Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Going where?”

  “They won’t all be traveling together. From the tracks it looks like a couple dozen vehicles headed in different directions. We’ll run down a few of them. With luck we’ll pick up Lise and the other major targets. With a little more warning we would have had drones in the air to keep watch. But we didn’t have time and anyway every drone on the continent has been shipped to the far west, surveying the fucking oil allotments for earthquake damage.”

  Sigmund was still growling into his handset. Then he switched it off and said to Weil, “The plane’s gone.”

  Turk Findley’s bush plane, presumably. Gone. Escaped. Should he be pleased about that?

  “The aircraft, at least, we can track,” Weil said.

  And Lise along with it.

  Brian looked back at the ruins of the compound. Black smoke gushed from collapsed foundations and small fires burned fitfully in the surrounding desert. Of the brick and adobe buildings that had once stood there, nothing remained.

  They spent the night in what passed for public accommodations in Kubelick’s Grave, a tile-roofed motel in which Brian shared a unit with Sigmund and Weil. Two beds and a cot—Brian got the cot.

  Most of the afternoon and evening he spent listening to Sigmund make and take calls. The name of the Executive Action Committee was frequently invoked.

  That night, unable to sleep in his cot, cold despite the banging antique electric heater, it occurred to Brian to wonder whether they had found out about Lise’s last call to him.

  Were his calls tapped for audio? Lise’s callback code had been unfamiliar to him, probably a disposable loaded with anonymous minutes, so they wouldn’t have been able to trace it. And there hadn’t been anything really incriminating about the call. Apart from the fact that Brian had failed to report it. Which would suggest that his loyalties were divided. That he might not be a trustworthy DGS man.

  He wanted to be angry with Lise. Hated her pointless personal involvement in this fucking mess, her obsessive need to sort out her father’s disappearance and turn the story into some kind of memoir.

  He wanted to be angry with her, and he was angry with himself when he didn’t succeed.

  Reports on the round-up of fugitive Fourths began to come in before dawn, Sigmund shouting into his phone while Brian hurriedly dressed.

  Success had been mixed, he gathered.

  “At least half the population of the compound is still at large,” Weil said. “Our guys intercepted three vehicles carrying a total of fifteen people, none of them the major players. The good news—”

  Brian braced himself.

  “The good news is, a small plane registered to Turk Findley attempted to refuel at a little utility airport a couple of hundred miles west of here. The airport manager recognized the plane from a legal bulletin—Mr. Findley’s former employer wants it impounded for back rent. He called the Provisional Government and somebody there was kind enough to refer the matter to us. Our guys arrived and detained the pilot and passengers. One male, three females, all refusing to identify themselves.”

  “And one of them is Lise?” Brian asked.

  “Maybe. That’s not confirmed. And there may be higher-value targets along with her.”

  “She’s not a target. I wouldn’t call her a target.”

  “She made herself a target when she ran.”

  But not high value, he thought, clinging to that. “Can I see her?”

  “We can be there by noon if we get a move on,” Weil said.

  It occurred to Brian to wonder, as the town of Kubelick’s Grave vanished behind them, who Kubelick might have been and why he was buried out here in the badlands; but nobody in the car had an answer to that question. Then the little cluster of buildings was behind them, Sigmund driving away from the mountains toward the razor-flat western horizon. The road ahead quivered in the morning heat like a figment of the imagination.

  Sigmund couldn’t make his phone work, though he kept banging it with one hand while he steered with the other. Even communication between the widely-spaced cars of the convoy—this vehicle plus three heavy trucks containing hired soldiers—was intermittent and unreliable. Weil couldn’t explain it: “A half-dozen aerostats anchored between here and the west coast and not one of the fucking things doing what it’s supposed to do. Lucky we got the news from the airfield when we did. Jesus!”

  And it was not only the ruptured communication that seemed remarkable to Brian. He called attention to the steady flow of traffic in the opposite direction, not just oil-company traffic but a number of private vehicles, some so sand-pitted and sun-scarred that they looked barely functional. As if they were evacuating the inhabited outposts of the Rub al-Khali, and maybe they were—some new tremor, maybe.

