Axis s-2

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He wanted to talk to Lise. But he didn't want to dump his problems on her. It still seemed unlikely that he had hooked up with her at all. His relationship with Lise was something fortune had dropped in his lap. Fortune had done him few favors in the past, and he wasn't sure he trusted it.

  Cornmeal, coffee, beer…

  He decided to give Tomas another call. Maybe he hadn't explained too well what it was he wanted. There was only one real favor he could do Lise, and that was to help her understand why her father had gone Fourth—which Turk assumed was what had happened. And if anyone could explain that to her or put it in a sane perspective it might be Tomas and, if Tomas would put in a word for him, Ibu Diane, the Fourth nurse who lived with the Minang upcoast.

  He ticked Tomas's number into his phone.

  But there was no answer, nor was the call dumped to voice mail. Which was odd because Tomas carried his phone everywhere. It was probably his most valuable possession.

  Turk thought about what to do next. He could go over his accounts and try to rig up some accommodation with Mike Arundji. Or he could drive back into town, maybe see Lise, if she wasn't sick of him—maybe check up on Tomas on the way. The sensible thing, he guessed, would be to stay home and take care of business.

  If he had any real business to take care of.

  He turned off the lights as he left.

  * * * * *

  Lise drove away from the consulate feeling scalded. That was the word precisely. Scalded, dipped in hot water, burned raw. She drove aimlessly for more than an hour until the car registered the sunset and switched on its lights. The sky had gone red, one of those long Equatorian sunsets, made gaudier by the fine ash still lingering in the air. She drove through the Arab district, past souks and coffee shops under piebald awnings and strings of colored lights, the crowds dense this evening, making up for time lost during the ashfall; then up into the foothills, the pricey neighborhoods where wealthy men and women from Beijing or Tokyo or London or New York built faux-Mediterranean palaces in pastel shades. Belatedly, she realized she was driving down the street where she had lived with her parents during her four adolescent years in this city.

  And here was the house where she had lived when her family was still whole. She slowed the car as she passed. The house was smaller than she remembered and noticeably smaller than the would-be palaces that had grown up around it, a cloth coat among minks. She dreaded to think what it must rent for nowadays. The white-painted veranda was drenched in evening shadow, and had been furnished by strangers.

  "This is where we'll be living for the next little while," her mother had told her when they moved here from California. But to Lise it was never "my house," even when she was talking to friends at the American school. It was "where we're staying," her mother's preferred formulation. At thirteen Lise had been a little frightened of the foreign places she had seen on television, and Port Magellan was all those foreign places jumbled together in a single overbrimming gumbo. At least at first, she had longed for lost California.

  Now she longed for—what?

  Truth. Memory. The extraction of truth from memory.

  The roof of the house was dark with ash. Lise could not help picturing herself on the veranda in the old days, sitting with her father. She wished she could sit there with him now, not to discuss Brian or her problems but to speculate about the ashfall, to talk about what Robert Adams had liked to call (inevitably smiling as he said it) the Very Large Subjects, the mysteries that lay beyond the boundary of the respectable world.

  It was dark when she finally got home. The apartment was still in disarray, the dishes unwashed in the sink, the bed unmade, a little of Turk's aura still lingering. She poured herself a glass of red wine and tried to think coherently about what Brian had said. About powerful people and their interest in the woman who had (perhaps, in some way) seduced her father away from home.

  Was Brian right when he said she should leave? Was there really anything meaningful left to extract from the shards of her father's life?

  Or maybe she was closer than she realized to some fundamental truth, and maybe that was why she was in trouble.

  * * * * *

  Turk guessed there was something wrong when Tomas failed to answer the second and third calls he placed from the car. Tomas might have been drinking—he still drank, though rarely to excess—but even drunk, Tomas usually answered his phone.

  So Turk approached the old man's trailer with some apprehension, snaking his car through the dust-choked alleys of the Flats at a cautious speed. Tomas was a Fourth, hence fairly hearty, but not immortal. Even Fourths grew old. Even Fourths died. Tomas might be sick. Or he might be in some other kind of trouble. There was often trouble in the Flats. A couple of Filipino gangs operated out of the area, and there were drug houses scattered through the neighborhood. Unpleasant things happened from time to time.

  He parked his car by a noisy bodega and walked the last few yards to the corner of Tomas's muddy little street. It was only just dark and there were plenty of people around, canned music yammering from every other doorway. But Tomas's trailer was dark, the windows unlit. Could be the old man was asleep. But no. The door was unlocked and ajar.

  Turk knocked before he stepped inside, even though he had a sour certainty that the gesture was pointless. No answer.

  He reached to his left, switched on the overhead light and blinked. The room had been trashed. The table next to Tomas's chair was lying legs-up, the lamp in pieces on the floor. The air still smelled of stale masculine sweat. He made a cursory check of the back bedroom, but it was likewise empty.

  After a moment's thought, he left Tomas's small home and knocked at the door of the trailer next door. An obese woman in a gray shift answered: a Mrs. Goudy, lately widowed. Tomas had introduced her to Turk once or twice, and Mrs. Goudy had been known to share a drink with the old man. No, Mrs. Goudy hadn't heard from Tomas lately, but she had noticed a white van parked outside his trailer a little while ago… was anything wrong?

