It had been an odd thought. One that would have made no sense to almost anyone he would have told—but he told no one. And perhaps it was Ada’s youth, she was only seven-and-First-Twenty when they first made love and fell in love, which allowed her to share his odd and romantic notions of exclusiveness. They’d even held their own “wedding” ceremony at Ardis Hall, and while the four hundred others had mostly humored them, accepting this excuse for yet another party, a few—Petyr, Daeman, Hannah, a few others—had understood that it meant much more.

Thinking about this is not helping you do what Prospero says you have to do, Harman.

He was kneeling naked above a woman who had been sleeping—according to the lying logosphere avatar who called himself Prospero—for almost a millennium and a half. And he was surprised to find that he was not ready for sex?

Why did she look so much like Savi? Savi had been perhaps the most interesting person Harman had ever met—bold, mysterious, ancient, from another age, never quite honest, shrouded in ways that almost no old-style human from Harman’s age could ever be—but he’d never been attracted to her as a woman. He remembered her thin body in its skintight thermskin on Prospero’s orbital isle.

This younger Savi was not thin. Her muscles had not atrophied with the age of centuries. Her hair—everywhere—was dark—not the black he’d first thought, not the jet black of Ada’s beautiful hair, but very dark brown. The clouds had dissipated off the north face of Chomolungma and in the reflected bright light from the emerging sun, some of this woman’s hair glowed coppery red. Harman could see the tiny pores in her skin. Her nipples, he noticed, were more brown than pink. The set of her chin had Savi’s center crease and firmness, but the wrinkles he remembered on her brow and around her mouth and the corners of her eyes were not yet there.

Who is she? he wondered for the fiftieth time.

It doesn’t matter who she really is, Harman’s mind screamed at itself. If Prospero is telling the truth, she’s the woman you have to have sex with so she’ll wake up and teach you the things you have to learn to get home.

Harman leaned forward until his weight was partially on the sleeping woman. She was lying on her back with her arms at her side, palms down against the cushioned material, legs already slightly apart. Feeling every inch the violator, Harman used his right knee to move her left leg farther to the side, then his left knee to open her right leg. She could not have been more open and vulnerable to him.

And he could not have been less physically excited.

Harman raised his weight on his hands until he was doing a push-up above the supine form. He forced his head up and out of the only slightly buzzing forcefield and drew in great gulps of the freezing air there. When he lowered his head into the sarcophagus’ energy field again, he felt like a drowning man going under for the third time.

Harman laid his weight upon the sleeping woman. She did not budge or stir. Her eyelashes were long and dark, but there was not the slightest flutter or sense of her eyes moving under their lids as he’d seen Ada’s do so many times when he lay awake watching her sleeping next to him in the moonlight. Ada.

He closed his eyes and remembered her—not injured and unconscious on Starved Rock as Prospero’s red turin cloth had shown, but the way she had been during their eight months together at Ardis Hall. He remembered waking up next to her in the night just to watch her sleep.

He remembered the clean soap and female scent of her next to him in the night in their room with the bay window in the ancient Ardis manor.

Harman felt himself start to stir.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about now. Just remember.

He allowed himself to remember that first time with Ada, just nine months three weeks and two days ago now. They had been traveling with Savi, Daeman, and Hannah and had just met the reawakened Odysseus at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. They each had separate sleeping cubbies that night—the round, green spheres clinging to the orange tower of the ancient bridge like grapes on a vine, these hanging beneath the horizontal support strut some seven hundred feet and more above the ruins far below.

After everyone had gone to his or her own sleeping domi—everyone taken aback that the floors were as transparent as the crystal floor of this crypt—No, don’t think about that now—Harman had slipped out of his room and knocked on Ada’s door. She’d let him in and he’d noticed how lustrous her dark eyes were that night.

He’d actually gone to her room to talk to her about something, not to make love to her that night. Or so he thought at the time. He’d already hurt Ada’s feelings once—in Paris Crater it was, he remembered now, at Daeman’s mother’s place, Marina’s domi high on the bamboo-three towers at the edge of the red-eyed crater. And Ada had risked her life—or at least a fax to the orbital Firmary—by climbing from her balcony to his, teetering over a thousand miles of black hole crater to join him on his balcony that night. And he’d said no. He’d said “Let’s wait.” And she had, although certainly no man had ever turned down or turned away beautiful black-haired Ada from Ardis Hall before.

But that night in the clear-sided sphere-domi hanging from the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu, with the mountains he later guessed to be the rocky Andes rising around them and the haunted ruins a thousand feet below, he’d come to talk to her about… what? Oh, yes—he’d come to her room to persuade her to remain behind at Ardis Hall with Hannah and Odysseus while he and Daeman went on with Savi to that legendary place called Atlantis where there might be a spaceship waiting to take them to the rings. He’d been very convincing. And he’d lied through his teeth. He told young Ada that it would be better if she were to introduce Odysseus to everyone at Ardis Hall, that he and Daeman would certainly be gone just a few days. In truth, he’d been frightened that Savi would lead them into terrible danger—and she had, at forfeit of her own life—and even then Harman did not want Ada in harm’s way. Even then, he felt that it would be his own flesh and soul sundered if harm came to her.

She’d been wearing the thinnest of short, silk sleeping gowns when she’d ordered the cubby door to iris open on the night she became his. The moonlight had been pale on her arms and eyelashes while he spoke so earnestly to her about staying at Ardis Hall with this stranger Odysseus.

And then he’d kissed her. No—he’d only kissed Ada on the cheek at the end of their conversation, the way a father or friend might kiss a child. It had been she who first kissed him—a full, open, lingering kiss, her arms going around him and pulling him closer as they stood there in the moonlight and starlight. He remembered feeling her young breasts against his chest through the thin silk of her blue nightgown.

He remembered carrying her to the small bed that lay against the curved, clear wall of the cubby. She’d helped him off with his clothes, both of them in a clumsy yet elegant hurry now.

Had the storm swept down out of the higher mountains and struck just as they began to make love on that narrow bed? Not long after, certainly. He did remember the moonlight on Ada’s upturned face and the moonlight illuminating her nipples as he cupped each breast and raised it to his lips.

But he remembered the wall of wind hitting the bridge, rocking the cubbie dangerously, sensuously, just as they began to rock and move themselves, Ada under him, her legs rising around his hips, her right hand slipping down and finding him, guiding him…

No one guided him now as he stiffened and rose against the sex of this woman in the crystal crèche. This won’t work, he thought through the surge of his own memories and renewed desire. She’ll be dry. I’ll have to…