“Help!” Lightning struck less than a mile away and the thunder moved across the tall corn like a shock wave. Daeman blinked away the afterimages of the flash and noticed that the corn seemed less thick up the row and to his right. It had to be the edge of the field.

He ran the last fifteen rows or so and burst into the opening.

It was not the edge of the field where he’d entered, but a clearing, perhaps twenty feet wide and thirty feet deep. In the center of the clearing, rising six or eight feet taller than the corn, was a large metal cross. Daeman ran the beam of the flashlight from the base of the cross up to the top of it.

The figure was not on the cross, but, rather, nestled in the hollowed-out metal form, its naked torso wedged into the upright column, its bare arms extended in the crossmembers. The flashlight beam jiggled in the downpour as Daeman stared.

It was not a man—at least like no man Daeman had ever seen. The man-thing was naked and slick, scaled and greenish—not fish-green, but with the green Daeman had always imagined as the color of corpses before the firmary ended such barbarities. The scales were small and numerous and gleamed in the flashlight. The thing was well-muscled, but the muscles were wrong—the arms too long, forearms too lanky, wrists too powerful, knuckles far too large, yellow claws instead of fingernails, thighs too powerful, feet three-toed and oddly splayed. It was a male—the penis and scrotum were obscenely visible and garishly pink beneath the washboard stomach and muscled abdomen, again somehow wrong, like a turtle or shark with almost-human genitalia—but the thick upper torso, snakelike neck, and hairless head were the least human aspects of the creature. Rain ran off the muscles and scales and banded ligaments, dripping across the rough black metal of the cross.

The eyes were sunken under brows at once apelike and fishlike and the face extruded out more snout or gill-like than nose. Under the snout, the thing’s mouth hung slightly open and Daeman stared at the long yellow teeth—not human, not animal, more fishlike if fish were monsters—and a far-too-long blue-ish tongue that stirred even as Daeman watched. He flicked the flashlight beam higher and almost screamed again.

The man-thing’s eyes had opened—oblong yellow cat’s-eyes, without a cat’s cool connection to humanity—with tiny black slits in the center. The thing . . . what had Savi called it? A calibani ?—stirred in its cross-niche, the hands opened from fists to extended fingers, long claws catching the light, and the legs and torso shifted as if the creature were waking and stretching.

There were no restraints on it. There was nothing to keep it from leaping down at Daeman this instant.

Daeman tried to run, but found that he couldn’t turn his back on the thing. It stirred again, its right hand and most of its arm coming free from the cross-niche. Its feet, Daeman now saw, also held yellow claws at the end of the webbed toes.

There was a crashing and roar behind Daeman—more calibani, already free from their crosses, he was sure—and Daeman whirled to meet their charge, raising the flashlight like a club and losing the light from it.

His feet slipped, or his legs weakened, and Daeman went to his knees in the mud in the clearing. He felt like crying, but didn’t think he did in the few seconds before the crawler burst from the row of corn, looming like a monstrous spider over Daeman and the cornfield and the cross and the unmoving calibani. The crawler’s eight headlights switched on, blinding him. He threw his forearm across his face, but, he realized later, more to hide his tears than to protect his eyes from the light.

Dressed in thermskins, the two men reclining on the cracked leather chairs and the old woman lying on the inner curve of the glass sphere, they ate their foodbars, passed around the water bottle, and watched the storm in silence for a while. Daeman had asked Savi to get away from the field and the cross and the creature, so she’d driven a mile or two up the red clay road before pulling to the side and shutting off everything but the crawler’s forcefield and dim virtual panels.

“What was that thing?” Daeman said at last.

“One of the calibani,” said Savi. She actually looked comfortable lying on the glass wall, backpack behind her head.

“I know what you called them,” snapped Daeman. “What are they?”

Savi sighed. “If I start explaining one thing, then I have to explain the rest. There’s a lot you eloi don’t know—almost everything, actually.”

“Why don’t you start with explaining why you call us eloi,” said Harman. His voice was hard.

“I guess it started as a form of insult,” said Savi. Lightning flashed, illuminating the lines on her face, but the storm had moved on far enough that the thunder came late, from very far away. “Although to be fair, I called my own people that before calling yours the word.”

“What does it mean?” demanded Harman.

“It’s a term from a very old story in a very old book,” said Savi. “About a man who travels through time to the far future and finds humankind evolved into two races—one gentle, lazy, purposeless, basking in the sun, the eloi, and the other ugly, monstrous, productive, technological, but hiding in caves and darkness, the morlocks. In the old book, the morlocks provided food, shelter, and clothing for the eloi until the gentle people had fattened up nicely. And then the morlocks ate them.”

Lightning flashed across the fields again, but it was a pale, receding light. “Is that what our world is like?” asked Daeman. “Us as the eloi and the calibani and voynix as the morlocks ? Do they eat us?”

“I wish it were that simple,” said Savi. She laughed softly, but the noise held no humor.

“What are the calibani?” said Harman.

Instead of answering, the old woman said, “Daeman, show Harman one of your palm tricks.”

Daeman hesitated. “Which one?” he said. “Proxnet or farnet?”

“We know where we are, darling,” the old woman said sarcastically. “Show him farnet.”

Daeman scowled, but did so. He told Harman to think of three blue squares in the center of three red circles and suddenly a blue oval was floating over both of their palms. “Think of someone,” Daeman said, feeling strange. He’d never taught anyone anything before, if one didn’t count sexual techniques. “Anyone,” he added. “Just visualize them.”

Harman looked dubious but concentrated. An aerial representation of Ardis filled Harman’s oval, then a diagram of the layout of Ardis Hall. A stylized female figure was standing with a group of stylized men and women on the front porch of the manor.

“Ada,” said Daeman. “You were thinking of Ada.”

“Incredible,” said Harman. He stared at the image for a moment. “I’m going to visualize Odysseus,” he said.

The image shifted, changed magnitude, searched, but came up with nothing.

“Farnet doesn’t have a lock on Odysseus, according to Savi,” said Daeman. “But go back to Ada. Look where she is.”

Harman frowned but focused. The stylized cartoon of Ada was in a field a hundred yards or so behind Ardis Hall. There were scores of other human figures represented seated in front and around a void. Ada joined the crowd.

Daeman looked at Harman’s palm image. “I wonder what’s going on there. If Odysseus is in that empty spot, it looks as if the old barbarian’s addressing a crowd.”

“And Ada’s listening to him or watching him perform,” said Harman. He looked away from the palm oval. “What does this have to do with my question, Savi? Who are the calibani ? Why are the voynix trying to kill us? What’s going on?”

“A few centuries before the final fax,” she said, folding her hands together, “the post-humans got too clever by half. Their science was impressive. To all intents and purposes, they’d fled the Earth to their orbital rings during the terrible rubicon epidemic. But they were still masters of the earth. They thought they were masters of the universe.