Axis

"Decoys," Weil said, his voice turgid with disgust.

"Find out who they are and what they know," Sigmund told the armed men waiting in the corridor.

Weil pulled Brian out after him. "Are you all right?"

"Just… yes," Brian managed. "I mean, I'm fine."

He wasn't fine. He was picturing the four prisoners with bullet-raddled skulls, washed up, perhaps, on some distant beach, or just buried in the desert, bodies shriveled under a layer of grit, paying the butcher's bill for their longevity.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

D'vali drove the car that took them north until nightfall, and in her less distracted moments Lise made a study of him.

He was—above all else—protective of the child, Isaac.

Lise and Turk had been hustled into a big utility vehicle, the kind with sprung-metal wheels that could cope with all kinds of terrain. The car had been built to accommodate six people comfortably but they had squeezed in seven: Lise and Turk, Diane, Mrs. Rebka, Sulean Moi—and Isaac.

Turk had advocated taking the Skyrex, but Dvali and Mrs. Rebka argued him out of it. An aircraft would be easier to trace and harder to hide than one land vehicle among many. They would use the plane as a diversion, Dr. Dvali said. Four of the compound's eldest Fourths, one of whom was a qualified pilot, volunteered to take it west. Probably they would be captured. But they knew what they were doing, Dr. Dvali had insisted. They weren't afraid to die, if it came to that. One of the ironies of the Martian treatment was that it quelled the fear of death even as it extended life. Turk asked if they had a cure for the fear of insolvency.

So they drove away, and a dozen or so land vehicles left the compound after them, scattering in multiple directions on the available roads or across the raw desert. The compound had been rigged with explosives to keep it from falling into the hands of the authorities and to destroy any evidence that might lead to their eventual capture. Lise and company had been too far down the road to see the actual explosion, but at one point she had spotted a plume of smoke on the horizon. She asked Dr. Dvali whether anyone might have been hurt—if DGS agents had arrived before the timed detonation, wouldn't they have been killed?

"DGS knows what to expect in situations like this. If they found the compound deserted they would have known it was rigged to detonate."

But if they'd been careless, or the timing had been bad?

Dvali shrugged. "Nothing is guaranteed in this life."

"I thought Fourths were supposed to be nonviolent."

"We're more sensitive than unaltered people to the suffering of others. That makes us vulnerable. It doesn't make us stupid, and it doesn't prevent us from taking risks."

"Even risks with other people's lives?"

Sulean Moi—who was, according to Diane, a deformed Martian, but who looked to Lise like a ski

Dvali wanted to drive through the night, but Turk convinced him to stop and make camp in a glade of the scrubby finger pines that forested the western slope of the mountainous Equatorian divide. Because of the elevation rain fell fairly regularly here, and there was even a clean-ru

Sunlight on snow, the mechanical groan of the lifts and the sound of laughter cutting the cold air: far away now, worlds and years away.

She helped Turk warm up a ca

On the road north along the foothills they had discussed their plans. Turk, at least, had discussed his plans; the Fourths were less forthcoming. Turk and Lise would ride as far north as the town of New Cumberland; from there they would catch a bus over the Pharoah Pass to the coast. The Fourths would continue on to—well, to wherever it was they meant to go.

Someplace where they could take care of the boy, Lise hoped. He was a strange-looking child. His hair was rusty red, cut short by whoever passed for the compounds barber, probably Mrs. Rebka with a pair of kitchen scissors. His eyes were widely spaced, giving him a birdlike aspect, and the pupils were flecked with gold. He hadn't said much all day, and most of that had been in the morning, but he was uncomfortable in some way Lise couldn't quite understand: whenever the road curved he would either frown and moan or sigh with relief. By late afternoon he was feverish—"again," she heard Mrs. Rebka say.

Now Isaac was sleeping'in one of the rear seats of the car, windows open to let the alpine air flow through. Hot day, but the sunlight had grown horizontal, and she had been told the air might turn uncomfortably cold during the night. There were only six sleeping bags in the vehicle but they were the expensive kind, thermally efficient, and someone could sleep in the car if necessary. It didn't seem likely to rain but Turk had already strung a tarp among the trees for what meager protection or concealment it could offer.

She stirred the pot of stew while Turk made coffee. "It's too bad about the plane."

"I would have lost it anyway."

"What are you going to do when you get back to the coast?"

"Depends," he said.

"On what?"

"A lot of things." He looked at her as if from a distance, squinting. "Probably go back to sea… if nothing else turns up."

"Or we could go back to the States," she said, wondering how he'd read that we. "The legal trouble you were in, that's essentially over, right?"

"It could heat up again."

"So we'll do something else." The pronoun hanging in the air like an unbroken pinata.

"Guess we have to."

We.

They served out di

Which left Dr. Dvali, and Lise's first real opportunity to speak to him with any degree of privacy. She abandoned Turk to the camp stove and the pots and went to sit next to him. Dvali looked at her querulously, like a large brown bird, but made no objection when she joined him. "You want to talk about your father," he said.

She could only nod.

"We were friends." It was as if Dvali had rehearsed this speech. "What I admired most about your father was that he loved his work, but not in a narrow way. He was in love with it because he saw it in the broader context. Do you know what I mean?"

"No." Yes. But she wanted to hear it from him. "Not exactly"

Dvali reached down and scooped a handful of dirt. "What do I have in my hand?"

"Topsoil. Old leaves. Probably a few bugs."

"Topsoil, mineral residue, silts, decaying biomass broken down to elemental nutrients, feeding itself back to itself. Bacteria, fungal spores—and no doubt some insects." He brushed it away. "Much like Earth, but subtly different in the details. On the geological level the resemblance between the two planets is even more obvious. Granite is granite, schist is schist, but they exist here in different proportions. There's less vulcanism here than on Earth. The continental plates drift and erode at a different speed, the thermocline between the equator and the poles is less steep. But what's really distinctive about this world is how fundamentally similar it is to Earth."