Axis by Robert Charles Wilson Page A

passed through the docks at Port Magellan just months ago. She had been listed on a passengership manifest as Sulean Moi.
    The name turned up again in connection with Turk Findley, who had piloted the charter flight that carried Sulean Moi over the mountains to the desert town of Kubelick’s Grave—the same town to which Lise had been attempting to fly a few months before, following a different lead.
     
     
    Turk listened to all this patiently. Then he said, “She wasn’t talkative. She paid cash. I put her down at the airstrip in Kubelick’s Grave and that was that. She never said anything about her past or why she was flying west. You think she’s a Fourth?”
    “She hasn’t changed much in fifteen years. That suggests she might be.”
    “So maybe the simplest explanation is true. Your father took the illegal treatment and started a new life under a new name.”
    “Maybe. But I don’t want another hypothesis. I want to know what really happened.”
    “So you find out the truth, what then? Does that make your life better? Maybe you’ll learn something you don’t like. Maybe you have to start mourning all over again.”
    “At least,” she said, “I’ll know what I’m mourning for.”
     
     
    As often happened when she talked about her father, she dreamed of him that night.
    More memory than dream at first: she was with him on the veranda of their house on the hill in Port Magellan, and he was talking to her about the Hypotheticals.
    He talked to her on the veranda because Lise’s mother didn’t care for these conversations. This was the starkest contrast Lise could draw between her parents. Both were Spin survivors, but they had emerged from the crisis with polarized sensibilities. Her father had thrown himself headlong into the mystery, had fallen in love with the heightened strangeness of the universe. Her mother pretended that none of it had happened—that the garden fence and the back wall were barricades strong enough to repulse the tide of time.
    Lise had not quite known where to place herself on that divide. She loved the sense of safety she felt in her mother’s home. But she loved to hear her father talk.
    In the dream he talked about the Hypotheticals. The Hypotheticals
aren’t people, Lise, you must not make that mistake.
As the unnamed Equatorian stars turned in the slate-black sky.
They are a network of more or less mindless machines, we suspect, but is that network aware of itself? Does it have a mind, Lise, the way you and I do? If it does, every element of its thought must be propagated over hundreds or
thousands
of light-years.
It
would see time and space very differently than we do. It might not perceive us at all, except as a
passing
phenomenon, and if it manipulates us it might do so at an entirely unconscious level
.
    Like God, Lise in her dream suggested.
    A blind God,
her father said, but he was wrong, because in the dream, while she was entranced in the grandeur of his vision and safe in the boundary of her mothers sensibility, the Hypothetical had reached down from the sky, opened a steel fist that glittered in the starlight, and snatched him away before she could summon the courage to scream.
     
     
     

CHAPTFR FIVE
     
     
    The dust fell more sparsely for another few hours, yielded to a gray daylight, and stopped altogether by dark. The city remained eerily quiet apart from the intermittent growl of earthmovers ceaselessly shifting the ash. Turk could tell where the earth-movers were working by the billows of fine dust that rose around and above them, gray pillars lofting over the corduroy of shops, shanties, office buildings, billboards, commingling with saltwater plumes where pump lines laid from the harbor to the hills had begun to sluice the streets. A wasteland. But even at this hour there were people in the street, masked or with bandannas tied over their faces, kicking through the drifts on their way somewhere or just assessing the damage, gazing around like bit