Axis s-2

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She said, "Don't make assumptions about me and Brian. Just because we're still on speaking terms doesn't mean I'm doing him favors."

  "Just so we know where we are," he said.

  * * * * *

  The sky was gray again by noon, but the clouds were rain clouds, nothing exotic, and they brought a drenching, unseasonable downpour. Turk guessed the rain might ultimately be a boon—it would wash some of this ash into the soil or out to sea, maybe help salvage the season's crops, if that was possible. But it did nothing to ease the drive south from the Port, once he recovered his car from the parking lot at Harley's. Glistening washes of gray ash made the pavement treacherous. Creeks and rivers had turned the color of clay and ran turgidly in their beds. When the road crossed the high ridges Turk could see a bloom of silt tailing into the sea from a dozen muddy deltas.

  He left the coast road at an unmarked exit toward a place most English-speakers called New Delhi Flats, a shanty settlement on a plateau between two creeks, under a sheer bluff that crumbled a little every rainy season. The alleys between the rows of cheap Chinese-branded prefab housing were unpaved, and the fair-weather huts had been improved with tarpaper roofing and sheets of insulation hauled in from cheapjack factories up-coast. There were no police in the Flats, no real authority beyond what could be leveraged by the churches, temples, and mosques. The earthmovers hadn't been anywhere near the Flats, and the narrower alleys were congested with sloggy wet dunes. But a passage had been shoveled along the main avenue, and it took Turk only a few extra minutes to reach Tomas Ginn's undistinguished home—an arsenic-green hovel squeezed between two just like it.

  He parked and waded through a thin gruel of wet ash to Tomas's door. He knocked. When there was no answer he knocked again. A lined face appeared briefly at the small curtained window to his left. Then the door swung open.

  "Turk!" Tomas Ginn had a voice that sounded as if it had been filtered through bedrock, an old man's voice, but firmer than it had been when Turk first encountered him. "Didn't expect to see you. Specially in the middle of all this trouble. Come on in. Place is a fuckin' mess but I can pour you a drink, anyhow."

  Turk stepped inside. Tomas's home was little more than a single thin-walled room with a raggedy sofa and table at one end and a miniature kitchen at the other, all dimly lit. The Port Magellan Power Authority hadn't strung any cables out this way. The only electricity came from an array of Sinotec photovoltaics on the roof, and their efficiency had been slashed by the dustfall. The place had a lingering aroma of sulfur and talc, but that was mostly the ash Turk had tracked in with him. Tomas was a fastidious housekeeper, in his own way. A "fuckin' mess," in Tomas's vocabulary, meant there were a couple of empty beer bottles undisposed-of on a narrow counter.

  "Sit on down," Tomas said, settling himself on a chair with a dent in the seat that had been worn into a mirror image of his bony ass. Turk selected the least-tattered cushion on his friend's ancient sofa. "Can you believe this shit falling out of the sky? I mean, who asked for that! I had to shovel my way out of the house yesterday just to go out and get groceries."

  Pretty unbelievable, Turk acknowledged.

  "So what brings you here? Something more than neighborliness, I expect, given the weather. If you can call it weather."

  "Got a question to ask," Turk said.

  "A question or a favor?"

  "Well—starts with a question, anyway."

  "Serious?"

  "It might be."

  "So you want a beer? Get the dust out of your throat?"

  "Not a bad idea," Turk said.

  * * * * *

  Turk had met Tomas aboard an ancient single-hulled tanker bound for Breaker Beach on its final voyage.

  The ship, called Kestrel, had been Turk's ticket to the New World. Turk had signed on as an able-bodied seaman at negligible wages. All the crew had, because it was a one-way trip. Across the Arch, in Equatoria, the market for scrap iron and steel was booming. On Earth a leviathan like the Kestrel was a liability, too old to meet international standards and useless for anything but the poorest kind of coastal trade, prohibitively expensive to scrap. But in the New World the same rusty hulk would be a source of valuable raw material, stripped and diced by the acetylene-wielding armies of Thai and Indian laborers who made their living unrestrained by environmental regulations—the professional breakers of Breaker Beach, located some hundred miles north of Port Magellan.

