Axis (2 page)

Last year Dr. Dvali had shown him a compass. The planet, too, was a magnet, Dr. Dvali said. It had a rotating iron core, hence lines of force, a shield against charged particles arriving from the sun, a polarity that distinguished north from south. Isaac had asked to borrow the compass, a hefty military model made on Earth, and Dr. Dvali had generously allowed him to keep it.

Late in the evening, alone in his room, Isaac placed the compass on his desk so that the red point of the needle aligned with the letter N. Then he closed his eyes and spun himself around, stopped and waited for his dizziness to subside. Eyes still closed, he felt what the world told him, intuited his place in it, found the direction that eased some inner tension. Then he put out his right hand and opened his eyes to see which way he was pointing. He found out a lot of things, mostly irrelevant.

He performed the experiment on three successive nights. Each night he discovered himself aligned almost perfectly with the W on the face of the compass.

Then he did it again. And again. And again.

It was shortly before the annual meteor shower that he resolved at last to share this unsettling discovery with Sulean Moi.

The meteor shower came at the end of every August—this year, on the 34
^th
. (Months in the New World were named after terrestrial months, though each one lasted a few days longer than its namesake.) On the eastern coast of Equatoria, August signalled the beginning of the end of the mild summer: boats left the rich northern fisheries with their last harvests in order to arrive back at Port Magellan before the autumn storms began. Here in the desert it signified little more than the steady, subtle cooling of the nights. Desert seasons were nocturnal, it seemed to Isaac: the days were mostly alike, but winter nights could be bitingly, painfully cold.

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 34
^th
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 Worlds 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 Hypothetical—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 fragile-seeming 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.

Lise Adams drove toward the little rural airstrip on the afternoon of the 34
^th
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 unbearable, 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…”