Before he could say anything more—in Martian or in English—the boy Isaac stopped speaking and fell into a sleep from which he could not be aroused. The Fourths continued to tend to his needs but were unable to treat or diagnose his condition. His vital signs were stable and he seemed to be in no immediate danger.
Sulean Moi sat with the child in his room as the sun shone on the desert beyond the window, clocking shadows across the alkaline grit. Two days passed. One morning, as occasionally happened this time of year, a storm blew out of the mountains, a shelf of coal-black clouds that produced much lightning and thunder but only a little rain. By sunset the storm had gone and the sky in its wake was a radiant, purified turquoise. The air smelled fresh and astringent. Still the boy slept.
Out in the western wastes spindly plants were provoked by the brief rain to flower. Perhaps other things, too, bloomed in the emptiness. Things like Isaac's ocular rose.
Outwardly calm, Sulean was terrified.
The boy had spoken with Esh's voice.
She wondered if this was what religious texts meant when they talked about trembling in the presence of God. The Hypothetical weren't gods—if she understood what that simple but strangely elastic word meant—but they were just as powerful and just as inscrutable. She didn't believe they possessed conscious intent, and even the word "they" was a misnomer, a crude anthropomorphism. But when "they" manifested themselves, the natural human response was to cower and hide—the instinctive reaction of the rabbit to the fox, the fox to the hunter.
Twice in a lifetime, Sulean thought: that's my special burden, to witness this twice in a lifetime.
At times she napped in the chair next to the bed where Isaac lay, his chest rising and falling with the cadence of his breath. Often she dreamed—more fiercely and deeply than she had dreamed since she was a child—and in her dreams she was in a different desert, where the horizon was close and the sky a dark and penetrating blue. In this desert there were rocks and sand and also a number of brightly-colored tubular or angular growths, like a madman's hallucinations come to life. And of course there was the boy. Not Isaac. The other boy, the first one. He was more frail than Isaac, his skin was darker, but his eyes, like Isaac's, had become gold-flecked and strange. He was lying where he had fallen in a stupor of exhaustion, and although Sulean was in the company of a number of grown men she was the first who dared approach him.
The boy opened his eyes. He could not otherwise move, because his legs, arms, and torso had been bound with pliant ropes or vines. The strange growths had pinned him there, and some of them had pierced his body.
Surely he must be dead. How could anyone survive such an impalement?
But he opened his eyes. He opened his eyes and whispered, "Sulean —''
* * * * *
She woke in the chair next to Isaac's bed, sweating in the dry heat. Mrs. Rebka had come into the room and was staring at her.
"We're having a meeting in the common room," Mrs. Rebka said. "We would like you to be there, Ms. Moi."
"All right Yes."
"Has his condition changed?"
"No," Sulean said. Thinking: Not yet.
* * * * *
It wasn't really a coma. It was only sleep, though a profound one that lasted many days. Isaac woke from it that evening, and when he did, he was alone in his room.
He felt… different.
More alert than usual: not only awake but more awake than he had ever been. His vision seemed sharper and more focused. He felt as if he could count the dust motes in the air, if he wanted, even though there was only the light of his bedside lamp to see by.
He wanted to go west. He felt the attraction of what was out there, although there was no word for it, no word he knew. A presence, rising; and it wanted him, and he wanted it, with an urgency akin to love or lust.
But he wouldn't leave the compound, not tonight. Isaac's first and purely instinctive long walk had come to nothing—apart from the discovery of the rose—and there was no use repeating it. Not until he was stronger. Still, he did need to get away from the narrow confinement of his room. To smell the air and feel it on his skin.
He stood, dressed, and walked downstairs past the closed doors of the large central room from which emanated the solemn voices of adults. He went out to the courtyard. A guard had been posted at the far gate, presumably to keep him from wandering away again. But he stayed on the other side of the houses, in the walled garden.
The air was cool tonight and the garden was lush. He stepped in among the plants, following the gardener's cobbled path. The night-blooming succulents had put out blossoms, richly colorful even in the faint moonlight.
Other things, small things, stirred in the soil where the ash had been driven down by the rain.
Isaac put his hand palm-down on a bare patch of earth. The soil was warm, retaining what it had conserved of the day's heat.
Overhead, the stars were crystal-bright. Isaac looked a long time at the stars. They were symbols hovering on the brink of intelligibility, letters that made words that made sentences he could almost (not quite) read.
