Axis

"What about you?"

"I can disappear on my own terms."

"You could, you know, come back with me. Come back to the States."

"Wouldn't be safe, Lise. The trouble we're in right now isn't the first trouble I've had. There are good reasons why I can't go back."

Tell me, she thought. Don't make me ask. Do you know he's a criminal? That's why he fled the States . So tell me. She said, "Legal problems?"

"You don't want to know."

"Yeah, I do."

He was flying low across the desert, the moonlit foothills hanging off his right wing. He said, "I burned down a building. My father's warehouse."

"You told me your father was in the oil business."

"He was, at one time. But he didn't like being overseas. When we left Turkey he went into my uncle's import business. They brought in nickel-and-dime shit from Middle Eastern factories, rugs and souvenirs and things like that."

"Why'd you burn down the warehouse?"

"I was nineteen years old, Lise. I was pissed off and I wanted to do some damage to my old man."

She said as gently as possible, "How come?"

He allowed another silent moment to pass, looking at the desert, his instruments, anywhere but at her. "There was this girl I'd been seeing. We were going to get married. It was that serious. But my old man and my uncle didn't want it to happen. They were old-fashioned about, you know, race."

"You're girlfriend wasn't white?"

"Hispanic."

"Did you really care what your father thought?"

"Not at that point, no. I hated him. He was a brutal little shit, frankly. Drove my mother to her grave, in my opinion. I didn't give a fuck what he thought. But he knew that. So he didn't say a word to me. What he did was, he went to my girlfriend's family and offered to pay a year's tuition on her college education if she would stay away from me. I guess it sounded like a good deal. I never saw her again. But she felt bad enough to send me a letter and explain what happened."

"So you burned his warehouse."

"Took a couple cans of paint stripper out of the garage and went down to the industrial district and dumped it on the truck bay doors. It was after midnight. The place was three-quarters in flames by the time the fire department got there."

"So you had your revenge."

"What I didn't know was that there was a night guard in the building. He spent six months in a burn ward because of me."

Lise said nothing.

"What made it worse," Turk said, "was that my old man covered it up. Cooked up some arrangement with the insurance company. He tracked me down and told me that. How he'd taken this huge financial hit in order to save me from legal action. He said it was because I was family, that was why he did what he did about my girlfriend, because family mattered, whether I knew it or not."

"He expected you to be grateful?"

"Hard as that is to believe, yeah, I think he honestly expected me to be grateful."

"Were you?"

"No," Turk said. "I was not grateful."

He landed the Skyrex where he had landed it for Sulean Moi some months before, on a little strip of pavement that appeared to be in the middle of nowhere but was, Diane insisted, less than a mile from Dvali's compound, a hikeable distance.

They hiked, carrying flashlights.

He could smell the commune before he could see it. It smelled like water and flowers against the flat mineral essence of the desert. Then they crossed a little hill and there it was, a few lights still burning: four buildings and a courtyard, terracotta roofs like some kind of transplanted hacienda. There was a garden, and a gate, and Turk saw what looked like a young boy standing behind the ornate ironwork. As soon as the boy spotted them he ran inside, and by the time they reached the gate many more lights had come on and a crowd of ten or fifteen people was waiting for them.

"Let me talk to them," Diane said, a suggestion Turk was happy to accept. He stood a few paces back with Lise while the old woman approached the fence. Turk tried to study the crowd of Fourths, but the light was behind them and they weren't much more than silhouettes.

Diane shaded her eyes. "Mrs. Rebka?" she said abruptly.

A woman stepped out of the crowd. All Turk could see of this Mrs. Rebka was that she was a little plump and that her hair was fine and made a white halo around her head.

"Diane Dupree," the woman named Mrs. Rebka said.

"I'm afraid I've brought uninvited guests."

"And you're one yourself. What brings you here, Diane?"

"Do you have to ask?"

"I suppose not."

"Turn us away, then, or let us in. I'm tired. And I doubt we'll have much time to talk before we're disturbed again."

Isaac wanted to stay and see the visitors—unexpected visitors being as rare a phenomenon in Isaac's life as the ashfall had been—but his fever had returned and he was escorted back to bed, where he lay sleepless and sweating for several hours more.

He knew that the tendril that had reached up from the garden and touched his hand was a Hypothetical device. A biological machine. It was incomplete and unsuited to this environment, but Isaac had experienced a deep and thrilling sense of rightness as it circled his wrist. Some fraction of the unfulfilled need inside him had been briefly satisfied.

But that contact was over, and the need was worse for its absence. He wanted the western desert, and he wanted it badly. He was, of course, also afraid—afraid of the vast dry land and of what he might find there, afraid of the need that had overtaken him with such compulsive force. But it was a need that could be sated. He knew that now.

He watched the dawn as it drove the stars away, the planet turning like a flower to the sun.

Two of the Fourths escorted Lise and Turk to a dormitory room in which several bunks had been set up. The bedclothes were clean enough but had the smell of long-undisturbed linen.

The Fourths who accompanied them were aloof but seemed reasonably friendly, given the circumstances. Both were women. The younger of them said, "The bathroom is down the hall when you want it."

Lise said, "I need to talk to Dr. Dvali—will you tell him I want to see him?"

The Fourths exchanged glances. "In the morning," the younger one said.

Lise lay down on the nearest bunk. Turk stretched out on another, and almost immediately his breathing settled into long snores.

She tried to suppress her resentment.

Her head was full of thoughts, all raucous, all screaming for attention. She was a little shocked that she had come this far, that she had been party to what amounted to a theft and was accepting the hospitality of a community of rogue Fourths. Avram Dvali was only a few rooms away, and she might be exactly that close to understanding the mystery that had haunted her family for a dozen years.

Understanding it, she thought, or being trapped in it. She wondered how close her father had actually gotten to these dangerous truths.

She left her bunk, tiptoed across the room, and slipped under Turk's blanket. She curled against him, one hand on his shoulder and the other snaked under his pillow, hoping his audacity or his anger would seep into her and make her less afraid.

Diane sat with Mrs. Rebka—A

So this is their compound, Diane thought. Comfortable enough, if austere. But there was an atmosphere of monasticism about it. A sacral hush. It was uneasily familiar—she had spent much of her youth among the intemperately religious.