Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  But they had also become a license for an entire generation’s lunacy, and that was less easy for Brian to excuse. Many millions of otherwise rational men and women had reacted to the Spin with a shocking display of irrationality, mutual distrust, and outright viciousness. Now those same people felt entitled to the respect of anyone Brian’s age or younger.

  They didn’t deserve it. Lunacy wasn’t a virtue and decency didn’t boast. “Decency,” in fact, was what Brian’s generation had been left to rebuild. Decency, trust, and a certain decorum in human behavior.

  The Hypotheticals were the causal agent behind the Spin: Why would anyone want to communicate with them? What would that even mean? And how could it be achieved by a biological modification, even a Martian one?

  “What this technology does,” Sigmund said, “is modify a human nervous system to make it sensitive to the signals the Hypotheticals use to communicate among themselves. Basically, they create a kind of human intermediary. A communicant who can translate between our species and whatever the Hypotheticals are.”

  “They actually did this?”

  “The Martians won’t say. It may have been attempted on their planet, maybe more than once. But we believe the technology, like the longevity treatment, was carried to Earth by Wun Ngo Wen and released into the general population.”

  “So why haven’t I heard more about it?”

  “Because it’s not something universally desirable, like an extra forty years of life. If our intelligence is correct, it’s lethal if attempted on an adult human being. It may be what killed Jason Lawton, way back when.”

  “So what good is it if it’s lethal?”

  “It may not be lethal,” Weil said, “if the pharmaceuticals are delivered to a human being in utero. The developing embryo builds itself around the biotech. The human and the alien growing together.”

  “Jesus,” Brian said. “To do that to a child—”

  “It’s profoundly unethical, obviously. You know, at the Department we spend a lot of time worrying about Fourths, about the harm that can come from cultists engineering changes in human biology. And that’s a real, legitimate problem. But this is so much more shocking. Really, deeply . . . evil is the only word for it.”

  “Has anybody actually done this on Earth?”

  “Well, that’s what we’re looking into. So far we have very little hard evidence or eyewitness testimony. But where we do, one person appears. Many names, but just one person, one face. You want to guess who that is?”

  The woman in the photograph. The woman who had been seen with Lise’s father.

  “So Sulean Moi shows up on facial-recognition data from the docks at Port Magellan, and when we arrive to investigate we find Lise, who has a prior connection, has been going over this same ground, talking to her father’s old colleagues and so forth. For perfectly legitimate reasons, granted. She’s curious, it’s a family mystery, she thinks knowing the truth would make her feel better. But that leaves us with a problem. Do we interfere with her? Do we let her go on doing what she’s doing, and just sort of supervise? Do we warn her that she’s in dangerous territory?”

  “Warning her didn’t work,” Brian said.

  “So we have to make use of her in some other way.”

  “Make use of her?”

  “Instead of physically arresting her—which is what some of my superiors have been advocating—we think a wait-and-watch approach might be more informative in the long run. She’s already connected with other persons of interest. One of them is Turk Findley.”

  Turk Findley, the freelance pilot and general fuck-up. Bad as it was that Brian had not been able to sustain his marriage to Lise, how much worse that she had taken up with someone so wayward, dysfunctional, and generally useless to his fellow man? Turk Findley was another variety of fallout from the Spin, Brian thought. A maladapted human being. A purposeless drifter. Possibly something worse, if Sigmund’s implication was correct.

  “You’re saying Turk Findley has some connection to this elderly woman, apart from the fact that she once chartered a flight with him?”

  “Well, that’s certainly suggestive right there. But Turk has other contacts almost as suspicious. Known and suspected Fourths. And he’s a criminal. Did you know that? He left the United States with a warrant on him.”

  “Warrant for what?”

  “He was a person of interest in a warehouse fire.”

  “What are you telling me, he’s an arsonist?”

  “The case lapsed, but he may have burned down his old man’s business.”

  “I thought his father was an oil man.”

  “His father worked in Turkey at one time and had some connections with Aramco, but he made most of his money on an import business. Some kind of bad blood between the two, the old man’s warehouse burns down, Turk skips the country. You can draw your own conclusions.”

  It just gets worse, Brian thought. “So we have to get Lise away from him. She might be in danger.”

  “We suspect she’s been drawn into something she doesn’t understand. We doubt she’s under any kind of duress. She’s cooperating with this man. It was probably Turk who told her to stop taking calls.”

  “But you can find them, right?”

  “Sooner or later. But we’re not magicians, we can’t just conjure them out of the void.”

  “Then tell me how I can help.” Brian couldn’t help adding, “If you’d been straight with me about this before I talked to her—”

  “Would you have done anything differently? We can’t just hand out this kind of information. And neither can you, Brian. Just so you know. We’re taking you into our confidence here. None of this is to be discussed except between you, me, and Sigmund.”

  “Of course not, but—”

  “What we’d like you to do is keep trying to get in touch with her. She may be aware of your calls even if she isn’t answering them. She might eventually feel guilty or lonely and decide to talk to you.”

  “And if she does?”

  “All we want right now is a clue to her location. If you can talk her into meeting you, with or without Turk, that would be even better.”

