Axis s-2

by Robert Charles Wilson

  * * * * *

  Really, he thought, all we know about each other is a handful of stories and thumbnail sketches: the short version of everything. Before tonight, it was all that had seemed necessary. Their best conversations had been wordless. Suddenly that wasn't enough.

  "Where are you parked?" she asked.

  "The lot around the corner."

  "Me too. But I don't know if I should use my car. It might be tagged with a tracking device or something."

  "More likely they bugged mine. If they were following me this morning I would have led them straight to Tomas." And Tomas, an old man living hand-to-mouth out in the Flats, would have been an easy target. A quick blood test—no doubt forcibly applied—would have revealed him as a Fourth. And then all bets were off.

  "Why would they do that, though? Why take him away?"

  "To interrogate him. I can't think of any other reason."

  "They think he knows something?"

  "If they're serious they would have given him a hemo test as soon as they were through the door."

  "No. Genomic Security—if we're assuming that's who's responsible—doesn't work like that. Even here, there are limits. You can't steal people away and interrogate them for no reason."

  "Well, I guess they thought they had a reason. But, Lise, what you read about Genomic Security in press releases isn't the whole story. That agency's bigger than Brian's little piece of it. When they break up a cloning ring or bust some longevity scam it makes the news, but they do other things that aren't so public."

  "You know this for a fact?"

  "It's what I've heard."

  "From Fourths?"

  "Well—from Tomas, for example."

  "Unofficial kidnappings. This is insane."

  To which he had no answer.

  "I don't want to go back to my apartment," she said. "And I guess it wouldn't be any safer at your place."

  "And I haven't dusted," Turk said, just to see a ghost of a smile pass across her lips. "We could rent a room."

  "That doesn't guarantee they won't find us."

  "If they want us, Lise, they can probably have us. It may be possible to change that, but for now we're better off assuming they know where we are. But I doubt they'll do anything drastic, at least not right away. It's not you they're after, and you're not the kind of person they can just pick up and work over. So what do you want to do, Lise? What's your next step?"

  "I want to do what I should have done months ago."

  "What's that?"

  "I want to find Avram Dvali."

  * * * * *

  They walked along the undulating pavement toward the harbor lights and the faint clang of cargo containers cycling through the quays. The streets were empty and lonesome, and the remnant dust caked on curbs and walls muffled the sound of their footsteps.

  Turk said, "You want to go to Kubelick's Grave."

  "Yes. All the way this time. Will you take me there?"

  "Maybe. But there's someone we ought to talk to first. And, Lise, there are things you ought to do if you're serious about this. Let someone you trust know where you are and what's happening. Take out enough cash to keep you for a while and then don't touch your e-credit. Things like that."

  She gave him that half-smile again. "What did you do, take a course in criminal behavior?"

  "It comes naturally."

  "Another thing. I can afford the time and money it takes to go underground for a while. But you have work to do, you have a business to run."

  "That's not a problem."

  I'm serious."

  "So am I."

  And that's the difference between us, Turk thought. She had a purpose: she was committed to finishing this post-mortem on her father's disappearance. He was just putting on his shoes and walking. Not for the first time, and in all likelihood not for the last.

  He wondered if she knew that about him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The senior Genomic Security operatives who had lately arrived from the States were named Sigmund and Weil, and Brian Gatelys teeth clenched every time the two men came to the DGS offices at the consulate.

  They came in this morning not half an hour after Brian arrived for work. He felt his molars grinding.

  Sigmund was tall, sepulchral, flinty Weil was six inches shorter and stout enough that he probably bought his pants at a specialty store. Weil was capable of smiling. Sigmund was not.

  They advanced toward Brian where he stood by the water cooler. "Mr. Gately," Sigmund said, and Weil said, "Can we talk to you privately?"

  "In my office."

  Brian's office wasn't large but it had a window overlooking the consulate's walled garden. The cubicle was equipped with a filing cabinet, a desk of native wood, enough floating memory to accommodate the Library of Congress a few times over, and a plastic ficus. The desk was covered with correspondence between Genomic Security and the Provisional Government, one small tributary of the information stream that circulated between the two domains like an eternal sludgy Nile. Brian sat in his customary chair. Weil plumped down in the guest chair and Sig-mund stood with his back to the door like a carrion bird, sinister in his patience.

  "You talked to your ex-wife," Weil said.

  "I did. I told her what you asked me to tell her."

  "It doesn't seem to have done any good. Do I have to tell you she reconnected with Turk Findley?"

  "No," Brian said flatly. "I don't suppose you do."

  "They're together right now," Sigmund said. Sigmund was a man of few words, all of them unwelcome. "In all probability. Her and him."

  "But the point," Weil said, "is that we can't currently locate either of them."

  Brian wasn't sure whether to believe that. Weil and Sigmund represented the Executive Action Committee of the Department of Genomic Security. Much of what the Executive Action Committee did was highly classified, hence the stuff of legend. Back home, they could write themselves constitutional waivers with more or less automatic judicial approval. Here in Equatoria—in the overlapping magisteria of the United Nations Provisional Government, contending national interests, and monied oil powers—their work was at least theoretically more constrained.

