Axis

CHAPTER EIGHT

After the fall of the luminous dust—after the skies had cleared and the courtyard had been swept and the desert or the wind had absorbed what was left behind—news of another mystery came to the compound where the boy Isaac lived.

The ash had been terrifying when it fell and had been a topic for endless talk and speculation when it stopped. The newer mystery arrived more prosaically, as a news report relayed from the city across the mountains. It was less immediately frightening, but it touched uneasily on one of Isaac's secrets.

He had overheard two of the adults, Mr. Nowotny and Mr. Fisk, discussing it in the corridor outside the dining hall. Commercial flights to the oil wastes of the Rub al-Khali had been canceled or re-routed for days even before the ashfall, and now the Provisional Government and the oil powers had issued an explanation: there had been an earthquake.

This was a mystery, Mr. Nowotny went on to say, because there were no known faults beneath that part of the Rub al-Khali: it was a geologically stable desert craton that had persisted unchanged for millions of years. There should never have been even a minor tremor so deep in the Rub al-Khali.

But what had happened was more than a tremor. Oil production had been shut down for more than a week, and the wells and pipelines had been expensively damaged.

"We know less about this planet than we thought we did," Mr. Nowotny said.

It was slightly less mysterious to Isaac. He knew, though he could not say how, that something was stirring under the sedate sands of the deep western desert. He felt it in his mind, his body. Something was stirring, and it spoke in cadences he didn't understand, and he could point to it with his eyes closed even though it was hundreds of miles away, still only half-waking from a slumber as long as the lives of mountains.

For two days during and after the ashfall everyone had stayed inside, doors closed and windows locked, until Dr. Dvali announced that the ash wasn't particularly harmful. Eventually Mrs. Rebka told Isaac he could go out at least as far as the courtyard gardens, as long as he wore a cloth mask. The courtyard had been cleaned but there might still be remnant dust in the air, and she didn't want him inhaling particulate matter. He must not put himself at risk, she said.

Isaac agreed to wear the mask even though it was sweatily warm across his mouth and nose. All that remained of the dust was a grainy residue silted against the brick walls and the rail fences made of never-green wood. Under a relentless afternoon sun, Isaac stooped over one of these small windrows and sifted the ash with his hand.

The ash, according to Dr. Dvali, contained tiny fragments of broken machines.

Not much remained of these machines, to Isaac's eyes, but he liked the grittiness of the ash and the way it pooled in his palm and slipped like talc between his fingers. He liked the way it compressed into a flaky lump when he squeezed it and dissolved into the air when he opened his fist.

The ash glittered. In fact it glowed. That wasn't exactly the right word, Isaac knew. It wasn't the sort of glow you could see with your eyes, and he understood that no one else in the compound could see it the way he did. It was a different kind of glow, differently perceived. He thought perhaps Sulean Moi would be able to explain, if he could find a way to pose the question.

Isaac had a lot of questions he wanted to ask Sulean. But she had been busy since the ashfall, often in conference with the adults, and he had to wait his turn.

At dinner Isaac noticed that when the adults discussed the ashfall or its origins they tended to direct their questions to Sulean Moi, which surprised him, because for years he had assumed the adults with whom he lived were more or less all-knowing.

Certainly they were wiser than average people. He could not say this by direct experience—Isaac had never met any average people—but he had seen them in videos and read about them in books. Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely. Here in the compound, the talk was occasionally intense but the arguments never drew blood. Everyone was wise (or seemed to be), everyone was calm (or struggled to give that impression), and, except for Isaac, everyone was old.

Sulean Moi was apparently not an average person either. Somehow, she knew more than the other adults. She was smarter than the people to whom Isaac had always deferred, and—even more perplexing—she didn't seem to like them very much. But she tolerated their questions politely.

Dr. Dvali said, "Of course it implicates the Hypotheticals," talking about the ashfall, and asked Sulean, "Don't you agree?"

"It's an obvious conclusion to draw." The old woman probed the contents of her bowl with a fork. The adults theoretically took turns cooking, though a handful volunteered more often than the rest. Tonight Mr. Posell had taken kitchen duty. Mr. Posell was a geologist, but as a chef he was more enthusiastic than talented. Isaac's vegetable bowl tasted of garlic, gulley-seed oil, and something dreadfully burnt.

"Have you seen or heard of anything like it," Dr. Dvali asked, "in your own experience?"

There was no formal hierarchy among the adults at the commune, but it was usually Dr. Dvali who took the lead when large issues arose, Dr. Dvali whose pronouncements, when he made them, were considered final. He had always paid close attention to Isaac. The hair on his head was white and silky-fine. His eyes were large and brown, his eyebrows wild as abandoned hedges. Isaac had always tolerated him indifferently. Lately, however, and for reasons he didn't understand, Isaac had begun to dislike him.

Sulean said, "Nothing exactly like this. But my people have had a little more experience with the post-Spin world than yours, Dr. Dvali. Unusual things do fall out of the sky from time to time."

And who were "my people," and what sky was she talking about?

"One of these things conspicuously absent from the Martian Archives," Dr. Dvali said, "is any discussion of the nature of the Hypotheticals."

"Perhaps there was nothing substantive to say."

"You must have an opinion, Ms. Moi."

"The self-replicating devices that constitute the Hypothetical are equivalent in many ways to living creatures. They process their environment. They build complicated structures out of rock and ice and perhaps even empty space. And their byproducts aren't immune to the process of decay. Their physical structures grow old and corrupt and are systematically replaced. That would explain the detritus in the dust."

Corrupt machines have fallen on us, Isaac thought.

"But the sheer tonnage of it," Dr. Dvali said, "distributed over so many square kilometers—"

"Is that so surprising? Given the great age of the Hypotheticals, it's no more surprising that decomposed mechanisms should fall out of the sky than that your garden should generate organic mulch."

She sounded so sure of herself. But how did Sulean know such things? Isaac was determined to find out.

That night the quick southern winds grew even quicker, and Isaac lay in bed listening to his window rattle in its casement. Beyond the glass the stars were obscured by fine sand blown aloft from the wastelands of the Rub al-Khali.

Old, old, old: the universe was old. It had generated many miracles, including the Hypotheticals, but not least Isaac himself—his body, his very thoughts.

Who was his father? Who was his mother? His teachers had never really answered the question. Dr. Dvali would say, You're not like other children, Isaac. You belong to all of us. Or Mrs. Rebka would say, We're all your parents now, even though it was inevitably Mrs. Rebka who tucked him into bed, who made sure he was fed and bathed. It was true that everyone at the commune had taken a hand in raising him, but it was Dr. Dvali and Mrs. Rebka he pictured when he imagined what it might be like to have a particular mother and father.

Was that what made him feel different from the people around him? Yes, but not just that. He didn't think the way other people thought. And although he had many keepers, he had no friends. Except, perhaps, Sulean Moi.

Isaac tried to sleep but couldn't. He was restless tonight. It wasn't an ordinary restlessness, more like an appetite without an object, and after he had lain in bed for long hours listening to the hot wind rattle and whisper, he dressed and left his room.

Midnight had come and gone. The commune was quiet, the corridors and wooden stairs echoing the sound of his footsteps. Probably there was no one awake except Dr. Taira, the historian, who did her best reading (he had heard her say) late at night. But Dr. Taira was a pale, skinny woman who kept to herself, and if she happened to be awake she didn't notice when Isaac shuffled past her door. From the lower commons room he entered the open courtyard, unobserved.

His shoes crunched on the wind-blown grit underfoot. The small moon hung over the eastern mountains and cast a diffuse light through the dust-obscured darkness. Isaac could see well enough to walk, at least if he was careful, and he knew the environment around the commune so completely that he could have navigated blind. He opened the squeaky gate in the courtyard fence and headed west. He let his wordless impulses lead him and the wind carry away his doubts.

There was no road here, just pebbly desert and a series of shallow, serpentine ridges. The moon aimed his shadow like an arrow in front of him. But he was headed in the right direction: he felt the Tightness of it in the center of himself, like the sense of relief he felt when he solved some vexing mathematical problem. He deliberately set aside the noise of his own thinking and gave his attention to the sounds that came out of the darkness—his feet on the sandpaper gravel and the wind and the sounds of small nocturnal creatures foraging in the creviced landscape. He walked in a state of blissful emptiness.

He walked for a long time. He could not have said how long or far he had walked when he came at last to the rose. The rose startled him into a sudden awareness.

Had he had been walking in his sleep? The moon, which had been above the mountains when he left home, now lit the flat western horizon like a watchman's lantern. Although the night air was relatively cool he felt hot and exhausted.

He looked away from the moon and back at the rose, which grew from the desert at his feet.

"Rose" was his own word. It was what came to mind when he saw the thick stem rooted in the dry ground, the glassy crimson bulb that could pass in the moonlight for a flower.

Of course it wasn't really a flower. Flowers didn't grow in isolation in arid deserts, and their petals weren't made of what appeared to be translucent red crystals.

"Hello," Isaac said, his voice sounding small and foolish in the darkness. "What are you doing here?"

The rose, which had been leaning toward the moonlit west, promptly swiveled to face him. There was an eye in the middle of the bloom, a small eye black as obsidian, and it regarded him coolly.

