CHAPTER THREE

It was like nothing Turk had seen during his ten years in the New World.

But, in a way, that was exactly typical. The New World had a habit of reminding you it wasn't Earth. Things happened differently here. It ain't Kansas, as people liked to say, and they probably said the same thing in a dozen different languages. It ain't the Steppes. It ain't Kandahar. It ain't Mombassa.

"Do you think it's dangerous?" Lise asked.

Some of the restaurant's clientele evidently thought so. They settled their bills with barely-disguised haste and made for their cars. Within a few minutes there were only a few stalwarts left on the broad wooden patio. "You want to leave?" Turk asked.

"Not if you don't."

"I guess we're as safe here as anywhere," Turk said. "And the view is better."

The phenomenon was still hanging out at sea, though it seemed to move steadily closer. What it looked like was luminous rain, a rolling gray cloud shot with light—the way a thunderstorm looked when you saw it from a long way off, except that the glow wasn't fitful, like lightning, but seemed to hang below the billowing darkness and illuminate it from beneath. Turk had seen storms roll in from sea often enough, and he estimated that this one was approaching at roughly the local wind speed. The brightness falling from it appeared to be composed of discrete luminous or burning particles, maybe as dense as snow, but he could be wrong about that—it didn't snow in this part of Equatoria and the last snow he had seen was off the coast of Maine many years back.

His first concern was fire. Port Magellan was a tinderbox, crowded with sub-code housing and shacks; the docklands housed countless storage and transport facilities and the bay was thick with oil and LNG tankers, funneling fuel to the insatiable Earth. What looked like a dense squall of lit matches was blowing in from the east, and he didn't want to think about the potential consequences of that.

He said nothing to Lise. He imagined she had drawn many of the same conclusions, but she didn't suggest running—was smart enough, he guessed, to know there was no logical place to run to, not at the speed this thing was coming. But she tensed up as the phenomenon visibly approached the point of land at the southern extremity of the bay.

"It's not bright all the way down," she said.

The staff at Harley's started dragging in tables from the patio, as if that was going to protect anything from anything, and urged the remaining diners to stay indoors until someone had some idea what was going on. But the waiters knew Turk well enough to let him alone. So he stayed out a while longer with Lise and they watched the light of the flares, or whatever they were, dancing on the distant sea.

Not bright all the way down. He saw what she meant. The shifting, glittering curtains tailed into darkness well before they reached the surface of the ocean. Burned out, maybe. That was a hopeful sign. Lise took out her phone and punched up a local news broadcast, relaying bits of it to Turk. They were talking about a "storm," she said, or what looked on radar like a storm, the fringes of it extending north and south for hundreds of miles, the heart of it more or less centered on the Port.

And now the bright rain fell over the headlands and the inner harbor, illuminating the decks and superstructures of cruise ships and cargo vessels at anchor. Then the silhouettes of the cargo cranes grew misty and obscure, the tall hotels in the city dimmed in the distance, the souks and markets vanished as the shining rain moved up the hillsides and seemed to grow taller as it came, a canyon wall of murky light. But nothing burst into flame. That was good, Turk thought. Then he thought: but it could be toxic. It could be any fucking thing. "About time to move indoors," he said.

Tyrell, the headwaiter at Harley's, was a guy Turk had briefly worked with on the pipelines out in the Rub al-Khali. They weren't big buddies or anything but they were friendly, and Tyrell looked relieved when Turk and Lise finally abandoned the patio. Tyrell slid the glass doors shut and said, "You got any idea—?"

"No," Turk said.

"I don't know whether to run or just enjoy the show. I called my wife. We live down in the Flats." A low-rent neighborhood some few miles along the coast. "She says it's happening there, too. She says there's stuff falling on the house, it looks like ash."

"But nothing's burning?"

"She said not."

"It could be volcanic ash," Lise said, and Turk had to admire how she was handling all this. She was tense but not visibly afraid, not too scared to venture a theory. "It would have to have been some kind of tectonic event way out over the horizon, something at sea…"

"Like a sea volcano," Tyrell said, nodding.

"But we would have felt something before the ash got to us if it was anywhere close—an earthquake, a tsunami."

"Been no report of any such thing," Turk said, "far as I know."

"Ash," Tyrell added. "Like, gray and powdery."

Turk asked Tyrell if there was any coffee back in the kitchen and Tyrell said yeah, not a bad idea, and went to check. There were still a few diners in the restaurant, people with nowhere better to go, though nobody was eating or celebrating. They sat at the innermost tables and talked nervously with the waitstaff.

The coffee came and it was good and dense, and Turk added cream to his cup just as if the sky weren't falling. Lise's phone buzzed repeatedly, and she fended off a couple of friendly calls before shunting everything to her voice mail. Turk didn't get any calls, though his phone was in his shirt pocket.

