Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Diane Dupree,” the woman named Mrs. Rebka said.

  “I’m afraid I’ve brought uninvited guests.”

  “And you’re one yourself. What brings you here, Diane?”

  “Do you have to ask?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Turn us away, then, or let us in. I’m tired. And I doubt we’ll have much time to talk before we’re disturbed again.”

  Isaac wanted to stay and see the visitors—unexpected visitors being as rare a phenomenon in Isaac’s life as the ashfall had been—but his fever had returned and he was escorted back to bed, where he lay sleepless and sweating for several hours more.

  He knew that the tendril that had reached up from the garden and touched his hand was a Hypothetical device. A biological machine. It was incomplete and unsuited to this environment, but Isaac had experienced a deep and thrilling sense of rightness as it circled his wrist. Some fraction of the unfulfilled need inside him had been briefly satisfied.

  But that contact was over, and the need was worse for its absence. He wanted the western desert, and he wanted it badly. He was, of course, also afraid—afraid of the vast dry land and of what he might find there, afraid of the need that had overtaken him with such compulsive force. But it was a need that could be sated. He knew that now.

  He watched the dawn as it drove the stars away, the planet turning like a flower to the sun.

  Two of the Fourths escorted Lise and Turk to a dormitory room in which several bunks had been set up. The bedclothes were clean enough but had the smell of long-undisturbed linen.

  The Fourths who accompanied them were aloof but seemed reasonably friendly, given the circumstances. Both were women. The younger of them said, “The bathroom is down the hall when you want it.”

  Lise said, “I need to talk to Dr. Dvali—will you tell him I want to see him?”

  The Fourths exchanged glances. “In the morning,” the younger one said.

  Lise lay down on the nearest bunk. Turk stretched out on another, and almost immediately his breathing settled into long snores.

  She tried to suppress her resentment.

  Her head was full of thoughts, all raucous, all screaming for attention. She was a little shocked that she had come this far, that she had been party to what amounted to a theft and was accepting the hospitality of a community of rogue Fourths. Avram Dvali was only a few rooms away, and she might be exactly that close to understanding the mystery that had haunted her family for a dozen years.

  Understanding it, she thought, or being trapped in it. She wondered how close her father had actually gotten to these dangerous truths.

  She left her bunk, tiptoed across the room, and slipped under Turk’s blanket. She curled against him, one hand on his shoulder and the other snaked under his pillow, hoping his audacity or his anger would seep into her and make her less afraid.

  Diane sat with Mrs. Rebka—Anna Rebka, whose husband Joshua had died before she became a Fourth—in a room full of tables and chairs recently abandoned by the community’s residents. Water glasses had been left on the rough wooden tabletops to marinate in their own condensation. It was late, and the night air of the desert moved through the room and chilled her feet.

  So this is their compound, Diane thought. Comfortable enough, if austere. But there was an atmosphere of monasticism about it. A sacral hush. It was uneasily familiar—she had spent much of her youth among the intemperately religious.

  She knew or could imagine much of what went on here. The compound no doubt functioned like other such communities, apart from their experiment with the child. Hidden somewhere, probably underground, were the ultra-low-temperature bioreactors in which Martian “pharmaceuticals” were propagated and stored. She had already seen the pottery kilns that functioned as camouflage: an uninvited visitor would be offered crude crockery and utopian tracts and sent away none the wiser.

  Diane had known or met most of the founding members. Only one of the original founders had not been a Fourth, and that was Mrs. Rebka herself. Presumably she had taken the treatment since.

  “What I have to tell you,” Diane said, “is that Genomic Security is in Port Magellan, apparently in force. And they’ll find you before long. They’ve been following the Martian woman.”

  Mrs. Rebka maintained a steely calm. “Haven’t they always been following the Martian woman?”

  “Apparently they’re getting better at it.”

  “Do they know she’s here?”

  “If they don’t, they soon will.”

  “And your coming here might have led them to us. Did you think about that, Diane?”

