86

Harman held the pistol to his forehead for only a few seconds. Even as his finger touched the weapon’s trigger, he knew that he wasn’t going to end things that way. It was a coward’s way out, and however terrified he felt right then at the imminence of his own death, he did not want to exit as a coward.

He pivoted, aimed the weapon at the hulking bow of the ancient submarine where it emerged through the north wall of the Breach, and squeezed the trigger until the weapon stopped firing nine shots later. His hand was shaking so badly he didn’t even know if he’d hit the huge target, but the act of shooting at it both focused and exorcised some of his rage and revulsion at the folly of his own species.

The soiled thermskin came off slowly. Harman did not even consider trying to wash the thing, but simply cast it aside. He was shaking from the aftermaths of the vomiting and diarrhea, but he didn’t even consider putting on his outer clothes or boots as he rose, found his balance, and started walking west.

Harman didn’t have to query his new biometric functions to know that he was dying quickly. He could feel the radiation in his guts and bowels and testicles and bones. The final weakness was growing in him like some foul homunculus stirring. So he walked west, toward Ada and Ardis.

For several hours, Harman’s mind was wonderfully quiescent, becoming aware only to help him avoid stepping on something sharp or to lead him to the correct path through ridges of coral or rock. He was vaguely aware that the walls of the Breach on both sides were growing much higher—the ocean was deeper here—and that the air around him was much cooler. But the midday sun still struck him. Once, in midafternoon, Harman looked down and saw that his legs and thighs were still soiled, mostly with blood, and he staggered to the south wall of the Breach, reached his bare hand through the forcefield—his fingers feeling the terrible pressure and cold—and scooped enough saltwater out of the sea to clean himself. He staggered on toward the west.

When he did begin thinking again he was pleased to note that it was not just about the obscenity of the machine and its cargo of planetary death that were now out of sight behind him. He began to think about his own life, one hundred years of it.

At first Harman’s thoughts were bitter—scolding himself for wasting all those decades on parties and play and an aimless series of faxing to this social event or that—but he soon forgave himself. There had been good times there, real moments even amidst that false existence, and the last year of true friendships, real love, and honest commitment had made up at least in part for all the years of shallowness.

He thought of his own role in the last year’s events and found the capacity to forgive himself there as well. The post-human who called herself Moira teased him about being Prometheus, but Harman saw himself more as a sort of combined Adam and Eve who—by seeking out the one Forbidden Fruit in the perfect Garden of Indolence—had banished his species from that mindless, healthy place forever.

What had he given Ada, his friends, his race, in return? Reading? As central as reading and knowledge had been to Harman, he wondered if that one ability—so much more potentially powerful than the hundred functions now stirred to wakefulness in his body—could compensate for all the terror, pain, uncertainty, and death ahead.

Perhaps, he realized, it did not have to.

As evening darkened the long slot of sky far above, Harman stumbled westward and began thinking about death. His own, he knew, was only hours away, perhaps less, but what of the concept of death that he and his people had never had to face until recent months?

He allowed himself to search all the data stored in him after the crystal cabinet and found that death—the fear of death, the hope for surviving death, curiosity about death—had been the central spur for almost all literature and religion for the nine millennia of information he had stored. The religion parts, Harman could not quite comprehend—he had little context except for his current terror at the presence of Death. He saw the hunger there in a thousand cultures over thousands of years to have assurance—any assurance—that one’s life continued even after life so obviously had fled. He blinked as his mind sorted through concepts of afterlife—Valhalla, Heaven, Hell, the Islamic Paradise that the crew of the submarine behind him had been so eager to enter, the sense of having lived a Righteous life so as to live on in the minds and memories of others—and then he looked at all the myriad versions of the theme of being reborn into an Earthly life, the mandala, reincarnation, the Wu-Nine Path to Center. To Harmon’s mind and heart, it was all beautiful and as airy and empty as an abandoned spiderweb.

As he stumbled westward into the cold gathering shadows, Harman realized that if he responded to human views of Death now stored in his dying cells and very DNA, it was to the literary and artistic attempts to express the human side of the encounter—a sort of defiance of genius. Harman looked at stored images of the last self-portraits of Rembrandt and wept at the terrible wisdom in that visage. He listened to his own mind read every word of the full version of Hamlet and realized—as so many generations before had realized—that this aging prince in black might have been the only true envoy from the Undiscovered Country.

Harman realized that he was weeping and that it was not for himself or his imminent demise—nor even for the loss of Ada and his unborn child, who were never truly out of his mind—but it was simply because he had never had the chance to watch a Shakespearean play performed. He realized that if he were returning home to Ardis all hale and hearty, rather than as this bleeding, dying skeleton, he would have insisted that the community perform one of Shakespeare’s plays if they managed to survive the voynix.

Which one?

Trying to decide this interesting question kept Harman distracted long enough that he did not notice the sky above fading to deep twilight hues, nor did he notice when the slice of sky became only starfields and ring movement and he did not immediately notice that the cold in the deep trench he was staggering westward in was seeping into his skin first, then flesh, then his very bones.

Finally he could go on no longer. He kept stumbling over rocks and other unseen things. He could not even see where the walls of the Breach began. Everything was terribly cold and totally dark—a pretaste of death.

Harman did not want to die. Not yet. Not now. He curled into a fetal position on the sandy bottom of the Breach, feeling the grit and sand rubbing his skin raw as the reality that he was alive. He hugged himself, teeth chattering, pulled his knees higher up and hugged them, body shaking, but reassured that he was alive. He even thought wistfully about the rucksack he had left so far behind and of the thermal-blanket sleeping bag in it and of his clothes. His mind acknowledged the food bars left in it as well, but his stomach wanted no part of that.

Several times during the night, Harman had to crawl away from the nest in the sand he had made with his curled body and shake on hands and knees as he retched again and again—but dry heaves only. Anything he’d had in his stomach yesterday was long gone. Then he would crawl back slowly, laboriously, to his little fetal-shaped gouge in the sand, anticipating the slight warmth he would find again when curled up there the way he once might have anticipated a fine meal.

Which play? The first he had ever read had been Romeo and Juliet and it held the affection of first encounter. Now he reviewed King Lear—never, never, never, never never—and thought it perfectly appropriate for a dying man such as himself, even one who had not lived long enough to see his son or daughter, but it might be too much for the Ardis family in their first encounter with Shakespeare. Since they would have to be their own actors, he wondered who among them could even play old Lear… Odysseus-Noman was the only face that seemed right. He wondered how Noman fared this day.