Axis (23 page)

In a joint press conference held today at the Observatory, representatives of the American University, the United Nations Geophysical Survey, and the Provisional Government displayed photographs and samples of “incompletely self-replicating and self-assembling quasi-organic objects” recovered from the western extremes of the dry inland basin that stretches from the coastal mountains to the western sea.

These objects, ranging from a pea-sized hollow sphere to an assembly of what appeared to be tubes and wires as large as a man’s head, were said to be unstable in a planetary environment and hence posed no threat to human life.

“The ‘space-plague’ scenario is a non-starter,” senior astronomer Scott Cleland said. “The infalling material was ancient and probably already corrupted by wear and tear before it entered the atmosphere. The vast majority of it was sterilized by a violent passage that left only a few nano-scale elements intact. A very few of these retained enough molecular integrity to re-initiate the process of growth. But they were designed to flourish in the extreme cold and vacuum of deep space. In a hot, oxygen-rich desert they simply can’t survive for long.”

Asked whether any of these structures remained active today, Dr. Cleland said, “None that we’ve sampled. By far the greatest number of active clusters occurred deep in the Rub al-Khali,” the oil-rich far western desert. “Residents of the coastal cities are unlikely to find alien plants in their gardens.”

Because harmful effects cannot be entirely ruled out, however, a loose quarantine has been established between the oil concessions and the western coast of Equatoria. This formidable terrain has attracted no substantial settlements, although tourists occasionally visit the canyonlands and the oil consortia maintain a constant presence. “Travel is being monitored and alerts have been issued,” said Paul Nissom of the Provisional Government’s Territorial Authority. “We want to keep out the casually curious and facilitate the work of the researchers who need to study and understand this important phenomenon.”

There were a couple of further paragraphs with trivial details and contact numbers, but Brian figured he had the gist. He gave Weil a well-what-about-it look.

“Works out nicely for us,” Weil said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Ordinarily the Provisional Government isn’t much more than a harassed nanny. Since the ashfall, and especially this weird shit out west, they finally started paying attention to who goes where. Monitoring air traffic, especially.”

There were more private planes per capita in Equatoria than anywhere back on Earth, most of them small craft, and an equally large number of casual airstrips. For years the traffic had been unregulated, ferrying passengers between bush communities or oil geologists to the desert.

“The bad news,” Weil continued, “is that Turk Findley made it to his plane, along with Lise Adams and an unidentified third party. They flew out last night.”

Brian felt an expanding hollowness in his chest. Some of it was jealousy. Some of it was fear for Lise, who was digging herself into deeper trouble by the hour.

“The
good
news,” Weil said, his smile broadening, “is that we know where they went. And we’re going there. And we want you to come with us.”

Turk had expected to land his aircraft at a familiar strip a couple of miles outside of Kubelick’s Grave, west of the foothills on the highway to the oil allotments. His plane might be confiscated if Mike Arundji had called ahead and was prepared to press charges. But that was probably inevitable anyway.

Diane surprised him, as the plane began the long glide down the western slopes of the divide toward the desert, by suggesting a different destination. “Do you remember where you took Sulean Moi?”

“More or less.”

“Take us there, please.”

Lise craned her head to look back at Diane. “You know where to find Dvali?”

“I’ve heard a few things over the years. These foothills are riddled with little Utopian communities and religious retreats of every imaginable kind. Avram Dvali disguised his compound as one of those.”

“But if you knew where he was—”

“We didn’t, not at first. But even a community like Dvali’s is porous. People arrive, people leave. He was hidden from us when it was critical for him to hide, before the child was born.”

It meant another half hour in the air. After yet more simmering silence Turk said, “I’m sorry about that phone thing back in the city. What were you doing, trying to get a message to your mom back in the States, something like that?”

“Something like that.” She was pleased that he had apologized and she didn’t want to make it worse by admitting she’d called Brian Gately even in an attempt to get Tomas Ginn out of custody. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Go ahead.”

“How come you had to steal your own plane?”