  Turk and Tomas had shared a mess on that voyage and learned a few things about each other. Tomas claimed to have been born in Bolivia, but he had been raised, he said, in Biloxi, and had worked the docks in that city and then New Orleans as a boy and young man. He had been at sea off and on for decades, during the tumultuous years of the Spin, when the U.S. government had revived the old Merchant Marine as a gesture toward national security, and afterward, when trade across the Arch created fresh demand for new shipping.

  Tomas had joined Kestrel for the same reason Turk had signed on: it was a one-way ticket to the promised land. Or what they both liked to imagine was a promised land. Tomas wasn't naive: he had crossed the Arch five times before, had spent months in Port Magellan, knew the towns vices firsthand, and had seen how cruelly the town could treat newcomers. But it was a freer, more open, more casually polyglot city than any on Earth—a seaman's town, much of it built by expatriate sailors, and it was where he wanted to spend the last years of his life, looking at a landscape on which human hands had only recently been laid. (Turk had signed on for much the same reason, though it would be his first trip cross-Arch. He had wanted to get as far from Texas as it was practical to get, for reasons he didn't care to dwell on.)

  The trouble with Kestrel was that, because it had no future, it had been poorly maintained and was barely seaworthy. Everyone aboard was aware of that fact, from the Filipino captain down to the illiterate Syrian teenager who stewarded the crew mess. It made for a dangerous transit. Bad weather had scuttled many a vessel bound for Breaker Beach, and more than one rusty keel had gone to rest under the Arch of the Hypotheticals.

  But the weather in the Indian Ocean had been reassuringly benign, and because this was Turk's first passage he had risked the derision of his shipmates by arranging to be on deck when the crossing happened.

  A night crossing of the Arch. He staked out a place aft of the forecastle out of the breeze, made a pillow from a hank of rag stiff with dried paint, stretched out and gazed at the stars. The stars had been scattered by the four billion years of galactic evolution that had transpired while the Earth was enclosed in its Spin membrane, and they remained nameless after thirty years, but they were the only stars Turk had ever known. He had been barely five years old when the Spin ended. His generation had grown up in the post-Spin world, accustomed to the idea that a person could ride an ocean vessel from one planet to another. Unlike some, however, Turk had never been able to make that fact seem prosaic. It was still a wonder to him.

  The Arch of the Hypotheticals was a structure vastly larger than anything human engineering could have produced. By the scale of stars and planets, the scale on which the Hypotheticals were assumed to operate, it was a relatively small thing… but it was the biggest made thing Turk imagined he would ever encounter. He had seen it often enough in photographs, on video, in representative diagrams in schoolbooks, but none of those did justice to the real item.

  He had first seen it with his own eyes from the Sumatran port where he joined the Kestrel. The Arch's eastern leg had been visible on clear days and especially at sunset, when the last light climbed that pale thread and burnished it to a fine golden line. But now he was almost directly beneath the apex, a different view entirely. The Arch had been compared to a thousand-mile-wide wedding ring dropped into the Indian Ocean, half of it embedded in the bedrock of the planet and the other half projecting above the atmosphere into naked space. From the deck of the Kestrel he couldn't see either leg where it entered the sea, but he could see the peak of the Arch reflecting the last light
of the sun, a brushstroke of silvery-blue fading to dusky red at its eastern and western extremities. It quivered in the heat of the evening air.

  Up close, people said, if you sailed within hailing proximity of either leg, it looked as plain as a pillar of concrete rising from the surface of the sea, except that the enormously wide pillar didn't stop rising, simply vanished from sight. But the Arch wasn't an inert object no matter how static it appeared. It was a machine. It communicated with a copy of itself—or the other half of itself, perhaps—set in the compatible ocean of the New World, many light-years distant. Maybe it orbited one of the stars Turk could see from the deck of the Kestrel: there was a shivery thought. The Arch might appear to be inanimate, but in fact it was watching the near surface of both worlds, conducting two-way traffic. Because that was what it did: that was its function. If a bird, a storm-tossed tree limb, or an ocean current passed beneath the Arch it would continue on its way unmolested. The waters of Earth and the New World never mingled. But if a manned ocean vessel crossed under the Arch it would be picked up and translated across an unimaginable distance. By all reports the transition was so easy as to be almost anticlimactic, but Turk wanted to experience it out here in the open, not down in crew quarters where he wouldn't even know it had happened until the ship sounded its ritual horn.