  “They’ve already connected Sulean Moi with Kubelick’s Grave. They have Dvali’s name. From there, how hard would it be for them to locate this place?”

  “Not hard,” Mrs. Rebka admitted, staring at the tabletop. “We’re modest about our presence here, but still . . .”

  “Still,” Diane said, dryly. “Have you planned for this contingency?”

  “Of course we have. We can be gone within hours. If we must.”

  “What about the boy?”

  “We’ll keep him safe.”

  “And how’s the experiment going, Anna? Are you in touch with the Hypotheticals? Do they talk to you?”

  “The boy is sick.” Mrs. Rebka raised her head and frowned. “Spare me your disapproval.”

  “Did you ever consider what you were creating here?”

  “With due respect, if what you say is true, we don’t have time to debate.”

  Diane said—more gently—“Has it been what you hoped?”

  Anna Rebka stood, and Diane thought she wasn’t going to answer. But she paused at the door and looked back.

  “No,” she said flatly. “It hasn’t.”

  Lise woke when sunlight from the window touched her cheek like a feverish hand.

  She was alone in the room. Turk had gone off somewhere, probably taking a pee or inquiring about breakfast.

  She dressed in the generic shirt and jeans the Fourths had provided for her, thinking about Avram Dvali, framing the questions she wanted to ask him. She needed to talk to him as soon as possible, as soon as she washed up and had something to eat. But there were hurried footsteps from the corridor beyond her door, and when she looked out the window she saw a dozen vehicles being loaded with supplies. She drew the obvious conclusion: these people were getting ready to abandon the compound. Lise could think of dozens of good reasons why they might want to. But she was suddenly afraid Dvali would be gone before she could talk to him; she hurried into the corridor and asked the first person who passed where she could find him.

  Probably the common room, the passing Fourth advised her, down the corridor and left off the courtyard—but he might also be supervising the loading. She finally located him by the garden gate, where he was consulting some kind of written list.

  Avram Dvali. She must have glimpsed him at the faculty parties her parents used to hold in Port Magellan, but she had seen so many unintroduced adults at those events that their faces had been blenderized by memory. Did he look familiar? No. Or only vaguely, from photographs. Because he had taken the Fourth treatment he probably looked much as he had twelve years ago: a bearded man, big eyes in a rounded face. His eyes were shaded by a broad-brimmed desert hat. Easy to imagine him circulating through the Adams living room, one more middle-aged professor of something-or-other, a drink in one hand and the other prospecting in the pretzel bowl.

  She suppressed her anxiety and walked straight toward him. He looked up as she approached.

  “Miss Adams,” he said.

  He had been warned. She nodded. “Call me Lise,” she said—to quell his suspicions, not because she wanted to be on a first-name basis with a man who had created and confined a human child for purposes of scientific research.

  “Diane Dupree said you wanted to speak to me. Unfortunately, at the moment—”

  “You’re busy,” she said. “What’s going on?”

 
“We’re leaving.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Here and there. It’s not safe to stay, for reasons I imagine you understand.”

  “I really just need a few minutes. I want to ask you about—”

  “Your father. And I’d be happy to talk to you, Miss Adams—Lise—but do you understand what’s happening here? Not only do we have to leave with all deliberate speed, we need to destroy much of what we’ve built. The bioreactors and their contents, documents and cultures, anything we don’t want to fall into the hands of our persecutors.” He consulted a printed paper, then made a checkmark as two men dragged a dolly of cardboard boxes to one of the trucks. “Once we’re ready to go, you and your friends can ride with me for a while. We’ll talk. But for now I need to attend to business.” He added, “Your father was a brave and principled man, Miss Adams. We disagreed about some things, but I held him in the highest regard.”

  That was something, at least, Lise thought.

  Turk had gotten up early.

