Ada tried to hold his hand again, but he batted her hand away with his left hand. She kept her hands still and let him touch her neck, her cheek—he laid the palm flat against her forehead, then used all of his strength to mold his hand to her skull, clutching at her almost desperately.
Before she could even think to pull away, it began.
Nothing, not even the explosion that had just thrown her ten feet backward through the air, had ever struck Ada as this did.
First there was Harman’s clear voice—It’s all right, my love, my darling. Relax. It’s all right. I must give you this gift while I can.
And then everything around Ada disappeared except for the pressure from her beloved’s damaged hand and bleeding fingers, pouring images in to her—not just to her mind, but filling her with words, memories, images, pictures, data, more memories, functions, quotes, books, entire volumes, more books, more memories, his love for her, his thoughts about her and their child, his love, more information, more voices and names and dates and thoughts and facts and ideas and…
“Ada? Ada?” Tom was kneeling over her, splashing water on her face while he gently slapped her face. Hannah, Daeman, and others knelt nearby. Harman had dropped his arm. The little metal-plastic person still fussed over Harman, but her darling looked dead.
Ada stood. “Daeman! Hannah! Come here. Lean close.”
“What?” asked Hannah.
Ada shook her head. No time to explain. No time to do anything but share. “Trust me,” she said.
She reached out her left and right hands, gripped Daeman’s forehead with her left hand, Hannah’s with her right, and activated the Sharing function.
It took no more than thirty seconds—no more than the time it had taken for Harman to share the functions and essential data with her, the data he’d spent the hours of his walk west in the Breach compartmentalizing, preparing for transmission—but the thirty seconds seemed like thirty eternities to Ada. If she could have done the next part alone, she wouldn’t have bothered, wouldn’t have taken the time—not even if the future of the human race depended on it—but she couldn’t do the next part alone. She needed one person to continue the Sharing and one person to help her try to save Harman.
It was done.
All three—Ada, Daeman, Hannah—fell to their knees, eyes closed.
“What is it?” asked Siris.
Someone ran shouting into the compound. It was one of their volunteers at the pavilion a mile and a quarter away. The faxnode was working! Just as the voynix were closing in there, shouted the messenger, the faxnode had come alive.
There’s no time for the fax pavilion, thought Ada. And nowhere to go among the numbered faxnodes either. Everywhere the humans were in retreat or under direct attack. There was no other place on a known node where her darling could be saved.
The large creature that looked like some sort of giant metallic horseshoe crab was rumbling in English. “There are human rejuvenation tanks in orbit,” it was saying. “But the only tanks we know about for certain are on Sycorax’s orbital asteroid, and it just passed the moon under full thrust. We’re sorry we don’t know any other…”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Ada, kneeling next to Harman again. She touched his forearm. There was no reaction but she could feel the last embers of life in him—his biomonitors speaking to her new biometric functions. She was madly sorting through all the thousands of freefax nodes, the freefax function procedures itself.
There were the post-human storage depots in the Mediterranean Basin—they had medicines even for such radiation death—but the depots were sealed in stasis and Ada saw from the allnet monitors that the Hands of Hercules had slowly disappeared, refilling the Mediterranean. She would need machines—submersibles—to get to the depots there. Too long. There were other post storage areas—on the steppes of China, near the Dry Valley in Antarctica…but all would take too long to reach and the medical procedures were too complicated. Harman wouldn’t live long enough to…
Ada grabbed Daeman’s arm, pulled him down next to her. The man seemed dazed, transfixed. “All the new functions…” he said.
Ada shook him. “Tell me again what the Moira ghost said!”
“What?” Even his stare was unfocused.
“Daeman, tell me again what the Moira ghost said to you on the day that we voted on letting Noman leave. Was it ’Remember…’ Tell me!”
“Ah…she said…’Remember, Noman’s coffin was Noman’s coffin,’” he said. “How can that…”
“No,” cried Ada. “The second Noman was meant to be two words. ’Noman’s coffin was no man’s coffin.’ Hannah, you waited while that sarcophagus at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu cured Odysseus. You’ve been to the Bridge more often than any of us. Will you go with me? Will you try?”
