Of course she knew that. She had held his dying body in her arms, sick with the knowledge that she had helped him escape to the desert, to the thing he had so desperately wanted, the same thing Isaac wanted, which was the Hypotheticals, which was death.

She said, "But you can speak in his voice."

"Because I remember him."

"You remember him?"

"That is, he—I don't know how to explain!"

The boy was becoming anxious. Sulean suppressed her own terror and forced what she hoped was a reassuring smile. "You don't have to explain. It's a mystery. I don't understand it either. Just tell me how it feels."

"I know what I am, I know what they made me to be, Dr. Dvali, Mrs. Rebka, they want me to talk to the Hypotheticals, but I can't do that. I'm sorry, but I can't. But there's something in me—" He pointed to his ribs. "And out there—" The desert. "—something that remembers a million things and Esh is only one of them, but because he's like me it remembers him to me—I mean—"

Sulean stroked the boy's head. His hair was lank and gritty. All this traveling and no water for baths.

Poor child. "Please don't be upset."

"The thing in me remembers Esh and I remember what Esh remembered. I look at you and I see both."

"Both?"

"The way you are now. And the way you were then."

Quite a contrast, Sulean imagined.

"And Esh can see me, too?"

"No, I told you, he's dead, he can't see anything. He's not here. But I know what he would say if he was here."

"And what would he say, Isaac?"

"He would say," and Isaac slipped into the Martian language again, his inflections shockingly familiar even after all these long and arduous years: "He would say, Hello, big sister."

Esh's voice, undeniably.

"And he would say…"

"What? Tell me."

"He would say, Don't be afraid."

Oh, but that I cannot do, Sulean thought, and she retreated from the bed, almost to the door where, although she had not heard him arrive, Dr. Dvali was standing and listening, his face red with an emotion that was as much jealousy as anger.

* * * * *

"How long have you known this about him?"

Dvali had insisted on walking a short distance from the truck stop, away from the others, into the intimidating landscape that had surrounded them for days, as if the deserts of Mars had been re-created on this hotter alien world. A huge sky domed the evening emptiness, and of the works of man there was only the most tawdry.

Esh, Esh, she thought. Such a distance to come to hear his voice again. "A few weeks," she managed to say.

"Weeks! And were you planning to share this information with us?"

"There was never any information. Only a possibility."

"The significant possibility that Isaac is somehow sharing memories with your Martian experiment, this Esh—"