Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Like the woman in the photograph. Sulean Moi.”

  “The woman you flew to Kubelick’s Grave. Or like this Diane, who sent her to you.”

  “I don’t know how much Diane can tell you. More than I can, anyhow. I made it a point not to ask questions. The Fourths I’ve met . . . they’re easy to like, they don’t strike me as sinister, and as far as I can tell they’re not doing anything to put the rest of us in danger. Contrary to all that Genomic Security bullshit you hear on the news, they’re just people.”

  “People who know how to keep secrets.”

  “I’ll grant you that,” Turk said.

  Moments later they passed a crude wooden sign on which the name of the village had been written in several languages: DESA NEW SARANDIB TOWN, in approximate English. Half a mile farther on a skinny kid, not much more than twenty years old, Lise guessed, if that, stepped into the road and waved them down. He came to Turk’s side of the car and leaned into the window.

  “Going to Sarandib?” The kid’s shrill voice made him seem even younger than he looked. His breath smelled like rancid cinnamon.

  “Headed that way,” Turk said.

  “You got business there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Personal business.”

  “You want to buy ky? Not a good place to buy ky.”

  Ky was the hallucinogenic wax produced by some kind of native hive insect, lately a big deal in the Port Magellan clubs. “I don’t want any ky. Thanks anyhow.” Turk stepped on the gas—not hard enough to injure the kid, who ducked away promptly, but hard enough to win him a nasty look. Lise glanced back and saw the kid still standing in the road, glaring after them. She asked Turk what that was all about.

  “Lately you get townies driving around the boondocks trying to score a gram or two, getting robbed, getting into trouble.”

  “You think he wanted to sell us some?”

  “I don’t know what he wanted.”

  But the kid must have had a phone on him, and he must have called ahead, because as soon as they passed the first few inhabited shacks along the road and before they reached the town center the local gendarmerie, two big men wearing improvised uniforms and driving a years-old utility truck, forced Turk’s vehicle to the side of the road. Lise sat still and let Turk do the talking.

  “You have business here?” one of the men asked.

  “We need to see Ibu Diane.”

  Long pause. “No such person here.”

  “Okay,” Turk said. “I must have made a wrong turn. We’ll stop and have lunch, and then, since there’s no such person, we’ll be on our way.”

  The cop—if you could call him that, Lise thought, because these small-town constabularies had no standing with the Provisional Government—gave Turk a long sour look. “You have a name?”

  “Turk Findley.”

  “You can get a tea across the road. I don’t know about lunch.” He held up a single finger. “One hour.”

  They were seated at a table that appeared to have been made from an enormous discarded cable spool, sweating in the afternoon heat and drinking tea from chipped ceramic cups while the other patrons of the café avoided their eyes, when the curtains parted and a woman entered the room.

  An old, old woman. Her hair was the color and texture of dandelion fluff, her skin so pale that it seemed in danger of tearing. Her eyes were unusually large and blue, framed inside the stark contours of her skull. She came to the table and said, “Hello, Turk.”

  “Diane.”

  “You know, you really shouldn’t have come back here. This is a bad time.”

  “I know,” Turk said. “Tomas was arrested, or kidnapped or something.”

  The woman displayed no reaction beyond a barely-perceptible flinch.

  “And we have a couple of questions to ask, if that’s okay.”

  “Since you’re here, we may as well talk.” She pulled up a chair and said, “Introduce me to your friend.”

  This woman is a Fourth, Lise thought. Maybe that was why she generated this odd, fragile authority, to which strong men apparently deferred. Turk introduced her as Ibu Diane Dupree, using the Minang honorific, and Lise accepted the woman’s small, brittle hand. It was like handling some unexpectedly muscular small bird.

  “Lise,” Diane said. “And you have a question for me?”

  “Show her the picture,” Turk said.

  So Lise fumbled nervously in her pack until she came up with the envelope containing the photo of Sulean Moi.

