Axis

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She slept longer than she meant to and woke with daylight in her eyes—not sunlight, exactly, but a welcome ambient brightness. By the time she dressed, Turk was already awake. She found him at the living room window, gazing out.

  “Looks a little better,” she said.

  “At least, not as bad.”

  There was still a flat, glittery dust in the outside air. But it wasn’t falling as thickly as it had last night and the sky was relatively clear.

  “According to the news,” Turk said, “the precipitation—that’s what they’re calling it—is tapering off. The ash cloud is still there but it’s moving inland. What they can see on radar and satellite images suggests the whole thing might be finished late tonight, early tomorrow, at least as far as the coast is concerned.”

  “Good,” Lise said.

  “But that’s not the end of the problem. The streets need to be cleared. There’s still trouble with the electrical grid. A few roofs collapsed, mostly those flat-roofed tourist rentals down along the headland. Just cleaning up the docks is going to be a huge project. The Provisional Government contracted a bunch of earthmovers to clean the roads, and once some mobility is established they can start pumping seawater and sluice it all into the bay, assuming the storm sewers accommodate the runoff. All this is complicated by dust in motors, stalled cars and so forth.”

  “Any word on toxicity?”

  “According to the news guys the ash is mostly carbon, sulfur, silicates, and metals, some of it arranged in unusual molecules, whatever that means, but breaking down pretty quick into simpler elements. Short-term it’s not dangerous unless you’ve got asthma or emphysema. Long-term, who knows? They still want people to stay indoors, and they’re advising a face mask if you really need to go out.”

  “Anybody making any guesses about where it all came from?”

  “No. We’re getting a lot of speculation, mostly bullshit, but somebody at the Geophysical Survey had the same idea we did—that it’s spaceborne material that’s been modified by the Hypotheticals.”

  In other words, nobody really knew anything. “Did you sleep last night?”

  “Not much.”

  “Had any breakfast?”

  “Didn’t want to mess up your kitchen.”

  “I’m not much of a cook, but I can do omelettes and coffee.” When he offered to help she said, “You’d just be in the way. Give me twenty minutes.”

  There was a window in the kitchen, and Lise was able to survey the Port while butter sizzled in the frying pan—this big, polyglot, kaleidoscopically multicultural city that had grown so quickly on the edge of a new continent, now blanketed in ominous gray. The wind had stiffened overnight. The ash had duned in the empty streets and it shivered down from the crowns of the trees that had been planted along Rue Abbas.

  She sprinkled fresh cheddar onto the omelette and folded it. For once it didn’t break and spill off the spatula in a gooey lump. She put together two plates and carried them into the living room. She found Turk standing in the space she used for an office: a desk, her keyboard and file holders, a small library of paper books.

  “This where you write?” he asked.

  “Yes.” No. She put the plates on the coffee table. Turk joined her on the sofa, folding his long legs and taking the plate onto his lap.

  “Good,” he said, sampling the omelette.

  “Thank you.”

  “So that book you’re working on,” he said. “How’s that going?”

  She winced. The book, the notional book, her excuse for prolonging her stay in Equatoria, didn’t exist. She told people she was writing a book because she was a journalism graduate and because it seemed a plausible thing for her to do in the aftermath of a failed marriage—a book about her father, who had vanished without explanation when the family lived here a dozen years ago, when she was fifteen. “Slowly,” she said.

  “No progress?”

  “A few interviews, some good conversations with my father’s old colleagues at the American University.” All this was true. She had immersed herself in her family’s fractured history. But she hadn’t written more than notes to herself.

  “I remember you said your father was interested in Fourths.”

  “He was interested in all kinds of things.” Robert Adams had come to Equatoria as part of the Geophysical Survey’s deal with the fledgling American University. The course he taught was New World Geology, and he had done fieldwork in the far west. The book he had been working on—a real book—had been called Planet as Artifact, a study of the New World as a place where geological history had been deeply influenced by the Hypotheticals.

  And, yes, he had also been fascinated by the community of Fourths—privately, not professionally.

  “The woman in the photograph you showed me,” Turk said. “Is she a Fourth?”

  “Maybe. Probably.” How much of this did she really want to discuss?

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because I’ve seen her before,” Lise said, putting down her fork and turning to face him. “Do you want the whole story?”

  “If you want to tell it.”

  Lise had heard the word “disappeared” applied to her father for the first time three days after he failed to come home from the university, a month after her fifteenth birthday. The local police had come to discuss the case with Lise’s mother while Lise listened from the corridor outside the kitchen. Her father had “disappeared”—that is, he had left work as usual, had driven away in the customary direction, and somewhere between the American University and their rented house in the hills above Port Magellan he had vanished. There was no obvious explanation, no pertinent evidence.

  But the investigation went on. The issue of his fascination with Fourths had come up. Lise’s mother was interviewed again, this time by men who wore business suits rather than uniforms: men from the Department of Genomic Security. Mr. Adams had expressed an interest in Fourths: was the interest personal? Had he, for instance, repeatedly mentioned the subject of longevity? Did he suffer from any degenerative disease that might have been reversed by the Martian longevity treatment? Was he unusually concerned with death? Unhappy at home?

