Read Online Axis by Robert Charles Wilson - Free Book Online Page A

Port,” she said, “here in the New World. The laws aren’t enforced the way they are back on Earth.”
    “That’s changing, I hear.”
    “Which is why I want to look at what my father was interested in before it all gets erased. People say there’s a Fourth underground in the city. Maybe more than one.”
    “Yeah, I’ve heard that. I’ve heard a lot of things. Not all true.”
    “I can do all the secondhand research I want, but what I really need is to talk to someone who’s had direct experience with the Fourth community here.”
    “Right. Maybe Brian can arrange it for you, next time DGS arrests somebody.”
    He was immediately sorry he’d said it, or said it so bluntly. She tightened up. “Brian and I are divorced, and I’m not responsible for what Genomic Security does.”
    “But he’s looking for the same people you’re looking for.”
    “For different reasons.”
    “Do you ever wonder about that? Whether he might be using you as some kind of cat’s paw? Riding on your research?”
    “I don’t show my work to Brian—to anyone.”
    “Not even when he’s baiting you with the woman who maybe took away your father?”
    “I’m not sure you have the right—”
    “Forget it. I’m just, you know, concerned.”
    She was obviously on the verge of handing that right back to him, but she cocked her head and thought about it first. That was one of the things Turk had noticed about her right away, the habit she had of stepping outside the moment before she rendered a verdict.
    She said, “Don’t make assumptions about me and Brian. Just because we’re still on speaking terms doesn’t mean I’m doing him favors.”
    “Just so we know where we are,” he said.
    * * * * *
    The sky was gray again by noon, but the clouds were rain clouds, nothing exotic, and they brought a drenching, unseasonable downpour. Turk guessed the rain might ultimately be a boon—it would wash some of this ash into the soil or out to sea, maybe help salvage the season’s crops, if that was possible. But it did nothing to ease the drive south from the Port, once he recovered his car from the parking lot at Harley’s. Glistening washes of gray ash made the pavement treacherous. Creeks and rivers had turned the color of clay and ran turgidly in their beds. When the road crossed the high ridges Turk could see a bloom of silt tailing into the sea from a dozen muddy deltas.
    He left the coast road at an unmarked exit toward a place most English-speakers called New Delhi Flats, a shanty settlement on a plateau between two creeks, under a sheer bluff that crumbled a little every rainy season. The alleys between the rows of cheap Chinese-branded prefab housing were unpaved, and the fair-weather huts had been improved with tarpaper roofing and sheets of insulation hauled in from cheapjack factories up-coast. There were no police in the Flats, no real authority beyond what could be leveraged by the churches, temples, and mosques. The earthmovers hadn’t been anywhere near the Flats, and the narrower alleys were congested with sloggy wet dunes. But a passage had been shoveled along the main avenue, and it took Turk only a few extra minutes to reach Tomas Ginn’s undistinguished home—an arsenic-green hovel squeezed between two just like it.
    He parked and waded through a thin gruel of wet ash to Tomas’s door. He knocked. When there was no answer he knocked again. A lined face appeared briefly at the small curtained window to his left. Then the door swung open.
    “Turk!” Tomas Ginn had a voice that sounded as if it had been filtered through bedrock, an old man’s voice, but firmer than it had been when Turk first encountered him. “Didn’t expect to see you. Specially in the middle of all this trouble. Come on in. Place is a fuckin‘ mess but I can pour you a drink, anyhow.”
    Turk stepped inside. Tomas’s home was little more than a single thin-walled room with a raggedy sofa and table at one end and a miniature kitchen