  Diane opened the envelope and looked at the photograph for a long moment. Then she handed it back. Her expression was mournful.

  “So can we talk?” Turk asked.

  “I think we have to. But somewhere more private than this. Follow me.”

  Ibu Diane led them away from the café, down a lane between a makeshift grocery store and a wooden municipal building with buffalo-horn eaves, past a gas station where the pumps were painted carnival colors. Lise would have expected a slow walk, given Diane’s age and the heat of the day, but the older woman moved briskly and at one point reached out and took Lise’s hand to urge her along. It was a strange gesture and it made Lise feel like a little girl.

  She took them to a cinderblock bunker on which a multilingual sign announced, in its English portion, MEDICAL CLINIC. Lise said, “Are you a doctor?”

  “I’m not even a registered nurse. But my husband was a physician and he cared for these people for years, long before the Red Crescent showed up in any of these villages. I learned basic medicine from him, and the villagers wouldn’t let me retire after he died. I can take care of minor injuries and sicknesses, administer antibiotics, salve a rash, bind a wound. For anything more serious I send people to the clinic down the highway. Have a seat.”

  They sat in the reception area of Diane’s clinic. It was fitted out like a village parlor with wicker furniture and wooden slat blinds clattering in the breeze. Everything was painted or upholstered in faded green. There was a watercolor picture of the ocean on one wall.

  Ibu Diane smoothed her plain white muslin dress. “May I ask how you came to possess a photograph of this woman?”

  Get to the point, in other words. “Her name is Sulean Moi.”

  “I know.”

  “You know her?”

  “I’ve met her. I recommended Turk’s charter service to her.”

  “Tell her about your father,” Turk suggested, and Lise did. And she brought the story up to date: how she had come back determined to learn more about the disappearance; Brian Gately’s connection to Genomic Security; how he had run her old snapshot of Sulean Moi through the Agency’s facial-recognition software and learned that the woman had re-entered Port Magellan only months earlier.

  “That must have been the trigger,” Diane said.

  “Trigger?”

  “Your inquiries—or your ex-husband’s—probably brought Ms. Moi to someone’s attention back in the States. Genomic Security has been looking for Sulean Moi for a long time.”

  “Why? What’s so important about her?”

  “I’ll tell you what I know, but would you answer some questions of mine first? It might clarify matters.”

  “Go ahead,” Lise said.

  “How did you meet Turk?”

  “I hired him to fly me over the mountains. One of my father’s colleagues was known to have visited Kubelick’s Grave. At the time it was the only lead I had. So I hired Turk . . . but we never made it across the mountains.”

  “Bad weather,” Turk said, and coughed into his hand.

  “I see.”

  “Then,” Lise said, “when Brian told me Sulean Moi had chartered a small plane just a few weeks before—”

  “How did Brian know this? Oh, I suppose he arranged a search of the air traffic manifests. Or something like that.”

  Lise said, “It was a lead I intended to follow up . . . although Brian urged me not to. Even then, he thought I was getting in
too deep.”

  “While Turk, of course, was fearless.”

  “That’s me,” Turk said. “Fearless.”

  “But I hadn’t got around to it, and then there was the ashfall, and then—”

  “And then,” Turk said, “Tomas got himself disappeared, and we found out Lise was being followed and her phone service was tapped. And I’m sorry, Diane, but all I could think of was to come here. I was hoping you could—”

  “What? Intervene on your behalf? What magic do you think I possess?”

  “I thought,” Turk said, “you might be able to explain. I also didn’t rule out the possibility of some useful advice.”

  Diane nodded and tapped her chin with her forefinger. Her sandal-clad foot counted a parallel rhythm on the wooden floor.

  “You could start,” Lise said, “by telling us who Sulean Moi really is.”

  “The first relevant fact about her,” Diane said, “is that she’s a Martian.”

  The human civilization on Mars had been a great disappointment to Lise’s father.

  That was another thing they had discussed, those nights on the veranda when the sky had opened like a book above them.

