Axis

  “All this from a cut on his arm?”

  Tomas looked as if someone had stuck a hose down his throat and siphoned out his insides. Turk thought he had never seen a thinner man.

  “It’s more complicated than that. Sit down and I’ll explain.”

  Outside the window of Diane’s clinic, the Minang village was lively in the dark. Lanterns hung swaying from eaves and he could hear the sound of recorded music playing tinnily. Diane made coffee with an electric kettle and a French press, and the resulting brew was hot and dense.

  There used to be two real doctors at the clinic, she said. Her husband and a Minang woman, both of whom had lately died of natural causes. Only Diane was left, and the only medicine she knew was what she had learned while acting as a nurse. Enough to keep the clinic going: it was an indispensable resource not only for this village but for a half-dozen nearby villages and for the impoverished breakers. Any condition she couldn’t treat she referred to the Red Crescent clinic up the coast or the Catholic charity hospital in Port Magellan, though that was a long trip. In matters of cuts, cleanly broken bones, and common disorders, she was perfectly competent. She consulted regularly with a traveling physician from the Port who understood her situation and made sure she was supplied with basic medicines, sterile bandages, and so forth.

  “So maybe you should have sent Tomas downcoast,” Turk said. “He looks seriously ill to me.”

  “The cut on his arm was the least of his problems. Did Tomas tell you he had cancer?”

  “Jesus, no. Cancer? Does he?”

  “We brought him back here because his wound was infected, but the cancer showed up in simple blood tests. I don’t have much in the way of diagnostic equipment, but I do have a portable imager—ten years old but it works like a charm. It confirmed the diagnosis, and the prognosis was very grave. Cancer is hardly an untreatable disease, but your friend had been avoiding doctors for far too long. He was deeply metastasized.”

  “So he is dying.”

  “No.” Diane paused. Once again she riveted him with that stare, fierce and a little uncanny. Turk made an effort not to avert his own eyes. It was like playing stare-down with a cat. “I offered him an unconventional treatment.”

  “Like what, radiation or something?”

  “I offered to make him a Fourth.”

  For a moment he was too startled to speak. Outside, the music played on, something tunelessly alien beaten out of a wooden xylophone and funneled through a cheap loudspeaker.

  He said, “You can do that?”

  “I can. I have.”

  Turk wondered what he had gotten himself into and how he could most efficiently extract himself from it. “Well . . . I guess it’s not illegal here . . .”

  “You guess wrong. It’s just easier to get away with. And we have to be discreet. An extra few decades of life isn’t something you advertise, Turk.”

  “So why tell me?”

  “Because Tomas is going to need some help as he recovers. And because I think I can trust you.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “Because you came here looking for him.” She startled him by smiling. “Call it an educated guess. You understand that the Fourth treatment isn’t just about longevity? The Martians were deeply ambivalent about tinkering with human biology. They didn’t want to create a community of powerful elders. The Fourth treatment gives and it takes away. It gives you an extra thirty or forty years of life—and I’m a case in point, if you haven’t guessed—but it also rearranges certain human traits.”

  “Traits,” Turk said, dry-mouthed. He had never, to his knowledge, spoken to a Fourth before. And that was what this woman claimed to be. How old was she? Ninety years? One hundred?

  “Am I so frightening?”

  “No, ma’am, not at all, but—”

  “Not even a little?” Still smiling.

  “Well, I—”

  “What I mean to say, Turk, is that as a Fourth I’m more sensitive to certain social and behavioral cues than the majority of unmodified people. I can generally tell when someone’s lying or being disingenuous, at least when we’re face-to-face. Although, against sincere lies I have no defense. I’m not omniscient, I’m not especially wise, and I can’t read minds. The most you might say is that my bullshit detector has been turned up a notch or two. And since any group of Fourths is necessarily under siege—from the police or from criminals, or both—that’s a useful faculty to have. No, I don’t know you well enough to say I trust you, but I perceive you clearly enough to say that I’m willing to trust you . . . do you understand?”

