Axis (26 page)

“Depends,” he said.

“On what?”

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

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

“It could heat up again.”

“So we’ll do something else.” The pronoun hanging in the air like an unbroken pinata.

“Guess we have to.”

We.

They served out dinner while the sun met the horizon in a reddening haze. Turk ate quickly and said little. Diane Dupree sat on a distant log with the Martian woman Sulean Moi, conversing intently but inaudibly while Mrs. Rebka hovered over Isaac, who had to be coaxed to eat.

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

She could only nod.

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

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

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

“Topsoil. Old leaves. Probably a few bugs.”

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

“Because the Hypotheticals built this planet for us.”

“Maybe not for us, exactly, but yes, they built it, or at least modified it, and that turns our study of this world into a whole new discipline—not just biology or geology but a kind of planetary
archaeology
. This world was profoundly influenced by the Hypotheticals long before modern human beings evolved, millions of years before the Spin, millions of years before the Arch was put in place. That tells us something about their methods and their extraordinary capacity for very long-term planning. It may also tell us something about their ultimate goals, if we ask the right question. That was the context in which your father worked. He never lost sight of that larger truth, never ceased to marvel at it.”

“Planet as artifact,” Lise said.

“The book he was writing.” Dvali nodded. “Have you read it?”

“All I’ve seen of it is the introduction.” And a few notes, salvaged from one of her mother’s convulsive fits of radical housecleaning.

“I wish there had been more. It would have been an important work.”

“Is that what you talked about with him?”

“Often enough, yes.”

“But not always.”

“Obviously, we talked about the Martians and what they might know about the Hypotheticals. He knew I was a Fourth—”

“You told him?”

“I took him into my confidence.”

“May I ask why?”

“Because of his obvious interest. Because he was trustworthy. Because he understood the nature of the world.” Dvali smiled. “Basically, because I liked him.”

“He was okay with that, with your—Fourthness?”

“He was curious about it.”

“Did he talk about taking the treatment himself?”

“I won’t say he didn’t consider it. But he never made the request to me or, so far as I know, anyone else. He loved his family, Miss Adams—I don’t need to tell you that. I was as shocked as anyone else when I heard about his disappearance.”

“Did you confide in him about this project of yours, too? About Isaac?”

“When it was in the planning stage, yes, I talked to him about it.” Dvali sipped his coffee. “He hated the idea.”

“But he didn’t inform on you. He didn’t do anything to stop it.”

“No, he didn’t inform on us, but we argued bitterly over it—the friendship was strained at that point.”

“Strained, but not broken.”

“Because despite our disagreement, he understood why the work seemed necessary. Urgently necessary.” Dvali leaned closer to her and for a moment Lise was afraid he would reach out and take her hands. She wasn’t sure she could stand that. “The idea of any tangible contact with the Hypotheticals—with the motivating spirit behind their vast network of machines—fascinated him as much as it fascinated me. He knew how important it was, not just for our generation but for generations to come, for humanity as a species.”

“You must have been disappointed when he wouldn’t cooperate.”

“I didn’t need his cooperation. I would have liked his approval. I was disappointed when he withheld it. After a time we simply stopped talking about it—we talked about other things. And when the project began in earnest I left Port Magellan. I never saw your father again.”

“That was six months before he disappeared.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know anything about that?”

“About his disappearance? No. Genomic Security was in the Port at the time—looking for me, among others, since rumors of the project had reached them—and when I heard Robert Adams had gone missing I assumed he’d been picked up and interrogated by Genomic Security. But I don’t know that for certain. I wasn’t there.”

“Most of the people who are interrogated by Genomic Security walk away from it, Dr. Dvali.” Although she knew better.

“Not all,” Dvali said.

“He wasn’t a Fourth. Why would they hurt him?” Kill
him
, she couldn’t bring herself to say.

“He would have resisted on principle and out of personal loyalty.”

“You knew him well enough to say that?”

“I took the treatment in Bangalore, Miss Adams, twenty years ago. I’m not omniscient, but I’m a good judge of human character. Not that there was anything especially occult about Robert Adams. He wore his sincerity on his sleeve.”

He was murdered
. That had always been the most likely explanation, though the details might be uglier than Lise had imagined. Robert Adams had been murdered and the men who murdered him would never come to trial for it. But there was another story inside the story. The story of his curiosity, his idealism, the strength of his convictions.

Some of these thoughts must have shown on her face. Dvali was radiating a sympathetic concern. “I know that isn’t much help. I’m sorry.”

Lise stood up. All she felt at the moment was cold. “May I ask you one more thing?”

“If you like.”

“How
do
you justify it? The fate of humanity aside, how do you justify putting an innocent child in Isaac’s position?

Dvali turned up his cup and emptied the last of his coffee on the ground. “Isaac was never an innocent child. Isaac has never been anything other than what he is now. And I would trade places with him, Miss Adams, if I could. Eagerly.”

She came across the campground to the circle of light in which Turk was sitting, fiddling with a pocket telecom receiver. Turk, her avatar of disappearances: Turk, who had vanished from many lives. “Radio broken?”

“Nothing coming in over the aerostats. Nothing from Port Magellan. Last I heard they were talking about another tremor out west.” Oil revenue, of course, being the Port’s perennial obsession. In the Trusts we trust. Turk gave her a second look. “Are you all right?”

