Axis by Robert Charles Wilson

welcome presence. Brian had quickly learned the paramount rule in dealing with Lise’s mother, that one did not mention the New World, the Hypotheticals, the Spin, or the disappearance of Robert Adams. In Susan Adams’ household these subjects had acquired the power of profanity. Which was one reason Lise had been so anxious to leave that household behind.
    And there had been much anxiety and resistance after the wedding, when Brian was transferred to Port Magellan.
You must not go,
Lise’s mother had said, as if the New World were some ghostly otherness from which no one emerged undamaged. No, not even for the sake of Brian’s career should they enter that perdition.
    This was, of course, an ongoing act of denial, a forcible exile of unacceptable truths, a strategy her mother had devised for containing and channeling her unvented grief. But that was precisely why Lise resented it. Lise hated the dark space into which her mother had walled these memories. Memory was all that was left of Lise’s father, and that memory surely included his wide-eyed fascination with the Hypotheticals and his love of the planet into which they had opened their perplexing doorway.
    Even the ashfall would have fascinated him, Lise thought: those cogs and seashells embedded in the dust, pieces in a grand puzzle…
    I simply hope that these events convince you of the wisdom of coming home. Lise,
if
money is a problem, let me book you a ticket. I admit that California is not what it once was, but we can still see the ocean from the kitchen window, and although the summers are warm and the winter storms more intense than I remember them being, surely that’s a small thing compared to what you are presently enduring.
    You don’t know, Lise thought, what I’m enduring. You don’t care to know.
     
     
    In the afternoon sunlight the American Consulate looked like a benevolent fortress set behind a moat of wrought-iron fences. Someone had planted a garden along the runnels of the fence, but the recent ashfall hadn’t been kind to the flowers—native flowers, because you weren’t supposed to bring terrestrial plants over the Arch, not that the ban was especially effective. The flowers that had survived the ashfall were sturdy red whore’s-lips (in the crude taxonomy of the first settlers), stems like enamelled chopsticks and leaves like Victorian collars enfolding the tattered blooms.
    There was a guard at the consulate door next to a sign that advised visitors to check all weapons, personal electronics, and unsealed bottles or containers. This was not a new drill for Lise, who had regularly visited Brian at the Genomic Security offices before the divorce. And she remembered riding past the consulate as a teenager during her father’s time here; remembered how reassuring and strong the building had seemed with its high white walls and narrow embrasures.
    The guard called Brian’s office for confirmation and issued her a visitor’s badge. She rode the elevator to the fifth floor, mid-building, a tiled windowless hallway, the labyrinth of bureaucracy.
    Brian stepped into the corridor as she approached and held open the door marked simply 507 DGS. Brian, she thought, was somehow changeless: carefully dressed, still trim in his mid-thirties, tanned; he took weekend hikes in the hills above the Port. He smiled briefly as a way of greeting her, but his demeanor today was stiff—sort of a whole-body frown, Lise thought. She braced herself for whatever was coming. Brian bossed a staff of three people but none of them was present. “Come on in,” he said, “sit down, we have to have a little discussion. I’m sorry, but we’ll get this out of the way as quickly as possible.”
    Even at this juncture he was unfailingly nice, the quality she had found most frustrating in him. The marriage had been bad from the beginning. Not a disaster so much as a bad choice compounded by more bad choices, some of which she was reluctant to admit even to herself.