  “I suppose so. I mean, I don’t have anything against Fourths. Never thought much about it either way.”

  “That comfortable innocence is over. Your friend won’t die of cancer, but he can’t stay here, and he has a lot of adjustments to make. What I would like to do is discharge him into your care.”

  “Ma’am—uh, Diane—I don’t know the first thing about taking care of a sick man, much less a Fourth.”

  “He won’t be sick for long. But he’ll need an understanding friend. Will you be that person for him?”

  “Well, I mean, you know, I’m willing, I suppose, but it might be better to make some other arrangement, because I’m in a difficult position, financially and all—”

  “I wouldn’t have asked you if I could think of anything better. It was a blessing that you showed up when you did.” She added, “If I hadn’t wanted you to find me I would have been much more difficult to find.”

  “I tried calling, but—”

  “I had to discontinue that number.” She frowned but didn’t offer to explain.

  “Well—” Well, fuck, he thought. “I guess I wouldn’t turn out a stray dog in a rainstorm.”

  Her smile returned. “That’s what I thought.”

  “I guess you learned a few things about Fourths since then,” Tomas said.

  “I don’t know,” Turk said. “You’re the only close sample I’ve got. Not too inspiring, actually.”

  “Did she actually say that, about a bullshit detector?”

  “More or less. What do you think, Tomas, is it true?”

  Tomas had recovered from his illness—from the genetic rebuild that constituted the Fourth treatment—as quickly as Diane had predicted. His psychological adjustment was another matter. He was a man who had come to Equatoria prepared to die, and instead he had found himself staring down another three or more decades for which he had no plan or ambition.

  Physically, though, it had been a liberation. After a week of recovery Tomas could have passed for a man much younger. His crabbed way of walking became more supple, his appetite was suddenly bottomless. This was almost too strange for Turk to deal with, as if Tomas had shed his old body the way a snake sheds its skin. “Fuck, it’s just me,” Tomas would proclaim whenever Turk became too uncomfortably conscious of the distance between the old Tomas and the new. Tomas clearly relished his newfound health. The only drawback, he said, was that the treatment had erased his tattoos. Half his history had been written in those tattoos, he said.

  “Is it true that I have an improved bullshit detector? Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder. It’s been ten years, Turk. What do you think?”

  “We never talked much about this.”

  “I would of been happy to keep it that way.”

  “Can you tell when you’re being lied to?”

  “There’s no drug that’ll make a stupid man smart. And I’m not a particularly smart man. I’m no lie detector, either. But I can generally tell when somebody’s trying to sell me something.”

  “Because I think Lise has been lied to. Her business with Fourths is legitimate, but I think she’s being used. Also she has some information Diane might like to hear.”

  Tomas was silent for a while. He tipped up his beer to drain it and put the bottle on a tray table next to his chair. He gave Turk a look uneasily reminiscent of Diane’s evaluative stare.

  “
You’re in some difficult territory here,” he said.

  “I know that,” Turk said.

  “Could get dangerous.”

  “I guess that’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “Can you give me some time to think this over?”

  “Guess so,” Turk said.

  “Okay. I’ll ask around. Call me in a couple of days.”

  “I appreciate it,” Turk said. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Tomas said. “Maybe I’ll change my mind.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The node in Lise’s car announced new mail as she was driving to the Consulate. “From?” Lise asked.

  “Susan Adams,” the node replied.

  These days Lise could not think of her mother without visualizing that calendar-box of pharmaceuticals on her kitchen counter, assorted by day and hour, the clockwork of her mortality. Pills for depression, pills to adjust her blood cholesterol, pills to avert the Alzheimer’s for which she carried a suspect gene. “Read,” she said, grimly.

  Dear Lise. The node’s voice was male, indifferent, offering up the text with all the liveliness of a frozen fish. Thank you for your latest. It is somewhat reassuring after what I’ve seen on the news.

