very senior, people working out of levels of the department light-years above what we do here. People who are deeply interested in finding the woman in the picture. People interested enough to sail out of Djakarta and knock on my door.”

  Lise sat back in her chair and tried to absorb all this.

  After a long moment she said, “My mother showed the same snapshot to DGS back when my father disappeared. Nobody made a fuss about it then.”

  “That was a decade ago. Other information has turned up since. The same face in a different context. More than that I can’t say.”

  “I’d like to talk to these people. If they know anything about Sulean Moi—”

  “Nothing that would help you find out what happened to your father.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Try to put it in perspective, Lise. These people are doing an important job. They mean business. I went out of my way to convince these guys not to talk to you.”

  “But you gave them my name?”

  “I told them everything I know about you, because otherwise they might think you’re involved in—well, what they’re investigating. Which would be a waste of their time and a hardship for you. Honestly, Lise. You have to keep a low profile on this one.”

  “They’re watching me. Is that what you’re trying to say? They’re watching me and they know I was with Turk.”

  He winced at the name, but nodded. “They know those things. Yes.”

  “Jesus, Brian!”

  He raised his hands in a gesture that looked like surrender. “All I’m saying is, when I stand back from all this—from what our relationship is and what I would like it to be—when I ask myself what would really be best for you—my advice is to let this go. Stop asking questions. Maybe even think about heading back home, back to California.”

  “I don’t want to go home.”

  “Think about it, is all I’m saying. There’s only so much I can do to protect you.”

  “I never asked you to protect me.”

  “Maybe we can talk about this again when you’ve given it some consideration.”

  She stood up. “Or maybe not.”

  “And maybe we can talk about Turk Findley and what’s going on in that department.”

  In that department. Poor Brian, unfailingly prim, even when he was rebuking her.

  She thought about defending herself. She could say, We were having dinner when the ash fell. She could say, Of course he came home with me, what was he supposed to do, sleep in his car? She could lie and say, We’re just friends. Or she could say, I went to bed with him because he’s unafraid and unpredictable and his fingernails aren’t impeccably clean and he doesn’t work for the fucking DGS.

  She was angry, humiliated, not a little guilt-stricken. “It’s not your business anymore. You need to figure that out, Brian.”

  And turned, and left.

  Turk went home to fix himself dinner, some shiftless meal appropriate to his mood. He lived in a two-room bungalow set among similar cabins on a barely-paved road near Arundji’s airfield, on a bluff overlooking the sea. Maybe someday this would be expensive real estate. Currently it was off-grid. The toilet fed a cesspool and his electricity came from sunlight and a generator in a back shed. Every summer he repaired his shingles, and every winter they leaked from a new angle.

  The sun was setting over the foothills west of him, and to the east the sea had turned an inky shade of blue. A few fishing boats straggled toward the harbor to the north. The air was cool and there was a breeze to carry off the remnant stink of the ash.

  The ash had settled in windrows around the foundations of the cabin, but the roof seemed to have borne up under the strain. His shelter was intact. There wasn’t much food in the kitchen cupboards, however. Less than he remembered. It was canned beans or go out for groceries. Or spend money he didn’t have in some restaurant he couldn’t afford.

  Lost my plane, he thought. But no, not really, not yet; the plane was only embargoed, not yet sold. But there was nothing in his bank account to offer a convincing counter-argument. So that little mantra had been running through his head since he left Mike Arundji’s office: Lost my plane.

  He wanted to talk to Lise. But he didn’t want to dump his problems on her. It still seemed unlikely that he had hooked up with her at all. His relationship with Lise was something fortune had dropped in his lap. Fortune had done him few favors in the past, and he wasn’t sure he trusted it.

  Cornmeal, coffee, beer . . .

  He decided to give Tomas another call. Maybe he hadn’t explained too well what it was he wanted. There was only one real favor he could do Lise, and that was to help her understand why her father had gone Fourth—which Turk assumed was what had happened. And if anyone could explain that to her or put it in a sane perspective it might be Tomas and, if Tomas would put in a word for him, Ibu Diane, the Fourth nurse who lived with the Minang upcoast.

  He ticked Tomas’s number into his phone.

  But there was no answer, nor was the call dumped to voice mail. Which was odd because Tomas carried his phone everywhere. It was probably his most valuable possession.

