Isaac’s condition had improved considerably and most of the life-support machines that had been attached to him had been taken away. A crowd of physicians and nurses still hovered out of earshot, but he ignored them and looked directly at me.

He could do that now. The reconstruction of his ruined head and body was almost complete. The flesh on the left side of his skull was still translucent, and when he opened his mouth I could see the hinge of his jaw moving like a crab in a milky tide pool. But his new left eye had lost its bloodshot opacity and it focused in tandem with the other. I took a step toward the chair where he was reclining. “Hey, Isaac,” I said.

His jaw did its crab-dance under a veil of capillaries. “Tuh,” he managed to say. “Tuh-tuh—”

“It’s me, it’s Turk.”

“Turk!” He nearly shouted it.

One of the Voxish physicians whispered to Oscar, who translated: “Isaac’s voluntary motor functions are much better now but his impulse control is still very poor—”

“SHUT UP!” Isaac screeched.

Isaac had been touched hard by the Hypotheticals, which made him the next best thing to a living god. I tried to imagine how Oscar felt, being chastised by a deity with poor impulse control.

“Hey, I’m here,” I said. “Right here, Isaac.”

But the effort at speech had already wearied him. His eyelids went to half-mast. His arms trembled against the restraints that bound him to his chair. I looked over my shoulder and said, “Does he really need to be tied down?”

More consultation with the Voxish physicians; then Oscar said in a barely audible whisper, “Yes, I’m afraid so, for his own safety. At this stage of his recovery he could easily hurt himself.”

“You mind if I stay a while longer?”

I had addressed the question to Isaac, but it was Oscar who fetched me a chair. When I sat down Isaac’s eyes veered nervously until they found me again. An expression that might have been anxiety or relief played over his pale face.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I told him. He trembled against his restraints.

“He responds positively to the sound of your voice,” one of the physicians suggested.

So I talked. I talked to Isaac for most of an hour, registering his occasional grunts as encouragement. Since I wasn’t sure how much he understood about Vox or how he’d got here, that was what I talked about. I told him how we had been taken up by the temporal Arch in the Equatorian desert and how we had come to Vox after a passage of ten thousand years. We were back on Earth now, I said—Vox had some business to attend to here—but Earth had suffered considerably in all the centuries we’d been gone.