“She was the wisest woman I’ve ever met,” said Harman. “I won’t see her like again.”
Noman flashed his unfriendly smile. “The second part of that statement is correct.”
They encountered a stream that ran down into the larger stream, balancing precariously on rocks and fallen logs as they crossed. It was too cold to get their feet and clothes wet unless necessary. The ox lumbered through the chill water, bouncing the empty droshky behind him. Petyr crossed first and stood guard with the flechette rifle ready as the other three came over. They were not following the same cattle tracks home, but were within a few hundred yards of the way they’d come. They knew they had one more rolling, wooded ridge to cross, then a long rocky meadow, then another bit of meadow before Ardis Hall, warmth, food, and relative safety.
The sun had set behind the bank of dark clouds to the southwest. Within minutes, it was dark enough that the rings were providing most of the light. There were two lanterns in the droshky and candles in the pack that Harman carried, but they wouldn’t need them unless the clouds moved in to obscure the rings and stars.
“I wonder if Daeman got off to go get his mother,” said Petyr. The young man seemed uncomfortable in long silences.
“I wish he’d waited for me,” said Harman. “ Or at least until daylight on the other end. Paris Crater isn’t very safe these days.”
Noman grunted. “Of all of you, Daeman—amazingly—seems the best fitted to take care of himself. He’s surprised you, hasn’t he, Harman?”
“Not really,” said Harman. Instantly he realized that this wasn’t the truth. Less than a year ago, when he’d first met Daeman, he’d seen a whining, pudgy momma’s boy whose only hobbies were capturing butterflies and seducing young women. In fact, Harman was sure that Daeman had come to Ardis Hall ten months ago to seduce his cousin Ada. In their first adventures, Daeman had been timid and complaining. But Harman had to acknowledge to himself that events had changed the younger man, and much more for the better than they’d changed Harman. It had been a starved but determined Daeman—forty pounds lighter but infinitely more aggressive—who had taken on Caliban in single combat in the near zero-gravity of Prospero’s orbital isle. And it had been Daeman who had gotten Harman and Hannah out alive. Since the Fall, Daeman had been much quieter, more serious, and dedicated to learning every fighting and survival skill that Odysseus would teach.
Harman was a little envious. He’d thought of himself as the natural leader of the Ardis group—older, wiser, the only man on earth nine months ago who could read, or wanted to, the only man on earth who knew then that the earth was round—but now Harman had to admit that the ordeal that had strengthened Daeman had weakened him in both body and spirit. Is it my age? Physically, Harman looked to be in his healthy late thirties or early forties, like any Four Twenties-plus male before the Fall. The blue worms and bubbling chemicals he’d seen in the Firmary tanks up there had renewed him well enough during his first four visits. But psychologically? Harman had to worry. Perhaps old was old, no matter how skillfully one’s human form had been reworked. Adding to this feeling was the fact that Harman was still limping from injuries to his leg received up there on Prospero’s hellish isle eight months earlier. No Firmary tank now waited to undo every bit of damage done, no servitors floated forth to bandage and heal the result of every little careless accident. Harman knew his leg would never be right, that he’d limp until the day he died—and this thought added to his odd sadness this day.
They trudged on through the woods in silence. Each of them seemed to the others to be lost in his or her own thoughts. Harman was taking his turn to lead the ox by its halter, and the ox was getting more stubborn and willful as the evening grew darker. All it would take was for the stupid animal to lurch the wrong way, bash the droshky against one of these trees, and they’d have to either stay out all night repairing the goddamned thing or just leave it out here and lead the ox home without it. Neither alternative was appealing.
He glanced at Odysseus-Noman walking easily along, shortening his stride to keep pace with the slow ox and limping Harman, and then he looked at Hannah staring wistfully at Noman and Petyr staring wistfully at Hannah, and he just wanted to sit down on the cold ground and weep for the world that was too busy surviving to weep. He thought of the incredible play he’d just read—Romeo and Juliet—and wondered if some things and follies were universal to human nature even after almost two millennia of self-styled evolution, nano-engineering, and genetic manipulation.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have allowed Ada to get pregnant. This was the thought that haunted Harman the most.
She had wanted a child. He had wanted a child. More than that, uniquely after all these centuries, they had both wanted a family—a man to stay with the woman and child, the child to be raised by them and not by servitors. While all pre-Fall old-style humans knew their mothers, almost no one had known—or wanted to know—who his or her father was. In a world where males stayed young and vital until their Fifth and Final Twenty, in a small population—perhaps fewer than three hundred thousand people worldwide—and in a culture comprised of little more than parties and brief sexual liaisons where youthful beauty was prized above all else, it was almost certain that many fathers would unknowingly couple with their daughters, young men with their mothers.
This bothered Harman after he had taught himself to read and got his first glimpses of previous cultures, long-lost values—too late, too late—but the incest would have bothered no one else nine months ago. The same genetically engineered nano-sensors in a woman’s body that allowed her to choose from carefully stored sperm packets months or years after intercourse, would have never allowed the woman to choose someone from her immediate family as a breeding mate. It simply couldn’t happen. The nanoprogramming was foolproof, even if the coupling humans were fools.
But now everything is different, thought Harman. They would need families to survive—not just to make it through the voynix attacks and hardships after the Fall, but to help them organize for the war that Odysseus had sworn was coming. The old Greek wouldn’t say anything else about his Fall-night prophecy, but he had said that night that some large war was coming—some speculated a war related to the siege of Troy they’d all vicariously enjoyed under their turin cloths before those embedded microcircuits also ceased to function. “New worlds will appear on your lawn,” he’d told Ada.
As they came out into the last broad meadow before the final rim of forest, Harman realized that he was tired and scared. Tired of always trying to decide what was right—who was he to have destroyed the Firmary, possibly freed Prospero, and now always to be lecturing on family and the need to organize into protective groups? What did he know—ninety-nine-year-old Harman who had wasted almost all of his lifetime without learning wisdom?
And he was scared not so much of dying—although they all shared that fear for the first time in a millennium and half of human experience—but of the very change he’d helped bring about. And he was afraid of the responsibility.
Were we right to allow Ada to get pregnant now? In this new world, the two had decided that it made more sense—even in the midst of hardships and uncertainty—to begin a family, though “begin a family” was a strange phrase since it took a great effort even to think of having more than one child. Only one child had been permitted to each old-style human woman during the millennium-and-a-half rule of the absent post-humans. It had been disorienting to the point of vertigo for Ada and Harman to realize that they could have several children if they so chose and if their biology agreed. There was no waiting list, no need for post-human approval signaled through the servitors. On the other hand, they didn’t know if a human could have more than one child. Would their altered genetics and nanoprogramming allow it?