Axis

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.'

PART THREE — INTO THE WEST

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Before he could say anything more—in Martian or in English—the boy Isaac stopped speaking and fell into a sleep from which he could not be aroused. The Fourths continued to tend to his needs but were unable to treat or diagnose his condition. His vital signs were stable and he seemed to be in no immediate danger.

Sulean Moi sat with the child in his room as the sun shone on the desert beyond the window, clocking shadows across the alkaline grit. Two days passed. One morning, as occasionally happened this time of year, a storm blew out of the mountains, a shelf of coal-black clouds that produced much lightning and thunder but only a little rain. By sunset the storm had gone and the sky in its wake was a radiant, purified turquoise. The air smelled fresh and astringent. Still the boy slept.

Out in the western wastes spindly plants were provoked by the brief rain to flower. Perhaps other things, too, bloomed in the emptiness. Things like Isaac's ocular rose.

Outwardly calm, Sulean was terrified.

The boy had spoken with Esh's voice.

She wondered if this was what religious texts meant when they talked about trembling in the presence of God. The Hypothetical weren't gods—if she understood what that simple but strangely elastic word meant—but they were just as powerful and just as inscrutable. She didn't believe they possessed conscious intent, and even the word 'they' was a misnomer, a crude anthropomorphism. But when 'they' manifested themselves, the natural human response was to cower and hide—the instinctive reaction of the rabbit to the fox, the fox to the hunter.

Twice in a lifetime, Sulean thought: that's my special burden, to witness this twice in a lifetime.

At times she napped in the chair next to the bed where Isaac lay, his chest rising and falling with the