Robert Wilson - Axis

"All right. I hope I can answer them. I'll try."

So they turned away from the ocular rose and began to walk eastward at the old woman's pace, and Sulean was patient while Isaac began to assemble all the uncertainties that had come into his head, not least the question of the rose itself. Although he hadn't slept, he wasn't tired. He was wide awake—as awake as he had ever been, and more curious.

"Where are you from?" he finally asked.

There was a brief hitch in the rhythm of her footsteps. He thought for a moment she might not answer. Then:

"I was born on Mars," she said.

That felt like a true answer. It wasn't the answer he had expected and he had the feeling it was a truth she would have preferred not to reveal. Isaac accepted it without comment. Mars, he thought.

A moment later he asked, "How much do you know about the Hypotheticals?"

"That's odd," the old woman said, smiling faintly and regarding him with what he took to be affection. "That's exactly what I came all this way to ask you."

They talked until noon, when they reached the compound, and Isaac learned a number of new things from their conversation. Then, before stepping past the gate, he paused and looked back the way he had come. The rose was out there, but not just the rose. The rose was only—what? An incomplete fragment of something much larger.

Something that interested him deeply. And something that was interested in him.

Turk drove through one of the older parts of the city, frame houses painted firetruck-red by Chinese settlers, squat three- and four-story apartment buildings of ochre brick quarried from the cliffs above Candle Bay. It was late enough now that the streets were empty. Overhead, an occasional shooting star wrote lines against the dark.

Half an hour ago he had finally gotten through to Lise. He couldn't say what he needed to say over the phone, but she seemed to catch on after a couple of awkward questions. "Meet me where we met," he said. "Twenty minutes."

Where they had met was a 24-hour bar-and-grill called La Rive Gauche, located in the retail district west of the docks. Lise had shown up there six months ago with a crowd from the consulate. A friend of Turk's had spotted a friend at the table and hauled him over for introductions. Turk noticed Lise because she was unescorted and because she was attractive in the way he found women attractive at first glance, based on the depth and availability of her laughter as much as anything else. He was wary of women who laughed too easily and unnerved by women who never laughed at all. Lise laughed gently but wholeheartedly, and when she joked there was nothing mean or competitive in it. And he liked her eyes, the way they turned up at the corners, the pale aqua of the irises, what they looked at and lingered on.

Later she started talking about a trip she was planning across the mountains to Kubelick's Grave, and Turk gave her one of his business cards. "Makes more sense than driving," he said. "Really. You'd have to go by way of the Mahdi Pass, but the road isn't a hundred percent reliable this time of year. There's a bus, but it's crowded and it slides into a gully every now and then."

He asked her what she wanted in a crapped-out little filling-station town like Kubelick's Grave, and she said she was trying to locate an old colleague of her father's, a man named Dvali, but she wouldn't elaborate. And that was probably the end of it, Turk thought, strangers in the night, passing ships, et cetera, but she had called a couple of days later and booked a flight.

He hadn't been looking for a lover—no more than he ever was. He just liked the way she smiled and the way he felt when he smiled back, and when they were forced to wait out that off-season storm on the shore of a mountain lake it was as if they had been granted a free pass from God.

Which had been revoked, apparently. Karma had come calling.

There was only the night staff at the bar and all the tables were empty, and the waitress who brought Turk a menu looked irritable and eager to go off-shift.

Lise showed up a few minutes later. Turk immediately wanted to tell her about Tomas's disappearance and what that might mean, the possibility that his connection with Lise had led someone nasty to Tomas. But he hadn't started to rehearse the words when she launched into the story of her run-in with her ex-husband Brian Gately—which was also pertinent.

Turk had met Brian Gately a couple of times. That was the interesting thing about docklands places like La Rive Gauche: you saw American businessmen sitting next to merchant sailors, Saudi oil executives sharing gossip with Chinese salarymen or unwashed artists from the arrondissements. Brian Gately had seemed like one of those temporary transplants common enough in this part of town, a guy who could travel around the world—two worlds—without really leaving Dubuque, or wherever it was he had been raised. Nice enough, in a bland way, as long as you didn't challenge any of his preconceptions.

But tonight Lise said Brian had threatened her. She described her meeting with him and finished, "So yes, it was a threat, not from Brian directly, but he was communicating what he'd been told, and it adds up to a threat."

"So there are DGS people in town who have a particular interest in Fourths. Especially the woman in the photo."

"And they know where I've been and who I've talked to. The implications of that are fairly obvious. I mean, I don't think anyone followed me here. But they might have. Or planted a locator in my car or something. I have no way of knowing."

All that was possible, Turk thought.

"Lise," he said gently, "it might be worse."

"Worse?"

"There's a friend of mine, a guy I've known a long time. His name is Tomas Ginn. He's a Fourth. That's not public information, but he's pretty upfront about it if he trusts a person. I thought you might like to talk to him. But I had to clear that with him first. I visited him this morning; he promised to think about it. But when I called him tonight I couldn't get hold of him, and when I went to his place he was gone. Abducted. Apparently some people in a white van took him away."

She looked at him wide-eyed and said, "Oh, Christ." She shook her head. "He was what, arrested?"

"Not formally arrested, no. Only the Provisional Government has the power to make an arrest, and they don't do plainclothes warrantless raids—not to my knowledge."

"So he was kidnapped? That's a reportable crime."

"I'm sure it is, but the police are never going to hear about it. Tomas is vulnerable because of what he is. A blood test would prove he's a Fourth, and that in itself is enough to get him shipped back to the States and put on permanent probation or worse. A neighbor told me about the men in the van, but she'd never say any of that to a government official. Where my friend lives, his neighbors are generally people with a lot of exposure on legal grounds—a lot of what people do for a living in Tomas's neighborhood is prohibited under the Accords, and most of them are squatting on land they don't have title to."

"You think Brian knows something about this?"

"Maybe. Or maybe not. It sounds like Brian's pretty far down the pecking order."

"The Genomic Security office at the consulate is kind of a joke compared to what they do back home. They run facial-recognition software at the ports and occasionally serve a warrant on some fugitive dog-cloner or black-market gene-enhancer, but that's about it. At least until now." She paused. "What he told me was that it would be smart for me to go home. Back to the States."

"Maybe he's right."

"You think I should leave?"

"If you're concerned about your safety. And probably you ought to be."