Axis (3 page)

“Sure thing. I’ll leave my keys with Paul.”

“Just like that?” She never ceased to marvel at the way people on the frontier did business. “You’re not afraid of missing a customer?”

“Customer can leave a message. I’ll get back sooner or later. Anyhow, it’s been slow this week. You came at the right time. What do you say to Harley’s?”

Harley’s was one of the more upscale American-style restaurants in the Port. “You can’t afford Harley’s.”

“Business expense. I have a question for
you
, come to think of it. Call it quid pro quo.”

Whatever that meant. All she could say was, “Okay.” Dinner at Harley’s was both more and less than she had expected. She had driven out to Arundjis on the assumption that a personal appearance would be more meaningful than a phone call, after the time that had elapsed since their last conversation. A sort of unspoken apology. But if he resented the gap in their relationship (and it wasn’t even a “relationship” anymore, perhaps not even a friendship), he showed no sign of it. She reminded herself to focus on the work. On the real reason she was here. The unexplained loss that had opened a chasm in her life twelve years ago.

Turk had a car of his own at the airfield, so they arranged to meet at the restaurant in three hours, about dusk.

Traffic permitting. Prosperity in Port Magellan had meant more cars, and not just the little South Asian utility vehicles or scooters everyone used to drive. Traffic was thick through the docklands—she was sandwiched between a pair of eighteen-wheelers much of the way—but she made it to the restaurant on time. The parking lot at Harley’s was crowded, unusually for a Wednesday night. The food here was reasonably good, but what people paid a premium for was the view: the restaurant occupied a hilltop overlooking Port Magellan. The Port had been established for obvious reasons on what was the largest natural harbor on the coast, close to the Arch that joined this planet to Earth. But its easy lowlands had been overbuilt and the city had expanded up the terraced hillsides. Much of it had been constructed hastily, without reference to whatever building codes the Provisional Government was attempting to enforce. Harley’s, all native wood and glass panels, was an exception.

She left her name and waited in the bar for half an hour until Turk’s elderly car chugged into the lot. She watched through the window as he locked the vehicle and strode toward the entrance through a deepening dusk. He was clearly not as well-dressed as the average customer at Harley’s, but the staff recognized and welcomed him: he often met clients here, Lise knew, and as soon as he joined her, the waiter escorted them to a U-shaped booth with a window view. All the other window tables were occupied. “Popular place,” she said.

“Tonight, yeah,” he said, and when Lise stared at him blankly he added, “The meteor shower.”

Oh. Right. She had forgotten. Lise had been in Port Magellan less than eleven months local time, which meant she had missed last year’s meteor shower. She knew it was a big deal, that a kind of informal Mardi Gras had evolved around the occasion, and she remembered the event from the part of her childhood she had spent here—a spectacular celestial display that happened with clockwork regularity, a perfect excuse for a party. But the shower didn’t peak until the third night. Tonight was just the beginning.

“But we’re at the right place to see it start,” Turk said. “In a couple of hours, when it’s full dark, they’ll turn down the lights and open those big patio doors so everybody gets an unobstructed view.”

The sky was a radiant indigo, clear as glacial water, no sign of meteors yet, and the city was arrayed below the restaurant in a gracefully concealing sunset glow. She could see the fires flaring from the refinery stacks in the industrial sector, the silhouettes of mosques and churches, the illuminated billboards along the Rue de Madagascar advertising Hindi movies, herbal toothpaste (in Farsi), and chain hotels. Cruise ships in the harbor began to light up for the night. It was, if you squinted and thought nice thoughts, pretty. She might once have said exotic, but it no longer struck her that way.

She asked Turk how his business was doing.

He shrugged. “I pay the rent. I fly. I meet people. There’s not much more to it than that, Lise. I don’t have a mission in life.”

Unlike you,
he seemed to imply. Which led directly to the reason she had gotten in touch with him. She was reaching for her bag when the waiter showed up with ice water. She had barely glanced at the menu, but she ordered paella made with local seafood and seasoned with imported saffron. Turk asked for a steak, medium-well. Until fifteen years ago the most common terrestrial animal on Equatoria had been the water buffalo. Now you could buy fresh beef.