Perhaps not surprisingly—Isaac wasn't surprised—it was Sulean Moi who eventually found him.

It was a still, hot morning by the time she arrived, and he sat on the ground as if the desert were a vast curved bowl and he had slid to the center of it. He cradled his head in his hands and rested his elbows on his knees. He heard the sound of her shuffling approach but he didn't look up. He didn't have to. He had hoped she would come for him.

"Isaac," Sulean Moi said, her voice dry but gentle.

He didn't answer.

"People are worried about you," she said. "They've been looking everywhere."

"I'm sorry."

She put her small hand on his shoulder. "What caused you to come all this way from home? What were you after?"

"I don't know." He gestured at the rose. "But I found this."

Now Sulean knelt to look at it—slowly, slowly, her old knees crackling.

The rose had suffered by daylight. Its dark green stem had buckled at dawn. The crystalline bulb was no longer radiant and the eye had lost its luster. Last night, Isaac thought, it had been something like alive. Now it was something like dead.

Sulean gazed at it thoughtfully a long while before she asked, "What is it, Isaac?"

"I don't know."

"Is this what you came out here for?"

"No… I don't think so." That was an incomplete answer. The rose, yes, but not only the rose… something the rose represented.

"It's remarkable," she said. "Shall we tell anyone about this, Isaac? Or shall we keep it secret?"

He shrugged.

"Well. We do have to go back, you know."

"I know."

He didn't mind leaving—the rose wouldn't last much longer.

"Will you walk with me?"

"Yes," Isaac said. "If I can ask you some questions."

"All right. I hope I can answer them. I'll try."

So they turned away from the ocular rose and began to walk eastward at the old woman's pace, and Sulean was patient while Isaac began to assemble all the uncertainties that had come into his head, not least the question of the rose itself. Although he hadn't slept, he wasn't tired. He was wide awake—as awake as he had ever been, and more curious.

"Where are you from?" he finally asked.

There was a brief hitch in the rhythm of her footsteps. He thought for a moment she might not answer. Then:

"I was born on Mars," she said.

That felt like a true answer. It wasn't the answer he had expected and he had the feeling it was a truth she would have preferred not to reveal. Isaac accepted it without comment. Mars, he thought.

A moment later he asked, "How much do you know about the Hypotheticals?"

"That's odd," the old woman said, smiling faintly and regarding him with what he took to be affection. "That's exactly what I came all this way to ask you."

They talked until noon, when they reached the compound, and Isaac learned a number of new things from their conversation. Then, before stepping past the gate, he paused and looked back the way he had come. The rose was out there, but not just the rose. The rose was only—what? An incomplete fragment of something much larger.

Something that interested him deeply. And something that was interested in him.

CHAPTER NINE

Turk drove through one of the older parts of the city, frame houses painted firetruck-red by Chinese settlers, squat three- and four-story apartment buildings of ochre brick quarried from the cliffs above Candle Bay. It was late enough now that the streets were empty. Overhead, an occasional shooting star wrote lines against the dark.

Half an hour ago he had finally gotten through to Lise. He couldn't say what he needed to say over the phone, but she seemed to catch on after a couple of awkward questions. "Meet me where we met," he said. "Twenty minutes."

Where they had met was a 24-hour bar-and-grill called La Rive Gauche, located in the retail district west of the docks. Lise had shown up there six months ago with a crowd from the consulate. A friend of Turk's had spotted a friend at the table and hauled him over for introductions. Turk noticed Lise because she was unescorted and because she was attractive in the way he found women attractive at first glance, based on the depth and availability of her laughter as much as anything else. He was wary of women who laughed too easily and unnerved by women who never laughed at all. Lise laughed gently but wholeheartedly, and when she joked there was nothing mean or competitive in it. And he liked her eyes, the way they turned up at the corners, the pale aqua of the irises, what they looked at and lingered on.

Later she started talking about a trip she was planning across the mountains to Kubelick's Grave, and Turk gave her one of his business cards. "Makes more sense than driving," he said. "Really. You'd have to go by way of the Mahdi Pass, but the road isn't a hundred percent reliable this time of year. There's a bus, but it's crowded and it slides into a gully every now and then."

He asked her what she wanted in a crapped-out little filling-station town like Kubelick's Grave, and she said she was trying to locate an old colleague of her father's, a man named Dvali, but she wouldn't elaborate. And that was probably the end of it, Turk thought, strangers in the night, passing ships, et cetera, but she had called a couple of days later and booked a flight.

He hadn't been looking for a lover—no more than he ever was. He just liked the way she smiled and the way he felt when he smiled back, and when they were forced to wait out that off-season storm on the shore of a mountain lake it was as if they had been granted a free pass from God.

Which had been revoked, apparently. Karma had come calling.

There was only the night staff at the bar and all the tables were empty, and the waitress who brought Turk a menu looked irritable and eager to go off-shift.

Lise showed up a few minutes later. Turk immediately wanted to tell her about Tomas's disappearance and what that might mean, the possibility that his connection with Lise had led someone nasty to Tomas. But he hadn't started to rehearse the words when she launched into the story of her run-in with her ex-husband Brian Gately—which was also pertinent.

Turk had met Brian Gately a couple of times. That was the interesting thing about docklands places like La Rive Gauche: you saw American businessmen sitting next to merchant sailors, Saudi oil executives sharing gossip with Chinese salarymen or unwashed artists from the arrondissements. Brian Gately had seemed like one of those temporary transplants common enough in this part of town, a guy who could travel around the world—two worlds—without really leaving Dubuque, or wherever it was he had been raised. Nice enough, in a bland way, as long as you didn't challenge any of his preconceptions.

But tonight Lise said Brian had threatened her. She described her meeting with him and finished, "So yes, it was a threat, not from Brian directly, but he was communicating what he'd been told, and it adds up to a threat."

"So there are DGS people in town who have a particular interest in Fourths. Especially the woman in the photo."

"And they know where I've been and who I've talked to. The implications of that are fairly obvious. I mean, I don't think anyone followed me here. But they might have. Or planted a locator in my car or something. I have no way of knowing."

All that was possible, Turk thought.

"Lise," he said gently, "it might be worse."

"Worse?"

"There's a friend of mine, a guy I've known a long time. His name is Tomas Ginn. He's a Fourth. That's not public information, but he's pretty upfront about it if he trusts a person. I thought you might like to talk to him. But I had to clear that with him first. I visited him this morning; he promised to think about it. But when I called him tonight I couldn't get hold of him, and when I went to his place he was gone. Abducted. Apparently some people in a white van took him away."

She looked at him wide-eyed and said, "Oh, Christ." She shook her head. "He was what, arrested?"

"Not formally arrested, no. Only the Provisional Government has the power to make an arrest, and they don't do plainclothes warrantless raids—not to my knowledge."

"So he was kidnapped? That's a reportable crime."

"I'm sure it is, but the police are never going to hear about it. Tomas is vulnerable because of what he is. A blood test would prove he's a Fourth, and that in itself is enough to get him shipped back to the States and put on permanent probation or worse. A neighbor told me about the men in the van, but she'd never say any of that to a government official. Where my friend lives, his neighbors are generally people with a lot of exposure on legal grounds—a lot of what people do for a living in Tomas's neighborhood is prohibited under the Accords, and most of them are squatting on land they don't have title to."

"You think Brian knows something about this?"

"Maybe. Or maybe not. It sounds like Brian's pretty far down the pecking order."

"The Genomic Security office at the consulate is kind of a joke compared to what they do back home. They run facial-recognition software at the ports and occasionally serve a warrant on some fugitive dog-cloner or black-market gene-enhancer, but that's about it. At least until now." She paused. "What he told me was that it would be smart for me to go home. Back to the States."

"Maybe he's right."

"You think I should leave?"

"If you're concerned about your safety. And probably you ought to be."

She sat up straighter. "Obviously I'm concerned about my safety. But I'm concerned about other things, too. I'm here for a reason."

"Clearly these people don't fuck around, Lise. They followed you, and it would be wise to assume they're the people who kidnapped Tomas."

"And they're interested in the woman in the photograph, Sulean Moi."

"So they might imagine you're involved in some way. That's the danger. That's what Brian was trying to tell you."

"I am involved."

Turk registered her determination and decided he wouldn't press her on it, at least not tonight. "Well, maybe you don't have to leave. Maybe you just need to lay low for a little while."

"If I hide, I can't do my work."

"If you mean talking to people who knew your father and asking questions about Fourths, no, you can't do that, obviously. But there's no disgrace in keeping quiet until we figure this out."

"Is that what you'd do?"

Fuck no, Turk thought. What I would do is pack my case and catch the next bus out of town. Which was what he had always done when he felt threatened. No point in saying that to Lise, though.

Briefly, he wondered if that was why Lise's father had vanished.

Maybe the idea of Fourthness had seemed like a door out of whatever secret sin he couldn't endure. Or maybe he didn't take up the offer of artificial longevity at all. Maybe he just walked. People did.

Turk shrugged.

Lise was looking at him with a sad intensity he felt in his throat. "So you're telling me Brian's right and I ought to go back to the States."

"I regret every minute we're not together. But I hate the idea of you getting hurt."

She looked at him a while longer. Two more couples had just come through the door—probably tourists, but who could tell? Their privacy was compromised. She reached across the table and touched his hand. "Let's go for a walk," she said.

