Ilium

“Within a dozen yards, the sheared walls of water on both sides rise far over your head. Shadows move within. You see small fish swimming near the barrier between air and sea, then the shadow of a shark, then the pale glow of jellied, floating things you can’t quite identify. Sometimes the sea creatures approach the Breach barrier, touch it with their cold heads, and then turn away quickly, as if alarmed. A mile or so out and the water is so far over your head that the sky above grows darker. A dozen or so miles out and the walls of water on either side rise more than a thousand feet above you. The stars come out in the slice of sky you can see, even in daylight.”

“No!” said a thin, sandy-haired man far down the table. Daeman remembered his name—Loes. “You’re joking.”

“No,” said Harman, “I’m not.” He smiled again. “I walked for about four days. Slept during the night. Turned back when I was out of food.”

“How did you know whether it was night or day?” asked Ada’s friend, the athletic young woman named Ha

“The sky is black and the stars are out in the daytime sky,” said Harman, “but the slices of ocean on either side hold the full band of light, from bright blue far above, to murky black along the bottom at the level of the Breach walkway.”

“Did you find anything exotic?” asked Ada.

“Some sunken ships. Ancient. Lost Age and earlier. And one that might be . . . newer.” He smiled again. “I went to explore one of them—a huge, rusted hulk emerging from the north wall of the Breach, tilted on its side. I entered through a hole in the hull, climbed ladders, made my way north along tilted floors using a small lantern I’d brought along, until suddenly in one large space—I think it was called a hold—there was the Breach barrier, from the ceiling to the tilted floor, a wall of water, alive with fish. I set my face against the cold, invisible wall and could see barnacles, mollusks, sea snakes, and life-forms encrusting every surface, feeding on one another, while on my side—dryness, old rust, the only living things consisting of me and a small white land crab that had obviously migrated, as I had, from the shore.”

A wind came up and rustled the leaves in the tall tree above them. Lanterns swayed and their rich light played across the silk and cotton clothing and hairdos and and hands and warmly lighted faces around the table. Everyone was rapt. Even Daeman found himself interested, despite the fact that it was all nonsense. Torches in braziers along the walkway flickered and crackled in the sudden breeze.

“What about the voynix?” asked a woman sitting next to Loes. Daeman could not remember her name. Emme, perhaps? “Are there more or fewer than on land? Sentinels or motile?”

“No voynix.”

Everyone at the table seemed to take a breath. Daeman felt the same sudden surge of shock he’d experienced when Harman had a

“No voynix,” repeated Ada in a tone not so much of wonder but of wistfulness. She raised her glass of wine. “A toast,” she said. Servitors floated closer to fill glasses. Everyone raised his or her own glass. Daeman blinked away the dizziness and forced a pleasant, sociable smile into place.

Ada did not a

The wind had come up by the end of the meal, clouds moving in to obscure the p- and e-rings, and the air smelled of ozone and of the curtains of rain dragging across the dark hills to the west, so the party moved inside and then broke up as couples wandered off to their rooms or to various wings and rooms for entertainment. Servitors produced chamber music in the south conservatory, the glassed-in swimming pool to the rear of the manor attracted a few people, and there was a midnight buffet laid out in the curved bay of the second-floor observation porch. Some couples went to their private rooms to make love, while others found a quiet place to unfold their turins and to go to Troy.

Daeman followed Ada, who had led Ha

Standing and walking near her, Daeman could feel the warmth of her skin through the tan and black silk she wore. Her lower lip, he noticed again after a decade, was maddeningly full, red, and meant for biting. When she raised her arm to show Harman and Ha

He had been in a library before, but never one this large. The room must have been more than a hundred feet long and half that high, with a mezzanine ru

The curly-haired man who claimed to be in his last year and who claimed to have walked into the Atlantic Breach stopped in wonder. “It’s wonderful, Ada.” He climbed a ladder, slid it along a row of shelves, and reached a hand out to touch a thick leather volume.

Daeman laughed. “Do you think the reading function has returned, Harman Uhr?”

The man smiled, but seemed so confident that for a second Daeman half expected to see the golden rush of symbols down his arm as the reading function signaled the content. Daeman had never seen the lost function in action, of course, but had heard it described by his grandmother and other old folks describing what their great-great-grandparents had enjoyed.

No words flowed. Harman pulled his hand back. “Don’t you wish you had the reading function, Daeman Uhr?”

Daeman heard himself laughing yet again on this odd evening and was acutely aware of both of the young women looking at him with expressions somewhere between bemusement and curiosity.

“No, of course not,” he said at last. “Why should I? What could these old things tell me that could have any pertinence to our lives today?”

Harman climbed higher on the ladder. “Aren’t you curious why the post-humans are no longer seen on Earth and where they went?”

“Not at all. They went home to their cities in the rings. Everyone knows that.”

“Why?” asked Harman. “After many mille

“Nonsense,” said Daeman, perhaps a bit more gruffly than he had intended. “The posts are still watching over us. From above.”

Harman nodded as if enlightened and shuffled his ladder a few yards along its brass track. The man’s head was almost touching the underside of the library mezzanine now. “How about the voynix?”

“What about the voynix?”

“Did you ever wonder why they were motionless for so many centuries and are so active now?”

Daeman opened his mouth but had nothing to say to that. After a moment, he managed, “That business about the voynix not moving before the final fax is total nonsense. Myths. Folklore.”