And then Ariel had levitated from the shadows and closed and locked the panel above Harman’s head.

And then Moira had touched some control on the vertical and virtual control panel where she stood.

And then a pump chugged to life again somewhere in the base of the crystal cabinet and more fluid began to fill the closed container.

Harman had screamed at them then—screamed at them to let him out—and then, when both post-human and biosphere non-human ignored him, Harman had pounded and kicked, trying to open the panel, trying to shatter the crystal. The fluid continued to rise. For some seconds Harman found the last inch of air at the top facet of the dodecahedron and he breathed it in deeply, still pounding on the overhead panels. And then the fluid rose until there was no more inch of air, no more air bubbles except those escaping from Harman’s lips and nose.

He held his breath for as long as he could. He wished that his last thought could have been of Ada and his love for Ada—and his sorrow for having betrayed Ada—but although he thought of her, his last thoughts while holding his breath until his lungs were afire were a confused jumble of terror and fury and regret.

And then he could hold his breath no more and—still pounding on the unyielding crystal panel above him—he exhaled, coughed, gagged, cursed, gagged more, breathed in the thickening fluid, felt darkness flowing over his mind even as overwhelming panic continued to fill his body with useless adrenaline, and then his lungs held no air at all, but Harman did not know this. Heavier without air in his lungs, his body no longer kicking, moving, or breathing, Harman sank to the center of the dodecahedron.

There had been a flurry of activity and tightbeamed conversation on the bridge of the Queen Mab as another masered message came in from the Voice on the asteroid city on polar Earth orbit, but it was only a repeat of the previous rendezvous coordinates and after five minutes confirming this and with no other message following, the principal moravecs met back at the chart table.

“Where were we?” said Orphu of Io.

“You were about to present your Theory of Everything,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“And you said you knew who the Voice is,” said Cho Li. “Who or what is it?”

“I don’t know who the Voice is,” answered Orphu, vocalizing in soft rumbles rather than tightbeaming or transmitting on the standard in-ship comm channels. “But I have a pretty good guess.”

“Tell us,” said General Beh bin Adee. The Belt moravec’s tone did not suggest a polite request so much as a direct order.

“I’d rather explain my entire… Theory of Everything… first and then tell you about the Voice,” said Orphu. “It’ll make more sense in context.”

“Proceed,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

Mahnmut heard his friend take in a full breath of O-two, even though the Ionian had weeks or months of reserve in his tanks. He wanted to tightbeam his friend the question—Are you sure you want to go ahead with this explanation?—but since Mahnmut himself had no clue as to what Orphu was going to say, he remained silent. But he was nervous for his friend.

“First of all,” said Orphu of Io, “you haven’t released the information yet, but I’m pretty sure you’ve identified most of the million or so satellites that make up Earth’s polar and equatorial rings that we’re so quickly approaching… and I bet that most of the objects aren’t asteroids or habitations.”

“That is correct,” said Asteague/Che.

“Some of them we know to be early post-human attempts at creating and corralling black holes,” continued Orphu. “Huge devices like the wormhole accumulator that you showed us crashing into that other orbital asteroid city nine months ago. But how many of those are there? A few thousand?”

“Fewer than two thousand,” confirmed Asteague/Che.

“It’s my bet that the bulk of the rest of the million… things … that the post-humans put in orbit are data storage devices. I don’t know what kind—DNA, maybe, although that would require constant life support, so they’re probably bubble memory combined with some sort of advanced quantum computer with some complicated post-human memory storage that we moravecs haven’t discovered yet.”

Orphu paused and there was a silence that seemed to stretch on for hours to Mahnmut. The various Prime Integrators and moravec leaders were not looking at one another, but Mahnmut guessed that they had a private tightbeam channel and that they were conferring.

Asteague/Che finally broke the silence—which had probably lasted only seconds in real time.

“They are mostly storage devices,” said the Prime Integrator. “We’re not sure of their nature, but they appear to be some sort of advanced magnetic bubble-memory quantum wavefront storage units.”

“And each unit is essentially independent,” said Orphu. “Its own hard disk, so to speak.”

“Yes,” said Asteague/Che.

“And most of the rest of the satellites in the rings—probably no more than ten thousand or so—are basic power transmitters and some sort of modulated tachyon waveform transmitters.”

“Six thousand four hundred and eight power transmitters,” said the navigator Cho Li. “Precisely three thousand tachyon wave transmitters.”

“How do you know this, Orphu of Io?” asked Suma IV, the powerful Ganymedan. “Have you hacked into our Integrator comm channels or files?”

Orphu held two of his multisegmented forward manipulator arms out, flat palms up. “No, no,” he said. “I don’t have enough programming knowledge to hack into my sister’s diary… if I had a sister or if she had a diary.”

“Then how …” began Retrograde Sinopessen.

“It just makes sense,” said Orphu. “I have an abiding interest in human beings and their literature. Over the centuries, I’ve paid attention to those observations of Earth, the post-humans’ rings, and the data about the few humans left on the planet that the Five Moons Consortium has made public knowledge.”

“The Consortium has never released public information on the memory storage devices in orbit,” said Suma IV.

“No,” agreed Orphu, “but it makes sense that’s what those things are. All evidence fourteen centuries ago when they left the surface of the Earth was that there were only a few thousand post-human entities in existence, isn’t that right?”

“That is correct,” said Asteague/Che.

“Our moravec experts at the time weren’t even sure these post-humans had bodies… not bodies as we think of them,” said Orphu, “so they sure didn’t need to build a million cities in orbit.”

“That does not lead to the conclusion that the majority of the objects that are in Earth orbit are memory devices,” said General Beh bin Adee.

Mahnmut found himself wondering what the punishment on this ship was for espionage.

“It does when you look at what the old-style humans have been doing on Earth for almost a millennium and a half,” said Orphu of Io. “And what they haven’t been doing.”

“What do you mean, ‘haven’t been doing?’ ” asked Mahnmut. He’d planned to stay silent during this conversation, but his curiosity was too great.

“First of all, they haven’t been breeding like human beings breed,” said Orphu. “There were fewer than ten thousand of them for several centuries. Then that neutrino beam—guided by modulated tachyons, I understand from the astronomers’ online publications—shot up from Jerusalem fourteen hundred years ago, a beam aimed at nowhere in deep space, and then, suddenly, there seemed to be no humans left. None.”

“Only briefly,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“Yes, but still …” said Orphu. He seemed to lose track of what he was going to say, but then said, “And then, less than a century later, there were about one million old-style humans scattered around the planet. Evidently not descendants of those ten thousand or so who disappeared. No buildup of population… just wham, bang, thank-you-ma’am… one million people out of nowhere.”