Dear Lise. The node's voice was male, indifferent, offering up the text with all the liveliness of a frozen fish. Thank you for your latest. It is somewhat reassuring after what I've seen on the news.

The ashfall, she meant, which still clogged the side streets and had caused thousands of tourists to flee to their cruise ships, begging for a quick ride home. People who had come to Equatoria hoping to find a landscape pleasingly strange, but who had stumbled into something altogether different— real strangeness, the kind that didn't negotiate with human preconceptions.

Precisely how her mother would have reacted, Lise thought.

All I can think of is how far away you are and how inaccessible you have made yourself. No, I won't start that old argument again. And I won't say a word about your separation from Brian.

Susan Adams had argued fiercely against the divorce—ironically, since she had argued almost as fiercely against the marriage. At first, Lise's mother had disliked Brian because he worked for Genomic Security—Genomic Security, in Susan Adams' mind, being represented by the terse and unhelpful men who had hovered around her after her husband's incomprehensible disappearance. Lise must not marry one of these compassionless monsters, she had insisted; but Brian was not compassionless, in fact Brian had charmed Lise's mother, had patiently dismantled her objections until he became a welcome presence.

Brian had quickly learned the paramount rule in dealing with Lise's mother, that one did not mention the New World, the Hypotheticals, the Spin, or the disappearance of Robert Adams. In Susan Adams'

household these subjects had acquired the power of profanity. Which was one reason Lise had been so anxious to leave that household behind.

And there had been much anxiety and resistance after the wedding, when Brian was transferred to Port Magellan. You must not go, Lise's mother had said, as if the New World were some ghostly otherness from which no one emerged undamaged. No, not even for the sake of Brian's career should they enter that perdition.

This was, of course, an ongoing act of denial, a forcible exile of unacceptable truths, a strategy her mother had devised for containing and channeling her unvented grief. But that was precisely why Lise resented it. Lise hated the dark space into which her mother had walled these memories. Memory was all that was left of Lise's father, and that memory surely included his wide-eyed fascination with the Hypotheticals and his love of the planet into which they had opened their perplexing doorway.

Even the ashfall would have fascinated him, Lise thought: those cogs and seashells embedded in the dust, pieces in a grand puzzle…