Ada shook him. “Tell me again what the Moira ghost said!”

“What?” Even his stare was unfocused.

“Daeman, tell me again what the Moira ghost said to you on the day that we voted on letting Noman leave. Was it ‘Remember …’ Tell me!”

“Ah… she said …’Remember, Noman’s coffin was Noman’s coffin,’ ” he said. “How can that…”

“No,” cried Ada. “The second Noman was meant to be two words. ‘Noman’s coffin was no man’s coffin.’ Hannah, you waited while that sarcophagus at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu cured Odysseus. You’ve been to the Bridge more often than any of us. Will you go with me? Will you try?”

Hannah took only a second to understand what her friend was asking. “Yes,” she said.

“Daeman,” said Ada, rushing not only against time, but against Death, who was already among them, who already was holding Harman in his dark claws, “you need to do the Sharing with everyone here. At once.”

“Yes,” said Daeman, moving away quickly, calling others to him.

The moravec troopers—Ada knew them all now by form if not by name—were still firing around the perimeter, still killing the last of the attacking voynix. Not one voynix had gotten through.

“Hannah,” said Ada, “we’ll need the litter, but if it doesn’t freefax, put Harman’s blanket over your shoulder, we’ll use that if we have to.”

“Hey,” cried the small Europan morevac when Hannah roughly pulled the blanket off their dying human patient. “He needs that! He was shivering…”

Ada touched the little moravec’s arm, felt the humanity and soul even through the metal and plastic. “It’s all right,” she said at last. She pulled its name—his name—from his cybernetic memory. “Friend Mahnmut, it’s all right,” she said. “We know what we’re doing. After all this time, we finally know what we’re doing.”

She gestured for the others to stand back.

Hannah knelt on one side of the litter, one of her hands on Harman’s shoulder, the other on the metal handle of the litter itself. Ada did the same on her side.

“I think we just visualize that main room—the one where we met Odysseus—and the coordinates come to us,” said Ada. “It’s important that we’ve both been there.”

“Yes,” said Hannah.

“On the count of three?” said Ada. “One, two… three.”

Both women, the litter, and Harman winked out of existence.

Even though the dying Harman looked as if he weighed nothing, it took all of their strength for the two women to carry him and the litter from the main museum area of the Golden Gate Bridge at Machu Picchu, down several flights of stairs through the green bubble into the sarcophagus area, past Savi’s old-time sarcophagus and down the final flight of curved stairs to Odysseus-Noman’s coffin.

Ada’s palm could find only the slightest flicker of living response when she set her hand against her beloved’s ravaged chest, but she did not waste more time in searching for life.

“On the count of three again,” she panted.

Hannah nodded.

“One, two… three.”

They gently lifted the naked Harman out of the litter and lowered his body into Noman’s coffin. Hannah pulled the lid down and snapped it shut.

“How do you …” began Ada in a panic. She could interrogate all the various machinery here, her new functions told her that, but it would take too long…

“Here,” said Hannah. “Noman showed me after he revived.” Her sculptor’s fingers tapped a series of glowing virtual buttons. The old-style human functions interacted with the crèche controls.

The coffin sighed, then began to hum. A mist flowed into the sleeping chamber through unseen vents and hid most of Harman’s body from view. Ice crystals formed on the clear cover. Several new lights came on. One winked red.

“Oh!” said Hannah. Her voice was very small.

“No,” said Ada. Her tone was calm but firm. “No. No. No.” She set her palm across the plastic control nexus of the coffin as if she were reasoning with the machine.

The red light winked, changed to amber, switched back to red.

“No,” Ada said firmly.

The red light wavered, dimmed, switched to amber. Stayed amber.

Hannah’s and Ada’s fingers met briefly above the coffin and then Ada returned her palm to the glowing curve of the AI nexus.

The amber light stayed on.

Several hours later, as late afternoon clouds moved in to obscure first the ruins of Machu Picchu and then the roadway of the suspension bridge six hundred feet below them, Ada said, “Hannah, freefax back to Ardis. Get some food. Rest.”

Hannah shook her head.

Ada smiled. “Then at least head up to the dining area and get us some fruit or something. Water.”

The amber light burned all that afternoon. Just after sundown, as the Andes valleys were bathed in alpenglow, Daeman, Tom, and Siris freefaxed in, but they stayed only a few moments.

“We’ve already reached thirty of the other communities,” Daeman said to Ada. She nodded, but her gaze never left the amber light.

The others eventually faxed away with promises to return in the morning. Hannah pulled the blanket around her and fell asleep there on the floor next to the coffin.

Ada remained—sometimes kneeling, sometimes sitting, but always thinking, and always with her palm on the coffin control nexus, always sending word of her presence and her prayers through the circuits separating her and her Harman, and always with her eyes on the amber monitor light.

Sometime after three a.m. local time, the amber light turned to green.

Part 4

88

One week after the Fall of Ilium:

Achilles and Penthesilea appeared on the empty ridgeline that rose between the Plain of the Scamander and the Plain of the Simois. As Hephaestus promised, there were two horses waiting—a powerful black stallion for the Achaean and a shorter but even more muscular white mare for the Amazon. The two mounted to inspect what was left.

There was not much left.

“How can an entire city like Ilium disappear?” said Penthesilea, her voice as contentious as always.

“All cities disappear,” said Achilles. “It is their fate.”

The Amazon snorted. Achilles had already noted that the blonde human female’s snort was similar to that of her white mare’s. “They aren’t supposed to disappear in a day … an hour.” The comment sounded like a complaint, a lament. Only two days after Penthesilea’s resurrection from the Healer’s tanks, Achilles was getting used to that constant tone of complaint.

For half an hour they allowed their horses to pick their way through the jumble of rock that stretched for two miles along the ridgeline that once had held mighty Troy. Not a single foundation stone was left. The divine magic that had taken Troy had sheared it off almost a foot beneath the earliest stones of the city. Not so much as a dropped spear or rotting carcass had been left behind.

“Zeus is powerful indeed,” said Penthesilea.

Achilles sighed and shook his head. The day was warm. Spring was coming. “I’ve told you, Amazon. Zeus did not do this. Zeus is dead by my own hand. This is the work of Hephaestus.”

The woman snorted. “I’ll never believe that little bumbuggering bad-breathed cripple could do something like this. I don’t even believe he’s a real god.”

“He did this,” said Achilles. With Nyx’s help, he mentally added.

“So you say, son of Peleus.”

“I told you not to call me that. I am no longer son of Peleus. I was Zeus’s son, no credit to him or me.”

“So you say,” said Penthesilea. “Which would make you a father-killer if your boasts are true.”

“Yes,” said Achilles. “And I never boast.”

Both Amazon and her white mare snorted in unison.

Achilles kicked the ribs of his black stallion and led them down off the ridge, along the rutted south road that had led from the Scaean Gate—the stump of the great oak tree that had always grown there since the creation of the city remained, but the great gates were gone—and then right again onto the Plain of the Scamander that separated the city from the beach.