  He checked his watch. Almost time. He was still waiting when Tomas stepped out of the shadows into the glare of a deck light, grinning at him.

  "First time, yeah," Turk said, forestalling the inevitable comment.

  "Fuck," Tomas said, "you don't need to explain. I come out every time I pass. Day or night. Like paying respects."

  Respects to whom? The Hypothetical? But Turk didn't ask.

  "And, oh my!" Tomas said, aiming his old face at the sky. "Here it comes."

  So Turk braced himself-—unnecessarily—and watched the stars dim and swirl around the peak of the Arch like watery reflections stirred by the prow of a boat. Then suddenly there was fog all around the Kestrel, or a mistiness that reminded him of fog although it had no scent or taste of moisture to it—a transient dizziness, a pressure in his ears. Then the stars came back, but they were different stars, thicker and brighter in what seemed like a blacker sky; and now the air did taste and smell subtly different, and a gust of it swirled around the hard steel angles of the topdeck as if to introduce itself, air warm and salt-scented and bracingly fresh. And up on the high bridge of the Kestrel, the compass needle must have swung on its pivot, as compasses did at every crossing of the Arch, because the ship's horn sounded one long wail—punishingly loud but sounding almost tentative across an ocean only lately acquainted with human beings.

  "The New World," Turk said, thinking, That's it? As easy as that?

  "Equatoria," Tomas said, confusing the continent with the planet as most people did. "How's it feel to be a spaceman, Turk?"

  But Turk couldn't answer, because two crewmen who had been stealthily pacing the topdeck rounded on Turk with a bucket of saltwater and doused him, laughing. Another rite of passage, a christening for the virgin sailor. He had crossed, at last, the world's strangest meridian. And he had no intention of going back, no real home to go back to.

  Tomas had been frail with age when he boarded the Kestrel, and he was injured when the beaching of the vessel went bad.

  There were no docks or quays at Breaker Beach. Turk had seen it from the deck rail, his first real look at the coast of Equatoria. The continent loomed out of the horizon like a mirage, pink with morning light, though hardly untouched by human hands. The three decades since the end of the Spin had transformed the western fringe of Equatoria from a wilderness into a chaos of fishing villages, lumber camps, primitive industry, slash-and-burn farmland, hasty roads, a dozen booming towns, and one city through which most of the hinterlands rich resources were channeled. Breaker Beach, almost a hundred nautical miles north of Port Magellan, was possibly the ugliest occupied territory on the coast—Turk could hardly say, but the Filipino cargomaster insisted it was, and the argument was plausible. The broad white beach, protected from the surf by a pebbly headland, was littered with the corpses of broken vessels and smudged with the smoke and ash of a thousand fires. Turk spotted a double-hulled tanker not unlike the Kestrel, a score of coastal tankers, even a military vessel stripped of all identifying flags and markings. These were recent arrivals, the work of their deconstruction hardly begun. For many miles more the beach was crowded with steel frames denuded of hull plating, cavernous half-ships in which the acetylene glare of the breakers' torches made a fitful light.

  Beyond that lay the scrap-metal huts and forges and toolsheds and machine shops of the breakers, mostly Indian and Malaysian men working out the contracts that had bought them passage under the Arch. Farther on, hazy in the morning air, forested hills unrolled into the blue-gray foothills of the mountains.

  He couldn't stay on deck during the beaching. The standard way to deliver a large vessel to Breaker Beach was simply to run it up the littoral and strand it there. The breakers would do the rest, swarming over the ship once the crew had been evacuated. The ship's steel would end up in re-rolling mills downcoast, the ship's miles of wiring and aluminum piping would be extracted and sold in bulk lots, even the ship's bells, Turk had heard, would be marketed to local Buddhist temples. This was Equatoria, and any manmade thing would find a use. It didn't matter that beaching a vessel as enormous as the Kestrel could be a violent, destructive process. None of these ships would ever float again.

  He went belowdecks when the signal sounded and found Tomas waiting in the crew mess, grinning. Turk had grown fond of Tomas's bony grin—demented-looking but genuine. "End of the road for Kestrel," Tomas said, "and the end of the road for me, too. Every chicken comes home to roost, I guess."