  "I hope not. When exactly did you see this van, Mrs. Goudy?"

  "Hour ago, maybe two."

  "Thank you, Mrs. Goudy. I wouldn't worry about it. Best to keep your door locked, though."

  "Don't I know it," Mrs. Goudy said.

  He went back to Tomas's place and closed the door, making sure it was secure this time. A wind had come up, and it rattled the makeshift streetlight where Tomas's short walkway met the road. Shadows swayed fitfully.

  He took his phone out of his pocket and called Lise, praying she would answer.

  * * * * *

  Back at the apartment, Lise had her home node read aloud the remainder of her mothers letter. The home unit, at least, had a female voice, slightly if unconvincingly modulated.

  Please don't misunderstand, Lise. I'm just worried about you in the usual motherly way. I can't help thinking of you alone in that city—

  Alone. Yes. Trust her mother to strike at her vulnerable place. Alone—because it was so hard to make anyone else understand what she wanted here and why it was so important to her.

  —putting yourself in danger—

  A danger that seemed so much more real when you were, as she said, alone …

  —when you could be here at home, safe, or even with Brian, who—

  Who would show the same puzzled condescension that radiated from her mothers message.

  —would surely agree—

  No doubt.

  —that there's no use digging up the dead past.

  But what if the past wasn't dead? What if she simply lacked the courage or callousness to put the past behind her, had no choice but to pursue it until it yielded its last dividend of pain or satisfaction?

  "Pause," she said to the media node. She couldn't take too much of this at one time. Not with everything else that was happening. Not when an alien dust had dropped out of the sky. Not when she was being tracked and possibly bugged by DGS, for reasons not even Brian would explain. Not when she was, yes, tha
nks Mom for that little reminder, alone.

  She checked her other text messages.

  They were junk, except for one, which turned out to be gold. It was a note and an attachment sent by one Scott Cleland, whom she had been trying to contact for months. Scott Cleland was the only one of her father's old university associates she hadn't yet succeeded in talking to. He was an astronomer, working with the Geophysical Survey at the observatory on Mt. Mahdi. She had just about given up on him. But here at last was a response to her mail, and a friendly one: the node read it to her, adopting a male voice to suit the given name.

  Dear Lise Adams: I'm sorry to have been so slow in responding to your queries. The reason far this is not just procrastination. It took a little searching to find the attached document, which may interest you.

  I wasn't close to Dr. Adams but we respected each other's work. As for the details of his life at that time, and the other questions you asked, I'm afraid I can't help you. Our connection was purely professional.

  At the time of his disappearance, however, and as you probably know, he had begun work on a book to be called Planet as Artifact. He asked me to read the brief introduction he had written, which I did, but I found no errors and could suggest no significant improvements (apart from a catchier title).

  In case there was no copy of this among his papers, I enclose the one he sent me.

  Robert Adams' disappearance was a great loss to all of us at the university. He often spoke affectionately about his family, and I hope your research brings you some comfort.

  Lise had the household node print the document. Contrary to what Cleland suspected, her father had not left a copy of the introduction with his papers. Or, if he had, Lise's mother had shredded it. Susan Adams had shredded or discarded all of her husband's papers and had donated his books to the university. Part of what Lise had come to think of as the Ritual Cleansing of the Adams Household.

  She turned off her phone and poured a glass of wine and took the wine and the six pages of printed text out to the balcony. The night was warm, she had swept away the ash this morning, and the indoor lamps cast enough light to read by.

  After a few minutes she went back inside to fetch a pen, came out again and began to underline certain phrases. She underlined them not because they were new to her but because they were familiar.

  Many things changed during the interval we call the Spin, but perhaps the most far-reaching change is also the most overlooked. The Earth was held in stasis for more than four billion years, which means we now live in a universe vastly more ancient—and more complexly evolved—than the one to which we were accustomed.

  Familiar because, in more polished prose, these were the things he had often said to her when they sat on the veranda and looked out at the darkness and the stars.

  Any real understanding of the nature of the Hypotheticals must take this into account. They were ancient when we first encountered them, and they are more ancient now. Since they cannot be observed directly, we must make our deductions about them based on their work in the universe, by the clues they leave behind them, by their vast and abiding footprints.

  Here was the excitement she learned from him at an early age, an outward-looking curiosity that contrasted with her mother's habitual caution and timidity. She could hear his voice in the words.

  Of their works, one of the most immediately obvious is the Indian Ocean Arch that links the Earth to the New World—and the Arch that connects the New World to another less hospitable planet, and so on, as far as we have been able to explore: a chain of increasingly hostile environments made available to us for reasons we do not yet understand.

  Sail to the other side of this world, he had told Lise, and you'll find a second Arch, and beyond it a rocky, stormy planet with barely breathable air; and beyond that—a journey that had to be undertaken on ocean vessels sealed and pressurized as if they were spaceships—a third world, its atmosphere poisoned with methane, the oceans oily and acidic.