Hannah took only a second to understand what her friend was asking. “Yes,” she said.
“Daeman,” said Ada, rushing not only against time, but against Death, who was already among them, who already was holding Harman in his dark claws, “you need to do the Sharing with everyone here. At once.”
“Yes,” said Daeman, moving away quickly, calling others to him.
The moravec troopers—Ada knew them all now by form if not by name—were still firing around the perimeter, still killing the last of the attacking voynix. Not one voynix had gotten through.
“Hannah,” said Ada, “we’ll need the litter, but if it doesn’t freefax, put Harman’s blanket over your shoulder, we’ll use that if we have to.”
“Hey,” cried the small Europan morevac when Hannah roughly pulled the blanket off their dying human patient. “He needs that! He was shivering…”
Ada touched the little moravec’s arm, felt the humanity and soul even through the metal and plastic. “It’s all right,” she said at last. She pulled its name—his name—from his cybernetic memory. “Friend Mahnmut, it’s all right,” she said. “We know what we’re doing. After all this time, we finally know what we’re doing.”
She gestured for the others to stand back.
Hannah knelt on one side of the litter, one of her hands on Harman’s shoulder, the other on the metal handle of the litter itself. Ada did the same on her side.
“I think we just visualize that main room—the one where we met Odysseus—and the coordinates come to us,” said Ada. “It’s important that we’ve both been there.”
“Yes,” said Hannah.
“On the count of three?” said Ada. “One, two…three.”
Both women, the litter, and Harman winked out of existence.
Even though the dying Harman looked as if he weighed nothing, it took all of their strength for the two women to carry him and the litter from the main museum area of the Golden Gate Bridge at Machu Picchu, down several flights of stairs through the green bubble into the sarcophagus area, past Savi’s old-time sarcophagus and down the final flight of curved stairs to Odysseus-Noman’s coffin.
Ada’s palm could find only the slightest flicker of living response when she set her hand against her beloved’s ravaged chest, but she did not waste more time in searching for life.
“On the count of three again,” she panted.
Hannah nodded.
“One, two…three.”
They gently lifted the naked Harman out of the litter and lowered his body into Noman’s coffin. Hannah pulled the lid down and snapped it shut.
“How do you…” began Ada in a panic. She could interrogate all the various machinery here, her new functions told her that, but it would take too long…
“Here,” said Hannah. “Noman showed me after he revived.” Her sculptor’s fingers tapped a series of glowing virtual buttons. The old-style human functions interacted with the crèche controls.
The coffin sighed, then began to hum. A mist flowed into the sleeping chamber through unseen vents and hid most of Harman’s body from view. Ice crystals formed on the clear cover. Several new lights came on. One winked red.
“Oh!
” said Hannah. Her voice was very small.
“No,” said Ada. Her tone was calm but firm. “No. No. No.” She set her palm across the plastic control nexus of the coffin as if she were reasoning with the machine.
The red light winked, changed to amber, switched back to red.
“No,” Ada said firmly.
The red light wavered, dimmed, switched to amber. Stayed amber.
Hannah’s and Ada’s fingers met briefly above the coffin and then Ada returned her palm to the glowing curve of the AI nexus.
The amber light stayed on.
Several hours later, as late afternoon clouds moved in to obscure first the ruins of Machu Picchu and then the roadway of the suspension bridge six hundred feet below them, Ada said, “Hannah, freefax back to Ardis. Get some food. Rest.”
Hannah shook her head.
Ada smiled. “Then at least head up to the dining area and get us some fruit or something. Water.”
The amber light burned all that afternoon. Just after sundown, as the Andes valleys were bathed in alpenglow, Daeman, Tom, and Siris freefaxed in, but they stayed only a few moments.
“We’ve already reached thirty of the other communities,” Daeman said to Ada. She nodded, but her gaze never left the amber light.
