Axis s-2

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Her name, he said, was Diane.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Turk told Tomas Ginn about Lise—a little bit about her. How they had connected when they were stranded in the mountains; how he couldn't get her out of his mind even when they were back in civilization, even when she stopped returning his calls; how they got back together during the ashfall.

  Tomas listened from his tattered easy chair, sipping beer from a green glass bottle and smiling placidly, as if he had discovered some kind of windless place inside his head. "Sounds like you hardly know this lady."

  "I know as much as I need to. Some people, it isn't that hard to tell whether you trust them or not."

  "Trust her, do you?"

  "Yeah."

  Tomas cupped the crotch of his baggy jeans. "This is what you trust. Every inch a sailor."

  "It's not like that."

  "It never is. But it always is. So why you want to drive up here and tell me about this woman?"

  "Actually, I was thinking maybe I could introduce her to you."

  "To me? I ain't your daddy, Turk."

  "No, and you're not what you used to be, either."

  "Don't see what that's got to do with it."

  Turk had to tread carefully here. With the utmost delicacy, insofar as he was capable of it. "Well… she's curious about Fourths."

  "Oh, my Christ." Tomas rolled his eyes. "Curious?"

  "She's got reasons to be."

  "So you want to serve me up to her? Exhibit A or whatever?"

  "No. What I really want to do is let her talk to Diane. But I want your opinion first."

  * * * * *

  Diane—the Western doctor, or nurse, as she insisted on calling herself—had hiked to Breaker Beach from some inland village to treat Tomas's slashed arm.

  At first Turk was suspicious of her. In Equatoria, especially out here in the backwoods, nobody was checking anybody's medical license. At least that was the impression he got. If you owned a syringe and a bottle of distilled water you could call yourself a doctor, and the breaker bosses would naturally endorse any self-appointed physician who worked for free, regardless of results. So Turk sat with Tomas inside a vacant hut waiting for this woman to arrive, making occasional conversation until the older man fell asleep despite the blood still leaking into his makeshift bandage. The hut was made of some local wood, round barked branches knobbed like bamboo holding up a flat tin roof. It smelled of stale cooking and tobacco and human sweat. It was hot inside, though the screened door admitted an occasional slow sigh of air.

  The sun was going down when the doctor finally walked up the plank steps to the platform floor, tugging aside a layer of bug netting.

  She wore a tunic and loose pants of a cloth the color and texture of raw muslin. She wasn't a young woman. Far from it. Her hair was so white it seemed almost transparent. "Who's the patient?" she asked, squinting. "And light a lamp, please—I can hardly see."

  "My name's Turk Findley," Turk said.

  "Are you the patient?"

  "No, I—"

  "Show me the patient."

  So he turned up the wick of an oil lamp and escorted her through another layer of netting to the yellowed mattress where Tomas slept. Out in the dusk, insect choruses were warming up. They sounded like no insects he had heard before, but you could tell that's what it was, that steely staccato buzzing. From the beach came the sound of hammering, the clatter of sheet metal, the chug and whine of diesel motors.

  Tomas snored, oblivious. The doctor—Diane—looked at the bandage on his arm with an expression of contempt. "How did this happen?"

  Turk told her how it had happened.

  "So he sacrificed himself for you?"

  "Sacrificed a chunk of his arm, anyhow."

  "You're lucky to have a friend like that."

  "Wake him up first. Then tell me whether I'm lucky."

  She nudged Tomas's shoulder and Tomas opened his eyes and promptly cursed. Old curses, Creole curses, pungent as gumbo. He tried to sit up, then thought better of it. Finally he fixed his attention on Diane. "And who the fuck might you be?"

  "I'm a nurse. Calm down. Who bandaged you?"

  "Guy on the ship."

  "He did a lousy job. Let me see."

  "Well, I guess it was his first time. He—ow! Jesus! Turk, is this a real nurse?"

