“Like horses?” said Daeman. He’d thought the huge, scary animals in the turin drama had been pure fantasy until recently.
“Smaller and hairier than horses,” said Savi. “But equally extinct.”
“Why would the posts bring back dinosaurs,” Daeman asked with a real shudder, “and not those wonderful turin horses and these dog things?”
“As I said,” repeated Savi, “much of the posts’ behavior was hard to understand.”
They had awakened shortly after dawn and driven north-northwest all day, rumbling down the red-clay road through fields rich with every sort of crop Daeman was familiar with and many he’d never seen. Twice they’d come to shallow rivers and once a deep, empty permcrete canal, all of which the crawler had crossed easily with its huge wheels and wildly articulated struts.
There were servitors in the fields, and the commonplace look of them reassured Daeman until he realized that many of these servitors were huge—some twelve or fifteen feet tall and half that broad, much larger than the machines he was used to—and as they drove deeper into the Basin, both the crops and servitors continued to look more alien.
The crawler was lumbering between tall green walls of what Savi said was sugarcane, the road not quite wide enough for the crawler and green stalks crunching under the six wheels, when Harman noticed the gray-green humanoid things slipping through the fields on either side. The forms moved so fluidly and quickly that they did not disturb the close-packed cane, flowing like ghost-corpses passing through the tall stalks.
“Calibani,” said Savi. “I don’t think they’ll attack.”
“I thought you said you fixed it so they wouldn’t,” said Daeman. “You know, that D-and-A stuff from the hair you stole from Harman and me.”
Savi smiled. “Deals with Ariel are never certain. But I suspect that if the calibani were going to stop us, they would have done it last night.”
“Won’t the forcefield around the sphere hold them off?” asked Daeman.
The old woman shrugged. “Calibani are more clever than voynix. They might surprise us.”
Daeman shuddered and watched the fields, catching only glimpses of the pale figures. The crawler moved out of the lane between the sugarcane fields and climbed a low hill. The road ran on through broad fields of winter wheat, stalks no taller than fifteen or sixteen inches, entire fields rippling in the breeze from the west. The calibani, at least a dozen on each side of the road, came out of the canefields behind them and loped along through the wheat, keeping a distance of sixty yards or so. Out in the open, they ran on all fours.
“I don’t like the looks of them,” said Daeman.
“You’d probably like the looks of Caliban even less,” said Savi.
“I thought these were calibani,” said Daeman. The old woman never seemed to make sense for long.
Savi smiled, steering the crawler across and over a row of six pipes carrying something from west to east or east to west. “It’s said that the calibani are cloned from the single Caliban, the third element of the Gaiaic Trinity, along with Ariel and Prospero.”
“It’s said,” mocked Daeman. “Everything’s gossip with you. Don’t you know anything from firsthand knowledge? These old stories are absurd.”
“Some are,” agreed Savi. “And even though I’ve been alive 1,500 years or more, that doesn’t mean I’ve been around all that time. So I have to report secondhand things I hear and read.”
“What do you mean, you haven’t been around all that time?” asked Harman. He sounded very interested.
Savi laughed, but not, Daeman thought, with much amusement in her voice. “I’m better nano-engineered for repair than you eloi,” she said. “But nobody lives forever. Or for fourteen hundred years. Or even a thousand. I spend most of my time like Dracula, sleeping in the long-term cryo crèches in places like the Golden Gate Bridge. I pop out from time to time, try to see what’s going on, try to find a way to get my friends out of the blue beam. Then back into the cold.”
Harman leaned forward. “How many years have you been . . . awake?”
“Fewer than three hundred,” said Savi. “And even that’s enough to tire a body out. And a mind. And a spirit.”
“Who’s Dracula?” asked Daeman.
Savi, not answering, kept driving the crawler north by northwest.
She’d told them the site they were headed for was about three hundred miles from the shoreline where they’d entered the Basin from the land that had been called Israel—a word Daeman had never heard. But the phrase “three hundred miles” meant little to Harman and nothing at all to Daeman, since trips by voynix-pulled carriole or droshky were never longer than a mile or two. Anything farther than that, and Daeman would fax. Anyone would fax.
Still, they had covered half that distance by midday, but then the red-clay road ended, the terrain grew rough, and the crawler had to move much more slowly, sometimes detouring for miles before returning to its course. Savi kept that course by using a small instrument from her pack and checking distances on a hand-drawn, much-folded map.
“Why don’t you use the palm finding-function?” Daeman asked.
“Farnet and allnet work here in the Basin,” said Savi, “but proxnet doesn’t, and the place we’re heading is in no net databank. I’m using a map and an ancient thing called a compass. Works, though.”
“How does it work?” asked Harman.
“Magic,” said Savi.
That was answer enough for Daeman.
They continued to descend, the Basin topography falling away above and behind them, the orderly rows of crops replaced now by boulder fields, gulleys, and occasional stands of bamboo or high ferns. The calibani were no longer visible, but it began to rain shortly after they reached the rough areas, and the creatures might have been just beyond the curtains of falling water.
The crawler passed odd artifacts—the hulls of numerous ships made of wood and steel, a city of tumbled Ionian columns, ancient plastic objects gleaming in gray sediment, the bleached bones of numerous sea creatures, and several huge, rusted tanks that Savi called “submarines.”
In the afternoon the rain lifted some and the three saw a high mesa appear to the northeast. It was high and broad and rolling rather than peaked, more mountain than mesa, green on top, ridged on the sides with steep, rilled cliffs.
“Is that where we’re going?” asked Daeman.
“No,” said Savi. “That’s Cyprus. I lost my virginity there one thousand, four hundred and eight-two years ago next Tuesday.”
Daeman exchanged covert glances with Harman. Both men had the good sense not to say anything.
By late afternoon the terrain became lower and marshier and fields of crops began appearing on either side of a rough, red-clay road again. Oddly formed servitors were working in the fields, but none looked up to watch the crawler trundle past. Most of the machines didn’t appear to have eyes. Once their way was blocked by a river at least two hundred yards across. Savi sealed the slice-door, shutting off the fresh air they’d been enjoying, made sure the sphere forcefield was activated, and rolled the crawler down the bank. The water was deep—forty feet or more near the center of the channel—and even the crawler’s searchlights had trouble cutting through the silt and gloom. The current was stronger than Daeman would have imagined for such a wide, deep river, and the crawler was buffeted around violently enough that Savi had to work the virtual controls and fight the machine back onto the proper course. Daeman guessed that a machine with smaller wheels, less flexible struts, or less motor power would have been carried away to the west.
When they emerged on the north shore, the machine throwing mud thirty feet behind them and water rushing off the spider-struts like a waterfall, Harman said, “I didn’t know the crawler could be driven underwater.”