Sitting there on the cold bench with the rings revolving overhead and the nightly meteor shower increasing in intensity, her shadow thrown across the frost-whitened lawn by the glow of that light and the cupola, Ada realized that it was easier to contemplate one’s own mortality than the death of one’s beloved. This wasn’t a total revelation to her—she had imagined such a perspective before, Ada was very, very good at imagining—but the reality and totality of the feeling itself was a revelation. As with the sense of the new life within her, the sensation of loss and love for Harman infused her—it was somehow, impossibly, larger not only than herself but than her capacity for such a thought or feeling.
Ada had expected to love making love with Harman—with sharing her body with him and learning the pleasure his body could bring her—but she had been amazed to find that as their closeness grew, it was as if each of them had discovered another body—not hers, not his, but something shared and inexplicable. Ada had never discussed this with anyone—not even with Harman, although she knew that he shared the feeling—and it was her opinion that it had taken the Fall to liberate this mystery in human beings.
These last eight months since the Fall should have been a hard, sad time for Ada—the servitors crashed to uselessness, her life of ease and partying gone forever, the world that she had known and grown up in gone forever, her mother—who had refused to come back to the danger of Ardis Hall, staying at the Loman Estate near the eastern coast with two thousand others, dead along with all the others there in the massed voynix attack in the autumn—the disappearance of Ada’s cousin-friend Virginia from her estate outside of Chom above the Arctic Circle, the unprecedented worries about food and warmth and safety and survival, the terrible knowledge that the Firmary was gone forever and that the certainty of ascension to the heaven of the p-ring and e-ring was all a vicious myth, the sobering knowledge that only death awaited them someday and that even the Five Twenties lifespan was not their birthright any more, that they could die at any time…it all should have been terrifying and oppressive to the twenty-seven-year-old woman.
She had been happy. Ada had been happier than at any time in her life. She had been happy with the new challenges and with the need to find courage as well as the need to trust and depend on others for her life. Ada had been happy learning that she loved Harman and that he loved her in some way that their old world of fax-in parties and servitor luxuries and temporary connections between men and women would never have allowed. As unhappy as she was each time he left on a hunting trip or to lead an attack on voynixes or on a sonie voyage to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu or to another ancient site, or on one of his teaching fax-journeys to any of the three-hundred-some other communities of survivors—at least half the humans on Earth dead since the Fall, and there were never a million of us we know now, that number the post-humans had given us centuries ago had always been a lie—she was equally happy every time he returned and gloriously happy every cold, dangerous, uncertain day that he was there at Ardis Hall with her.
She would go on if her beloved Harman was dead—she knew in her heart that she would go on, survive, fight, birth and raise this child, perhaps love again—but she also knew this night that the fierce, gliding joy of the past eight months would be gone forever.
Quit being an idiot, Ada commanded herself.
She rose, adjusted her shawl, and had turned to go into the house when the bell in the gate watchtower rang out, as did the voice of one of the sentries.
“Three people approaching from the forest!”
All the men at the cupola dropped their work, grabbed spears or bows or crossbows, and ran to the walls. The roving sentries from the east and west yards also ran to the ladders and parapets.
Three people. For a moment, Ada stood frozen where she was. Four had left that morning. And they’d had a converted droshky pulled by an ox. They wouldn’t return without the droshky and ox unless something terrible had happened, and if it was just that someone had been injured—say, a twisted ankle or broken leg—they would have used the droshky to transport him or her.
“Three people approaching the north gate,” cried the watchtower guard again. “Open the gate. They’re carrying a body.”
Ada dropped her shawl and ran as fast as she could for the north gate.
23
Hours before the voynix attacked, Harman had the sense that something terrible was going to happen.
This outing hadn’t really been necessary. Odysseus—Noman now, Harman reminded himself, although to him the sturdy man with the salt-and-pepper beard would always be Odysseus—had wanted to bring in fresh meat, track down some of the missing cattle, and reconnoiter the hill country to the north. Petyr suggested that they just use the sonie, but Odysseus argued that even with the leaves off the trees, it was still difficult to see even something as large as a cow from a low-flying sonie. Besides, he wanted to hunt.
“The voynix want to hunt too,” Harman had said. “They’re getting bolder every week.”
Odysseus—Noman—had shrugged.
Harman had come along despite his sure knowledge that everyone on this little expedition had better things to do. Hannah had been working toward an early morning iron pour for the following day and her absence might throw that plan behind schedule. Petyr had been cataloging the hundreds of books brought in during the last two weeks, setting priorities on which should be sigled first. Noman himself had been talking about finally going on his long-delayed solo sonie search for the elusive robotic factory somewhere along the shores of what had once been called Lake Michigan. And Harman would have probably devoted the entire day to his obsessive attempt to penetrate the allnet and discover more functions, although he’d also been considering going to Paris Crater with Daemon to help fetch his friend’s mother.