“Just tired,” she said.

She brewed another pot of coffee and drank enough to keep her alert, even as the others began to settle in for the night. At last—as she had hoped—there was no one up and moving except herself and the Martian woman, Sulean Moi.

Lise was intimidated by Sulean Moi, even though she looked like the kind of elderly woman you might help across the street at a stoplight. She wore her age and the distance she had traveled as a kind of invisible aura. It took a certain amount of courage to join her at the guttering campfire, where the logs had worn down to radiant hollows and red chambers.

“Don’t be afraid,” the old woman said.

Lise was startled. “Are you reading my mind?”

“Reading your face.”

“I’m not really afraid.” Not much.

Sulean smiled, exposing her small white teeth. “I think I would be, in your position—given what you must have heard about me. I know the stories they tell. The grim elder Martian, victim of a childhood injury.” She tapped her skull. “My supposed moral authority. My unusual history.”

“Is that how you see yourself?”

“No, but I recognize the caricature. You spent a good deal of time and energy looking for me, Miss Adams.”

“Call me Lise.”

“Lise, then. Do you still have that photograph you’ve been showing around?”

“No.” She had destroyed it back in the Minang village, at Diane’s urging.

“Just as well. So here we are. No one to overhear us. We can talk.”

“When I started looking for you I had no idea—”

“That it would inconvenience me? Or that it would attract the attention of Genomic Security? Don’t apologize. You knew what you knew, and what you didn’t know could hardly enter into your calculations. You want to ask me about Robert Adams and how and why he died.”

“Do you know for a fact that he’s dead?”

“I didn’t witness the killing, but I’ve spoken with people who saw him abducted and I can’t imagine any other outcome. If he had been able to come home he would have done so. I’m sorry if that seems blunt.”

Blunt but increasingly self-evident, Lise thought. “It’s true that he was taken by Genomic Security?”

“By one of what they call their Executive Action Groups.”

“And they were hunting for Dr. Dvali and his group.”

“Yes.”

“And so were you.”

“Yes. For slightly different reasons.”

“You wanted to stop him from creating Isaac.”

“I wanted to stop him from performing a needlessly cruel and probably useless human experiment, yes.”

“Isn’t that what Genomic Security wanted?”

“Only in their press releases. Do you really believe organizations like Genomic Security operate within their mission statements? If Genomic Security could acquire the tools they would have secret bunkers full of multiple Isaacs—wired to machines, under armed guard.”

Lise shook her head to order her thoughts. “How did you meet my father?”

“The first useful person I met in Equatoria was Diane Dupree. There’s no formal hierarchy among Terrestrial Fourths, but in every Fourth community there’s some pivotal figure who figures in every major decision. Diane played that role in coastal Equatoria. I told her why I wanted to find Dvali and she gave me the names of people who might be useful—not all of them Fourths. Dr. Dvali had befriended your father. I befriended him too.”

“Dr. Dvali said my father was trustworthy.”

“Your father had a striking faith in fundamental human goodness. That didn’t always work to his advantage.”

“You think Dvali took advantage of him?”

“I think it took him a long time to see Dr. Dvali for what he was.”

“Which is?”

“A man with grandiose ambitions, profound insecurities, and a dangerously malleable conscience. Your father was reluctant to reveal Dr. Dvali’s announced plans and whereabouts, even to me.”

“Did he, though?”

“Once we got to know each other. We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father’s unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.”

“If he told you what he knew, why couldn’t you find Dvali and stop him?”

“Because Dr. Dvali was wise enough to change his plans once he left Port Magellan. Your father believed Dvali was establishing a compound on the far west coast of Equatoria—still mostly a wilderness even today, apart from a few fishing villages. That’s what he told me, and that’s no doubt what he told Genomic Security when they interrogated him.”

“Dvali thinks my father refused to talk—that that was why they killed him.”

“I’m sure he resisted. I doubt he succeeded, given what I know about their interrogation techniques. I know it hurts you to hear that, Lise, and I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. Your father told me what he knew because he believed Dvali ought to be stopped and he believed I had the authority to intervene without doing violence to Dvali or the Fourth community in general. If he told these things to Genomic Security, he would have done so only under duress. But, Lise, it didn’t matter. Dvali wasn’t on the west coast. He never had been. Genomic Security lost track of him, and by the time I found out where he had truly gone it was far too late—years had passed. Isaac was a living child. He couldn’t be called back into the womb.”

“I see.”

In the ensuing silence Lise could hear the crackle of the smoldering fire.

“Lise,” Sulean Moi said softly. “I lost my parents when I was very young. I expect Diane told you that. I lost my parents, but, worse than that, I lost my memory of them. It was as if they had never existed at all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not asking for sympathy. What I want to tell you is that, at a certain age, I made it my business to educate myself about them—to learn who they were, and how they had come to live beside a certain river before it flooded, and what warnings they might have heeded or ignored. I think I wanted to know whether I ought to love them for trying to rescue me or hate them for failing. I found out a lot of things, mostly irrelevant, including a number of painful truths about their personal lives, but the only
important
thing I learned was that they were blameless. It was a very small consolation, but it was all there would ever be, and in a way it was enough. Lise—your father was blameless.”