  But the Arch is not the only artifact at hand. The planet "next door to Earth," from which I write these words, is also an artifact. There is evidence that it was constructed or at least modified over the course of many millions of years with the objective of making it a congenial environment for human beings.

  Planet as artifact.

  Many have speculated about the purpose of this eons-long work. Is the New World a gift or is it a trap? Have we entered a maze, as laboratory mice, or have we been offered a new and splendid destiny? Does the fact that our own Earth is still protected from the deadly radiation of its expanded sun mean that the Hypotheticals take an interest in our survival as a species, and if so, why?

  I cannot claim to have answered any of these questions, but I mean to give the reader an overview of the work that has already been done and of the thoughts and speculations oj the men and women who are devoting their professional lives to that work…

  And, later in the piece, this:

  We are in the position of a coma patient waking from a sleep as long as the lifetime of a star. What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

  She underlined that twice. She wished she could text it to her mother, wished she could write it on a banner and wave it in Brian's face. This was all she had ever meant to say to them: an answer to their genteel silences, to the almost surgical elision of Robert Adams from the lives of his survivors, to the gently troubled poor-Lise expressions they wore on their faces whenever she insisted on mentioning her vanished father. It was as if Robert Adams himself had stepped out of obscurity to whisper a reassuring word. What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

  She had put the pages aside and was heading for bed when she checked her phone one last time.

  Three messages were stacked there, all tagged urgent, all from Turk. A fourth came in while the phone was still in her hand.

  PART TWO — THE OCULAR ROSE

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After the fall of the luminous dust—after the skies had cleared and the courtyard had been swept and the desert or the wind had absorbed what was left behind—news of another mystery came to the compound where the boy Isaac lived.

  The ash had been terrifying when it fell and had been a topic for endless talk and speculation when it stopped. The newer mystery arrived more prosaically, as a news report relayed from the city across the mountains. It was less immediately frightening, but it touched uneasily on one of Isaac's secrets.

  He had overheard two of the adults, Mr. Nowotny and Mr. Fisk, discussing it in the corridor outside the dining hall. Commercial flights to the oil wastes of the Rub al-Khali had been canceled or re-routed for days even before the ashfall, and now the Provisional Government and the oil powers had issued an explanation: there had been an earthquake.

  This was a mystery, Mr. Nowotny went on to say, because there were no known faults beneath that part of the Rub al-Khali: it was a geologically stable desert craton that had persisted unchanged for millions of years. There should never have been even a minor tremor so deep in the Rub al-Khali.

  But what had happened was more than a tremor. Oil production had been shut down for more than a week, and the wells and pipelines had been expensively damaged.

  "We know less about this planet than we thought we did," Mr. Nowotny said.

  It was slightly less mysterious to Isaac. He knew, though he could not say how, that something was stirring under the sedate sands of the deep western desert. He felt it in his mind, his body. Something was stirring, and it spoke in cadences he didn't understand, and he could point to it with his eyes closed even though it was hundreds of miles away, still only half-waking from a slumber as long as the lives of mountains.

  For two days during and after the ashfall everyone had stayed inside, doors closed and windows locked, until Dr. Dvali announced that the ash wasn't particularly harmful. Eventually Mrs. Rebka told Isaac he could go out at least as far as the courtyard gardens, as long as he wore a cloth mask. The courtyard had been cleaned but there mi
ght still be remnant dust in the air, and she didn't want him inhaling particulate matter. He must not put himself at risk, she said.

  Isaac agreed to wear the mask even though it was sweatily warm across his mouth and nose. All that remained of the dust was a grainy residue silted against the brick walls and the rail fences made of never-green wood. Under a relentless afternoon sun, Isaac stooped over one of these small windrows and sifted the ash with his hand.

  The ash, according to Dr. Dvali, contained tiny fragments of broken machines.

  Not much remained of these machines, to Isaac's eyes, but he liked the grittiness of the ash and the way it pooled in his palm and slipped like talc between his fingers. He liked the way it compressed into a flaky lump when he squeezed it and dissolved into the air when he opened his fist.

  The ash glittered. In fact it glowed. That wasn't exactly the right word, Isaac knew. It wasn't the sort of glow you could see with your eyes, and he understood that no one else in the compound could see it the way he did. It was a different kind of glow, differently perceived. He thought perhaps Sulean Moi would be able to explain, if he could find a way to pose the question.

  Isaac had a lot of questions he wanted to ask Sulean. But she had been busy since the ashfall, often in conference with the adults, and he had to wait his turn.

  At dinner Isaac noticed that when the adults discussed the ashfall or its origins they tended to direct their questions to Sulean Moi, which surprised him, because for years he had assumed the adults with whom he lived were more or less all-knowing.

  Certainly they were wiser than average people. He could not say this by direct experience—Isaac had never met any average people—but he had seen them in videos and read about them in books. Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely. Here in the compound, the talk was occasionally intense but the arguments never drew blood. Everyone was wise (or seemed to be), everyone was calm (or struggled to give that impression), and, except for Isaac, everyone was old.