  "Don't be an infant," Diane said. "And hold still. I can't help you if I can't see what's wrong." A pause. "Ah. Well. You're lucky you didn't cut an artery." She took a syringe from her kit and filled it. "Something for the pain before I clean and stitch."

  Tomas started to protest, but that was for show. He looked relieved when the needle went in.

  Turk backed away and tried to give Diane room to work, not that there was a whole lot of space in this little hut. He wondered what it must be like to make a living as a breaker—to sleep under a tin roof praying you wouldn't be hurt or killed before your contract played out, before you got the payoff they promised you, a year's wages and a bus ticket to the Port. There was an official camp physician, the breaker boss had explained, but he only came in twice a week, usually to fill out forms. Diane did most of the routine cut-and-stitch duty.

  Turk watched her as she worked, a silhouette cast by lamplight on the gauzy bug screen. She was skinny and she moved with the calculated caution of the very old. But she was strong, too. She worked methodically and smoothly, occasionally muttering to herself. She might be around Tomas's age, which the sailor variously gave as sixty or seventy—maybe older.

  She worked, and from time to time Tomas swore with fierce intent but a certain drugged lethargy. There was a stink of antiseptic, and Turk stepped out into the rising dark. His first night in the New World. In the near distance there was a stand of flowering bushes he couldn't name, six-fingered leaves moving in an offshore breeze. The flowers were blue and smelled like cloves or cinammon or some other Christmas spice. Farther off, the lights and fires of the industrial beach guttered like lit fuses. And beyond the beach the ocean rolled in faint green phosphorescence, and the alien stars turned grand slow circles.

  * * * * *

  "There's a potential complication," Diane said when she had finished with Tomas.

  She came and sat with Turk on the edge of the wooden platform that held the floor a foot or so above the ground. She had worked hard cleaning and closing Tomas's wound, and she mopped her forehead with a handkerchief. Her accent was American, Turk thought. A shade southern—Maryland, maybe, or those parts.

  He asked her what kind of complications those might be.

  "With luck, nothing serious. But Equatoria is a completely novel microbial environment—do you understand?"

  "I may be dumb, but I'm not ignorant."

  She laughed at that. "I apologize, Mr.—?"

  "Findley, but call me Turk."

  "Your parents named you Turk?"

  "No, ma'am. But the family lived in Istanbul for a couple years when I was a kid. I picked up a little Turkish. And a nickname. So what are you saying—Tomas might come down with some local disease?"

  "There are no native human beings on this planet, no hominids, no primates, nothing remotely like us. Most local diseases can't touch us. But there are bacteria and fungi that thrive in moist, warm environments, including the human body. Nothing we can't adjust to, Mr. Findley—Turk—and nothing so dangerous or communicable that it could be carried back to Earth. But it's still not a good idea to arrive in the New World with a challenged immune system or, in Mr. Ginn's case, an open wound bandaged by an idiot."

  "Can't you give him some kind of antibiotic?"

  "I did. But the local microorganisms don't necessarily respond to standard pharmaceuticals. Don't misunderstand. He's not ill, and in all likelihood he won't become ill, but there's a certain unavoidable risk. Are you a close friend of Mr. Ginn?"

  "Not exactly. But like I said, he was trying to help me out when he got hurt."

  "I'd prefer to keep him here a few days, under my observation. Is t
hat all right?"

  "Fine by me, but you might have to go some to convince Tomas. I'm not his keeper."

  "Where are you headed, if you don't mind me asking?"

  "Downcoast to the city."

  "Any particular address? A number where I can reach you?"

  "No, ma'am. I'm new here. But you can tell Tomas I'll look for him at the union hall when he makes it down to Port Magellan."

  She seemed disappointed. "I see."

  "Or maybe I can call you."

  She turned and gazed at him for a long moment. Scrutinized him, actually. Turk started to feel a little awkward under that relentless stare. Then she said, "Okay. Let me give you a number."

  She found a pencil in her kit bag and scribbled the number on the back of a Coast & Urban Coach Lines ticket stub.

