Axis

Even at this juncture he was unfailingly nice, the quality she had found most frustrating in him. The marriage had been bad from the beginning. Not a disaster so much as a bad choice compounded by more bad choices, some of which she was reluctant to admit even to herself. Worse because she couldn't confess her unhappiness in any way Brian was liable to understand. Brian went to church every Sunday, Brian believed in decency and propriety, and Brian despised the complexity and weirdness of the post-Spin world. And that, ultimately, was what Lise could not abide. She had had enough of that from her mother. She wanted, instead, the quality her father had tried so hard to communicate to her on those nights when they looked at the stars: awe, or, failing that, at least courage.

Brian had occasional charm, he had earnestness, he had, buried in him, a deep and poignant seriousness of purpose. But he was afraid of what the world had become, and that, in the end, she could not abide.

She sat down. He pulled a second chair across the carpet and sat facing her knee-to-knee. 'This might not be the pleasantest conversation we ever had,' he said. 'But we're having it for your sake, Lise. Please try to remember that.'

* * * * *

Turk arrived at the airport that afternoon still pondering his talk with Tomas and intending to inspect his aircraft before he went home for the night. Turk's little Skyrex twin-engine fixed-wing prop plane was nearly five years old and needed repairs and maintenance more often than it used to. It had lately been fitted with a new fuel injector, and Turk wanted to see for himself what the mechanics had done. So he parked in his usual space behind the cargo building and crossed a patch of tarmac turned woolen-gray by ash and rain, but when he reached the hangar he found the door padlocked. Tucked behind the latch was a note advising him to see Mike Arundji.

Not much question what this was about. Turk owed two months' rent on his hangar space and was in arrears for maintenance.

But he was friendly with Mike Arundji—most of the time, anyhow—and he walked into the owner's office rehearsing his usual excuses. It was a ritual dance: the demand, the apology, the token payment (though even that was going to be tight), another reprieve… although the padlock was a new touch.

This time the older man looked up from his desk with an expression of deep regret. 'The lock,' he said immediately, 'yeah, I'm sorry about that, but I don't have a choice here. I have to run my business like a business.'

'It's the ash,' Turk said. 'I lost a couple of charters to it. Otherwise you'd be paid by now.'

'So you say, and I'm not disputing it. But what difference would a couple of charters make, long-term? You have to ask yourself. This isn't the only small airport in the district. I've got competition. In the old days it was okay to be a little loose, cut everybody some slack. It was all semi-amateurs, independents like you. Now there are corporate charter companies bidding up hangar space. Even if the books balanced I'd be taking a loss on you. That's just a fact.'

'I can't make money if I can't fly my plane, Mike.'

'The trouble is, I can't make money whether you fly it or not.'

'Seems like you do okay.'

'I have a payroll to meet. I have a whole new raft of regulations coming down from the Provisional Government. If you looked at my spreadsheets you wouldn't tell me I'm doing okay. My accountant doesn't come in here and tell me I'm doing okay.'

And you probably don't call your accountant an amateur, Turk thought. Mike Arundji was an old hand: he had opened up this strip when there was nothing south of Port Magellan but fishing villages and squatters' camps. Even a half-dozen years ago the word 'spreadsheet' would have been foreign to his vocabulary.

That was the kind of environment in which Turk had arranged for the import—at eye-bulging expense—of his six-seater Skyrex. And it had made him a modest little living, at least until recently. He no longer owed money on it. Unfortunately, he seemed to owe money on everything else. 'So what do I have to do to get my plane back in the air?'

Arundji shifted in his chair and wouldn't meet Turk's eye. 'Come in tomorrow, we'll talk about it. Worse comes to worst, it wouldn't be hard to find a buyer.'

'Find—what?'

'A buyer. A buyer, you know! People are interested. Sell the plane, pay your debts, start fresh. People do that. It happens all the time.'

Turk said, 'Not to me.'

'Calm down. We don't necessarily have conflicting interests here. I can help you get a premium price. I mean, if it comes to that. And shit, Turk, you're the one who's always talking about hiring onto a research boat and sailing somewhere. Maybe this is the time. Who knows?'

'Your confidence is inspiring.'

'Think about it, is what I'm saying. Talk to me in the morning.'

'I can pay what I owe you.'

'Can you? Okay. No problem. Bring me a certified check and we'll forget about it.'

To which Turk had no answer.

'Go home,' Arundji said. 'You look tired, buddy.'

* * * * *

'First,' Brian said, 'I know you were with Turk Findley.'

'What the hell?' Lise said promptly.

'Hold on, let me finish—'

'What, you had somebody follow me?'

'I couldn't do that if I wanted to, Lise.'

'What, then?'

Brian took a breath. His pursed lips and narrowed eyes were meant to announce that he found this as unpleasant as she did. 'Lise, there are other people at work here.'

She made an effort to control her own breathing. She was already angry. And in a way the anger was not unwelcome. It beat feeling guilty, the mood in which her encounters usually left her. 'What people?'

'Let me just remind you of the larger issues,' he said. 'Bear with me. It's easy to forget what's at stake. The nature and definition of the human genome, of what we are as a people, all of us. That's been put at risk by everything from the cloning trade to these Martian longevity cults, and there are people in every government in the world who spend a lot of time thinking about that.'

His credo, the same justification, Lise recalled, that he had once offered to her mother. 'What does that have to do with me?' Or Turk, for that matter.

'You came to me with an old snapshot taken at one of your dad's faculty parties, so I ran it through the database—'

'You offered to run it through the database.'

'I offered, okay, and we pulled an image from the dockland security cameras. But when you run a check like that, the query gets bumped around a little bit. And I guess something rang a bell somewhere. Within the last week we've had people from Washington show up here—'

'What do you mean, DGS people?'

'DGS people, right, but very senior, people working out of levels of the department light-years above what we do here. People who are deeply interested in finding the woman in the picture. People interested enough to sail out of Djakarta and knock on my door.'

Lise sat back in her chair and tried to absorb all this.

After a long moment she said, 'My mother showed the same snapshot to DGS back when my father disappeared. Nobody made a fuss about it then.'

'That was a decade ago. Other information has turned up since. The same face in a different context. More than that I can't say.'

'I'd like to talk to these people. If they know anything about Sulean Moi—'

'Nothing that would help you find out what happened to your father.'

'How can you be sure of that?'

'Try to put it in perspective, Lise. These people are doing an important job. They mean business. I went out of my way to convince these guys not to talk to you.'