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Here was the excitement she learned from him at an early age, an outward-looking curiosity that contrasted with her mother's habitual caution and timidity. She could hear his voice in the words.
Of their works, one of the most immediately obvious is the Indian Ocean Arch that links the Earth to the New World—and the Arch that co
Sail to the other side of this world, he had told Lise, and you'll find a second Arch, and beyond it a rocky, stormy planet with barely breathable air; and beyond that—a journey that had to be undertaken on ocean vessels sealed and pressurized as if they were spaceships—a third world, its atmosphere poisoned with methane, the oceans oily and acidic.
But the Arch is not the only artifact at hand. The planet "next door to Earth," from which I write these words, is also an artifact. There is evidence that it was constructed or at least modified over the course of many millions of years with the objective of making it a congenial environment for human beings.
Planet as artifact.
Many have speculated about the purpose of this eons-long work. Is the New World a gift or is it a trap? Have we entered a maze, as laboratory mice, or have we been offered a new and splendid destiny? Does the fact that our own Earth is still protected from the deadly radiation of its expanded sun mean that the Hypotheticals take an interest in our survival as a species, and if so, why?
I ca
And, later in the piece, this:
We are in the position of a coma patient waking from a sleep as long as the lifetime of a star. What we ca
She underlined that twice. She wished she could text it to her mother, wished she could write it on a ba
She had put the pages aside and was heading for bed when she checked her phone one last time.
Three messages were stacked there, all tagged urgent, all from Turk. A fourth came in while the phone was still in her hand.
PART TWO — THE OCULAR ROSE
CHAPTER EIGHT
After the fall of the luminous dust—after the skies had cleared and the courtyard had been swept and the desert or the wind had absorbed what was left behind—news of another mystery came to the compound where the boy Isaac lived.
The ash had been terrifying when it fell and had been a topic for endless talk and speculation when it stopped. The newer mystery arrived more prosaically, as a news report relayed from the city across the mountains. It was less immediately frightening, but it touched uneasily on one of Isaac's secrets.
He had overheard two of the adults, Mr. Nowotny and Mr. Fisk, discussing it in the corridor outside the dining hall. Commercial flights to the oil wastes of the Rub al-Khali had been canceled or re-routed for days even before the ashfall, and now the Provisional Government and the oil powers had issued an explanation: there had been an earthquake.
This was a mystery, Mr. Nowotny went on to say, because there were no known faults beneath that part of the Rub al-Khali: it was a geologically stable desert craton that had persisted unchanged for millions of years. There should never have been even a minor tremor so deep in the Rub al-Khali.
But what had happened was more than a tremor. Oil production had been shut down for more than a week, and the wells and pipelines had been expensively damaged.
"We know less about this planet than we thought we did," Mr. Nowotny said.
It was slightly less mysterious to Isaac. He knew, though he could not say how, that something was stirring under the sedate sands of the deep western desert. He felt it in his mind, his body. Something was stirring, and it spoke in cadences he didn't understand, and he could point to it with his eyes closed even though it was hundreds of miles away, still only half-waking from a slumber as long as the lives of mountains.
For two days during and after the ashfall everyone had stayed inside, doors closed and windows locked, until Dr. Dvali a
Isaac agreed to wear the mask even though it was sweatily warm across his mouth and nose. All that remained of the dust was a grainy residue silted against the brick walls and the rail fences made of never-green wood. Under a relentless afternoon sun, Isaac stooped over one of these small windrows and sifted the ash with his hand.
The ash, according to Dr. Dvali, contained tiny fragments of broken machines.
Not much remained of these machines, to Isaac's eyes, but he liked the grittiness of the ash and the way it pooled in his palm and slipped like talc between his fingers. He liked the way it compressed into a flaky lump when he squeezed it and dissolved into the air when he opened his fist.
The ash glittered. In fact it glowed. That wasn't exactly the right word, Isaac knew. It wasn't the sort of glow you could see with your eyes, and he understood that no one else in the compound could see it the way he did. It was a different kind of glow, differently perceived. He thought perhaps Sulean Moi would be able to explain, if he could find a way to pose the question.
Isaac had a lot of questions he wanted to ask Sulean. But she had been busy since the ashfall, often in conference with the adults, and he had to wait his turn.
At di
Certainly they were wiser than average people. He could not say this by direct experience—Isaac had never met any average people—but he had seen them in videos and read about them in books. Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely. Here in the compound, the talk was occasionally intense but the arguments never drew blood. Everyone was wise (or seemed to be), everyone was calm (or struggled to give that impression), and, except for Isaac, everyone was old.
Sulean Moi was apparently not an average person either. Somehow, she knew more than the other adults. She was smarter than the people to whom Isaac had always deferred, and—even more perplexing—she didn't seem to like them very much. But she tolerated their questions politely.
Dr. Dvali said, "Of course it implicates the Hypotheticals," talking about the ashfall, and asked Sulean, "Don't you agree?"
"It's an obvious conclusion to draw." The old woman probed the contents of her bowl with a fork. The adults theoretically took turns cooking, though a handful volunteered more often than the rest. Tonight Mr. Posell had taken kitchen duty. Mr. Posell was a geologist, but as a chef he was more enthusiastic than talented. Isaac's vegetable bowl tasted of garlic, gulley-seed oil, and something dreadfully burnt.