"Because they're crazy, Turk. They sound rational, but they have this big carnival of craziness planned. I don't want any part of it."

Turk went to the window just to make sure the stars hadn't exploded or anything, because she was right, lunacy was on the march. But there was only the central Equatorian desert stretched out under its meager moon. That was a sight to make you feel small, he thought, that desert.

And another little tremor rattled the useless lamp on the side table.

* * * * *

Isaac felt the tremor but it didn't quite wake him. He had been sleeping a lot lately. He had lost some of his ability to distinguish between sleeping and waking.

The clock of the stars turned relentlessly inside him. In the darkness he dreamed things for which he had no words. There were many things for which he had no words. And there were words he knew but didn't understand and couldn't define: for instance, love.

I love you, Mrs. Rebka had whispered to him when no one but Isaac could hear.

He hadn't known what to say in return. But that was all right. She didn't seem to need an answer. I love you, Isaac, my only son, she had whispered, and then turned her face away.

What did that mean?

What did it mean when he closed his eyes and saw the cycling stars or the banked fires of an invisible thing deep in the western desert? What did it mean that he felt its liveliness and power?

What did it mean that he could hear a million voices, more voices than there were stars in the sky? What did it mean that out of that multitude he could call up the voice of Esh, a dead Martian boy? Was he remembering Esh or was something remembering Esh through him—remembering Esh's voice with the air in Isaac's lungs?

Because—and here was something Isaac did know—the act to which he had been summoned, to which all the tumbling fragments of Hypothetical machinery had been summoned from their lazy courses in the sky, was a remembering.

A remembering larger than the world itself.

He felt it coming. The crust of the planet trembled, its shivering rose up through the foundation of this old building, through the floor, the joists, the beams, through the bed frame and the mattress, until Isaac trembled along with it, the motion filling him with a heatless joy, memory and annihilation advancing with giant steps, with strides as long as continents, until at last he asked himself: Is this love?

PART FIVE

IN THE COMPANY OF THE UNSPEAKABLE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

They had reached the outskirts of the oil concessions—the desolate, thin end of nowhere—when the third and most intense ashfall began.