“Stop,” said Daeman. The voynix halted in its tracks, still holding the cart shafts. The internal gyro hummed softly to itself.
Daeman looked back behind Ardis Hall but Harman was already out of sight through the trees. For no reason in particular, he tried to remember where he had met Oelleo—at a party in Bellinbad two summers ago? At Verna’s Fourth Twenty in Chom only a few months before? At one of his own sleepover parties in Paris Crater?
He couldn’t remember. Had he slept with Oelleo? He had an image of the girl naked, but that could have been from one of the swimming parties or one of the living art displays that had been in vogue last winter. He couldn’t remember if he’d gone to bed with the woman. There were so many.
Daeman tried to remember Tobi’s Second Twenty celebration in Ulanbat only three days ago. It was a blur—a smear of laughter and sex and drink blending into all the other parties near all the other faxnodes. But when he tried to remember the Dry Valley in . . . what was it called? Antarctica? . . . or the iceberg, or the Golden Gate Bridge above Machu Picchu, or even the stupid redwood forest . . . everything was clear, distinct, sharp.
Daeman climbed down from the carriole and began walking toward the fields. This is crazy, he thought. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Halfway to the treeline, he broke into a lumbering, clumsy run.
He was out of breath and sweating heavily by the time he reached the far side of the field. The sonie was gone, only a depression in the high grass near a stone wall where it had been.
“God damn it,” said Daeman, looking up at the evening sky, empty except for the turning equatorial-ring and polar-ring. “Damn it.” He sat down heavily on the moss-slick stone wall. The sun was setting behind him. For some reason, he felt like crying.
The sonie came in low over the trees to the north, swooped, and hovered ten feet off the ground.
“I thought you might change your mind,” called down Savi. “Want a ride?”
Daeman stood.
They had flown east into darkness, climbing high enough that the stars and the orbital rings illuminated the tops of clouds already glowing from lightning rippling like visible peristalsis through milky interiors. They stopped near the coast that night and slept in a strange treehouse made up of separate little domi-houses connected by platforms and winding staircases. The place had plumbing, but no servitors or voynix, and there were no other people or dwellings nearby.
“Do you have many places like this where you stay?” Harman asked Savi.
“Yes,” said the old woman. “Away from your three hundred faxnodes, most of the Earth is empty, you know. At least empty of people. I have favorite places here and there.”
They were sitting outside on a sort of dining platform halfway up the tall tree. Below them, fireflies winked on and off in a grassy glade that held an array of huge, ancient, rusted machines that had been mostly reclaimed by the grass and ferns and hillside. Ringlight fell down between the leaves and painted the high grass a soft white. The storms they’d flown over had not reached this far east yet, and the night was warm and clear. Although there were no servitors here, there were freezers with food, and Savi had supervised the cooking of noodles, meat, and fish. Daeman was almost getting used to this odd idea of fixing the food one ate.
Suddenly Harman asked Savi, “Do you know why the post-humans left the Earth and haven’t come back?”
Daeman remembered the strange data-vision he’d suffered in the redwood clearing earlier that day. Just the memory made him a bit nauseated.
“Yes,” said Savi, “I think I do.”
“Are you going to tell us?” asked Harman.
“Not right now,” said the old woman. She rose and walked up the winding stairs to a lighted domi ten meters higher up the trunk.
Harman and Daeman looked at each other in the soft light, but they had nothing to say to each other and eventually went off to their own domis to sleep.
They followed the Breach across the Atlantic at high speed, swooped south before reaching land, and paralleled something that Savi called the Hands of Hercules.
“Amazing,” said Harman, rising almost to his knees to look to their left as they flew south.
Daeman had to agree. Between a big, slab-sided mountain on the north—which Savi called Gibraltar—and a lower mountain some nine miles to the south, the ocean simply stopped, held out of the deep basin stretching away to the east by a series of huge golden human hands rising from the seabed. Each hand was over five hundred feet tall and the splayed fingers held back the wall of the Atlantic from the dry Mediterranean Basin dropping like a deepening valley into clouds and fogs to the east.
“Why the hands?” asked Daeman as they reached land on the south side of the fog-shrouded Basin and turned east again. “Why didn’t the post-humans just use forcefields to hold back the sea, the way they did in the Breach?”
The old woman shook her head. “The Hands of Hercules were here before I was born and the posts never told us why they did it that way. I’ve always suspected it was just a whim on their part.”
“A whim,” repeated Harman. It seemed to trouble him.
“Are you sure we can’t just fly straight across the Basin?” asked Daeman.
“I’m sure,” said Savi. “The sonie would drop out of the sky like a stone.”
Through the late afternoon they flew across swamps, lakes, fern forests, and broad rivers above a land that Savi called the Northern Sahara. Soon the swamps dwindled and died and the land became drier, rockier. Herds of huge striped beasts—not dinosaurs, but as large as dinosaurs—moved by the hundreds across grasslands and rocky uplands.
“What are those?” asked Daeman.
Savi shook her head. “I have no idea.”
“If Odysseus were here, he’d probably want to kill one and have it for dinner,” said Harman.
Savi grunted.
It was late afternoon again when they lost altitude, circled a strange, walled city set on highlands only twenty-five miles from the Mediterranean Basin, and landed on a rocky plain just west of the city.
“What is this place?” asked Daeman. He’d never seen walls or buildings so old, and even from a distance it was unsettling.
“It’s called Jerusalem,” said Savi.
“I thought we were going down into the Basin to look for spaceships,” said Harman.
The old woman got out of the sonie and stretched. She looked very tired, but then, Daeman though, she had been driving the sonie for two straight days. “We are,” she said. “We’ll get transport here. And there’s something I want you to see at sunset.”
This sounded ominous to Daeman, but he followed her and Harman across the rocky plain, over rubble of what once might have been suburbs or newer sections of the old walled city but which now was a rising plain paved with stones pounded and ground fine as pebbles. She led them up to and though a gate in the wall, keeping up a mostly meaningless narration as they walked. The air was dry and cooling, the low sunlight rich on the ancient buildings.
“This was called the Jaffa Gate,” she said, as if that might mean something to them. “This is David Street, and it used to separate the Christian Quarter from the Armenian Quarter.”
Harman glanced at Daeman. It was obvious to Daeman that even the learned old man, so proud of his useless ability to read, had never heard the words “Christian” or “Armenian.” But Savi was babbling on, pointing out something called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the tumbled ruins to their left, and neither man interrupted her with a question until Daeman asked, “Aren’t there any voynix or servitors here?”
“Not now,” said Savi. “But when my friends Pinchas and Petra were here in the last minutes before the final fax fourteen hundred years ago, there were tens of thousands of voynix suddenly active near the Western Wall. I have no idea why.” She stopped walking and looked at each of them. “You understand, don’t you, that the voynix popped out of the temporalclastic cloud two centuries before the final fax, but they were immobile—rust and iron statues—not the obedient servants you have now? That’s important to remember.”