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

at the other, all dimly lit. The Port Magellan Power Authority hadn’t strung any cables out this way. The only electricity came from an array of Sinotec photovoltaics on the roof, and their efficiency had been slashed by the dustfall. The place had a lingering aroma of sulfur and talc, but that was mostly the ash Turk had tracked in with him. Tomas was a fastidious housekeeper, in his own way. A “fuckin‘ mess,” in Tomas’s vocabulary, meant there were a couple of empty beer bottles undisposed-of on a narrow counter.
    “Sit on down,” Tomas said, settling himself on a chair with a dent in the seat that had been worn into a mirror image of his bony ass. Turk selected the least-tattered cushion on his friend’s ancient sofa. “Can you believe this shit falling out of the sky? I mean, who asked for
that!
I had to shovel my way out of the house yesterday just to go out and get groceries.”
    Pretty unbelievable, Turk acknowledged.
    “So what brings you here? Something more than neighborliness, I expect, given the weather. If you can call it weather.”
    “Got a question to ask,” Turk said.
    “A question or a favor?”
    “Well—starts with a question, anyway.”
    “Serious?”
    “It might be.”
    “So you want a beer? Get the dust out of your throat?”
    “Not a bad idea,” Turk said.
     
     
    Turk had met Tomas aboard an ancient single-hulled tanker bound for Breaker Beach on its final voyage.
    The ship, called
Kestrel,
had been Turk’s ticket to the New World. Turk had signed on as an able-bodied seaman at negligible wages. All the crew had, because it was a one-way trip. Across the Arch, in Equatoria, the market for scrap iron and steel was booming. On Earth a leviathan like the
Kestrel
was a liability, too old to meet international standards and useless for anything but the poorest kind of coastal trade, prohibitively expensive to scrap. But in the New World the same rusty hulk would be a source of valuable raw material, stripped and diced by the acetylene-wielding armies of Thai and Indian laborers who made their living unrestrained by environmental regulations—the professional breakers of Breaker Beach, located some hundred miles north of Port Magellan.
    Turk and Tomas had shared a mess on that voyage and learned a few things about each other. Tomas claimed to have been born in Bolivia, but he had been raised, he said, in Biloxi, and had worked the docks in that city and then New Orleans as a boy and young man. He had been at sea off and on for decades, during the tumultuous years of the Spin, when the U.S. government had revived the old Merchant Marine as a gesture toward national security, and afterward, when trade across the Arch created fresh demand for new shipping.
    Tomas had joined
Kestrel
for the same reason Turk had signed on: it was a one-way ticket to the promised land. Or what they both liked to imagine was a promised land. Tomas wasn’t naive: he had crossed the Arch five times before, had spent months in Port Magellan, knew the towns vices firsthand, and had seen how cruelly the town could treat newcomers. But it was a freer, more open, more casually polyglot city than any on Earth—a seaman’s town, much of it built by expatriate sailors, and it was where he wanted to spend the last years of his life, looking at a landscape on which human hands had only recently been laid. (Turk had signed on for much the same reason, though it would be his first trip cross-Arch. He had wanted to get as far from Texas as it was practical to get, for reasons he didn’t care to dwell on.)
    The trouble with
Kestrel
was that, because it had no future, it had been poorly maintained and was barely seaworthy. Everyone aboard was aware of that fact, from the Filipino captain down to the illiterate Syrian teenager who stewarded the crew mess. It made for a dangerous transit. Bad weather had scuttled many a vessel bound for Breaker Beach, and more than one rusty keel had gone to rest under the Arch of the