  "We're positioned off the beach," Turk said. Soon the captain would start the engines and engage the screws and send the ship dead for shore. The engines would be shut down at the last practical moment and the prow of the ship would gully into the sand while the tide was high. Then the crew would drop rope ladders and scurry down the hull; their kit bags would be lowered; Turk would take his first steps in the grit and wash of Breaker Beach. Within a month Kestrel would be little more than a memory and a few thousand tons of recycled iron, steel, and aluminum.

  "Every death is a birth," said Tomas, who was old enough to get away with such pronouncements.

  "I wouldn't know about that."

  "No. You strike me as somebody who knows more than he lets on. End of Kestrel. But your first time in the New World. That's a death and a birth right there."

  "If you say so, Tomas."

  Turk felt the ship's elderly engines begin to throb. The beaching would be violent, inevitably. All the loose gear in the ship had already been stowed or dismounted and sent ashore along with the lifeboats. Half the crew was already ashore. "Whoa," Tomas exclaimed as the vibration came up through the deck plating and the chair legs. "Making some speed now, you bet."

  The prow of the ship would be cutting a knife-edge through the water, Turk thought, as it did whenever the vessel began to throb and surge like this. Except they weren't in open water anymore. Their slot on the beach was dead ahead, the continent rising beneath them. The captain was in radio contact with a shore pilot who would call in minor course corrections and tell him when to cut the engines.

  Soon, Turk hoped. He liked being at sea, and he didn't mind being belowdecks, but he found he very much disliked being in a windowless room when a deliberately-engineered disaster was only moments away. "You done this before?"

  "Well, no," Tomas said, "not from this end. But I was at a wreckers' beach near Goa a few years ago and I watched an old container ship ground itself. Ship not much smaller than this one. Kind of a poetry to it, actually. It rode up the tideline like one of those turtles trying to lay an egg. I mean, I guess you want to brace yourself for it, but it wasn't violent." A few minutes later Tomas looked at the watch that hung like a bracelet on his skinny wrist
and said, "About time to cut engines."

  "You got it timed?"

  "I got eyes and ears. I know where we were anchored and I can tell by listening what kind of speed we're making."

  This sounded to Turk like one of Tomas's boasts, but it might be true. Turk wiped his palms on the knees of his jeans. He was nervous, but what could go wrong? At this point it was all ballistics.

  What did go wrong—as he sorted it out afterward—was that at a critical moment Kestrel's bridge lost electrical power, due to some short or component failure in the antique circuitry, so that the captain could neither hear the shore pilot's instructions nor relay his orders to the engine room. Kestrel should have come in coasting, but she beached under power instead. Turk was thrown from his chair as the ship ground into the littoral and listed grotesquely to starboard. He was alert enough to see the brushed-steel cutlery locker break loose from the near wall and tumble toward him. The locker was the size of a coffin and about as heavy, and he tried to crawl away from it, but there wasn't time to pull himself out of the way. But here was Tomas, somehow still upright, grabbing for the screeching metal box and managing to snag the corner of it as it slid by, giving Turk enough time to scramble aside. He fetched up against a chair as Kestrel stopped moving and the ship's engines finally, mercifully, died. The old tanker's hull gave a ratcheting, prehistoric groan and fell silent. Beached. No harm done…

  Except to Tomas, who had briefly taken the full weight of the locker and whose left arm had been sliced open below the elbow, deep enough to show bone.

  Tomas cradled the injury in his blood-soaked lap, looking startled. Turk applied a handkerchief as a tourniquet and told his friend to stop cursing and keep still while he went for help. It took him ten minutes to find an officer who would listen to him.

  The ship's doctor had already gone ashore and the infirmary had been stripped of drugs, so Tomas had to be lowered from the deck in an improvised rope-and-basket litter with only a couple of aspirin to dull the pain. The Kestrel's captain, in the end, refused to admit liability, collected his pay from the breaker boss, and caught a bus for Port Magellan before sunset. So Turk was left to look after Tomas until an off-shift Malay welder could be convinced to summon a genuine doctor. Or what passed for a doctor in this part of the New World. A woman, the skinny Malay said in broken English. A good doctor, a Western doctor, very kind to the breakers. She was white but had lived for years in a Minang fishing village not far upcoast.