Something touched his hand where it rested on the rich garden loam, and Isaac looked down again. When he pulled his hand away he saw the earth swell and crumble minutely—a worm, he thought; but it wasn't a worm. It wasn't anything he had ever seen before. It shrugged itself slowly from the soil like a knuckled, fleshy finger. Maybe some kind of root, but it grew too quickly to be natural. It extended itself toward Isaac's hand as if it sensed his warmth.
He wasn't afraid of it. Well, no, that wasn't true. Part of him was afraid of it, almost paralyzed with terror. The everyday part of him wanted to recoil and run back to the safety of his room. But above and enclosing the everyday part of him was this new sense of himself, bold and confident, and to the new Isaac the pale green finger wasn't frightening or even unfamiliar. He recognized it, although he couldn't name it.
He allowed it to touch him. Slowly, the green finger encircled his wrist. Isaac drew a curious strength from it, and it from him, he suspected, and he looked back at the sky where the stars which were suns glimmered brightly. Now each star seemed as familiar as a face, each with its own color and weight and distance and identity, known but not named. And like an animal scenting the air, he faced once more to the west.
Two things were obvious to Sulean as she entered the common room. One was that much discussion had taken place in her absence—she had been called here to testify, not to deliberate.
The second obvious thing was an atmosphere of collective sadness, almost mourning, as if these people understood that the life they had created for themselves was coming to an end. And that was no doubt true. This community couldn't exist much longer. It had been created for the purpose of birthing and nurturing Isaac, and that process would soon be finished… one way or another.
The majority of these people must have been born before the Spin, Sulean thought. Like other Terrestrial Fourths, a large percentage of them had come from the academic community, but not all; there were technicians who helped maintain the cryogenic incubators; there was a mechanic, a gardener. Like Martian Fourths, these people had separated themselves from the general community. They were not like the Fourths among whom Sulean had been raised… but they were Fourths; they stank of Fourthness. So glum, so self-important, so blind to their own arrogance.
Avram Dvali, of course, was chairing the meeting. He waved Sulean to a chair at the front of the room. "We'd like you to explain a few things, Ms. Moi, before the crisis proceeds any further."
Sulean sat primly erect. "Of course I'm happy to help in any way I can."
Mrs. Rebka, who sat at Dr. Dvali's right at the head table, gave her a sharply skeptical look. "I hope that's true. You know, when we took on the task of raising Isaac thirteen years ago we faced some opposition—"
" Raising him, Mrs. Rebka, or creating him?"
Mrs. Rebka ignored the remark. "Opposition from other members of the Fourth community. We acted on convictions not everyone shared. We know we're a minority, a minority within a minority. And we knew you were out there, Ms. Moi, doing whatever work you do for the Martians. We knew you might eventually find us, and we were prepared to be frank and open with you. We respect your connection to a community far older than our own."
"Thank you," Sulean said, not concealing her own skepticism.
"But we had hoped you would be as frank with us as we were with you."
"If you have a question, please ask it."
"The procedure that created Isaac has been attempted before."
"It has been," Sulean admitted, "yes."
"And is it true that you have some personal experience of that?"
This time she wasn't quite so quick to answer. "Yes." The story of her upbringing had circulated widely among the Terrestrial Fourths.
"Would you share that experience with us?"
"If I'm reluctant to talk about it, the reasons are largely personal. The memory isn't pleasant."
"Nevertheless," Mrs. Rebka said.
Sulean closed her eyes. She didn't want to recall these events. The memory came to her, unbidden, all too often. But Mrs. Rebka was right, as much as Sulean hated to admit it. The time had come.
The boy.
The boy in the desert. The boy in the Martian desert.
The boy had died in the dry southern province of Bar Kea, some distance from the biological research station where he had been born and where he had lived all his life.
Sulean was the same age as the boy. She had not been born at the Bar Kea Desert Station but she could remember no other home. Her life before Bar Kea was little more than a story she had been told by her teachers: a story about a girl who had been washed away, along with her family, by a flood along the Paia River, and who had been rescued from the intake filter of a dam three miles downstream. Her parents had died and the small girl, this unremembered Sulean, had been so grievously wounded that she could only be saved by profound biotechnical intervention.
Specifically, the child Sulean had to be rebuilt using the same process that was used to extend life and create Fourths.
The treatment was more or less successful. Her damaged body and brain were reconstructed according to templates written in her DNA. For obvious reasons, she remembered nothing of her life before the accident. Her salvation was a second birth, and Sulean had relearned the world the way an infant learns it, acquiring language a second time and crawling before she took her first (or second) tentative steps.
But there was a drawback to the treatment, which was why it was so rarely used as a medical intervention. It conferred its customary longevity, but it also interrupted the natural cycle of her life. At puberty, every Martian child developed the deep wrinkles that made Martians appear so distinctive to Terrestrials. But that didn't happen to Sulean. She remained, by Martian standards, sexless and grotesquely smooth-skinned, an overgrown infant. When she looked in a mirror, even today, Sulean was inevitably reminded of something pink and unformed: a grub writhing in a rotten stump. To protect her from humiliation she had been sheltered and nurtured by the Fourths who saved her life, the Fourths of Bar Kea Desert Station. At the Station she had a hundred indulgent, caring parents, and she had the dry hills of Bar Kea for a playground.
The only other child at the Station was the boy named Esh.
They had not given him any other name, only Esh.
Esh had been built to communicate with the Hypotheticals, though it seemed to Sulean he could barely communicate even with the people around him. Even with Sulean, whose company he obviously enjoyed, he seldom spoke more than a few words. Esh was kept apart, and Sulean was allowed to see him only at appointed times.
Nevertheless she was his friend. It didn't matter to Sulean that the boy's nervous system was supposedly receptive to the obscure signals of alien beings, any more than it mattered to Esh that she was as pink as a stillborn fetus. Their uniquenesses made them alike and had thus become irrelevant.
The Fourths at Bar Kea Desert Station encouraged the friendship. They had been disappointed by Esh's refractory silences and his outward display of dull-normal intelligence. He was studious but incurious. He sat wide-eyed in the classrooms the adults had designed for him, and he absorbed a reasonable amount of information, but he was indifferent to it all. The sky was full of stars and the desert was full of sand, but stars and sand might have traded places for all it mattered to Esh. Whether he spoke to the Hypotheticals, or they to him, no one could say. He was stubbornly silent on the subject.
Esh was at his liveliest when he was alone with Sulean. They were allowed to leave the station on certain days to explore the nearby desert. They were supervised, of course—an adult was always within sight—but compared to the closeted spaces of the Station this was wild freedom. Bar Kea was formidably dry, but the scarce spring rains sometimes pooled among the rocks, and Sulean delighted in the small creatures that swam in these short-lived ponds. There were tiny fish that encased themselves in hibematory cysts, like seeds, when the water dried, and sprang back to life during the rare rains. She liked to cup the populated water in her hands, Esh watching with silent wonder as the wriggling things slipped between her fingers.
Esh never asked questions, but Sulean pretended he did. At the Station she was always being taught, always being encouraged to listen; alone with Esh she became the teacher, he the rapt and silent audience. Often she would explain to him what she had learned that day or week.
People had not always lived on Mars, she told him one day as they wandered among sunlit, dusty rocks. Years and centuries ago their ancestors had come from Earth, a planet closer to the sun. You couldn't see Earth directly, because the Hypotheticals had enclosed it in a lightless barrier—but you knew it was there, because it had a moon that circled it.
She mentioned the Hypotheticals (called by Martians Ab-ashken, a word compounded of the root-words for "powerful" and "remote"), cautiously at first, wondering how Esh would react. She knew he was part Hypothetical himself and she didn't want to offend him. But the name provoked no special response, only his usual blank indifference. So Sulean was free to lecture, imagine, dream. Even then the Hypotheticals had fascinated her.
They live among the stars, as far as anyone knows, she told the boy.
Esh, of course, said nothing in return.
They're not exactly animals, they're more like machines, but they grow and reproduce themselves.
They do things for no apparent reason, she told him. They put the Earth inside a slow-time bubble millions of years ago, but no one knows why.
No one has talked to them, she said, unless you have, I suppose, and no one has seen them. But pieces of them fall out of the sky from time to time, and strange things happen…
* * * * *
Pieces of them fall from the sky: this last piece of information caused considerable consternation among Dr. Dvali's Fourths.
Dvali cleared his throat and said, "There's nothing about such an event in the Martian Archives."
"No," Sulean admitted. "Nor did we ever mention it in direct communication with the Earth. Even on Mars it's a rare occurrence—something that happens once every two or three hundred years."
