Once we passed the airlock he stripped off his gear. His upper body had sustained a number of small cuts, none of them deep or life-threatening. He told me where to find a medical kit, and I smeared his wounds with something that stopped the bleeding.

A few of the tiny crystalline butterflies—dead or dormant—were still clinging to his discarded survival gear. Oscar emptied a ration box, tweezed one of the dead butterflies between his thumb and forefinger and dropped it inside. A sample for analysis, he said. Then we dumped the rest of our tattered clothes out the airlock.

*   *   *

“They didn’t touch you,” Oscar said, once we were aloft and the aircraft was following a programmed route to Vox.

What had been a crowded crew cabin on the flight out now seemed grimly and cavernously empty. The air, our bodies, even the fresh clothing we put on all reeked of hydrogen sulfide.

“No…”

“Because they recognized you.” His voice had been reduced to a shocked querulousness.

“I don’t know what that means, Oscar.”

“Obviously, they recognized you because you were Uptaken.”

“I don’t understand what happened any more than you do. But I’m not Isaac—I don’t have any Hypothetical biotech inside me.”

“Mr. Findley,” he said, “are you still denying it, even now? A human body doesn’t pass through a temporal Arch the way it might pass through one of the spatial Arches. We know this from many years of study. You weren’t preserved, like a frozen vegetable. In all likelihood you were re-created from stored information. The reconstruction may seem flawless to human eyes and human instruments. But they know you for one of their own.”

I was too exhausted to argue. Oscar was clinging to one of the few expectations this encounter had actually borne out: that the Hypotheticals had recognized me and singled me out for salvation. He believed he had survived because I was beside him, helping him. He imagined he had been saved, in other words, by a truculent and stupid demigod.

Chapter Sixteen. Turk’s Story

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SANDRA AND BOSE

Sandra arrived at the State Care intake facility at noon. The parking lot was silvered with heat mirages and the air was thick and oppressive, worse, if that was possible, than yesterday. The guard manning the desk at the entrance—his name was Teddy—sat basking in the breeze from a small rotary fan, but he stood up hastily when he recognized Sandra. “Dr. Cole! Hi! Hey, listen, I’m sorry, but I have instructions not to let you pass—”

“That’s okay, Teddy. Give Dr. Congreve a call and tell him I’m here and that I’d like to speak to him.”