  Much as he disliked the idea of handing her over to the Executive Action Committee, surely that was better than letting her get more deeply involved in some criminal enterprise. “I’ll do what I can,” Brian said.

  “Great.” Weil grinned. “We appreciate that.”

  The two men shook Brian’s hand and left him alone in his office. He sat there a long time, thinking.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The up-coast roads hadn’t been entirely cleared of the ashfall (or the muck it made when it mixed with rain), so Turk had to pull over at a truckstop and rent a room while the route was plowed at some critical switchback by the overworked road crews of the Provisional Government.

  The motel was a cinderblock barracks cut into the boundary of the forest, dwarfed by spire willows that leaned across the building like sorrowing giants. It was designed to cater to truckers and loggers, Lise gathered, not tourists. She ran her finger along the sill of their room’s small window and showed Turk the line of dust.

  “Probably from last week,” he said. “They don’t spend a lot of money on housekeeping out this way.”

  Dust of the gods, then. The debris of ancient Hypothetical constructions. That’s what they were saying about it now. The video news was full of poorly-interpreted facts about the ashfall: fragments of things that might once have been machines, fragments of things that might once have been living organisms, molecular arrangements of unprecedented complexity.

  Lise could hear voices from the room next door arguing in what sounded like Filipino. She took out her phone, wanting another fix of the local broadcast news. Turk watched her closely and said, “Remember—”

  “No calls in or out. I know.”

  “We should reach the village by this time tomorrow,” Turk said, “as long as the road’s cleared overnight. Then we might actually l
earn something.”

  “You have a lot of faith in this woman—Diane, you said her name was?”

  “Not faith exactly. She needs to know about Tomas. She might be able to do something to help him. And she’s been hooked into the local Fourth network for a long time—it’s even possible she knows something about your father.”

  She had asked him how long he had been connected with Fourths. Not connected, exactly, he said. But this Diane woman trusted him, and he had done favors for her in the past. It had been Diane, apparently, who suggested Turk’s charter business as a way of getting Sulean Moi to the mountains as discreetly as possible. More than that Turk did not know; had not wanted to know.

  Lise looked again at the windowsill, the dust. “Lately I feel like it’s all connected. Everything weird that’s been happening—the ash, Tomas, whatever’s going on out west . . .”

  The news broadcasts had begun reporting on the earthquake that had temporarily shut down the oil complexes of the Rub al-Khali.

  “It’s not necessarily connected,” Turk said. “It’s just triple-strange.”

  “What?”

  “Something Tomas used to say. Weirdness comes in clusters. Like this time we were crewing a freighter in the Strait of Malacca. One day we had engine trouble and had to anchor for repairs. Next day freakish weather, a monsoon nobody’d predicted. Day after that the sky was clear but we were hosing Malay pirates off the deck. Once things get strange, Tomas used to say, you can pretty much count on triple-strange.”

  How comforting, Lise thought.

  They shared a bed that night but they didn’t make love. Both of them were tired and both of them, Lise thought, were coming to terms with the truth that this wasn’t a tent by a mountain lake and they weren’t having a harmless weekend adventure. Larger forces had been engaged. People had been hurt. And, thinking about her father, she began to wonder whether he might have stumbled into some similar wonderland of triple-strangeness. Maybe his disappearance had not been selfish or even voluntary: maybe he’d been abducted, like Turk’s friend Tomas, by anonymous men in an unmarked van.

  Turk was asleep as soon as he hit the mattress, typically. Nevertheless it was good to lie beside him, to feel his bulk at her side. He had showered before bed and the smell of soap and maleness emanated from him like a benevolent aura. Had Brian ever smelled like that?

  Not that she could recall. Brian had no particular smell beyond the chemical tang of whatever deodorant he happened to be using. Probably took some small degree of pride in being odor-free.

  No, that wasn’t fair. There was more to Brian than that. Brian believed in an ordered life. That didn’t make him a monster or a villain, and she couldn’t believe he had been personally involved in tracking her movements or abducting Tomas. That wasn’t playing by the book. Brian always played by the book.

  Not necessarily a bad thing. If it made him less adventurous than Turk, it also made him more reliable. Brian would never fly a plane across a mountain or hire himself out as an able-bodied seaman on some rust-riddled merchant vessel. Nor would he break a promise or violate an oath. Which was why it had been so hard to negotiate the conclusion of their hasty and unwise marriage. Lise had met Brian when she was doing a journalism degree at Columbia and he was a junior functionary in the New York offices of the DGS. It was his gentleness and his sympathy that had won her over, and she had only belatedly understood that Brian would always be at her side but never quite on her side—that in the end he was one more in the chorus of voices advising her to ignore her own history because its lacunae might conceal some unbearable truth.

  But he had loved her, innocently, doggedly. Claimed he still did. She opened her eyes and saw her phone where she had left it on the bedside table, faintly glowing. It had already registered several attempted calls from Brian. She had answered none of them. That was also unfair. Necessary, maybe. She was willing to take Turk’s word on that. But not fair, and not kind. Brian deserved better.