  The sound of hurried footsteps in the hall woke him, and he was careful to roll out of bed without disturbing Lise, who had climbed in with him sometime during the night. She was half-wrapped in a blanket and softly snoring, tender as the creation of some benevolent god. He wondered how she would react to what he had told her about himself. Not the CV she’d been hoping for. More than enough to chase her back to her family in California, maybe.

  He went to find Ibu Diane, meaning to offer his help if help was needed: everybody seemed to be carrying something. The Fourths were obviously getting ready to abandon the place. But Diane, when he found her in the common room, told him all the duties had been assigned and were being performed in some meticulous order by the Fourths, so he made himself breakfast. When he figured it was time to wake up Lise, if she wasn’t up already, he headed back to their room.

  He was intercepted by a young boy peering out of a doorway down the corridor. It could only be the boy Diane was so worked up about—the half-Hypothetical boy. Turk had pictured some freakish hybrid, but what stood in front of him was just a babyfaced twelve-year-old, his face flushed and his eyes a little wide.

  “Hey there,” Turk said cautiously.

  “You’re new,” the boy said.

  “Yeah, I got here last night. My name’s Turk.”

  “I saw you from the garden. You and the other two.” The boy added, “I’m Isaac.”

  “Hi, Isaac. Looks like everybody’s pretty busy this morning.”

  “Not me. They didn’t give me anything to do.”

  “Me neither,” Turk said.

  “They’re going to blow up the bioreactors,” the boy confided.

  “Are they?”

  “Yes. Because—”

  But suddenly the boy stiffened. His eyes widened until Turk could see the small uncanny flecks of gold around the irises. “Whoa, hey—you all right?”

  A terrified whisper: “Because I remember—”

  The boy began to topple over. Turk caught him in his arms and called for help.

  “Because I remember—”

  “What, Isaac? What do you remember?”

  “Too much,” the boy said, and wept.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  By dawn Brian Gately was on a transport plane lofting out of Port Magellan’s major airport, strapped into a bench seat with Weil on one side of him and Sigmund on the other. Elsewhere in the plane was a group of armed men—not quite soldiers, since they wore no insignia on their flak jackets. The interior of the plane was stripped-down and possessed all the homely comfort of an industrial warehouse. Brian could tell day was breaking by the red glow coming through the porthole-sized windows.

  Weil had ordered him to the airport well before dawn. “In the event that we get involved in negotiations,” he had said, “or in any other talking-type situation—a post-event interrogation, say—we’d like you to be the one who interacts with Lise Adams. We think you’d be better than someone she doesn’t know. How do you feel about that?”

  How did he feel about that? Shitty, basically. But he could hardly say no. He might be in a position to protect her. He certainly didn’t want her questioned by some hostile DGS functionary or one of these mercenaries. She was in the wrong place for the wrong reasons, but that didn’t make her a criminal, and with luck Brian might be able to defend her from the threat of prison. Or worse. His memory of the photo of Tomas Ginn’s body throbbed in his head like a fragile aneurysm.

  What he told Weil was, “I’ll help if I can.”

  “Thank you. We appreciate that. I know it’s not what you signed up for.”

  Not what he had signed up for. That was becoming a joke. He had signed up with Genomic Security because he possessed a talent for administration and because one of his father’s cousins, a DGS bureau chief in Kansas City, had opened the door for him. He had believed in the work of Genomic Security, at least to the degree to which it was professionally necessary to believe. The Department’s mission statement had made sense to him, the idea of preserving the human biological heritage against black-market cloning, unlicensed human modification, and imported Martian biotech. Most nations had similar bureaus and they followed the broad guidelines set down by the United Nations under the Stuttgart Accords. All clean and aboveboard.

  And if there were bureaucratic nooks at the more carefully classified levels of DGS, hidden aeries in which less politically palatable attacks on the enemies of human genetic continuity were planned and carried out—was that so surprising? Those who were required to know, knew. Brian had never been required to know. Ignorance was his preferred mode of consciousness, at least when it came to the Executive Action Committee. Of course not everything could be done legally or visibly. As an adult, one understood this.