But Noman—who constantly went on solo hunting expeditions—had wanted to go out with others this time. And poor Hannah, who had been in love with Noman-Odysseus since the day she’d met him on the Golden Gate Bridge at Machu Picchu more than nine months earlier, insisted on coming along. Then Petyr, who had first come to Ardis Hall as a disciple of Odysseus’ before the Fall, back when the old man was still teaching his strange philosophy, but who was now a disciple only of Hannah in the sense that he was helplessly in love with her, had also insisted on going. And finally Harman had agreed to join them because…he wasn’t sure why he had agreed to join them. Perhaps he didn’t want three such star-crossed lovers alone in the woods all day with their weapons.
Later, while walking behind those three in the cold forest and thinking these words, Harman had to smile. He’d run across that phrase—“star-crossed lovers”—only the previous day while reading—visually reading, not function-sigling—Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Harman was drunk on Shakespeare that week, having read three plays in two days. He was surprised he could walk, much less hold a conversation. His mind was filled to overflowing with incredible cadences, a torrent of new vocabulary, and more insight into the complexity of what it meant to be human than he’d ever hoped to achieve. It made him want to weep.
If he wept, he knew with some shame, it would not be for the beauty and power of the plays—the entire concept of staged drama was new to Harman and his postliterate world. No, he’d be weeping because of selfish sorrow over the fact that he’d not encountered such things as Shakespeare until less than three months before his allotted fivescore years was up. Even though he was certain, since he’d helped to destroy it, that the orbital Firmary would be faxing no more old-style humans up to the e-ring on their Fifth Twenty—or on any other Twenty for that matter—ninety-nine years of thinking that his life on earth would end on the stroke of midnight marking his hundredth birthday was a hard mind-set to escape.
As dusk approached, the four of them walked slowly along a cliff’s edge, returning from their fruitless day. Their pace was never faster than the lumbering ox they’d brought along to pull the droshky. Before the Fall, the conveyances ha
d been balanced on one wheel by internal gyroscopes and pulled by voynix, but without internal power now, the damned things couldn’t balance, so the machine-guts and moving parts of each vehicle had been ripped out, the tongues moved farther apart, and a yoke rigged for the ox, while the single, slender center wheel had been replaced by two broader wheels on a newly forged axle. Harman thought the jury-rigged droshkies and carrioles were pathetically crude, but they did represent the first human-built wheeled vehicles in more than fifteen hundred years of nonhistory.
That thought also made him want to weep.
They’d headed about four miles north, walking mostly along the low bluffs overlooking a tributary to the river Harman now knew had once been named the Ekei, and before that the Ohio. The droshky was necessary to transport any deer carcasses they managed to accumulate—although Noman was notorious for walking miles with a dead deer draped over his shoulders—so their progress was slow in the way that only an ox’s progress could be slow.
At times, two of them would stay with the cart while two went into the woods with bows or crossbows. Petyr was carrying a flechette rifle—one of the few firearms at Ardis Hall—but they preferred to hunt with less noisy weapons. Voynix did not have ears, as such, but somehow their hearing was excellent.
All during the morning, the three old-style humans had monitored their palms. For whatever reason, voynix did not show up on the finders, farnet, or the rarely used allnet functions, but they usually did on proxnet. But then again, as Harman and Daeman had learned with Savi nine months earlier in a place called Jerusalem, voynix also used proxnet—to locate humans.
It didn’t matter this day. By noon, all of the functions were down. The four trusted to their eyes, being more careful in the forest, watching the edge of the tree line when moving through meadows and along the line of low bluffs.
The wind out of the northwest was very cold. All of the old distributories had quit working on the day of the Fall, and there had been few heavy garments needed before then anyway, so the three old-style humans were wearing rudely fashioned coats and cloaks of wool or animal hides. Odysseus…Noman…seemed impervious to the cold and wore the same chest armor and short-skirt sort of girdle he always wore on his expeditions, with only a short red blanket-cape draped around his shoulders for warmth.
They found no deer, which was odd. Luckily they ran across no allosauruses or other RNA-returned dinosaurs either. The consensus at Ardis Hall was that the few dinos that still hunted this far north had migrated south during this unusual cold spell. The bad news was that the sabertoothed tigers that had shown up the previous summer had not migrated with the large reptiles. Noman showed them fresh pugmarks not far from the cattle tracks they’d been following for much of the day.
Petyr made sure that the power rifle had a fresh magazine of crystal flechettes locked in.
They turned back after they found the rib cages and scattered, bloody bones of two of the missing cattle along a rocky stretch of cliff. Then ten minutes later, they found the hide, hair, vertebrae, skull, and amazing curved teeth of a sabertooth.
Noman’s head had come up and he’d turned three hundred and sixty degrees, scrutinizing every distant tree and boulder. He kept both hands on his long spear.
“Did another sabertooth do this?” asked Hannah.
“Either that or voynix,” said Noman.
“Voynix don’t eat,” said Harman, realizing how silly his comment was as soon as he’d said it.
Noman shook his head. His gray curls stirred in the wind. “No, but this sabertooth might have attacked a pack of voynix. Scavengers or other cats ate this one afterward. See those other pugmarks in the soft soil there? Right next to them are voynix padmarks.”
Harman saw them, but only after Noman actually pointed again.
