Which was true. But still, Turk thought. She's here because of me. The chorus of his biography appeared to him as if conjured by the untrustworthy light: lost or purloined lovers, friends become enemies, friends damaged or killed in bar fights or shipboard accidents. See my bridges burning, he thought. See my trail of tears. He didn't want that for Lise. He didn't want to drag her beyond the boundaries of the kind of life she might still make for herself, a life in which kindness was not fleeting and there was the possibility of something more meaningful than nights sealed in the cockpit of an aircraft, months bunking below the deck of some stinking freighter, years locked in the castle of his own head while she waited for what he could not provide and grew disappointed and finally bitter.

He would find her a way out of this jungle, he thought, and then, if he could summon the requisite courage or cruelty, he would find a way to leave her.

* * * * *

It is a communication, Avram Dvali thought.

He thought: There is no denying it. The Hypotheticals were all around him, a small but significant fraction of the network that comprised their incomprehensibly vast intelligence. All process, the dogmatic Martian woman had said during one of their arguments, of no more significance than the flowering of club moss or periwinkles; put it together any way you liked, it was only evolution, mindless as the sea. But she was wrong. He felt it. He did not, could not, understand how these organisms grew or what nourishment they derived from the parched earth, but communication passed between, of that he was sure; they had not grown randomly, but at some precipitative signal.

He had been watching the canopy of the forest. The clustered globes shifted color constantly, and it seemed to him that each globe's color was affected by the changes in its immediate neighbors, perhaps according to some rule or set of rules, so that patterns traveled through the forest like flocks of intangible birds. This was communication in the sense that cells in the human brain communicated one with another and in concert produced the emergent phenomenon of mind. He was walking through the physical architecture, perhaps, of some great thought, a thought he could never comprehend…

Though perhaps Isaac could. If Isaac was alive, and if he understood, finally, the nature of the gift Avram Dvali had given him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

It was warm in the ruined stockroom, and although most of the dust had settled out of the air—seemed to have been absorbed, somehow, into the rubble—no fresh air flowed into the enclosed space. Sooner or later, Sulean Moi thought, and most likely sooner, that would become a problem. And there was the body of Diane Dupree to think about. If she could tolerate such thoughts.