  But he didn’t like it. It was Brian’s nature to prefer rules to anarchy. Law was the gardener of human behavior, and what lay beyond was brutal, red in tooth and claw. What lay beyond the garden was Sigmund and Weil and their uncommunicative smiles and their cadres of armed men. What lay beyond, fundamentally, was the battered body of Tomas Ginn.

  The aircraft lurched as it rose to cross the coastal mountains that absorbed most of Equatoria’s rainfall and made the inland a desert. “We’ll be in Kubelick’s Grave in an hour,” Weil said. Brian had passed through Kubelick’s Grave once before, part of an orientation tour he had taken when he was newly-arrived from the States. It was a nothing town, an adobe armpit that existed for the sole purpose of refueling land traffic bound for the oil sands of the Rub al-Khali or back through the Mahdi Pass to the coast. Weil said there was a community of robed eccentrics living in the desert foothills north and east of Kubelick’s Grave: rogue Fourths, in fact, since aerial photographs taken in the past few hours showed Turk Findley’s little bush plane nearby.

  And now the site would be seized and secured, Brian thought, and would the seizure be violent? There was a large number of weapons on hand, he hoped, mainly for show. To make a plausible threat. Because Fourths were supposed to be nonviolent, gentled by the same tech that granted them longevity. No killing would be necessary, surely. And if there was any killing involved, it wouldn’t involve Lise. He would see to that. In his intentions, at least, he was brave.

  It all happened quickly.

  The airport at Kubelick’s Grave was barely large enough to accommodate the transport. As soon as it had settled at the end of a cracked concrete runway, the rear cargo door dropped and the armed men trooped off in military order. A handful of lightly armored vehicles waited in the coppery morning sunlight. Brian joined Sigmund and Weil in one of those open-topped desert vehicles the locals called “roosters” for the way they bounced over the landscape like flightless birds. Sigmund took the driver’s seat and they drove off at the back of the convoy. Not a comfortable ride. The heat and sun were oppressive even at this hour. All he saw of Kubelick’s Grave was a garage and gas depot where rusty automobile parts lay scattered, the drive train of an ancient truck abandon
ed on the gravel like the spine of some Jurassic creature. Then they were off the main road, rattling over a hardpan trail parallel to the mountains.

  An hour passed, broken only by the hoarse shouting of Sigmund as he attempted to converse with someone over a field radio. The talk, what Brian could hear of it, consisted of codewords and incomprehensible commands. Then the convoy came over the peak of a small rill and the Fourth compound was suddenly dead ahead. The military vehicles put on a burst of speed, big tires kicking up geysers of dust, but Weil pulled up short and killed the engine, leaving Brian’s ears ringing in the relative silence.

  Sigmund began yelling again, first into his radio and then at Weil: something about “too late” and an order to “abort.”

  “They abandoned the compound,” Weil said to Brian. “Fresh tracks. Must have been a good two dozen vehicles.”

  “Can’t you secure the site, at least?”

  “Not until we can defuse whatever ordnance they left behind. What happens in these cases, they—”

  He was interrupted by a burst of distant light.

  Brian looked at the Fourth compound. A moment before it had been a cluster of small buildings around a central courtyard. Now it was an expanding cloud of dust and smoke.

  “Shit,” Weil had time to say. The concussion reached them a fraction of a second later, a noise that seemed to swell his lungs until his chest hurt. Brian closed his eyes. A second shockwave, like the beat of a hot wing, washed over him.

  The compound was gone. Brian told himself that Lise wasn’t inside: no one had been inside.

  “. . . rig it . . .” Weil was saying.

  “What?”

  “They rig it to destroy their technical gear and keep us from taking samples. We got here late.” Weil’s complexion had turned pale with dust kicked up by the explosion. Sigmund’s assault team had turned back, hastily.

  “Is Lise—?”

  “We have to assume she left with the others.”