Mahnmut softly sang on the intercom—

“They say that Achilles in the darkness stirred…

And Priam and his fifty sons

Wake all amazed and hear the guns,

And shake for Troy again.”

Who’s that? sent Orphu. I don’t recognize that verse.

Rupert Brooke, Mahnmut replied on the tightbeam. World War I–era British poet. He wrote that on his way to Gallipoli … but he never got to Gallipoli. Died of disease along the way.

“I say,” boomed General Beh bin Adee on the common band, “I can’t say much for your radio discipline, little Europan, but that’s a cracking good poem.”

On the crystal city in polar orbit, the airlock door slid up and Odysseus entered into the city proper. It was filled with sunlight, trees, vines, tropical birds, streams, a waterfall tumbling from a tall outcropping of lichen-covered stone, old ruins, and small wildlife. Odysseus saw a red deer quit munching grass, raise its head, look at the human approaching behind his shield with sword raised, and then walk calmly away.

“Sensors indicate a humanoid form is approaching—not yet visible through the foliage,” Cho Li radioed to the dropship.

Odysseus heard the footsteps before he saw her—bare feet on packed soil and smooth rock. He lowered his shield and slid his sword into the loop on his broad belt as she came into sight.

The woman was beautiful beyond words. Even the inhuman moravecs in their steel and plastic shells, with organic hearts thumping next to their hydraulic hearts, organic brains and glands nestling next to plastic pumps and nanocyte servomechanisms—even the moravecs one thousand kilometers away staring at their holograms recognized how incredibly beautiful the woman was.

Her skin was a tanned brown, her hair long and dark but streaked with blond, the curls flowing down over her bare shoulders. She wore only the slightest two-piece outfit of glittering but flimsy silk that emphasized her full, heavy breasts and broad hips. Her feet were bare but there were gold bracelets around her slim ankles and a riot of bracelets on each wrist, silver and gold clasps on her smooth upper arms.

As she came closer, Odysseus and the staring moravecs in space and the staring moravecs circling above ancient Troy saw that the woman’s eyebrows arched in a sensuous curve over her amazingly green eyes, that her lashes were long and dark, and that what had looked like makeup around those amazing eyes from three meters away resolved into normal shadows and skin tones as she approached to within a meter of the stunned Odysseus. Her lips were soft, full, and very red.

In perfect Greek of Odysseus’ era, in a voice as soft as a breeze through palms or the rustle of perfectly tuned wind chimes, the beautiful woman said, “Welcome, Odysseus. I have been waiting for you for many years. My name is Sycorax.”

On the second evening of his hike through the Atlantic Breach with Moira, Harman found himself thinking of many things.

Something about walking between the two high walls of water—the Atlantic was more than five hundred feet deep here, on their second day of walking, now almost seventy miles out from the coast—was absolutely mesmerizing. A bundle of protein memory stored in modified DNA helixes somewhere near his spine pedantically tugged at Harman’s consciousness and wanted to fill in the details—(the word mesmerizing is based upon Franz Anton Mesmer, born May 23, 1734, in Iznang, Swabia, died March 5, 1815, in Meersburg, Swabia—German physician whose system of therapeutics known as mesmerism, in which he affected sympathetic control of his patients’ consciousness, was the forerunner of the later practice of hypnotism …)—but Harman’s mind, lost in labyrinths of thought, batted away the interruption. He was getting better at shutting down the nonessential voices roaring in and around his mind, but his head still hurt like a son of a bitch.

The five-hundred-foot-high walls of water on each side of the eighty-yard dry path were also frightening and even two days in the Breach hadn’t fully acclimated Harman to the sense of claustrophobia and fear of imminent collapse. He’d actually been in the Atlantic Breach once before, two years earlier when he was celebrating his ninety-eighth birth-day—leaving from faxnode 124 near the Loman Estate on what had once been the New Jersey coast of North America and walking two days out, two days back, but not covering nearly so much ground as he was with Moira—and the walls of water and deep gloom of the trench had not bothered him so much then. Of course, Harman thought, I was younger then. And believed in magic.

He and Moira had not spoken in several hours, but their strides easily matched each other and they walked well together in silence. Harman was analyzing some of the information that now filled his universe, but mostly he was thinking about what he could and should do if he ever did manage to get back to Ardis.

The first thing he should do, he realized, is apologize to Ada from the bottom of his heart for having left on that idiotic voyage to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. His pregnant wife and unborn child should have come first. Consciously, he’d known that then, but he knew it now.

Next Harman was trying to stitch together a plan for saving his beloved, his unborn child, his friends, and his species. This was not so easy.

What was easier with the million volumes of information that had been—literally—poured into him was seeing some options.

First of all, there were the reawakened functions his mind and body kept exploring, almost one hundred of them. The most important of these, at least in the short term, was the free-fax function. Rather than find nodes and activate machinery, the nano-machinery present in every old-style human, and now understood by Harman, could fax from anywhere to anywhere on the planet Earth and even—should the interdictions be dropped—from the surface of the planet to selected points in the 1,108,303 objects, machines, and cities in orbit around the Earth. Free-faxing could save them all from the voynix—and from Setebos and his loosened calibani, even from Caliban himself—but only if the fax machines and storage modules in orbit were turned back on for humans.

Second, Harman now knew several ways he could get back up to the rings and even had a vague understanding of the alien-witch-thing named Sycorax who now ruled the former post-human orbital universe up there, but he had no clue as to how he and others could overpower Sycorax and Caliban—for Harman was certain that Setebos had sent his only begotten son up to the rings to interdict the fax function. But if they did prevail, Harman knew that he would have to drown in more crystal cabinets before he’d have all the technical information he needed to reactivate the complicated fax and sensor satellites.

Third, as Harman studied the many functions now available to him—many of which dealt with monitoring his own body and mind and finding data stored there—he knew that it would not be a problem sharing his newfound information. One of the lost functions was a simple sharing function—a sort of reverse sigling—wherein Harman could touch another old-style human, select the RNA-DNA caged protein memory packets he wanted to download, and the information would flow through his flesh and skin to the other person. It had been perfected for the Little Green Men prototypes almost two thousand years earlier, and quickly been adapted to human nanocyte function. All old-styles had this nano-induced DNA-bound memory capability and all old-styles had the hundred latent functions in their bodies and minds, but it took one informed person to start the rekindling of human abilities.