Axis s-2

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The bus stopped periodically at concrete-block terminals and storefront depots off the highway, a world populated by forlorn men and flickering lights. Then the city was behind them and there was only the highway and the horizonless dark of the sea.

  Diane Dupree came across the aisle and took the seat next to Lise.

  "Turk thinks you need to take the risk more seriously," the old woman said.

  "Did he tell you that?"

  "I surmised."

  "I do take it seriously."

  "The phone was a bad idea. In all likelihood the call can't be traced, but who knows what technology the police or Genomic Security might bring to bear? It's better not to make assumptions."

  "I do take it seriously," Lise insisted again, "it's just…"

  But she couldn't finish, couldn't find the words for the sudden awareness of exactly how much of life as she had known it was slipping away under the wheels of the bus.

  By the time the bus reached a depot near Arundji's airport Turk had stopped gnashing his teeth and had begun to look a little sheepish. He gave Lise an apologetic sidelong glance, which she ignored.

  "It's a good half mile to Arundji's," he said. "You two up for the walk?"

  "Yes," Diane said. Lise just nodded.

  The road from the depot was rural and sparsely lit. As they walked Lise listened to the crackle of her footsteps on the barely-paved verge of the road, the rush of wind raking scrubby, treeless lots. Off in the high grass some insect buzzed—she could have mistaken it for a cricket except for the mournful tone of its creaking, like a disconsolate man running his thumbnail over the teeth of a comb.

  They approached the fenced territory of Arundji's at a back entrance, away from the main gate. Turk fished a key out of his pocket and swung open a chain-link gate, saying, "You might want to stay inconspicuous from here on in. The terminal shuts down after ten o'clock, but we've got a maintenance crew on site and security guards out where they're grading the new runway."

  Lise said, "Don't you have a right to be here?"

  "Sort of. But it would be best not to attract too much attention."

  She followed Turk and Diane to an aluminum-sheet hangar, one of dozens lined up at the rear of the terminal. Its huge doors were chained shut and Turk said, "I wasn't kidding about that crowbar. I'll need something to spring this."

  "You're locked out of your own hangar?"

  "Kind of a funny story." He walked off, apparently looking for a tool.

  Use was sweaty and her calves ached from the walk and she needed to pee. She no longer owned a change of clothes.

  "Forgive Turk," Diane said. "It isn't that he distrusts you. He's afraid for you. He—"

  "Are you going to do this from now on? Make these guru-like pronouncements? Because it's getting kind of tiresome."

  Diane stared, wide-eyed. Then, somewhat to Lise's relief, she laughed. Lise said, "I mean, I'm sorry, but—"

  "No! Don't apologize. You're absolutely right. Its one of the hazards of great age, the temptation to pronounce judgments."

  "I know what Turk is afraid of. Turk is burning his bridges behind him. My bridges are still there. I have a life I can go back to."

  "Nevertheless," Diane said, "here you are." She smiled again. "Speaks the guru."

  * * * * *

  Turk came back with a piece of rebar from the construction site and used it to lever off the latch, which was flimsier than the padlock attached to it and came away from the door with a concussive twang. He rolled open the big steel doors and switched on the interior light.

  His plane was inside. His twin-engine Skyrex. Lise remembered this aircraft from their abortive flight across the mountains—ages ago, it seemed.

  Lise and Diane used the grimy employees' restroom while Turk did his preflight checks. When Lise came back from the rear of the hangar she found him in a heated discussion with a uniformed man. The man in the uniform was short, balding, and conspicuously unhappy. "I have to call Mr. Arundji," he said, "you know that, Turk," and Turk said, "Give me a few minutes, that's all I ask—haven't I bought enough rounds over the last few years to earn me that?"

  "I'm advising you that this is not allowed."

  "Fine. No problem. Fifteen minutes, then you can call anybody you want."

  "I'm giving you notice here. Nobody can say I let you get away with this."

