She paused at the large arched window at the end of the hall on the third floor. For the first time in thousands of years, thought Ada, forests were falling to human beings wielding axes—and not just for the firewood. In the last of the wan winter twilight flowing through the gravity-warped panes, she could see the view-blocking but reassuring gray wall of the wooden palisade down the hill on the south lawn. The palisade stretched all around Ardis Hall, sometimes as close as thirty yards from the house, sometimes as far away as a hundred yards behind the house to the edge of the forest. More trees had been felled to build the watch towers rising at all the corners and angles of the palisade, and then even more to turn the scores of summer tents into homes and barracks for the more than four hundred people now living on the grounds of Ardis.

Where is Harman? Ada had been trying to block the urgency of that thought for hours—busying herself with a score of domestic tasks—but now she couldn’t ignore her concern. Her lover—“husband” was the archaic word that Harman liked to use—had left with Hannah, Petyr, and Odysseus—who insisted upon being called Noman these days—a little after dawn that morning, leading an oxen-pulled droshky, sweeping up through the forests and meadows ten miles and more from the river hunting for deer and searching for more of the lost cattle.

They should have been home by now. He promised me he’d be home long before dark.

Ada returned to the first floor and went into the kitchen. For centuries the preserve only of servitors and the occasional voynix bringing in meat from their slaughter grounds, the huge kitchen was now alive with human activity. It was Emme and Reman’s night to plan the meal—usually about fifty people ate in Ardis Hall itself—and there were almost a dozen men and women bustling around baking bread, preparing salads, roasting meat on the spit in the huge old fireplace, and generally producing a genial chaos that would soon resolve itself into a long table filled with food.

Emme caught Ada’s eye. “Are they back yet?”

“Not yet,” said Ada, smiling, attempting to make her voice sound totally unconcerned.

“They will be,” said Emme, patting Ada’s pale hand.

Not for the first time, and not with anger—she liked Emme—Ada wondered why people seemed to feel that they had a greater right to touch and pat you when you were pregnant. She said, “Of course they will. And I hope with some venison and at least four of those missing head of cattle… or better yet, two of the cattle and two cows.”

“We need the milk,” agreed Emme. She patted Ada’s hand again and returned to her duties by the fire.

Ada slipped outside. For a second the cold took her breath away, but she’d brought her shawl and now she hitched it higher around her shoulders and neck. The cold air felt like needles against her cheeks after the warmth of the kitchen and she paused a moment on the back patio to let her eyes adjust to the dark.

To heck with it, she thought, raising her left palm and invoking the proxnet function by visualizing a single yellow circle with a green triangle in it. It was the fifth time she’d tried the function in the last two hours.

The blue oval coalesced into existence above her palm but the holographic imagery was still blurred and static-lashed. Harman had suggested that these occasional failures of proxnet or farnet or even of the old finder function had nothing to do with their bodies—the nanomachinery was still there in their genes and blood, he’d said with a laugh—but may have something to do with the satellites and relay asteroids in either the p-ring or e-ring, perhaps due to interference caused by the nightly meteor showers. Looking up at the darkening evening sky, Ada could see those polar and equatorial rings shifting and turning overhead like two crisscrossing bands of light, each ring composed of thousands of discrete glowing objects. For almost all of her twenty-seven years, those rings had been reassuring—the friendly home of the Firmary where their bodies would be renewed every Twenty, the home of the post-humans who watched over them and whose ranks they would ascend to on each person’s Fifth and Final Twenty—but now, Ada knew from Harman and Daeman’s experience there, the rings were empty of post-humans and a terrible threat. The Fifth Twenty had been a lie these long centuries—a final fax up to unconscious death by cannibalism from the thing called Caliban.

The falling stars—actually chunks of the two orbital objects that Harman and Daemon had helped to collide eight months earlier—were streaking from west to east, but this was a tiny meteor shower, nothing like the terrible bombardment of those first weeks after the Fall. Ada mused on that phrase they’d all used in the past months. The Fall. Fall of what? Fall of the chunks of the orbital asteroid Harman and Daemon had helped Prospero destroy, fall of the servitors, fall of the electrical grid, the end of the service from the voynix who had fled human control that very night… the night of the Fall. Everything had fallen that day a little more than eight months ago, Ada realized—not just the sky, but their world as they and preceding generations of old-style humans had known it for more than fourteen Five Twenties.

Ada began to feel the queasiness of the nausea she’d suffered the first three months of pregnancy, but this was anxiety, not morning sickness. Her head ached from tension. She thought off and the proxnet flicked off, tried farnet—it wasn’t working either—tried the primitive finder function, but the three men and one woman she wanted to find weren’t close enough for it to glow red, green, or amber. She blinked off all the palm functions.

Invoking any function made her want to read more books. Ada looked up at the glowing windows of the library—she could see the heads of others in there now, sigling away—and she wished she was with them, running her hands across the spines of the new volumes brought in and stacked in recent days, watching the golden words flow down her hands and arms into her mind and heart. But she’d read fifteen thick books already this short winter day, and even the thought of more sigling made her nausea surge.

Reading—or at least sigl-reading—is a lot like being pregnant, she thought, rather pleased with the metaphor. It fills you with feelings and reactions you’re not ready for …it makes you feel too full, not quite yourself, suddenly moving toward some destined moment that will change everything in your life forever. She wondered what Harman would say about her metaphor—he was brutal in critiquing his own metaphors and analogies, she knew—and then she felt the nausea in her belly move to her heart as the concern flooded back in. Where are they? Where is he? Is my darling all right?

Ada’s heart was pounding as she walked out toward the glowing open hearth and web of wooden scaffolding that was Hannah’s cupola, manned twenty-four hours a day now that bronze and iron and other metals were being shaped for weapons.

Hannah’s friend Loes and a group of the younger men were stoking and maintaining the fires tonight. “Good evening, Ada Uhr,” called down the tall, thin man. He’d known her for years, but always preferred the formality of the honorific.

“Good evening, Loes Uhr. Any word from the watchtowers?”

“None, I’m afraid,” called down Loes, stepping away from the opening at the top of the cupola. Ada noticed in her distraction that the man had shaved his beard and that his face was red and sweaty from the heat. He was working bare-chested up there on a night when it might snow.

“Is there a pour tonight?” asked Ada. Hannah always informed her of such things—and night pours were dramatic to watch—but the metal furnace was not one of Ada’s responsibilities and a fact of their new life that was only of passing interest to her.