Axis (16 page)

“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 aw
^T
kward 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.”

“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 smalltown 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 cafe 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 cafe, 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 terra-forming 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 Earths 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 Hypothetical. To Lise’s father these were unforgivable omissions. “They’ve known about the Hypothetical 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.