  "Nobody'll say any such thing."

  "Fifteen minutes. More like ten." The guard turned and walked away.

  * * * * *

  In the old days, Turk said, an airport was anywhere in Equatoria you could carve out a landing strip. A little four-seater prop plane would get you places you couldn't otherwise go, and nobody worried about filing a flight plan. But that had changed under the relentless pressure of the Provisional Government and the air-travel conglomerates. Big business and big government would drive places like Arundji's into the ground, Turk said, sooner or later. Even now, he said, it wasn't exactly legal to be making this kind of after-hours departure from a closed strip. Probably it would cost him his license. But he was being squeezed out anyhow. Nothing to lose, he said. Nothing much. Then he pivoted the plane onto a vacant runway and started his takeoff run.

  This was Turk doing what he claimed to do best, Lise thought: putting on his shoes and walking away from something. He believed in the redemptive power of distant horizons. It was a faith she couldn't bring herself to share.

  The aircraft left the ground swaying like a kite, its huge feathered props pulling them toward the moonlit mountains, the engine purring. Ibu Diane peered out the window and murmured something about "how much quieter these things are than they used to be—oh, years ago now, years ago."

  Lise watched the arc of the coast tilt to starboard and the distant smudge of Port Magellan grow even smaller. She waited patiently for Turk to say something, maybe even to apologize, but he didn't speak—only pointed once, abruptly; and Lise looked up in time to see the white-hot trail of a shooting star flash over the peaks and passes of the mountains toward the emptiness of the western desert.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Brian Gately wasn't prepared for the violent image that popped out of his mailbox that morning. It provoked an unpleasant memory. In the summer of his thirteenth year Brian had done volunteer work at the Episcopal church where his family worshipped. He had not been a particularly devout teenager—doctrinal matters confused him, he avoided Bible Study—but the church, both the institution and the physical building, possessed a reassuring weight, a quality he later learned to call "gravitas." The church put a sensible boundary on things. That was why his parents, who had lived through the economic and religious uncertainties of the Spin, went to church every week, and that was why Brian liked it. That, and the pinewood smell of the newly-built chapel, and the way the stained-glass windows broke the morning light into colors. So he had volunteered for summer work and had spent a few drowsy days sweeping the chapel or opening doors for elderly parishioners or running errands for the pastor or the choirmaster, and in mid-August he was recruited to help set up tables for the annual picnic.

  The suburb in which Brian lived was graced with a number of well-maintained parks and wooded ravines. The annual church picnic—an institution so quaint the words themselves had a sort of horse-and-buggy aura about them—was held in the largest of these parks. More than a picnic, it was (according to the flyer in the Sunday bulletin) a Day of Family Communion, and there were plenty of families there to commune with, three generations in some cases, and Brian was kept busy laying out plastic tablecloths and lugging coolers of ice and soft drinks until the event was well under way, hot dogs circulating freely, kids he barely knew tossing Frisbees, toddlers underfoot, and it was the perfect day for it, sunny but not too hot, a breeze to carry off the smoke of the grills. Even at the age of thirteen Brian had appreciated the slightly narcotic atmosphere of the picnic, an afternoon suspended in time.

  Then his friends Lyle and Kev showed up and tempted him away from the adul
ts. Down through the woods there was a creek where stones might be skipped or tadpoles captured. Brian begged a break from his volunteer work and went off with them into the green shade of the forest. Down by the verge of the creek, which flowed in a shallow ribbon over gravel tilled by ancient glaciers, they found not just stones to throw but, surprisingly, a habitation: a scrap of canvas tent, all awry, and plastic grocery bags, rusted cans (pork and beans, animal food), empty bottles and brown flasks, a corroded shopping cart, and finally, between two oak trees whose roots had grown out of the ground and twined together like a fist, a bundle of old clothes—which, examined more closely, was not a bundle of old clothes at all, but a dead man.