  Brian wasn't an idealist. He knew there were levels and echelons of Genomic Security to which he would never be admitted, realms where policy was made and rules were defined. But on the scale at which he worked Brian thought he performed useful if unexciting work. Criminals often fled from the U.S. to Equatoria, criminals whose misdeeds fell under the aegis of Genomic Security—cloning racketeers, peddlers of false or lethal longevity treatments, Fourth cultists of a radical stripe, purveyors of "enhancements" to couples willing to pay for superior children. Brian did not pursue or apprehend those criminals, but what he did do—liaising with the Provisional Government, smoothing ruffled feathers when jurisdictional disputes arose—was essential to their apprehension. It was tricky, the relationship between a quasi-police organization attached to a national consulate and the UN-sponsored local government. You had to be polite. You had to make certain reciprocal gestures. You couldn't just wade in and offend everybody.

  Although apparently these guys could. And that was disappointing, because Brian believed in the rule of law. The inevitably imperfect, confusing, grindingly inefficient, occasionally corrupt, but absolutely essential rule of law. That without which we are no better than the beasts, etc. He had run his office that way: carefully, cleanly.

  And now here came Sigmund and Weil, the tall one sour as Angostina bitters and the short one hard but hale, like a velvet-wrapped bowling ball, to remind him that at altitudes more vertiginous than his own the law could be tailored to suit a circumstance.

  "You've already been a big help," Weil said.

  "Well, I hope so. I want to be."

  "Putting us in touch with the right people at the Provisional Government. And of course this thing with Lise Adams. The fact that you had a personal relationship with this woman—I mean, 'awkward' is hardly th
e word for it."

  "Thank you for noticing," Brian said, stupidly grateful even though he knew he was being played.

  "And I can assure you again that we don't want to arrest her or even necessarily talk to her directly. Lise is definitely not the target in this case."

  "You're looking for the woman in the photograph."

  "Which of course is why we don't want Lise getting underfoot. We hoped you could get that idea across to her…"

  "I tried."

  "I know, and we appreciate it. But let me tell you how this works, Brian, so you understand what our concerns are. Because when your image search came up on our database, it definitely raised eyebrows. You said Lise explained to you why she's interested in Sulean Moi—"

  "Sulean Moi was seen with Lise's father before he disappeared, and she wasn't connected to the university or anyone else in the family's social circle. Given Lise's father's interest in Fourths, it's an obvious connection to make. Lise suspects the woman was a recruiter or something."

  "The truth is a little more bizarre. You deal with Fourths on a regular basis, legally speaking. No surprises for you there. But the longevity treatment is only one of the medical modifications that were brought to Earth by our Martian cousins."

  Brian nodded.

  "We're after something a little bigger than the usual Fourth cultist here," Weil said. "Details are scarce, and I'm not a scientist, but it involves a biologically mediated attempt at communicating with the Hypothetical."

  Like many of his generation Brian tended to wince at mention of the Hypotheticals, or for that matter the Spin. The Spin had ended before he was old enough to attend school, and the Hypotheticals were simply one of the more abstruse facts of daily life, an important but airy abstraction, like electromagnetism or the motions of the tides.

  But like everyone else he had been raised and educated by Spin survivors, people who believed they had lived through the most momentous turning point in human history. And maybe they had. The aftershocks of the Spin—wars, religious movements and countermovements, a generalized human insecurity and a corrosive global cynicism—were still shaping the world. Mars was an inhabited planet and mankind had been admitted into a labyrinth as large as the sky itself. All these changes had no doubt been confounding to those who endured them and would be felt for centuries to come.

  But they had also become a license for an entire generation's lunacy, and that was less easy for Brian to excuse. Many millions of otherwise rational men and women had reacted to the Spin with a shocking display of irrationality, mutual distrust, and outright viciousness. Now those same people felt entitled to the respect of anyone Brian's age or younger.

  They didn't deserve it. Lunacy wasn't a virtue and decency didn't boast. "Decency," in fact, was what Brian's generation had been left to rebuild. Decency, trust, and a certain decorum in human behavior.

  The Hypotheticals were the causal agent behind the Spin: Why would anyone want to communicate with them? What would that even mean? And how could it be achieved by a biological modification, even a Martian one?

  "What this technology does," Sigmund said, "is modify a human nervous system to make it sensitive to the signals the Hypotheticals use to communicate among themselves. Basically, they create a kind of human intermediary. A communicant who can translate between our species and whatever the Hypothetical are."

  "They actually did this?"

  "The Martians won't say. It may have been attempted on their planet, maybe more than once. But we believe the technology, like the longevity treatment, was carried to Earth by Wun Ngo Wen and released into the general population."

  "So why haven't I heard more about it?"

  "Because it's not something universally desirable, like an extra forty years of life. If our intelligence is correct, it's lethal if attempted on an adult human being. It may be what killed Jason Lawton, way back when."

  "So what good is it if it's lethal?"

