Dvali was limping conspicuously by the time they descended the stairwell to the door at the intact end of the building, though he refused to stop and rest. It was essential, he said, that they find Isaac and the others. "The others" being a sort of footnote in Dvali's mind, Lise suspected. For Dvali there was only Isaac, Isaac and the apotheosis of the Hypotheticals, whatever that might turn out to mean.

"Go on, open it," Dvali said, waving at the door.

Lise and Turk had agreed that the most useful thing they could do was to try to reach the local mall where they had left Isaac and the Fourth women. How to get there was an open question. When Lise had looked out into the light of dawn she had seen a landscape utterly transformed—had seen what she might have called a canopy of trees, if trees were made of glossy tubes and iridescent beach balls.

And she asked the same stupid, irrepressible question: "Why? What's it for? Why now, why here?"

"We may yet find out," Dr. Dvali said.

* * * * *

If the past was any guide, Turk thought, the Hypothetical growths would ignore human beings (with the obvious exception of Isaac, who was only partly human)—but was that still true?

He cracked the door a narrow inch, and when nothing came rushing in he risked a look outside.

Cool air touched his face. The sulfuric stench of the ashfall was gone. So was the ash itself. It had all turned into a Technicolor forest. Compared to this, the growths in Bustee had been daffodils withering in a cold breeze. This was high summer. This was some kind of Hypothetical Eden.

He drew the door fully open and waited. Lise and Dr. Dvali crowded him from behind.

The ash had turned itself into a forest of stalks bearing globular fruit instead of leaves. The stalks, of several colors but predominantly a cyanotic blue, lofted up twenty or thirty feet into the air and were so closely spaced that a person would have to turn sideways to pass between them. The globes that comprised the canopy ranged in size from goldfish bowl to beach ball to something a man might climb inside and stand upright in without bumping his head. They pressed up against each other, gently yielding where they touched, to make a nearly solid but translucent mass. The sunlight that came through was dim and shiftingly iridescent.

Turk took a tentative step. From here he could see along the wall of the workers' barracks to the point at which it had collapsed, the three floors of the north wing pancaked into something less than one. God help us if we'd been in there, he thought. And God help Isaac and the women, wherever they might have found shelter.