Axis by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

stiffened overnight. The ash had duned in the empty streets and it shivered down from the crowns of the trees that had been planted along Rue Abbas.
    She sprinkled fresh cheddar onto the omelette and folded it. For once it didn’t break and spill off the spatula in a gooey lump. She put together two plates and carried them into the living room. She found Turk standing in the space she used for an office: a desk, her keyboard and file holders, a small library of paper books.
    “This where you write?” he asked.
    “Yes.” No. She put the plates on the coffee table. Turk joined her on the sofa, folding his long legs and taking the plate onto his lap.
    “Good,” he said, sampling the omelette.
    “Thank you.”
    “So that book you’re working on,” he said. “How’s that going?”
    She winced. The book, the notional book, her excuse for prolonging her stay in Equatoria, didn’t exist. She told people she was writing a book because she was a journalism graduate and because it seemed a plausible thing for her to do in the aftermath of a failed marriage—a book about her father, who had vanished without explanation when the family lived here a dozen years ago, when she was fifteen. “Slowly,” she said.
    “No progress?”
    “A few interviews, some good conversations with my father’s old colleagues at the American University.” All this was true. She had immersed herself in her family’s fractured history. But she hadn’t written more than notes to herself.
    “I remember you said your father was interested in Fourths.”
    “He was interested in all kinds of things.” Robert Adams had come to Equatoria as part of the Geophysical Survey’s deal with the fledgling American University. The course he taught was New World Geology and he had done fieldwork in the far west. The book
he
had been working on—a real book—had been called
Planet as Artifact,
a study of the New World as a place where geological history had been deeply influenced by the Hypotheticals.
    And, yes, he had also been fascinated by the community of Fourths—privately, not professionally.
    “The woman in the photograph you showed me,” Turk said. “Is she a Fourth?”
    “Maybe. Probably.” How much of this did she really want to discuss?
    “How can you tell?”
    “Because I’ve seen her before,” Lise said, putting down her fork and turning to face him. “Do you want the whole story?”
    “If you want to tell it.”
     
     
    Lise had heard the word “disappeared” applied to her father for the first time three days after he failed to come home from the university, a month after her fifteenth birthday. The local police had come to discuss the case with Lise’s mother while Lise listened from the corridor outside the kitchen. Her father had “disappeared”—that is, he had left work as usual, had driven away in the customary direction, and somewhere between the American University and their rented house in the hills above Port Magellan he had vanished. There was no obvious explanation, no pertinent evidence.
    But the investigation went on. The issue of his fascination with Fourths had come up. Lise’s mother was interviewed again, this time by men who wore business suits rather than uniforms: men from the Department of Genomic Security. Mr. Adams had expressed an interest in Fourths: was the interest personal? Had he, for instance, repeatedly mentioned the subject of longevity? Did he suffer from any degenerative disease that might have been reversed by the Martian longevity treatment? Was he unusually concerned with death? Unhappy at home?
    No, Lise’s mother had said. Actually, what she said most often was “No, goddammit.” Lise remembered her mother at the kitchen table, interrogated, drinking endless cups of rust-brown roiboos tea and saying, “No, goddammit, no.”
    Nevertheless, a theory had emerged. A family man in the New World, often apart from his family, seduced by the anything-goes atmosphere of the frontier