Axis

'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