It was almost dark when she got home. September now, the days getting shorter, though it was still hotter than high August. She checked for any fresh message from Bose. There was one, but it was only another installment of Orrin’s notebook.

Her phone buzzed while she was microwaving dinner. She picked up without looking at the display, expecting Bose, but the voice on the other end was unfamiliar. “Dr. Cole? Sandra Cole?”

“Yes?” Feeling wary, though she couldn’t say why.

“I hope you had a rewarding visit with your brother today.”

“Who is this?”

“Someone with your best interests at heart.”

She was conscious of the fear that began in her belly and traveled up her spine and seemed to lodge, somehow, in her heart. This is not good, she thought. But she didn’t put down the phone. She waited, listening.

Chapter Thirteen. Sandra and Bose

CHAPTER TWELVE

TURK’S STORY

1.

“What is majestic about them,” Oscar was saying, “almost incomprehensibly majestic, is their physical structure—trillions upon trillions of diverse components, from the microscopic to the very large, distributed over an entire galaxy! A human body is trivial, less than microscopic by comparison. And yet we matter to them! In some way, we’re a significant part of their existence.” He wore the abstracted smile of a man contemplating a sacred vision. “And they know we’re here, and they’re coming to meet us.”

He was talking about the Hypotheticals.

For the first time, Oscar had invited me to his home. Before today I hadn’t really envisioned Oscar having either a home or a family. But he had both, and he wanted me to see them. His home was a low, pleasant wood and stone structure deep in one of the starboard tiers of Vox Core, set around with delicate thin-leafed trees. The members of his family present when I visited were three women and two children. The children, his daughters, were eight and ten years of age. One of the women was his permanent partner; the other two were more distant members of the family—the Voxish language had a word for the relationship but Oscar said it wasn’t easy to translate into English; we settled on “cousins.” The family shared a meal of braised fish and vegetables, during which I answered polite questions about the twenty-first century; then the cousins escorted the noisy daughters away. Oscar’s partner, a mild-eyed woman named Brion (with the customary string of titles and honorifics), lingered after dinner but eventually excused herself. Which left Oscar talking to me about the Hypotheticals as the artificial daylight faded to dusk.

It wasn’t just casual conversation. I began to understand that Oscar had invited me here to pose a difficult question or make some onerous demand.

“Even if they know about us,” I said, “what’s that mean?”