Axis s-2

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Tomas had recovered from his illness—from the genetic rebuild that constituted the Fourth treatment—as quickly as Diane had predicted. His psychological adjustment was another matter. He was a man who had come to Equatoria prepared to die, and instead he had found himself staring down another three or more decades for which he had no plan or ambition.

  Physically, though, it had been a liberation. After a week of recovery Tomas could have passed for a man much younger. His crabbed way of walking became more supple, his appetite was suddenly bottomless. This was almost too strange for Turk to deal with, as if Tomas had shed his old body the way a snake sheds its skin. "Fuck, it's just me," Tomas would proclaim whenever Turk became too uncomfortably conscious of the distance between the old Tomas and the new. Tomas clearly relished his newfound health. The only drawback, he said, was that the treatment had erased his tattoos. Half his history had been written in those tattoos, he said.

  "Is it true that I have an improved bullshit detector? Well, that's in the eye of the beholder. It's been ten years, Turk. What do you think?"

  "We never talked much about this."

  "I would of been happy to keep it that way."

  "Can you tell when you're being lied to?"

  "There's no drug that'll make a stupid man smart. And I'm not a particularly smart man. I'm no lie detector, either. But I can generally tell when somebody's trying to sell me something."

  "Because I think Lise has been lied to. Her business with Fourths is legitimate, but I think she's being used. Also she has some information Diane might like to hear."

  Tomas was silent for a while. He tipped up his beer to drain it and put the bottle on a tray table next to his chair. He gave Turk a look uneasily reminiscent of Diane's evaluative stare.

  "You're in some difficult territory here," he said.

  "I know that," Turk said.

  "Could get dangerous."

  "I guess that's what I'm afraid of."

  "Can you give me some time to think this over?"

  "Guess so," Turk said.

  "Okay. I'll ask around. Call me in a couple of days."

  "I appreciate it," Turk said. "Thank you."

  "Don't thank me yet," Tomas said. "Maybe I'll change my mind."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The node in Lise's car announced new mail as she was driving to the Consulate. "From?" Lise asked.

  "Susan Adams," the node replied.

  These days Lise could not think of her mother without visualizing that calendar-box of pharmaceuticals on her kitchen counter, assorted by day and hour, the clockwork of her mortality. Pills for depression, pills to adjust her blood cholesterol, pills to avert the Alzheimer's for which she carried a suspect gene. "Read," she said, grimly.

  Dear Lise. The node's voice was male, indifferent, offering up the text with all the liveliness of a frozen fish. Thank you for your latest. It is somewhat reassuring after what I've seen on the news.

  The ashfall, she meant, which still clogged the side streets and had caused thousands of tourists to flee to their cruise ships, begging for a quick ride home. People who had come to Equatoria hoping to find a landscape pleasingly strange, but who had stumbled into something altogether different—real strangeness, the kind that didn't negotiate with human preconceptions.

  Precisely how her mother would have reacted, Lise thought.

  All I can think of is how far away you are and how inaccessible you have made yourself. No, I won't start that old argument again. And I won't say a word about your separation from Brian.

  Susan Adams had argued fiercely against the divorce—ironically, since she had argued almost as fiercely against the marriage. At first, Lise's mother had disliked Brian because he worked for Genomic Security—Genomic Security, in Susan Adams' mind, being represented by the terse and unhelpful men who had hovered around her after her husband's incomprehensible disappearance. Lise must not marry one of these compassionless monsters, she had insisted; but Brian was not compassionless, in fact Brian had charmed Lise's mother, had patiently dismantled her objections until he became a welcome presence. Brian had quickly learned the paramount rule in dealing with Lise's mother, that one did not mention the New World, the Hypotheticals, the Spin, or the disappearance of Robert Adams. In Susan Adams' household these subjects had acquired the power of profanity. Which was one reason Lise had been so anxious to leave that household behind.