  Robert Adams had been a young man—an undergraduate at Cal Tech during the lean years of the Spin, facing what had looked like the inevitable destruction of the world he knew—when Wun Ngo Wen arrived on Earth.

  The most spectacular success story of the Spin had been the terraforming and colonization of Mars. Using the expanding sun and the passage of millions of years in the external solar system as a kind of temporal lever, Mars had been rendered at least marginally habitable and seed colonies of human beings had been established there. While a scant few years passed on Earth behind its Spin membrane, civilizations on Mars had risen and fallen.

  (Even those bare facts—unmentionable in the presence of Lise’s mother, who had lost her parents to the dislocations of the Spin and would brook no discussion of it—had raised the hackles on Lise’s neck. She had learned all this in school, of course, but without the attendant sense of awe. In Robert Adams’ hushed discourse the numbers had not been just numbers: When he said a million years she could hear the distant roar of mountains rising from the sea.)

  A vastly old and vastly strange human civilization had arisen on Mars during the time it took, on the enclosed Earth, for Lise to walk to school and back.

  That civilization had been wrapped by the Hypotheticals in its own envelope of slow time—an enclosure that brought Mars into synchronization with the Earth and ended when the Earth’s enclosure ended. But before that happened, the Martians had sent a manned spacecraft to Earth. Its sole occupant had been Wun Ngo Wen, the so-called Martian Ambassador.

  Lise would ask—they had this conversation on more than one starry summer night—“Did you ever meet him?”

  “No.” Wun had been killed in a roadside attack during the worst years of the Spin. “But I watched his address to the United Nations. He seemed . . . likable.”

  (Lise had seen historical footage of Wun Ngo Wen from an early age. As a child she had imagined having him for a friend: a sort of intellectual Munchkin, no taller than herself.)

  But the Martians had been coy from the beginning, her father told her. They had given the Earth their Archives, a compendium of their knowledge of the physical sciences, in some areas more advanced than earthly science. But it said very little about their work in human biology—the work that had produced their caste of long-lived Fourths—or about the Hypotheticals. To Lise’s father these were unforgivable omissions. “They’ve known about the Hypotheticals for hundreds if not thousands of years,” he said. “They must have had something to say, even if it was only speculation.”

  When the Spin ended, and both Earth and Mars were restored to the customary flow of time, radio communication with the Martians had flourished for a time. There had even been a second Martian expedition to Earth, more ambitious than the first, and a group of Martian legates had been installed in a fortresslike building attached to the old United Nations complex in New York—the Martian Embassy, it came to be called. When their scheduled five-year tenure expired, they were returned home aboard a terrestrial spacecraft jointly engineered by the major industrial powers and launched from Xichang.

  There was never a second delegation. Plans to send a reciprocal terrestrial expedition to Mars broke down in multinational negotiations, and in any case the Martians had shown little enthusiasm for it. “I suspect,” Lise’s father said, “they were a little bit appalled by us.” Mars had never been a resource-rich world, even after the ecopoeisis, and its civilization had survived through a sort of meticulous collective parsimony. Earth—with its vast but polluted bodies of water, its inefficient industries and collapsing ecosystems—would have horrified the visitors. “They must have been glad,” Robert Adams said, “to put a few million miles between them and us.”

  And they had their own post-Spin crises to deal with. The Hypotheticals had also installed an Arch on Mars. It rose above the equatorial desert, and it opened on a similar small, rocky planet, hospitable but uninhabited, orbiting a distant star.

  Communications between Earth and Mars had slowed to a perfunctory trickle.

  And there were no more Martians on Earth. They had all gone home when the diplomatic mission ended. Lise had never heard otherwise.

  So how could Sulean Moi be a Martian?

  “She doesn’t even look like a Martian,” Lise said. Martians were four to five feet tall at most and their skin was deeply ridged and wrinkled. Sulean Moi, as she appeared in the original snapshot from her father’s house in Port Magellan, had been only ordinarily short and not especially wrinkly.