Now the ash began to fall on Harley's patio, and Turk and Lise moved closer to the window to watch.

Gray and powdery. Tyrell's description was on the money. Turk had never seen volcanic ash, but he imagined this was what it might look like. It sifted down over the wooden slats and boards of the patio and drifted against the window glass. It was like snow the color of an old wool suit, but here and there were flecks of something shiny, something still luminous, which dimmed as he watched.

Lise pressed up against his shoulder, wide-eyed. He thought again of their weekend up in the Mohindar Range, marooned by weather on that nameless lake. She had been just as self-possessed back then, just as balanced, braced for whatever the situation might throw at her. "At least," he said, "nothing's burning."

"No. But you can smell it."

He could, now that she mentioned it—a mineral smell, slightly acrid, a little sulfuric.

Tyrell said, "You think it's dangerous?"

"Nothing we can do about it if it is."

"Except stay indoors," Lise said. But Turk doubted that was practical. Even now, through the glittering ashfall, he could make out traffic on Rue Madagascar, pedestrians scurrying down the sidewalks covering their heads with jackets or handkerchiefs or newspapers. "Unless—"

"Unless what?"

"Unless," she said, "this goes on too long. There's not a roof in Port Magellan built to bear much weight."

"And it isn't just dust," Tyrell said.

"What?"

"Well, look.'" He gestured at the window.

Absurdly, impossibly, something the shape of a starfish drifted past the glass. It was gray but speckled with light. It must have weighed nearly nothing because it floated in the weak breeze like a balloon, and when it reached the deck of the patio it crumbled into powder and a few larger fragments.

Turk gave Lise a glance. She shrugged, incredulous.

"Get me a tablecloth," Turk said.

Tyrell said, "What do you want with a tablecloth?"

"And one of those linen napkins."

"You don't want to mess with the linen," Tyrell said. "Management's very strict about that."

"Go get the manager, then."

"Mr. Darnell's off tonight. I guess that makes me the manager."

"Then get a tablecloth, Tyrell. I want to check this out."

"Don't mess up my place."

"I'll be careful."

Tyrell went to undress a table. Lise said, "You're going out there?"

"Just long enough to retrieve a little of whatever's coming down."

"What if it's toxic?"

"Then I guess we're all fucked." She flinched, and he added, "But we'd probably know by now if it was."

"Can't be good for your lungs, whatever it is."

"So help me tie that napkin over my face."

The remaining diners and waiters watched curiously but made no effort to help. Turk took the tablecloth to the nearest exit to the patio and gestured to Tyrell to slide open the glass door. The smell immediately intensified—it was something like wet, singed animal hair—and Turk hurriedly spread the tablecloth on the patio floor and backed inside.

"Now what?" Tyrell said.

"Now we let it sit a few minutes."

He rejoined Lise, and, bereft of conversation, they watched the dust come down for a quarter of an hour more. Lise asked him how he planned to get home. He shrugged. He lived in what was essentially a trailer a few miles downcoast from the airfield. There was already a good half inch of ash on the ground and traffic was crawling.

"I'm only a couple of blocks from here," she said. "The new building on Rue Abbas by the Territorial Authority compound? It ought to be fairly sturdy."

It was the first time she had invited him home. He nodded.

But he was still curious. He waved down Tyrell, who had been serving coffee to everyone still present, and Tyrell slid open the patio door one more time. Turk gripped the open tablecloth, now burdened with a layer of ash, and pulled it gently, trying not to disturb whatever fragile structures it might have captured. Tyrell closed the door promptly. "Phew! Stinks."

Turk brushed off the few flakes of gray ash that clung to his shirt and hair. Lise joined him as he squatted to examine the debris-covered tablecloth. A couple of curious diners pulled their chairs a little closer, though they wrinkled their noses at the smell.

Turk said, "You have a pen or a pencil on you?"

Lise rummaged in her purse and came up with a pen. Turk took it from her and used it to probe the layer of dust that had collected on the tablecloth.

"What's that?" Lise asked over his shoulder. "To your left. Looks like, I don't know, an acorn …"

Turk hadn't seen an acorn in years. Oaks didn't grow in Equatoria. The object in the ashfall was about the size of his thumb. It was saucer-shaped at one end and tapered to a blunt point at the other—an acorn, or maybe a tiny egg wearing a minuscule sombrero. It appeared to be made of the same stuff as the fallen ash, and when he touched it with the tip of the pen it dissolved as if it possessed no particular substance at all.

"And over there," Lise said, pointing. Another shaped object, this one resembling a gear out of an old mechanical clock. It, too, crumbled when he touched it.

