Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Slowly Isaac had allowed Sulean Moi to become his friend. It wasn’t that they talked much or about anything especially important. Sulean seemed almost as wordless as Isaac often was. But she accompanied him on his walks through the hills, and she was more agile than seemed possible for her age: she was slow, but she could climb as well as Isaac, and she could sit motionless for an hour or more when Isaac did. She never gave him the impression that this was a duty or a strategy or anything more or less than her way of sharing certain pleasures he had always suspected were his alone.

  Sulean must not have seen the annual meteor shower before, since she told Isaac she had arrived in Equatoria only months ago. Isaac was a fan of the event and declared that she ought to see it from a good vantage point. So—with the uneasy permission of Dr. Dvali, who didn’t seem to entirely approve of Sulean Moi—on the evening of the 34th he escorted her to the flat rock in the hills, the rock from which he had first seen her appear on the sun-quivering horizon.

  That had been daylight, but now it was dark. The New World’s moon was smaller and faster than Earth’s, and it had traversed the sky completely by the time Sulean and Isaac arrived at their destination. Both carried hand lanterns to light their way, and both wore high boots and thick leggings to protect them from the sandfish that often basked on these granite ledges while the stone was still breathing out the heat of the day. Isaac scanned the location carefully and found no wildlife present. He sat crosslegged on the stone. Sulean bent slowly but without complaint into the same posture. Her face was serene, calmly expectant. They turned off their lanterns and allowed the darkness to swallow them up. The desert was blacker than the sky, the sky was salted with stars. No one had officially named these stars, though astronomers had given them catalog numbers. The stars were as dense in the heavens as swarming insects. Each star was a sun, Isaac knew, and many of them cast their light on inaccessible, unknowable landscapes—perhaps on deserts like this one. Things lived among the stars, he knew. Things that lived vast slow cold lives, in which the passage of a century was no more than the blink of a distant eye.

  “I know why you came here,” Isaac said.

  He couldn’t see the old woman’s face in this darkness, which made the conversation easier, eased the embarrassing clumsiness of words like bricks in his mouth.

  “Do you?”

  “To study me.”

  “No. Not to study you, Isaac. I’m more a student of the sky than I am of you in particular.”

  Like the others at the compound, she was interested in the Hypotheticals—the unseen beings who had rearranged the heavens and the earth.

  “You came because of what I am.”

  She cocked her head and said, “Well, yes, that.”

  He began to tell her about his sense of direction. He spoke haltingly at first, and more confidently when she listened without questioning him. He tried to anticipate the questions she might want to ask. When had he first noticed this special talent? He couldn’t remember; only that it had been this year, a few months ago, just a glimmering at first: for instance, he had liked to work in the compound’s library because his desk there faced the same direction as the desk in his room, though there was no window to look through. In the dining room he always sat at the side of the table nearest the door, even when there was no one else present. He had moved his bed so that he could sleep more comfortably, aligned with—with, well, what?

  But he couldn’t say. Everywhere he went, always, when he stood still, there was a direction he preferred to face. This was not a compulsion, only a gentle urge, easily ignored. There was a good way to face, and a less good way to face.

  “And are you facing the good way now?” Sulean asked.

  In fact he was. He hadn’t been aware of it before she asked, but he was comfortable on this rock looking away from the mountains into the lightless hinterland.

  “West,” Sulean said. “You like to face west.”

  “A little north of west.”

  There. The secret was out. There was nothing more to say, and he heard Sulean Moi adjust her posture in the silence, adapting to the pressure of the rock. He wondered if it was painful or uncomfortable to be so old and to sit on solid stone. If so, she gave no indication of it. She looked up at the sky.

  “You were right about the falling stars,” she said after a long time. “They’re quite lovely.”

  The meteor shower had begun.