  "It may not be lethal," Weil said, "if the pharmaceuticals are delivered to a human being in utero. The developing embryo builds itself around the biotech. The human and the alien growing together."

  "Jesus," Brian said. "To do that to a child—"

  "It's profoundly unethical, obviously. You know, at the Department we spend a lot of time worrying about Fourths, about the harm that can come from cultists engineering changes in human biology. And that's a real, legitimate problem. But this is so much more shocking. Really, deeply… evil is the only word for it."

  "Has anybody actually done this on Earth?"

  "Well, that's what we're looking into. So far we have very little hard evidence or eyewitness testimony. But where we do, one person appears. Many names, but just one person, one face. You want to guess who that is?"

  The woman in the photograph. The woman who had been seen with Lise's father.

  "So Sulean Moi shows up on facial-recognition data from the docks at Port Magellan, and when we arrive to investigate we find Lise, who has a prior connection, has been going over this same ground, talking to her father's old colleagues and so forth. For perfectly legitimate reasons, granted. She's curious, it's a family mystery, she thinks knowing the truth would make her feel better. But that leaves us with a problem. Do we interfere with her? Do we let her go on doing what she's doing, and just sort of supervise? Do we warn her that she's in dangerous territory?"

  "Warning her didn't work," Brian said.

  "So we have to make use of her in some other way."

  "Make use of her?"

  "Instead of physically arresting her—which is what some of my superiors have been advocating—we think a wait-and-watch approach might be more informative in the long run. She's already connected with other persons of interest. One of them is Turk Findley."

  Turk Findley, the freelance pilot and general fuck-up. Bad as it was that Brian had not been able to sustain his marriage to Lise, how much worse that she had taken up with someone so wayward, dysfunctional, and generally useless to his fellow man? Turk Findley was another variety of fallout from the Spin, Brian thought. A maladapted human being. A purposeless drifter. Possibly something worse, if Sigmunds implication was correct.

  "You're saying Turk Findley has some connection to this elderly woman, apart from the fact that she once chartered a flight with him?"

  "Well, that's certainly suggestive right there. But Turk has other contacts almost as suspicious. Known and suspected Fourths. And he's a criminal. Did you know that? He left the United States with a warrant on him."

  "Warrant for what?"

  "He was a person of interest in a warehouse fire."

  "What are you telling me, he's an arsonist?"

  "The case lapsed, but he may have burned down his old man's business."

  "I thought his father was an oil man."

  "His father worked in Turkey at one time and had some connections with Aramco, but he made most of his money on an import business. Some kind of bad blood between the two, the old man's warehouse burns down, Turk skips the country. You can draw your own conclusions."

  It just gets worse, Brian thought. "So we have to get Lise away from him. She might be in danger."

  "We suspect she's been drawn into something she doesn't understand. We doubt she's under any kind of duress. She's cooperating with this man. It was probably Turk who told her to stop taking calls."

  "But you can find them, right?"

  "Sooner or later. But we're not magicians, we can't just conjure them out of the void."

  "Then tell me how I can help." Brian couldn't help adding, "If you'd been straight with me about this before I talked to her—"

  "Would you have done anything differently? We can't just hand out this kind of information. And neither can you, Brian. Just so you know. We're taking you into our confidence here. None of this is to be discussed except between you, me, and Sigmund."

  "Of course not, but—"

  "What we'd like you to do is keep trying to get in touch with her. She may be aware of
your calls even if she isn't answering them. She might eventually feel guilty or lonely and decide to talk to you."

  "And if she does?"

  "All we want right now is a clue to her location. If you can talk her into meeting you, with or without Turk, that would be even better."

  Much as he disliked the idea of handing her over to the Executive Action Committee, surely that was better than letting her get more deeply involved in some criminal enterprise. "I'll do what I can," Brian said.

  "Great." Weil grinned. "We appreciate that."

  The two men shook Brian's hand and left him alone in his office. He sat there a long time, thinking.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The up-coast roads hadn't been entirely cleared of the ashfall (or the muck it made when it mixed with rain), so Turk had to pull over at a truckstop and rent a room while the route was plowed at some critical switchback by the overworked road crews of the Provisional Government.

  The motel was a cinderblock barracks cut into the boundary of the forest, dwarfed by spire willows that leaned across the building like sorrowing giants. It was designed to cater to truckers and loggers, Lise gathered, not tourists. She ran her finger along the sill of their room's small window and showed Turk the line of dust.

  "Probably from last week," he said. "They don't spend a lot of money on housekeeping out this way."

  Dust of the gods, then. The debris of ancient Hypothetical constructions. That's what they were saying about it now. The video news was full of poorly-interpreted facts about the ashfall: fragments of things that might once have been machines, fragments of things that might once have been living organisms, molecular arrangements of unprecedented complexity.

  Lise could hear voices from the room next door arguing in what sounded like Filipino. She took out her phone, wanting another fix of the local broadcast news. Turk watched her closely and said, "Remember—"

  "No calls in or out. I know."

  "We should reach the village by this time tomorrow," Turk said, "as long as the road's cleared overnight. Then we might actually learn something."