"You have a lot of faith in this woman—Diane, you said her name was?"
"Not faith exactly She needs to know about Tomas. She might be able to do something to help him. And she's been hooked into the local Fourth network for a long time—it's even possible she knows something about your father."
She had asked him how long he had been connected with Fourths. Not connected, exactly, he said. But this Diane woman trusted him, and he had done favors for her in the past. It had been Diane, apparently, who suggested Turk's charter business as a way of getting Sulean Moi to the mountains as discreetly as possible. More than that Turk did not know; had not wanted to know.
Lise looked again at the windowsill, the dust. "Lately I feel like it's all connected. Every thing weird that's been happening—the ash, Tomas, whatever's going on out west…"
The news broadcasts had begun reporting on the earthquake that had temporarily shut down the oil complexes of the Rub al-Khali.
"It's not necessarily connected," Turk said. "It's just triple-strange."
"What?"
"Something Tomas used to say. Weirdness comes in clusters. Like this time we were crewing a freighter in the Strait of Malacca. One day we had engine trouble and had to anchor for repairs. Next day freakish weather, a monsoon nobody'd predicted. Day after that the sky was clear but we were hosing Malay pirates off the deck. Once things get strange, Tomas used to say, you can pretty much count on triple-strange."
How comforting, Lise thought.
* * * * *
They shared a bed that night but they didn't make love. Both of them were tired and both of them, Lise thought, were coming to terms with the truth that this wasn't a tent by a mountain lake and they weren't having a harmless weekend adventure. Larger forces had been engaged. People had been hurt. And, thinking about her father, she began to wonder whether he might have stumbled into some similar wonderland of triple-strangeness. Maybe his disappearance had not been selfish or even voluntary: maybe he'd been abducted, like Turk's friend Tomas, by anonymous men in an unmarked van.
Turk was asleep as soon as he hit the mattress, typically. Nevertheless it was good to lie beside him, to feel his bulk at her side. He had showered before bed and the smell of soap and maleness emanated from him like a benevolent aura. Had Brian ever smelled like that?
Not that she could recall. Brian had no particular smell beyond the chemical tang of whatever deodorant he happened to be using. Probably took some small degree of pride in being odor-free.
No, that wasn't fair. There was more to Brian than that. Brian believed in an ordered life. That didn't make him a monster or a villain, and she couldn't believe he had been personally involved in tracking her movements or abducting Tomas. That wasn't playing by the book. Brian always played by the book.
Not necessarily a bad thing. If it made him less adventurous than Turk, it also made him more reliable. Brian would never fly a plane across a mountain or hire himself out as an able-bodied seaman on some rust-riddled merchant vessel. Nor would he break a promise or violate an oath. Which was why it had been so hard to negotiate the conclusion of their hasty and unwise marriage. Lise had met Brian when she was doing a journalism degree at Columbia and he was a junior functionary in the New York offices of the DGS. It was his gentleness and his sympathy that had won her over, and she had only belatedly understood that Brian would always be at her side but never quite on her side—that in the end he was one more in the chorus of voices advising her to ignore her own history because its lacunae might conceal some unbearable truth.
But he had loved her, innocently, doggedly. Claimed he still did. She opened her eyes and saw her phone where she had left it on the bedside table, faintly glowing. It had already registered several attempted calls from Brian. She had answered none of them. That was also unfair. Necessary, maybe. She was willing to take Turk's word on that. But not fair, and not kind. Brian deserved better.
* * * * *
By morning a lane had been opened and they drove north for another four hours, passing buses, jitneys painted like circus caravans, logging trucks, freight trucks, tank trucks loaded with refined oil or gasoline, until Turk turned west on one of the poorly-maintained side roads that diced through this part of the country like the lines on an old mans palm.
And suddenly they were in the wilderness. The Equatorian forest closed on them like a mouth. It was only here, away from the city and the farms and refineries and busy harbors, that Lise felt the alienness of this world, the intrinsic and ancient strangeness that had fascinated her father. The towering trees and dense, ferny undergrowth—plants for which Lise did not know the folk names, much less their provisional binomials—were supposedly related to terrestrial life: their DNA contained evidence of terrestrial ancestry. The planet had been stocked and seeded by the Hypothetical, supposedly to make it habitable for human beings. But the plans of the Hypothetical were long-term, to say the least. They calculated events in the billions of years. Evolution must be a perceptible event to them.
Maybe they couldn't even directly experience events as brief, in their eyes—if they had eyes—as a human life. Lise found that idea oddly comforting. She could see and feel things that for the Hypotheticals must be vanishingly evanescent: things as commonplace as the swaying of these strange trees above the road and the sunlight that speckled their shadows on the forest floor. That was a gift, she thought. Our mortal genius.
The sun tracked through finely-feathered or fernlike leaves. The underbrush was populated with wildlife, much of which had not (even yet) learned to fear human beings. She caught glimpses of jack dogs, a striped ghoti, a flock of spidermice, the names usually referring to some Earthly animal although the resemblance was often fanciful. There were insects, too, humming or whining in the emerald shadows. Worst were the carrion wasps, not dangerous but big and foul-smelling. Gnats, which looked exactly like the gnats that used to hover in shady places back home, swarmed among the mossy tree trunks.
