CHAPTER FOUR

Lise found Turk a robe big enough to decently fit him and told him to put his clothes in the washer, in case the dust clinging to them was in any way toxic. While he did that she took a turn in the shower. When she rinsed her hair, gray water pooled around the drain. An omen, she thought, a portent: maybe the ashfall wouldn't stop until Port Magellan was entombed like Pompeii. She stood under the shower until the water ran clear.

The lights flickered twice before she was done. The electrical grid in Port Magellan was still fairly crude; probably it wouldn't take much to put a local transformer out of commission. She tried to imagine what would happen if this storm (if you could call it that) went on for another day, or two, or more. A whole population trapped in the dark. UN relief ships arriving in the harbor. Soldiers evacuating the survivors. No, better not to imagine it.

She changed into fresh jeans and a cotton shirt, and the lights were still on when she joined Turk in the living room. In her old flannel robe he looked deeply embarrassed but dangerously sexy. Those ridiculously long legs, scarred in places by the life he had led before he started flying passengers over the mountains. He had told her he was a merchant seaman when he arrived here, that his first work in the New World had been on the Saudi-Aramco pipeline. Big blunt hands, well-used.

He gazed around in a way that made her conscious of her apartment, the wide east-facing window, the video panel and her small library of books and recordings. She wondered how it seemed to him. A little upscale, probably, compared to what he called "his trailer," a little too back-home, too obviously an imported fragment of North America, though it was still new to her, still slightly uninhabited—the place she had brought her stuff after she split from Brian.

Not that he showed any sign of such thoughts. He was watching the local news channel. There were three daily papers in Port Magellan but only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them. But now there was something substantial to talk about. A camera crew had gone out in the ashfall to get views from street level, while two commentators read advisories from various departments of the Provisional Government.

"Turn it up," Lise said.

The big intersection at Portugal and Tenth was shut down, stranding a busful of tourists desperate to get back to their cruise ship. Radio transmission had been compromised by the gunk in the atmosphere and communication with vessels at sea was intermittent. A government lab was doing hasty chemical analysis of the fallen ash, but no results had been announced. Some respiratory problems had been reported but nothing to suggest that the ash was immediately harmful to human health. Loose talk suggested a link between the ashfall and the annual meteor shower, but that was impossible to confirm. Best advice from local authorities was to hunker down, keep doors and windows closed, wait it out.

Everything after that was more of the same. Lise didn't need a reporter to tell her the city was shutting down. The usual night noises had gone silent, apart from the periodic wail of emergency-vehicle sirens.

Turk muted the display and said, "My clothes are probably clean by now." He walked to the laundry alcove and took his T-shirt and jeans into the bathroom to dress. He had been more brazen out in the lake country. But then, so had she. Lise made up the sofa as a bed for him. Then she said, "How about a nightcap?"

He nodded.

In the kitchen she drained what was left of her last bottle of white wine into two glasses. When she came back to the living room Turk had opened the blinds and was peering out into the darkness. A deepening wind swept falling ash past the window. She could smell it, faintly. That sulfurous reek.

"Reminds me of diatoms," Turk said, accepting a glass.

"Excuse me?"

"You know. Out in the ocean there's plankton? Microscopic animals? They grow a shell. Then the plankton dies and the shells drift down through the sea and make a kind of silt, and if you dredge it up and look at it under a microscope you see all these plankton skeletons—diatoms, little stars and spikes and so forth."

Lise watched the ash drift and thought about Turk's analogy. The remains of things once living settling through the turbulent atmosphere. The shells of dead Hypotheticals.

It would not have surprised her father, she thought.

She was still contemplating that when her phone buzzed again. This time she picked up: she couldn't exclude the exterior world forever—she'd have to reassure friends that she was all right. She briefly and guiltily hoped that it wouldn't be Brian on the other end; but, of course, it was.

"Lise?" he said. "I was worried sick about you. Where are you?"

She walked to the kitchen as if to put some symbolic space between Brian and Turk. "I'm fine," she said. "I'm home."

"Well, good. Lot of people aren't."

"How about you?"

"I'm in the consulate compound. There's a lot of us here. We thought we'd stick it out, sleep on cots. The building has a generator if the power goes down. You have power?"

"At the moment."

"About half the Chinese district is in the dark. The city's having trouble getting repair crews out."