Really, he thought, all we know about each other is a handful of stories and thumbnail sketches: the short version of everything. Before tonight, it was all that had seemed necessary. Their best conversations had been wordless. Suddenly that wasn't enough.

"Where are you parked?" she asked.

"The lot around the corner."

"Me too. But I don't know if I should use my car. It might be tagged with a tracking device or something."

"More likely they bugged mine. If they were following me this morning I would have led them straight to Tomas." And Tomas, an old man living hand-to-mouth out in the Flats, would have been an easy target. A quick blood test—no doubt forcibly applied—would have revealed him as a Fourth. And then all bets were off.

"Why would they do that, though? Why take him away?"

"To interrogate him. I can't think of any other reason."

"They think he knows something?"

"If they're serious they would have given him a hemo test as soon as they were through the door."

"No. Genomic Security—if we're assuming that's who's responsible—doesn't work like that. Even here, there are limits. You can't steal people away and interrogate them for no reason."

"Well, I guess they thought they had a reason. But, Lise, what you read about Genomic Security in press releases isn't the whole story. That agency's bigger than Brian's little piece of it. When they break up a cloning ring or bust some longevity scam it makes the news, but they do other things that aren't so public."

"You know this for a fact?"

"It's what I've heard."

"From Fourths?"

"Well—from Tomas, for example."

"Unofficial kidnappings. This is insane."

To which he had no answer.

"I don't want to go back to my apartment," she said. "And I guess it wouldn't be any safer at your place."

"And I haven't dusted," Turk said, just to see a ghost of a smile pass across her lips. "We could rent a room."

"That doesn't guarantee they won't find us."

"If they want us, Lise, they can probably have us. It may be possible to change that, but for now we're better off assuming they know where we are. But I doubt they'll do anything drastic, at least not right away. It's not you they're after, and you're not the kind of person they can just pick up and work over. So what do you want to do, Lise? What's your next step?"

"I want to do what I should have done months ago."

"What's that?"

"I want to find Avram Dvali."

They walked along the undulating pavement toward the harbor lights and the faint clang of cargo containers cycling through the quays. The streets were empty and lonesome, and the remnant dust caked on curbs and walls muffled the sound of their footsteps.

Turk said, "You want to go to Kubelick's Grave."

"Yes. All the way this time. Will you take me there?"

"Maybe. But there's someone we ought to talk to first. And, Lise, there are things you ought to do if you're serious about this. Let someone you trust know where you are and what's happening. Take out enough cash to keep you for a while and then don't touch your e-credit. Things like that."

She gave him that half-smile again. "What did you do, take a course in criminal behavior?"

"It comes naturally."

"Another thing. I can afford the time and money it takes to go underground for a while. But you have work to do, you have a business to run."

"That's not a problem."

I'm serious."

"So am I."

And that's the difference between us, Turk thought. She had a purpose: she was committed to finishing this post-mortem on her father's disappearance. He was just putting on his shoes and walking. Not for the first time, and in all likelihood not for the last.

He wondered if she knew that about him.

CHAPTER TEN

The senior Genomic Security operatives who had lately arrived from the States were named Sigmund and Weil, and Brian Gatelys teeth clenched every time the two men came to the DGS offices at the consulate.

They came in this morning not half an hour after Brian arrived for work. He felt his molars grinding.

Sigmund was tall, sepulchral, flinty Weil was six inches shorter and stout enough that he probably bought his pants at a specialty store. Weil was capable of smiling. Sigmund was not.

They advanced toward Brian where he stood by the water cooler. "Mr. Gately," Sigmund said, and Weil said, "Can we talk to you privately?"

"In my office."

Brian's office wasn't large but it had a window overlooking the consulate's walled garden. The cubicle was equipped with a filing cabinet, a desk of native wood, enough floating memory to accommodate the Library of Congress a few times over, and a plastic ficus. The desk was covered with correspondence between Genomic Security and the Provisional Government, one small tributary of the information stream that circulated between the two domains like an eternal sludgy Nile. Brian sat in his customary chair. Weil plumped down in the guest chair and Sig-mund stood with his back to the door like a carrion bird, sinister in his patience.

"You talked to your ex-wife," Weil said.

"I did. I told her what you asked me to tell her."

"It doesn't seem to have done any good. Do I have to tell you she reconnected with Turk Findley?"

"No," Brian said flatly. "I don't suppose you do."

"They're together right now," Sigmund said. Sigmund was a man of few words, all of them unwelcome. "In all probability. Her and him."

"But the point," Weil said, "is that we can't currently locate either of them."

Brian wasn't sure whether to believe that. Weil and Sigmund represented the Executive Action Committee of the Department of Genomic Security. Much of what the Executive Action Committee did was highly classified, hence the stuff of legend. Back home, they could write themselves constitutional waivers with more or less automatic judicial approval. Here in Equatoria—in the overlapping magisteria of the United Nations Provisional Government, contending national interests, and monied oil powers—their work was at least theoretically more constrained.

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 connected to the university or anyone else in the family's social circle. Given Lise's father's interest in Fourths, it's an obvious connection to make. Lise suspects the woman was a recruiter or something."

"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 connection, has been going over this same ground, talking to her father's old colleagues and so forth. For perfectly legitimate reasons, granted. She's curious, it's a family mystery, she thinks knowing the truth would make her feel better. But that leaves us with a problem. Do we interfere with her? Do we let her go on doing what she's doing, and just sort of supervise? Do we warn her that she's in dangerous territory?"

"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 connected with other persons of interest. One of them is Turk Findley."

Turk Findley, the freelance pilot and general fuck-up. Bad as it was that Brian had not been able to sustain his marriage to Lise, how much worse that she had taken up with someone so wayward, dysfunctional, and generally useless to his fellow man? Turk Findley was another variety of fallout from the Spin, Brian thought. A maladapted human being. A purposeless drifter. Possibly something worse, if Sigmunds implication was correct.

"You're saying Turk Findley has some connection to this elderly woman, apart from the fact that she once chartered a flight with him?"

"Well, that's certainly suggestive right there. But Turk has other contacts almost as suspicious. Known and suspected Fourths. And he's a criminal. Did you know that? He left the United States with a warrant on him."

"Warrant for what?"

"He was a person of interest in a warehouse fire."

"What are you telling me, he's an arsonist?"

"The case lapsed, but he may have burned down his old man's business."

"I thought his father was an oil man."

"His father worked in Turkey at one time and had some connections with Aramco, but he made most of his money on an import business. Some kind of bad blood between the two, the old man's warehouse burns down, Turk skips the country. You can draw your own conclusions."

It just gets worse, Brian thought. "So we have to get Lise away from him. She might be in danger."

"We suspect she's been drawn into something she doesn't understand. We doubt she's under any kind of duress. She's cooperating with this man. It was probably Turk who told her to stop taking calls."

"But you can find them, right?"

"Sooner or later. But we're not magicians, we can't just conjure them out of the void."

"Then tell me how I can help." Brian couldn't help adding, "If you'd been straight with me about this before I talked to her—"

"Would you have done anything differently? We can't just hand out this kind of information. And neither can you, Brian. Just so you know. We're taking you into our confidence here. None of this is to be discussed except between you, me, and Sigmund."

"Of course not, but—"

"What we'd like you to do is keep trying to get in touch with her. She may be aware of your calls even if she isn't answering them. She might eventually feel guilty or lonely and decide to talk to you."

"And if she does?"

"All we want right now is a clue to her location. If you can talk her into meeting you, with or without Turk, that would be even better."

Much as he disliked the idea of handing her over to the Executive Action Committee, surely that was better than letting her get more deeply involved in some criminal enterprise. "I'll do what I can," Brian said.

"Great." Weil grinned. "We appreciate that."

The two men shook Brian's hand and left him alone in his office. He sat there a long time, thinking.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The up-coast roads hadn't been entirely cleared of the ashfall (or the muck it made when it mixed with rain), so Turk had to pull over at a truckstop and rent a room while the route was plowed at some critical switchback by the overworked road crews of the Provisional Government.

The motel was a cinderblock barracks cut into the boundary of the forest, dwarfed by spire willows that leaned across the building like sorrowing giants. It was designed to cater to truckers and loggers, Lise gathered, not tourists. She ran her finger along the sill of their room's small window and showed Turk the line of dust.

"Probably from last week," he said. "They don't spend a lot of money on housekeeping out this way."

Dust of the gods, then. The debris of ancient Hypothetical constructions. That's what they were saying about it now. The video news was full of poorly-interpreted facts about the ashfall: fragments of things that might once have been machines, fragments of things that might once have been living organisms, molecular arrangements of unprecedented complexity.

Lise could hear voices from the room next door arguing in what sounded like Filipino. She took out her phone, wanting another fix of the local broadcast news. Turk watched her closely and said, "Remember—"

"No calls in or out. I know."

"We should reach the village by this time tomorrow," Turk said, "as long as the road's cleared overnight. Then we might actually learn something."

"You have a lot of faith in this woman—Diane, you said her name was?"

"Not faith exactly She needs to know about Tomas. She might be able to do something to help him. And she's been hooked into the local Fourth network for a long time—it's even possible she knows something about your father."

