"I'm in the consulate compound. There's a lot of us here. We thought we'd stick it out, sleep on cots. The building has a generator if the power goes down. You have power?"

"At the moment."

"About half the Chinese district is in the dark. The city's having trouble getting repair crews out."

"Anybody there know what's going on?"

Brian's voice came through the phone with a stressed reediness, the way he sounded when he was nervous or upset. "No, not really…"

"Or when it's going to stop?"

"No. It can't go on forever, though."

That was a nice thought, but Lise doubted she could convince herself of the truth of it, at least not tonight.

"Okay, Brian. Appreciate the call but I'm fine."

There was a pause. He wanted to say more. Which was what he always seemed to want these days. A conversation, if not a marriage.

"Let me know if you have a problem there."

She thanked him and cut the connection, left the phone on the kitchen counter and walked back into the living room.

"Was that your ex?" Turk asked.

Turk knew about her problems with Brian. In the mountains, by the side of a stormy lake, she had shared a number of difficult truths about herself and her life. She nodded.

"Am I creating a problem for you here?"

"No," she said. "No problem."

* * * * *

She sat up with Turk watching more sporadic news, but fatigue caught up with her around three in the morning and she finally staggered off to bed. Even so she was awake for a while in the dark, curled under a cotton sheet as if it could protect her from whatever was falling out of the sky. It isn't doomsday, she told herself. It's just something inconvenient and unexpected.

Diatoms, she thought: sea shells, ancient life, another reminder that the universe had shifted radically during and after the Spin, that the kind of world she had been born into was not the world her parents or her grandparents had ever expected to see. She remembered an old astronomy book of her grandfather's that had fascinated her as a child. The last chapter was called Are We Alone? and it had been full of what seemed like naive, silly speculation. Because that question had been answered. No, we are not alone. No, we can never again think of the universe as our private property. Life, or something like life, had been here long before the evolution of human beings. We're on their turf, Lise thought, and because we don't understand them we can't predict their behavior. Even today no one knew with any certainty why the Earth had been preserved down four billion years of galactic history like a tulip bulb wintering in a dark cellar, or why a seaway to this new planet had been installed in the Indian Ocean. What was falling outside the window was just more evidence of humanity's gross ignorance.

* * * * *