  * * * * *

  "She was evaluating you," Tomas said. "I know that."

  "Good instincts, that woman." "Yeah. That's the point," Turk said.

  So Turk found a place to live in the Port and lived on his savings for a while and dropped by the Seaman's Union every now and then to look for Tomas. But Tomas never showed. Which, at first, didn't worry him much. Tomas could be anywhere. Tomas could have taken it into his head to cross the mountains, for all he knew. So Turk would have dinner or a drink and forget about his messmate; but when a month had passed he dug out the ticket stub and keyed the number scribbled on it.

  What he got was an automated message that the number had been discontinued.

  Which piqued his curiosity as well as his sense of obligation. His money was running out and he was getting ready to sign up for pipeline work, but he caught a ride upcoast and hiked a couple of miles to the breaker compound and started asking questions. One of the breaker bosses remembered Turk's face and told him his friend had got sick, and that was too bad, but they couldn't let a sick sailor take up time and attention, so Ibu Diane and some Minang fishermen had hauled the old man back to their village.

  Turk bought dinner at a tin-roofed Chinese restaurant at the crossroads, then hitched a ride farther upcoast, to a horseshoe bay turning gaudy colors under the long Equatorian dusk. The driver, a salesman for some West African import firm, pointed Turk at an unpaved road and a sign marked in a curvilinear language Turk couldn't read. Minang village down that way, he said. Turk walked a couple of miles through the forest, and just as the stars were turning bright and the insects bothersome he found himself between a row of wooden houses with buffalo-horn eaves and a lantern-lit general store where men in box caps sat at cable-spool tables drinking coffee. He put on his best smile and asked a local for directions to Doctor Diane's clinic.

  The pedestrian smiled back and nodded and called out to the coffee house. Two muscular young men hurried out and positioned themselves on each side of Turk. "We'll take you there," they said in English when Turk repeated his request—and they smiled, too, but Turk had the uneasy feeling he'd been politely but firmly taken into custody.

  "I guess I was pretty fucked-up when you finally saw me," Tomas said.

  "You don't remember?"

  "Not much of it, no."

  "Yeah," Turk said. "You were pretty fucked-up."

  * * * * *

  Pretty fucked-up, which in this case meant Tomas was bedridden, emaciated, gasping for breath in the back room of the big wooden building Diane called her "clinic." Turk had looked at his friend with something approaching horror.

  "Jesus Christ, what happened to him?"

  "Calm down," Ibu Diane said. Ibu was what the villagers called her. He gathered it was some kind of honorific.

  "Is he dying?"

  "No. Appearances to the contrary, he's getting well."

  "All this from a cut on his arm?"

  Tomas looked as if someone had stuck a hose down his throat and siphoned out his insides. Turk thought he had never seen a thinner man.

  "It's more complicated than that. Sit down and I'll explain."

  Outside the window of Diane's clinic, the Minang village was lively in the dark. Lanterns hung swaying from eaves and he could hear the sound of recorded music playing tinnily. Diane made coffee with an electric kettle and a French press, and the resulting brew was hot and dense.

  There used to be two real doctors at the clinic, she said. Her husband and a Minang woman, both of whom had lately died of natural causes. Only Diane was left, and the only medicine she knew was what she had learned while acting as a nurse. Enough to keep the clinic going: it was an indispensable resource not only for this village but for a half-dozen nearby villages and for the impoverished breakers. Any condition she couldn't treat she referred to the Red Crescent clinic up the coast or the Catholic charity hospital in Port Magellan, though that was a long trip. In matters of cuts, cleanly broken bones, and common disorders, she was perfectly competent. She consulted regularly with a traveling physician from the Port who understood her situation and made sure she was supplied with basic medicines, sterile bandages, and so forth.

  "So maybe you should have sent Tomas downcoast," Turk said. "He looks seriously ill to me."

  "The cut on his arm was the least of his problems. Did Tomas tell you he had cancer?"