  The ashfall, she meant, which still clogged the side streets and had caused thousands of tourists to flee to their cruise ships, begging for a quick ride home. People who had come to Equatoria hoping to find a landscape pleasingly strange, but who had stumbled into something altogether different—real strangeness, the kind that didn’t negotiate with human preconceptions.

  Precisely how her mother would have reacted, Lise thought.

  All I can think of is how far away you are and how inaccessible you have made yourself. No, I won’t start that old argument again. And I won’t say a word about your separation from Brian.

  Susan Adams had argued fiercely against the divorce—ironically, since she had argued almost as fiercely against the marriage. At first, Lise’s mother had disliked Brian because he worked for Genomic Security—Genomic Security, in Susan Adams’ mind, being represented by the terse and unhelpful men who had hovered around her after her husband’s incomprehensible disappearance. Lise must not marry one of these compassionless monsters, she had insisted; but Brian was not compassionless, in fact Brian had charmed Lise’s mother, had patiently dismantled her objections until he became a welcome presence. Brian had quickly learned the paramount rule in dealing with Lise’s mother, that one did not mention the New World, the Hypotheticals, the Spin, or the disappearance of Robert Adams. In Susan Adams’ household these subjects had acquired the power of profanity. Which was one reason Lise had been so anxious to leave that household behind.

  And there had been much anxiety and resistance after the wedding, when Brian was transferred to Port Magellan. You must not go, Lise’s mother had said, as if the New World were some ghostly otherness from which no one emerged undamaged. No, not even for the sake of Brian’s career should they enter that perdition.

  This was, of course, an ongoing act of denial, a forcible exile of unacceptable truths, a strategy her mother had devised for containing and channeling her unvented grief. But that was precisely why Lise resented it. Lise hated the dark space into which her mother had walled these memories. Memory was all that was left of Lise’s father, and that memory surely included his wide-eyed fascination with the Hypotheticals and his love of the planet into which they had opened their perplexing doorway.

  Even the ashfall would have fascinated him, Lise thought: those cogs and seashells embedded in the dust, pieces in a grand puzzle . . .

  I simply hope that these events convince you of the wisdom of coming home. Lise, if money is a problem, let me book you a ticket. I admit that California is not what it once was, but we can still see the ocean from the kitchen window, and although the summers are warm and the winter storms more intense than I remember them being, surely that’s a small thing compared to what you are presently enduring.

  You don’t know, Lise thought, what I’m enduring. You don’t care to know.

  In the afternoon sunlight the American Consulate looked like a benevolent fortress set behind a moat of wrought-iron fences. Someone had planted a garden along the runnels of the fence, but the recent ashfall hadn’t been kind to the flowers—native flowers, because you weren’t supposed to bring terrestrial plants over the Arch, not that the ban was especially effective. The flowers that had survived the ashfall were sturdy red whore’s-lips (in the crude taxonomy of the first settlers), stems like enamelled chopsticks and leaves like Victorian collars enfolding the tattered blooms.

  There was a guard at the consulate door next to a sign that advised visitors to check all weapons, personal electronics, and unsealed bottles or containers. This was not a new drill for Lise, who had regularly visited Brian at the Genomic Security offices before the divorce. And she remembered riding past the consulate as a teenager during her father’s time here; remembered how reassuring and strong the building had seemed with its high white walls and narrow embrasures.

  The guard called Brian’s office for confirmation and issued her a visitor’s badge. She rode the elevator to the fifth floor, mid-building, a tiled windowless hallway, the labyrinth of bureaucracy.

  Brian stepped into the corridor as she approached and held open the door marked simply 507 DGS. Brian, she thought, was somehow changeless: carefully dressed, still trim in his mid-thirties, tanned; he took weekend hikes in the hills above the Port. He smiled briefly as a way of greeting her, but his demeanor today was stiff—sort of a whole-body frown, Lise thought. She braced herself for whatever was coming. Brian bossed a staff of three people but none of them was present. “Come on in,” he said, “sit down, we have to have a little discussion. I’m sorry, but we’ll get this out of the way as quickly as possible.”

