“Neither did I,” said Savi. She took a bearing north by northwest and drove on.
The first energy constructs appeared shortly after that and Harman was the first to notice them.
The first device was shimmering and shifting thirty yards to the left of the clay road, in an opening beyond a stand of bamboo. Savi stopped so they could get out and see, although Daeman was leery of getting away from the crawler even though they’d seen no calibani for several hours. But Harman wanted to see it and Daeman didn’t want to stay in the sphere alone, so he ended up following the two down the strut ladder and across the field toward the glowing object. It felt strange to Daeman to be walking again after so many hours sitting.
The first energy construct was small—about twenty feet long by eight or ten high, yellow and orange with moving green veins, roughly spherical with pseudopods growing out of the top, bottom, and ends, the forms blobbing into shapes of their own, and then being reabsorbed by the central mass. The thing floated about four feet off the ground and Daeman would get no closer than twenty paces, even as Savi and Harman walked right up to it.
“What is it?” asked Harman, his head and shoulders disappearing for a minute behind the slowly flowing thing.
“We’re in the suburbs of Atlantis,” said Savi, “even though we’re still sixty miles or so away. The posts built their ground stations out of this material.”
“What material?” said Harman. He stretched his hand toward the yellow ovoid. “Can I touch it?”
“Some of the shapes shock. Some don’t. None kill. Go ahead and try it. It won’t melt your hand.”
Harman set his fingers against the curve of the shiny shape. His hand disappeared inside. When he quickly pulled it out, molten blobs of yellow and orange dripped off his fingers and then flew back to the shape. “Cold,” he said. “Very cold.” He flexed his fingers and winced.
“It’s essentially one large molecule,” said Savi. “Although how that’s possible, I don’t know.”
“What’s a molecule?” called Daeman. He’d taken a few steps backward when Harman’s hand disappeared, and had to raise his voice to be heard now. He also kept checking over his shoulder. Savi had the gun in her belt, but the bamboo forest was too close for Daeman’s comfort. It was almost dark.
“Molecules are the little things that everything else is made of,” said Savi. “You can’t see them without special lenses.”
“I can see that one easily enough,” said Daeman. Sometimes, he thought, talking to Savi was like talking to a young child, although Daeman had never spent time around a young child.
The three walked back to the crawler. Rich evening sunlight prismed off the passenger sphere and made the high, articulated struts glow. The tops of stratocumulus far to their east, toward the hill called Cyprus, caught the golden light.
“Atlantis is made up mostly of this macro-molecular frozen energy,” said the old woman. “It’s part of the quantum screwing around that the posts were always up to. There is real material mixed in—something the Lost Age scientists called ‘exotic matter’—but I don’t know the ratio, or how it works. I just know that it makes their cities—stations—whatever they are, sort of shapeshifters, phasing in and out of our quantum reality.”
“I don’t understand,” said Harman, freeing Daeman of the necessity of saying it.
“You’ll see for yourself soon enough. We should be able to see the city when we get over that large rise on the horizon. And be there about the time it gets dark.”
They climbed into the crawler and took their seats. But before Savi could shift the big machine into gear, Harman said, “You’ve been here before.” He didn’t pose it as a question.
“Yes.”
“But you said before that you’ve never been to the orbital rings. Was that your reason for coming before?”
“Yes,” said Savi. “I still think the answer to freeing my friends from the neutrino beam lies up there.” She flicked her head toward the e- and p-rings bright in the twilight sky above.
“But you didn’t succeed before,” said Harman. “Why?”
Savi swiveled in her chair and looked at him. “I’ll tell you why and how I failed, if you’ll tell me why you really want to go up there. Why you’ve spent years trying to find a way up to the rings.”
Harman returned her gaze for a minute and then looked away. “I’m curious,” he said.
“No,” said Savi. She waited.
He looked back at her and Daeman realized that the older man’s face showed the most emotion Daeman had seen from him. “You’re right,” snapped Harman. “It’s not some sort of idle curiosity. I want to find the firmary.”
“So you can live longer,” Savi said softly.
Harman balled his fists. “Yes . So I can live longer. So I can continue to exist beyond this fucking Final Twenty. Because I’m greedy for life. Because I want Ada to have my child and I want to be around to see it grow up, even though fathers don’t do things like that. Because I’m a greedy bastard—greedy for life. Are you satisfied?”
“Yes,” said Savi. She looked at Daeman. “And what are your reasons for coming on this trip, Daeman Uhr?”
Daeman shrugged. “I’d jump home in a second if there was a fax portal nearby.”
“There isn’t,” said Savi. “Sorry.”
He ignored the sarcasm and said, “Why did you bring us, old woman? You know the way here. You know how to find the crawler. Why bring us?”
“Fair question,” she said. “The last time I came to Atlantis, I came on foot. From the north. It was a century and a half ago, and I brought two eloi with me—I’m sorry, that’s an insulting term—I brought two young women with me. They were curious.”
“What happened?” said Harman.
“They died.”
“How?” asked Daeman. “The calibani?”
“No. The calibani killed and ate the man and woman who came with me the time before that, almost three centuries ago. I didn’t know how to contact the Ariel biosphere then, nor about the DNA.”
“Why do you always come in threes?” asked Harman. Daeman thought it an odd question. He was ready to ask for more details about all these dead traveling companions. Did she mean permanently dead? Or just firmary-repair dead?
Savi laughed. “You ask good questions, Harman Uhr. You’ll see soon. You’ll see why I’ve come with two others after that first solo visit of mine to Atlantis more than a millennium ago. And not just to Atlantis—but to some of their other stations. In the Himalayas. Easter Island. One actually at the south pole. Those were fun trips, since a sonie can’t get within three hundred miles of any of them.”
She’d lost Daeman. He wanted to hear more about the killing and eating.
“But you’ve never found a spaceship, a shuttle, to get you up there?” said Harman. “After all these tries?”
“There are no spaceships,” said Savi. She activated the virtual controls, slammed the crawler in gear, and guided them north by northwest as the sunset spilled red across the entire western sky.
The city of the post-humans spread for miles across the dry seabed, with glowing energy towers rising and falling a thousand feet high. The crawler trundled between energy obelisks, floating spheres, red energy stairways going nowhere, blue ramps that appeared and disappeared, blue pyramids folding into themselves, a giant green torus that moved back and forth along pulsing yellow rods, and countless colored cubes and cones.
When Savi stopped and slid the door slice open, even Harman seemed hesitant to get out. Savi had made sure they were wearing their thermskins and now she pulled three osmosis masks from the crawler’s tool locker.
It was almost dark now, the stars joining the rotating rings in the purple-black sky above them. The glow from the energy city illuminated seabed and farm fields for five miles in each direction. Savi led them to a red stairway and then up—the macromolecular steps holding their weight, although Daeman thought it felt like walking on giant sponges.