  No, Lise’s mother had said. Actually, what she said most often was “No, goddammit.” Lise remembered her mother at the kitchen table, interrogated, drinking endless cups of rust-brown roiboos tea and saying, “No, goddammit, no.”

  Nevertheless, a theory had emerged. A family man in the New World, often apart from his family, seduced by the anything-goes atmosphere of the frontier and by the idea of the Fourth Age, an extra thirty years or so tacked onto his expected span of life . . .

  Lise had to admit there was a certain logic to it. He wouldn’t have been the first man to be lured from his family by the promise of longevity. Three decades ago the Martian Wun Ngo Wen had brought to Earth a technique for extending human life—a treatment that changed behavior in other and subtler ways as well. Proscribed by virtually every government on Earth, the treatment circulated in the underground community of Terrestrial Fourths.

  Would Robert Adams have abandoned his career and family to join that community? Lise’s instinctive answer was the same as her mother’s: no. He wouldn’t have done that to them, no, no matter how tempted he might have been.

  But evidence had emerged to subvert that faith. He had been associating with strangers off-campus. People had been coming to the house, people not associated with the university, people he had not introduced to his family and whose purposes he had been reluctant to explain. And the Fourth cults held a special appeal in the academic community—the treatment had first been circulated by the scientist Jason Lawton, among friends he considered trustworthy, and it had spread primarily among intellectuals and scholars.

  No, goddammit—but did Mrs. Adams have a better explanation?

  Mrs. Adams did not. Nor did Lise.

  The investigation remained inconclusive. After a year of this Lise’s mother had booked passage to Californ
ia for herself and her daughter, bent by the insult to her well-planned life but not, at least outwardly, broken. The disappearance—the New World in general—became a subject one didn’t mention in her presence. Silence was better than speculation. Lise had learned that lesson well. Like her mother, Lise had secured her pain and curiosity in the dark internal attic where unthinkable thoughts were stored. At least until her marriage to Brian and his transfer to Port Magellan. Suddenly those memories were refreshed: the wound reopened as if it had never healed, and her curiosity, she discovered, had been distilled in its enclosure, had become an adult’s curiosity rather than a child’s.

  So she had begun to ask questions of her father’s colleagues and friends, the few still living in the city, and inevitably these questions had involved the community of Fourths in the New World.

  Brian at first tried to be helpful. He hadn’t much liked her ad hoc investigation into what he considered potentially dangerous matters—and Lise supposed it had been one more in a growing number of emotional disconnects between them—but he had tolerated it and even used his DGS credentials to follow up on some of her queries.

  Like the woman in the photograph.

  “Two photographs, actually,” she told Turk. When she moved out of her mother’s house, Lise had salvaged a number of items her mother was forever threatening to throw away, in this case a disk of photographs from her parents’ Port Magellan years. A few of the pictures had been taken at faculty parties at the Adams house. Lise had selected a few of these photos and shown them to old family friends, hoping to track down those she didn’t recognize. She managed to put names, at least, to most of them, but one stood out: a dark-skinned elderly woman in jeans, caught standing in the doorway beyond a crowd of far more expensively-dressed faculty members, as if she had arrived unexpectedly. She seemed disconcerted, nervous.

  No one had been able to identify her. Brian had offered to run the picture through DGS image-recognition software and see if anything turned up. This had been the latest of what Lise had come to think of as Brian’s “charity bombs”—acts of generosity he threw in front of her as if to divert her from the path to separation—and she had accepted the offer with a warning that it wouldn’t change anything.

  But the search had turned up a pertinent match. The same woman had passed through the docks at Port Magellan just months ago. She had been listed on a passengership manifest as Sulean Moi.

  The name turned up again in connection with Turk Findley, who had piloted the charter flight that carried Sulean Moi over the mountains to the desert town of Kubelick’s Grave—the same town to which Lise had been attempting to fly a few months before, following a different lead.

  Turk listened to all this patiently. Then he said, “She wasn’t talkative. She paid cash. I put her down at the airstrip in Kubelick’s Grave and that was that. She never said anything about her past or why she was flying west. You think she’s a Fourth?”

  “She hasn’t changed much in fifteen years. That suggests she might be.”

  “So maybe the simplest explanation is true. Your father took the illegal treatment and started a new life under a new name.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t want another hypothesis. I want to know what really happened.”

  “So you find out the truth, what then? Does that make your life better? Maybe you’ll learn something you don’t like. Maybe you have to start mourning all over again.”

  “At least,” she said, “I’ll know what I’m mourning for.”

  As often happened when she talked about her father, she dreamed of him that night.

  More memory than dream at first: she was with him on the veranda of their house on the hill in Port Magellan, and he was talking to her about the Hypotheticals.

