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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