They’d turned back then, but the stupid ox walked more slowly than ever, despite Noman’s encouragement to it with the shaft of his spear and even the sharp end on occasion. The wheels and axle squeaked and creaked and once they had to repair a loose hub. The low clouds moved in with an even colder wind and the daylight began to fade when they were still two miles from home.
“They’ll keep our dinner warm,” said Hannah. Until her recent bout of lovesickness, the tall, athletic young woman had always been the optimist. But now her easy smile seemed strained.
“Try your proxnet,” said Noman. The old Greek had no functions. But on the other hand, his ancient-style body, devoid of the last two millennia’s nanogenetic tampering, didn’t register on finder, farnet, or proxnet on the voynix’s functions.
“Just static,” said Hannah, looking at the blue oval floating above her palm. She flicked it off.
“Well, now they can’t see us either,” said Petyr. The young man had a lance in one hand, the flechette rifle slung over his shoulder, but his gaze remained on Hannah.
They resumed trudging across the meadow, the high, brittle grass scraping against their legs, the repaired droshky squeaking louder than usual. Harman glanced at Noman-Odysseus’ bare legs above the high-strapped sandals and wondered why his calves and shins weren’t a maze of welts.
“It looks like our day was sort of useless,” said Petyr.
Noman shrugged. “We know now that something large is taking the deer near Ardis,” he said. “A month ago, I would have killed two or three on a long day’s hunt like this.”
“A new predator?” said Harman. He chewed his lip at the idea.
“Could be,” said Noman. “Or perhaps the voynix are killing off the wild game and driving the cattle away in an attempt to starve us out.”
“Are the voynix that smart?” asked Hannah. The organic-mechanical things had always been looked down upon as slave labor by the old-style humans—mute, dumb except to orders, programmed, like the servitors, to care for, take orders from, and protect human beings. But the servitors had all crashed on the day of the Fall and the voynix had fled and turned lethal.
Noman shrugged again. “Athough they can function on their own, the voynix take orders. Always have. From who or what, I’m not quite sure.”
“Not from Prospero,” Harman said softly. “After we were in the city called Jerusalem, which was crawling with voynix, Savi said that the noosphere thing named Prospero had created Caliban and the calibani as protection against the voynix. They’re not from this world.”
“Savi,” grunted Noman. “I can’t believe the old woman is dead.”
“She is,” said Harman. He and Daeman had watched the monster Caliban murder her and drag her corpse away, up there on that orbital isle. “How long did you know her, Odysseus…Noman?”
The older man rubbed his short, gray beard. “How long did I know Savi? Just a few months of real time…but spread out over more than a millennium. Sometimes we slept together.”
Hannah looked shocked and actually stopped walking.
Noman laughed. “She in her cryo crèche, I in my time sarcophagus on the Golden Gate. It was all very proper and parallel. Two babies in separate cribs. If I were to take the name of one of my countrymen in vain…I would say it was a platonic relationship.” Noman laughed heartily even though no one joined in. But when he was finished laughing, he said, “Don’t believe everything that old crone told you, Harman. She lied about much, misunderstood more.”
“She was the wisest woman I’ve ever met,” said Harman. “I won’t see her like again.”
Noman flashed his unfriendly smile. “The second part of that statement is correct.”
They encountered a stream that ran down into the larger stream, balancing precariously on rocks and fallen logs as they crossed. It was too cold to get their feet and clothes wet unless necessary. The ox lumbered through the chill water, bouncing the empty droshky behind him. Petyr crossed first and stood guard with the flechette rifle ready as the other three came over. They were not following the same cattle tracks home, but were within a few hundred yards of the way they’d come. They knew they had one more rolling, wooded ridge to cross,
then a long rocky meadow, then another bit of meadow before Ardis Hall, warmth, food, and relative safety.
The sun had set behind the bank of dark clouds to the southwest. Within minutes, it was dark enough that the rings were providing most of the light. There were two lanterns in the droshky and candles in the pack that Harman carried, but they wouldn’t need them unless the clouds moved in to obscure the rings and stars.
“I wonder if Daeman got off to go get his mother,” said Petyr. The young man seemed uncomfortable in long silences.
“I wish he’d waited for me,” said Harman. “ Or at least until daylight on the other end. Paris Crater isn’t very safe these days.”
Noman grunted. “Of all of you, Daeman—amazingly—seems the best fitted to take care of himself. He’s surprised you, hasn’t he, Harman?”
“Not really,” said Harman. Instantly he realized that this wasn’t the truth. Less than a year ago, when he’d first met Daeman, he’d seen a whining, pudgy momma’s boy whose only hobbies were capturing butterflies and seducing young women. In fact, Harman was sure that Daeman had come to Ardis Hall ten months ago to seduce his cousin Ada. In their first adventures, Daeman had been timid and complaining. But Harman had to acknowledge to himself that events had changed the younger man, and much more for the better than they’d changed Harman. It had been a starved but determined Daeman—forty pounds lighter but infinitely more aggressive—who had taken on Caliban in single combat in the near zero-gravity of Prospero’s orbital isle. And it had been Daeman who had gotten Harman and Hannah out alive. Since the Fall, Daeman had been much quieter, more serious, and dedicated to learning every fighting and survival skill that Odysseus would teach.