Mrs. Rebka said, "Excuse me, but what happens? I don't understand."
"The Hypotheticals exist in a kind of ecology, Mrs. Rebka. They bloom, flourish, and die back, only to repeat the cycle again, over and over."
"By the Hypotheticals," Dr. Dvali said, "I presume you mean their machines."
"That may not be a meaningful distinction. There's no evidence that their self-reproducing machines are under the control of anything but their own networked intelligence and their own contingent evolution.
Naturally, the detritus of their lives circulates through the solar system. Periodically the debris is captured by the gravitation of an inner planet."
"Why haven't these things fallen on the Earth?"
"Before the Spin the Earth existed in a much younger solar system Five billion years ago the Hypotheticals had barely established themselves in the Kuiper Belt. If their machines did occasionally enter the Earths atmosphere it would have been an isolated, rare event. There are enough reports of hovering lights or strange aerial objects to suggest that perhaps it did happen, now and then, though no one recognized it as such. When the Spin barrier was put in place it excluded any such fall-through, and even now the Earth is protected from the excessive radiation of the sun by a different kind of membrane. Mars, for good or ill, is more exposed. Martians didn't arrive in the modern day as strangers, Dr. Dvali. We've grown and evolved for millennia with the knowledge that the Hypotheticals exist and that the solar system is, in effect, their property."
"The ash that fell on us," Mrs. Rebka said, her voice throaty with a kind of hostile urgency, "was that the same phenomenon?"
"Presumably. And the growths in the desert. It's only natural to assume that this solar system has also hosted Hypotheticals for countless centuries. The annual meteor showers are more likely their detritus than the simple remains of ancient rocks. The ashfall was just a particularly dense example, perhaps from a recent exfoliation. As if we had passed through a cloud of, of—"
"Of their discarded cells," Dr. Dvali said.
"Cells, in a sense, shed, perhaps discarded, but not necessarily inert or entirely dead. Some partial metabolism persists." Hence the ocular rose and the other abortive, short-lived growths.
"Your people must have studied these remains."
"Oh yes," Sulean said. "In fact we cultivated them. Much of our biological technology was derived from the study of them. Even the longevity treatment is remotely derived from Hypothetical sources. Most of our pharmaceuticals entail some element of Hypothetical technology—that's why we grow them at cryogenic temperatures, simulating the outer solar system."
"And the Martian boy—and Isaac as well, I suppose—"
"The treatment they received is much more closely related to the raw matter of Hypothetical devices. I suppose you thought it was some purely human pharmaceutical? Another example of marvelous Martian biotech? And in a sense it is. But it's something more, too. Something inhuman, inherently uncontrollable."
"And yet Wun Ngo Wen brought the seed stock to Earth."
"If Wun had discovered the older, wiser culture we all assumed must exist on Earth, I'm sure he would have been frank about the origins of it. But he found something quite different, unfortunately. He entrusted many of our secrets to Jason Lawton, who rashly experimented on himself—and Jason Lawton circulated the secrets to people he trusted, who proved no more prudent."
Sulean was aware of the shock in the room. These were names, Wun Ngo Wen and Jason Lawton, reverently spoken among Terrestrial Fourths. But they were mortal men, after all. Susceptible to doubt, fear, greed, and hasty decisions repented at leisure.
"Still," Dr. Dvali said at last, "your people could have told us—"
"These are Fourth things!" Sulean was surprised by the vehemence in her own voice. "You don't understand. It's not zuret—" She couldn't exactly translate the word and all its nuances. "It's not correct, it's not proper, to share them with the unaltered. The unaltered don't want to know; these things are for the very old to worry about; by accepting the burden of longevity they accept this burden too. But I would have shared them with you, Dr. Dvali, before you began this project, if you hadn't hidden yourself so well."
But the people she was addressing, born in the raucous jungle that was Earth, couldn't be expected to understand. Even their Fourthness was alien. The last estate of life, the elective decades, meant nothing more to them than a few more years in which to draw breath. On Mars all Fourths were ritually separated from the rest of the population. When you entered the Fourth Age—unless you entered it, as Sulean had, under exceptional circumstances—you accepted its constraints and agreed to live according to its cloistered traditions. The Terrestrial Fourths had attempted to re-create some of those traditions, and this group had even withdrawn to a kind of desert sanctuary, but it wasn't the same… they didn't understand the burden of it; they hadn't been initiated into the sacral knowledge.
