Axis

"I suppose so. I mean, I don't have anything against Fourths. Never thought much about it either way."

"That comfortable i

"Ma'am—uh, Diane—I don't know the first thing about taking care of a sick man, much less a Fourth."

"He won't be sick for long. But he'll need an understanding friend. Will you be that person for him?"

"Well, I mean, you know, I'm willing, I suppose, but it might be better to make some other arrangement, because I'm in a difficult position, financially and all—"

"I wouldn't have asked you if I could think of anything better. It was a blessing that you showed up when you did." She added, "If I hadn't wanted you to find me I would have been much more difficult to find."

"I tried calling, but—"

"I had to discontinue that number." She frowned but didn't offer to explain.

"Well—" Well, fuck, he thought. "I guess I wouldn't turn out a stray dog in a rainstorm."

Her smile returned. "That's what I thought."

"I guess you learned a few things about Fourths since then," Tomas said.

"I don't know," Turk said. "You're the only close sample I've got. Not too inspiring, actually."

"Did she actually say that, about a bullshit detector?"

"More or less. What do you think, Tomas, is it true?"

Tomas had recovered from his illness—from the genetic rebuild that constituted the Fourth treatment—as quickly as Diane had predicted. His psychological adjustment was another matter. He was a man who had come to Equatoria prepared to die, and instead he had found himself staring down another three or more decades for which he had no plan or ambition.

Physically, though, it had been a liberation. After a week of recovery Tomas could have passed for a man much younger. His crabbed way of walking became more supple, his appetite was suddenly bottomless. This was almost too strange for Turk to deal with, as if Tomas had shed his old body the way a snake sheds its skin. "Fuck, it's just me," Tomas would proclaim whenever Turk became too uncomfortably conscious of the distance between the old Tomas and the new. Tomas clearly relished his newfound health. The only drawback, he said, was that the treatment had erased his tattoos. Half his history had been written in those tattoos, he said.

"Is it true that I have an improved bullshit detector? Well, that's in the eye of the beholder. It's been ten years, Turk. What do you think?"

"We never talked much about this."

"I would of been happy to keep it that way."

"Can you tell when you're being lied to?"

"There's no drug that'll make a stupid man smart. And I'm not a particularly smart man. I'm no lie detector, either. But I can generally tell when somebody's trying to sell me something."

"Because I think Lise has been lied to. Her business with Fourths is legitimate, but I think she's being used. Also she has some information Diane might like to hear."

Tomas was silent for a while. He tipped up his beer to drain it and put the bottle on a tray table next to his chair. He gave Turk a look uneasily reminiscent of Diane's evaluative stare.

"You're in some difficult territory here," he said.

"I know that," Turk said.

"Could get dangerous."

"I guess that's what I'm afraid of."

"Can you give me some time to think this over?"

"Guess so," Turk said.

"Okay. I'll ask around. Call me in a couple of days."

"I appreciate it," Turk said. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet," Tomas said. "Maybe I'll change my mind."

CHAPTER SEVEN

The node in Lise's car a

"Susan Adams," the node replied.

These days Lise could not think of her mother without visualizing that calendar-box of pharmaceuticals on her kitchen counter, assorted by day and hour, the clockwork of her mortality. Pills for depression, pills to adjust her blood cholesterol, pills to avert the Alzheimer's for which she carried a suspect gene. "Read," she said, grimly.

Dear Lise. The node's voice was male, indifferent, offering up the text with all the liveliness of a frozen fish. Thank you for your latest. It is somewhat reassuring after what I've seen on the news.

The ashfall, she meant, which still clogged the side streets and had caused thousands of tourists to flee to their cruise ships, begging for a quick ride home. People who had come to Equatoria hoping to find a landscape pleasingly strange, but who had stumbled into something altogether different—real strangeness, the kind that didn't negotiate with human preconceptions.

Precisely how her mother would have reacted, Lise thought.

All I can think of is how far away you are and how inaccessible you have made yourself. No, I won't start that old argument again. And I won't say a word about your separation from Brian.

Susan Adams had argued fiercely against the divorce—ironically, since she had argued almost as fiercely against the marriage. At first, Lise's mother had disliked Brian because he worked for Genomic Security—Genomic Security, in Susan Adams' mind, being represented by the terse and unhelpful men who had hovered around her after her husband's incomprehensible disappearance. Lise must not marry one of these compassionless monsters, she had insisted; but Brian was not compassionless, in fact Brian had charmed Lise's mother, had patiently dismantled her objections until he became a welcome presence. Brian had quickly learned the paramount rule in dealing with Lise's mother, that one did not mention the New World, the Hypotheticals, the Spin, or the disappearance of Robert Adams. In Susan Adams' household these subjects had acquired the power of profanity. Which was one reason Lise had been so anxious to leave that household behind.

And there had been much anxiety and resistance after the wedding, when Brian was transferred to Port Magellan. You must not go, Lise's mother had said, as if the New World were some ghostly otherness from which no one emerged undamaged. No, not even for the sake of Brian's career should they enter that perdition.

This was, of course, an ongoing act of denial, a forcible exile of unacceptable truths, a strategy her mother had devised for containing and cha

Even the ashfall would have fascinated him, Lise thought: those cogs and seashells embedded in the dust, pieces in a grand puzzle…

I simply hope that these events convince you of the wisdom of coming home. Lise, if money is a problem, let me book you a ticket. I admit that California is not what it once was, but we can still see the ocean from the kitchen window, and although the summers are warm and the winter storms more intense than I remember them being, surely that's a small thing compared to what you are presently enduring.

You don't know, Lise thought, what I'm enduring. You don't care to know.

In the afternoon sunlight the American Consulate looked like a benevolent fortress set behind a moat of wrought-iron fences. Someone had planted a garden along the ru