“What . . .” began Hannah.
“Terror Birds,” said Savi. “Phorushacos . After the rubicon, the ARNists had a wild few centuries of such play. It’s sort of fitting, since the real Terror Birds wandered these plains and hills about two million years ago, but that kind of recombinant crap—like your dinosaurs up north—plays havoc with the ecology. The posts promised to clean it all up during the final fax Hiatus, but they didn’t.”
“What’s an ARNist?” asked Ada. The animals—red-beaked Terror Birds and prey alike—were out of sight behind them. Larger herds with larger animals were visible now to the west, being stalked by tigerish-looking things. The sonie swung higher and turned toward the foothills.
Savi sighed as if weary. “RNA artists. Recombinant freelancers. Social rebels and merry pranksters with sequencers and bootleg regen tanks.” She looked over at Ada, then at Harman, then back at Daeman and Hannah. “Never mind, children,” she said.
They flew another fifteen minutes above steaming forests and then turned west into a mountain range. Clouds moved around and between the mountain peaks below them and snow whipped around the sonie, but somehow the forcefield kept the elements at bay.
Savi touched a glowing image; the sonie slowed, circled, and turned west toward the late-afternoon sun. They were very high.
“Oh my,” said Harman.
Ahead of them, two sharp peaks rose on either side of a narrow saddle covered by grassy terraces and truly ancient ruins, stone walls with no roofs. A bridge—also from the Lost Age but obviously not as ancient as the stone ruins—ran from one of the sharp-toothed peaks to the other above the ruins. There was no road beyond the suspension bridge—the roadway ended in a wall of rock at both ends—and the foundations were sunk into rock between the ruins below.
The sonie circled.
“A suspension bridge,” whispered Harman. “I’ve read about them.”
Ada was good at estimating the size of things, and she guessed that the main span of this bridge was almost a mile in length, although the roadbed had broken away in a score of places, showing rusted rebar and empty air. She guessed the two towers—each showing ancient orange paint, but sporting mostly rust—to be more than 700 feet tall, the top of each tower rising higher than the mountains at either end. The double-towers were green with what looked to be ivy from a distance, but as the sonie circled closer, Ada could see that the “growth” was artificial—green bubbles and stairways and globs of flexible glasslike material, wrapping around the towers, strung along the heavy suspension cables, even trailing down the support cables and hanging free above the ruined roadway. Clouds moved down from the high peaks and mixed with the fog rising from the deep canyons below the ruins on the hilltop, curling and writhing around the south tower and obscuring the roadway and hanging cables there.
“Does this place have a name?” asked Ada.
“The Golden Gate at Machu Picchu,” said Savi as she touched the controls to bring them closer.
“What does that mean?” asked Daeman.
“I have no idea,” said Savi.
The sonie circled the northern tower—dull orange and scabrous rust-red in the bright sunlight here beyond the clouds—and floated slowly, carefully, to the top of the tower, touching down without a sound.
The forcefield died away. Savi nodded and everyone crawled out, stretched, looked around. The air was cold and very thin.
Daeman wandered over to the rusted edge of the tower top, leaning out to look. Growing up with Paris Crater as his home base, he had no fear of heights.
“I wouldn’t fall if I were you,” said Savi. “There’s no firmary rescue here. You die away from the faxnodes, you stay dead.”
Daeman lurched backward, almost falling in his haste to get back from the edge. “What are you talking about?”
“Just what I said,” said Savi, hoisting her pack to her right shoulder. “There’s no fax to the firmary here. Try to stay alive until you get back.”
Ada looked skyward to where both rings were visible through the high, thin air. “I thought the post-humans could fax us from anywhere if we . . . got into trouble.”
“To the rings,” said Savi, her voice flat. “Where the firmary heals you. To where you ascend after your Fifth Twenty to join the post-humans.”
“Yes,” Ada said weakly.
Savi shook her head. “It’s not the posts who fax you away when something bad happens, rebuilding you. All that’s myth. Or to be less polite—bullshit.”
Harman opened his mouth to speak but it was Daeman who spoke first. “I was just there,” he said, anger in his voice. “In the firmary. In the rings.”
“In the firmary, yes,” said Savi. “But not healed by post-humans. If they’re up there, they don’t care a whit about you. And I don’t think they’re up there anymore.”
The four stood on the rusted tower summit more than five hundred feet above the ruined roadway, eight hundred feet above the grassy saddle and stone ruins. Wind from the higher peaks buffeted them and blew their hair.
“After our last Twenty, we go up to join the posts . . .” began Hannah, her voice small.
Savi laughed and led the way toward an irregular glass globule blobbing up over the west end of the ancient tower top.
There were rooms and anterooms and stairways descending and frozen escalators and smaller rooms off the main chambers. Ada thought it strange that the sky and the orange towers and the hanging cables and glimpses of the jungle and roadway below were not tinted green through the material, nor was the sunlight streaming in turned green—the green glass somehow passed colors accurately.
Savi led them down and around from one green module to the next, from one side of the bifurcated tower to another through thin tubes that should have been swinging in the strong breeze, but weren’t. Some of the chambers extended thirty or forty feet out beyond the tower, and Ada had no clue how the green globule was attached to the concrete and steel.
Some of the rooms were empty. Others had—artifacts. A series of animal skeletons stood silhouetted against the mountain skyline in one room. In another, what appeared to be replicas of machines lined display counters and hung from wires. In yet another, plexiglass cubes held fetuses of a hundred creatures, none of them human but some disturbingly close to human. In another room, faded holograms of starfields and ringfields moved over and through the observers.
“What is this place?” asked Harman.
“A sort of museum,” said Savi. “I think most of the important displays are missing.”
“Created by whom?” asked Hannah.
Savi shrugged. “Not by the posts, I think. I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure that the bridge—or the original of this bridge, it may be a replica—once stood above water near a Lost Age city on what was then the west coast of the continent north of here. Have you heard of such a thing, Harman?”
“No.”
“Perhaps I dreamt it,” said Savi with a rueful laugh. “My memory plays tricks on me after all these centuries of sleep.”
“You mentioned sleeping through the centuries once before,” Daeman said, his tone sounding brusque to Ada. “What are you talking about?”
Savi had led them down a long spiral staircase in the green-glass tube strung between the suspension cables, and now she gestured to a line of what appeared to be crystal coffins. “A form of cryosleep,” she said. “Only not cold—which is silly, because that’s what ‘cryo’ meant originally. Some of these cocoons still work, still freeze molecular motion. Not through cold, but through some microtechnology that draws power from the bridge.”