Ada had expected to love making love with Harman—with sharing her body with him and learning the pleasure his body could bring her—but she had been amazed to find that as their closeness grew, it was as if each of them had discovered another body—not hers, not his, but something shared and inexplicable. Ada had never discussed this with anyone—not even with Harman, although she knew that he shared the feeling—and it was her opinion that it had taken the Fall to liberate this mystery in human beings.
These last eight months since the Fall should have been a hard, sad time for Ada—the servitors crashed to uselessness, her life of ease and partying gone forever, the world that she had known and grown up in gone forever, her mother—who had refused to come back to the danger of Ardis Hall, staying at the Loman Estate near the eastern coast with two thousand others, dead along with all the others there in the massed voynix attack in the autumn—the disappearance of Ada’s cousin-friend Virginia from her estate outside of Chom above the Arctic Circle, the unprecedented worries about food and warmth and safety and survival, the terrible knowledge that the Firmary was gone forever and that the certainty of ascension to the heaven of the p-ring and e-ring was all a vicious myth, the sobering knowledge that only death awaited them someday and that even the Five Twenties lifespan was not their birthright any more, that they could die at any time… it all should have been terrifying and oppressive to the twenty-seven-year-old woman.
She had been happy. Ada had been happier than at any time in her life. She had been happy with the new challenges and with the need to find courage as well as the need to trust and depend on others for her life. Ada had been happy learning that she loved Harman and that he loved her in some way that their old world of fax-in parties and servitor luxuries and temporary connections between men and women would never have allowed. As unhappy as she was each time he left on a hunting trip or to lead an attack on voynixes or on a sonie voyage to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu or to another ancient site, or on one of his teaching fax-journeys to any of the three-hundred-some other communities of survivors—at least half the humans on Earth dead since the Fall, and there were never a million of us we know now, that number the post-humans had given us centuries ago had always been a lie—she was equally happy every time he returned and gloriously happy every cold, dangerous, uncertain day that he was there at Ardis Hall with her.
She would go on if her beloved Harman was dead—she knew in her heart that she would go on, survive, fight, birth and raise this child, perhaps love again—but she also knew this night that the fierce, gliding joy of the past eight months would be gone forever.
Quit being an idiot, Ada commanded herself.
She rose, adjusted her shawl, and had turned to go into the house when the bell in the gate watchtower rang out, as did the voice of one of the sentries.
“Three people approaching from the forest!”
All the men at the cupola dropped their work, grabbed spears or bows or crossbows, and ran to the walls. The roving sentries from the east and west yards also ran to the ladders and parapets.
Three people. For a moment, Ada stood frozen where she was. Four had left that morning. And they’d had a converted droshky pulled by an ox. They wouldn’t return without the droshky and ox unless something terrible had happened, and if it was just that someone had been injured—say, a twisted ankle or broken leg—they would have used the droshky to transport him or her.
“Three people approaching the north gate,” cried the watchtower guard again. “Open the gate. They’re carrying a body.”
Ada dropped her shawl and ran as fast as she could for the north gate.
23
Hours before the voynix attacked, Harman had the sense that something terrible was going to happen.
This outing hadn’t really been necessary. Odysseus—Noman now, Harman reminded himself, although to him the sturdy man with the salt-and-pepper beard would always be Odysseus—had wanted to bring in fresh meat, track down some of the missing cattle, and reconnoiter the hill country to the north. Petyr suggested that they just use the sonie, but Odysseus argued that even with the leaves off the trees, it was still difficult to see even something as large as a cow from a low-flying sonie. Besides, he wanted to hunt.
“The voynix want to hunt too,” Harman had said. “They’re getting bolder every week.”
Odysseus—Noman—had shrugged.
Harman had come along despite his sure knowledge that everyone on this little expedition had better things to do. Hannah had been working toward an early morning iron pour for the following day and her absence might throw that plan behind schedule. Petyr had been cataloging the hundreds of books brought in during the last two weeks, setting priorities on which should be sigled first. Noman himself had been talking about finally going on his long-delayed solo sonie search for the elusive robotic factory somewhere along the shores of what had once been called Lake Michigan. And Harman would have probably devoted the entire day to his obsessive attempt to penetrate the allnet and discover more functions, although he’d also been considering going to Paris Crater with Daeman to help fetch his friend’s mother.
But Noman—who constantly went on solo hunting expeditions—had wanted to go out with others this time. And poor Hannah, who had been in love with Noman-Odysseus since the day she’d met him on the Golden Gate Bridge at Machu Picchu more than nine months earlier, insisted on coming along. Then Petyr, who had first come to Ardis Hall as a disciple of Odysseus’ before the Fall, back when the old man was still teaching his strange philosophy, but who was now a disciple only of Hannah in the sense that he was helplessly in love with her, had also insisted on going. And finally Harman had agreed to join them because… he wasn’t sure why he had agreed to join them. Perhaps he didn’t want three such star-crossed lovers alone in the woods all day with their weapons.
Later, while walking behind those three in the cold forest and thinking these words, Harman had to smile. He’d run across that phrase—“star-crossed lovers”—only the previous day while reading—visually reading, not function-sigling—Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Harman was drunk on Shakespeare that week, having read three plays in two days. He was surprised he could walk, much less hold a conversation. His mind was filled to overflowing with incredible cadences, a torrent of new vocabulary, and more insight into the complexity of what it meant to be human than he’d ever hoped to achieve. It made him want to weep.
If he wept, he knew with some shame, it would not be for the beauty and power of the plays—the entire concept of staged drama was new to Harman and his postliterate world. No, he’d be weeping because of selfish sorrow over the fact that he’d not encountered such things as Shakespeare until less than three months before his allotted fivescore years was up. Even though he was certain, since he’d helped to destroy it, that the orbital Firmary would be faxing no more old-style humans up to the e-ring on their Fifth Twenty—or on any other Twenty for that matter—ninety-nine years of thinking that his life on earth would end on the stroke of midnight marking his hundredth birthday was a hard mind-set to escape.