  Sixty miles farther on the convoy pulled onto the gravel verge and stopped. Sigmund and Weil went forward to talk to the leader of the paramilitary company. It looked more like an argument than a conversation, but Brian couldn’t make out the words. He stood at the roadside watching the eastbound traffic. Eerie, he thought, how much this part of Equatoria looked like Utah: the same dusty blue horizon, the same torpid daytime heat. Had the Hypotheticals designed this desert when they assembled the planet, and if so, why? But Brian doubted they paid that kind of attention to details—the Hypotheticals, it seemed to him, were firm believers in the long result. Plant a seed (or seed a planet) and let nature do the rest. Until the harvest . . . whatever that meant or might one day mean.

  Not much grew out here, just the peculiar woody tufts the locals called cactus grass, and even this looked dehydrated to Brian’s eye. But among the umber patches of cactus grass at his feet he spotted a place where something more colorful had taken root. He crouched to look, for lack of anything better to do. What had caught his attention was a red flower: he was no botanist, but the bloom looked out of place in this barren scrub. He put out his hand and touched it. The plant was cold, fleshy . . . and it seemed almost to cringe. The stem bent away from him; the flower, if it was a flower, lowered its head.

  Was that normal?

  He hated this fucking planet, its endless strangeness. It was a nightmare, he thought, masquerading as normalcy.

  They came at last to the airfield off the highway, a couple of quonset-hut structures and two paved landing strips at contrary angles to one another, a bank of fuel pumps, a two-story adobe control tower with a radar bubble. Ordinarily the airstrip’s customers would have been oil company planes ferrying executives to and from the Rub al-Khali. Today there was just one plane visible on the tarmac: Turk Findley’s aircraft, a sturdy little blue-and-white Skyrex baking in the sun.

  The Genomic Security caravan parked in front of the nearest pavilion. Brian was a little shaky getting out of the car, his fears surfacing again. Fear for Lise, and under that a fear of Lise—of what she might say to him and what she might deduce, correctly or not, about his presence in the company of men such as Sigmund and Weil.

  Maybe he could help her. He clung to that thought. She was in trouble, deep and perilous trouble, but she could still keep herself afloat if she said the right things, denied complicity, shifted the blame, and cooperated with the inquiry. If she was willing to do that, Brian might be able to keep her out of prison. She would have to go back home, of course, forget about Equatoria and her little journalistic hobby. Given the events of the last few days, though, she might not be so haughty at the prospect of a trip back to the States. She might even learn to appreciate what he had done, and was willing to do, on her behalf.

  He hurried to keep up with Sigmund and Weil, who brushed past a cluster of airstrip employees and hurried down a makeshift corridor to the door of a tiny office guarded by an airport security guy in a dusty blue uniform. “The suspects are inside?” Sigmund asked.

  “All four of ’em.”

  “Let’s see them.”

  The guard opened the door, Sigmund went through first, Weil behind him, Brian in the rear. The two DGS men stopped short and Bri
an had to crane to see over their shoulders.

  “Fuck!” Sigmund said.

  Three women and one man sat at a stained conference table in the middle of the room. Each of them had been handcuffed to a chair.

  The male was maybe sixty years old, judging by his looks. Probably older, since he was a Fourth. He was white-haired, he was skinny, he was dark-complexioned . . . what he was not was Turk Findley.

  The three women were of similar age. None of them looked like Sulean Moi. And certainly none of them was Lise Adams.

  “Decoys,” Weil said, his voice turgid with disgust.

  “Find out who they are and what they know,” Sigmund told the armed men waiting in the corridor.

  Weil pulled Brian out after him. “Are you all right?”

  “Just . . . yes,” Brian managed. “I mean, I’m fine.”

