Axis

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 co

"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.