  And there had been much anxiety and resistance after the wedding, when Brian was transferred to Port Magellan. You must not go, Lise's mother had said, as if the New World were some ghostly otherness from which no one emerged undamaged. No, not even for the sake of Brian's career should they enter that perdition.

  This was, of course, an ongoing act of denial, a forcible exile of unacceptable truths, a strategy her mother had devised for containing and channeling her unvented grief. But that was precisely why Lise resented it. Lise hated the dark space into which her mother had walled these memories. Memory was all that was left of Lise's father, and that memory surely included his wide-eyed fascination with the Hypotheticals and his love of the planet into which they had opened their perplexing doorway.

  Even the ashfall would have fascinated him, Lise thought: those cogs and seashells embedded in the dust, pieces in a grand puzzle…

  I simply hope that these events convince you of the wisdom of coming home. Lise, if money is a problem, let me book you a ticket. I admit that California is not what it once was, but we can still see the ocean from the kitchen window, and although the summers are warm and the winter storms more intense than I remember them being, surely that's a small thing compared to what you are presently enduring.

  You don't know, Lise thought, what I'm enduring. You don't care to know.

  * * * * *

  In the afternoon sunlight the American Consulate looked like a benevolent fortress set behind a moat of wrought-iron fences. Someone had planted a garden along the runnels of the fence, but the recent ashfall hadn't been kind to the flowers—native flowers, because you weren't supposed to bring terrestrial plants over the Arch, not that the ban was especially effective. The flowers that had survived the ashfall were sturdy red whore's-lips (in the crude taxonomy of the first settlers), stems like enamelled chopsticks and leaves like Victorian collars enfolding the tattered blooms.

  There was a guard at the consulate door next to a sign that advised visitors to check all weapons, personal electronics, and unsealed bottles or containers. This was not a new drill for Lise, who had regularly visited Brian at the Genomic Security offices before the divorce. And she remembered riding past the consulate as a teenager during her father's time here; remembered how reassuring and strong the building had seemed with its high white walls and narrow embrasures.

  The guard called Brian's office for confirmation and issued her a visitor's badge. She rode the elevator to the fifth floor, mid-building, a tiled windowless hallway, the labyrinth of bureaucracy.

  Brian stepped into the corridor as she approached and held open the door marked simply 507 DGS. Brian, she thought, was somehow changeless: carefully dressed, still trim in his mid-thirties, tanned; he took weekend hikes in the hills above the Port. He smiled briefly as a way of greeting her, but his demeanor today was stiff—sort of a whole-body frown, Lise thought. She braced herself for whatever was coming. Brian bossed a staff of three people but none of them was present. "Come on in," he said, "sit down, we have to have a little discussion. I'm sorry, but we'll get this out of the way as quickly as possible."

  Even at this juncture he was unfailingly nice, the quality she had found most frustrating in him. The marriage had been bad from the beginning. Not a disaster so much as a bad choice compounded by more bad choices, some of which she was reluctant to admit even to herself. Worse because she couldn't confess her unhappiness in any way Brian was liable to understand. Brian went to church every Sunday, Brian believed in decency and propriety, and Brian despised the complexity and weirdness of the post-Spin world. And t
hat, ultimately, was what Lise could not abide. She had had enough of that from her mother. She wanted, instead, the quality her father had tried so hard to communicate to her on those nights when they looked at the stars: awe, or, failing that, at least courage.

  Brian had occasional charm, he had earnestness, he had, buried in him, a deep and poignant seriousness of purpose. But he was afraid of what the world had become, and that, in the end, she could not abide.

  She sat down. He pulled a second chair across the carpet and sat facing her knee-to-knee. "This might not be the pleasantest conversation we ever had," he said. "But we're having it for your sake, Lise. Please try to remember that."