She had asked him how long he had been connected with Fourths. Not connected, exactly, he said. But this Diane woman trusted him, and he had done favors for her in the past. It had been Diane, apparently, who suggested Turk's charter business as a way of getting Sulean Moi to the mountains as discreetly as possible. More than that Turk did not know; had not wanted to know.

Lise looked again at the windowsill, the dust. "Lately I feel like it's all connected. Every thing weird that's been happening—the ash, Tomas, whatever's going on out west…"

The news broadcasts had begun reporting on the earthquake that had temporarily shut down the oil complexes of the Rub al-Khali.

"It's not necessarily connected," Turk said. "It's just triple-strange."

"What?"

"Something Tomas used to say. Weirdness comes in clusters. Like this time we were crewing a freighter in the Strait of Malacca. One day we had engine trouble and had to anchor for repairs. Next day freakish weather, a monsoon nobody'd predicted. Day after that the sky was clear but we were hosing Malay pirates off the deck. Once things get strange, Tomas used to say, you can pretty much count on triple-strange."

How comforting, Lise thought.

They shared a bed that night but they didn't make love. Both of them were tired and both of them, Lise thought, were coming to terms with the truth that this wasn't a tent by a mountain lake and they weren't having a harmless weekend adventure. Larger forces had been engaged. People had been hurt. And, thinking about her father, she began to wonder whether he might have stumbled into some similar wonderland of triple-strangeness. Maybe his disappearance had not been selfish or even voluntary: maybe he'd been abducted, like Turk's friend Tomas, by anonymous men in an unmarked van.

Turk was asleep as soon as he hit the mattress, typically. Nevertheless it was good to lie beside him, to feel his bulk at her side. He had showered before bed and the smell of soap and maleness emanated from him like a benevolent aura. Had Brian ever smelled like that?

Not that she could recall. Brian had no particular smell beyond the chemical tang of whatever deodorant he happened to be using. Probably took some small degree of pride in being odor-free.

No, that wasn't fair. There was more to Brian than that. Brian believed in an ordered life. That didn't make him a monster or a villain, and she couldn't believe he had been personally involved in tracking her movements or abducting Tomas. That wasn't playing by the book. Brian always played by the book.

Not necessarily a bad thing. If it made him less adventurous than Turk, it also made him more reliable. Brian would never fly a plane across a mountain or hire himself out as an able-bodied seaman on some rust-riddled merchant vessel. Nor would he break a promise or violate an oath. Which was why it had been so hard to negotiate the conclusion of their hasty and unwise marriage. Lise had met Brian when she was doing a journalism degree at Columbia and he was a junior functionary in the New York offices of the DGS. It was his gentleness and his sympathy that had won her over, and she had only belatedly understood that Brian would always be at her side but never quite on her side—that in the end he was one more in the chorus of voices advising her to ignore her own history because its lacunae might conceal some unbearable truth.

But he had loved her, innocently, doggedly. Claimed he still did. She opened her eyes and saw her phone where she had left it on the bedside table, faintly glowing. It had already registered several attempted calls from Brian. She had answered none of them. That was also unfair. Necessary, maybe. She was willing to take Turk's word on that. But not fair, and not kind. Brian deserved better.

By morning a lane had been opened and they drove north for another four hours, passing buses, jitneys painted like circus caravans, logging trucks, freight trucks, tank trucks loaded with refined oil or gasoline, until Turk turned west on one of the poorly-maintained side roads that diced through this part of the country like the lines on an old mans palm.

And suddenly they were in the wilderness. The Equatorian forest closed on them like a mouth. It was only here, away from the city and the farms and refineries and busy harbors, that Lise felt the alienness of this world, the intrinsic and ancient strangeness that had fascinated her father. The towering trees and dense, ferny undergrowth—plants for which Lise did not know the folk names, much less their provisional binomials—were supposedly related to terrestrial life: their DNA contained evidence of terrestrial ancestry. The planet had been stocked and seeded by the Hypothetical, supposedly to make it habitable for human beings. But the plans of the Hypothetical were long-term, to say the least. They calculated events in the billions of years. Evolution must be a perceptible event to them.

Maybe they couldn't even directly experience events as brief, in their eyes—if they had eyes—as a human life. Lise found that idea oddly comforting. She could see and feel things that for the Hypotheticals must be vanishingly evanescent: things as commonplace as the swaying of these strange trees above the road and the sunlight that speckled their shadows on the forest floor. That was a gift, she thought. Our mortal genius.

The sun tracked through finely-feathered or fernlike leaves. The underbrush was populated with wildlife, much of which had not (even yet) learned to fear human beings. She caught glimpses of jack dogs, a striped ghoti, a flock of spidermice, the names usually referring to some Earthly animal although the resemblance was often fanciful. There were insects, too, humming or whining in the emerald shadows. Worst were the carrion wasps, not dangerous but big and foul-smelling. Gnats, which looked exactly like the gnats that used to hover in shady places back home, swarmed among the mossy tree trunks.

Turk drove with close attention to the unpaved road. Fortunately the dustfall here had been light and the canopy of the forest had absorbed most of it. When the driving was critical Turk was silent. On the straightaways, he asked about her father. She had discussed this with him before, but that had been before the dustfall and the strange events of the last few days.

"How old were you exactly when your father disappeared?"

"Fifteen." A young fifteen. Naive, and clinging to American fashions as a rebuke to the world into which she had been unwillingly imported. Braces on her teeth, for God's sake.

"The authorities take it seriously?"

"How do you mean?"

"Just, you know, he wouldn't be the first guy to walk out on his family. No offense."

"He wasn't the type to walk out on us. I know everybody says that in cases like this. 'It was so unexpected.' And I was the loyal, naive daughter—I couldn't imagine him doing anything bad or thoughtless. But it's not just me. He was fully engaged in his work at the university. If he was leading a double life I don't know where he found the time for it."

"Supporting his family on a teacher's salary?"

"We had money from my mother's side."

"So I guess it wasn't hard to get the attention of the Provisional Government when he disappeared."

"We had ex-Interpol men interviewing everybody, an open police file, but nothing ever came of it."

"So your family contacted Genomic Security."

"No. They contacted us."

Turk nodded and looked thoughtful while he maneuvered the vehicle through a shallow washout. A three-wheeled motorcycle passed in the opposite direction—balloon tires, high carriage, a basket of vegetables strapped to the rear rack. The driver, some skinny local, glanced at them incuriously.

"Anybody find that odd," Turk asked, "that Genomic Security came calling?"

"My father was researching Fourth activity in the New World, among other things, so they were aware of him. He'd had talks with them before."

"Researching Fourths for what purpose?"

"'Personal interest," she said, cringing at how incriminating that sounded. "Really, it was part of his whole fascination with the post-Spin world—how people were adapting to it. And I think he was convinced the Martians knew more about the Hypotheticals than they included in their Archives, and maybe some of that knowledge had been passed around by Fourths along with the chemical and biological stuff."

"But the Genomic Security people didn't turn up anything either."

"No. They kept the file open for a while longer, or so they claimed, but in the end they didn't have any more luck than the PG had. The conclusion they obviously reached was that his research had gotten the better of him—that at some point he was offered the longevity treatment and took it."

"Okay, but that doesn't mean he had to disappear."

"People do, though. They take the treatment and assume a new identity. It means not so many awT kward questions when your peers start to die off and you still look like the picture in your grad book. The idea of starting a new life is attractive for a lot of people, especially if they're in some kind of personal or financial bind. But my father wasn't like that."

"People can carry around a fear of death and never let on, Lise. They just live with it. But if you show them a way out, who knows how they might behave?"

Or who they might leave behind. Lise was silent for a moment. Over the hum of the car's engine she heard a minor-key melody trilling from the high canopy of the forest, some bird she couldn't identify.

She said, "When I came back here I was prepared for that possibility. I'm far from convinced that he just walked out on us, but I'm not omniscient, I can't know for sure what was going on in his mind. If that's what happened, okay. I'll deal with it. I don't want revenge, and if he did take the treatment—if he's living somewhere under a new name—I can deal with that, too. I don't need to see him. I just need to know. Or find somebody who does."

"Like the woman in the photograph. Sulean Moi."

"The woman you flew to Kubelick's Grave. Or like this Diane, who sent her to you."

"I don't know how much Diane can tell you. More than I can, anyhow. I made it a point not to ask questions. The Fourths I've met… they're easy to like, they don't strike me as sinister, and as far as I can tell they're not doing anything to put the rest of us in danger. Contrary to all that Genomic Security bullshit you hear on the news, they're just people."

"People who know how to keep secrets."

"I'll grant you that," Turk said.

Moments later they passed a crude wooden sign on which the name of the village had been written in several languages: desa new sarandib town, in approximate English. Half a mile farther on a skinny kid, not much more than twenty years old, Lise guessed, if that, stepped into the road and waved them down. He came to Turk's side of the car and leaned into the window.

"Going to Sarandib?" The kid's shrill voice made him seem even younger than he looked. His breath smelled like rancid cinnamon.

"Headed that way," Turk said.

"You got business there?"

"Yeah."

"What kind of business?"

"Personal business."

"You want to buy ky? Not a good place to buy ky."