  He wasn’t fine. He was picturing the four prisoners with bullet-raddled skulls, washed up, perhaps, on some distant beach, or just buried in the desert, bodies shriveled under a layer of grit, paying the butcher’s bill for their longevity.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Dvali drove the car that took them north until nightfall, and in her less distracted moments Lise made a study of him.

  He was—above all else—protective of the child, Isaac.

  Lise and Turk had been hustled into a big utility vehicle, the kind with sprung-metal wheels that could cope with all kinds of terrain. The car had been built to accommodate six people comfortably but they had squeezed in seven: Dvali, Lise and Turk, Diane, Mrs. Rebka, Sulean Moi—and Isaac.

  Turk had advocated taking the Skyrex, but Dvali and Mrs. Rebka argued him out of it. An aircraft would be easier to trace and harder to hide than one land vehicle among many. They would use the plane as a diversion, Dr. Dvali said. Four of the compound’s eldest Fourths, one of whom was a qualified pilot, volunteered to take it west. Probably they would be captured. But they knew what they were doing, Dr. Dvali had insisted. They weren’t afraid to die, if it came to that. One of the ironies of the Martian treatment was that it quelled the fear of death even as it extended life. Turk asked if they had a cure for the fear of insolvency.

  So they drove away, and a dozen or so land vehicles left the compound after them, scattering in multiple directions on the available roads or across the raw desert. The compound had been rigged with explosives to keep it from falling into the hands of the authorities and to destroy any evidence that might lead to their eventual capture. Lise and company had been too far down the road to see the actual explosion, but at one point she had spotted a plume of smoke on the horizon. She asked Dr. Dvali whether anyone might have been hurt—if DGS agents had arrived before the timed detonation, wouldn’t they have been killed?

  “DGS knows what to expect in situations like this. If they found the compound deserted they would have known it was rigged to detonate.”

  But if they’d been careless, or the timing had been bad?

  Dvali shrugged. “Nothing is guaranteed in this life.”

  “I thought Fourths were supposed to be nonviolent.”

  “We’re more sensitive than unaltered people to the suffering of others. That makes us vulnerable. It doesn’t make us stupid, and it doesn’t prevent us from taking risks.”

  “Even risks with other people’s lives?”

  Sulean Moi—who was, according to Diane, a deformed Martian, but who looked to Lise like a skinny Appalachian apple doll—had smiled sardonically at that. “We aren’t saints. That should be obvious by now. We make moral choices. Often the wrong ones.”

  Dvali wanted to drive through the night, but Turk convinced him to stop and make camp in a glade of the scrubby finger pines that forested the western slope of the mountainous Equatorian divide. Because of the elevation rain fell fairly regularly here, and there was even a clean-running creek from which they could draw potable water. The water was cold and Lise guessed it came from the glaciers that clung to the valleys of the highest passes. The chill provoked a pleasant memory of the time (she had been ten years old) when her father took her skiing at Gstaad. Sunlight on snow, the mechanical groan of the lifts and the sound of laughter cutting the cold air: far away now, worlds and years away.

  She helped Turk warm up a canned meat and vegetable stew over a propane stove. He wanted to have dinner ready and the stove cooled off by nightfall in case there were drones overhead looking for their heat signature. Dr. Dvali said he doubted their pursuers would go to such lengths, especially since most such surveillance equipment had been co-opted for use in the crisis in the oilpatch. Turk nodded but said it was better to take a useless precaution than give themselves away.

  On the road north along the foothills they had discussed their plans. Turk, at least, had discussed his plans; the Fourths were less forthcoming. Turk and Lise would ride as far north as the town of New Cumberland; from there they would catch a bus over the Pharoah Pass to the coast. The Fourths would continue on to—well, to wherever it was they meant to go.

  Someplace where they could take care of the boy, Lise hoped. He was a strange-looking child. His hair was rusty red, cut short by whoever passed for the compound’s barber, probably Mrs. Rebka with a pair of kitchen scissors. His eyes were widely spaced, giving him a birdlike aspect, and the pupils were flecked with gold. He hadn’t said much all day, and most of that had been in the morning, but he was uncomfortable in some way Lise couldn’t quite understand: whenever the road curved he would either frown and moan or sigh with relief. By late afternoon he was feverish—“again,” she heard Mrs. Rebka say.

