Axis

Feeling simultaneously purified and paranoid, Lise climbed into the rust-spackled vehicle Diane had arranged for them to drive. Turk took the drivers seat, Lise buckled in next to him, and they waited while Diane said goodbye to a dozen villagers who had gathered around her.

"Popular woman," Lise observed.

"She's known in every village up the north coast," Turk said. "She moves between a whole bunch of these communities, expat Malays and Tamils and Minang, season by season, helping out. They all keep a place for her and they're all protective of her."

"They know she's a Fourth?"

"Sure. And she's not the only one. A bunch of these village elders are more elderly than you might think."

The world was changing, Lise thought, and no amount of rhetoric about the sanctity of the human genome was going to stop it. She pictured herself trying to communicate that truth to Brian. A truth he would no doubt refuse or deny. Brian was adept at patching cracks in the foundation of his faith in the good works of Genomic Security. But the cracks kept coming. The edifice trembled.

Ibu Diane Dupree levered herself into the car with elaborate caution and fastened her threadbare seat belt. Turk drove slowly, and the crowd of villagers followed for a few yards, filling the narrow street.

"They don't like to see me go," Diane said. "They're afraid I might not come back."

Lise shrank a little every time they passed another vehicle, but Turk drove cheerfully once they were back on the paved roads, a cloth cap pulled low over his eyes, humming to himself. Ibu Diane sat patiently, watching the world scroll past.

Lise decided to break Diane's silence. She turned her head and said, "Tell me about Avram Dvali."

"It might be easier if you told me what you already know."

"Well—he taught at the American University, but he was secretive and not especially well-liked by the faculty. He left his teaching position without an explanation less than a year before my father vanished. Someone at the chancery office told me his last paycheck had been forward by letter mail to a box address in Kubelick's Grave. According to my mother," at least on the rare and emotionally difficult occasions when Lise had pressed her to talk about the past, "he visited the house several times before he quit his job. There's no listed address for him in Kubelick's Grave, but a search on his name didn't turn up any contemporary address, anywhere. I meant to go to Kubelick's Grave and see if the box address still worked or if there was any record of who had rented it. But it seemed like a long shot."

"You were very close to something you didn't understand. I'm not surprised Genomic Security took an interest in you."

"So Dvali was involved in one of these communicant cults."

"Not involved in it. It was his. He created it."

Dvali, she said, had taken his Fourth treatment in New Delhi years before he emigrated to the New World. "I met him not long after he was hired by the university. There are literally thousands of Fourths in the area around Port Magellan—not including those who choose to live out their extended lives quietly and in isolation. Some of us are more organized than others. We don't hold conventions, for obvious reasons, but I meet most of the known Fourths, sooner or later, and I can sort out the cliques and subgroups."

"Dvali had his own group?"

"So I gather. Like-minded people. A few of them." She hesitated.

"We're called Fourths, you know, because on Mars the treatment is equivalent to entering a fourth stage of life, an adulthood beyond adulthood. But the treatment doesn't guarantee any special maturity. That's built into the institutions surrounding it as much as into the treatment itself. Avram Dvali brought his own obsession into his Fourthness."

"What obsession?"

"With the Hypothetical. With the transcendent forces of the universe. Some people chafe at their humanity. They want to be redeemed by something larger than themselves, to ratify their sense of their own unique value. They want to touch God. The paradox of Fourthness is that it's a magnet for such people. We try to contain them, but—" She shrugged. "We don't have the tools the Martians put in place."

"So he organized around the idea of creating a, a—"

"A communicant, a human interface with the Hypotheticals. He was very serious about it. He recruited his group from among our community and then did his best to seal them away from us. They became much more secretive once the process was underway."

"You couldn't stop him?"

"We tried, of course. Dvali's project wasn't the first such attempt. In the past, the intervention of other Fourths was enough to quell the effort—abetted, when necessary, by Sulean Moi, whose authority among most Fourths is unquestionable. But Dr. Dvali was immune to moral suasion, and by the time Sulean Moi arrived, he and his group were in hiding. We've had very sporadic contact with them since—too little and too late to stop them."

"You mean there's a child?"

"Yes. His name, I'm told, is Isaac. He would be twelve years old by now."

"My father disappeared twelve years ago. You think he might have joined this group?"

"No—from your description of him and my knowledge of Dvali's recruiting, no, I'm sorry, he's not among them."

"Then maybe he knew something dangerous about them—maybe they abducted him."

"As Fourths we're inhibited against that kind of violence. What you're suggesting isn't impossible, but it's extremely unlikely. I've never heard even a rumor that Dvali was capable of such a thing. If anything like that happened to your father, it was more likely the work of Genomic Security. They were sniffing at Dvali's heels even then."

"Why would DGS kidnap my father?"

"Presumably to interrogate him. If he resisted—" Diane shrugged unhappily.

"Why would he resist?"

"I don't know. I never met your father. I can't answer that."

"They interrogated him and then, what, killed him?"

"I don't know."

Turk said, "They have what they call Executive Action Committees in DGS, Lise. They write their own legal ticket and they do what they want. I'm pretty sure that's who took Tomas Gi

"They killed Tomas?"

"I expect so. Or transported him to some secret prison to kill him a little more slowly."

Could Brian have known about this, learned about it at work? Lise had a brief but horrifying vision of the DGS staff at the consulate laughing at her, at her naive quest to uncover the truth about her father. She had been walking over an abyss on a skin of thin ice, nothing to protect her but her own ignorance.

But—no. As an institution, Genomic Security might be capable of that; Brian was not. Unhappy as she had been in her marriage, she knew Brian intimately. Brian was many things. But he was not a murderer.

Clever as Ibu Diane had been about discarding cars and clothing, Turk seemed to lose some of his confidence as they left the wooded lands and entered the industrialized outskirts of Port Magellan. Coming past the oil refineries at dusk, the ocean on the left and the refineries emitting a kind of fungal glow, he said, "There's a couple of vehicles I keep seeing ever since we got on the main road. Like they're pacing us. But it could be my imagination."

"Then we shouldn't go directly to Arundji's," Diane said. "In fact we should get off the highway as soon as possible."

"I'm not saying we're being followed. It's just something I noticed."