  Even at this juncture he was unfailingly nice, the quality she had found most frustrating in him. The marriage had been bad from the beginning. Not a disaster so much as a bad choice compounded by more bad choices, some of which she was reluctant to admit even to herself. Worse because she couldn’t confess her unhappiness in any way Brian was liable to understand. Brian went to church every Sunday, Brian believed in decency and propriety, and Brian despised the complexity and weirdness of the post-Spin world. And that, ultimately, was what Lise could not abide. She had had enough of that from her mother. She wanted, instead, the quality her father had tried so hard to communicate to her on those nights when they looked at the stars: awe, or, failing that, at least courage.

  Brian had occasional charm, he had earnestness, he had, buried in him, a deep and poignant seriousness of purpose. But he was afraid of what the world had become, and that, in the end, she could not abide.

  She sat down. He pulled a second chair across the carpet and sat facing her knee-to-knee. “This might not be the pleasantest conversation we ever had,” he said. “But we’re having it for your sake, Lise. Please try to remember that.”

  Turk arrived at the airport that afternoon still pondering his talk with Tomas and intending to inspect his aircraft before he went home for the night. Turk’s little Skyrex twin-engine fixed-wing prop plane was nearly five years old and needed repairs and maintenance more often than it used to. It had lately been fitted with a new fuel injector, and Turk wanted to see for himself what the mechanics had done. So he parked in his usual space behind the cargo building and crossed a patch of tarmac turned woolen-gray by ash and rain, but when he reached the hangar he found the door padlocked. Tucked behind the latch was a note advising him to see Mike Arundji.

  Not much question what this was about. Turk owed two months’ rent on his hangar space and was in arrears for maintenance.

  But he was friendly with Mike Arundji—most of the time, anyhow—and he walked into the owner’s office rehearsing his usual excuses. It was a ritual dance: the demand, the apology, the token payment (though even that was going to be tight), another reprieve . . . although the padlock was a new
touch.

  This time the older man looked up from his desk with an expression of deep regret. “The lock,” he said immediately, “yeah, I’m sorry about that, but I don’t have a choice here. I have to run my business like a business.”

  “It’s the ash,” Turk said. “I lost a couple of charters to it. Otherwise you’d be paid by now.”

  “So you say, and I’m not disputing it. But what difference would a couple of charters make, long-term? You have to ask yourself. This isn’t the only small airport in the district. I’ve got competition. In the old days it was okay to be a little loose, cut everybody some slack. It was all semi-amateurs, independents like you. Now there are corporate charter companies bidding up hangar space. Even if the books balanced I’d be taking a loss on you. That’s just a fact.”

  “I can’t make money if I can’t fly my plane, Mike.”

  “The trouble is, I can’t make money whether you fly it or not.”

  “Seems like you do okay.”

  “I have a payroll to meet. I have a whole new raft of regulations coming down from the Provisional Government. If you looked at my spreadsheets you wouldn’t tell me I’m doing okay. My accountant doesn’t come in here and tell me I’m doing okay.”

  And you probably don’t call your accountant an amateur, Turk thought. Mike Arundji was an old hand: he had opened up this strip when there was nothing south of Port Magellan but fishing villages and squatters’ camps. Even a half-dozen years ago the word “spreadsheet” would have been foreign to his vocabulary.

  That was the kind of environment in which Turk had arranged for the import—at eye-bulging expense—of his six-seater Skyrex. And it had made him a modest little living, at least until recently. He no longer owed money on it. Unfortunately, he seemed to owe money on everything else. “So what do I have to do to get my plane back in the air?”

  Arundji shifted in his chair and wouldn’t meet Turk’s eye. “Come in tomorrow, we’ll talk about it. Worse comes to worst, it wouldn’t be hard to find a buyer.”