Axis

Brian wasn't an idealist. He knew there were levels and echelons of Genomic Security to which he would never be admitted, realms where policy was made and rules were defined. But on the scale at which he worked Brian thought he performed useful if unexciting work. Criminals often fled from the U.S. to Equatoria, criminals whose misdeeds fell under the aegis of Genomic Security—cloning racketeers, peddlers of false or lethal longevity treatments, Fourth cultists of a radical stripe, purveyors of "enhancements" to couples willing to pay for superior children. Brian did not pursue or apprehend those criminals, but what he did do—liaising with the Provisional Government, smoothing ruffled feathers when jurisdictional disputes arose—was essential to their apprehension. It was tricky, the relationship between a quasi-police organization attached to a national consulate and the UN-sponsored local government. You had to be polite. You had to make certain reciprocal gestures. You couldn't just wade in and offend everybody.

Although apparently these guys could. And that was disappointing, because Brian believed in the rule of law. The inevitably imperfect, confusing, grindingly inefficient, occasionally corrupt, but absolutely essential rule of law. That without which we are no better than the beasts, etc. He had run his office that way: carefully, cleanly.

And now here came Sigmund and Weil, the tall one sour as Angostina bitters and the short one hard but hale, like a velvet-wrapped bowling ball, to remind him that at altitudes more vertiginous than his own the law could be tailored to suit a circumstance.

"You've already been a big help," Weil said.

"Well, I hope so. I want to be."

"Putting us in touch with the right people at the Provisional Government. And of course this thing with Lise Adams. The fact that you had a personal relationship with this woman—I mean, 'awkward' is hardly the word for it."

"Thank you for noticing," Brian said, stupidly grateful even though he knew he was being played.

"And I can assure you again that we don't want to arrest her or even necessarily talk to her directly. Lise is definitely not the target in this case."

"You're looking for the woman in the photograph."

"Which of course is why we don't want Lise getting underfoot. We hoped you could get that idea across to her…"

"I tried."

"I know, and we appreciate it. But let me tell you how this works, Brian, so you understand what our concerns are. Because when your image search came up on our database, it definitely raised eyebrows. You said Lise explained to you why she's interested in Sulean Moi—"

"Sulean Moi was seen with Lise's father before he disappeared, and she wasn't co

"The truth is a little more bizarre. You deal with Fourths on a regular basis, legally speaking. No surprises for you there. But the longevity treatment is only one of the medical modifications that were brought to Earth by our Martian cousins."

Brian nodded.

"We're after something a little bigger than the usual Fourth cultist here," Weil said. "Details are scarce, and I'm not a scientist, but it involves a biologically mediated attempt at communicating with the Hypothetical."

Like many of his generation Brian tended to wince at mention of the Hypotheticals, or for that matter the Spin. The Spin had ended before he was old enough to attend school, and the Hypotheticals were simply one of the more abstruse facts of daily life, an important but airy abstraction, like electromagnetism or the motions of the tides.

But like everyone else he had been raised and educated by Spin survivors, people who believed they had lived through the most momentous turning point in human history. And maybe they had. The aftershocks of the Spin—wars, religious movements and countermovements, a generalized human insecurity and a corrosive global cynicism—were still shaping the world. Mars was an inhabited planet and mankind had been admitted into a labyrinth as large as the sky itself. All these changes had no doubt been confounding to those who endured them and would be felt for centuries to come.

But they had also become a license for an entire generation's lunacy, and that was less easy for Brian to excuse. Many millions of otherwise rational men and women had reacted to the Spin with a shocking display of irrationality, mutual distrust, and outright viciousness. Now those same people felt entitled to the respect of anyone Brian's age or younger.

They didn't deserve it. Lunacy wasn't a virtue and decency didn't boast. "Decency," in fact, was what Brian's generation had been left to rebuild. Decency, trust, and a certain decorum in human behavior.

The Hypotheticals were the causal agent behind the Spin: Why would anyone want to communicate with them? What would that even mean? And how could it be achieved by a biological modification, even a Martian one?

"What this technology does," Sigmund said, "is modify a human nervous system to make it sensitive to the signals the Hypotheticals use to communicate among themselves. Basically, they create a kind of human intermediary. A communicant who can translate between our species and whatever the Hypothetical are."

"They actually did this?"

"The Martians won't say. It may have been attempted on their planet, maybe more than once. But we believe the technology, like the longevity treatment, was carried to Earth by Wun Ngo Wen and released into the general population."

"So why haven't I heard more about it?"

"Because it's not something universally desirable, like an extra forty years of life. If our intelligence is correct, it's lethal if attempted on an adult human being. It may be what killed Jason Lawton, way back when."

"So what good is it if it's lethal?"

"It may not be lethal," Weil said, "if the pharmaceuticals are delivered to a human being in utero. The developing embryo builds itself around the biotech. The human and the alien growing together."

"Jesus," Brian said. "To do that to a child—"

"It's profoundly unethical, obviously. You know, at the Department we spend a lot of time worrying about Fourths, about the harm that can come from cultists engineering changes in human biology. And that's a real, legitimate problem. But this is so much more shocking. Really, deeply… evil is the only word for it."

"Has anybody actually done this on Earth?"

"Well, that's what we're looking into. So far we have very little hard evidence or eyewitness testimony. But where we do, one person appears. Many names, but just one person, one face. You want to guess who that is?"

The woman in the photograph. The woman who had been seen with Lise's father.

"So Sulean Moi shows up on facial-recognition data from the docks at Port Magellan, and when we arrive to investigate we find Lise, who has a prior co

"Warning her didn't work," Brian said.

"So we have to make use of her in some other way."

"Make use of her?"

"Instead of physically arresting her—which is what some of my superiors have been advocating—we think a wait-and-watch approach might be more informative in the long run. She's already co