  Turk thought about what to do next. He could go over his accounts and try to rig up some accommodation with Mike Arundji. Or he could drive back into town, maybe see Lise, if she wasn’t sick of him—maybe check up on Tomas on the wa
y. The sensible thing, he guessed, would be to stay home and take care of business.

  If he had any real business to take care of.

  He turned off the lights as he left.

  Lise drove away from the consulate feeling scalded. That was the word precisely. Scalded, dipped in hot water, burned raw. She drove aimlessly for more than an hour until the car registered the sunset and switched on its lights. The sky had gone red, one of those long Equatorian sunsets, made gaudier by the fine ash still lingering in the air. She drove through the Arab district, past souks and coffee shops under piebald awnings and strings of colored lights, the crowds dense this evening, making up for time lost during the ashfall; then up into the foothills, the pricey neighborhoods where wealthy men and women from Beijing or Tokyo or London or New York built faux-Mediterranean palaces in pastel shades. Belatedly, she realized she was driving down the street where she had lived with her parents during her four adolescent years in this city.

  And here was the house where she had lived when her family was still whole. She slowed the car as she passed. The house was smaller than she remembered and noticeably smaller than the would-be palaces that had grown up around it, a cloth coat among minks. She dreaded to think what it must rent for nowadays. The white-painted veranda was drenched in evening shadow, and had been furnished by strangers.

  “This is where we’ll be living for the next little while,” her mother had told her when they moved here from California. But to Lise it was never “my house,” even when she was talking to friends at the American school. It was “where we’re staying,” her mother’s preferred formulation. At thirteen Lise had been a little frightened of the foreign places she had seen on television, and Port Magellan was all those foreign places jumbled together in a single overbrimming gumbo. At least at first, she had longed for lost California.

  Now she longed for—what?

  Truth. Memory. The extraction of truth from memory.

  The roof of the house was dark with ash. Lise could not help picturing herself on the veranda in the old days, sitting with her father. She wished she could sit there with him now, not to discuss Brian or her problems but to speculate about the ashfall, to talk about what Robert Adams had liked to call (inevitably smiling as he said it) the Very Large Subjects, the mysteries that lay beyond the boundary of the respectable world.

  It was dark when she finally got home. The apartment was still in disarray, the dishes unwashed in the sink, the bed unmade, a little of Turk’s aura still lingering. She poured herself a glass of red wine and tried to think coherently about what Brian had said. About powerful people and their interest in the woman who had (perhaps, in some way) seduced her father away from home.

  Was Brian right when he said she should leave? Was there really anything meaningful left to extract from the shards of her father’s life?

  Or maybe she was closer than she realized to some fundamental truth, and maybe that was why she was in trouble.

  Turk guessed there was something wrong when Tomas failed to answer the second and third calls he placed from the car. Tomas might have been drinking—he still drank, though rarely to excess—but even drunk, Tomas usually answered his phone.

  So Turk approached the old man’s trailer with some apprehension, snaking his car through the dust-choked alleys of the Flats at a cautious speed. Tomas was a Fourth, hence fairly hearty, but not immortal. Even Fourths grew old. Even Fourths died. Tomas might be sick. Or he might be in some other kind of trouble. There was often trouble in the Flats. A couple of Filipino gangs operated out of the area, and there were drug houses scattered through the neighborhood. Unpleasant things happened from time to time.

  He parked his car by a noisy bodega and walked the last few yards to the corner of Tomas’s muddy little street. It was only just dark and there were plenty of people around, canned music yammering from every other doorway. But Tomas’s trailer was dark, the windows unlit. Could be the old man was asleep. But no. The door was unlocked and ajar.

  Turk knocked before he stepped inside, even though he had a sour certainty that the gesture was pointless. No answer.

  He reached to his left, switched on the overhead light and blinked. The room had been trashed. The table next to Tomas’s chair was lying legs-up, the lamp in pieces on the floor. The air still smelled of stale masculine sweat. He made a cursory check of the back bedroom, but it was likewise empty.

  After a moment’s thought, he left Tomas’s small home and knocked at the door of the trailer next door. An obese woman in a gray shift answered: a Mrs. Goudy, lately widowed. Tomas had introduced her to Turk once or twice, and Mrs. Goudy had been known to share a drink with the old man. No, Mrs. Goudy hadn’t heard from Tomas lately, but she had noticed a white van parked outside his trailer a little while ago . . . was anything wrong?

