“Not everything burned,” Ada said loudly. She had no idea if everything had burned or not; she’d been unconscious when they’d flown her away from the flaming ruins. But Daeman and Greogi had described unburned sections of the compound. “Not everything burned,” she said again. “There are logs there. Remnants of the tents and barracks. If nothing else, we’ll pull down the stockade wall and build cabins out of the wood. And there will be artifacts—things that didn’t burn in the ruins. Guns, maybe. Things we left behind.”

“Like the voynix,” said a scarred man named Elos.

“Maybe so,” said Ada, “but the voynix are everywhere. And they’re afraid of this Setebos Egg that Daeman’s carrying. As long as we have it, the voynix will stay away. And where would you rather face them, Elos? In the darkness of the forest at night, or sitting around a big fire at Ardis, in a warm hut, while your friends help stand watch?”

There was silence but it was an angry silence. Some still tried tapping at the faxpad, then pounding the column in frustration.

“Why don’t we just stay here at the pavilion?” said Elle. “It has a roof already. We can close in the sides, build a fire. The stockade is smaller here and would be easier to rebuild. And if the fax starts working again, we could get out fast.”

Ada nodded. “That makes sense, my friend. But what about water? The stream is almost a quarter of a mile from the pavilion here. Someone would always have to be fetching water, risking exposure or voynix attack to get it. And there’s no place to store it here, nor room enough for all of us under this pavilion roof. And this valley is cold. Ardis gets more sunlight, we’ll have more building material to use there, and Ardis Hall had a well under it. We can build our new Ardis Hall around the well so we’ll never have to go outside for water.”

People shifted their weight from foot to foot but no one had anything to say. The thought of walking back down that frozen road, away from the salvation of the fax pavilion, seemed too difficult to contemplate.

“I’m going now,” said Ada. “It will be dark in a few hours. I want a big fire roaring before ringlight sets in.”

She walked out of the pavilion and headed west down the road. Daeman followed. Then Boman and Edide. Then Tom, Siris, Kaman, and most of the others. Greogi supervised loading the sick back into the sonie.

Daeman hurried to catch up to her and leaned close to whisper to her. “I have good news and bad news,” he said.

“What’s the good news?” Ada asked tiredly. Her head was pounding so ferociously that she had to keep her eyes closed, opening them only once in a while to stay on the frozen dirt road.

“Everyone’s coming,” he said.

“And the bad news?” asked Ada. She was thinking—I will not cry. I will not cry.

“This goddamned Setebos Egg is starting to hatch,” said Daeman.

As Harman took off his clothes in the crystal crypt beneath the marble mass of the Taj Moira, he realized just how damned cold it was in that glass room. It also must have been cold in the huge Taj chamber above, but the thermskin he’d put on in the eiffelbahn car had kept him from noticing. Now he hesitated at the foot of the clear coffin with the thermskin peeled half down his torso, his regular clothes in a tumble at his feet and goosebumps rising on his bare arms and chest.

This is wrong. This is absolutely, totally wrong.

Other than a lifetime awe of the post-humans in their orbital rings and the almost spiritual belief everyone had that they would rise to the rings and spend eternity with the posts after their Final Fax, Harman and his people knew nothing of religion. The closest they had come to understanding religious awe and ceremony had come from the glimpses they’d received of the Greek gods through the turin-cloth drama.

But now Harman felt that he was about to commit something like sin.

Ada’s life—the life of everyone I know and care for—may depend on me waking this post-human woman.

“By having sex with a dead or comatose stranger?” he whispered aloud. “This is wrong. This is crazy.”

Harman glanced over his shoulder and up the stairway, but, as he’d promised, Prospero was nowhere to be seen. Harman shucked out of the rest of his thermskin. The air was freezing cold. He looked down at himself and almost laughed at how contracted, cold, and shrunken he was.

What if this is all the crazy old magus’s idea of a joke? And who was to say whether Prospero was lurking around under some invisibility cloak or other contrivance of his magusy ways?

Harman stood at the foot of the crystal coffin and shook. The cold was part of it. The unpleasantness of what he was about to do a greater part. Even the idea that he was descended from this Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep made him queasy.

He remembered Ada injured, unconscious, atop that place called Starved Rock with the pitifully few other survivors of the massacre at Ardis.

Who’s to say that was real? Certainly Prospero could make a turin cloth transmit false images.

But he had to proceed as if the vision had been real. He had to proceed as if Prospero’s emotional statement to him that he had to learn, to change, to enter this fight against Setebos and the voynix and the calibani, or all would be lost, was true.

But what can one man who’s had his Five Twenties do? Harman asked himself.

As if to answer that, Harman crawled up over the edge of the massive crèche. He lowered himself carefully into the end of the thing, not touching the naked woman’s bare feet. The semipermeable forcefield made it feel as if he were slipping into a warm bath through a tingling resistance. Now only his head and shoulders were out of the warmth.

The coffin was long and wide, easily wide enough for him to lie down next to the sleeping female without touching her. The cushioned material she was lying on had looked like silk, but it felt more like some soft, metallic fiber under Harman’s knees. Now that he was mostly in the containment of the time crèche, he could feel surges and pulses of whatever energy field kept this Savi-lookalike young and perhaps asleep.

If I lower my head below the forcefield, thought Harman, maybe it’ll put me into a fifteen-hundred-year sleep as well and solve all my problems. Especially the problem of what to do next here.

He did crouch lower, putting his face below the level of the tingling forcefield the way a timid swimmer might enter the water. He was now on his hands and knees over the woman’s legs. The air was much warmer here in the crèche and he felt the vibration of energy from the sarcophagus machinery humming throughout his body, but it didn’t put him to sleep.

Now what? he thought. There must have been some time in Harman’s life where he had felt this awkward, but he couldn’t recall it.

As with the absence of the concept of sin in Harman’s world, so was there little incidence or thought of the idea of rape. There were no laws nor anyone to enforce laws in this now-vanished world of the old-style humans, but neither had there been aggression between the sexes or intimacy without permission by both parties. There had been no laws, no police, no prisons—none of the words Harman had sigled in the last eight months—but there had been a sort of informal shunning in their tight little communities of parties and cotillions and faxes to this event and that. No one had wanted to be left out.

And there had been enough sex for anyone who wanted it. And almost everyone had wanted it.

Harman had wanted it often enough in his almost-Five-Twenties. It was just in the last decade or so since he’d taught himself to read the strange squiggles in books that he had quit the fax-somewhere/bed-someone rhythm of life. He’d gained the odd idea that there was, or could be, or might be, someone special for him, someone with whom—for both of them—sexual intercourse should be an exclusive and shared special experience, separate from all the easy liaisons and physical friendships that made up the old-style human world.