"Don't you miss the world?" He is quiet; so is she. Both ride spirals of memory. "I have the whole world right here," he says, and taps the cover of Darwin, "And in my radios. Right at my fingertips." Her uncle seems almost a child, monastic in the modesty of his needs and wholly independent of any sort of temporal obligations. And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind."