Robert Wilson - Axis

Her name, he said, was Diane.

Turk told Tomas Ginn about Lise—a little bit about her. How they had connected when they were stranded in the mountains; how he couldn't get her out of his mind even when they were back in civilization, even when she stopped returning his calls; how they got back together during the ashfall.

Tomas listened from his tattered easy chair, sipping beer from a green glass bottle and smiling placidly, as if he had discovered some kind of windless place inside his head. "Sounds like you hardly know this lady."

"I know as much as I need to. Some people, it isn't that hard to tell whether you trust them or not."

"Trust her, do you?"

"Yeah."

Tomas cupped the crotch of his baggy jeans. "This is what you trust. Every inch a sailor."

"It's not like that."

"It never is. But it always is. So why you want to drive up here and tell me about this woman?"

"Actually, I was thinking maybe I could introduce her to you."

"To me? I ain't your daddy, Turk."

"No, and you're not what you used to be, either."

"Don't see what that's got to do with it."

Turk had to tread carefully here. With the utmost delicacy, insofar as he was capable of it. "Well… she's curious about Fourths."

"Oh, my Christ." Tomas rolled his eyes. "Curious?"

"She's got reasons to be."

"So you want to serve me up to her? Exhibit A or whatever?"

"No. What I really want to do is let her talk to Diane. But I want your opinion first."

Diane—the Western doctor, or nurse, as she insisted on calling herself—had hiked to Breaker Beach from some inland village to treat Tomas's slashed arm.

At first Turk was suspicious of her. In Equatoria, especially out here in the backwoods, nobody was checking anybody's medical license. At least that was the impression he got. If you owned a syringe and a bottle of distilled water you could call yourself a doctor, and the breaker bosses would naturally endorse any self-appointed physician who worked for free, regardless of results. So Turk sat with Tomas inside a vacant hut waiting for this woman to arrive, making occasional conversation until the older man fell asleep despite the blood still leaking into his makeshift bandage. The hut was made of some local wood, round barked branches knobbed like bamboo holding up a flat tin roof. It smelled of stale cooking and tobacco and human sweat. It was hot inside, though the screened door admitted an occasional slow sigh of air.

The sun was going down when the doctor finally walked up the plank steps to the platform floor, tugging aside a layer of bug netting.

She wore a tunic and loose pants of a cloth the color and texture of raw muslin. She wasn't a young woman. Far from it. Her hair was so white it seemed almost transparent. "Who's the patient?" she asked, squinting. "And light a lamp, please—I can hardly see."

"My name's Turk Findley," Turk said.

"Are you the patient?"

"No, I—"

"Show me the patient."

So he turned up the wick of an oil lamp and escorted her through another layer of netting to the yellowed mattress where Tomas slept. Out in the dusk, insect choruses were warming up. They sounded like no insects he had heard before, but you could tell that's what it was, that steely staccato buzzing. From the beach came the sound of hammering, the clatter of sheet metal, the chug and whine of diesel motors.

Tomas snored, oblivious. The doctor—Diane—looked at the bandage on his arm with an expression of contempt. "How did this happen?"

Turk told her how it had happened.

"So he sacrificed himself for you?"

"Sacrificed a chunk of his arm, anyhow."

"You're lucky to have a friend like that."

"Wake him up first. Then tell me whether I'm lucky."

She nudged Tomas's shoulder and Tomas opened his eyes and promptly cursed. Old curses, Creole curses, pungent as gumbo. He tried to sit up, then thought better of it. Finally he fixed his attention on Diane. "And who the fuck might you be?"

"I'm a nurse. Calm down. Who bandaged you?"

"Guy on the ship."

"He did a lousy job. Let me see."

"Well, I guess it was his first time. He— ow! Jesus! Turk, is this a real nurse?"

"Don't be an infant," Diane said. "And hold still. I can't help you if I can't see what's wrong." A pause. "Ah. Well. You're lucky you didn't cut an artery." She took a syringe from her kit and filled it. "Something for the pain before I clean and stitch."

Tomas started to protest, but that was for show. He looked relieved when the needle went in.

Turk backed away and tried to give Diane room to work, not that there was a whole lot of space in this little hut. He wondered what it must be like to make a living as a breaker—to sleep under a tin roof praying you wouldn't be hurt or killed before your contract played out, before you got the payoff they promised you, a year's wages and a bus ticket to the Port. There was an official camp physician, the breaker boss had explained, but he only came in twice a week, usually to fill out forms. Diane did most of the routine cut-and-stitch duty.

Turk watched her as she worked, a silhouette cast by lamplight on the gauzy bug screen. She was skinny and she moved with the calculated caution of the very old. But she was strong, too. She worked methodically and smoothly, occasionally muttering to herself. She might be around Tomas's age, which the sailor variously gave as sixty or seventy—maybe older.

She worked, and from time to time Tomas swore with fierce intent but a certain drugged lethargy. There was a stink of antiseptic, and Turk stepped out into the rising dark. His first night in the New World. In the near distance there was a stand of flowering bushes he couldn't name, six-fingered leaves moving in an offshore breeze. The flowers were blue and smelled like cloves or cinammon or some other Christmas spice. Farther off, the lights and fires of the industrial beach guttered like lit fuses. And beyond the beach the ocean rolled in faint green phosphorescence, and the alien stars turned grand slow circles.

"There's a potential complication," Diane said when she had finished with Tomas.

She came and sat with Turk on the edge of the wooden platform that held the floor a foot or so above the ground. She had worked hard cleaning and closing Tomas's wound, and she mopped her forehead with a handkerchief. Her accent was American, Turk thought. A shade southern—Maryland, maybe, or those parts.

He asked her what kind of complications those might be.

"With luck, nothing serious. But Equatoria is a completely novel microbial environment—do you understand?"

"I may be dumb, but I'm not ignorant."

She laughed at that. "I apologize, Mr.—?"

"Findley, but call me Turk."

"Your parents named you Turk?"

"No, ma'am. But the family lived in Istanbul for a couple years when I was a kid. I picked up a little Turkish. And a nickname. So what are you saying—Tomas might come down with some local disease?"

"There are no native human beings on this planet, no hominids, no primates, nothing remotely like us. Most local diseases can't touch us. But there are bacteria and fungi that thrive in moist, warm environments, including the human body. Nothing we can't adjust to, Mr. Findley—Turk—and nothing so dangerous or communicable that it could be carried back to Earth. But it's still not a good idea to arrive in the New World with a challenged immune system or, in Mr. Ginn's case, an open wound bandaged by an idiot."

"Can't you give him some kind of antibiotic?"

"I did. But the local microorganisms don't necessarily respond to standard pharmaceuticals. Don't misunderstand. He's not ill, and in all likelihood he won't become ill, but there's a certain unavoidable risk. Are you a close friend of Mr. Ginn?"