  "Jesus, no. Cancer? Does he?"

  "We brought him back here because his wound was infected, but the cancer showed up in simple blood tests. I don't have much in the way of diagnostic equipment, but I do have a portable imager—ten years old but it works like a charm. It confirmed the diagnosis, and the prognosis was very grave. Cancer is hardly an untreatable disease, but your friend had been avoiding doctors for far too long. He was deeply metastasized."

  "So he is dying."

  "No." Diane paused. Once again she riveted him with that stare, fierce and a little uncanny. Turk made an effort not to avert his own eyes. It was like playing stare-down with a cat. "I offered him an unconventional treatment."

  "Like what, radiation or something?"

  "I offered to make him a Fourth."

  For a moment he was too startled to speak. Outside, the music played on, something tunelessly alien beaten out of a wooden xylophone and funneled through a cheap loudspeaker.

  He said, "You can do that?"

  "I can. I have."

  Turk wondered what he had gotten himself into and how he could most efficiently extract himself from it. "Well… I guess it's not illegal here…"

  "You guess wrong. It's just easier to get away with. And we have to be discreet. An extra few decades of life isn't something you advertise, Turk."

  "So why tell me?"

  "Because Tomas is going to need some help as he recovers. And because I think I can trust you."

  "How could you possibly know that?"

  "Because you came here looking for him." She startled him by smiling. "Call it an educated guess. You understand that the Fourth treatment isn't just about longevity? The Martians were deeply ambivalent about tinkering with human biology. They didn't want to create a community of powerful elders. The Fourth treatment gives and it takes away. It gives you an extra thirty or forty years of life—and I'm a case in point, if you haven't guessed—but it also rearranges certain human traits."

  "Traits," Turk said, dry-mouthed. He had never, to his knowledge, spoken to a Fourth before. And that was what this woman claimed to be. How old was she? Ninety years? One hundred?

  "Am I so frightening?"

  "No, ma'am, not at all, but—"

  "Not even a little?" Still smiling.

  "Well, I—"

  "What I mean to say, Turk, is that as a Fourth I'm more sensitive to certain social and behavioral cues than the majority of unmodified people. I can generally tell when someone's lying or being disingenuous, at least when we're face-to-face. Although, against sincere lies I have no defense. I'm not omniscient, I'm not especially wise, and I can't read minds. The most you might say is that my bullshit detector has been turned up a notch or two. And since any group of Fourths is necessarily under siege—from the police or from criminals, or both—that's a usefu
l faculty to have. No, I don't know you well enough to say I trust you, but I perceive you clearly enough to say that I'm willing to trust you… do you understand?"

  "I suppose so. I mean, I don't have anything against Fourths. Never thought much about it either way."

  "That comfortable innocence is over. Your friend won't die of cancer, but he can't stay here, and he has a lot of adjustments to make. What I would like to do is discharge him into your care."

  "Ma'am—uh, Diane—I don't know the first thing about taking care of a sick man, much less a Fourth."

  "He won't be sick for long. But he'll need an understanding friend. Will you be that person for him?"

  "Well, I mean, you know, I'm willing, I suppose, but it might be better to make some other arrangement, because I'm in a difficult position, financially and all—"

  "I wouldn't have asked you if I could think of anything better. It was a blessing that you showed up when you did." She added, "If I hadn't wanted you to find me I would have been much more difficult to find."

  "I tried calling, but—"

  "I had to discontinue that number." She frowned but didn't offer to explain.

  "Well—" Well, fuck, he thought. "I guess I wouldn't turn out a stray dog in a rainstorm."

  Her smile returned. "That's what I thought."

  * * * * *

  "I guess you learned a few things about Fourths since then," Tomas said.

  "I don't know," Turk said. "You're the only close sample I've got. Not too inspiring, actually."

  "Did she actually say that, about a bullshit detector?"

  "More or less. What do you think, Tomas, is it true?"