  Now Isaac was sleeping in one of the rear seats of the car, windows open to let the alpine air flow through. Hot day, but the sunlight had grown horizontal, and she had been told the air might turn uncomfortably cold during the night. There were only six sleeping bags in the vehicle but they were the expensive kind, thermally efficient, and someone could sleep in the car if necessary. It didn’t seem likely to rain but Turk had already strung a tarp among the trees for what meager protection or concealment it could offer.

  She stirred the pot of stew while Turk made coffee. “It’s too bad about the plane.”

  “I would have lost it anyway.”

  “What are you going to do when you get back to the coast?”

  “Depends,” he said.

  “On what?”

  “A lot of things.” He looked at her as if from a distance, squinting. “Probably go back to sea . . . if nothing else turns up.”

  “Or we could go back to the States,” she said, wondering how he’d read that we. “The legal trouble you were in, that’s essentially over, right?”

  “It could heat up again.”

  “So we’ll do something else.” The pronoun hanging in the air like an unbroken piñata.

  “Guess we have to.”

  We.

  They served out dinner while the sun met the horizon in a reddening haze. Turk ate quickly and said little. Diane Dupree sat on a distant log with the Martian woman Sulean Moi, conversing intently but inaudibly, while Mrs. Rebka hovered over Isaac, who had to be coaxed to eat.

  Which left Dr. Dvali, and Lise’s first real opportunity to speak to him with any degree of privacy. She abandoned Turk to the camp stove and the pots and went to sit next to him. Dvali looked at her querulously, like a large brown bird, but made no objection when she joined him. “You want to talk about your father,” he said.

  She could only nod.

  “We were friends.” It was as if Dvali had rehearsed this speech. “What I admired most about your father was that he loved his work, but not in a narrow way. He was in love with it because he saw it in the broader context. Do you know what I mean?”

  “No.” Yes. But she wanted to hear it from him. “Not exactly.”

  Dvali reached down and scooped a handful of dirt. “What do I have in my hand?”

  “Topsoil. Old leaves. Probably a few bugs.”

  “Topsoil, mineral residue, silts, decaying biomass broken down to
elemental nutrients, feeding itself back to itself. Bacteria, fungal spores—and no doubt some insects.” He brushed it away. “Much like Earth, but subtly different in the details. On the geological level the resemblance between the two planets is even more obvious. Granite is granite, schist is schist, but they exist here in different proportions. There’s less vulcanism here than on Earth. The continental plates drift and erode at a different speed, the thermocline between the equator and the poles is less steep. But what’s really distinctive about this world is how fundamentally similar it is to Earth.”

  “Because the Hypotheticals built this planet for us.”

  “Maybe not for us, exactly, but yes, they built it, or at least modified it, and that turns our study of this world into a whole new discipline—not just biology or geology but a kind of planetary archaeology. This world was profoundly influenced by the Hypotheticals long before modern human beings evolved, millions of years before the Spin, millions of years before the Arch was put in place. That tells us something about their methods and their extraordinary capacity for very long-term planning. It may also tell us something about their ultimate goals, if we ask the right question. That was the context in which your father worked. He never lost sight of that larger truth, never ceased to marvel at it.”

  “Planet as artifact,” Lise said.

  “The book he was writing.” Dvali nodded. “Have you read it?”

  “All I’ve seen of it is the introduction.” And a few notes, salvaged from one of her mother’s convulsive fits of radical housecleaning.

  “I wish there had been more. It would have been an important work.”

  “Is that what you talked about with him?”

  “Often enough, yes.”

  “But not always.”

  “Obviously, we talked about the Martians and what they might know about the Hypotheticals. He knew I was a Fourth—”

  “You told him?”

  “I took him into my confidence.”