As if to answer that, Harman crawled up over the edge of the massive crèche. He lowered himself carefully into the end of the thing, not touching the naked woman’s bare feet. The semipermeable forcefield made it feel as if he were slipping into a warm bath through a tingling resistance. Now only his head and shoulders were out of the warmth.
The coffin was long and wide, easily wide enough for him to lie down next to the sleeping female without touching her. The cushioned material she was lying on had looked like silk, but it felt more like some soft, metallic fiber under Harman’s knees. Now that he was mostly in the containment of the time crèche, he could feel surges and pulses of whatever energy field kept this Savi-lookalike young and perhaps asleep.
If I lower my head below the forcefield, thought Harman, maybe it’ll put me into a fifteen-hundred-year sleep as well and solve all my problems. Especially the problem of what to do next here.
He did crouch lower, putting his face below the level of the tingling forcefield the way a timid swimmer might enter the water. He was now on his hands and knees over the woman’s legs. The air was much warmer here in the crèche and he felt the vibration of energy from the sarcophagus machinery humming throughout his body, but it didn’t put him to sleep.
Now what? he thought. There must have been some time in Harman’s life where he had felt this awkward, but he couldn’t recall it.
As with the absence of the concept of sin in Harman’s world, so was there little incidence or thought of the idea of rape. There were no laws nor anyone to enforce laws in this now-vanished world of the old-style humans, but neither had there been aggression between the sexes or intimacy without permission by both parties. There had been no laws, no police, no prisons—none of the words Harman had sigled in the last eight months—but there had been a sort of informal shunning in their tight little communities of parties and cotillions and faxes to this event and that. No one had wanted to be left out.
And there had been enough sex for anyone who wanted it. And almost everyone had wanted it.
Harman had wanted it often enough in his almost-Five-Twenties. It was just in the last decade or so since he’d taught himself to read the strange squiggles in books that he had quit the fax-somewhere/bed-someone rhythm of life. He’d gained the odd idea that there was, or could be, or might be, someone special for him, someone with whom—for both of them—sexual intercourse should be an exclusive and shared special experience, separate from all the easy liaisons and physical friendships that made up the old-style human world.
It had been an odd thought. One that would have made no sense to almost anyone he would have told—but he told no one. And perhaps it was Ada’s youth, she was only seven-and-First-Twenty when they first made love and fell in love, which allowed her to share his odd and romantic notions of exclusiveness. They’d even held their own “wedding” ceremony at Ardis Hall, and while the four hundred others had mostly humored them, accepting this excuse for yet another party, a few—Petyr, Daeman, Hannah, a few others—had understood that it meant much more.
Thinking about this is not helping you do what Prospero says you have to do, Harman.
He was kneeling naked above a woman who had been sleeping—according to the lying logosphere avatar who called himself Prospero—for almost a millennium and a half. And he was surprised to find that he was not ready for sex?
Why did she look so much like Savi? Savi had been perhaps the most interesting person Harman had ever met—bold, mysterious, ancient, from another age, never quite honest, shrouded in ways that almost no old-style human from Harman’s age could ever be—but he’d never been attracted to her as a woman. He remembered her thin body in its skintight thermskin on Prospero’s orbital isle.
This younger Savi was not thin. Her muscles had not atrophied with the age of centuries. Her hair—everywhere—was dark—not the black he’d first thought, not the jet black of Ada’s beautiful hair, but very dark brown. The clouds had dissipated off the north face of Chomolungma and in the reflected bright light from the emerging sun, some of this woman’s hair glowed coppery red. Harman could see the tiny pores in her skin. Her nipples, he noticed, were more brown than pink. The set of her chin had Savi’s center crease and firmness, but the wrinkles he remembered on her brow and around her mouth and the corners of her eyes were not yet there.
Who is she? he wondered for the fiftieth time.
It doesn’t matter who she really is, Harman’s mind screamed at itself. If Prospero is telling the truth, she’s the woman you have to have sex with so she’ll wake up and teach you the things you have to learn to get home.
Harman leaned forward until his weight was partially on the sleeping woman. She was lying on her back with her arms at her side, palms down against the cushioned material, legs already slightly apart. Feeling every inch the violator, Harman used his right knee to move her left leg farther to the side, then his left knee to open her right leg. She could not have been more open and vulnerable to him.
And he could not have been less physically excited.
Harman raised his weight on his hands until he was doing a push-up above the supine form. He forced his head up and out of the only slightly buzzing forcefield and drew in great gulps of the freezing air there. When he lowered his head into the sarcophagus’ energy field again, he felt like a drowning man going under for the third time.
Harman laid his weight upon the sleeping woman. She did not budge or stir. Her eyelashes were long and dark, but there was not the slightest flutter or sense of her eyes moving under their lids as he’d seen Ada’s do so many times when he lay awake watching her sleeping next to him in the moonlight. Ada.
He closed his eyes and remembered her—not injured and unconscious on Starved Rock as Prospero’s red turin cloth had shown, but the way she had been during their eight months together at Ardis Hall. He remembered waking up next to her in the night just to watch her sleep.
He remembered the clean soap and female scent of her next to him in the night in their room with the bay window in the ancient Ardis manor.
Harman felt himself start to stir.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about now. Just remember.
He allowed himself to remember that first time with Ada, just nine months three weeks and two days ago now. They had been traveling with Savi, Daeman, and Hannah and had just met the reawakened Odysseus at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. They each had separate sleeping cubbies that night—the round, green spheres clinging to the orange tower of the ancient bridge like grapes on a vine, these hanging beneath the horizontal support strut some seven hundred feet and more above the ruins far below.
After everyone had gone to his or her own sleeping domi—everyone taken aback that the floors were as transparent as the crystal floor of this crypt—No, don’t think about that now—Harman had slipped out of his room and knocked on Ada’s door. She’d let him in and he’d noticed how lustrous her dark eyes were that night.
He’d actually gone to her room to talk to her about something, not to make love to her that night. Or so he thought at the time. He’d already hurt Ada’s feelings once—in Paris Crater it was, he remembered now, at Daeman’s mother’s place, Marina’s domi high on the bamboo-three towers at the edge of the red-eyed crater. And Ada had risked her life—or at least a fax to the orbital Firmary—by climbing from her balcony to his, teetering over a thousand miles of black hole crater to join him on his balcony that night. And he’d said no. He’d said “Let’s wait.” And she had, although certainly no man had ever turned down or turned away beautiful black-haired Ada from Ardis Hall before.