Harman and Daeman looked at each other in the soft light, but they had nothing to say to each other and eventually went off to their own domis to sleep.

They followed the Breach across the Atlantic at high speed, swooped south before reaching land, and paralleled something that Savi called the Hands of Hercules.

“Amazing,” said Harman, rising almost to his knees to look to their left as they flew south.

Daeman had to agree. Between a big, slab-sided mountain on the north—which Savi called Gibraltar—and a lower mountain some nine miles to the south, the ocean simply stopped, held out of the deep basin stretching away to the east by a series of huge golden human hands rising from the seabed. Each hand was over five hundred feet tall and the splayed fingers held back the wall of the Atlantic from the dry Mediterranean Basin dropping like a deepening valley into clouds and fogs to the east.

“Why the hands?” asked Daeman as they reached land on the south side of the fog-shrouded Basin and turned east again. “Why didn’t the post-humans just use forcefields to hold back the sea, the way they did in the Breach?”

The old woman shook her head. “The Hands of Hercules were here before I was born and the posts never told us why they did it that way. I’ve always suspected it was just a whim on their part.”

“A whim,” repeated Harman. It seemed to trouble him.

“Are you sure we can’t just fly straight across the Basin?” asked Daeman.

“I’m sure,” said Savi. “The sonie would drop out of the sky like a stone.”

Through the late afternoon they flew across swamps, lakes, fern forests, and broad rivers above a land that Savi called the Northern Sahara. Soon the swamps dwindled and died and the land became drier, rockier. Herds of huge striped beasts—not dinosaurs, but as large as dinosaurs—moved by the hundreds across grasslands and rocky uplands.

“What are those?” asked Daeman.

Savi shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“If Odysseus were here, he’d probably want to kill one and have it for dinner,” said Harman.

Savi grunted.

It was late afternoon again when they lost altitude, circled a strange, walled city set on highlands only twenty-five miles from the Mediterranean Basin, and landed on a rocky plain just west of the city.

“What is this place?” asked Daeman. He’d never seen walls or buildings so old, and even from a distance it was unsettling.

“It’s called Jerusalem,” said Savi.

“I thought we were going down into the Basin to look for spaceships,” said Harman.

The old woman got out of the sonie and stretched. She looked very tired, but then, Daeman though, she had been driving the sonie for two straight days. “We are,” she said. “We’ll get transport here. And there’s something I want you to see at sunset.”

This sounded ominous to Daeman, but he followed her and Harman across the rocky plain, over rubble of what once might have been suburbs or newer sections of the old walled city but which now was a rising plain paved with stones pounded and ground fine as pebbles. She led them up to and though a gate in the wall, keeping up a mostly meaningless narration as they walked. The air was dry and cooling, the low sunlight rich on the ancient buildings.

“This was called the Jaffa Gate,” she said, as if that might mean something to them. “This is David Street, and it used to separate the Christian Quarter from the Armenian Quarter.”

Harman glanced at Daeman. It was obvious to Daeman that even the learned old man, so proud of his useless ability to read, had never heard the words “Christian” or “Armenian.” But Savi was babbling on, pointing out something called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the tumbled ruins to their left, and neither man interrupted her with a question until Daeman asked, “Aren’t there any voynix or servitors here?”

“Not now,” said Savi. “But when my friends Pinchas and Petra were here in the last minutes before the final fax fourteen hundred years ago, there were tens of thousands of voynix suddenly active near the Western Wall. I have no idea why.” She stopped walking and looked at each of them. “You understand, don’t you, that the voynix popped out of the temporalclastic cloud two centuries before the final fax, but they were immobile—rust and iron statues—not the obedient servants you have now? That’s important to remember.”

“All right,” said Harman, but his voice carried a hint of being patronizing. She was babbling. “But you said you were in an iceberg down near Antarctica when the final fax came,” continued Harman. “How do you know where your friends were and what the voynix were doing?”

“Farnet, proxnet, and allnet records,” said the old woman. She turned and led them further east down the street.

Harman glanced at Daeman again, as if to share his concern about her nonsense-talk, but Daeman felt a rush of something—pride? superiority?—as he realized that he knew exactly what she meant when she talked about farnet and proxnet. He looked at his own palm and keyed the finder function, but the glow was blank. What would happen, he wondered, if he visualized the four blue rectangles above three red circles above four green triangles to summon the full-data function the way she’d taught him in the forest glen yesterday?

Savi stopped and spoke as if she’d read his mind. “You don’t want to invoke the allnet function here, Daeman. You wouldn’t be virtually immersed in energy-microclimate interactions like you were in the forest . . . not here in Jerusalem. You’d be dealing with five thousand years of pain, terror, and virulent anti-Semitism.”

“Anti-Semitism?” repeated Harman.

“Hatred of Jews,” said Savi.

Harman and Daeman looked at each other with quizzical expressions. The idea made no sense.

Daeman was beginning to be sorry that he’d changed his mind and come along. He was hungry. The sun was setting behind them. He didn’t know where he was going to sleep this night, but he suspected that it would be uncomfortable.

“Come,” said Savi and led them another block, through stone doorways, down a narrow alley, and out into a space dominated by a tall, blank wall.

“Is this what we came to see?” said Daeman, disappointed. It was a dead end—a courtyard bound around by lower walls, stone buildings, and this one big wall with some sort of round metallic structure just visible atop it. There was no way to get up there from here.

“Patience,” said Savi. She squinted at the disappearing sun. “And today’s Tisha b’Av, just as it was on the day of the final fax.”

Looking as if he was tired of repeating nonsense syllables, Harman said, “Tisha b’Av?”

“The Ninth of Av,” said Savi. “A day of lamentation. Both the First and Second Temples were destroyed on Tisha b’Av, and I think the voynix built this blasphemous Third Temple on the Ninth of Av on the day of the final fax.” She pointed to the black metal half-dome beyond the wall.

Suddenly there was a rumble so deep that Daeman’s bones and teeth rattled. Both he and Harman took a frightened step back, the air filled with ozone and static so thick that the hair on Daeman’s head rose and rippled like tall grass in a high wind, and—with an explosive crash faster and louder than a lightning strike—a solid shaft of pure blue, blindingly brilliant light some sixty feet across shot up from the metal half-dome, pierced the evening sky, and disappeared arrow-straight into space, barely missing the orbital e-ring in its eternal rotation to the east.