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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.
     
     
     

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