Someplace where they could take care of the boy, Lise hoped. He was a strange-looking child. His hair was rusty red, cut short by whoever passed for the compounds barber, probably Mrs. Rebka with a pair of kitchen scissors. His eyes were widely spaced, giving him a birdlike aspect, and the pupils were flecked with gold. He hadn't said much all day, and most of that had been in the morning, but he was uncomfortable in some way Lise couldn't quite understand: whenever the road curved he would either frown and moan or sigh with relief. By late afternoon he was feverish—"again," she heard Mrs. Rebka say.

Now Isaac was sleeping'in one of the rear seats of the car, windows open to let the alpine air flow through. Hot day, but the sunlight had grown horizontal, and she had been told the air might turn uncomfortably cold during the night. There were only six sleeping bags in the vehicle but they were the expensive kind, thermally efficient, and someone could sleep in the car if necessary. It didn't seem likely to rain but Turk had already strung a tarp among the trees for what meager protection or concealment it could offer.

She stirred the pot of stew while Turk made coffee. "It's too bad about the plane."

"I would have lost it anyway."

"What are you going to do when you get back to the coast?"

"Depends," he said.

"On what?"

"A lot of things." He looked at her as if from a distance, squinting. "Probably go back to sea… if nothing else turns up."

"Or we could go back to the States," she said, wondering how he'd read that we. "The legal trouble you were in, that's essentially over, right?"

"It could heat up again."

"So we'll do something else." The pronoun hanging in the air like an unbroken pinata.

"Guess we have to."

We.

* * * * *

They served out dinner while the sun met the horizon in a reddening haze. Turk ate quickly and said little.

Diane Dupree sat on a distant log with the Martian woman Sulean Moi, conversing intently but inaudibly while Mrs. Rebka hovered over Isaac, who had to be coaxed to eat.

Which left Dr. Dvali, and Lise's first real opportunity to speak to him with any degree of privacy. She abandoned Turk to the camp stove and the pots and went to sit next to him. Dvali looked at her querulously, like a large brown bird, but made no objection when she joined him. "You want to talk about your father," he said.

She could only nod.

"We were friends." It was as if Dvali had rehearsed this speech. "What I admired most about your father was that he loved his work, but not in a narrow way. He was in love with it because he saw it in the broader context. Do you know what I mean?"

"No." Yes. But she wanted to hear it from him. "Not exactly"