Axis

"No progress?"

"A few interviews, some good conversations with my father's old colleagues at the American University." All this was true. She had immersed herself in her family's fractured history. But she hadn't written more than notes to herself.

"I remember you said your father was interested in Fourths."

"He was interested in all kinds of things." Robert Adams had come to Equatoria as part of the Geophysical Survey's deal with the fledgling American University. The course he taught was New World Geology and he had done fieldwork in the far west. The book he had been working on—a real book—had been called Planet as Artifact, a study of the New World as a place where geological history had been deeply influenced by the Hypotheticals.

And, yes, he had also been fascinated by the community of Fourths—privately, not professionally.

"The woman in the photograph you showed me," Turk said. "Is she a Fourth?"

"Maybe. Probably." How much of this did she really want to discuss?

"How can you tell?"

"Because I've seen her before," Lise said, putting down her fork and turning to face him. "Do you want the whole story?"

"If you want to tell it."

Lise had heard the word "disappeared" applied to her father for the first time three days after he failed to come home from the university, a month after her fifteenth birthday. The local police had come to discuss the case with Lise's mother while Lise listened from the corridor outside the kitchen. Her father had "disappeared"—that is, he had left work as usual, had driven away in the customary direction, and somewhere between the American University and their rented house in the hills above Port Magellan he had vanished. There was no obvious explanation, no pertinent evidence.

But the investigation went on. The issue of his fascination with Fourths had come up. Lise's mother was interviewed again, this time by men who wore business suits rather than uniforms: men from the Department of Genomic Security. Mr. Adams had expressed an interest in Fourths: was the interest personal? Had he, for instance, repeatedly mentioned the subject of longevity? Did he suffer from any degenerative disease that might have been reversed by the Martian longevity treatment? Was he unusually concerned with death? Unhappy at home?

No, Lise's mother had said. Actually, what she said most often was "No, goddammit." Lise remembered her mother at the kitchen table, interrogated, drinking endless cups of rust-brown roiboos tea and saying, "No, goddammit, no."

Nevertheless, a theory had emerged. A family man in the New World, often apart from his family, seduced by the anything-goes atmosphere of the frontier and by the idea of the Fourth Age, an extra thirty years or so tacked onto his expected span of life…

Lise had to admit there was a certain logic to it. He wouldn't have been the first man to be lured from his family by the promise of longevity. Three decades ago the Martian Wun Ngo Wen had brought to Earth a technique for extending human life—a treatment that changed behavior in other and subtler ways as well. Proscribed by virtually every government on Earth, the treatment circulated in the underground community of Terrestrial Fourths.

Would Robert Adams have abandoned his career and family to join that community? Lise's instinctive answer was the same as her mother's: no. He wouldn't have done that to them, no, no matter how tempted he might have been.

But evidence had emerged to subvert that faith. He had been associating with strangers off-campus. People had been coming to the house, people not associated with the university, people he had not introduced to his family and whose purposes he had been reluctant to explain. And the Fourth cults held a special appeal in the academic community—the treatment had first been circulated by the scientist Jason Lawton, among friends he considered trustworthy, and it had spread primarily among intellectuals and scholars.

No, goddammit—but did Mrs. Adams have a better explanation?

Mrs. Adams did not. Nor did Lise.

The investigation remained inconclusive. After a year of this Lise's mother had booked passage to California for herself and her daughter, bent by the insult to her well-pla

So she had begun to ask questions of her father's colleagues and friends, the few still living in the city, and inevitably these questions had involved the community of Fourths in the New World.

Brian at first tried to be helpful. He hadn't much liked her ad hoc investigation into what he considered potentially dangerous matters—and Lise supposed it had been one more in a growing number of emotional disco

Like the woman in the photograph.

"Two photographs, actually," she told Turk. When she moved out of her mother's house, Lise had salvaged a number of items her mother was forever threatening to throw away, in this case a disk of photographs from her parents' Port Magellan years. A few of the pictures had been taken at faculty parties at the Adams' house. Lise had selected a few of these photos and shown them to old family friends, hoping to track down those she didn't recognize. She managed to put names, at least, to most of them, but one stood out: a dark-ski

No one had been able to identify her. Brian had offered to run the picture through DGS image-recognition software and see if anything turned up. This had been the latest of what Lise had come to think of as Brian's "charity bombs"—acts of generosity he threw in front of her as if to divert her from the path to separation—and she had accepted the offer with a warning that it wouldn't change anything.

But the search had turned up a pertinent match. The same woman had passed through the docks at Port Magellan just months ago. She had been listed on a passengership manifest as Sulean Moi.

The name turned up again in co

Turk listened to all this patiently. Then he said, "She wasn't talkative. She paid cash. I put her down at the airstrip in Kubelick's Grave and that was that. She never said anything about her past or why she was flying west. You think she's a Fourth?"

"She hasn't changed much in fifteen years. That suggests she might be."

"So maybe the simplest explanation is true. Your father took the illegal treatment and started a new life under a new name."

"Maybe. But I don't want another hypothesis. I want to know what really happened."

"So you find out the truth, what then? Does that make your life better? Maybe you'll learn something you don't like. Maybe you have to start mourning all over again."

"At least," she said, "I'll know what I'm mourning for."