"Anybody there know what's going on?"

Brian's voice came through the phone with a stressed reediness, the way he sounded when he was nervous or upset. "No, not really…"

"Or when it's going to stop?"

"No. It can't go on forever, though."

That was a nice thought, but Lise doubted she could convince herself of the truth of it, at least not tonight. "Okay, Brian. Appreciate the call but I'm fine."

There was a pause. He wanted to say more. Which was what he always seemed to want these days. A conversation, if not a marriage.

"Let me know if you have a problem there."

She thanked him and cut the connection, left the phone on the kitchen counter and walked back into the living room.

"Was that your ex?" Turk asked.

Turk knew about her problems with Brian. In the mountains, by the side of a stormy lake, she had shared a number of difficult truths about herself and her life. She nodded.

"Am I creating a problem for you here?"

"No," she said. "No problem."

* * * * *

She sat up with Turk watching more sporadic news, but fatigue caught up with her around three in the morning and she finally staggered off to bed. Even so she was awake for a while in the dark, curled under a cotton sheet as if it could protect her from whatever was falling out of the sky. It isn't doomsday, she told herself. It's just something inconvenient and unexpected.

Diatoms, she thought: sea shells, ancient life, another reminder that the universe had shifted radically during and after the Spin, that the kind of world she had been born into was not the world her parents or her grandparents had ever expected to see. She remembered an old astronomy book of her grandfather's that had fascinated her as a child. The last chapter was called Are We Alone? and it had been full of what seemed like naive, silly speculation. Because that question had been answered. No, we are not alone. No, we can never again think of the universe as our private property. Life, or something like life, had been here long before the evolution of human beings. We're on their turf, Lise thought, and because we don't understand them we can't predict their behavior. Even today no one knew with any certainty why the Earth had been preserved down four billion years of galactic history like a tulip bulb wintering in a dark cellar, or why a seaway to this new planet had been installed in the Indian Ocean. What was falling outside the window was just more evidence of humanity's gross ignorance.

* * * * *

She slept longer than she meant to and woke with daylight in her eyes—not sunlight, exactly, but a welcome ambient brightness. By the time she dressed, Turk was already awake. She found him at the living room window, gazing out.

"Looks a little better," she said.

"At least, not as bad."

There was still a flat, glittery dust in the outside air. But it wasn't falling as thickly as it had last night and the sky was relatively clear.

"According to the news," Turk said, "the precipitation—that's what they're calling it—is tapering off. The ash cloud is still there but it's moving inland. What they can see on radar and satellite images suggests the whole thing might be finished late tonight, early tomorrow, at least as far as the coast is concerned."

"Good," Lise said.

"But that's not the end of the problem. The streets need to be cleared. There's still trouble with the electrical grid. A few roofs collapsed, mostly those flat-roofed tourist rentals down along the headland. Just cleaning up the docks is going to be a huge project. The Provisional Government contracted a bunch of earthmovers to clean the roads, and once some mobility is established they can start pumping seawater and sluice it all into the bay, assuming the storm sewers accommodate the runoff. All this is complicated by dust in motors, stalled cars and so forth."

"Any word on toxicity?"

"According to the news guys the ash is mostly carbon, sulfur, silicates, and metals, some of it arranged in unusual molecules, whatever that means, but breaking down pretty quick into simpler elements. Short-term it's not dangerous unless you've got asthma or emphysema. Long-term, who knows? They still want people to stay indoors, and they're advising a face mask if you really need to go out."

"Anybody making any guesses about where it all came from?"

"No. We're getting a lot of speculation, mostly bullshit, but somebody at the Geophysical Survey had the same idea we did—that it's spaceborne material that's been modified by the Hypotheticals."

In other words, nobody really knew anything. "Did you sleep last night?"

"Not much."

"Had any breakfast?"

"Didn't want to mess up your kitchen."

"I'm not much of a cook, but I can do omelettes and coffee." When he offered to help she said, "You'd just be in the way. Give me twenty minutes."

There was a window in the kitchen, and Lise was able to survey the Port while butter sizzled in the frying pan—this big, polyglot, kaleido-scopically multicultural city that had grown so quickly on the edge of a new continent, now blanketed in ominous gray. The wind had stiffened overnight. The ash had duned in the empty streets and it shivered down from the crowns of the trees that had been planted along Rue Abbas.

