“Prospero arranged that to keep his captive Caliban fed,” said Moira.

Harman felt his stomach lurch. Part of that was his reaction to having ever felt any friendly or forgiving thoughts toward the logosphere avatar magus. But most of the sudden surge of nausea came from the fact that he’d not eaten anything since two bites of that day’s food bar before dawn that morning, and he’d forgotten even to drink from his hydrator tube in the past few hours. “Why are you stopping?” he asked Moira.

“It’s too dark to walk,” said the post-human. “Let’s build our fire and cook our weenies and roast some marshmallows and sing camp songs. Then you can get a few hours’ sleep and dream of living forever in the bright future of the blue-worm tanks.”

“You know,” said Harman, “you can really be a sarcastic pain in the ass sometimes.”

Moira smiled now. Her smile was Cheshirecatlike, almost the only detail he could see of her in the Breach-trench darkness. “When my many sisters were here,” she said, “before they all flew off to become gods—many of them male gods, which I thought was a demotion—they used to tell me the same thing. Now pull that dried wood and seaweed that we’ve been picking up all day out of your pack and start us a nice fire… that’s a good little old-style.”

Mommy! Mommmmeeee! I’m so scared. It’s so cold and dark down here. Mommy! Come help me get out. Mommy, please!

Ada awoke just half an hour after falling asleep in the cold, early hours of the dark winter morning. The child-voice in her mind felt like a small, cold, and unwelcome hand inside her clothes.

Mommy, please. I don’t like it here. It’s cold and dark and I can’t get out. The rock is too hard. I’m hungry. Mommy, please help me get out of here. Mommeeeee.

As exhausted as she was, Ada forced herself out of her bedroll and into the cold air. The survivors—there were forty-eight now one week and five days after their return to the ruins of Ardis—had made tents out of salvaged canvas and Ada now slept with four other women. The cluster of tents and the original lean-to next to the well formed the center of a new palisade, with the sharpened stakes set only a hundred feet out from the center of the tent city and the tumbled ruins of the original Ardis Hall.

Mommeeee… please, Mommy….

The voice was there much of the time now and although Ada had learned to ignore it during most of her waking day, it kept her from sleeping. Tonight—this dark predawn morning—it was much worse than usual.

Ada pulled on her trousers, boots, and heavy sweater and stepped out of the tent, moving as quietly as she could so as not to waken Elle and her other tentmates. There were a few people awake by the center campfire—there always were, all through the night—and sentries out on the new walls, but the area between Ada and the Pit was empty and dark.

It was very dark; thick clouds had blocked the starlight and ringlight and it smelled like snow was on the way. Ada stepped carefully as she made her way to the Pit—some people still preferred sleeping outdoors now that they’d stitched together and lined better bedrolls and sleeping bags. She didn’t want to step on anyone. Just in her fifth month of pregnancy, Ada already felt fat and clumsy.

Mommeeeeeeeeee!

She hated that damned voice. With a real child growing inside her, she couldn’t tolerate the pleading, whining ersatz-child voice coming from that thing in the Pit, even if it was just a mental echo. She wondered if her own baby’s developing neural system could pick up this telepathic invasion. She hoped not.

Mommy, please let me out. It’s dark down here.

They’d decided to have one person standing guard at the Pit at all times, and tonight it was Daeman. She knew the thin, muscular silhouette with its flechette rifle slung over his shoulder even before she could make out his face. He turned to her as she came up to the edge of the Pit.

“Can’t sleep?” he whispered.

“It won’t let me,” she whispered back.

“I know,” said Daeman. “I can always hear it when it targets you with its pleading. Faint, but audible—a sort of tickling at the back of the brain. I hear the thing calling ‘Mommeee’ and just want to unload this magazine of flechettes into it.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” said Ada, staring down at the metal grill welded and bolted into rock above the Pit. The grill was large, heavy, and fine-meshed—they’d taken it from the old cistern near the ruins of Ardis Hall—and the Setebos baby had already grown to the point where it couldn’t get its stalk-wandering hands through the mesh. The Pit itself was only fourteen feet deep, but they’d hacked it and blasted it out of solid rock. And strong as the monstrous thing down there was—the many-eyed, many-handed brain part of it was now more than four feet long and its hands were stronger every day—it wasn’t strong enough to tear the grill’s bolts and welded, sunken rods out of the rock. Not yet.

“A good idea except for the fact that we’d have twenty thousand voynix on us in five minutes if we kill the thing,” whispered Daeman.

Ada didn’t have to be reminded of this, but hearing it said aloud made the coldness and chill of nausea creep deeper into her. The sonie was up now, in the cloudy dark, doing its slow reconnaissance orbits.

The news was the same every day—the voynix stayed away, in an almost perfect circle with a radius of just under two miles from what could be this last human encampment on Earth—yet the numbers kept growing. Greogi had estimated at least twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand of the dull-silvery things out there in the treeless forests yesterday afternoon. There would be more at first light this morning. There were more each day. It was as certain as the weak, wintry sunrises. It was as certain as the fact that the pleading, whining, insinuating mental voice coming up from the Pit would never stop until it got free.

And then what? wondered Ada.

She could imagine. Just the presence of the thing had cast a pall over the Ardis survivors. It was hard enough just to get through the days—building and expanding their little tents and shacks, salvaging what they could from the ruins, improving their hopeless little log fort, not to mention getting enough to eat—without the Setebos baby’s evil whining in their minds.

Food was a serious issue. All the cattle had been driven away during the massacre and sonie outings had found only their rotting carcasses in distant fields and on the winter forest floor. The voynix had slaughtered them as well. And with the soil frozen and even the hope of gardens or crops or planting months away, and with the canned and preserved goods that had been in the basement of Ardis Manor now merely melted blobs under charred rubble, the forty-eight Ardis survivors depended on the hunters who went out in the sonie every day. There was no game within the four-mile circle of the voynix army, so every day two men or women with flechette guns risked a trip beyond the voynix—a longer trip every day as the deer and larger game fled the area—and every evening, if they were lucky, a mule deer or wild pig would turn on the spit above the central cooking fire. But they hadn’t been that lucky recently—they didn’t have fresh meat every day, and fewer hunts provided them an animal to kill within the increasing radius of their flights, so they preserved what they could with smoking and with the remaining precious salt salvaged from the storehouses, and they munched on their monotonously bad-tasting jerky, and they watched the voynix continue massing, and each day and night their moods grew darker with the Setebos baby constantly sending its white, clammy hands and tendrils of telepathy into their brains. Even while they slept. And like the game they hunted from the sonie, sleep grew increasingly harder to find.