  “I hope not. When exactly did you see this van, Mrs. Goudy?”

  “Hour ago, maybe two.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Goudy. I wouldn’t worry about it. Best to keep your door locked, though.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Mrs. Goudy said.

  He went back to Tomas’s place and closed the door, making sure it was secure this time. A wind had come up, and it rattled the makeshift streetlight where Tomas’s short walkway met the road. Shadows swayed fitfully.

  He took his phone out of his pocket and called Lise, praying she would answer.

  Back at the apartment, Lise had her home node read aloud the remainder of her mother’s letter. The home unit, at least, had a female voice, slightly if unconvincingly modulated.

  Please don’t misunderstand, Lise. I’m just worried about you in the usual motherly way. I can’t help thinking of you alone in that city—

  Alone. Yes. Trust her mother to strike at her vulnerable place. Alone—because it was so hard to make anyone else understand what she wanted here and why it was so important to her.

  —putting yourself in danger—

  A danger that seemed so much more real when you were, as she said, alone . . .

  —when you could be here at home, safe, or even with Brian, who—

  Who would show the same puzzled condescension that radiated from her mother’s message.

  —would surely agree—

  No doubt.

  —that there’s no use digging up the dead past.

  But what if the past wasn’t dead? What if she simply lacked the courage or callousness to put the past behind her, had no choice but to pursue it until it yielded its last dividend of pain or satisfaction?

  “Pause,” she said to the media node. She couldn’t take too much of this at one time. Not with everything else that was happening. Not when an alien dust had dropped out of the sky. Not when she was being tracked and possibly bugged by DGS, for reasons not even Brian would explain. Not when she was, yes, thanks Mom for that little reminder, alone.

  She checked her other text messages.

  They were junk, except for one, which turned out to be gold. It was a note and an attachment sent by one Scott Cleland, whom she had been trying to contact for months. Scott Cleland was the only one of her father’s old university associates she hadn’t yet succeeded in talking to. He was an astronomer, working with the Geophysical Survey at the observatory on Mt. Mahdi. She had just about given up on him. But here at last was a response to her mail, and a friendly one: the node read it to her, adopting a male voice to suit the given name.

  Dear Lise Adams: I’m sorry to have been so slow in responding to your queries. The reason for this is not just procrastination. It took a little searching to find the attached document, which may interest you.

  I wasn’t close to Dr. Adams but we respected each other’s work. As for the details of his life at that time, and the other questions you asked, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Our connection was purely professional.

  At the time of his disappearance, however, and as you probably know, he had begun work on a book to be called Planet as Artifact. He asked me to read the brief introduction
he had written, which I did, but I found no errors and could suggest no significant improvements (apart from a catchier title).

  In case there was no copy of this among his papers, I enclose the one he sent me.

  Robert Adams’ disappearance was a great loss to all of us at the university. He often spoke affectionately about his family, and I hope your research brings you some comfort.

  Lise had the household node print the document. Contrary to what Cleland suspected, her father had not left a copy of the introduction with his papers. Or, if he had, Lise’s mother had shredded it. Susan Adams had shredded or discarded all of her husband’s papers and had donated his books to the university. Part of what Lise had come to think of as the Ritual Cleansing of the Adams Household.

  She turned off her phone and poured a glass of wine and took the wine and the six pages of printed text out to the balcony. The night was warm, she had swept away the ash this morning, and the indoor lamps cast enough light to read by.

  After a few minutes she went back inside to fetch a pen, came out again and began to underline certain phrases. She underlined them not because they were new to her but because they were familiar.

  Many things changed during the interval we call the Spin, but perhaps the most far-reaching change is also the most overlooked. The Earth was held in stasis for more than four billion years, which means we now live in a universe vastly more ancient—and more complexly evolved—than the one to which we were accustomed.

  Familiar because, in more polished prose, these were the things he had often said to her when they sat on the veranda and looked out at the darkness and the stars.

  Any real understanding of the nature of the Hypotheticals must take this into account. They were ancient when we first encountered them, and they are more ancient now. Since they cannot be observed directly, we must make our deductions about them based on their work in the universe, by the clues they leave behind them, by their vast and abiding footprints.