They climbed into the crawler and took their seats. But before Savi could shift the big machine into gear, Harman said, “You’ve been here before.” He didn’t pose it as a question.

“Yes.”

“But you said before that you’ve never been to the orbital rings. Was that your reason for coming before?”

“Yes,” said Savi. “I still think the answer to freeing my friends from the neutrino beam lies up there.” She flicked her head toward the e- and p-rings bright in the twilight sky above.

“But you didn’t succeed before,” said Harman. “Why?”

Savi swiveled in her chair and looked at him. “I’ll tell you why and how I failed, if you’ll tell me why you really want to go up there. Why you’ve spent years trying to find a way up to the rings.”

Harman returned her gaze for a minute and then looked away. “I’m curious,” he said.

“No,” said Savi. She waited.

He looked back at her and Daeman realized that the older man’s face showed the most emotion Daeman had seen from him. “You’re right,” snapped Harman. “It’s not some sort of idle curiosity. I want to find the firmary.”

“So you can live longer,” Savi said softly.

Harman balled his fists. “Yes . So I can live longer. So I can continue to exist beyond this fucking Final Twenty. Because I’m greedy for life. Because I want Ada to have my child and I want to be around to see it grow up, even though fathers don’t do things like that. Because I’m a greedy bastard—greedy for life. Are you satisfied?”

“Yes,” said Savi. She looked at Daeman. “And what are your reasons for coming on this trip, Daeman Uhr?”

Daeman shrugged. “I’d jump home in a second if there was a fax portal nearby.”

“There isn’t,” said Savi. “Sorry.”

He ignored the sarcasm and said, “Why did you bring us, old woman? You know the way here. You know how to find the crawler. Why bring us?”

“Fair question,” she said. “The last time I came to Atlantis, I came on foot. From the north. It was a century and a half ago, and I brought two eloi with me—I’m sorry, that’s an insulting term—I brought two young women with me. They were curious.”

“What happened?” said Harman.

“They died.”

“How?” asked Daeman. “The calibani?”

“No. The calibani killed and ate the man and woman who came with me the time before that, almost three centuries ago. I didn’t know how to contact the Ariel biosphere then, nor about the DNA.”

“Why do you always come in threes?” asked Harman. Daeman thought it an odd question. He was ready to ask for more details about all these dead traveling companions. Did she mean permanently dead? Or just firmary-repair dead?

Savi laughed. “You ask good questions, Harman Uhr. You’ll see soon. You’ll see why I’ve come with two others after that first solo visit of mine to Atlantis more than a millennium ago. And not just to Atlantis—but to some of their other stations. In the Himalayas. Easter Island. One actually at the south pole. Those were fun trips, since a sonie can’t get within three hundred miles of any of them.”

She’d lost Daeman. He wanted to hear more about the killing and eating.

“But you’ve never found a spaceship, a shuttle, to get you up there?” said Harman. “After all these tries?”

“There are no spaceships,” said Savi. She activated the virtual controls, slammed the crawler in gear, and guided them north by northwest as the sunset spilled red across the entire western sky.

The city of the post-humans spread for miles across the dry seabed, with glowing energy towers rising and falling a thousand feet high. The crawler trundled between energy obelisks, floating spheres, red energy stairways going nowhere, blue ramps that appeared and disappeared, blue pyramids folding into themselves, a giant green torus that moved back and forth along pulsing yellow rods, and countless colored cubes and cones.

When Savi stopped and slid the door slice open, even Harman seemed hesitant to get out. Savi had made sure they were wearing their thermskins and now she pulled three osmosis masks from the crawler’s tool locker.

It was almost dark now, the stars joining the rotating rings in the purple-black sky above them. The glow from the energy city illuminated seabed and farm fields for five miles in each direction. Savi led them to a red stairway and then up—the macromolecular steps holding their weight, although Daeman thought it felt like walking on giant sponges.

A hundred feet above the seabed floor, the staircase ended at a black platform made out of a dull, dark metal that reflected no light. In the center of the square platform were three ancient-looking wooden chairs with high backs and red seat cushions. The chairs were equidistantly spaced around a black hole in the black platform, about ten feet apart, facing outward.

“Sit,” said Savi.

“Is this a joke?” said Daeman.

Savi shook her head and sat in the chair facing west. Harman took his seat. Daeman walked around the black platform again, returned to the single empty chair. “What happens next?” he asked. “We have to wait here for something?” He looked at the tall yellow tower thrusting up hundreds of feet nearby, the energy-material rearranging itself like a rectangular yellow cloud.

“Sit and you’ll find out,” said Savi.

Daeman took his seat gingerly. The back of the chair and the thick arms were elaborately carved. There was a white circle on the left arm of the chair and a red circle on the right arm. He touched neither.

“When I count to three,” said Savi, “depress the white button. That’s the one on your left if you’re colorblind, Daeman.”

“I’m not colorblind, goddammit.”

“All right,” said the old woman. “One, two . . .”

“Wait, wait!” said Daeman. “What’s going to happen to me if I press the white circle?”

“Absolutely nothing,” said Savi. “But we have to press it at the same time. I learned this when I came here alone. Ready? One, two, three.”

They all pressed their white circles.

Daeman leaped out of his chair and ran to the edge of the black platform and then the red platform thirty paces beyond that before turning to look back. The blast of energy behind his chair had been deafening.

“Holy crap,” he shouted, but the two still in their chairs could not hear him.

It was like lightning, he thought. A searing blast of jagged energy, just a yard or so across, emanating from the black hole in the middle of the chair-triangle and rising up into the dark sky. Rising higher, higher . . . then curving to the west like some impossible, white-hot thread, arching west until the end of it disappeared from sight above, but the thread visible and also moving, as if the lightning were connected to . . .

It was connected, Daeman realized with a flood of fear that almost made him void his bowels. Connected to the moving e-ring thousands of miles above. Connected to one of the stars, one of the moving lights, now crossing from west to east in that ring.

“Come back!” Savi was shouting above the crackle and roar of the lightning thread.

It took Daeman several minutes to come back—to walk to that empty wooden chair, shielding his eyes, his shadow and the chair’s shadow thrown out fifty feet across the black and red rooftop by the blinding, crackling light. He could never explain later, even to himself, how or why he returned to that chair, or why he did what he did next.

“On the count of three, depress the red circle,” shouted Savi. The old woman’s gray hair was standing on end, whipping around her head like short snakes. She had to scream above the energy roar to be heard. “One, two . . .”

I absolutely can’t do this was Daeman’s litany to himself. I absolutely won’t do this.

“Three!” shouted Savi. She pressed her red circle. Harman pressed his red circle.