Axis by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
     
     
    She slept longer than she meant to and woke with daylight in her eyes—not sunlight, exactly, but a welcome ambient brightness. By the time she dressed, Turk was already awake. She found him at the living room window, gazing out.
    “Looks a little better,” she said.
    “At least, not as bad.”
    There was still a flat, glittery dust in the outside air. But it wasn’t falling as thickly as it had last night and the sky was relatively clear.
    “According to the news,” Turk said, “the precipitation—that’s what they’re calling it—is tapering off. The ash cloud is still there but it’s moving inland. What they can see on radar and satellite images suggests the whole thing might be finished late tonight, early tomorrow, at least as far as the coast is concerned.”
    “Good,” Lise said.
    “But that’s not the end of the problem. The streets need to be cleared. There’s still trouble with the electrical grid. A few roofs collapsed, mostly those flat-roofed tourist rentals down along the headland. Just cleaning up the docks is going to be a huge project. The Provisional Government contracted a bunch of earthmovers to clean the roads, and once some mobility is established they can start pumping seawater and sluice it all into the bay, assuming the storm sewers accommodate the runoff. All this is complicated by dust in motors, stalled cars and so forth.”
    “Any word on toxicity?”
    “According to the news guys the ash is mostly carbon, sulfur, silicates, and metals, some of it arranged in unusual molecules, whatever that means, but breaking down pretty quick into simpler elements. Short-term it’s not dangerous unless you’ve got asthma or emphysema. Long-term, who knows? They still want people to stay indoors, and they’re advising a face mask if you really need to go out.”
    “Anybody making any guesses about where it all came from?”
    “No. We’re getting a lot of speculation, mostly bullshit, but somebody at the Geophysical Survey had the same idea we did—that it’s spaceborne material that’s been modified by the Hypotheticals.”
    In other words, nobody really knew anything. “Did you sleep last night?”
    “Not much.”
    “Had any breakfast?”
    “Didn’t want to mess up your kitchen.”
    “I’m not much of a cook, but I can do omelettes and coffee.” When he offered to help she said, “You’d just be in the way. Give me twenty minutes.”
    There was a window in the kitchen, and Lise was able to survey the Port while butter sizzled in the frying pan—this big, polyglot, kaleido-scopically multicultural city that had grown so quickly on the edge of a new continent, now blanketed in ominous gray. The wind had