Ky was the hallucinogenic wax produced by some kind of native hive insect, lately a big deal in the Port Magellan clubs. "I don't want any ky. Thanks anyhow." Turk stepped on the gas—not hard enough to injure the kid, who ducked away promptly, but hard enough to win him a nasty look. Lise glanced back and saw the kid still standing in the road, glaring after them. She asked Turk what that was all about.

"Lately you get townies driving around the boondocks trying to score a gram or two, getting robbed, getting into trouble."

"You think he wanted to sell us some?"

"I don't know what he wanted."

But the kid must have had a phone on him, and he must have called ahead, because as soon as they passed the first few inhabited shacks along the road and before they reached the town center the local gendarmerie, two big men wearing improvised uniforms and driving a years-old utility truck, forced Turk's vehicle to the side of the road. Lise sat still and let Turk do the talking.

"You have business here?" one of the men asked.

"We need to see Ibu Diane."

Long pause. "No such person here."

"Okay," Turk said. "I must have made a wrong turn. We'll stop and have lunch, and then, since there's no such person, we'll be on our way."

The cop—if you could call him that, Lise thought, because these smalltown constabularies had no standing with the Provisional Government—gave Turk a long sour look. "You have a name?"

"Turk Findley."

"You can get a tea across the road. I don't know about lunch." He held up a single finger. "One hour."

They were seated at a table that appeared to have been made from an enormous discarded cable spool, sweating in the afternoon heat and drinking tea from chipped ceramic cups while the other patrons of the cafe avoided their eyes, when the curtains parted and a woman entered the room.

An old, old woman. Her hair was the color and texture of dandelion fluff, her skin so pale that it seemed in danger of tearing. Her eyes were unusually large and blue, framed inside the stark contours of her skull. She came to the table and said, "Hello, Turk."

"Diane."

"You know, you really shouldn't have come back here. This is a bad time."

"I know," Turk said. "Tomas was arrested, or kidnapped or something."

The woman displayed no reaction beyond a barely-perceptible flinch.

"And we have a couple of questions to ask, if that's okay."

"Since you're here, we may as well talk." She pulled up a chair and said, "Introduce me to your friend."

This woman is a Fourth, Lise thought. Maybe that was why she generated this odd, fragile authority, to which strong men apparently deferred. Turk introduced her as Ibu Diane Dupree, using the Minang honorific, and Lise accepted the woman's small, brittle hand. It was like handling some unexpectedly muscular small bird.

"Lise," Diane said. "And you have a question for me?"

"Show her the picture," Turk said.

So Lise fumbled nervously in her pack until she came up with the envelope containing the photo of Sulean Moi.

Diane opened the envelope and looked at the photograph for a long moment. Then she handed it back. Her expression was mournful.

"So can we talk?" Turk asked.

"I think we have to. But somewhere more private than this. Follow me."

Ibu Diane led them away from the cafe, down a lane between a makeshift grocery store and a wooden municipal building with buffalo-horn eaves, past a gas station where the pumps were painted carnival colors. Lise would have expected a slow walk, given Diane's age and the heat of the day, but the older woman moved briskly and at one point reached out and took Lise's hand to urge her along. It was a strange gesture and it made Lise feel like a little girl.

She took them to a cinderblock bunker on which a multilingual sign announced, in its English portion, medical clinic. Lise said, "Are you a doctor?"

"I'm not even a registered nurse. But my husband was a physician and he cared for these people for years, long before the Red Crescent showed up in any of these villages. I learned basic medicine from him, and the villagers wouldn't let me retire after he died. I can take care of minor injuries and sicknesses, administer antibiotics, salve a rash, bind a wound. For anything more serious I send people to the clinic down the highway. Have a seat."

They sat in the reception area of Diane's clinic. It was fitted out like a village parlor with wicker furniture and wooden slat blinds clattering in the breeze. Everything was painted or upholstered in faded green. There was a watercolor picture of the ocean on one wall.

Ibu Diane smoothed her plain white muslin dress. "May I ask how you came to possess a photograph of this woman?"

Get to the point, in other words. "Her name is Sulean Moi."

"I know."

"You know her?"

"I've met her. I recommended Turk's charter service to her."

"Tell her about your father," Turk suggested, and Lise did. And she brought the story up to date: how she had come back determined to learn more about the disappearance; Brian Gately's connection to Genomic Security; how he had run her old snapshot of Sulean Moi through the Agency's facial-recognition software and learned that the woman had re-entered Port Magellan only months earlier.

"That must have been the trigger," Diane said.

"Trigger?"

"Your inquiries—or your ex-husband's—probably brought Ms. Moi to someone's attention back in the States. Genomic Security has been looking for Sulean Moi for a long time."

"Why? What's so important about her?"

"I'll tell you what I know, but would you answer some questions of mine first? It might clarify matters."

"Go ahead," Lise said.

"How did you meet Turk?"

"I hired him to fly me over the mountains. One of my father's colleagues was known to have visited Kubelick's Grave. At the time it was the only lead I had. So I hired Turk… but we never made it across the mountains."

"Bad weather," Turk said, and coughed into his hand.

"I see."

"Then," Lise said, "when Brian told me Sulean Moi had chartered a small plane just a few weeks before—"

"How did Brian know this? Oh, I suppose he arranged a search of the air traffic manifests. Or something like that."

Lise said, "It was a lead I intended to follow up… although Brian urged me not to. Even then, he thought I was getting in too deep."

"While Turk, of course, was fearless."

"That's me," Turk said. "Fearless."

"But I hadn't got around to it, and then there was the ashfall, and then—"

"And then," Turk said, "Tomas got himself disappeared, and we found out Lise was being followed and her phone service was tapped. And I'm sorry, Diane, but all I could think of was to come here. I was hoping you could—"

"What? Intervene on your behalf? What magic do you think I possess?"

"I thought," Turk said, "you might be able to explain. I also didn't rule out the possibility of some useful advice."

Diane nodded and tapped her chin with her forefinger. Her sandal-clad foot counted a parallel rhythm on the wooden floor.

"You could start," Lise said, "by telling us who Sulean Moi really is."

"The first relevant fact about her," Diane said, "is that she's a Martian."

The human civilization on Mars had been a great disappointment to Lise's father.

That was another thing they had discussed, those nights on the veranda when the sky had opened like a book above them.

Robert Adams had been a young man—an undergraduate at Cal Tech during the lean years of the Spin, facing what had looked like the inevitable destruction of the world he knew—when Wun Ngo Wen arrived on Earth.

The most spectacular success story of the Spin had been the terra-forming and colonization of Mars. Using the expanding sun and the passage of millions of years in the external solar system as a kind of temporal lever, Mars had been rendered at least marginally habitable and seed colonies of human beings had been established there. While a scant few years passed on Earth behind its Spin membrane, civilizations on Mars had risen and fallen.

(Even those bare facts—unmentionable in the presence of Lise's mother, who had lost her parents to the dislocations of the Spin and would brook no discussion of it—had raised the hackles on Lise's neck. She had learned all this in school, of course, but without the attendant sense of awe. In Robert Adams' hushed discourse the numbers had not been just numbers: When he said a million years she could hear the distant roar of mountains rising from the sea.)

A vastly old and vastly strange human civilization had arisen on Mars during the time it took, on the enclosed Earth, for Lise to walk to school and back.

That civilization had been wrapped by the Hypotheticals in its own envelope of slow time—an enclosure that brought Mars into synchronization with the Earth and ended when the Earths enclosure ended. But before that happened, the Martians had sent a manned spacecraft to Earth. Its sole occupant had been Wun Ngo Wen, the so-called Martian Ambassador.

Lise would ask—they had this conversation on more than one starry summer night—"Did you ever meet him?"

"No." Wun had been killed in a roadside attack during the worst years of the Spin. "But I watched his address to the United Nations. He seemed… likable."

(Lise had seen historical footage of Wun Ngo Wen from an early age. As a child she had imagined having him for a friend: a sort of intellectual Munchkin, no taller than herself.)

But the Martians had been coy from the beginning, her father told her. They had given the Earth their Archives, a compendium of their knowledge of the physical sciences, in some areas more advanced than earthly science. But it said very little about their work in human biology—the work that had produced their caste of long-lived Fourths—or about the Hypothetical. To Lise's father these were unforgivable omissions. "They've known about the Hypothetical for hundreds if not thousands of years," he said. "They must have had something to say, even if it was only speculation."

When the Spin ended, and both Earth and Mars were restored to the customary flow of time, radio communication with the Martians had flourished for a time. There had even been a second Martian expedition to Earth, more ambitious than the first, and a group of Martian legates had been installed in a fortresslike building attached to the old United Nations complex in New York—the Martian Embassy, it came to be called. When their scheduled five-year tenure expired, they were returned home aboard a terrestrial spacecraft jointly engineered by the major industrial powers and launched from Xichang.

There was never a second delegation. Plans to send a reciprocal terrestrial expedition to Mars broke down in multinational negotiations, and in any case the Martians had shown little enthusiasm for it. "I suspect," Lise's father said, "they were a little bit appalled by us." Mars had never been a resource-rich world, even after the ecopoeisis, and its civilization had survived through a sort of meticulous collective parsimony. Earth—with its vast but polluted bodies of water, its inefficient industries and collapsing ecosystems—would have horrified the visitors. "They must have been glad," Robert Adams said, "to put a few million miles between them and us."