  Isaac was fascinated by it. Dr. Dvali had told him about meteors, which were not really stars at all but burning fragments of rock or dust, the remains of ancient comets circling for millennia around the New World’s sun. But that explanation had only added to Isaac’s fascination. He sensed in these evanescent lights the enacting of ancient geometries, vectors set in motion long before the planet was formed (or before it had been constructed by the Hypotheticals), rhythms elaborated over a lifetime or several lifetimes or even the lifetime of a species. Sparks flew across the zenith, east to west, while Isaac listened inwardly to the murmurings of the night.

  He was content that way, until Sulean suddenly stood and peered back toward the mountains and said, “Look—what’s that? It looks like something falling.”

  Like luminous rainfall, as if a storm had come down through the high passes of the divide—as they sometimes did, but this glow wasn’t lightning; it was diffuse, persistent. She said, “Is that normal?”

  “No,” Isaac said.

  No. It wasn’t normal at all.

  “Then perhaps we ought to go back.”

  Isaac nodded uneasily. He wasn’t afraid of the approaching—well, “storm,” if that’s what it was—but it carried a significance he couldn’t explain to Sulean, a relationship to the silent presence that lived under the Rub al-Khali, the Empty Quarter of the far west, and to which his private compass was attuned. They walked back to the compound at a brisk pace, not quite running, because Isaac wasn’t sure that someone as fragileseeming as Sulean could run, while the mountain peaks to the east were first revealed and then obscured by fresh waves of this peculiar cloudy light. By the time they reached the gate the meteor shower was entirely hidden by this new phenomenon; a sort of dust had begun to fall from the sky, and Isaac’s lantern carved out an increasingly smaller swath of visibility. Isaac thought this falling substance might be snow—he had seen snow in videos—but Sulean said no, it wasn’t snow at all, it was more like ash. The smell of it was rank, sulfurous.

  Like dead stars, Isaac thought, falling.

  Mrs. Rebka was waiting at the compound’s main door and she pulled Isaac inside with a grip so intense it was painful. He gave her a shocked, reproving look: Mrs. Rebka had never hurt him before; none of the adults had hurt him. She ignored his expression and held him possessively, told him she had been afraid he would be lost in this, this . . .

  Words failed her.

  In the common room, Dr. Dvali was listening to an audio feed from Port Magellan, the great city on the eastern coast of Equatoria. The signal was relayed across the mountains by aerostats and was intermittent, Dr. Dvali told the gathered adults, but he had learned that the Port was experiencing the same phenomenon, a blanketing fall of something like ash, and that there was no immediate explanation. Some people in the city had begun to panic. Then the broadcast, or the aerostat relaying the signal, failed entirely.

  Isaac, at Mrs. Rebka’s urging, went to his room while the adults talked. He didn’t sleep, couldn’t imagine sleeping. Instead he sat at the window, where there was nothing to see but a tunneled grayness where the overhead light bled into the ashfall, and he listened to the sound of nothing at all—a silence that nevertheless seemed to speak to him, a silence steeped in meaning.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lise Adams drove toward the little rural airstrip on the afternoon of the 34th of August feeling lost, feeling free.

  It was a feeling she couldn’t explain even to herself. Maybe the weather, she thought. Late August along the coast of Equatoria was inevitably warm, often unbe
arable, but today the breeze from the sea was gentle and the sky was that indigo blue she had come to associate with the New World, deeper and truer than the smudgy pastel skies of Earth. But the weather had been fine for weeks, nice but not all that remarkable. Free, she thought, yes, absolutely: a marriage behind her, the decree nisi freshly-issued, an unwise thing undone . . . and, ahead of her, the man who had been a factor in that undoing. But so much more than that. A future severed from her past, a painful question hovering on the brink of an answer.