The waiter sauntered away and Turk said, “You could have called, you know.”

Since the last time they had been together—since her expedition into the mountains, and a few uneasy arranged meetings afterward—he had phoned her a few times. Lise had returned his calls eagerly at first, then perfunctorily; then, when the guilt set in, not at all. “I know, and I’m sorry, but the last couple of months have been busy for me—”

“I mean today. You didn’t have to drive all the way out to Arundji’s just to make a date for dinner. You could have called.”

“I thought if I called it might be too, you know, impersonal.” He said nothing. She added, more honestly, “I guess I wanted to see you first. Make sure things were still okay.”

“Different rules out there in the wilderness. I know that, Lise. There are
home
things and there are
away
things. I figured we must have been…”

“An away thing?”

“Well, I figured that’s how you wanted it.”

“There’s a difference between what you want and what’s practical.”

“Tell me about it.” He smiled ruefully. “How are things with you and Brian?”

“Over.”

“Really?”

“Officially. Finally.”

“And that book you’re working on?”

“It’s the research that’s slow, not the writing.” She hadn’t written a word, never would write a word.

“But it’s why you decided to stay.”

In the New World, he meant. She nodded.

“And what happens when you’re done? You go back to the States?”

“Possibly.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “People come to the Port for all kinds of reasons. Some of them find reasons to stay, some don’t. I think people just cross a certain line. You get off the boat for the first time and you realize you’re literally on another planet—the air smells different, the water tastes different, the moon’s the wrong size and it rises too fast. The day’s still divided into twelve hours but the hours run long. After a few weeks or a few months people get disoriented on some deep level. So they turn around and go home. Or else it snaps into place and starts to feel normal. That’s when they have second thoughts about going back to the anthill cities and bad air and septic oceans and all that stuff they used to take for granted.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“In part, I guess,” he said. “Sure.”

Their meals arrived, and they ate and talked about nothing in particular for a while. The sky darkened, the city glittered, the waiter came back to clear the table. Turk ordered coffee. Lise summoned her courage and said, “Will you look at a photograph for me? Before they dim the lights.”

“Sure. What kind of photograph?”

“A picture of someone who might have chartered a flight with you. This would have been a few months ago.”

“You’ve been looking at my passenger manifests?”

“No! I mean, not me… you file manifests with the PG, right?”

“What’s this about, Lise?”

“There’s a lot I can’t explain right now. Will you look at the picture first?”

He was frowning. “Show me.”

Lise took her bag into her lap and withdrew the envelope. “But you said you had a favor to ask, too—”

“You first.”

She passed the envelope across the linen tablecloth. He pulled out the picture. His expression didn’t change. Finally he said, “I assume there’s a story goes with this?”

“It was taken by a security camera at the docks late last year. The image has been enlarged and enhanced.”

“You have access to security camera downloads, too?”

“No, but—”

“So you got these from someone else. One of your friends at the consulate. Brian, or one of his buddies.”

“I can’t go into that.”

“Can you at least tell me why you’re curious about—” He gestured at the image. “An old lady?”

“You know I’ve been trying to interview people who were connected with my father. She’s one of them. Ideally, I’d like to make contact with her.”

“Any particular reason? I mean, why
this
woman?”

“Well… I can’t go into that.”

“The conclusion I’m drawing here is that all roads lead back to Brian. What’s his interest in this woman?”

“Brian works for the Department of Genomic Security. I don’t.”

“But someone there is doing you favors.”

“Turk, I—”

“No, never mind. Don’t ask, don’t tell, right? Obviously, somebody knows I flew with this person. Which means somebody besides yourself would like to find her.”

“That’s a reasonable inference. But I’m not asking you on behalf of anyone else. What you choose to say or not say to anyone at the consulate is your own business. What you say to me stays with me.”

He looked at her as if he were evaluating this statement. But, Lise thought, why should he trust her? What had she ever done to instill trust in him, besides sleep with him during the course of one exceptional weekend?

