Axis by Robert Charles Wilson

and by the idea of the Fourth Age, an extra thirty years or so tacked onto his expected span of life…
    Lise had to admit there was a certain logic to it. He wouldn’t have been the first man to be lured from his family by the promise of longevity. Three decades ago the Martian Wun Ngo Wen had brought to Earth a technique for extending human life—a treatment that changed behavior in other and subtler ways as well. Proscribed by virtually every government on Earth, the treatment circulated in the underground community of Terrestrial Fourths.
    Would Robert Adams have abandoned his career and family to join that community? Lise’s instinctive answer was the same as her mother’s: no. He wouldn’t have done that to them,
no,
no matter how tempted he might have been.
    But evidence had emerged to subvert that faith. He had been associating with strangers off-campus. People had been coming to the house, people not associated with the university, people he had not introduced to his family and whose purposes he had been reluctant to explain. And the Fourth cults held a special appeal in the academic community—the treatment had first been circulated by the scientist Jason Lawton, among friends he considered trustworthy, and it had spread primarily among intellectuals and scholars.
    No, goddammit
—but did Mrs. Adams have a better explanation?
    Mrs. Adams did not. Nor did Lise.
    The investigation remained inconclusive. After a year of this Lise’s mother had booked passage to California for herself and her daughter, bent by the insult to her well-planned life but not, at least outwardly, broken. The disappearance—the New World in general—became a subject one didn’t mention in her presence. Silence was better than speculation. Lise had learned that lesson well. Like her mother, Lise had secured her pain and curiosity in the dark internal attic where unthinkable thoughts were stored. At least until her marriage to Brian and his transfer to Port Magellan. Suddenly those memories were refreshed: the wound reopened as if it had never healed, and her curiosity, she discovered, had been distilled in its enclosure, had become an adult’s curiosity rather than a child’s.
    So she had begun to ask questions of her father’s colleagues and friends, the few still living in the city, and inevitably these questions had involved the community of Fourths in the New World.
    Brian at first tried to be helpful. He hadn’t much liked her
ad hoc
investigation into what he considered potentially dangerous matters—and Lise supposed it had been one more in a growing number of emotional disconnects between them—but he had tolerated it and even used his DGS credentials to follow up on some of her queries.
    Like the woman in the photograph.
    “Two photographs, actually,” she told Turk. When she moved out of her mother’s house, Lise had salvaged a number of items her mother was forever threatening to throw away, in this case a disk of photographs from her parents’ Port Magellan years. A few of the pictures had been taken at faculty parties at the Adams’ house. Lise had selected a few of these photos and shown them to old family friends, hoping to track down those she didn’t recognize. She managed to put names, at least, to most of them, but one stood out: a dark-skinned elderly woman in jeans, caught standing in the doorway beyond a crowd of far more expensively-dressed faculty members, as if she had arrived unexpectedly. She seemed disconcerted, nervous.
    No one had been able to identify her. Brian had offered to run the picture through DGS image-recognition software and see if anything turned up. This had been the latest of what Lise had come to think of as Brian’s “charity bombs”—acts of generosity he threw in front of her as if to divert her from the path to separation—and she had accepted the offer with a warning that it wouldn’t change anything.
    But the search had turned up a pertinent match. The same woman had