  And lost, almost literally: she had only come out this way a couple of times before. South of Port Magellan, where she had rented an apartment, the coast flattened into an alluvial plain that had been given over to farms and light industry. Much of it was still wild, a sort of rolling prairie grown over with feathery grasses, meadows that broke like waves against the peaks of the coastal range. Before long she began to see small aircraft coming and going from Arundji’s Airfield, which was her destination. These were little prop planes, bush planes: the runways at Arundji’s weren’t long enough for anything big. The planes that alighted there were either rich men’s hobbies or poor men’s businesses. If you wanted to rent a hangar, join a tourist excursion into the glacial passes, or get to Bone Creek or Kubelick’s Grave in a hurry, you came to Arundji’s. And if you were smart you talked to Turk Findley, who flew discount charters for a living, before you did any of those things.

  Lise had flown with Turk once before. But she wasn’t here to hire a pilot. Turk’s name had come up in connection with the photograph Lise carried in a brown envelope, currently tucked into the glove compartment of her car.

  She parked in the gravel lot at Arundji’s, climbed out of the car, and stood listening to the sound of insects buzzing in the afternoon heat. Then she walked through the door at the back of the cavernous tin-roofed shed—it looked like a converted cow barn—that served as Arundji’s passenger terminal. Turk’s charter business operated out of a corner of this building with the consent of Mike Arundji, the airfield’s owner, who took a share of Turk’s profits in return. Turk had told her this, back when they had had time to talk.

  There was no security barrier to pass through. Turk Findley worked out of a three-sided cubicle tucked into the north end of the building, and she simply walked into it and cleared her throat in lieu of knocking. He was behind his desk filling out what looked like UN Provisional Government papers—she could see the blue logo at the top of the page. He inked his signature a final time and looked up. “Lise!”

  His grin was genuine and disarming. No recrimination, no why-didn’t-you-return-my-calls. She said, “Uh, are you busy?”

  “Do I look busy?”

  “Looks like you have work to do, anyhow.” She was fairly certain he would be willing to put aside anything nonessential for a chance to see her: a chance she hadn’t offered him in a long time. He came around the desk and hugged her, chastely but sincerely. She was briefly flustered by the smell of him in close proximity. Turk was thirty-five years old, eight years older than Lise, and a foot taller. She tried not to let that be intimidating. “Paperwork,” he said. “Give me an excuse to ignore it. Please.”

  “Well,” she said.

  “At least tell me if it’s business or pleasure.”

  “Business.”

  He nodded. “Okay. Sure. Name a destination.”

  “No, I mean—my business, not your business. There’s something I’d like to talk to you about, if you’re willing. Maybe over dinner? My treat?”

  “I’d be happy to go to dinner, but it’s on me. I can’t imagine how I can help you write your book.”

  She was pleased that he remembered what she had told him about her book. Even though there was no book. An aircraft taxied up to a hangar some yards away and the noise came through the thin walls of Turk’s office as if through an open door. Lise looked at the ceramic cup on Turk’s desk and saw the oily surface of what must have been hours-old coffee break into concentric ripples. When the roar faded she said, “Actually you can help a lot, especially if we can go somewhere quieter. . . .”

  “Sure thing. I’ll leave my keys with Paul.”

  “Just like that?” She never ceased to marvel at the way people on the frontier did business. “You’re not afraid of missing a customer?”

  “Customer can leave a message. I’ll get back sooner or later. Anyhow, it’s been slow this week. You came at the right time. What do you say to Harley’s?”

  Harley’s was one of the more upscale American-style restaurants in the Port. “You can’t afford Harley’s.”

  “Business expense. I have a question for you, come to think of it. Call it quid pro quo.”

  Whatever that meant. All she could say was, “Okay.” Dinner at Harley’s was both more and less than she had expected. She had driven out to Arundji’s on the assumption that a personal appearance would be more meaningful than a phone call, after the time that had elapsed since their last conversation. A sort of unspoken apology. But if he resented the gap in their relationship (and it wasn’t even a “relationship” anymore, perhaps not even a friendship), he showed no sign of it. She reminded herself to focus on the work. On the real reason she was here. The unexplained loss that had opened a chasm in her life twelve years ago.