“Yeah,” he said finally, “I flew with her.”

“Okay… can you tell me anything about her? Where she is, what she talked about?”

He sat back in his chair. True to his prediction, the lights in the restaurant began to dim. A couple of waiters rolled back the glass wall that separated the indoor dining room from the patio. The sky was starry and deep, slightly washed out by the lights of the Port but still crisper than any sky Lise had known back in California. Had the meteor shower begun? She saw what looked like a few bright flashes across the meridian.

Turk hadn’t spared it a glance. “I’ll have to think about this.”

“I’m not asking you to violate any confidences. Just—”

“I know what you’re asking. And it’s probably not unreasonable. But I’d like to think it over, if that’s okay with you.”

“All right.” She couldn’t push it any farther. “But you mentioned a quid pro quo?”

“Just something I’m curious about—I thought you might have picked up a word or two from one of those sources you don’t like to discuss. Arundji got a memo this morning from the air regs department of the Provisional Government. I filed a flight plan for the far west, and all else being equal I probably would have been in the air by the time you drove up this afternoon. But they disallowed the flight. So I called around to find out what’s happening. Seems like nobody’s being allowed to fly into the Rub al-Khali.”

“How come?”

“They won’t say”

“This flight ban, is it temporary?”

“Also a question I can’t get an answer to.”

“Who imposed it? Under what authorization?”

“Nobody at the PG will own up to anything. I’ve been shuffled between a dozen departments and so has every other pilot who’s affected by this. I’m not saying there’s anything sinister about it, but it’s kinda surprising. Why turn the western half of the continent into a no-fly zone? There are still regular flights to and from the oil allotments, and past that there’s nothing but rocks and sand. Hikers and wilderness types go there—that’s who had my charter. I don’t understand it.”

Lise desperately wished she had a factoid or two to barter with, but this was the first she’d heard of the flight ban. It was true she had contacts at the U.S. Consulate, her ex-husband chief among them. But the Americans were only advisory members of the Provisional Government. And Brian wasn’t even a diplomat, just a DGS functionary.

“All I can do is ask,” she said.

“Appreciate it if you would. So. Business attended to? At least for now?”

“For now,” she said reluctantly.

“Then what do you say we take our coffee out on the patio while we can still find a table?”

Three months ago she had hired Turk to fly her across the Mohindar Range to a pipeline outpost called Kubelick’s Grave. Strictly a business arrangement. She had been trying to track down an old colleague of her father’s, a man named Dvali, but she never reached Kubelick’s Grave: a squall had forced the plane down in one of the high mountain passes. Turk had landed his aircraft on a nameless lake while clouds like cannon smoke billowed between granite peaks north and south of them. He had moored the plane on a pebbly beach and set up a surprisingly comfortable camp under a stand of trees that looked to Lise like bulbous, mutant pines. The wind had whistled down that pass for three days while visibility declined to nothing. Set foot outside the canvas tent and you’d be lost within a couple of meters. But Turk was a passable woodsman and had packed for emergencies, and even canned food was delicious when you were barricaded against nature and equipped with a camp stove and a hurricane lantern. Under other circumstances it might have been a three-day endurance contest, but Turk turned out to be good company. She had not meant to seduce him and she believed he had not set out to seduce her. The attraction had been sudden and mutual and utterly explicable.

They had exchanged stories and warmed each other when the wind turned cold. At the time it had seemed to Lise that she would be happy to wrap Turk Findley around herself like a blanket and shut out the rest of the world forever. And if you had asked her whether she was on the verge of something more meaningful than an unexpected tryst, she might have said yes,
maybe.

She had meant to keep up the relationship when they arrived back in the Port. But the Port had a way of subverting your best intentions. Problems that had seemed featherweight from the inside of a tent in the Mohindar Range regained their customary mass and inertia. Her separation from Brian was an established fact by that time, at least in her mind, though Brian was still liable to spasms of let’s-work-it-out, well meant, she supposed, but humiliating for both of them.