  By morning a lane had been opened and they drove north for another four hours, passing buses, jitneys painted like circus caravans, logging trucks, freight trucks, tank trucks loaded with refined oil or gasoline, until Turk turned west on one of the poorly-maintained side roads that diced through this part of the country like the lines on an old man’s palm.

  And suddenly they were in the wilderness. The Equatorian forest closed on them like a mouth. It was only here, away from the city and the farms and refineries and busy harbors, that Lise felt the alienness of this world, the intrinsic and ancient strangeness that had fascinated her father. The towering trees and dense, ferny undergrowth—plants for which Lise did not know the folk names, much less their provisional binomials—were supposedly related to terrestrial life: their DNA contained evidence of terrestrial ancestry. The planet had been stocked and seeded by the Hypotheticals, supposedly to make it habitable for human beings. But the plans of the Hypotheticals were long-term, to say the least. They calculated events in the billions of years. Evolution must be a perceptible event to them.

  Maybe they couldn’t even directly experience events as brief, in their eyes—if they had eyes—as a human life. Lise found that idea oddly comforting. She could see and feel things that for the Hypotheticals must be vanishingly evanescent: things as commonplace as the swaying of these strange trees above the road and the sunlight that speckled their shadows on the forest floor. That was a gift, she thought. Our mortal genius.

  The sun tracked through finely-feathered or fernlike leaves. The underbrush was populated with wildlife, much of which had not (even yet) learned to fear human beings. She caught glimpses of jack dogs, a striped ghoti, a flock of spidermice, the names usually referring to some Earthly animal although the resemblance was often fanciful. There were insects, too, humming or whining in the emerald shadows. Worst were the carrion wasps, not dangerous but big and foul-smelling. Gnats, which looked exactly like the gnats that used to hover in shady places back home, swarmed among the mossy tree trunks.

  Turk drove with close attention to the unpaved road. Fortunately the dustfall here had been light and the canopy of the forest had absorbed most of it. When the driving was critical Turk was silent. On the straightaways, he asked about her father. She had discussed this with him before, but that had been before the dustfall and the strange events of the last few days.

  “How old were you exactly when your father disappeared?”

  “Fifteen.” A young fifteen. Naïve, and clinging to American fashions as a rebuke to the world into which she had been unwillingly imported. Braces on her teeth, for God’s sake.

  “The authorities take it seriously?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Just, you know, he wouldn’t be the first guy to walk out on his family. No offense.”

  “He wasn’t the type to walk out on us. I know everybody says that in cases like this. ‘It was so unexpected.’ And I was the loyal, naïve daughter—I couldn’t imagine him doing anything bad or thoughtless. But it’s not just me. He was fully engaged in his work at the university. If he was leading a double life I don’t know where he found the time for it.”

  “Supporting his family on a teacher’s salary?”

  “We had money from my mother’s side.”

  “So I guess it wasn’t hard to get the attention of the Provisional Government when he disappeared.”

  “We had ex-Interpol men interviewing everybody, an open police file, but nothing ever came of it.”

  “So your family contacted Genomic Security.”

  “No. They contacted us.”

  Turk nodded and looked thoughtful while he maneuvered the vehicle through a shallow washout. A three-wheeled motorcycle passed in the opposite direction—balloon tires, high carriage, a basket of vegetables strapped to the rear rack. The driver, some skinny local, glanced at them incuriously.

  “Anybody find that odd,” Turk asked, “that Genomic Security came calling?”

  “My father was researching Fourth
activity in the New World, among other things, so they were aware of him. He’d had talks with them before.”

  “Researching Fourths for what purpose?”

  “Personal interest,” she said, cringing at how incriminating that sounded. “Really, it was part of his whole fascination with the post-Spin world—how people were adapting to it. And I think he was convinced the Martians knew more about the Hypotheticals than they included in their Archives, and maybe some of that knowledge had been passed around by Fourths along with the chemical and biological stuff.”

  “But the Genomic Security people didn’t turn up anything either.”

  “No. They kept the file open for a while longer, or so they claimed, but in the end they didn’t have any more luck than the PG had. The conclusion they obviously reached was that his research had gotten the better of him—that at some point he was offered the longevity treatment and took it.”

  “Okay, but that doesn’t mean he had to disappear.”

  “People do, though. They take the treatment and assume a new identity. It means not so many awkward questions when your peers start to die off and you still look like the picture in your grad book. The idea of starting a new life is attractive for a lot of people, especially if they’re in some kind of personal or financial bind. But my father wasn’t like that.”

  “People can carry around a fear of death and never let on, Lise. They just live with it. But if you show them a way out, who knows how they might behave?”

  Or who they might leave behind. Lise was silent for a moment. Over the hum of the car’s engine she heard a minor-key melody trilling from the high canopy of the forest, some bird she couldn’t identify.

  She said, “When I came back here I was prepared for that possibility. I’m far from convinced that he just walked out on us, but I’m not omniscient, I can’t know for sure what was going on in his mind. If that’s what happened, okay. I’ll deal with it. I don’t want revenge, and if he did take the treatment—if he’s living somewhere under a new name—I can deal with that, too. I don’t need to see him. I just need to know. Or find somebody who does.”