She sprinkled fresh cheddar onto the omelette and folded it. For once it didn't break and spill off the spatula in a gooey lump. She put together two plates and carried them into the living room. She found Turk standing in the space she used for an office: a desk, her keyboard and file holders, a small library of paper books.

"This where you write?" he asked.

"Yes." No. She put the plates on the coffee table. Turk joined her on the sofa, folding his long legs and taking the plate onto his lap.

"Good," he said, sampling the omelette.

"Thank you."

"So that book you're working on," he said. "How's that going?"

She winced. The book, the notional book, her excuse for prolonging her stay in Equatoria, didn't exist. She told people she was writing a book because she was a journalism graduate and because it seemed a plausible thing for her to do in the aftermath of a failed marriage—a book about her father, who had vanished without explanation when the family lived here a dozen years ago, when she was fifteen. "Slowly," she said.

"No progress?"

"A few interviews, some good conversations with my father's old colleagues at the American University." All this was true. She had immersed herself in her family's fractured history. But she hadn't written more than notes to herself.

"I remember you said your father was interested in Fourths."

"He was interested in all kinds of things." Robert Adams had come to Equatoria as part of the Geophysical Survey's deal with the fledgling American University. The course he taught was New World Geology and he had done fieldwork in the far west. The book he had been working on—a real book—had been called Planet as Artifact, a study of the New World as a place where geological history had been deeply influenced by the Hypotheticals.

And, yes, he had also been fascinated by the community of Fourths—privately, not professionally.

"The woman in the photograph you showed me," Turk said. "Is she a Fourth?"

"Maybe. Probably." How much of this did she really want to discuss?

"How can you tell?"

"Because I've seen her before," Lise said, putting down her fork and turning to face him. "Do you want the whole story?"

"If you want to tell it."

* * * * *

Lise had heard the word "disappeared" applied to her father for the first time three days after he failed to come home from the university, a month after her fifteenth birthday. The local police had come to discuss the case with Lise's mother while Lise listened from the corridor outside the kitchen. Her father had "disappeared"—that is, he had left work as usual, had driven away in the customary direction, and somewhere between the American University and their rented house in the hills above Port Magellan he had vanished. There was no obvious explanation, no pertinent evidence.

But the investigation went on. The issue of his fascination with Fourths had come up. Lise's mother was interviewed again, this time by men who wore business suits rather than uniforms: men from the Department of Genomic Security. Mr. Adams had expressed an interest in Fourths: was the interest personal? Had he, for instance, repeatedly mentioned the subject of longevity? Did he suffer from any degenerative disease that might have been reversed by the Martian longevity treatment? Was he unusually concerned with death? Unhappy at home?

No, Lise's mother had said. Actually, what she said most often was "No, goddammit." Lise remembered her mother at the kitchen table, interrogated, drinking endless cups of rust-brown roiboos tea and saying, "No, goddammit, no."

Nevertheless, a theory had emerged. A family man in the New World, often apart from his family, seduced by the anything-goes atmosphere of the frontier and by the idea of the Fourth Age, an extra thirty years or so tacked onto his expected span of life…

Lise had to admit there was a certain logic to it. He wouldn't have been the first man to be lured from his family by the promise of longevity. Three decades ago the Martian Wun Ngo Wen had brought to Earth a technique for extending human life—a treatment that changed behavior in other and subtler ways as well. Proscribed by virtually every government on Earth, the treatment circulated in the underground community of Terrestrial Fourths.

Would Robert Adams have abandoned his career and family to join that community? Lise's instinctive answer was the same as her mother's: no. He wouldn't have done that to them, no, no matter how tempted he might have been.

But evidence had emerged to subvert that faith. He had been associating with strangers off-campus. People had been coming to the house, people not associated with the university, people he had not introduced to his family and whose purposes he had been reluctant to explain. And the Fourth cults held a special appeal in the academic community—the treatment had first been circulated by the scientist Jason Lawton, among friends he considered trustworthy, and it had spread primarily among intellectuals and scholars.

No, goddammit—but did Mrs. Adams have a better explanation?

Mrs. Adams did not. Nor did Lise.

