Read Online Axis by Robert Charles Wilson - Free Book Online

thought.
    Turk had family in Austin, Texas. But they hadn’t heard from him lately and wouldn’t expect to.
    On the bookshelf by Lise’s desk was a three-volume bound copy of the Martian Archives, sometimes called the Martian Encyclopedia, the compendium of history and science brought to earth by Wun Ngo Wen thirty years ago. The blue dust jackets were tattered at their spine ends. He took down the first volume and leafed through it. When she finally put down the phone, he said, “Do you believe in this?”
    “It’s not a religion. It’s not something you have to believe in it.”
    Back during the freakish years of the Spin, the technologically advanced nations of the Earth had assembled the necessary resources to terraform and colonize the planet Mars. The most useful resource had already been put in place by the Hypotheticals, and that was time. For every year on Earth under the Spin membrane, thousands of years had passed in the universe at large. The biological transformation of Mars—scientists called it “the ecopoiesis”—had been relatively easy to accomplish, given that generous temporal disconnect. The human colonization of the planet had been an altogether riskier venture.
    Isolated from Earth for millennia, the Martian colonists had created a technology suited to their water-poor and nitrogen-starved environment. They were masters of biological manipulation but chronically wary of large-scale mechanical engineering. Sending a manned expedition to Earth had been a last, desperate strategy when the Hypotheticals appeared to be about to enclose Mars in a Spin membrane of its own.
    Wun Ngo Wen, the so-called Martian ambassador—Turk found a photograph of him as he leafed through an appendix to the book: a small, wrinkled, dark-skinned man—had arrived during the last years of the Spin. He had been feted by Earthly governments, until it became clear that he possessed no magic solution to their problems. But Wun had advocated and helped set in motion the launch of Martian-designed quasi-biological probes into the outer solar system—self-replicating robotic devices that were supposed to broadcast back information that might shed useful light on the nature of the Hypotheticals, and in a way they had succeeded—the network of probes had been absorbed into a preexisting, previously unsuspected ecology of self-replicating devices living in deep space, which was the physical “body” of the Hypotheticals, or so some people believed. But Turk had no opinion about that.
    The version of the Archives Lise possessed was an authorized redaction, published in the States. It had been vetted and organized by a panel of scientists and government officials and it was acknowledged to be incomplete. Before his death Wun had arranged for unedited copies of the text to be privately circulated, along with something even more valuable—Martian “pharmaceuticals,” including the drug that would add some thirty or more years to an average human life span, the so-called Fourth treatment by which Lise’s father had presumably been tempted.
    There were supposedly lots of native Fourths on Earth now, though they lacked the elaborate social structures that constrained the lives of their Martian cousins. Taking the treatment was illegal under a UN accord signed by virtually every member nation. Most of what the Department of Genomic Security did back in the States was shutting down Fourth cults both genuine and fraudulent—that, and policing the booming trade in human and animal genetic enhancements. These were the folks Lise’s ex-husband worked for.
     
     
    “You know,” she said, “we haven’t talked much about this.”
    “We haven’t talked nearly enough about anything at all, seems to me.”
    Her smile, though brief, was pleasing.
    She said, “Do you know any Fourths?”
    “Wouldn’t recognize one if I saw one.” And if that was an evasion, she didn’t appear to notice.
    “Because it’s different here in the