The others eventually faxed away with promises to return in the morning. Hannah pulled the blanket around her and fell asleep there on the floor next to the coffin.
Ada remained—sometimes kneeling, sometimes sitting, but always thinking, and always with her palm on the coffin control nexus, always sending word of her presence and her prayers through the circuits separating her and her Harman, and always with her eyes on the amber monitor light.
Sometime after three a.m. local time, the amber light turned to green.
PART
4
88
One week after the Fall of Ilium:
Achilles and Penthesilea appeared on the empty ridgeline that rose between the Plain of the Scamander and the Plain of the Simois. As Hephaestus promised, there were two horses waiting—a powerful black stallion for the Achaean and a shorter but even more muscular white mare for the Amazon. The two mounted to inspect what was left.
There was not much left.
“How can an entire city like Ilium disappear?” said Penthesilea, her voice as contentious as always.
“All cities disappear,” said Achilles. “It is their fate.”
The Amazon snorted. Achilles had already noted that the blonde human female’s snort was similar to that of her white mare’s. “They aren’t supposed to disappear in a day…an hour.” The comment sounded like a complaint, a lament. Only two days after Penthesilea’s resurrection from the Healer’s tanks, Achilles was getting used to that constant tone of complaint.
For half an hour they allowed their horses to pick their way through the jumble of rock that stretched for two miles along the ridgeline that once had held mighty Troy. Not a single foundation stone was left. The divine magic that had taken Troy had sheared it off almost a foot beneath the earliest stones of the city. Not so much as a dropped spear or rotting carcass had been left behind.
“Zeus is powerful indeed,” said Penthesilea.
Achilles sighed and shook his head. The day was warm. Spring was coming. “I’ve told you, Amazon. Zeus did not do this. Zeus is dead by my own hand. This is the work of Hephaestus.”
The woman snorted. “I’ll never believe that little bumbuggering bad-breathed cripple could do something like this. I don’t even believe he’s a real god.”
“He did this,” said Achilles. With Nyx’s help, he mentally added.
“So you say, son of Peleus.”
“I told you not to call me that. I am no longer son of Peleus. I was Zeus’s son, no credit to him or me.”
“So you say,” said Penthesilea. “Which would make you a father-killer if your boasts are true.”
“Yes,” said Achilles. “And I never boast.”
Both Amazon and her white mare snorted in unison.
Achilles kicked the ribs of his black stallion and led them down off the ridge, along the rutted south road that had led from the Scaean Gate—the stump of the great oak tree that had always grown there since the creation of the city remained, but the great gates were gone—and then right again onto the Plain of the Scamander that separated the city from the beach.
“If this sad Hephaestus is now king of the gods,” said Penthesilea, her voice as loud and irritating as fingernails on a flat, slate rock, “why was he hiding in his cave the whole time we were on Olympos?”
“I told you—he’s waiting for the war between the gods and the Titans to end.”
“If he’s the successor to Zeus, why in Hades doesn’t he just end it himself by commanding the lightning and the thunder?”
Achilles said nothing. Sometimes, he had discovered, if he said nothing, she would shut up.
The Scamander Plain—worn smooth over its eleven years as a battlefield—looked as if the ground had not been sheared, there were still the prints of thousands of sandaled men here, and blood dried on the rocks—but all living human beings, horses, chariots, weapons, corpses, and other artifacts had disappeared even as Hephaestus had described it to Achilles. Even the tents of the Achaeans and the burned hulks of their black ships were gone.
Achilles allowed their horses to rest on the beach for a few minutes and both man and Amazon watched the limpid waves of the Aegean roll up on the empty sand. Achilles would never tell the wolf-bitch next to him this, but his heart ached at the thought that he would never see his comrades in arms again—crafty Odysseus, booming big Ajax, the smiling archer Teucer, his faithful Myrmidons, even stupid, red-headed Menelaus and his scheming brother—Achilles’ nemesis—Agamemnon. It was strange, Achilles thought, how even one’s enemies become so important when they are lost to you.
