Axis

As often happened when she talked about her father, she dreamed of him that night.

More memory than dream at first: she was with him on the veranda of their house on the hill in Port Magellan, and he was talking to her about the Hypotheticals.

He talked to her on the veranda because Lise's mother didn't care for these conversations. This was the starkest contrast Lise could draw between her parents. Both were Spin survivors, but they had emerged from the crisis with polarized sensibilities. Her father had thrown himself headlong into the mystery, had fallen in love with the heightened strangeness of the universe. Her mother pretended that none of it had happened—that the garden fence and the back wall were barricades strong enough to repulse the tide of time.

Lise had not quite known where to place herself on that divide. She loved the sense of safety she felt in her mother's home. But she loved to hear her father talk.

In the dream he talked about the Hypotheticals. The Hypotheticals aren't people, Lise, you must not make that mistake. As the u

Like God, Lise in her dream suggested.

A blind God, her father said, but he was wrong, because in the dream, while she was entranced in the grandeur of his vision and safe in the boundary of her mothers sensibility, the Hypothetical had reached down from the sky, opened a steel fist that glittered in the starlight, and snatched him away before she could summon the courage to scream.

CHAPTFR FIVE

The dust fell more sparsely for another few hours, yielded to a gray daylight, and stopped altogether by dark. The city remained eerily quiet apart from the intermittent growl of earthmovers ceaselessly shifting the ash. Turk could tell where the earth-movers were working by the billows of fine dust that rose around and above them, gray pillars lofting over the corduroy of shops, shanties, office buildings, billboards, commingling with saltwater plumes where pump lines laid from the harbor to the hills had begun to sluice the streets. A wasteland. But even at this hour there were people in the street, masked or with banda

"You think it's over?" Lise asked.

Obviously a question he couldn't answer. But he guessed she didn't want a real answer as much as she wanted reassurance. "For now, anyway."

They were both too wired to sleep. He switched on the video display and they settled back on the sofa, trawling for new information. A newsreader a

They had spent the day in the apartment, Turk mostly sitting at the window, Lise making calls and sending messages to family back home, itemizing the food in the kitchen in case the city was shut down long-term, and in the process they had reestablished a kind of intimacy—the mountain-camp-in-a-thunderstorm intimacy they had shared before, brought down to the city—and when she put her head against his shoulder Turk raised his hand to stroke her hair, hesitated when he remembered the nature of their situation here.

"It's all right," she said.

Her hair smelled fresh and somehow golden, and it felt like silk under the palm of his hand.

"Turk," she said, "I'm sorry—"

"Nothing to apologize for."

"For thinking I needed an excuse to see you."

"Missed you too," he said.

"Just—it was confusing."

"I know."

"Do you want to go to bed?" She took his hand and rubbed her cheek against it. "I mean—"

He knew what she meant.

He spent that night with her and he spent another, not because he had to—the coast road had been mostly cleared by that time—but because he could.

But he couldn't stay forever. He lazed around one morning more, picking over breakfast while Lise made more calls. Amazing how many friends and acquaintances and home-folks she had. It made him feel a little unpopular. The only calls he made that morning were to customers whose flights would have to be rescheduled or canceled—cancellations he couldn't afford right now—and to a couple of buddies, mechanics from the airport, who might wonder why he wasn't around to go drinking with them. He didn't have much of a social life. He didn't even own a dog.

She recorded a long message to her mother back in the States. You couldn't make a direct call across the Arch, since the only things the Hypothetical allowed to travel between this world and the one next door were ma

Turk had family in Austin, Texas. But they hadn't heard from him lately and wouldn't expect to.

On the bookshelf by Lise's desk was a three-volume bound copy of the Martian Archives, sometimes called the Martian Encyclopedia, the compendium of history and science brought to earth by Wun Ngo Wen thirty years ago. The blue dust jackets were tattered at their spine ends. He took down the first volume and leafed through it. When she finally put down the phone, he said, "Do you believe in this?"

"It's not a religion. It's not something you have to believe in it."

Back during the freakish years of the Spin, the technologically advanced nations of the Earth had assembled the necessary resources to terraform and colonize the planet Mars. The most useful resource had already been put in place by the Hypotheticals, and that was time. For every year on Earth under the Spin membrane, thousands of years had passed in the universe at large. The biological transformation of Mars—scientists called it "the ecopoiesis"—had been relatively easy to accomplish, given that generous temporal disco