They lacked, perversely, the terrible dry monasticism of the Martian Fourths. It was what Sulean had hated about the Fourths who raised her. On Mars the Fourths moved as if through the invisible corridors of some ancient labyrinth. They had traded joy for a dusty gravitas. But even that was better than this anarchic recklessness—all the vices of terrestrial humanity, needlessly prolonged.
Dr. Dvali, perhaps sensing her agitation, said, "But what about the child? Tell us what happened to Esh, Ms. Moi."
* * * * *
What happened to the boy was both simple and terrible. It began with an infall of Hypothetical debris from the outer system.
This was not entirely unexpected. Martian astronomers had tracked the movement of the dust cloud for days before its arrival. There was some general excitement about the event. Sulean had been granted permission to climb the stairs to a high parapet of Bar Kea Desert Station, which had served as a fortress in the last of the wars five hundred years ago, to watch the fiery infall.
There had been no such event in two lifetimes, and Sulean wasn't the only one who climbed up on the walls to watch. Bar Kea Station had been built with its back to the spine of the Omod Mountains, and the dry southern plains, where much of the debris would fall, stretched roadless and mysterious in the starlight. That night the sky was shot through with falling stars like threaded fire, and Sulean stared at the show with rapt attention until an unwelcome sleepiness overcame her and one of her minders put a hand on her shoulder and escorted her back to bed.
Esh had come up to the parapet too, and although he watched the green and golden glow of the infalling debris he betrayed no reaction.
Back in bed Sulean found her sleepiness had evaporated. She lay awake for a long time thinking of what she had seen. She thought about the accumulated debris of Ab-ashken devices, things that ate ice and rock and lived and died over the course of long millennia in lonely places far from the sun, the remnants of them burning as they fell through the atmosphere. In some of these events enough of the debris had survived that it began a kind of abortive new life—the history books described curious growths of an incomplete and oddly mechanical nature, unsuited to the heat and (to them) corrosive air of this planet. Would that happen again? If so, would she witness it? Astronomers said the bulk of the material would fall not terribly far from Bar Kea Station. Fascinated as she was by the Hypotheticals, Sulean longed to see a living example.
So, apparently, did Esh.
There was considerable excitement in the station the next morning. Esh was in an agitated state—had cried for the first time since infancy, and one of his tenders had found him knocking his head against the southern wall of his sleeping chamber. Some invisible influence had shattered his customary complacency.
Sulean wanted to see him—demanded to be allowed to see him, when she heard the news—but she was refused, for days on end. Doctors were called in to examine Esh. The boy slipped in and out of fevers and deep, impenetrable sleeps. Whenever he was awake he demanded to be allowed to go outside.
He had stopped eating, and by the time Sulean was allowed into his chamber she hardly recognized him. Esh had been chubby, round-cheeked, young for his age. Now he had grown gaunt, and his eyes, strangely flecked with gold, had retreated into the bony contours of his skull.
She asked him what was wrong, not expecting an answer, but he startled her by saying, "I want to go see them."
"What? Who? Who do you want to see?"
"The Ab-ashken."
The boy's timid voice made the word sound even stranger than it otherwise might have. Sulean felt a chill creep up from the small of her spine to the crown of her head.
"What do you mean, you want to go see them?"
"Out in the desert," Esh said.
"There's nothing out there."
"Yes, there is. The Ab-ashken."
Then he began to cry, and Sulean had to leave the room. The nurse who had been attending Esh followed her into the corridor and said. "He's been asking for days to leave the building. But this is the first time he mentioned the Ab-ashken."
Were they really out there, the Hypotheticals, the Ab-ashken, or at least the fragmentary remains of them? Sulean posed the question to one of her caretakers, a fragile elder who had been an astronomer before he became a Fourth. Yes, he said, there had been some activity to the south, and he showed her a set of aerial photographs that had been taken over the previous few days.
Here was a wasteland not very different from the landscape beyond the gates of Bar Kea Station—sand, dust, and rocks. But cradled in a broad declivity was a clump of objects so unnatural as to defy description. Half-built, crazily incomplete things, it seemed to Sulean—brightly-colored pipes, silvered hexagonal mirrors, chambered spheres, many of these things linked to one another like the parts of an enormous, impossible insect.
"This must be where he wants to go," Sulean said.