“I owed some money to the guy who owns the airstrip. The business hasn’t been going too well.”

“You could have told me that.”

“Didn’t seem like a good way to impress a rich American divorcee.”

“Hardly rich, Turk.”

“Looked that way from where I stood.”

“So how were you planning to get out of hock?”

“Didn’t have what you could call an actual plan. Worst case, I figured I’d sell the plane and bank whatever I didn’t owe and find a berth on one of those research ships that sail out past the Second Arch.”

“There’s nothing past the Second Arch but rocks and bad air.”

“Thought I’d like to see for myself. That, or—”

“Or what?”

“Or if something worked out between you and me, I thought I’d stay in the Port and get a job. There’s always pipeline work.”

She was briefly startled. Also pleased.

“Not that it matters now,” he added. “Once we’re done here—and whether you find out anything about your father or not—you’re going to have to head back to the States. You’ll be okay there. You come from a respectable family and you’re well-connected enough that they won’t arrest and interrogate you.”

“What about you?”

“I can disappear on my own terms.”

“You could, you know, come back with me. Come back to the States.”

“Wouldn’t be safe, Lise. The trouble we’re in right now isn’t the first trouble I’ve had. There are good reasons why I can’t go back.”

Tell me, she thought. Don’t make me ask.
Do you know he’s a criminal? That’s why he fled the States
. So tell me. She said, “Legal problems?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yeah, I do.”

He was flying low across the desert, the moonlit foothills hanging off his right wing. He said, “I burned down a building. My father’s warehouse.”

“You told me your father was in the oil business.”

“He was, at one time. But he didn’t like being overseas. When we left Turkey he went into my uncle’s import business. They brought in nickel-and-dime shit from Middle Eastern factories, rugs and souvenirs and things like that.”

“Why’d you burn down the warehouse?”

“I was nineteen years old, Lise. I was pissed off and I wanted to do some damage to my old man.”

She said as gently as possible, “How come?”

He allowed another silent moment to pass, looking at the desert, his instruments, anywhere but at her. “There was this girl I’d been seeing. We were going to get married. It was that serious. But my old man and my uncle didn’t want it to happen. They were old-fashioned about, you know, race.”

“You’re girlfriend wasn’t white?”

“Hispanic.”

“Did you really care what your father thought?”

“Not at that point, no. I hated him. He was a brutal little shit, frankly. Drove my mother to her grave, in my opinion. I didn’t give a fuck what he thought. But he knew that. So he didn’t say a word to me. What he did was, he went to my girlfriend’s family and offered to pay a year’s tuition on her college education if she would stay away from me. I guess it sounded like a good deal. I never saw her again. But she felt bad enough to send me a letter and explain what happened.”

“So you burned his warehouse.”

“Took a couple cans of paint stripper out of the garage and went down to the industrial district and dumped it on the truck bay doors. It was after midnight. The place was three-quarters in flames by the time the fire department got there.”

“So you had your revenge.”

“What I didn’t know was that there was a night guard in the building. He spent six months in a burn ward because of me.”

Lise said nothing.

“What made it worse,” Turk said, “was that my old man covered it up. Cooked up some arrangement with the insurance company. He tracked me down and told me that. How he’d taken this huge financial hit in order to save me from legal action. He said it was because I was family, that was why he did what he did about my girlfriend, because family mattered, whether I knew it or not.”

“He expected you to be
grateful
?”

“Hard as that is to believe, yeah, I think he honestly expected me to be grateful.”

“Were you?”

“No,” Turk said. “I was not grateful.”

He landed the Skyrex where he had landed it for Sulean Moi some months before, on a little strip of pavement that appeared to be in the middle of nowhere but was, Diane insisted, less than a mile from Dvali’s compound, a hikeable distance.

They hiked, carrying flashlights.

He could smell the commune before he could see it. It smelled like water and flowers against the flat mineral essence of the desert. Then they crossed a little hill and there it was, a few lights still burning: four buildings and a courtyard, terracotta roofs like some kind of transplanted hacienda. There was a garden, and a gate, and Turk saw what looked like a young boy standing behind the ornate ironwork. As soon as the boy spotted them he ran inside, and by the time they reached the gate many more lights had come on and a crowd of ten or fifteen people was waiting for them.

