“Where is he? How is he?” Daeman realized that he’d shouted.

She smiled. “We can talk after the vote.”

“At least tell me why this vote is so important that you’ve come from… wherever you’ve come from to watch it,” demanded Daeman, his voice sounding as hard as he’d become inside over the past year.

Moira nodded. “I came to hear it because it is important.”

“Why? To whom? How?”

She said nothing. Her smile had disappeared.

Daeman released the whistle. “Is it important that we give Noman the sonie or important that we don’t loan it to him?”

“I just want to watch,” said the Savi-ghost who called herself Moira. “Not vote.”

“I didn’t ask that.”

“I know,” said the thing with Savi’s voice.

The bell for the conclave rang. People were gathering around the central lean-to, tent, and cooking area.

Daeman was in no hurry to rush to it. He knew it might be less of a threat to lead a live voynix into their camp. He also knew he had a very short time in which to make his decision. “If you can view the meeting without being seen by anyone, why did you reveal yourself to me?” he asked, his voice low.

“I told you,” said the young woman, “this was my choice. Or perhaps I’m like a vampire—I can only enter a place the first time if I am invited in.”

Daeman didn’t know what a vampire was but he didn’t think that was important right now. “No,” he said. “I’m not going to invite you into our safe area unless you give me a compelling reason to do so.”

Moira sighed. “Prospero and Harman also said you were stubborn, but I couldn’t imagine they meant this stubborn.”

“You talk as if you’ve seen Harman,” said Daeman. “Tell me something about him—how he is, where he is—something that will make me believe you’ve met him.”

Moira continued to gaze at him and Daeman felt that the air around their locked gazes should be sizzling.

The bell quit ringing. The meeting had begun.

Daeman stood motionless, silent.

“All right,” said Moira, smiling slightly again. “Your friend Harman has a scar through his pubic hair, just above his penis. I didn’t ask him how he received it but it must have been since his last Twenty. The healing tanks on Prospero’s Isle would never have left it there.”

Daeman did not blink. “I’ve never seen Harman naked,” he said. “You’ll have to tell me something else.”

Moira laughed easily. “You lie. When Prospero and I gave Harman the thermskin he is wearing now, he said that he knew exactly how to get into one—they’re tricky to pull on, you know—and that you and he had worn them for weeks up on the Isle. He said that once you had to strip in front of Savi to pull your thermskins on. You’ve seen him naked and it’s a noticeable scar.”

“Why is Harman wearing a thermskin now?” asked Daeman. “Where is he?”

“Take me to the meeting,” said Moira. “I promise I will tell you about Harman afterward.”

“You should talk to Ada about him,” said Daeman. “They’re… married.” The strange word did not come easily to Daeman.

Moira smiled. “I will tell you and you can tell Ada if you think it is appropriate. Shall we go?” She held out her left arm, crooked, as if he were going to take it to escort her into a formal dining room.

He took her arm.

“… so that’s the beginning and end of my request,” Noman/Odysseus was saying as he saw Daeman enter the circle of fifty-four people. Most were sitting on sleeping pads or blankets. Some were standing. Daeman stood apart, behind the standing survivors.

“You want to borrow our sonie—the one thing offering us a chance of survival here,” said Boman, “and you won’t tell us why you want it or how long you might keep it.”

“That is correct,” said Noman. “I might need it for only a few hours—I could program it to return on its own. It’s possible that the sonie might not return at all.”

“We’d all die,” said one of the Hughes Town survivors, a woman named Stefe.

Noman did not reply.

“Tell us why you need it,” said Siris.

“No, that’s a private matter,” said Noman.

Some of the sitting, kneeling, and standing people chuckled, as if the bearded Greek had made a joke. But Noman did not smile. He was as serious as his demeanor.

“Go find another sonie!” cried Kaman, their would-be military expert. He’d told others that he had never trusted the real Odysseus in the turin drama he’d watched every day for ten years before the Fall and was prepared to trust this older version even less.

“I would find another if I could,” said Noman, his voice level, unagitated. “But the nearest ones I know about are thousands of miles from here. It would take too long for the cobbled-together sky-raft I built to get there, if the thing could get there at all. I need to use the sonie today. Now.”

“Why?” asked Laman, absently rubbing his still-bandaged right hand with its missing fingers.

Noman remained silent.

Ada, who had remained standing near the barrel-chested Greek after her opening of the meeting and her introduction, said softly, “Noman, can you tell us how it might benefit us if we let you borrow the sonie?”

“If I succeed in what I want to do, it’s possible that the faxnodes will begin working again,” he said. “In just a few hours. A few days at most.”

There was an audible intake of breath among the crowd.

“It’s more possible,” he continued, “that they won’t.”

“So that’s your reason for using our sonie?” asked Greogi. “To get the fax pavilions working again?”

“No,” said Noman. “It’s just a possible side effect of my trip. Not even a probable one.”

“Would your… borrowing of the sonie… help us in some other way?” asked Ada. It was clear that she was more sympathetic to Noman’s request than the majority of those frowning among the ragged clump of listeners.

Noman shrugged.

Everyone was so silent for the next moment that Daeman could hear two sentries calling to each other more than a quarter of a mile away to the south. He turned—the spectral Moira was still standing near him, her arms crossed across her thermskinned breasts. Incredible as it was, no one who had looked up to watch the two of them approach the group—including Ada, Noman, and Boman, who had been staring at him since he passed through the palisade gate—evidently had been able to see her.

Noman held out his blunt, powerful hands, fingers splayed as if reaching for them all—or perhaps pushing them all away. “You want to hear that I will perform some miracle for you all,” he said, his tone low but his powerful, rhetoric-trained voice still echoing off the palisade. “There is no such miracle. If you stay here with the sonie, you’ll be killed sooner or later. Even if you evacuate to this island downriver you’re thinking of fleeing to, the voynix will follow you there. They can still fax, and not just through the faxnodes you know about. There are tens of thousands of voynix surrounding you now, massed within two miles of here—while all over the Earth, the last few thousand human survivors are either fleeing or holed up in caves or towers or the ruins of their old communities. The voynix are killing them. You have the advantage that the voynix won’t attack while this Setebos… thing … in the pit is your captive. But within days, if not hours, that Setebos-louse will be strong enough to rip its way out of the pit and into your minds. Trust me, you don’t want to experience that. And, in the end, the voynix will come anyway.”

“All the more reason to keep the sonie to ourselves!” shouted the man named Caul.

Noman turned his hands palms-up. “Perhaps. But soon there will be no place on this Earth for you to flee. Do you think you’re the only ones with a Finder Function? Your functions have ceased to work—the voynix’s and the calibanis’ finder functions haven’t. They’ll find you. Even Setebos will find you when he’s finished gorging himself on your planet’s history.”