  * * * * *

  Turk arrived at the airport that afternoon still pondering his talk with Tomas and intending to inspect his aircraft before he went home for the night. Turk's little Skyrex twin-engine fixed-wing prop plane was nearly five years old and needed repairs and maintenance more often than it used to. It had lately been fitted with a new fuel injector, and Turk wanted to see for himself what the mechanics had done. So he parked in his usual space behind the cargo building and crossed a patch of tarmac turned woolen-gray by ash and rain, but when he reached the hangar he found the door padlocked. Tucked behind the latch was a note advising him to see Mike Arundji.

  Not much question what this was about. Turk owed two months' rent on his hangar space and was in arrears for maintenance.

  But he was friendly with Mike Arundji—most of the time, anyhow—and he walked into the owner's office rehearsing his usual excuses. It was a ritual dance: the demand, the apology, the token payment (though even that was going to be tight), another reprieve… although the padlock was a new touch.

  This time the older man looked up from his desk with an expression of deep regret. "The lock," he said immediately, "yeah, I'm sorry about that, but I don't have a choice here. I have to run my business like a business."

  "It's the ash," Turk said. "I lost a couple of charters to it. Otherwise you'd be paid by now."

  "So you say, and I'm not disputing it. But what difference would a couple of charters make, long-term? You have to ask yourself. This isn't the only small airport in the district. I've got competition. In the old days it was okay to be a little loose, cut everybody some slack. It was all semi-amateurs, independents like you. Now there are corporate charter companies bidding up hangar space. Even if the books balanced I'd be taking a loss on you. That's just a fact."

  "I can't make money if I can't fly my plane, Mike."

  "The trouble is, I can't make money whether you fly it or not."

  "Seems like you do okay."

  "I have a payroll to meet. I have a whole new raft of regulations coming down from the Provisional Government. If you looked at my spreadsheets you wouldn't tell me I'm doing okay. My accountant doesn't come in here and tell me I'm doing okay."

  And you probably don't call your accountant an amateur, Turk thought. Mike Arundji was an old hand: he had opened up this strip when there was nothing south of Port Magellan but fishing villages and squatters' camps. Even a half-dozen years ago the word "spreadsheet" would have been foreign to his vocabulary.

  That was the kind of environment in which Turk had arranged for the import—at eye-bulging expense—of his six-seater Skyrex. And it had made him a modest little living, at least until recently. He no longer owed money on it. Unfortunately, he seemed to owe money on everything else. "So what do I have to do to get my plane back in the air?"

  Arundji shifted in his chair and wouldn't meet Turk's eye. "Come in tomorrow, we'll talk about it. Worse comes to worst, it wouldn't be hard to find a buyer."

  "Find—what?"

  "A buyer. A buyer, you know! People are interested. Sell the plane, pay your debts, start fresh. People do that. It happens all the time."

  Turk said, "Not to me."

  "Calm down. We don't necessarily have conflicting interests here. I can help you get a premium price. I mean, if it comes to that. And shit, Turk, you're the one who's always talking about hiring onto a research boat and sailing somewhere. Maybe this is the time. Who knows?"

  "Your confidence is inspiring."

  "Think about it, is what I'm saying. Talk to me in the morning."

  "I can pay what I owe you."

  "Can you? Okay. No problem. Bring me a certified check and we'll forget about it."

  To which Turk had no answer.

  "Go home," Arundji said. "You look tired, buddy."

  * * * * *

  "First," Brian said, "I know you were with Turk Findley."

  "What the hell?" Lise said promptly.

  "Hold on, let me finish—"

  "What, you had somebody follow me?"

  "I couldn't do that if I wanted to, Lise."

  "What, then?"

  Brian took a breath. His pursed lips and narrowed eyes were meant to announce that he found this as unpleasant as she did. "Lise, there are other people at work here."

  She made an effort to control her own breathing. She was already angry. And in a way the anger was not unwelcome. It beat feeling guilty, the mood in which her encounters usually left her. "What people?"

  "Let me just remind you of the larger issues," he said. "Bear with me. It's easy to forget what's at stake. The nature and definition of the human genome, of what we are as a people, all of us. That's been put at risk by everything from the cloning trade to these Martian longevity cults, and there are people in every government in the world who spend a lot of time thinking about that."

