Nor was she often allowed to see him, and Sulean's life seemed empty without his mute presence. Sometimes she walked past his room and winced when she heard him crying or shouting.
The situation remained unchanged for more endless, sunny days. Out in the wasteland, her tutor said, the Ab-ashken growths had bloomed and were beginning to wither, unsuited as they were to this environment. But Esh's frantic anxiety only increased.
Dr. Dvali said, 'These growths, were they dangerous?'
'No. There was never anything more than a temporary kind of life to them.'
Like hothouse flowers, Sulean thought, transplanted to the wrong climate and soil.
The last time she saw Esh alive was a day later.
Sulean was outside that morning, walking where she used to walk with him. Her minder stood at a discreet distance, mindful that Sulean was troubled and might want time to herself.
It was another sunny day. The rocks cast deep shadows across the sand. Sulean wandered aimlessly near the Station's gates, not really thinking about anything—in fact trying hard not to think about Esh—when she saw him, as startling as a mirage, squatting in the shade of a boulder looking south.
This was inexplicable. Sulean glanced back at her minder, another venerable Fourth. He had paused to rest in the shade of Bar Kea Station's southern wall. The old Fourth had not seen Esh, and Sulean did nothing to betray his presence.
She walked slowly closer, careful not to hurry and make herself conspicuous. Esh looked up plaintively from his hiding place.
She bent down as if examining a piece of shale or a scuttling sandbug and whispered, 'How did you get away?'
'Don't tell,' Esh demanded.
'I won't, of course I won't. But how—'
'No one was looking. I stole a robe,' he added, lifting his arms in the voluminous whiteness of some larger person's desert garb. 'I came over the north parapet where it touches the rock wall and climbed down.'
'But what are you doing out here? It'll be dark in a couple of hours.'
'I'm doing what I have to.'
'You need food and water.'
'I can do without.'
'No you can't.' Sulean insisted on giving him her water bottle, which she always carried when she left the shelter of the Station, and a bar of pressed meal she had been saving for herself.
'They'll know I'm gone,' Esh said. 'Don't tell them you saw me.'
This was more conversation than Sulean had ever had with Esh, a comparative flood of words. She said, 'I will. I mean, I won't. I won't tell anyone.'
'Thank you, Sulean.'
Another startling novelty: the first time he had ever said her name, maybe the first time he had said anyone's name. This wasn't just Esh crouching in the sand in front of her, this was Esh plus something else.
The Hypotheticals were inside him, looking out through his altered eyes.
Somewhere in the Station a bell began to ring, and Sulean's sleepy minder looked alert and called her name. 'Run,' she whispered.
But she didn't wait to see if the boy took her advice. She turned back to the Station, pretending nothing had happened, and went to her keeper, and said nothing at all, as if the silence in which Esh had dwelt for so many years had entered her throat and stilled her voice.
'What was it he wanted?' Dvali asked. 'To find the fallen artifacts, presumably—but what then?'
'I don't know,' Sulean said. 'I suppose like calls to like. The same instinct or programming that causes the Hypothetical replicators to cluster and share information and reproduce may have operated equally on the boy Esh. The crisis was caused by his proximity to these devices.'
'As is Isaac's?' Mrs. Rebka asked.
'Possibly.'
'Your people must have asked these questions.'
'Without finding any answers, unfortunately.'
Dvali said, 'You told us the boy died.'
'Yes.'
'Tell us how.'
Sulean thought: Must I? Must
Of course she must. Today, as every other day.
He had been gone from the Station for hours and it was well after dark when Suleans resolve broke. Frightened by the thought of Esh alone in the night, and shaken by the anxiety and alarms that ran through the Station like electricity in the absence of the boy, she sought out the man she considered the kindest of her mentors, her astronomy instructor, who used the single name Lochis. She had seen Esh this afternoon, she told him through a gush of guilty tears. When Lochis finally understood, he ordered her to stay where she was while he assembled a search party.
A group of five men and three women, all experienced in the hazards and geography of the desert, left the Station at dawn. They rode in a cart pulled by one of the Station's few large machines—large machines were a luxury on a resource-poor planet—and Sulean was allowed to ride along to point out where she had last seen Esh and perhaps to help convince him to return to the Station, should they find him.
More sophisticated machines, lighter-than-air remote viewing devices and the like, had already been sent from the nearest large city, but they wouldn't arrive for another day. Until then, Lochis told her, it would be a labor of eyesight and intuition. Fortunately Esh had not been able to conceal his tracks, and it was obvious that he was heading for the most concentrated infall of Ab-ashken remains.
As the expedition crossed a line of low hills into the low basinland of the southern desert, Sulean saw the decaying evidence of that infall. The machine-drawn cart passed close to a clump of dried and decaying… well,
Suleans first confrontation with the Hypothetical had been when she looked into Esh's altered eyes. This was her second. She shivered despite the heat and shrank back against Lochis's protective bulk.
'Don't be afraid,' he said. 'There's nothing dangerous here.'
But she wasn't afraid, not exactly. It was a different emotion that had overtaken her. Fascination, dread— some dizzying combination of the two. Here were pieces of the Ab-ashken, fragments of things that had overgrown the stars themselves, bone and sinew from the body of a god.
'It's as if I can feel them,' she whispered.
Or perhaps it was her own future she felt, bearing down on her like the waters of a swollen river.
'Again, Ms. Moi,' Dr. Dvali said sternly. 'How did the boy die?'
Sulean allowed a few moments to tick away in the silence of the common room. It was late. All was quiet. She imagined she could hear the sound of the desert wind pulsing in her ears.
'It was probably exhaustion that brought him to a stop. We found him at last in a small depression, invisible until we came very close. He was prostrate, barely breathing. All around him…'
She hated this image. It had haunted her all her long life.
'Go on,' Dvali said.
'All around him, things had grown. He was enclosed in a sort of grove of Hypothetical remnants. They were
