Effectively, I have one day left to live.
With that in mind, I finally decide where I am going.
16
South Polar Sea
The four travelers decided to eat after all.
Savi disappeared into one of her lighted tunnels for a few minutes and returned with warmer dishes—chicken, heated rice, curried peppers, and strips of grilled lamb. The four had munched on their food in Ulanbat hours earlier, but now they ate with enthusiasm.
“If you’re weary,” said Savi, “you can sleep here tonight before we head off. There are comfortable sleeping areas in some of the nearby rooms.”
Each said he or she was not that tired—it was only late afternoon Paris Crater time. Daeman looked around, swallowed some of the grilled lamb he was chewing, and said, “Why do you live in a . . .” He turned to Harman. “What did you call it?”
“An iceberg,” said Harman.
Daeman nodded and chewed and turned back to Savi. “Why do you live in an iceberg?”
The woman smiled. “This particular home of mine might be the result of . . . let’s say . . . an old woman’s nostalgia.” When she saw Harman looking at her intently, she added, “I was on a sort of sabbatical in a ‘berg much like this when the final fax went on without me fourteen of your allotted life spans ago.”
“I thought that everyone was stored during the final fax,” said Ada. She wiped her fingers on a beautiful tan linen napkin. “All the millions of old-style humans.”
Savi shook her head. “Not millions, my dear. There were just a few more than nine thousand of us when the posts carried out their final fax. As far as I can tell, none of those people—many of them my friends—were reconstituted after the Hiatus. All of us survivors of the pandemic were Jews, you know, because of our resistance to the rubicon virus.”
“What are Jews?” asked Hannah. “Or what were Jews?”
“Mostly a theoretical race construct,” said Savi. “A semi-distinct genetic group brought about by cultural and religious isolation over several thousand years.” She paused and looked at her four guests. Only Harman’s expression suggested that he might have the slightest clue to what she was talking about.
“It doesn’t really matter,” Savi said softly. “But it’s why you heard of me referred to as ‘the Wandering Jew,’ Harman. I became a myth. A legend. The phrase ‘Wandering Jew’ survived after the meaning was lost.” She smiled again, but with no visible humor.
“How did you miss the final fax?” asked Harman. “Why did the post-humans leave you behind?”
“I don’t know. I’ve asked myself that question for centuries. Perhaps so that I could serve as . . . witness.”
“Witness?” said Ada. “To what?”
“There were many strange changes in heaven and Earth in the centuries before and after the final fax, my dear. Perhaps the posts felt that someone—even if just one old-style human being—should bear witness to all these changes.”
“Many changes?” said Hannah. “I don’t really understand.”
“No, my dear, you wouldn’t, would you? You and your parents and your parents’ parents’ parents have known a world that does not seem to change at all, except for some of the individuals—and there only at a steady pace of a century per person. No, the changes I’m talking about were not all visible, to be sure. But this is not the Earth that the original old-styles or the early posts once knew.”
“What’s the difference?” asked Daeman, his tone showing everyone how little the answer might interest him.
Savi trained her clear gray-blue eyes on him. “For one thing—a small thing to be sure, certainly small when compared to all the others, but important to me, nonetheless—there are no other Jews.”
She showed them the way to private toilet areas and suggested that they remove their thermskins for the voyage.
“Won’t we need them?” asked Daeman.
“It’ll be cold getting to the sonie,” said Savi. “But we’ll manage. And you won’t need them after that.”
Ada changed out of her thermskin and was back in the main room on the couch, looking at the ice walls and thinking about all this, when Savi came out of a different side chamber. The older woman was wearing thicker trousers than before, stronger and higher boots, a lined cape, and a cap pulled low, her hair pulled back in a gray ponytail. She was carrying a faded khaki backpack that looked heavy. Ada had never seen a woman dress quite like this and was fascinated by the old woman’s style. She realized that she was fascinated by Savi in general.
Harman was also fascinated, it seemed, but with the weapon still visible in Savi’s belt. “You’re still considering shooting one of us?” he asked.
“No,” said Savi. “At least not right now. But there are other things that may need shooting from time to time.”
The walk up and out of the interior and across the surface to the sonie was cold—the wind was still howling and the snow was still pelting—but the machine was warm under its bubble forcefield. Savi took the front spot that Harman had occupied during the flight out and Ada settled into her place on the right, noticing that when Savi passed her hand over the black cowl under the handgrip, a holographic control panel appeared.
“Where did that come from?” asked Harman from his spot to the left of the old woman. One occupant indentation was still empty between Daeman and Hannah.
“It wouldn’t have been a good idea for you to try to fly the sonie on your way here,” said Savi. She checked to make sure that everyone was settled in and secure in their prone positions; then she tweaked the handgrip, the machine hummed deeply, and they rose vertically seven or eight hundred feet above the ice, did a full inverted loop—the forcefield kept them pressed in their places but it felt as if there was nothing but air standing between them and a terrible death falling to the blue ice and black sea so far below—and then the machine righted itself, banked left, and climbed steeply toward the stars.
When the machine was flying northwest at high speed and serious altitude, Harman said, “Can this take us there?” He gestured with his left hand, his fingers pressing into the elastic forcefield above him.
“Where?” said Savi, still concentrating on the holographic displays in front of her. She raised her eyes. “The p-ring?”
Harman was almost on his back, staring up at the polar ring moving north to south above them—the tens of thousands of individual components burning startlingly bright in the clear, thin air at this altitude. “Yes,” he said.
Savi shook her head. “This is a sonie, not a spacecraft. The p-ring is high. Why would you want to go up there?”
Harman ignored the question. “Do you know where we could find a spacecraft?”
The old woman smiled again. Watching Savi carefully, Ada was noticing the variety of the woman’s expressions—the smiles with real warmth, those with none, and this kind, that suggested something actively cold or ironic.
“Perhaps,” she said, but her tone warned against further questioning.
Hannah asked, “Did you actually meet post-humans?”
“Yes,” said Savi, raising her voice slightly to be heard above the sonie’s hum as they hurtled northward. “I actually met some.”
“What were they like?” Hannah’s voice was slightly wistful.
“First off, they were all women,” said Savi.
Harman blinked at this. “They were?”
“Yes. A lot of us suspected that only a few posts ever came down to earth, but that they used different forms. All female. Perhaps there were no male post-humans. Perhaps they didn’t retain gender as they controlled their own evolution. Who knows?”