  “Sulean Moi has a unique history,” Diane said. “As you might imagine. Would you like a cold drink? I think I would—my throat’s a little dry.”

  “I’ll fetch,” Turk said.

  “Fine. Thank you. As to Sulean Moi . . . I’m afraid I have to tell you something about myself before I can explain.” She hesitated and closed her eyes briefly. “My husband was Tyler Dupree. My brother was Jason Lawton.”

  A second passed before Lise placed the names. They were names out of history books, Spin-era names. Jason Lawton was the man who had helped seed the barren deserts of Mars, the man who had set the replicator launches in motion, the man to whom Wun Ngo Wen had entrusted his collection of Martian pharmaceuticals. It was Jason Lawton who had defied the U.S. government by distributing those drugs, and the techniques for reproducing them, among a scattered group of academics and scientists who would become the first Terrestrial Fourths.

  And Tyler Dupree, if she recalled correctly, had been Jason Lawton’s personal physician.

  “Is that possible?” Lise whispered.

  “I’m not trying to impress you with my age,” Diane said. “Just establish my credentials. I’m a Fourth, of course, and I’ve been a part of that community since its inception. That’s why Sulean Moi came to see me, a few months ago.”

  “But—if she’s a Martian, how did she get here? Why doesn’t she look like a Martian?”

  “She was born on Mars. When she was very young she nearly died in a catastrophic flood—she suffered injuries, including tissue death in the brain, that could only be treated by a radical reconstruction using the same drugs that extend life. Given at such an early age, the treatment has a rather dire side effect—a sort of genetic recidivism. She never acquired the wrinkles most Martians develop at puberty, and she continued growing past the point at which they ordinarily stop. Which left her looking almost like an Earthling—a throwback, as they would have seen it, to her earliest ancestors. Because she lost most of her immediate family, and because she was considered grotesquely deformed, she was raised by a community of ascetic Fourths. They gave her an impeccable education, if nothing else. No doubt because of her appearance, she was fascinated by Earth and devoted herself to scholarship in what we would call ‘Terrestrial Studies’—I have no idea what the Martians called it.”


  “An expert on Earth,” Lise said.

  “Which was why, eventually, she was selected as one of the Martian legates.”

  “If that’s true, her photograph would have been everywhere.”

  “She was kept away from the press. Her existence was a carefully guarded secret. Do you understand why?”

  “Well—if she looked so much like an Earthling—”

  “She could pass unnoticed in a crowd and she had taught herself to speak at least three terrestrial languages like a native.”

  “So she was what, a spy?”

  “Not exactly. The Martians knew there were Fourths on Earth. Sulean Moi was their diplomatic mission to us.”

  Turk handed out glasses of ice water. Lise sipped eagerly—her throat was dry.

  “And when the Martians left,” Diane said, “Sulean Moi chose to stay behind. She traded places with a woman, a Terrestrial Fourth who happened to resemble her. When the legation went back to Mars that woman went with them—our own secret ambassador, in a way.”

  “Why did Sulean Moi stay?”

  “Because she was shocked by what she found here. On Mars, of course, the Fourths have existed for centuries, constrained by laws and institutions that don’t exist on Earth. Martian Fourths buy their longevity with a variety of compromises. They don’t reproduce, for instance, and they don’t participate in government except as observers and adjudicators. Whereas all our Fourths are outlaws—both endangered and potentially dangerous. She hoped to bring Martian formality to the chaos.”

  “I gather she didn’t succeed.”

  “Let’s say her successes have been modest. There are Fourths and Fourths. Those of us who are sympathetic to her goals have funded and encouraged her over the years. Others resent her meddling.”

  “Meddling in what?”

  “In their efforts to create a human being who can communicate with the Hypotheticals.”

  “I know how grotesque that must sound,” Diane Dupree said. “But it’s true.” She added, in a more subdued voice, “It’s what killed my brother Jason.”