Turk drove with close attention to the unpaved road. Fortunately the dustfall here had been light and the canopy of the forest had absorbed most of it. When the driving was critical Turk was silent. On the straightaways, he asked about her father. She had discussed this with him before, but that had been before the dustfall and the strange events of the last few days.
"How old were you exactly when your father disappeared?"
"Fifteen." A young fifteen. Naive, and clinging to American fashions as a rebuke to the world into which she had been unwillingly imported. Braces on her teeth, for God's sake.
"The authorities take it seriously?"
"How do you mean?"
"Just, you know, he wouldn't be the first guy to walk out on his family. No offense."
"He wasn't the type to walk out on us. I know everybody says that in cases like this. 'It was so unexpected.' And I was the loyal, naive daughter—I couldn't imagine him doing anything bad or thoughtless. But it's not just me. He was fully engaged in his work at the university. If he was leading a double life I don't know where he found the time for it."
"Supporting his family on a teacher's salary?"
"We had money from my mother's side."
"So I guess it wasn't hard to get the attention of the Provisional Government when he disappeared."
"We had ex-Interpol men interviewing everybody, an open police file, but nothing ever came of it."
"So your family contacted Genomic Security."
"No. They contacted us."
Turk nodded and looked thoughtful while he maneuvered the vehicle through a shallow washout. A three-wheeled motorcycle passed in the opposite direction—balloon tires, high carriage, a basket of vegetables strapped to the rear rack. The driver, some skinny local, glanced at them incuriously.
"Anybody find that odd," Turk asked, "that Genomic Security came calling?"
"My father was researching Fourth activity in the New World, among other things, so they were aware of him. He'd had talks with them before."
> "Researching Fourths for what purpose?"
"'Personal interest," she said, cringing at how incriminating that sounded. "Really, it was part of his whole fascination with the post-Spin world—how people were adapting to it. And I think he was convinced the Martians knew more about the Hypotheticals than they included in their Archives, and maybe some of that knowledge had been passed around by Fourths along with the chemical and biological stuff."
"But the Genomic Security people didn't turn up anything either."
"No. They kept the file open for a while longer, or so they claimed, but in the end they didn't have any more luck than the PG had. The conclusion they obviously reached was that his research had gotten the better of him—that at some point he was offered the longevity treatment and took it."
"Okay, but that doesn't mean he had to disappear."
"People do, though. They take the treatment and assume a new identity. It means not so many awT kward questions when your peers start to die off and you still look like the picture in your grad book. The idea of starting a new life is attractive for a lot of people, especially if they're in some kind of personal or financial bind. But my father wasn't like that."
"People can carry around a fear of death and never let on, Lise. They just live with it. But if you show them a way out, who knows how they might behave?"
Or who they might leave behind. Lise was silent for a moment. Over the hum of the car's engine she heard a minor-key melody trilling from the high canopy of the forest, some bird she couldn't identify.
She said, "When I came back here I was prepared for that possibility. I'm far from convinced that he just walked out on us, but I'm not omniscient, I can't know for sure what was going on in his mind. If that's what happened, okay. I'll deal with it. I don't want revenge, and if he did take the treatment—if he's living somewhere under a new name—I can deal with that, too. I don't need to see him. I just need to know. Or find somebody who does."
"Like the woman in the photograph. Sulean Moi."
"The woman you flew to Kubelick's Grave. Or like this Diane, who sent her to you."
"I don't know how much Diane can tell you. More than I can, anyhow. I made it a point not to ask questions. The Fourths I've met… they're easy to like, they don't strike me as sinister, and as far as I can tell they're not doing anything to put the rest of us in danger. Contrary to all that Genomic Security bullshit you hear on the news, they're just people."
"People who know how to keep secrets."
"I'll grant you that," Turk said.
* * * * *
Moments later they passed a crude wooden sign on which the name of the village had been written in several languages: desa new sarandib town, in approximate English. Half a mile farther on a skinny kid, not much more than twenty years old, Lise guessed, if that, stepped into the road and waved them down. He came to Turk's side of the car and leaned into the window.
"Going to Sarandib?" The kid's shrill voice made him seem even younger than he looked. His breath smelled like rancid cinnamon.
"Headed that way," Turk said.
"You got business there?"
"Yeah."
"What kind of business?"
"Personal business."
"You want to buy ky? Not a good place to buy ky."
Ky was the hallucinogenic wax produced by some kind of native hive insect, lately a big deal in the Port Magellan clubs. "I don't want any ky. Thanks anyhow." Turk stepped on the gas—not hard enough to injure the kid, who ducked away promptly, but hard enough to win him a nasty look. Lise glanced back and saw the kid still standing in the road, glaring after them. She asked Turk what that was all about.
"Lately you get townies driving around the boondocks trying to score a gram or two, getting robbed, getting into trouble."
"You think he wanted to sell us some?"
"I don't know what he wanted."
