This mystery of life is a holy thing. It is our freedom. We have shot out of physical reality, we exist now in a kind of godlike freedom, and the mystery is integral to it.

No. We are still physical reality. Atoms in their rounds. Determined on most scales, random on some others.

Ah well. We disagree. But either way, the scientist’s job is to explore everything. No matter the difficulties! To stay open, to accept ambiguity. To attempt to fuse with the object of knowledge. To admit that there are values shot through the whole enterprise. To love it. To work toward discovering the values by which we should live. To work to enact those values in the world. To explore— and more than that— to create!

I’ll have to think about that.

1

Observation is never enough. Besides it wasn’t their experiment anyway. Desmond came to Dorsa Brevia, and Sax went to find him. “Is Peter still flying?”

“Why yes. He spends a fair amount of time in space, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yes. Can you get me in touch with him?”

“Sure I can.” Quizzical expression on Desmond’s cracked face. “Your speech is getting better and better, Sax. What have they been doing to you?”

“Gerontological treatments. Also growth hormone, L-dopa, serotonin, other chemicals. Stuff out of starfish.”

“Grew you a new brain, did they?”

“Yes. Parts anyway. Synergic synaptic stimulus. Also a lot of talking with Michel.”

“Uh-oh!”

“It’s still me.”

Desmond’s laugh was an animal noise. “I can see that. Listen, I’ll be off again in a couple days, and I’ll take you to Peter’s airport.”

“Thanks.”

• • •

Grew a new brain. Not an accurate way of putting it. The lesion had been sustained in the posterior third of the inferior frontal convolution. Tissues dead as a result of interruption of focused ultrasound memory-speech stimulation during interrogation. A stroke. Broca’s aphasia. Difficulty with motor apparatus of speech, little melody, difficulty in initiating utterances, reduction to telegramese, mostly nouns and simplest forms of verbs. A battery of tests determined that most other cognitive functions were unimpaired. He wasn’t so sure; he had understood people speaking to him, his thinking had been much the same as far as he could tell, and he had had no trouble with the spatial and other nonlinguistic tests. But when he tried to talk, sudden betrayal— in the mouth and in the mind. Things lost their names.

Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the six surfaces of revolution symmetrical around an axis, the plane, the sphere, the cylinder, the catenoid, the unduloid, and the nodoid; shapes without the names, but the shapes alone were like names. Spatializing language.