Sigmund and Weil had done something remarkable as they flew with Brian across the Bodhi Pass and down to the coastal plain: they had admitted defeat. The Fourths were scattered, Weil said, and the burned compound had yielded no evidence beyond the charred remains of a bioreactor hidden in a basement. Nothing incriminating had been discovered in Turk Findley's purloined aircraft, and the four captives were obviously decoys, elderly even by the standards of Fourths.

"So what, then," Brian asked as their aircraft overflew a canyon along which, far below, a lone oil tanker was navigating the switchbacks, "you just go home?"

"Of course we don't give up. We do what we've been doing for years, monitor communications, run software on strategic surveillance sites. Sooner or later something turns up. And in the meantime there's one less bioreactor to worry about. If nothing else, somebody's plans have been seriously fucked with."

"For this," Brian asked, "people die?"

"Who died, Brian? I don't remember anyone dying."

* * * * *

So he came at last to his small apartment in the polyglot city and was alone there when for the second time the sky filled with the luminous debris of ancient, incomprehensible machines.

He watched the local news broadcasts with a vague indifference. The newscasters used words like

"strange" and "unprecedented," but Brian wasn't impressed: it was only a kind of celestial rot, the rubble of a vast disintegration. The Hypotheticals had built their intelligences in the cold places around and between countless stars, and they built them to last, no doubt, but any made thing had a lifetime. The pyramids of Egypt eroded; the Roman aqueducts were stumps of broken stone. So must the constructions of the Hypotheticals break down once they had served their dozen or their million allotted years.

The ashes birthed monstrosities, some of which he could see from his own window. A dozen yards down the road, where the Arabic commercial district declined into a structureless maze of souks and tea shops, a green tubule as big as a sewer pipe writhed as if in a strong wind and then tumbled over to barricade the street.

In his mind he played back Lise's final phone call. Where was she now? Not even Sigmund and Weil had been able to answer that question. She had fled with the rogue Fourths, victim of her own wild sympathies. Free, perhaps, in some distasteful sense of the word. Unbroken. Not yet fallen to earth like an ancient machine.

* * * * *

The ashfall took longer to clean up than it had the first time. And because it had happened twice, the people on television were asking themselves somber questions. Was this the end of it or would it happen again? Would the effects follow some exponential curve, each time more peculiar and disastrous, until Port Magellan was entirely buried under a mass of what looked like enormous children's toys?