Daeman closed his fist again and pulled his hand away. “Not if it’s dangerous.”
“It’s not,” said Savi. “Not to us. Here, I’ll go first.” She lowered his arm, pulled his fingers open, and touched his palm in a way he found almost exciting. Then she set her own left palm next to his.
“Visualize four blue rectangles above three red circles above four green triangles,” she said softly.
Daeman frowned—that was difficult, the shapes skittered right at the edge of his ability to hold the image—but he managed at last, his eyes closed.
“Open your eyes,” said Savi.
He did so, wildly grabbing the sonie for support with both hands a second later.
There was no palm cloud. No unreadable maps or cartoon figures.
Instead, everything within his sight had been transformed. The nearby trees he had been ignoring except to borrow their shade were now towering complexities—transparent, layer upon layer of pulsing, living tissue, dead bark, vesicules, veins, dead inner material showing structural vectors and rings with columns of flowing data, the moving green and red of life—needles, xylem, phloem, water, sugar, energy, sunlight. He knew that if he could read the flowing data, he would understand exactly the hydrology of the living miracle that was that tree, know exactly how many foot-pounds of pressure it was taking to osmotically raise all that water from the roots—Daeman could look down and see the roots under the soil, see the energy exchange of water from the soil into those roots and the long voyage, hundreds of feet, from roots to the vertical tubules raising that water—hundreds of feet vertically! Like a giant sucking from a straw!—and then the lateral motion of the water, molecules of water in pipelines only molecules wide, out along branches fifty, sixty, seventy feet wide, narrowing, narrowing, life and nutrients in that water, energy from the sun . . .
Daeman looked up and saw sunlight for the discrete rain of energy it was—sunlight striking pine needles and being absorbed, sunlight striking the humus beneath his feet and warming the bacteria there. He could count the busy bacteria! The world around him was a torrent of information, a tidal wave of data, a million micro-ecologies interacting all at once, energy to energy. Even death was part of the complex dance of water, light, energy, life, recycling, growth, sex, and hunger flowing all around him.
Daeman could see a dead mouse almost buried in the humus on the opposite side of the glade, little more than hair and bones now, but still a beacon of red-light energy as the bacteria feasted and the fly eggs incubated into maggots in the afternoon sunlight and the slow unraveling of complex protein molecules continued on the molecular level, and . . .
Gasping, almost gagging, Daeman whirled away, trying to shut off this vision, but everywhere was the complexity—the tagged and streaming ebb and flow of energy being passed, nutrients being absorbed, cells being fed, molecules dancing in the transparent trees, and breathing soil and sky ablaze with its rain and surge of sunlight and radio messages from the stars.
Daeman clasped his hands over his eyes, but too late; he’d looked at Savi—the old woman, but also a galaxy of life. Life nested in the flashing neurons of her brain behind that grinning skull and firing like lightning on the string of shocks along her retinal nerve and in the billions upon billions of living forms in her gut, busy and indifferent all, and—trying to look away, Daeman made the mistake of looking down at himself, into himself, past himself at his connection to the air and ground and sky . . .
“Off!” said Savi; Daeman’s mind echoed the command.
The brilliant midday sunlight bouncing off the trees and needle-strewn soil suddenly seemed as dark as midnight to Daeman. His legs ceased to work. Gasping, Daeman slid along the edge of the sonie and collapsed on the ground, rolling onto his stomach, arms extended, palms pushed flat, face pressed against pine needles.
Savi crouched next to him and patted his shoulder. “It’ll go away in a minute,” she said softly. “You rest here. I’ll go find the others.”
Ada had been hesitant to go when Harman suggested they take a walk—she was afraid that Savi would be angry or alarmed at everyone’s absence when she returned to the glade—but Hannah had already run off in search of Odysseus, and Ada didn’t want to stay there by the sonie alone with Daeman. Besides, she didn’t know if she’d have another chance to speak in private with her new lover before she returned to Ardis and he went flying off to the Mediterwhatsis Basin with Savi.
They walked up a hill, then followed a stream down the other side. The forest was alive with birdsong, but they saw no animals larger than a squirrel. Harman seemed preoccupied, lost in thought, and the only time he touched Ada was when he extended his hand to help her across the stream just above a ten-foot waterfall. She wondered if their night together had been a mistake, a miscalculation on her part, but when they stopped to rest at the base of the waterfall, she saw his eyes focus on her, saw the affection and tenderness in his gaze, and was glad they’d become lovers.
“Ada,” he said, “do you know your father?”
She had to blink at this. The question was not quite shocking—people knew they had fathers, of course, theoretically—but such a thing was rarely asked. “Do you mean know who he was?” she asked.
Harman shook his head. “I mean know him. Have you met him?”
“No,” she said. “My mother told me his name at one point, but I believe he . . . reached his Fifth Twenty some years ago.” She had almost said Ascended to the rings, the most common euphemism for passing on bodily into the heaven of the post-humans. Her heart pounded when she wondered why Harman was asking her this odd question. Did he think there was a chance that he had been her father? It happened, of course. Young women made love with older men who could be their anonymous sperm-fathers—there was no taboo on incest, since there was no chance that a child could be born from such a union, and there were no brothers or sisters since every woman could reproduce only once—but it was strangely disturbing to think about it.
“I didn’t know who my father was,” said Harman. “Savi said that at one point in time—even after the Lost Age—fathers were almost as important to children as mothers are now.”
“That’s hard to imagine,” said Ada, still confused. What was he trying to tell her? That he was too old for her? That was nonsense.
“If I’m ever a father,” said Harman, “I want the child to know me. I want to be with the child as he or she grows up . . . just as a mother would.”
Ada was too shocked to speak.
He began walking again and she followed him in under the trees. It was cooler in the shade, but the air was thicker there. The waterfall made a soft noise behind them. Suddenly Ada looked around, alarmed.
“Did you hear something?” asked Harman, stopping next to her.
“No. It’s just . . . something’s wrong.”
“No servitors,” said Harman. “No voynix.”
That was it, realized Ada. They were alone. For the last two days, the absence of omnipresent servitors and voynix had been like a missing background noise, but it was more apparent now that they were alone, just the two of them.
Suddenly, for no apparent reason, she shivered. “Can you find the way back to the sonie?”
Harman nodded. “I’ve been making notes on the terrain and watching the sun.” He pointed with the branch he was using as a walking stick. “The glade is just over that hill.”
Ada smiled, but she wasn’t totally convinced. She checked her palm-finder, but it was as blank as it had been since they’d left the Antarctic domi. She’d been in the woods before—usually on her Ardis estate—but never without a servitor floating nearby to show the way home or without a voynix for protection. But this was just background tension to the central anxiety about Harman’s odd question and comment.