And they had their own post-Spin crises to deal with. The Hypothetical had also installed an Arch on Mars. It rose above the equatorial desert, and it opened on a similar small, rocky planet, hospitable but uninhabited, orbiting a distant star.

Communications between Earth and Mars had slowed to a perfunctory trickle.

And there were no more Martians on Earth. They had all gone home when the diplomatic mission ended. Lise had never heard otherwise.

So how could Sulean Moi be a Martian?

"She doesn't even look like a Martian," Lise said. Martians were four to five feet tall at most and their skin was deeply ridged and wrinkled. Sulean Moi, as she appeared in the original snapshot from her father's house in Port Magellan, had been only ordinarily short and not especially wrinkly.

"Sulean Moi has a unique history," Diane said. "As you might imagine. Would you like a cold drink? I think I would—my throat's a little dry."

"I'll fetch," Turk said.

"Fine. Thank you. As to Sulean Moi… I'm afraid I have to tell you something about myself before I can explain." She hesitated and closed her eyes briefly. "My husband was Tyler Dupree. My brother was Jason Lawton."

A second passed before Lise placed the names. They were names out of history books, Spin-era names. Jason Lawton was the man who had helped seed the barren deserts of Mars, the man who had set the replicator launches in motion, the man to whom Wun Ngo Wen had entrusted his collection of Martian pharmaceuticals. It was Jason Lawton who had defied the U.S. government by distributing those drugs, and the techniques for reproducing them, among a scattered group of academics and scientists who would become the first Terrestrial Fourths.

And Tyler Dupree, if she recalled correctly, had been Jason Lawton's personal physician.

"Is that possible?" Lise whispered.

"I'm not trying to impress you with my age," Diane said. "Just establish my credentials. I'm a Fourth, of course, and I've been a part of that community since its inception. That's why Sulean Moi came to see me, a few months ago."

"But—if she's a Martian, how did she get here? Why doesn't she look like a Martian?"

"She was born on Mars. When she was very young she nearly died in a catastrophic flood—she suffered injuries, including tissue death in the brain, that could only be treated by a radical reconstruction using the same drugs that extend life. Given at such an early age, the treatment has a rather dire side effect—a sort of genetic recidivism. She never acquired the wrinkles most Martians develop at puberty and she continued growing past the point at which they ordinarily stop. Which left her looking almost like an Earthling—a throwback, as they would have seen it, to her earliest ancestors. Because she lost most of her immediate family, and because she was considered grotesquely deformed, she was raised by a community of ascetic Fourths. They gave her an impeccable education, if nothing else. No doubt because of her appearance, she was fascinated by Earth and devoted herself to scholarship in what we would call 'Terrestrial Studies'—I have no idea what the Martians called it."

"An expert on Earth," Lise said.

"Which was why, eventually, she was selected as one of the Martian legates."

"If that's true, her photograph would have been everywhere."

"She was kept away from the press. Her existence was a carefully guarded secret. Do you understand why?"

"Well—if she looked so much like an Earthling—"

"She could pass unnoticed in a crowd and she had taught herself to speak at least three terrestrial languages like a native."

"So she was what, a spy?"

"Not exactly. The Martians knew there were Fourths on Earth. Sulean Moi was their diplomatic mission to us."

Turk handed out glasses of ice water. Lise sipped eagerly—her throat was dry.

"And when the Martians left," Diane said, "Sulean Moi chose to stay behind. She traded places with a woman, a Terrestrial Fourth who happened to resemble her. When the legation went back to Mars that woman went with them—our own secret ambassador, in a way."

"Why did Sulean Moi stay?"

"Because she was shocked by what she found here. On Mars, of course, the Fourths have existed for centuries, constrained by laws and institutions that don't exist on Earth. Martian Fourths buy their longevity with a variety of compromises. They don't reproduce, for instance, and they don't participate in government except as observers and adjudicators. Whereas all our Fourths are outlaws—both endangered and potentially dangerous. She hoped to bring Martian formality to the chaos."

"I gather she didn't succeed."

"Let's say her successes have been modest. There are Fourths and Fourths. Those of us who are sympathetic to her goals have funded and encouraged her over the years. Others resent her meddling."

"Meddling in what?"

"In their efforts to create a human being who can communicate with the Hypothetical."

"I know how grotesque that must sound," Diane Dupree said. "But it's true." She added, in a more subdued voice, "It's what killed my brother Jason."

What made this unquestionable, Lise thought, was the woman's obvious sincerity. That, and the wind rattling the blinds, and the human noise of the villagers going about their business, a dog barking aimlessly in the distance, Turk sipping his ice water as if these assertions were old news.

"That was how Jason Lawton died?" In the books Lise had read, Jason Lawton had been a casualty of the anarchic last days of the Spin. Hundreds of thousands had died in the panic.

"The process," Diane said calmly, "is deadly in an adult. It rebuilds much of the human nervous system and it renders it vulnerable to further manipulation by the networked intelligences of the Hypotheticals. There is—well, a sort of communication can take place. But it kills the communicant. Theoretically, the procedure might be more stable if it was applied to a human fetus in vivo. An unborn child in the womb."

"But that would be—"

"Indefensible," Diane said. "Morally and ethically monstrous. But it's been a terrible temptation for one faction of our community. It holds out the possibility of a real understanding of the mystery of the Hypotheticals, what they want from us and why they've done what they've done. And maybe something more, not just communication but a sort of communion. Commingling the human and the divine, if I can use those words."

"And the Martians want to stop this from happening?"

Diane looked subtly ashamed. "The Martian Fourths were the first to try it."

"What—they modified a human fetus?"

"The project was unsuccessful. The child didn't survive past puberty. The experiment was conducted by the same group of ascetic Fourths who raised Sulean Moi—she was there when the child died."

"The Martians allowed this?"

"Only once. Sulean Moi meant to prevent the same thing happening among our own Fourths, who are even less constrained by law and custom—or to interrupt the process if it had already begun."

The breeze was warm, but Lise shivered. "And has it? Begun, I mean?"

"The technology and the pharmaceuticals were distributed by Jason along with everything else Wun Ngo Wen brought to Earth. We've had the capability for decades, but there was no real interest in pursuing it except among a few… you might say, rogue groups."

"I thought Fourths had some kind of built-in inhibition," Turk said. "For instance, Tomas. Once he took the treatment he stopped drinking anything stronger than beer and he quit picking bar fights."

"We're inhibited against obvious aggression, but not so much so that we lack the capacity for moral choice—or self-defense. And this isn't aggression, exactly, Turk. It's callous, it's inexcusable, but it's also, in a sense, abstract. Pushing a needle into the vein of a pregnant volunteer isn't a perceived act of violence, especially if you're convinced of the necessity of it."

Lise said, "And that's why Genomic Security is interested in Sulean Moi."

"Yes. Genomic Security and every similar agency. It isn't just Americans who fear Fourths, you know. In the Islamic world the prejudice is especially strong. Nowhere is safe. For decades Genomic Security has been attempting to track down and secure every extant trace of forbidden Martian biotechnology. Probably less to destroy it than to monopolize it. They haven't succeeded and probably never will succeed. The genie is out of the bottle. But they've learned a few things in the course of their work. They learned about Sulean Moi, obviously. And the idea of Fourths interceding with the Hypotheticals scares the hell out of them."

"For the same reason you're afraid of it?"

"Some of the same reasons," Diane said. She drank from her glass of ice water. "Some."

The village muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Diane ignored the sound.

Lise said, "Sulean was in Port Magellan at least once before. Twelve years ago."

"Yes."

"Going about the same business?"

"Yes."

"Successfully? I mean, did she stop—whoever was involved—from doing this thing?"

Ibu Diane looked at Lise, looked away. "No, she was not successful."

"My father knew her."

"Sulean Moi knows a lot of people. What was your father's name?"

"Robert Adams," Lise said, her heart beating harder.

Diane shook her head. "The name isn't familiar. But you said you were looking for one of his colleagues in the town of Kubelick's Grave?"

"A man named Avram Dvali."

"Avram Dvali." Ibu Diane's expression became somber. Lise felt her excitement peak.

"Dvali was a Fourth?"

"He was. He is. He's also, in my opinion, just slightly insane."

CHAPTER TWELVE

After walking Isaac back to the compound Sulean Moi told Dr. Dvali about the flower.

The story seemed so improbable that it became necessary to mount an expedition and set out in search of the thing. Sulean didn't participate but she gave explicit directions. Dr. Dvali took three other men and one of the commune's vehicles and drove off into the desert. Dvali's excitement was predictable, Sulean thought. He was in love with the Hypotheticals—with what he imagined them to be. He could hardly resist the gift of an alien flower.

They were back by late afternoon. Dvali hadn't been able to find the sighted rose, but the expedition wasn't fruitless. There had been other unusual things growing in the dry wastes. He had collected three samples in a cotton bag, and he displayed them to Sulean and several other observers on a table in the common room.

One of his prizes was a spongy green disk shaped like a miniature bicycle wheel, with twig-like spokes and a gnarl of roots still attached to the hub. One was a translucent tube a centimeter in diameter and as long as Suleans forearm. The last was a viscid, knobby lump resembling a clenched fist, blue veined with red.

