Free Axis by Robert Charles Wilson Page A

my!” Tomas said, aiming his old face at the sky. “Here it comes.”
    So Turk braced himself-—unnecessarily—and watched the stars dim and swirl around the peak of the Arch like watery reflections stirred by the prow of a boat. Then suddenly there was fog all around the
Kestrel,
or a mistiness that reminded him of fog although it had no scent or taste of moisture to it—a transient dizziness, a pressure in his ears. Then the stars came back, but they were different stars, thicker and brighter in what seemed like a blacker sky; and now the air
did
taste and smell subtly different, and a gust of it swirled around the hard steel angles of the topdeck as if to introduce itself, air warm and salt-scented and bracingly fresh. And up on the high bridge of the
Kestrel,
the compass needle must have swung on its pivot, as compasses did at every crossing of the Arch, because the ship’s horn sounded one long wail—punishingly loud but sounding almost tentative across an ocean only lately acquainted with human beings.
    “The New World,” Turk said, thinking, That’s it? As easy as that?
    “Equatoria,” Tomas said, confusing the continent with the planet as most people did. “How’s it feel to be a spaceman, Turk?”
    But Turk couldn’t answer, because two crewmen who had been stealthily pacing the topdeck rounded on Turk with a bucket of saltwater and doused him, laughing. Another rite of passage, a christening for the virgin sailor. He had crossed, at last, the world’s strangest meridian. And he had no intention of going back, no real home to go back to.
     
     
    Tomas had been frail with age when he boarded the
Kestrel
, and he was injured when the beaching of the vessel went bad.
    There were no docks or quays at Breaker Beach. Turk had seen it from the deck rail, his first real look at the coast of Equatoria. The continent loomed out of the horizon like a mirage, pink with morning light, though hardly untouched by human hands. The three decades since the end of the Spin had transformed the western fringe of Equatoria from a wilderness into a chaos of fishing villages, lumber camps, primitive industry, slash-and-burn farmland, hasty roads, a dozen booming towns, and one city through which most of the hinterlands rich resources were channeled. Breaker Beach, almost a hundred nautical miles north of Port Magellan, was possibly the ugliest occupied territory on the coast—Turk could hardly say, but the Filipino cargomaster insisted it was, and the argument was plausible. The broad white beach, protected from the surf by a pebbly headland, was littered with the corpses of broken vessels and smudged with the smoke and ash of a thousand fires. Turk spotted a double-hulled tanker not unlike the
Kestrel,
a score of coastal tankers, even a military vessel stripped of all identifying flags and markings. These were recent arrivals, the work of their deconstruction hardly begun. For many miles more the beach was crowded with steel frames denuded of hull plating, cavernous half-ships in which the acetylene glare of the breakers’ torches made a fitful light.
    Beyond that lay the scrap-metal huts and forges and toolsheds and machine shops of the breakers, mostly Indian and Malaysian men working out the contracts that had bought them passage under the Arch. Farther on, hazy in the morning air, forested hills unrolled into the blue-gray foothills of the mountains.
    He couldn’t stay on deck during the beaching. The standard way to deliver a large vessel to Breaker Beach was simply to run it up the littoral and strand it there. The breakers would do the rest, swarming over the ship once the crew had been evacuated. The ship’s steel would end up in re-rolling mills downcoast, the ship’s miles of wiring and aluminum piping would be extracted and sold in bulk lots, even the ship’s bells, Turk had heard, would be marketed to local Buddhist temples. This was Equatoria, and any manmade thing would find a use. It didn’t matter