With that, he thought of Hector and of the things Hephaestus had told him about the Iliad—about Achilles’ own other future—and this caused the despair to rise in him like bile. He turned his horse’s head south and drank from the goatskin of wine tied to the pommel.
“And don’t think I will ever believe that the bearded cripple god actually had the ability to make us married,” groused Penthesilea from behind him. “That was a load of horse cobblers.”
“He’s king of all gods,” Achilles said tiredly. “Who better to sanctify our wedding vows?”
“He can sanctify my ass,” said Penthesilea. “Are we leaving? Why are we heading southeast? What’s this way? Why are we leaving the battlefield?”
Achilles said nothing until he reined his horse to a halt fifteen minutes later.
“Do you see this river, woman?”
“Of course I see it. Do you think I’m blind? It’s just the lousy Scamander—too thick to drink, too thin to plow—brother of the River Simois which it joins just a few miles upstream.”
“Here, at this river we call the Scamander and which the gods call the holy Xanthes,” said Achilles, “here according to Hephaestus who quotes my biographer Homer, I would have had my greatest aristeia—the combat that would have made me immortal even before I slew Hector. Here, woman, I would have fought the entire Trojan army single-handed—and the swollen, god-raised river itself!—and cried to the heavens, ’Die, Trojans, die!…till I butcher all the way to sacred Troy!’ Right there, woman, do you see where those low rapids run? Right there I would have slain in a blur of kills Thersilochus, Mydon, Astyplus, Mnesus, Thrasius, Aenius, and Ophelestes. And then the Paeonians would have fallen on me from the rear and I would have killed them all as well. And there, across the river on the Trojan side, I would have killed the ambidexterous Asteropaeus, my one Pelian-ash spearcast to his two. We both miss, but I hack the hero down with my sword while he’s trying to wrest my great spear from the riverbank to cast again….”
Achilles stopped. Penthesilea had dismounted and gone behind a bush to urinate. The crude sound of her making water made him want to kill the Amazo
n then and there and leave her body to the carrion crows that roosted on the creosote bush’s branches near the river. The vultures’ daily feed of dead flesh evidently had disappeared and Achilles hated to leave them disappointed.
But he could not hurt the Amazon. Aphrodite’s love spell still worked on him, leaving his love for this bitch coiling in his guts, as nausea-making as a bronze-tipped spear through the bowels. Your only hope is that the pheromones may wear off in time, Hephaestus had said when they were both drunk on wine that last night in the cave, toasting each other and everyone they knew, raising the big two-handled cups and confiding in each other in the way only brothers or drunks can do.
When the Amazon was remounted, Achilles led the way across the Scamander, the horses stepping carefully. The water was no more than knee deep at its deepest. He turned south.
“Where are we going?” demanded Penthesilea. “Why are we leaving this place? What do you have in mind? Do I get a vote on this or will it always be the mighty Achilles deciding every little thing? Don’t think I’ll follow you blindly, son of Peleus. I may not follow you at all.”
“We’re hunting for Patroclus,” Achilles said without turning in his saddle.
“What?”
“We’re hunting for Patroclus.”
“Your friend? That queer-boy fruit friend of yours? Patroclus is dead. Athena killed him. You saw it and said so yourself. You started a war with the gods because of it.”
“Hephaestus says that Patroclus is alive,” said Achilles. His hand was on the hilt of his sword, his knuckles white, but he did not draw the weapon. “Hephaestus says that he did not include Patroclus in the blue beam when he gathered up all the others on earth, nor when he sent Ilium away forever. Patroclus is alive and out there somewhere over the sea and we shall find him. It shall be my quest.”
“Oh, well, Hephaestus says,” jeered the Amazon. “Whatever Hephaestus says has to be true now, doesn’t it? The runty crippled bastard couldn’t be lying to you, now could he?”
Achilles said nothing. He was following the old road south along the coast, this road that had been trod by so many Trojan-bred horses over the centuries and followed north more recently by so many of the Trojan allies he’d helped to kill.