  The dead homeless man must have been there for days, undiscovered. He looked both bloated, a tattered red cotton shirt stretched taut across his enormous belly, and shrunken, as if something essential had been sucked out of him. The exposed parts of him had been nibbled by animals, there were bugs on his milky-white eyes, and when the wind came around the smell was so bad that Brian's friend Kev turned and promptly vomited into the glassy water of the creek.

  The three of them ran back to the friendly part of the park and told Pastor Carlysle what they'd found, and that was the end of the picnic.

  The police were called, an ambulance came to retrieve the body, and the suddenly somber gathering broke up.

  Kev and Lyle, over the course of the next six months, stopped showing up for Sunday services, as if the church and dead man had become associated one with the other, but Brian had the opposite reaction. He believed in the protective power of the chapel, precisely because he had seen what lay beyond it. He had seen unhallowed death.

  He had seen death, and death shouldn't have surprised him: nevertheless he was shocked by what popped out of his mailbox twenty years later, within the sanctified walls of his office and the carefully-defined if crumbling boundaries of his adult life.

  Two days before he had received the brief, aborted phone call from Lise.

  It had come late in the late evening. Brian had been on his way home from one of those tedious consulate social nights, drinks at the ambassadors residence and small talk with the usual suspects. Brian didn't drink much but what he did drink went to his head, and he let his car do the driving on the way home. Slowly, then—the car was idiotically literal-minded about speed limits and restricted to the few streets with automated driving grids—but safely, he came back to the apartment he had once shared with Lise, with its attendant atmosphere of claustrophobia and something that might have been desperation had it been less comfortably furnished. He showered before bed, and as he toweled off he listened to the silence of the city night and thought: am I inside the circle or out of it?

  The phone rang as he turned out the lights. He put the slate wedge to his ear and registered her distant voice.

  He tried to warn her. She said things he didn't immediately understand.

  And then the connection was broken.

  * * * * *

  Probably he should have gone to Sigmund and Weil with this, but he didn't. Couldn't. The message was personal. It was meant for him and for him alone. Sigmund and Weil could get along without it. Early the next day he sat in his office thinking about Lise, his failed marriage. Then he picked up the phone and called Pieter Kirchberg, his contact at the Security and Law Enforcement Division of the UN Provisional Government.

  Kirchberg had done him a number of small favors in the past and Brian had done more than a few in return. The settled eastern coast of Equatoria was a United Nations protectorate, at least nominally, with a complicated set of laws established and constantly revised by international committees. The closest thing to a fully-established police force was Interpol, though blue-helmeted soldiers did most of the daily enforcement. The result was a bureaucracy that created more paperwork than justice and existed mainly to smooth over conflicts between hostile national interests. To get anything done, you had to know people. Kirchberg was one of the people Brian knew.

  Kirchberg answered promptly and Brian listened to his inevitable complaints—the weather, the bullying oil cartels, his boneheaded underlings—before getting down to business. Finally, as Kirchberg wound down, he said, "I want to give you a name."

  "Fine," he said. "Just what I need. More work. Whose name?"

  "Tomas Ginn." He spelled it.

  "And why are you interested in this person?"

  "Departmental matter," Brian said.

  "Some desperate American criminal? A better-baby salesman, a renegade organ-vendor?"

  "Something like that."

  "I'll run it when I can. You owe me a drink."

  "Anytime," Brian said.

  He didn't tell Sigmund and Weil about that, either.

  * * * * *

  It was the following morning that the photograph rolled out of his printer, along with an unsigned note from Kirchberg.

  Brian looked at the photograph, then put it face down on his desk, then picked it up again.

  He had seen worse things. What he thought about immediately and involuntarily was the body he had discovered beyond the outer limits of the church picnic a quarter of a century ago, the body which had lain among the exposed roots of two trees with its eyes gone milky white and its skin traversed by feckless ants. He felt the same involuntary lurch of his stomach.