  He talked to her on the veranda because Lise’s mother didn’t care for these conversations. This was the starkest contrast Lise could draw between her parents. Both were Spin survivors, but they had emerged from the crisis with polarized sensibilities. Her father had thrown himself headlong into the mystery, had fallen in love with the heightened strangeness of the universe. Her mother pretended that none of it had happened—that the garden fence and the back wall were barricades strong enough to repulse the tide of time.

  Lise had not quite known where to place herself on that divide. She loved the sense of safety she felt in her mother’s home. But she loved to hear her father talk.

  In the dream he talked about the Hypotheticals. The Hypotheticals aren’t people, Lise, you must not make that mistake. As the unnamed Equatorian stars turned in the slate-black sky. They are a network of more or less mindless machines, we suspect, but is that network aware of itself? Does it have a mind, Lise, the way you and I do? If it does, every element of its thought must be propagated over hundreds or thousands of light-years. It would see time and space very differently than we do. It might not perceive us at all, except as a passing phenomenon, and if it manipulates us it might do so at an entirely unconscious level.

  Like God, Lise in her dream suggested.

  A blind God, her father said, but he was wrong, because in the dream, while she was entranced in the grandeur of his vision and safe in the boundary of her mother’s sensibility, the Hypotheticals had reached down from the sky, opened a steel fist that glittered in the starlight, and snatched him away before she could summon the courage to scream.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The dust fell more sparsely for another few hours, yielded to a gray daylight, and stopped altogether by dark.

  The city remained eerily quiet apart from the intermittent growl of earthmovers ceaselessly shifting the ash. Turk could tell where the earthmovers were working by the billows of fine dust that rose around and above them, gray pillars lofting over the corduroy of shops, shanties, office buildings, billboards, commingling with saltwater plumes where pump lines laid from the harbor to the hills had begun to sluice the streets. A wasteland. But even at this hour there were people in the street, masked or with bandannas tied over their faces, kicking through the drifts on their way somewhere or just assessing the damage, gazing around like bit players in a disaster drama. A man in a grimy dishdasha stood for half an hour outside the locked Arabic grocery across the street, smoking cigarettes and staring at the sky.

  “You think it’s over?” Lise asked.

  Obviously a question he couldn’t answer. But he guessed she didn’t want a real answer as much as she wanted reassurance. “For now, anyway.”

  They were both too wired to sleep. He switched on the video display and they settled back on the sofa, trawling for new information. A newsreader announced that the dust cloud had moved inland and no more “precipitation” was expected—there had been sporadic reports of ashfall from every community between Ayer’s Point and Haixi on the coast, but Port Magellan seemed to have been hit harder than most. Which was in a way a good thing, Turk supposed, because while this dump of particulate matter had been troublesome for the city it might have been a catastrophe for the local ecosystem, smothering forests and killing crops and maybe even poisoning the soil, though the newscaster said there was nothing terribly toxic in it, “according to the latest analyses.” The fossil- or machine-like structures in the ashfall had attracted attention, of course. Microphotographs of the dust revealed even more latent structure: degraded cogs and wheels, scalloped cones like tiny conch shells, inorganic molecules hooked together in complex and unnatural ways—as if some vast machine had eroded in orbit and only its finer elements had survived the fiery descent through the atmosphere.

  They had spent the day in the apartment, Turk mostly sitting at the window, Lise making calls and sending messages to family back home, itemizing the food in the kitchen in case the city was shut down long-term, and in the process they had reestablished a kind of intimacy—the mountain-camp-in-a-thunderstorm intimacy they had shared before, brought down to the city—and when she put her head against his shoulder Turk raised his hand to stroke her hair, hesitated when he remembered the nature o
f their situation here.

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  Her hair smelled fresh and somehow golden, and it felt like silk under the palm of his hand.

  “Turk,” she said, “I’m sorry—”

  “Nothing to apologize for.”

  “For thinking I needed an excuse to see you.”

  “Missed you too,” he said.

  “Just—it was confusing.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you want to go to bed?” She took his hand and rubbed her cheek against it. “I mean—”

  He knew what she meant.

  He spent that night with her and he spent another, not because he had to—the coast road had been mostly cleared by that time—but because he could.

  But he couldn’t stay forever. He lazed around one morning more, picking over breakfast while Lise made more calls. Amazing how many friends and acquaintances and home-folks she had. It made him feel a little unpopular. The only calls he made that morning were to customers whose flights would have to be rescheduled or canceled—cancellations he couldn’t afford right now—and to a couple of buddies, mechanics from the airport, who might wonder why he wasn’t around to go drinking with them. He didn’t have much of a social life. He didn’t even own a dog.

  She recorded a long message to her mother back in the States. You couldn’t make a direct call across the Arch, since the only things the Hypotheticals allowed to travel between this world and the one next door were manned ocean vessels. But there was a fleet of telecom-equipped commercial ships that shuttled back and forth to relay recorded data. You could watch video news from home that was only a few hours stale, and you could send voice or text the other direction. Lise’s message, what he overheard of it, was a careful reassurance that the ashfall had done no lasting harm and looked like it would be cleared up before long, although it was a mystery why it had happened, very confusing—no shit, Turk thought.