Axis
players in a disaster drama. A man in a grimy dishdasha stood for half an hour outside the locked Arabic grocery across the street, smoking cigarettes and staring at the sky.
    “You think it’s over?” Lise asked.
    Obviously a question he couldn’t answer. But he guessed she didn’t want a real answer as much as she wanted reassurance. “For now, anyway.”
    They were both too wired to sleep. He switched on the video display and they settled back on the sofa, trawling for new information. A newsreader announced that the dust cloud had moved inland and no more “precipitation” was expected—there had been sporadic reports of ashfall from every community between Ayer’s Point and Haixi on the coast, but Port Magellan seemed to have been hit harder than most. Which was in a way a good thing, Turk supposed, because while this dump of particulate matter had been troublesome for the city it might have been a catastrophe for the local ecosystem, smothering forests and killing crops and maybe even poisoning the soil, though the newscaster said there was nothing terribly toxic in it, “according to the latest analyses.” The fossil - or machine-like structures in the ashfall had attracted attention, of course. Microphotographs of the dust revealed even more latent structure: degraded cogs and wheels, scalloped cones like tiny conch shells, inorganic molecules hooked together in complex and unnatural ways—as if some vast machine had eroded in orbit and only its finer elements had survived the fiery descent through the atmosphere.
    They had spent the day in the apartment, Turk mostly sitting at the window, Lise making calls and sending messages to family back home, itemizing the food in the kitchen in case the city was shut down long-term, and in the process they had reestablished a kind of intimacy—the mountain-camp-in-a-thunderstorm intimacy they had shared before, brought down to the city—and when she put her head against his shoulder Turk raised his hand to stroke her hair, hesitated when he remembered the nature of their situation here.
    “It’s all right,” she said.
    Her hair smelled fresh and somehow golden, and it felt like silk under the palm of his hand.
    “Turk,” she said, “I’m sorry—”
    “Nothing to apologize for.”
    “For thinking I needed an excuse to see you.”
    “Missed you too,” he said.
    “Just—it was confusing.”
    “I know.”
    “Do you want to go to bed?” She took his hand and rubbed her cheek against it. “I mean—”
    He knew what she meant.
     
     
    He spent that night with her and he spent another, not because he had to—the coast road had been mostly cleared by that time—but because he could.
    But he couldn’t stay forever. He lazed around one morning more, picking over breakfast while Lise made more calls. Amazing how many friends and acquaintances and home-folks she had. It made him feel a little unpopular. The only calls he made that morning were to customers whose flights would have to be rescheduled or canceled—cancellations he couldn’t afford right now—and to a couple of buddies, mechanics from the airport, who might wonder why he wasn’t around to go drinking with them. He didn’t have much of a social life. He didn’t even own a dog.
    She recorded a long message to her mother back in the States. You couldn’t make a direct call across the Arch, since the only things the Hypothetical allowed to travel between this world and the one next door were manned ocean vessels. But there was a fleet of telecom-equipped commercial ships that shuttled back and forth to relay recorded data. You could watch video news from home that was only a few hours stale, and you could send voice or text the other direction. Lise’s message, what he overheard of it, was a careful reassurance that the ashfall had done no lasting harm and looked like it would be cleared up before long, although it was a mystery why it had happened, very confusing—no shit, Turk

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