The investigation remained inconclusive. After a year of this Lise's mother had booked passage to California for herself and her daughter, bent by the insult to her well-planned life but not, at least outwardly, broken. The disappearance—the New World in general—became a subject one didn't mention in her presence. Silence was better than speculation. Lise had learned that lesson well. Like her mother, Lise had secured her pain and curiosity in the dark internal attic where unthinkable thoughts were stored. At least until her marriage to Brian and his transfer to Port Magellan. Suddenly those memories were refreshed: the wound reopened as if it had never healed, and her curiosity, she discovered, had been distilled in its enclosure, had become an adult's curiosity rather than a child's.

So she had begun to ask questions of her father's colleagues and friends, the few still living in the city, and inevitably these questions had involved the community of Fourths in the New World.

Brian at first tried to be helpful. He hadn't much liked her ad hoc investigation into what he considered potentially dangerous matters—and Lise supposed it had been one more in a growing number of emotional disconnects between them—but he had tolerated it and even used his DGS credentials to follow up on some of her queries.

Like the woman in the photograph.

"Two photographs, actually," she told Turk. When she moved out of her mother's house, Lise had salvaged a number of items her mother was forever threatening to throw away, in this case a disk of photographs from her parents' Port Magellan years. A few of the pictures had been taken at faculty parties at the Adams' house. Lise had selected a few of these photos and shown them to old family friends, hoping to track down those she didn't recognize. She managed to put names, at least, to most of them, but one stood out: a dark-skinned elderly woman in jeans, caught standing in the doorway beyond a crowd of far more expensively-dressed faculty members, as if she had arrived unexpectedly. She seemed disconcerted, nervous.

No one had been able to identify her. Brian had offered to run the picture through DGS image-recognition software and see if anything turned up. This had been the latest of what Lise had come to think of as Brian's "charity bombs"—acts of generosity he threw in front of her as if to divert her from the path to separation—and she had accepted the offer with a warning that it wouldn't change anything.

But the search had turned up a pertinent match. The same woman had passed through the docks at Port Magellan just months ago. She had been listed on a passengership manifest as Sulean Moi.

The name turned up again in connection with Turk Findley, who had piloted the charter flight that carried Sulean Moi over the mountains to the desert town of Kubelick's Grave—the same town to which Lise had been attempting to fly a few months before, following a different lead.

* * * * *

Turk listened to all this patiently. Then he said, "She wasn't talkative. She paid cash. I put her down at the airstrip in Kubelick's Grave and that was that. She never said anything about her past or why she was flying west. You think she's a Fourth?"

"She hasn't changed much in fifteen years. That suggests she might be."

"So maybe the simplest explanation is true. Your father took the illegal treatment and started a new life under a new name."

"Maybe. But I don't want another hypothesis. I want to know what really happened."

"So you find out the truth, what then? Does that make your life better? Maybe you'll learn something you don't like. Maybe you have to start mourning all over again."

"At least," she said, "I'll know what I'm mourning for."

* * * * *

As often happened when she talked about her father, she dreamed of him that night.

More memory than dream at first: she was with him on the veranda of their house on the hill in Port Magellan, and he was talking to her about the Hypotheticals.

He talked to her on the veranda because Lise's mother didn't care for these conversations. This was the starkest contrast Lise could draw between her parents. Both were Spin survivors, but they had emerged from the crisis with polarized sensibilities. Her father had thrown himself headlong into the mystery, had fallen in love with the heightened strangeness of the universe. Her mother pretended that none of it had happened—that the garden fence and the back wall were barricades strong enough to repulse the tide of time.

Lise had not quite known where to place herself on that divide. She loved the sense of safety she felt in her mother's home. But she loved to hear her father talk.

In the dream he talked about the Hypotheticals. The Hypotheticals aren't people, Lise, you must not make that mistake. As the unnamed Equatorian stars turned in the slate-black sky. They are a network of more or less mindless machines, we suspect, but is that network aware of itself? Does it have a mind, Lise, the way you and I do? If it does, every element of its thought must be propagated over hundreds or thousands of light-years. It would see time and space very differently than we do. It might not perceive us at all, except as a passing phenomenon, and if it manipulates us it might do so at an entirely unconscious level.

Like God, Lise in her dream suggested.

A blind God, her father said, but he was wrong, because in the dream, while she was entranced in the grandeur of his vision and safe in the boundary of her mothers sensibility, the Hypothetical had reached down from the sky, opened a steel fist that glittered in the starlight, and snatched him away before she could summon the courage to scream.