Ilium

“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 Ha

“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 di

“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. Ha

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 Ha

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 Ha

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. Ha

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 i

For a second she was co