Axis

Lise and Diane used the grimy employees' restroom while Turk did his preflight checks. When Lise came back from the rear of the hangar she found him in a heated discussion with a uniformed man. The man in the uniform was short, balding, and conspicuously unhappy. "I have to call Mr. Arundji," he said, "you know that, Turk," and Turk said, "Give me a few minutes, that's all I ask—haven't I bought enough rounds over the last few years to earn me that?"

"I'm advising you that this is not allowed."

"Fine. No problem. Fifteen minutes, then you can call anybody you want."

"I'm giving you notice here. Nobody can say I let you get away with this."

"Nobody'll say any such thing."

"Fifteen minutes. More like ten." The guard turned and walked away.

In the old days, Turk said, an airport was anywhere in Equatoria you could carve out a landing strip. A little four-seater prop plane would get you places you couldn't otherwise go, and nobody worried about filing a flight plan. But that had changed under the relentless pressure of the Provisional Government and the air-travel conglomerates. Big business and big government would drive places like Arundji's into the ground, Turk said, sooner or later. Even now, he said, it wasn't exactly legal to be making this kind of after-hours departure from a closed strip. Probably it would cost him his license. But he was being squeezed out anyhow. Nothing to lose, he said. Nothing much. Then he pivoted the plane onto a vacant runway and started his takeoff run.

This was Turk doing what he claimed to do best, Lise thought: putting on his shoes and walking away from something. He believed in the redemptive power of distant horizons. It was a faith she couldn't bring herself to share.

The aircraft left the ground swaying like a kite, its huge feathered props pulling them toward the moonlit mountains, the engine purring. Ibu Diane peered out the window and murmured something about "how much quieter these things are than they used to be—oh, years ago now, years ago."

Lise watched the arc of the coast tilt to starboard and the distant smudge of Port Magellan grow even smaller. She waited patiently for Turk to say something, maybe even to apologize, but he didn't speak—only pointed once, abruptly; and Lise looked up in time to see the white-hot trail of a shooting star flash over the peaks and passes of the mountains toward the emptiness of the western desert.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Brian Gately wasn't prepared for the violent image that popped out of his mailbox that morning. It provoked an unpleasant memory. In the summer of his thirteenth year Brian had done volunteer work at the Episcopal church where his family worshipped. He had not been a particularly devout teenager—doctrinal matters confused him, he avoided Bible Study—but the church, both the institution and the physical building, possessed a reassuring weight, a quality he later learned to call "gravitas." The church put a sensible boundary on things. That was why his parents, who had lived through the economic and religious uncertainties of the Spin, went to church every week, and that was why Brian liked it. That, and the pinewood smell of the newly-built chapel, and the way the stained-glass windows broke the morning light into colors. So he had volunteered for summer work and had spent a few drowsy days sweeping the chapel or opening doors for elderly parishioners or ru

The suburb in which Brian lived was graced with a number of well-maintained parks and wooded ravines. The a

Then his friends Lyle and Kev showed up and tempted him away from the adults. Down through the woods there was a creek where stones might be skipped or tadpoles captured. Brian begged a break from his volunteer work and went off with them into the green shade of the forest. Down by the verge of the creek, which flowed in a shallow ribbon over gravel tilled by ancient glaciers, they found not just stones to throw but, surprisingly, a habitation: a scrap of canvas tent, all awry, and plastic grocery bags, rusted cans (pork and beans, animal food), empty bottles and brown flasks, a corroded shopping cart, and finally, between two oak trees whose roots had grown out of the ground and twined together like a fist, a bundle of old clothes—which, examined more closely, was not a bundle of old clothes at all, but a dead man.

The dead homeless man must have been there for days, undiscovered. He looked both bloated, a tattered red cotton shirt stretched taut across his enormous belly, and shrunken, as if something essential had been sucked out of him. The exposed parts of him had been nibbled by animals, there were bugs on his milky-white eyes, and when the wind came around the smell was so bad that Brian's friend Kev turned and promptly vomited into the glassy water of the creek.

The three of them ran back to the friendly part of the park and told Pastor Carlysle what they'd found, and that was the end of the picnic.

The police were called, an ambulance came to retrieve the body, and the suddenly somber gathering broke up.

Kev and Lyle, over the course of the next six months, stopped showing up for Sunday services, as if the church and dead man had become associated one with the other, but Brian had the opposite reaction. He believed in the protective power of the chapel, precisely because he had seen what lay beyond it. He had seen unhallowed death.

He had seen death, and death shouldn't have surprised him: nevertheless he was shocked by what popped out of his mailbox twenty years later, within the sanctified walls of his office and the carefully-defined if crumbling boundaries of his adult life.

Two days before he had received the brief, aborted phone call from Lise.

It had come late in the late evening. Brian had been on his way home from one of those tedious consulate social nights, drinks at the ambassadors residence and small talk with the usual suspects. Brian didn't drink much but what he did drink went to his head, and he let his car do the driving on the way home. Slowly, then—the car was idiotically literal-minded about speed limits and restricted to the few streets with automated driving grids—but safely, he came back to the apartment he had once shared with Lise, with its attendant atmosphere of claustrophobia and something that might have been desperation had it been less comfortably furnished. He showered before bed, and as he toweled off he listened to the silence of the city night and thought: am I inside the circle or out of it?

The phone rang as he turned out the lights. He put the slate wedge to his ear and registered her distant voice.

He tried to warn her. She said things he didn't immediately understand.

And then the co

Probably he should have gone to Sigmund and Weil with this, but he didn't. Couldn't. The message was personal. It was meant for him and for him alone. Sigmund and Weil could get along without it. Early the next day he sat in his office thinking about Lise, his failed marriage. Then he picked up the phone and called Pieter Kirchberg, his contact at the Security and Law Enforcement Division of the UN Provisional Government.