“I want to go with you to find this woman,” said Daeman.
The others, including his mother, looked at him with surprise. “Do you feel up to it?” asked Ada.
He ignored the question and said, “You’ll need me to identify the woman if you find her. This . . . Savi.”
“All right,” said Harman. “We appreciate your help.”
“But we’ll fax out in the morning,” said Daeman. “Not tonight. I’m tired.”
“Of course,” said Ada. She looked at Hannah and Harman. “Shall we fax back to Ardis?”
“Nonsense,” said Marina. “You’ll be our guests tonight. We have comfortable guest domis on the upper level.” She caught Ada’s subtle glance in Daeman’s direction. “My son has been very tired since the . . . accident. He may sleep ten hours or more. If you stay as our guests, you’ll be ready to leave together after he wakes. After breakfast.”
“Of course,” Ada said again. There was a seven-hour difference between Paris Crater and Ardis—it was not yet dinnertime back at Ardis Hall—but like all fax travelers, they were used to adapting to local times.
“We’ll show you to your rooms,” said Marina, leading the way across the room with her twin servitors floating beside her.
The “rooms” were actually small domis, elaborate suites of their own, one flight up from Marina and Daeman’s place and reached by a broad spiral staircase. Hannah expressed approval of her space but then went out to explore Paris Crater on her own. Harman said his good nights and disappeared into his domi. Ada locked the door behind her, inspected the interesting tapestries, enjoyed the view of the crater from the balcony—the rain had stopped and the moon and rings were visible between scattering clouds—and then went in and ordered a light dinner from the servitors. Afterward, she drew a bath and luxuriated in the hot, perfumed water for half an hour or more, feeling the ache of tension leave her muscles.
She had met Harman only twelve days earlier, but it seemed much longer ago. The man and his interests fascinated her. Ada had gone to a summer solstice party at a friend’s estate near the ruins of Singapore, not because she liked parties—she tended to avoid both faxing and parties when she could help it, traveling almost solely to old friends’ homes for small gatherings—but because her younger friend Hannah was going to be there and had urged her to attend. The solstice party had been fun, in its way, and many of the people interesting, since her friend there had just celebrated her fourth Twenty—Ada had always enjoyed the company of people older than herself—but then she had met Harman, coming across him as he was poking through the estate’s library. The man was quiet, reticent even, but Ada had drawn him out, using some of the tactics her smarter friends had used on her to get her to talk more.
Ada did not know what to think about Harman’s trick of learning how to read without a function—he had not confessed the ability until another meeting at another friend’s house just six days before the gathering at Ardis Hall—but the more Ada thought about it, the more amazed she was. Ada had always considered herself to be well educated—she knew all the usual folk songs and legends, she had memorized the Eleven Families and all their members, she knew many of the faxnodes by heart—but Harman’s breadth of both knowledge and curiosity left her breathless.
The map he had laid out in front of Daeman—so underappreciated even by curious, adventurous Hannah—continued to astound Ada. She had never even run across the concept of “map” before Harman had shown her the diagrams less than a week earlier. It was Harman who had explained to her that the world was a sphere. How many of Ada’s friends knew that? How many of them had ever wondered about the shape of the world on which they lived? Of what use was that arcane bit of knowledge? The “world” was your home and the fax network you used to see your friends and their homes. Who ever thought about the shape of the physical structure that lay beneath and beside that faxnet? And why would they?
Ada knew even from that first weekend around Harman that the man’s interest in the long-departed post-humans bordered on obsession. No, amended Ada, lying in the warm bathwater and moving bubbles up her breasts to her throat with her long, pale fingers, it is an obsession with Harman. He can’t stop thinking about the post-humans—where they are, why they left. To what purpose?
Ada did not know the answer, of course, but she had come to share in Harman’s passionate curiosity, approaching it as a game, an adventure. And he kept asking questions that would have made any of Ada’s other friends simply laugh—Why are there just a million of us humans? Why was that number chosen by the posts? Why never one more, one less? And why a hundred years assigned to each of us? Why do they save us even from our own folly so we can live a hundred years?
The questions were so simple and so profound that they were embarrassing—it was like hearing an adult ask why we have belly buttons.
But Ada had joined in the quest—for a flying machine, perhaps a spaceship to fly up to the rings and talk to the post-humans in person, now for this final fax-era legend of the Wandering Jew—and every day that passed brought more excitement.
Like Daeman being eaten by an allosaurus.
Ada blushed, seeing her pale skin redden down to the line of water and bubbles. That had been terribly embarrassing. None of the other guests could ever remember anything similar happening. Why hadn’t the voynix offered better protection?
What exactly are the voynix? Harman had asked her twelve days earlier in the treehouse complex near Singapore. Where do they come from? Did the Lost Age humans build them? Are they a produce of the rubicon dementia? Did the posts create them? Or are they alien to this world and time and here for their own purposes?
Ada remembered her uneasy laughter that evening as they sat on the vined terrace, champagne in hand, when he had asked such an absurd question in such serious tones. But she had not been able to answer it then—nor had her friends in the intervening days, although their laughter was more nervous even than her own had been—and now Ada, after a lifetime of seeing voynix every day, looked at them with a curiosity bordering on alarm. Hannah had begun to react the same way.
What are you? she had wondered just that evening as they had stepped out of their barouche in Paris Crater and left the voynix standing there, apparently eyeless, its rusted carapace and leathery hood wet from the rain, its killing blades retracted but manipulator pads extended and curled, still holding the stays of their carriage.
Ada stepped out of the water, dried herself, slipped into a thin robe, and told the servitors to leave her. They exited via one of their osmotic wall membranes. Ada went out onto the balcony.
Harman’s room and balcony adjoined hers on the right, but privacy on the porches was assured by a tightly latticed bamboo-fiber screen that extended three feet out beyond the porch railing. Ada walked to the partition, stood at her rail a moment—looking down at the red-eyed crater below—lifted her eyes to the clearing sky with its stars and moving rings, and then she flung her leg over the railing, feeling the smooth, wet bamboo against the flesh of her inner thigh an instant before she stepped out, barefoot, feeling her way along the thin rim of the partition.
For a second she was connected to the porch only by the pressure of her toes and fingertips, feeling blindly around the partition on the other side to find the matching narrow ledge, feeling gravity pull her back into emptiness. What would it feel like, to fall so far toward burning magma, to know that I would be dead after a few terrible and totally free minutes of falling? She knew she would never know. If she let go now, if her bare toes and fingers slipped now, she would never remember the next seconds and minutes after she awoke in the firmary tanks. The post-humans did not grant humans memories of their own death.