"Possibly. But we can't allow that. The risk is too great. He might come to harm."
"He's coming to harm here. He looks like he's dying!"
Her tutor shrugged. "The decision's neither mine nor yours."
Perhaps not. But Sulean was afraid for Esh. As a friend he wasn't much, but he was all she had. He shouldn't be held captive against his will, and Sulean longed to release him. She tried to imagine how she might do that, how she might sneak into his room and smuggle him outside… but the corridors of Bar Kea Station were never empty, and Esh was always under guard.
Nor was she often allowed to see him, and Sulean's life seemed empty without his mute presence. Sometimes she walked past his room and winced when she heard him crying or shouting.
The situation remained unchanged for more endless, sunny days. Out in the wasteland, her tutor said, the Ab-ashken growths had bloomed and were beginning to wither, unsuited as they were to this environment. But Esh's frantic anxiety only increased.
* * * * *
Dr. Dvali said, "These growths, were they dangerous?"
"No. There was never anything more than a temporary kind of life to them."
Like hothouse flowers, Sulean thought, transplanted to the wrong climate and soil.
* * * * *
The last time she saw Esh alive was a day later.
Sulean was outside that morning, walking where she used to walk with him. Her minder stood at a discreet distance, mindful that Sulean was troubled and might want time to herself.
It was another sunny day. The rocks cast deep shadows across the sand. Sulean wandered aimlessly near the Station's gates, not really thinking about anything—in fact trying hard not to think about Esh—when she saw him, as startling as a mirage, squatting in the shade of a boulder looking south.
This was inexplicable. Sulean glanced back at her minder, another venerable Fourth. He had paused to rest in the shade of Bar Kea Station's southern wall. The old Fourth had not seen Esh, and Sulean did nothing to betray his presence.
She walked slowly closer, careful not to hurry and make herself conspicuous. Esh looked up plaintively from his hiding place.
She bent down as if examining a piece of shale or a scuttling sandbug and whispered, "How did you get away?"
"Don't tell," Esh demanded.
"I won't, of course I won't. But how—"
"No one was looking. I stole a robe," he added, lifting his arms in the voluminous whiteness of some larger person's desert garb. "I came over the north parapet where it touches the rock wall and climbed down."
"But what are you doing out here? It'll be dark in a couple of hours."
"I'm doing what I have to."
"You need food and water."
"I can do without."
"No you can't." Sulean insisted on giving him her water bottle, which she always carried when she left the shelter of the Station, and a bar of pressed meal she had been saving for herself.
"They'll know I'm gone," Esh said. "Don't tell them you saw me."
This was more conversation than Sulean had ever had with Esh, a comparative flood of words. She said, "I will. I mean, I won't. I won't tell anyone."
"Thank you, Sulean."
Another startling novelty: the first time he had ever said her name, maybe the first time he had said anyone's name. This wasn't just Esh crouching in the sand in front of her, this was Esh plus something else.
The Ab-ashken, Sulean thought.
The Hypotheticals were inside him, looking out through his altered eyes.
Somewhere in the Station a bell began to ring, and Sulean's sleepy minder looked alert and called her name. "Run," she whispered.
But she didn't wait to see if the boy took her advice. She turned back to the Station, pretending nothing had happened, and went to her keeper, and said nothing at all, as if the silence in which Esh had dwelt for so many years had entered her throat and stilled her voice.
* * * * *
"What was it he wanted?" Dvali asked. "To find the fallen artifacts, presumably—but what then?"
"I don't know," Sulean said. "I suppose like calls to like. The same instinct or programming that causes the Hypothetical replicators to cluster and share information and reproduce may have operated equally on the boy Esh. The crisis was caused by his proximity to these devices."
"As is Isaac's?" Mrs. Rebka asked.
"Possibly."
"Your people must have asked these questions."
"Without finding any answers, unfortunately."
Dvali said, "You told us the boy died."
"Yes."
"Tell us how."
Sulean thought: Must I? Must I endure this yet again?
Of course she must. Today, as every other day.
* * * * *
He had been gone from the Station for hours and it was well after dark when Suleans resolve broke. Frightened by the thought of Esh alone in the night, and shaken by the anxiety and alarms that ran through the Station like electricity in the absence of the boy, she sought out the man she considered the kindest of her mentors, her astronomy instructor, who used the single name Lochis. She had seen Esh this afternoon, she told him through a gush of guilty tears. When Lochis finally understood, he ordered her to stay where she was while he assembled a search party.
