“Who did that?” he asked a moment later. “The stitches? Servitors?”
Odysseus walked closer to the bed. “I did the stitching,” said the barrel-chested barbarian.
“The servitors don’t work anymore,” said Ada. “Anywhere. The faxnodes still operate, so we’re hearing from everywhere—servitors out of order, the voynix gone.”
Daeman frowned at this, trying to understand and failing. Harman entered the room, using a walking stick as a cane. Daeman saw that the older man had kept his beard, although it looked as if he’d trimmed it. He sat on a chair next to the bed and gripped Daeman’s left arm. Daeman closed his eyes for a minute and just returned the tight grip. When he opened his eyes, they were watering. Fatigue, he thought.
“The meteor storm is letting up, a little less fierce each evening,” said Harman. “But there have been casualties. Deaths. More than a hundred people died in Ulanbat alone.”
“Deaths?” repeated Daeman. The word had not held real meaning for a long, long time.
“You people had to learn about burials again from scratch,” said Odysseus. “No faxing up to a happy eternity as immortal post-humans in the e- and p-rings any longer. People are burying their dead and trying to tend to the injured.”
“Paris Crater?” managed Daeman. “My mother?”
“She’s well,” said Ada. “That city wasn’t hit. We have runners coming every day with news. She sent a letter, Daeman—she’s afraid to fax until things settle down. A lot of people are. With servitors and voynix gone and the power off everywhere, most people don’t want to travel unless they absolutely have to.”
Daeman nodded. “Why is the power off but the faxnodes still working? Where are the voynix? What’s going on?”
“We don’t know,” said Harman. “But the meteor shower didn’t include . . . what did Prospero call it? . . . a Species Extinction Event. We can be glad for that.”
“Yes,” said Daeman, but what he was thinking was—So Prospero and Caliban and Savi’s death were real—it wasn’t all a dream? He moved his right arm again and the pain answered the question.
Hannah came in wearing a simple white shift. There seemed to be a slight fuzz on her scalp. Her face looked more human and alive in every way. She moved to Daeman’s bedside, took care not to touch his arm, and bent over and kissed him firmly on the lips. “Thank you, Daeman. Thank you,” she said when the kiss was finished. She handed him a tiny forget-me-not she’d picked in the yard and he took it clumsily in his left hand.
“You’re welcome,” said Daeman. “I liked that kiss.” He had. It was as if he—Daeman, the world’s most eager womanizer—had never been kissed before.
“This is interesting,” said Hannah, unballing a turin cloth from her other hand. “I found it down by the old oak table, but it doesn’t work anymore. I tried two others. Nothing. Even the turins don’t work now.”
“Or maybe the Greek and Trojan battle drama is finished,” said Harman, holding the embroidered circuits on the cloth to his forehead and then tossing the cloth aside. “Perhaps the turin’s story is over.”
Odysseus was looking out the window at the blue sky and green lawn, but now he turned back toward the little gathering. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I suspect that the real war has just begun.”
“Do you know anything about the turin drama?” asked Hannah. “I thought you said you never went under the cloth.”
Odysseus shrugged. “Savi and I distributed the turin cloths almost ten years ago. I brought the prototype from . . . far away.”
“Why?” asked Daeman.
Odysseus opened his hand. “The war was coming. Human beings here on earth had to learn something about war, its terror and its beauty. And they had to learn something about those people in the tale—Achilles, Hector, the others. Even me.”
“Why?” asked Hannah.
“Because the war is coming,” said Odysseus.
“We’re not a part of it,” said Ada.
Odysseus folded his arms. “You will be. You’re not on the front lines yet, but those battle lines are coming this way. You’ll be part of this conflict whether you want to be or not.”
“How can we take part?” asked Ada. “We don’t know how to fight. Or even want to learn how.”
“About sixty of the young men and women who’ve stayed here will know a bit about fighting in a few weeks time,” said Odysseus. “Whether they want to fight when the time comes will be up to them. As it always is.” He pointed to Harman. “Believe it or not, your sonie’s fixable. I’ve been working on it and may have it in the air in a week or ten days.”
“I don’t want to see fighting,” said Ada. “I don’t want to be in a war.”
“No,” said Odysseus. “You’re right not to.”
Ada lowered her face as if to fight back tears. When she put her closed hand on the bed, Daeman set his fingers next to hers and handed her Hannah’s forget-me-not. Then he drifted off to sleep.
He awoke in darkness and moonlight with a shape sitting next to the bed. Caliban! Daeman instinctively lifted his right arm, folding his right hand into a fist, and the pain set off lights behind his eyes.
“Easy,” said Harman, leaning across him to straighten the bandaged arm. “Easy, Daeman.”
Daeman was gasping, trying not to vomit from the pain. “I thought you were . . .”
“I know,” said Harman.
Daeman sat up in bed. “Do you think he’s dead?”
The shadow-man shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve been wondering . . . thinking about it. About both of them.”
“Both of them?” said Daeman. “You mean Savi as well?”
“No . . . I mean, yes, I think about her a lot . . . but I was thinking about Prospero. The hologram of Prospero who said it was only an echo of a shadow or whatever.”
“What about it?”
“I think it was Prospero,” whispered Harman. He leaned closer. “I think he was imprisoned somehow on the post-humans’ asteroid city—what the Prospero holo called ‘my isle’—just as Caliban was imprisoned there.”
“By whom?” said Daeman.
Harman sat back and sighed. “I don’t know. These days I don’t know a damned thing.”
Daeman nodded. “It took us a long time to learn enough to realize that none of us knows a damned thing, didn’t it, Harman?”
The older man laughed. But when he spoke again, his whispered tone was serious. “I’m worried that we freed them.”
“Freed them?” whispered Daeman. He’d been hungry a second before, ravenous, but now his belly felt filled with icewater. “Caliban and Prospero.”
“Yes.”
“Or maybe we killed them,” said Daeman, voice hard.
“Yes.” Harman rose and clasped the younger man’s shoulder. “I’m going to go and let you get some sleep. Thank you, Daeman.”
“For what?”
“Thank you,” repeated Harman. He left the room.
Daeman lay back on the pillows, exhausted, but sleep didn’t come. He listened to night sounds coming through the broken window—crickets, night birds he couldn’t name, frogs croaking in the small pond behind the house, the rustle of leaves in the night breeze—and he found that he was grinning.
If Caliban’s alive, it’s a damned shame. But I’m alive as well. I’m alive.
He slept then, a clean and dreamless sleep that lasted until Ada awoke him an hour after dawn with his first real breakfast in five weeks.
Four days later and Daeman was walking in the gardens alone on a cool but beautiful evening when Ada, Harman, Hannah, Odysseus, Petyr, and the young woman named Peaen came down the hill to find him.