Robert Wilson - Axis

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 But that was never more than a local observation and it's four billion years out of date.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.

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?"