A group of five men and three women, all experienced in the hazards and geography of the desert, left the Station at dawn. They rode in a cart pulled by one of the Station's few large machines—large machines were a luxury on a resource-poor planet—and Sulean was allowed to ride along to point out where she had last seen Esh and perhaps to help convince him to return to the Station, should they find him.
More sophisticated machines, lighter-than-air remote viewing devices and the like, had already been sent from the nearest large city, but they wouldn't arrive for another day. Until then, Lochis told her, it would be a labor of eyesight and intuition. Fortunately Esh had not been able to conceal his tracks, and it was obvious that he was heading for the most concentrated infall of Ab-ashken remains.
As the expedition crossed a line of low hills into the low basinland of the southern desert, Sulean saw the decaying evidence of that infall. The machine-drawn cart passed close to a clump of dried and decaying… well, things, was the only word Sulean could apply to it. A wide-mouthed tube, yellowish-white and more than two people high, towered over a cluster of orbs, pyramids, and slivered mirrors. All these things had simply grown out of the pebbly desert floor and died. Or almost died. A few feathery tendrils, like enormous bird feathers, stirred feebly amidst the surrealistic rubble. Or maybe it was the faint dry wind that made them move.
Suleans first confrontation with the Hypothetical had been when she looked into Esh's altered eyes. This was her second. She shivered despite the heat and shrank back against Lochis's protective bulk.
"Don't be afraid," he said. "There's nothing dangerous here."
But she wasn't afraid, not exactly. It was a different emotion that had overtaken her. Fascination, dread—some dizzying combination of the two. Here were pieces of the Ab-ashken, fragments of things that had overgrown the stars themselves, bone and sinew from the body of a god.
"It's as if I can feel them," she whispered.
Or perhaps it was her own future she felt, bearing down on her like the waters of a swollen river.
* * * * *
"Again, Ms. Moi," Dr. Dvali said sternly. "How did the boy die?"
Sulean allowed a few moments to tick away in the silence of the common room. It was late. All was quiet. She imagined she could hear the sound of the desert wind pulsing in her ears.
"It was probably exhaustion that brought him to a stop. We found him at last in a small depression, invisible until we came very close. He was prostrate, barely breathing. All around him…"
She hated this image. It had haunted her all her long life.
"Go on," Dvali said.
"All around him, things had grown. He was enclosed in a sort of grove of Hypothetical remnants. They were spiky, dangerous-looking things, spears of some brittle green substance, incomplete, of course, obviously not sustainable, but still motile… still alive, if you accept that description."
"And they had surrounded him?" Mrs. Rebka asked, her voice gentler now.
"Or they had grown up around him while he slept, or he had deliberately gone to them. Some of them had… pierced him." She touched her ribs, her abdomen, to show them where.
"Killed him?"
"He was still conscious when we found him."
* * * * *
Sulean had torn herself away from Lochis and run thoughtlessly toward Esh, who was impaled on the picket of alien growths. She ignored the frightened voices calling her back.
Because this was her fault. She should never have helped Esh escape the Station. As unhappy as he had been there, he had at least been safe. Now something dreadful had overtaken him.
She felt no particular fear of the Ab-ashken growths, peculiar as they were. They had grown around the boy's body like a ring of sharpened fenceposts. She could smell them, although she was barely aware of it—a sharply chemical smell, sulfurous and rank. The growths were not healthy; they were mazed with cracks and fissures and in places blackened with something like rot. Their stalks shifted slightly when she moved among them, as if they were aware of her presence. And maybe they were.
They were certainly aware of Esh. Several of the tallest growths had arched into half-circles and pierced the boy with their sharpened tips. They had penetrated his chest and abdomen in three places, leaving little circles of dry blood on his clothing. Sulean couldn't tell at first whether he was dead or, somehow, still alive.
Then he opened his eyes and looked at her and—impossibly—smiled.
"Sulean," he said. "I found it."
Then he closed his eyes for the last time.
* * * * *
The silence in the common room was interrupted by a timid knock.
There was only one person at the commune who hadn't attended this meeting. Mrs. Rebka hurried to open the door.
Isaac stood outside, still wearing his night clothes, the knees of his pajamas soiled, his hands dirty, his expression somber.
"Someone's coming," he said.