  Turk had a car of his own at the airfield, so they arranged to meet at the restaurant in three hours, about dusk.

  Traffic permitting. Prosperity in Port Magellan had meant more cars, and not just the little South Asian utility vehicles or scooters everyone used to drive. Traffic was thick through the docklands—she was sandwiched between a pair of eighteen-wheelers much of the way—but she made it to the restaurant on time. The parking lot at Harley’s was crowded, unusually for a Wednesday night. The food here was reasonably good, but what people paid a premium for was the view: the restaurant occupied a hilltop overlooking Port Magellan. The Port had been established for obvious reasons on what was the largest natural harbor on the coast, close to the Arch that joined this planet to Earth. But its easy lowlands had been overbuilt and the city had expanded up the terraced hillsides. Much of it had been constructed hastily, without reference to whatever building codes the Provisional Government was attempting to enforce. Harley’s, all native wood and glass panels, was an exception.

  She left her name and waited in the bar for half an hour until Turk’s elderly car chugged into the lot. She watched through the window as he locked the vehicle and strode toward the entrance through a deepening dusk. He was clearly not as well-dressed as the average customer at Harley’s, but the staff recognized and welcomed him: he often met clients here, Lise knew, and as soon as he joined her, the waiter escorted them to a U-shaped booth with a window view. All the other window tables were occupied. “Popular place,” she said.

  “Tonight, yeah,” he said, and when Lise stared at him blankly he added, “The meteor shower.”

  Oh. Right. She had forgotten. Lise had been in Port Magellan less than eleven months local time, which meant she had missed last year’s meteor shower. She knew it was a big deal, that a kind of informal Mardi Gras had evolved around the occasion, and she remembered the event from the part of her childhood she had spent here—a spectacular celestial display that happened with clockwork regularity, a perfect excuse for a party. But the shower didn’t peak until the third night. Tonight was just the beginning.

  “But we’re at the right place to see it start,” Turk said. “In a couple of hours, when it’s full dark, they’ll turn down the lights and open those big patio doors so everybody gets an unobstructed view.”

  The sky was a radiant indigo, clear as glacial water, no sign of meteors yet, and the city was arrayed below the restaurant in a gracefully concealing sunset glow. She could see the fires flaring from the refinery stacks in the industrial sector, the silhouettes of mosques and churches, the illuminated billboards along the Rue de Madagascar advertising Hindi movies, herbal toothpaste (in Farsi), and chain hotels. Cruise ships in the harbor began to li
ght up for the night. It was, if you squinted and thought nice thoughts, pretty. She might once have said exotic, but it no longer struck her that way.

  She asked Turk how his business was doing.

  He shrugged. “I pay the rent. I fly. I meet people. There’s not much more to it than that, Lise. I don’t have a mission in life.”

  Unlike you, he seemed to imply. Which led directly to the reason she had gotten in touch with him. She was reaching for her bag when the waiter showed up with ice water. She had barely glanced at the menu, but she ordered paella made with local seafood and seasoned with imported saffron. Turk asked for a steak, medium-well. Until fifteen years ago the most common terrestrial animal on Equatoria had been the water buffalo. Now you could buy fresh beef.

  The waiter sauntered away and Turk said, “You could have called, you know.”

  Since the last time they had been together—since her expedition into the mountains, and a few uneasy arranged meetings afterward—he had phoned her a few times. Lise had returned his calls eagerly at first, then perfunctorily; then, when the guilt set in, not at all. “I know, and I’m sorry, but the last couple of months have been busy for me—”

  “I mean today. You didn’t have to drive all the way out to Arundji’s just to make a date for dinner. You could have called.”

  “I thought if I called it might be too, you know, impersonal.” He said nothing. She added, more honestly, “I guess I wanted to see you first. Make sure things were still okay.”

  “Different rules out there in the wilderness. I know that, Lise. There are home things and there are away things. I figured we must have been . . .”

  “An away thing?”