"Let's say her successes have been modest. There are Fourths and Fourths. Those of us who are sympathetic to her goals have funded and encouraged her over the years. Others resent her meddling."

"Meddling in what?"

"In their efforts to create a human being who can communicate with the Hypothetical."

* * * * *

"I know how grotesque that must sound," Diane Dupree said. "But it's true." She added, in a more subdued voice, "It's what killed my brother Jason."

What made this unquestionable, Lise thought, was the woman's obvious sincerity. That, and the wind rattling the blinds, and the human noise of the villagers going about their business, a dog barking aimlessly in the distance, Turk sipping his ice water as if these assertions were old news.

"That was how Jason Lawton died?" In the books Lise had read, Jason Lawton had been a casualty of the anarchic last days of the Spin. Hundreds of thousands had died in the panic.

"The process," Diane said calmly, "is deadly in an adult. It rebuilds much of the human nervous system and it renders it vulnerable to further manipulation by the networked intelligences of the Hypotheticals.

There is—well, a sort of communication can take place. But it kills the communicant. Theoretically, the procedure might be more stable if it was applied to a human fetus in vivo. An unborn child in the womb."

"But that would be—"

"Indefensible," Diane said. "Morally and ethically monstrous. But it's been a terrible temptation for one faction of our community. It holds out the possibility of a real understanding of the mystery of the Hypotheticals, what they want from us and why they've done what they've done. And maybe something more, not just communication but a sort of communion. Commingling the human and the divine, if I can use those words."

"And the Martians want to stop this from happening?"

Diane looked subtly ashamed. "The Martian Fourths were the first to try it."

"What—they modified a human fetus?"

"The project was unsuccessful. The child didn't survive past puberty. The experiment was conducted by the same group of ascetic Fourths who raised Sulean Moi—she was there when the child died."

"The Martians allowed this?"

"Only once. Sulean Moi meant to prevent the same thing happening among our own Fourths, who are even less constrained by law and custom—or to interrupt the process if it had already begun."

The breeze was warm, but Lise shivered. "And has it? Begun, I mean?"

"The technology and the pharmaceuticals were distributed by Jason along with everything else Wun Ngo Wen brought to Earth. We've had the capability for decades, but there was no real interest in pursuing it except among a few… you might say, rogue groups."

"I thought Fourths had some kind of built-in inhibition," Turk said. "For instance, Tomas. Once he took the treatment he stopped drinking anything stronger than beer and he quit picking bar fights."