  The photograph was of an old man's body broken on a salt-encrusted rock. The marks on the body might have been massive bruises or simply the effects of decomposition. But there was no mistaking the bullet wound in the forehead.

  Kirchberg's unsigned note said: Washed up near South. Point two days ago; no papers but identified as Tomas W. Ginn (U.S. Merchant Marine DNA database). One of yours?

  Mr. Ginn had wandered outside the boundaries of the picnic, it seemed. And so, he thought with sickly dismay, had Lise.

  In the afternoon he called Pieter Kirchberg again. This time Kirchberg was less chatty.

  "I got what you sent me," Brian said.

  "No need to thank me."

  "One of ours, you said. What did you mean by that?"

  "I'd just as soon not discuss it."

  "An American, you mean?"

  No answer. One of yours. So, yes, an American, or was Pieter suggesting that Tomas Ginn belonged to Genomic Security? Or that his death did? Maybe he meant one of your killings.

  "Is there anything else?" Kirchberg asked. "Because I have a lot of work waiting for me…"

  "One more favor," Brian said. "If you don't mind, Pieter. Another name."

  PART THREE — INTO THE WEST

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Before he could say anything more—in Martian or in English—the boy Isaac stopped speaking and fell into a sleep from which he could not be aroused. The Fourths continued to tend to his needs but were unable to treat or diagnose his condition. His vital signs were stable and he seemed to be in no immediate danger.

  Sulean Moi sat with the child in his room as the sun shone on the desert beyond the window, clocking shadows across the alkaline grit. Two days passed. One morning, as occasionally happened this time of year, a storm blew out of the mountains, a shelf of coal-black clouds that produced much lightning and thunder but only a little rain. By sunset the storm had gone and the sky in its wake was a radiant, purified turquoise. The air smelled fresh and astringent. Still the boy slept.

  Out in the western wastes spindly plants were provoked by the brief rain to flower. Perhaps other things, too, bloomed in the emptiness. Things like Isaac's ocular rose.

  Outwardly calm, Sulean was terrified.

  The boy had spoken with Esh's voice.

  She wondered if this was what religious texts meant when they talked about trembling in the presence of God. The Hypothetical weren't gods—if she understood what that simple but strangely elastic word meant—but they were just as powerful and just as inscrutable. She didn't believe they possessed conscious intent, and even the word "they" was a misnomer, a crude anthropomorphism. But when "they" manifeste
d themselves, the natural human response was to cower and hide—the instinctive reaction of the rabbit to the fox, the fox to the hunter.

  Twice in a lifetime, Sulean thought: that's my special burden, to witness this twice in a lifetime.

  At times she napped in the chair next to the bed where Isaac lay, his chest rising and falling with the cadence of his breath. Often she dreamed—more fiercely and deeply than she had dreamed since she was a child—and in her dreams she was in a different desert, where the horizon was close and the sky a dark and penetrating blue. In this desert there were rocks and sand and also a number of brightly-colored tubular or angular growths, like a madman's hallucinations come to life. And of course there was the boy. Not Isaac. The other boy, the first one. He was more frail than Isaac, his skin was darker, but his eyes, like Isaac's, had become gold-flecked and strange. He was lying where he had fallen in a stupor of exhaustion, and although Sulean was in the company of a number of grown men she was the first who dared approach him.

  The boy opened his eyes. He could not otherwise move, because his legs, arms, and torso had been bound with pliant ropes or vines. The strange growths had pinned him there, and some of them had pierced his body.

  Surely he must be dead. How could anyone survive such an impalement?

  But he opened his eyes. He opened his eyes and whispered, "Sulean —''

  * * * * *

  She woke in the chair next to Isaac's bed, sweating in the dry heat. Mrs. Rebka had come into the room and was staring at her.

  "We're having a meeting in the common room," Mrs. Rebka said. "We would like you to be there, Ms. Moi."

  "All right Yes."

  "Has his condition changed?"

  "No," Sulean said. Thinking: Not yet.