None of these things looked healthy, although arguably they might once have been alive. The bicycle wheel was blackened and crumbling in places. The hollow tube had fractured along its axis. The fist was pallid and had begun to emit an unpleasant odor.

Mrs. Rebka said, "Did these things fall with the ash?"

Dvali shook his head. "They were all rooted."

"They grew out there? Out in the desert?"

"I can't explain it. I would guess they're associated with the ashfall in some way."

Dvali looked expectantly at Sulean.

Sulean had nothing to say.

In the morning Sulean went to see Isaac, but his door was closed and Mrs. Rebka stood outside, her arms crossed. "He's not well," she said.

"I'll speak to him briefly," Sulean said.

"I'd prefer to let him rest. He's running a fever. I think you and I have to talk, Ms. Moi."

The two women walked out into the courtyard. They kept to the shade of the main building and sat together on a stone bench with a view of the garden. The air was hot and still, and sunlight fell on the fenced flowerbed as if it had an immense invisible weight. Sulean waited for Mrs. Rebka to speak. In fact Sulean had expected something hostile from Mrs. Rebka sooner or later. She was the closest thing Isaac had to a mother, though Isaac's nature had precluded any real emotional warmth, at least on his part.

"He's never been sick before," Mrs. Rebka said. "Not once. But since you arrived… he's not the same. He wanders, he eats less. He's taken a ferocious interest in books, and at first I thought that was a good thing. But I wonder if it isn't just another symptom."

"Symptom of what?"

"Don't be evasive." Mrs. Rebka was a large woman. To Sulean all these people seemed large—Sulean herself barely topped five foot three—but Mrs. Rebka was especially large and seemed to want to appear intimidating. "I know who you are, as well as anyone does. Everyone in the community has been aware of you for years. We weren't surprised when you knocked at the door. Only surprised that it had taken so long. We're prepared to let you observe Isaac and even interact with him. The only condition is that you don't interfere."

" Have I interfered?"

"He's changed since you got here. You can't deny that."

"That has nothing to do with me."

"Doesn't it? I hope you're right. But you've seen this before, haven't you? Before you came to Earth."

Sulean had never made a secret of it. The story had spread among these Terrestrial Fourths—especially those, like Dvali, who were obsessed with the Hypotheticals. She nodded.

"A child like Isaac," Mrs. Rebka said.

"In some ways like him. A boy. He was Isaac's age when he—"

"When he died."

"Yes."

"Died of his… condition?"

Sulean didn't answer immediately. She hated calling up these memories, instructive as they inevitably were. "He died in the desert." A different desert. The Martian desert. "He was trying to find his way, but he got lost." She closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids the world was an infinite redness, thanks to this insufferably bright sunlight. "I would have stopped you if I could. You know that. But I came too late, and you were all very clever about concealing yourselves. Now I'm as helpless as you are, Mrs. Rebka."

"I won't let you hurt him." The fervor in Mrs. Rebka's voice was as startling as the accusation.

"I wouldn't do anything to harm him!"

"Possibly not. But I think, on some level, you're frightened of him."

"Mrs. Rebka, have you misunderstood so completely? Of course I'm afraid of him! Aren't you?"

Mrs. Rebka didn't answer, only stood up and walked slowly back into the compound.

That night Isaac was still feverish and was confined to his room. Sulean lay awake in her own room, gazing past the sand-scuffed windowpane at the stars.

At the Hypotheticals, to use that wonderfully ambiguous name bestowed upon them by English-speaking people. They had been called that even before their existence was well-established: the hypothetical entities who had enclosed the Earth in a strange temporal barrier, so that a million years might pass while a man walked his dog or a woman brushed her hair. They were a network of self-reproducing semibiological machines distributed throughout the galaxy. They intervened in human affairs, and perhaps the affairs of innumerable other sentient civilizations, for reasons not well-understood. Or for no reason at all.

She was looking at them, though they were of course invisible. They permeated the night sky. They contained worlds. They were everywhere.

Beyond that, what could one say? A network so vast it spanned a galaxy was indistinguishable from a natural force. It could not be bargained with. It could not even be spoken to. It interacted with humanity over inhuman spans of time. Its words were decades and its conversations were indistinguishable from the process of evolution.

Did it think, in any meaningful sense? Did it wonder, did it argue with itself, did it fabricate ideas and act on them? Was it an entity, in other words, or just a huge and complex process?

The Martians had argued over this for centuries. Sulean had spent much of her childhood listening to elderly Fourths debate the question. Sulean didn't have a conclusive answer—no one did—but her suspicion was that the Hypotheticals had no center, no operative intelligence. They did complex, unpredictable things-—but so did evolution. Evolution had produced vastly complex and interdependent biological systems without any central direction. Once self-reproducing machines had been unleashed on the galaxy (by some long lost ancient species, perhaps, long before Earth or Mars had condensed from stellar dust), they had been subject to the same inexorable logic of competition and mutation. What might that not have bred, over billions of years? Machines of immense scale and power, semi-autonomous, "intelligent" in a certain sense—the Arch, the temporal barrier that had surrounded the Earth—all that, yes. But a central motivating consciousness? A mind? Sulean had come to doubt it. The Hypotheticals were not one entity. They were just what happened when the logic of self-reproduction engulfed the vastnesses of space.

The dust of ancient machines had fallen on the desert, and from that dust had grown strange, abortive fragments. A wheel, a hollow tube, a rose with a coal-dark eye. And Isaac was interested in the west, the far west. What did that mean? Did it have a discernible meaning?

It meant, Sulean thought, that Isaac was being sacrificed to a force as mindless and indifferent as the wind.

In the morning Mrs. Rebka allowed Sulean to visit the boy's room. "You'll see," she said grimly, "why we're all so concerned."

Isaac was limp under a tangle of blankets. His eyes were closed. Sulean touched his forehead and felt the radiant heat of fever.

"Isaac," she sighed, as much to herself as to the boy. His pale inertness provoked too many memories. There had been another boy, yes, another fever, another desert.

"The rose," Isaac said, startling her.

"What's that?" she said.

"I remember the rose. And the rose, the rose remembers."

As if asleep, eyes still shut, he pulled himself into a sitting position, his pillow compressed under the small of his back and his head knocking the backboard of the bed. His hair was lank with sweat. How immortal human beings seem when they can walk, run, jump, Sulean thought. And how fragile when they can't.

Then the boy did something that shocked even Sulean.

He opened his eyes and the irises were newly discolored, as if their pale uniform blue had been spattered with gold paint. He looked at her directly and he smiled.

Then he spoke, and he spoke a language Sulean had not heard for decades, a Martian dialect from the sparsely inhabited southern wastes.

He said, "It's you, big sister! Where have you been?"

Then, just as quickly, he slept again, and Sulean was left shivering in the terrible echo of his words.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The next morning a helicopter flew low over the Minang village, and while that might have been innocuous—logging companies had been surveying these hills for the past couple of months—it unsettled the villagers and caused Ibu Diane to suggest that they move quickly. Staying was riskier than leaving, she said.

"Where are we going?" Lise asked.

"Over the mountains. Kubelick's Grave. Turk will fly us there, won't you, Turk?"

He appeared to think about it. "I might need a crowbar," he said, cryptically. "But yeah."

"We'll take one of the village cars back to the city," Ibu Diane said. "Something inconspicuous. The car you came in is a liability. I'll ask one of the villagers to drive it up the coast road and leave it somewhere."

"Do I get it back when all this is finished?"

"I doubt it."

"Well, that figures," Turk said.

The authorities had ways of tracking people in whom they were interested, Lise knew. Tiny RF tags could be planted on a vehicle or even in an item of clothing. And there were more arcane, even subtler devices available. The Minang villager who drove their car north also took with him their clothing and other possessions. Lise changed into a floral-print blouse and muslin pants from the village store, Turk into a pair of jeans and a white shirt. Both of them showered in Ibu Diane's clinic. "Be especially careful of your hair," Diane had instructed them. "Things can be hidden in hair."

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 Ginn. Tomas is a Fourth, and Fourths are notoriously hard to interrogate—they're not especially afraid of death and they have a high tolerance to pain. Getting any information out of a stubborn Fourth means putting him through a process that's usually, in the end, fatal."

"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."

"Assume the worst. Take the next exit. Find a gas station or somewhere we can stop without arousing suspicion."

"I know people around here," Turk said. "People I can trust, if we need a place to stay overnight."

"Thank you, Turk, but I don't think we should endanger anyone else. And I doubt Lise is anxious to make the acquaintance of one of your old girlfriends."

"Didn't say anything about a girlfriend," Turk said, but he blushed.

He pulled into a filling station attached to a retail store. This was the part of Port Magellan where the refinery workers lived, lots of prefabricated bungalows assembled in haste during the boom years and gone shabby since. He parked away from the pumps, under an umbrella tree. The last daylight had gone and there was only the yellow-orange glare of the street lamps.

"If you want to dump the car," Turk said, "there's a bus station a couple of blocks down. We can catch the bus to Rice Bay and walk to Arundji's. Won't get there till midnight, though."

"Maybe that's best," Diane said.

"Hate to abandon another vehicle, though. Who's paying for all this transportation?"