  His credo, the same justification, Lise recalled, that he had once offered to her mother. "What does that have to do with me?" Or Turk, for that matter.

  "You came to me with an old snapshot taken at one of your dad's faculty parties, so I ran it through the database—"

  "You offered to run it through the database."

  "I offered, okay, and we pulled an image from the dockland security cameras. But when you run a check like that, the query gets bumped around a little bit. And I guess something rang a bell somewhere. Within the last week we've had people from Washington show up here—"

  "What do you mean, DGS people?"

  "DGS people, right, but very senior, people working out of levels of the department light-years above what we do here. People who are deeply interested in finding the woman in the picture. People interested enough to sail out of Djakarta and knock on my door."

  Lise sat back in her chair and tried to absorb all this.

  After a long moment she said, "My mother showed the same snapshot to DGS back when my father disappeared. Nobody made a fuss about it then."

  "That was a decade ago. Other information has turned up since. The same face in a different context. More than that I can't say."

  "I'd like to talk to these people. If they know anything about Sulean Moi—"

  "Nothing that would help you find out what happened to your father."

  "How can you be sure of that?"

  "Try to put it in perspective, Lise. These people are doing an important job. They mean business. I went out of my way to convince these guys not to talk to you."

  "But you gave them my name?"

  "I told them everything I know about you, because otherwise they might think you're involved in—well, what they're investigating. Which would be a waste of their time and a hardship for you. Honestly, Lise. You have to keep a low profile on this one."

  "They're watching me. Is that what you're trying to say? They're watching me and they know I was with Turk."

  He winced at the name, but nodded. "They know those things. Yes."

  "Jesus, Brian!"

  He raised his hands in a gesture that looked like surrender. "All I'm saying is, when I stand back from all this—from what our relationship is and what I would like it to be—when I ask myself what would really be best for you—my advice is to let this go. Stop asking questions. Maybe even think about heading back home, back to California."

  "I don't want to go home."

 
"Think about it, is all I'm saying. There's only so much I can do to protect you."

  "I never asked you to protect me."

  "Maybe we can talk about this again when you've given it some consideration."

  She stood up. "Or maybe not."

  "And maybe we can talk about Turk Findley and what's going on in that department."

  In that department. Poor Brian, unfailingly prim, even when he was rebuking her.

  She thought about defending herself. She could say, We were having dinner when the ash fell. She could say, Of course he came home with me, what was he supposed to do, sleep in his car? She could lie and say, We're just friends. Or she could say, I went to bed with him because he's unafraid and unpredictable and his fingernails aren't impeccably clean and he doesn't work for the fucking DGS.

  She was angry, humiliated, not a little guilt-stricken. "It's not your business anymore. You need to figure that out, Brian."

  And turned, and left.

  * * * * *

  Turk went home to fix himself dinner, some shiftless meal appropriate to his mood. He lived in a two-room bungalow set among similar cabins on a barely-paved road near Arundji's airfield, on a bluff overlooking the sea. Maybe someday this would be expensive real estate. Currently it was off-grid. The toilet fed a cesspool and his electricity came from sunlight and a generator in a back shed. Every summer he repaired his shingles, and every winter they leaked from a new angle.

  The sun was setting over the foothills west of him, and to the east the sea had turned an inky shade of blue. A few fishing boats straggled toward the harbor to the north. The air was cool and there was a breeze to carry off the remnant stink of the ash.

  The ash had settled in windrows around the foundations of the cabin, but the roof seemed to have borne up under the strain. His shelter was intact. There wasn't much food in the kitchen cupboards, however. Less than he remembered. It was canned beans or go out for groceries. Or spend money he didn't have in some restaurant he couldn't afford.

  Lost my plane, he thought. But no, not really, not yet; the plane was only embargoed, not yet sold. But there was nothing in his bank account to offer a convincing counter-argument. So that little mantra had been running through his head since he left Mike Arundji's office: Lost my plane.