Eventually she went back to her writing. I picked up one of my books (The Collapse of Mars and the Martian Diaspora) and took it to bed with me, remembering what Oscar had said about the “incomprehensible majesty” of the Hypotheticals. The Hypotheticals had created a string of worlds linked by Arches, one end anchored on Earth and the other on Mars, the ten vastly distant habitable planets between them comprising a continuous extended landscape, something the book called a “distributed interstellar topology.” Mars had never been an easy place for human beings to live, despite our engineering of it, and a doorway to greener, kinder worlds had been a gift too great for the Martians to refuse. But without their careful husbandry Mars had reverted to its essential nature as a cold, dry planet—one more hostile desert in a universe that seemed full of them. The Martians, like the Earthlings, had lost a habitable homeworld.

I remembered stories about the Martian ambassador Wun Ngo Wen, who had arrived on Earth during the Spin. His Mars had sounded like a saner place than Earth. The Martians had already tapped Hypothetical technology in a modest way, using it to create their famous longevity treatment. But according to the book they had eventually repudiated that and every other form of Hypothetical technology. Most of the early bionormative philosophers had been Martians, the book said. Not that they opposed biotechnology in itself—the first cortical democracies had been Martian inventions—but they insisted on restricting themselves to human biotech, which could be fully understood and controlled.

That was a shortsighted and oppressive doctrine, the book suggested.

I had put down the book by the time Allison came to bed. We still slept together, though we hadn’t made love for weeks. It was our unguarded moments that put us most at risk: there was no telling what dangerous inferences the Network might draw from our sighs and gasps. The script we had written for ourselves would play out more plausibly without passionate interludes.

But I missed her, and not just physically. I woke that night and found her mumbling a slurry of English and Voxish words, asleep but not at rest, her eyelids trembling and her face wet with tears, and when I touched her cheek she moaned and turned away.

2.

The day before the expedition was scheduled to leave I visited Isaac Dvali in the medical suite. Oscar insisted on coming with me: he took a professional interest in my interactions with Isaac. “Your presence always has a measurable effect on him,” he told me. “His pulse rate increases when you’re with him. The electrical activity in his brain becomes more intense and more coherent.”

“Maybe he just likes company.”

“No one else has this effect on him.”

“Could be he recognizes me.”

“I’m sure he does,” Oscar said. “In one way or another.”