"Friends and friends of friends," Diane said. "Don't worry about it. Don't take anything out of the car."

Lise begged permission to go into the small store and buy something to eat—they hadn't stopped for a meal since breakfast—while Turk and Diane unscrewed and discarded the vehicle's license plates.

She bought cheese, crackers, and bottled water for the bus trip. At the counter she noticed a stack of disposable utility phones, the kind you pick up when you've lost your personal unit, also favored, or so she had read, by drug dealers seeking anonymity She grabbed one and added it to the groceries. Then she walked around the back of the store, bag in one hand and phone in the other.

She tapped out Brian's home number.

He picked up almost immediately. "Yes?"

Lise was briefly paralyzed by the sound of his voice. She thought about clicking off. Then she said, "Brian? I can't talk right now, but I want you to know I'm okay."

"Lise… please, tell me where you are."

"I can't. But one thing. This is important. There's a man named Tomas Ginn—that's T-O-M-A-S, G-I-N-N—who was taken into custody a couple of days ago. Presumably without a warrant or any legal record. It's possible he's being held by Genomic Security or somebody claiming to be DGS. Can you check on this? I mean, is it okay with you that people are being kidnapped? If not, is there anything you can do to get this man set free?"

"Listen to me, Lise. Listen. You don't know what you're involved in. You're with Turk Findley, right? Did he tell you he's a criminal? That's why he fled the States, Lise. He—"

She turned and saw Turk come around the corner of the store. Too late to hide. She closed the phone, but that was a useless gesture. She could see the anger on his face in the stark artificial light. Wordlessly, he took the phone from her hand and threw it into the air.

The phone sailed past a lamp standard and fluttered like a huge moth before disappearing down the embankment of a ravine.

Too shocked to speak, Lise turned to face him. Turk's face was livid. She had never seen him like this. He said, "You have no fucking clue, do you? No idea what's at stake here."

"Turk—"

He didn't listen. He grabbed her wrist and began to pull her toward the street. She managed to break his grip, though she dropped the bag of cheese and crackers.

"Goddamnit, I'm not a child!"

"Fucking prove it," he said.

The bus ride wasn't exactly pleasant.

Lise sat sullenly apart from Turk, watching the night roll by in the frame of the window. She was determined not to think about what Turk had done, or what she might have done wrong, or what Brian had said, at least until she calmed down. But as the anger abated she simply felt desolate. The last bus south was half-empty, the only other passengers a few grim-faced men in khaki pants and blue shirts, probably shift workers who lived downcoast to save the cost of city rent. The man in the seat behind her was muttering in Farsi, possibly to himself.

The bus stopped periodically at concrete-block terminals and storefront depots off the highway, a world populated by forlorn men and flickering lights. Then the city was behind them and there was only the highway and the horizonless dark of the sea.

Diane Dupree came across the aisle and took the seat next to Lise.

"Turk thinks you need to take the risk more seriously," the old woman said.

"Did he tell you that?"

"I surmised."

"I do take it seriously."

"The phone was a bad idea. In all likelihood the call can't be traced, but who knows what technology the police or Genomic Security might bring to bear? It's better not to make assumptions."

"I do take it seriously," Lise insisted again, "it's just…"

But she couldn't finish, couldn't find the words for the sudden awareness of exactly how much of life as she had known it was slipping away under the wheels of the bus.

By the time the bus reached a depot near Arundji's airport Turk had stopped gnashing his teeth and had begun to look a little sheepish. He gave Lise an apologetic sidelong glance, which she ignored.

"It's a good half mile to Arundji's," he said. "You two up for the walk?"

"Yes," Diane said. Lise just nodded.

The road from the depot was rural and sparsely lit. As they walked Lise listened to the crackle of her footsteps on the barely-paved verge of the road, the rush of wind raking scrubby, treeless lots. Off in the high grass some insect buzzed—she could have mistaken it for a cricket except for the mournful tone of its creaking, like a disconsolate man running his thumbnail over the teeth of a comb.

They approached the fenced territory of Arundji's at a back entrance, away from the main gate. Turk fished a key out of his pocket and swung open a chain-link gate, saying, "You might want to stay inconspicuous from here on in. The terminal shuts down after ten o'clock, but we've got a maintenance crew on site and security guards out where they're grading the new runway."

Lise said, "Don't you have a right to be here?"

"Sort of. But it would be best not to attract too much attention."

She followed Turk and Diane to an aluminum-sheet hangar, one of dozens lined up at the rear of the terminal. Its huge doors were chained shut and Turk said, "I wasn't kidding about that crowbar. I'll need something to spring this."

"You're locked out of your own hangar?"

"Kind of a funny story." He walked off, apparently looking for a tool.

Use was sweaty and her calves ached from the walk and she needed to pee. She no longer owned a change of clothes.

"Forgive Turk," Diane said. "It isn't that he distrusts you. He's afraid for you. He—"

"Are you going to do this from now on? Make these guru-like pronouncements? Because it's getting kind of tiresome."

Diane stared, wide-eyed. Then, somewhat to Lise's relief, she laughed. Lise said, "I mean, I'm sorry, but—"

"No! Don't apologize. You're absolutely right. Its one of the hazards of great age, the temptation to pronounce judgments."

"I know what Turk is afraid of. Turk is burning his bridges behind him. My bridges are still there. I have a life I can go back to."

"Nevertheless," Diane said, "here you are." She smiled again. "Speaks the guru."

Turk came back with a piece of rebar from the construction site and used it to lever off the latch, which was flimsier than the padlock attached to it and came away from the door with a concussive twang. He rolled open the big steel doors and switched on the interior light.

His plane was inside. His twin-engine Skyrex. Lise remembered this aircraft from their abortive flight across the mountains—ages ago, it seemed.

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 running errands for the pastor or the choirmaster, and in mid-August he was recruited to help set up tables for the annual picnic.

The suburb in which Brian lived was graced with a number of well-maintained parks and wooded ravines. The annual church picnic—an institution so quaint the words themselves had a sort of horse-and-buggy aura about them—was held in the largest of these parks. More than a picnic, it was (according to the flyer in the Sunday bulletin) a Day of Family Communion, and there were plenty of families there to commune with, three generations in some cases, and Brian was kept busy laying out plastic tablecloths and lugging coolers of ice and soft drinks until the event was well under way, hot dogs circulating freely, kids he barely knew tossing Frisbees, toddlers underfoot, and it was the perfect day for it, sunny but not too hot, a breeze to carry off the smoke of the grills. Even at the age of thirteen Brian had appreciated the slightly narcotic atmosphere of the picnic, an afternoon suspended in time.

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 connection was broken.

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.

Kirchberg had done him a number of small favors in the past and Brian had done more than a few in return. The settled eastern coast of Equatoria was a United Nations protectorate, at least nominally, with a complicated set of laws established and constantly revised by international committees. The closest thing to a fully-established police force was Interpol, though blue-helmeted soldiers did most of the daily enforcement. The result was a bureaucracy that created more paperwork than justice and existed mainly to smooth over conflicts between hostile national interests. To get anything done, you had to know people. Kirchberg was one of the people Brian knew.

Kirchberg answered promptly and Brian listened to his inevitable complaints—the weather, the bullying oil cartels, his boneheaded underlings—before getting down to business. Finally, as Kirchberg wound down, he said, "I want to give you a name."

"Fine," he said. "Just what I need. More work. Whose name?"

"Tomas Ginn." He spelled it.

"And why are you interested in this person?"

"Departmental matter," Brian said.

"Some desperate American criminal? A better-baby salesman, a renegade organ-vendor?"

"Something like that."

"I'll run it when I can. You owe me a drink."

"Anytime," Brian said.

He didn't tell Sigmund and Weil about that, either.

It was the following morning that the photograph rolled out of his printer, along with an unsigned note from Kirchberg.

Brian looked at the photograph, then put it face down on his desk, then picked it up again.

He had seen worse things. What he thought about immediately and involuntarily was the body he had discovered beyond the outer limits of the church picnic a quarter of a century ago, the body which had lain among the exposed roots of two trees with its eyes gone milky white and its skin traversed by feckless ants. He felt the same involuntary lurch of his stomach.

The photograph was of an old man's body broken on a salt-encrusted rock. The marks on the body might have been massive bruises or simply the effects of decomposition. But there was no mistaking the bullet wound in the forehead.

Kirchberg's unsigned note said: Washed up near South. Point two days ago; no papers but identified as Tomas W. Ginn (U.S. Merchant Marine DNA database). One of yours?

Mr. Ginn had wandered outside the boundaries of the picnic, it seemed. And so, he thought with sickly dismay, had Lise.

In the afternoon he called Pieter Kirchberg again. This time Kirchberg was less chatty.

"I got what you sent me," Brian said.

"No need to thank me."

"One of ours, you said. What did you mean by that?"

"I'd just as soon not discuss it."

"An American, you mean?"

No answer. One of yours. So, yes, an American, or was Pieter suggesting that Tomas Ginn belonged to Genomic Security? Or that his death did? Maybe he meant one of your killings.

"Is there anything else?" Kirchberg asked. "Because I have a lot of work waiting for me…"

"One more favor," Brian said. "If you don't mind, Pieter. Another name."