“I’m sorry,” I said. I inhaled deeply, then let it out slowly. “Yes,” I said, nodding slightly. “I want an honest answer.”

The Wreed rotated 180 degrees, so that its back was facing me — that’s when I first got a glimpse of its rear hand. I later learned that if a Wreed faced you with its opposite side, it was about to say something particularly candid. His yellow belt had an identical buckle on its back, and he touched it. “This symbolizes my religion,” he said. “A galaxy of blood — a galaxy of life.” He paused. “If God did not directly create cancer, then to berate him/her/it for its existence is unjust. And if he/she/it did create it, then he/she/it did so because it is necessary. Your death may serve no purpose for yourself or your family. But if it does serve some purpose in the creator’s plan, you should be grateful that, regardless of what pain you might feel, you are part of something that does have meaning.”

“I don’t feel grateful,” I said. “I feel cursed.”

The Wreed did something astonishing. It turned back around and reached out with its nine-fingered hand. My skin tingled as the force fields making up the avatar’s arm touched my own hand. The nine fingers squeezed gently. “Since your cancer is unavoidable,” said the synthesized voice, “perhaps you would find more peace if you believed what I believe rather than what you believe.”

I had no answer for that.

“And now,” said T’kna, “I must disengage; time it is again to attempt to communicate with God.”

The Wreed wavered and vanished.

I merely wavered.

14

A reconstruction . . .

Half a city away, down by the shore of Lake Ontario, Cooter Falsey was sitting in a dingy motel room’s overstuffed easy chair, hugging his knees and whimpering softly. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said, over and over, almost as if it were a mantra, a prayer. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Falsey was twenty-six, thin, blond, with a crew cut and teeth that should have received braces but never had.

J. D. Ewell sat down on the bed, facing Falsey. He was ten years older than Cooter, with a pinched face and longer dark hair. “Listen to me,” he said gently. Then, more forcefully: “Listen to me!”

Falsey looked up, his eyes red.

“There,” said Ewell. “That’s better.”

“He’s dead,” said Falsey. “That man on the radio said it: the doctor is dead.”

Ewell shrugged. “An eye for an eye, you know?”

“I never wanted to kill anybody,” said Falsey.

“I know,” said Ewell. “But that doctor, he was doing the devil’s work. You know that, Cooter. God will forgive you.”

Falsey seemed to consider this. “You think?”

“Of course,” said Ewell. “You and me, we’ll pray for His forgiveness. And He’ll grant it, you know He will.”

“What’ll happen to us if they catch us here?”

“Nobody’s going to catch us, Cooter. Don’t you worry about that.”

“When can we go home?” Falsey said. “I don’t like being in a foreign country. It was bad enough coming up to Buffalo, but at least that was the States. If we get caught, who knows what the Canucks will do to us. They might never let us go home.”

Ewell thought about mentioning that at least Canada had no death penalty, but decided not to. Instead, he said, “We can’t go back across the border yet. You heard the news report: they’ve already figured it was the same guys who did that clinic in Buffalo. Best we stay up here for a piece.”

“I want to go home,” said Falsey.

“Trust me,” said Ewell. “It’s better we stay awhile.” He paused, wondering if it was time to broach the topic yet. “Besides, there’s one more job we’ve got to do up here.”

“I don’t want to kill anybody again. I won’t — I can’t do that, J. D. I can’t.”

“I know,” said Ewell. He reached out, stroked Falsey’s arm. “I know. But you won’t have to, I promise.”

“You don’t know that,” said Falsey. “You can’t be sure.”

“Yes, I can,” said Ewell. “You don’t have to worry about killing anybody this time — because this time what we’re going after is already dead.”

“Well, that was a baffling conversation,” I said, turning to Hollus after the Wreed had disappeared from the conference room.

Hollus’s eyestalks did an S-ripple. “You can see why I like talking to you so much, Tom. At least I can understand you.”

“T’kna’s voice was translated, it seemed, by a computer.”

“Yes,” said Hollus. “Wreeds do not speak in a linear fashion. Rather, the words are woven together in a complex way that is utterly nonintuitive to us. The computer has to wait until they have finished speaking, then try to decipher their meaning.”

I thought about this. “Is it something like those word puzzles? You know, the ones in which we write ‘he himself,’ but decode it as the word ‘he’ is adjacent to the word ‘himself,’ and read that as ‘he is beside himself,’ and then take that metaphorically to mean ‘he was in a state of extreme excitement or agitation.”’

“I have not encountered such puzzles, but, yes, I suppose they are vaguely similar,” said Hollus, “but with much more complex thoughts, and much more intricate relationships between the words. Context sensitivity is extremely important to the Wreeds; words mean entirely different things depending on where they are positioned. They also have a language full of synonyms that seem to mean exactly the same things, but only one of which is appropriate at any given time. It took us years to learn to communicate verbally with Wreeds; only a few of my people — and I am not one of them — can do it without a computer’s aid. But even beyond the mere syntactic structures, Wreeds are different from humans and Forhilnors. They fundamentally do not think the same way we do.”

“What’s different about it?” I asked.

“Did you notice their digits?” asked Hollus.

“You mean their fingers? Yes. I counted twenty-three.”

“You counted them, yes,” said the Forhilnor. “That is what I had to do the first time I met a Wreed, too. But a Wreed would not have had to count. It would have simply known there were twenty-three.”

“Well, they are its fingers . . . ,” I said.

“No, no, no. It would not have had to count because it can perceive that level of cardinality at a glance.” He bounced his torso. “It is amusing,” he said, “but I have perhaps studied more human psychology than you have — not that it is my field, but . . .” He paused again. “That is another non-Wreed concept: the idea of having a specialized field of endeavor.”

“You’re making about as much sense as T’kna did,” I said, shaking my head.

“You are correct; sorry. Let me attempt this passage again. I have studied human psychology — as much as one can from monitoring your radio and TV broadcasts. You said you counted twenty-three fingers on T’kna, and doubtless you did. You mentally said to yourself, one, two, three, et cetera, et cetera, all the way up to twenty-three. And, if you are like me, you probably had to redo the counting, just to be sure you had not got it wrong the first time.”

I nodded; I had indeed done that.

“Well, if I showed you one object — one rock, say — you would not have to count it. You would just perceive its cardinality: you would know there was one object. The same thing happens with two objects. You just look at the pair of rocks and in a single glance, without any processing, you perceive that there are two of them present. You can do the same with three, four, or five items, if you are an average human. It is only when confronted with six or more items that you actually start counting them.”

“How do you know this?”

“I watched a program about it on the Discovery Channel.”

“All right. But how was this originally determined?”