“Let me talk to them,” Diane said, a suggestion Turk was happy to accept. He stood a few paces back with Lise while the old woman approached the fence. Turk tried to study the crowd of Fourths, but the light was behind them and they weren’t much more than silhouettes.

Diane shaded her eyes. “Mrs. Rebka?” she said abruptly.

A woman stepped out of the crowd. All Turk could see of this Mrs. Rebka was that she was a little plump and that her hair was fine and made a white halo around her head.

“Diane Dupree,” the woman named Mrs. Rebka said.

“I’m afraid I’ve brought uninvited guests.”

“And you’re one yourself. What brings you here, Diane?”

“Do you have to ask?”

“I suppose not.”

“Turn us away, then, or let us in. I’m tired. And I doubt we’ll have much time to talk before we’re disturbed again.”

Isaac wanted to stay and see the visitors—unexpected visitors being as rare a phenomenon in Isaac’s life as the ashfall had been—but his fever had returned and he was escorted back to bed, where he lay sleepless and sweating for several hours more.

He knew that the tendril that had reached up from the garden and touched his hand was a Hypothetical device. A biological machine. It was incomplete and unsuited to this environment, but Isaac had experienced a deep and thrilling sense of rightness as it circled his wrist. Some fraction of the unfulfilled need inside him had been briefly satisfied.

But that contact was over, and the need was worse for its absence. He wanted the western desert, and he wanted it badly. He was, of course, also afraid—afraid of the vast dry land and of what he might find there, afraid of the need that had overtaken him with such compulsive force. But it was a need that could be sated. He knew that now.

He watched the dawn as it drove the stars away, the planet turning like a flower to the sun.

Two of the Fourths escorted Lise and Turk to a dormitory room in which several bunks had been set up. The bedclothes were clean enough but had the smell of long-undisturbed linen.

The Fourths who accompanied them were aloof but seemed reasonably friendly, given the circumstances. Both were women. The younger of them said, “The bathroom is down the hall when you want it.”

Lise said, “I need to talk to Dr. Dvali—will you tell him I want to see him?”

The Fourths exchanged glances. “In the morning,” the younger one said.

Lise lay down on the nearest bunk. Turk stretched out on another, and almost immediately his breathing settled into long snores.

She tried to suppress her resentment.

Her head was full of thoughts, all raucous, all screaming for attention. She was a little shocked that she had come this far, that she had been party to what amounted to a theft and was accepting the hospitality of a community of rogue Fourths. Avram Dvali was only a few rooms away, and she might be exactly that close to understanding the mystery that had haunted her family for a dozen years.

Understanding it, she thought, or being trapped in it. She wondered how close her father had actually gotten to these dangerous truths.

She left her bunk, tiptoed across the room, and slipped under Turk’s blanket. She curled against him, one hand on his shoulder and the other snaked under his pillow, hoping his audacity or his anger would seep into her and make her less afraid.

Diane sat with Mrs. Rebka—Anna Rebka, whose husband Joshua had died before she became a Fourth—in a room full of tables and chairs recently abandoned by the community’s residents. Water glasses had been left on the rough wooden tabletops to marinate in their own condensation. It was late, and the night air of the desert moved through the room and chilled her feet.

So this is their compound, Diane thought. Comfortable enough, if austere. But there was an atmosphere of monasticism about it. A sacral hush. It was uneasily familiar—she had spent much of her youth among the intemperately religious.

She knew or could imagine much of what went on here. The compound no doubt functioned like other such communities, apart from their experiment with the child. Hidden somewhere, probably underground, were the ultra-low-temperature bioreactors in which Martian “pharmaceuticals” were propogated and stored. She had already seen the pottery kilns that functioned as camouflage: an uninvited visitor would be offered crude crockery and Utopian tracts and sent away none the wiser.