Daeman looked at Ada, their hostess, in hopes that she would intervene to change the topic, but Ada was smiling as if agreeing with everything Harman had said. Daeman looked down the table for help, but the other guests had been listening politely—even with apparent interest—as if such babble were part of their regular provincial dining repartee.
“The trout is quite good, isn’t it?” he said to the woman on his left. “Was yours good?”
A woman across the table, a heavyset redhead probably deep into her third Twenty, set her most prominent chin on her small fist and said to Harman, “What was it like? In the Breach, I mean?”
The curly-haired, deeply tanned man demurred, but others along the table—including the young blonde woman about whose trout Daeman had inquired and who had rudely ignored the query—all clamored for Harman to talk. He finally acquiesced with a graceful motion of his hand.
“If you’ve never seen the Breach, it’s a fascinating sight just from the shore. It’s about eighty yards wide—a cleft going east as far as one can see, becoming more and more narrow toward the horizon, until it seems just a slice of brightness inset along the line where ocean meets sky.
“Walking into it is . . . slightly strange. The sand along the beach is not wet where the Breach ends. No surf rolls back into it. At first, all of one’s attention is focused on one or the other of the edges—walking in to wading depth, you notice the abrupt shear of water, like a glass wall separating the walker from the curl and roll of tide. You have to touch the barrier—no one could resist. Spongy, invisible, very slightly yielding to heavy pressure, cool from the water on the other side, but impenetrable. You walk deeper on dry sand—over the centuries the sea bottom has felt only the moisture of rain, and so the sand and dirt are solid, the remaining sea creatures and plants there dried out, desiccated almost to the point of appearing fossilized.
“Within a dozen yards, the sheared walls of water on both sides rise far over your head. Shadows move within. You see small fish swimming near the barrier between air and sea, then the shadow of a shark, then the pale glow of jellied, floating things you can’t quite identify. Sometimes the sea creatures approach the Breach barrier, touch it with their cold heads, and then turn away quickly, as if alarmed. A mile or so out and the water is so far over your head that the sky above grows darker. A dozen or so miles out and the walls of water on either side rise more than a thousand feet above you. The stars come out in the slice of sky you can see, even in daylight.”
“No!” said a thin, sandy-haired man far down the table. Daeman remembered his name—Loes. “You’re joking.”
“No,” said Harman, “I’m not.” He smiled again. “I walked for about four days. Slept during the night. Turned back when I was out of food.”
“How did you know whether it was night or day?” asked Ada’s friend, the athletic young woman named Hannah.
“The sky is black and the stars are out in the daytime sky,” said Harman, “but the slices of ocean on either side hold the full band of light, from bright blue far above, to murky black along the bottom at the level of the Breach walkway.”
“Did you find anything exotic?” asked Ada.
“Some sunken ships. Ancient. Lost Age and earlier. And one that might be . . . newer.” He smiled again. “I went to explore one of them—a huge, rusted hulk emerging from the north wall of the Breach, tilted on its side. I entered through a hole in the hull, climbed ladders, made my way north along tilted floors using a small lantern I’d brought along, until suddenly in one large space—I think it was called a hold—there was the Breach barrier, from the ceiling to the tilted floor, a wall of water, alive with fish. I set my face against the cold, invisible wall and could see barnacles, mollusks, sea snakes, and life-forms encrusting every surface, feeding on one another, while on my side—dryness, old rust, the only living things consisting of me and a small white land crab that had obviously migrated, as I had, from the shore.”
A wind came up and rustled the leaves in the tall tree above them. Lanterns swayed and their rich light played across the silk and cotton clothing and hairdos and and hands and warmly lighted faces around the table. Everyone was rapt. Even Daeman found himself interested, despite the fact that it was all nonsense. Torches in braziers along the walkway flickered and crackled in the sudden breeze.
“What about the voynix?” asked a woman sitting next to Loes. Daeman could not remember her name. Emme, perhaps? “Are there more or fewer than on land? Sentinels or motile?”
“No voynix.”
Everyone at the table seemed to take a breath. Daeman felt the same sudden surge of shock he’d experienced when Harman had announced that it was his ninety-ninth year. He felt a surge of vertigo. Perhaps the wine had been stronger than he’d thought.
“No voynix,” repeated Ada in a tone not so much of wonder but of wistfulness. She raised her glass of wine. “A toast,” she said. Servitors floated closer to fill glasses. Everyone raised his or her own glass. Daeman blinked away the dizziness and forced a pleasant, sociable smile into place.
Ada did not announce a toast, but everyone—even, after a moment, Daeman—drank the wine as if she had.
The wind had come up by the end of the meal, clouds moving in to obscure the p- and e-rings, and the air smelled of ozone and of the curtains of rain dragging across the dark hills to the west, so the party moved inside and then broke up as couples wandered off to their rooms or to various wings and rooms for entertainment. Servitors produced chamber music in the south conservatory, the glassed-in swimming pool to the rear of the manor attracted a few people, and there was a midnight buffet laid out in the curved bay of the second-floor observation porch. Some couples went to their private rooms to make love, while others found a quiet place to unfold their turins and to go to Troy.
Daeman followed Ada, who had led Hannah and the man named Harman to the third-story library. If Daeman’s plan of seducing Ada before the weekend was over was to succeed, he had to spend every free minute with her. Seduction, he knew, was both science and art—a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.
Standing and walking near her, Daeman could feel the warmth of her skin through the tan and black silk she wore. Her lower lip, he noticed again after a decade, was maddeningly full, red, and meant for biting. When she raised her arm to show Harman and Hannah the height of shelves in the library, Daeman watched the subtle, soft shift of her right breast under its thin sheath of silk.
He had been in a library before, but never one this large. The room must have been more than a hundred feet long and half that high, with a mezzanine running around three walls and sliding ladders on both levels to give access to the higher and more remote volumes. There were alcoves, cubbies, tables with large books opened on them, seating areas here and there, and even shelves of books over the huge bay window on the far wall. Daeman knew that the physical books stored here must have been treated with non-decomposative nanochemicals many, many centuries before, probably millennia ago—these useless artifacts were made of leather and paper and ink, for heaven’s sake—but the mahogany-paneled room with its pools of source lighting, ancient leather furniture, and brooding walls of books still smelled of age and decay to Daeman’s sensitive snout. He could not imagine why Ada and the other family members maintained this mausoleum at Ardis Hall, or why Harman and Hannah wanted to see it tonight.