Everyone nodded impatiently. The rifle team walked to the star inlaid on the fax pavilion floor while Daeman poised his hand over the keypad. “Let’s go,” he said and tapped in the code for his uninhabited node.
Nothing happened. The usual puff of air and visual flicker as people faxed out of existence simply did not happen.
“One at a time,” said Daeman, although faxnodes could easily handle six people faxing at a time. “Caul. Stand on the star.”
Caul did, shifting his rifle nervously. Daeman faxed in the code again.
Nothing. The wind made a noise as it blew snow into the open pavilion.
“Maybe that faxnode doesn’t work anymore,” called a woman named Seaes from the crowd.
“I’ll try Loman’s Estate,” said Daeman and tapped in the familiar code.
It did not work.
“Holy Jesus Christ Shit,” cried the burly Kaman. He pushed forward. “Maybe you’re doing it wrong. Let me.”
Half a dozen people had a try. Three dozen familiar faxnode codes were tried. Nothing worked. Not Paris Crater. Not Chom or Bellinbad or the many Circles of Heaven code for Ulanbat. Nothing worked.
Finally everyone stood in silence, stunned, speechless, their faces turned to masks of terror and hopelessness. Nothing in the past year, none of the nightmares of the last months—not the Fall of the Meteors, not the failing of electricity and the fall of the servitors, not the early attacks of voynix nor the news from Paris Crater, not even the Ardis Hall Massacre or the hopeless situation on Starved Rock had struck these men and women with such a sense of hopelessness.
The faxnodes no longer worked. The world as they had known it since they were born no longer existed. There was nowhere to flee, nothing to do now but wait and die. Wait for the voynix to return or for the cold to kill them or for disease and starvation to finish them off one by one.
Ada stepped up onto the small base around the faxpad column so that she could be seen as well as be heard.
“We’re going back to Ardis Hall,” she said. Her voice was strong, brooking no argument. “It’s only a little more than a mile up the road. We can be there in less than an hour, even in our condition. Greogi and Tom will bring those to sick to walk.”
“What the fuck is at Ardis Hall?” asked a short woman whom Ada did not recognize. “What’s there except corpses and carrion and ashes and voynix?”
“Not everything burned,” Ada said loudly. She had no idea if everything had burned or not; she’d been unconscious when they’d flown her away from the flaming ruins. But Daeman and Greogi had described unburned sections of the compound. “Not everything burned,” she said again. “There are logs there. Remnants of the tents and barracks. If nothing else, we’ll pull down the stockade wall and build cabins out of the wood. And there will be artifacts—things that didn’t burn in the ruins. Guns, maybe. Things we left behind.”
“Like the voynix,” said a scarred man named Elos.
“Maybe so,” said Ada, “but the voynix are everywhere. And they’re afraid of this Setebos Egg that Daeman’s carrying. As long as we have it, the voynix will stay away. And where would you rather face them, Elos? In the darkness of the forest at night, or sitting around a big fire at Ardis, in a warm hut, while your friends help stand watch?”
There was silence but it was an angry silence. Some still tried tapping at the faxpad, then pounding the column in frustration.
“Why don’t we just stay here at the pavilion?” said Elle. “It has a roof already. We can close in the sides, build a fire. The stockade is smaller here and would be easier to rebuild. And if the fax starts working again, we could get out fast.”
Ada nodded. “That makes sense, my friend. But what about water? The stream is almost a quarter of a mile from the pavilion here. Someone would always have to be fetching water, risking exposure or voynix attack to get it. And there’s no place to store it here, nor room enough for all of us under this pavilion roof. And this valley is cold. Ardis gets more sunlight, we’ll have more building material to use there, and Ardis Hall had a well under it. We can build our new Ardis Hall around the well so we’ll never have to go outside for water.”
People shifted their weight from foot to foot but no one had anything to say. The thought of walking back down that frozen road, away from the salvation of the fax pavilion, seemed too difficult to contemplate.
“I’m going now,” said Ada. “It will be dark in a few hours. I want a big fire roaring before ringlight sets in.”
She walked out of the pavilion and headed west down the road. Daeman followed. Then Boman and Edide. Then Tom, Siris, Kaman, and most of the others. Greogi supervised loading the sick back into the sonie.
Daeman hurried to catch up to her and leaned close to whisper to her. “I have good news and bad news,” he said.
“What’s the good news?” Ada asked tiredly. Her head was pounding so ferociously that she had to keep her eyes closed, opening them only once in a while to stay on the frozen dirt road.
“Everyone’s coming,” he said.
“And the bad news?” asked Ada. She was thinking—I will not cry. I will not cry.
“This goddamned Setebos Egg is starting to hatch,” said Daeman.
54
As Harman took off his clothes in the crystal crypt beneath the marble mass of the Taj Moira, he realized just how damned cold it was in that glass room. It also must have been cold in the huge Taj chamber above, but the thermskin he’d put on in the eiffelbahn car had kept him from noticing. Now he hesitated at the foot of the clear coffin with the thermskin peeled half down his torso, his regular clothes in a tumble at his feet and goosebumps rising on his bare arms and chest.
This is wrong. This is absolutely, totally wrong.
Other than a lifetime awe of the post-humans in their orbital rings and the almost spiritual belief everyone had that they would rise to the rings and spend eternity with the posts after their Final Fax, Harman and his people knew nothing of religion. The closest they had come to understanding religious awe and ceremony had come from the glimpses they’d received of the Greek gods through the turin-cloth drama.
But now Harman felt that he was about to commit something like sin.
Ada’s life—the life of everyone I know and care for—may depend on me waking this post-human woman.
“By having sex with a dead or comatose stranger?” he whispered aloud. “This is wrong. This is crazy.”
Harman glanced over his shoulder and up the stairway, but, as he’d promised, Prospero was nowhere to be seen. Harman shucked out of the rest of his thermskin. The air was freezing cold. He looked down at himself and almost laughed at how contracted, cold, and shrunken he was.
What if this is all the crazy old magus’s idea of a joke? And who was to say whether Prospero was lurking around under some invisibility cloak or other contrivance of his magusy ways?
Harman stood at the foot of the crystal coffin and shook. The cold was part of it. The unpleasantness of what he was about to do a greater part. Even the idea that he was descended from this Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep made him queasy.
He remembered Ada injured, unconscious, atop that place called Starved Rock with the pitifully few other survivors of the massacre at Ardis.
Who’s to say that was real? Certainly Prospero could make a turin cloth transmit false images.
But he had to proceed as if the vision had been real. He had to proceed as if Prospero’s emotional statement to him that he had to learn, to change, to enter this fight against Setebos and the voynix and the calibani, or all would be lost, was true.
But what can one man who’s had his Five Twenties do? Harman asked himself.