But the kid must have had a phone on him, and he must have called ahead, because as soon as they passed the first few inhabited shacks along the road and before they reached the town center the local gendarmerie, two big men wearing improvised uniforms and driving a years-old utility truck, forced Turk's vehicle to the side of the road. Lise sat still and let Turk do the talking.
"You have business here?" one of the men asked.
"We need to see Ibu Diane."
Long pause. "No such person here."
"Okay," Turk said. "I must have made a wrong turn. We'll stop and have lunch, and then, since there's no such person, we'll be on our way."
The cop—if you could call him that, Lise thought, because these smalltown constabularies had no standing with the Provisional Government—gave Turk a long sour look. "You have a name?"
"Turk Findley."
"You can get a tea across the road. I don't know about lunch." He held up a single finger. "One hour."
* * * * *
They were seated at a table that appeared to have been made from an enormous discarded cable spool, sweating in the afternoon heat and drinking tea from chipped ceramic cups while the other patrons of the cafe avoided their eyes, when the curtains parted and a woman entered the room.
An old, old woman. Her hair was the color and texture of dandelion fluff, her skin so pale that it seemed in danger of tearing. Her eyes were unusually large and blue, framed inside the stark contours of her skull. She came to the table and said, "Hello, Turk."
"Diane."
"You know, you really shouldn't have come back here. This is a bad time."
"I know," Turk said. "Tomas was arrested, or kidnapped or something."
The woman displayed no reaction beyond a barely-perceptible flinch.
"And we have a couple of questions to ask, if that's okay."
"Since you're here, we may as well talk." She pulled up a chair and said, "Introduce me to your friend."
This woman is a Fourth, Lise thought. Maybe that was why she generated this odd, fragile authority, to which strong men apparently deferred. Turk introduced her as Ibu Diane Dupree, using the Minang honorific, and Lise accepted the woman's small, brittle hand. It was like handling some unexpectedly muscular small bird.
"Lise," Diane said. "And you have a question for me?"
"Show her the picture," Turk said.
So Lise fumbled nervously in her pack until she came up with the envelope containing the photo of Sulean Moi.
Diane opened the envelope and looked at the photograph for a long moment. Then she handed it back. Her expression was mournful.
"So can we talk?" Turk asked.
"I think we have to. But somewhere more private than this. Follow me."
* * * * *
Ibu Diane led them away from the cafe, down a lane between a makeshift grocery store and a wooden municipal building with buffalo-horn eaves, past a gas station where the pumps were painted carnival colors. Lise would have expected a slow walk, given Diane's age and the heat of the day, but the older woman moved briskly and at one point reached out and took Lise's hand to urge her along. It was a strange gesture and it made Lise feel like a little girl.
She took them to a cinderblock bunker on which a multilingual sign announced, in its English portion, medical clinic. Lise said, "Are you a doctor?"
"I'm not even a registered nurse. But my husband was a physician and he cared for these people for years, long before the Red Crescent showed up in any of these villages. I learned basic medicine from him, and the villagers wouldn't let me retire after he died. I can take care of minor injuries and sicknesses, administer antibiotics, salve a rash, bind a wound. For anything more serious I send people to the clinic down the highway. Have a seat."
They sat in the reception area of Diane's clinic. It was fitted out like a village parlor with wicker furniture and wooden slat blinds clattering in the breeze. Everything was painted or upholstered in faded green. There was a watercolor picture of the ocean on one wall.
Ibu Diane smoothed her plain white muslin dress. "May I ask how you came to posses
s a photograph of this woman?"
Get to the point, in other words. "Her name is Sulean Moi."
"I know."
"You know her?"
"I've met her. I recommended Turk's charter service to her."
"Tell her about your father," Turk suggested, and Lise did. And she brought the story up to date: how she had come back determined to learn more about the disappearance; Brian Gately's connection to Genomic Security; how he had run her old snapshot of Sulean Moi through the Agency's facial-recognition software and learned that the woman had re-entered Port Magellan only months earlier.
"That must have been the trigger," Diane said.
"Trigger?"
"Your inquiries—or your ex-husband's—probably brought Ms. Moi to someone's attention back in the States. Genomic Security has been looking for Sulean Moi for a long time."
"Why? What's so important about her?"
"I'll tell you what I know, but would you answer some questions of mine first? It might clarify matters."
"Go ahead," Lise said.
"How did you meet Turk?"
"I hired him to fly me over the mountains. One of my father's colleagues was known to have visited Kubelick's Grave. At the time it was the only lead I had. So I hired Turk… but we never made it across the mountains."
"Bad weather," Turk said, and coughed into his hand.
"I see."
"Then," Lise said, "when Brian told me Sulean Moi had chartered a small plane just a few weeks before—"
"How did Brian know this? Oh, I suppose he arranged a search of the air traffic manifests. Or something like that."
Lise said, "It was a lead I intended to follow up… although Brian urged me not to. Even then, he thought I was getting in too deep."
"While Turk, of course, was fearless."
"That's me," Turk said. "Fearless."
"But I hadn't got around to it, and then there was the ashfall, and then—"
"And then," Turk said, "Tomas got himself disappeared, and we found out Lise was being followed and her phone service was tapped. And I'm sorry, Diane, but all I could think of was to come here. I was hoping you could—"
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