“What do you mean, you haven’t been around all that time?” asked Harman. He sounded very interested.

Savi laughed, but not, Daeman thought, with much amusement in her voice. “I’m better nano-engineered for repair than you eloi,” she said. “But nobody lives forever. Or for fourteen hundred years. Or even a thousand. I spend most of my time like Dracula, sleeping in the long-term cryo crèches in places like the Golden Gate Bridge. I pop out from time to time, try to see what’s going on, try to find a way to get my friends out of the blue beam. Then back into the cold.”

Harman leaned forward. “How many years have you been . . . awake?”

“Fewer than three hundred,” said Savi. “And even that’s enough to tire a body out. And a mind. And a spirit.”

“Who’s Dracula?” asked Daeman.

Savi, not answering, kept driving the crawler north by northwest.

She’d told them the site they were headed for was about three hundred miles from the shoreline where they’d entered the Basin from the land that had been called Israel—a word Daeman had never heard. But the phrase “three hundred miles” meant little to Harman and nothing at all to Daeman, since trips by voynix-pulled carriole or droshky were never longer than a mile or two. Anything farther than that, and Daeman would fax. Anyone would fax.

Still, they had covered half that distance by midday, but then the red-clay road ended, the terrain grew rough, and the crawler had to move much more slowly, sometimes detouring for miles before returning to its course. Savi kept that course by using a small instrument from her pack and checking distances on a hand-drawn, much-folded map.

“Why don’t you use the palm finding-function?” Daeman asked.

“Farnet and allnet work here in the Basin,” said Savi, “but proxnet doesn’t, and the place we’re heading is in no net databank. I’m using a map and an ancient thing called a compass. Works, though.”

“How does it work?” asked Harman.

“Magic,” said Savi.

That was answer enough for Daeman.

They continued to descend, the Basin topography falling away above and behind them, the orderly rows of crops replaced now by boulder fields, gulleys, and occasional stands of bamboo or high ferns. The calibani were no longer visible, but it began to rain shortly after they reached the rough areas, and the creatures might have been just beyond the curtains of falling water.

The crawler passed odd artifacts—the hulls of numerous ships made of wood and steel, a city of tumbled Ionian columns, ancient plastic objects gleaming in gray sediment, the bleached bones of numerous sea creatures, and several huge, rusted tanks that Savi called “submarines.”

In the afternoon the rain lifted some and the three saw a high mesa appear to the northeast. It was high and broad and rolling rather than peaked, more mountain than mesa, green on top, ridged on the sides with steep, rilled cliffs.

“Is that where we’re going?” asked Daeman.

“No,” said Savi. “That’s Cyprus. I lost my virginity there one thousand, four hundred and eight-two years ago next Tuesday.”

Daeman exchanged covert glances with Harman. Both men had the good sense not to say anything.

By late afternoon the terrain became lower and marshier and fields of crops began appearing on either side of a rough, red-clay road again. Oddly formed servitors were working in the fields, but none looked up to watch the crawler trundle past. Most of the machines didn’t appear to have eyes. Once their way was blocked by a river at least two hundred yards across. Savi sealed the slice-door, shutting off the fresh air they’d been enjoying, made sure the sphere forcefield was activated, and rolled the crawler down the bank. The water was deep—forty feet or more near the center of the channel—and even the crawler’s searchlights had trouble cutting through the silt and gloom. The current was stronger than Daeman would have imagined for such a wide, deep river, and the crawler was buffeted around violently enough that Savi had to work the virtual controls and fight the machine back onto the proper course. Daeman guessed that a machine with smaller wheels, less flexible struts, or less motor power would have been carried away to the west.

When they emerged on the north shore, the machine throwing mud thirty feet behind them and water rushing off the spider-struts like a waterfall, Harman said, “I didn’t know the crawler could be driven underwater.”

“Neither did I,” said Savi. She took a bearing north by northwest and drove on.

The first energy constructs appeared shortly after that and Harman was the first to notice them.

The first device was shimmering and shifting thirty yards to the left of the clay road, in an opening beyond a stand of bamboo. Savi stopped so they could get out and see, although Daeman was leery of getting away from the crawler even though they’d seen no calibani for several hours. But Harman wanted to see it and Daeman didn’t want to stay in the sphere alone, so he ended up following the two down the strut ladder and across the field toward the glowing object. It felt strange to Daeman to be walking again after so many hours sitting.

The first energy construct was small—about twenty feet long by eight or ten high, yellow and orange with moving green veins, roughly spherical with pseudopods growing out of the top, bottom, and ends, the forms blobbing into shapes of their own, and then being reabsorbed by the central mass. The thing floated about four feet off the ground and Daeman would get no closer than twenty paces, even as Savi and Harman walked right up to it.

“What is it?” asked Harman, his head and shoulders disappearing for a minute behind the slowly flowing thing.

“We’re in the suburbs of Atlantis,” said Savi, “even though we’re still sixty miles or so away. The posts built their ground stations out of this material.”

“What material?” said Harman. He stretched his hand toward the yellow ovoid. “Can I touch it?”

“Some of the shapes shock. Some don’t. None kill. Go ahead and try it. It won’t melt your hand.”

Harman set his fingers against the curve of the shiny shape. His hand disappeared inside. When he quickly pulled it out, molten blobs of yellow and orange dripped off his fingers and then flew back to the shape. “Cold,” he said. “Very cold.” He flexed his fingers and winced.

“It’s essentially one large molecule,” said Savi. “Although how that’s possible, I don’t know.”

“What’s a molecule?” called Daeman. He’d taken a few steps backward when Harman’s hand disappeared, and had to raise his voice to be heard now. He also kept checking over his shoulder. Savi had the gun in her belt, but the bamboo forest was too close for Daeman’s comfort. It was almost dark.

“Molecules are the little things that everything else is made of,” said Savi. “You can’t see them without special lenses.”

“I can see that one easily enough,” said Daeman. Sometimes, he thought, talking to Savi was like talking to a young child, although Daeman had never spent time around a young child.

The three walked back to the crawler. Rich evening sunlight prismed off the passenger sphere and made the high, articulated struts glow. The tops of stratocumulus far to their east, toward the hill called Cyprus, caught the golden light.

“Atlantis is made up mostly of this macro-molecular frozen energy,” said the old woman. “It’s part of the quantum screwing around that the posts were always up to. There is real material mixed in—something the Lost Age scientists called ‘exotic matter’—but I don’t know the ratio, or how it works. I just know that it makes their cities—stations—whatever they are, sort of shapeshifters, phasing in and out of our quantum reality.”

“I don’t understand,” said Harman, freeing Daeman of the necessity of saying it.

“You’ll see for yourself soon enough. We should be able to see the city when we get over that large rise on the horizon. And be there about the time it gets dark.”