Tyrell went to the staff room and came back with a flashlight. When he played the beam over the tablecloth at a raking angle it showed up a number of these objects, if you could call them "objects"—the faintly structured remains of things that appeared to have been manufactured. There was a tube about a centimeter long, perfectly smooth; another about the same size, but knobbed like a length of spine from some small animal, a mouse, say. There was a six-pronged thorn; there was a disk with miniature, crumbling spokes, like a bicycle wheel; there was a beveled ring. Some of these things glinted with a faint remnant light.

"All burned," Lise observed.

Burned or otherwise decomposed. But how could something so completely cremated remain even partially intact after falling from the sky? What had these things been made of?

Also present in the ashfall were a few luminous specks. Turk hovered his hand over one of them.

"Careful," Lise said.

"It's not hot. It's not even warm."

"Could be, I don't know, radioactive."

"Could be." If so, it was another doomsday scenario. Everyone outside was inhaling this stuff. Everyone inside soon would be. None of these buildings was airtight, none of them filtered its air.

"You learning anything from this?" Tyrell asked. Turk stood up and brushed his hands. 

"Yeah. I'm learning that I know even less than I thought I did."

* * * * *

He accepted Lise's offer of temporary shelter. They borrowed spare kitchen clothing from Tyrell, chef's jackets to protect their clothes from the falling ash, and they shuffled as fast as they could across the gray dunes in the parking lot to Lise's car. The ash cloud had turned the sky dark, obscured the meteor shower, dimmed the streetlights.

Lise drove a Chinese car, smaller than Turk's vehicle but newer and probably more reliable. He shook himself off as he climbed into the shotgun seat.

She steered the vehicle out the back exit from the parking lot onto a narrow but less crowded avenue that connected Rue de Madagascar to Rue Abbas. She maneuvered the car with a kind of cautious grace, nursing it over the accumulations of dust, and Turk let her concentrate on her driving. But as the traffic slowed she said, "You think this is connected with the meteor shower?"

"It seems like more than a coincidence. But who knows."

"This is definitely not volcanic ash."

"Guess not."

"It could have come from outside the atmosphere."

"Could have, I guess."

"So it might be connected to the Hypothetical."

During the Spin, people had speculated endlessly about the Hypothetical, the still-mysterious entities that had bounced the Earth a few billion years into the galactic future and opened a gateway between the Indian Ocean and the New World. Without reaching any reliable conclusions, as far as Turk could tell. "Could be. But that doesn't explain anything."

"My father used to talk about the Hypothetical a lot. One of the things he said was, we tend to forget how much older the universe is now than it was before the Spin. It might have changed in ways we don't understand. Any textbook you pick says comets and meteors are junk falling in from the far edge of the solar system—here, or on Earth, or anywhere in the galaxy. But that was never more than a local observation and it's four billion years out of date. There's a theory that the Hypotheticals aren't biological organisms and never were—"

He waited while she turned a corner, the car's tires fighting for traction. Lise's father had been a college professor. Before he disappeared.

"That they're a system of self-replicating machines living out in the cold parts of the galaxy, at the fringes of planetary systems, with this really slow metabolism that eats ice and generates information…"

"Like those replicators we sent out during the Spin."

"Right. Self-replicating machines. But with billions of years of evolution behind them."

Was this how college profs talked to their daughters? Or was she just talking to ward off panic? "So what are you saying?"

"Maybe whatever falls into the atmosphere this time every year isn't just comet dust. Maybe it's—"

She shrugged.

"Dead Hypothetical," he finished.

"Well, it sounds inane when you put it that way."

"It's as good a theory as any. I don't mean to be skeptical. But we don't have any evidence that whatever's falling out of the sky is from space."

"Cogs and tubes made of ash? Where would it be from?"

"Look at it another way. People have only been on this planet for three decades. We tell ourselves it's all surveyed and reasonably well understood. But that's bullshit. It would be wrong to jump to a conclusion—any conclusion. Even if this is caused by the Hypothetical, that doesn't really explain anything. We've had a meteor shower every summer for thirty years and never anything like this."

The wipers piled dust at the margins of the windshield. Turk saw people on the sidewalks, some of them running, others sheltering in doorways, faces peering anxiously from windows. A Provisional Government police car passed them with its lights and siren on.

"Might be something unusual's happening out where we can't see it."

"Might be the Celestial Dog shaking off fleas. Too soon to say, Lise."

She nodded unhappily and pulled into the parking garage of the building where she lived, a concrete tower that looked as if it had been transplanted from Dade County. In the underground parking shelter there was no evidence of what was going on outside, only a mote or two hanging in the motionless air.

Lise slid her security card through the elevator call slot. "We made it."

So far, Turk thought, yeah.