"Sulean," he said. "I found it."

Then he closed his eyes for the last time.

* * * * *

The silence in the common room was interrupted by a timid knock.

There was only one person at the commune who hadn't attended this meeting. Mrs. Rebka hurried to open the door.

Isaac stood outside, still wearing his night clothes, the knees of his pajamas soiled, his hands dirty, his expression somber.

"Someone's coming," he said.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The door to Brian Gately's office opened just as a news summary popped up on his desktop. The visitor was the chubby DGS man named Weil. The press release was something about the recent ashfall.

Weil had left his sullen friend Sigmund elsewhere, and he was grinning—though his cheerfulness, under the circumstances, struck Brian as vaguely obscene.

"You forwarded this?" Brian asked, gesturing at the release.

"Read it. I'll wait."

Brian tried to focus on the document, but his mind's eye insisted on reviewing the photograph Pieter Kirchberg had sent. The corpse of Tomas Ginn on a rocky beach, much worse for wear. He wondered whether Weil had seen the photo. Or ordered the killing.

He was tempted to ask. He dared not. He blinked and read the press service release.

PORT MAGELLAN / REUTERS.ET: Scientists at the Mt. Mahdi Observatory today made the startling announcement that the recent Equatorian "ashfall," which affected the eastern coast and desert inland of that continent, was "not entirely inert."

The ashes and the microscopic structures the ash contained, believed to be the degraded remnants of Hypothetical structures from the outer reaches of the local solar system, have apparently shown signs of life.

In a joint press conference held today at the Observatory, representatives of the American University, the United Nations Geophysical Survey, and the Provisional Government displayed photographs and samples of "incompletely self-replicating and self-assembling quasi-organic objects" recovered from the western extremes of the dry inland basin that stretches from the coastal mountains to the western sea.

These objects, ranging from a pea-sized hollow sphere to an assembly of what appeared to be tubes and wires as large as a man's head, were said to be unstable in a planetary environment and hence posed no threat to human life.

"The 'space-plague' scenario is a non-starter," senior astronomer Scott Cleland said. "The infalling material was ancient and probably already corrupted by wear and tear before it entered the atmosphere. The vast majority of it was sterilized by a violent passage that left only a few nano-scale elements intact. A very few of these retained enough molecular integrity to re-initiate the process of growth. But they were designed to flourish in the extreme cold and vacuum of deep space. In a hot, oxygen-rich desert they simply can't survive for long."