“Perturbed, yes . . . perhaps an inadequate word to describe being devoured by a six-ton carnivore,” said Daeman, but he smiled slightly and bowed his head even more slightly to acknowledge his acceptance of the apology.

Harman leaned closed and clasped his hands, bobbing them up and down for emphasis as he spoke. “We had an unfinished item for discussion, Daeman Uhr . . .”

“The spaceship.” Now Daeman’s tone of irony had dripped into sarcasm.

Harman was not deterred. His clasped hands rose and fell with the syllables. “Yes. But not just a spaceship . . . that’s the ultimate goal, of course . . . but any form of flying machine. Jinker. Sonie. Ultralight. Anything to allow us to explore between faxports . . .”

Daeman sat back, away from Harman’s intensity, and folded his arms. “Why do you persist with this? Why do you bother me about this?”

Ada touched his arm. “Daeman, Hannah and I had both heard, from different people, that at a recent party in Ulanbat—about a month ago, I believe—you told some acquaintances of ours there that you’d once met someone who mentioned seeing a spaceship . . . and someone who spoke of flying between nodes . . .”

Daeman managed to look both blank and irritated for a moment, but then he laughed and shook his head. “The witch,” he said.

“Witch?” said Hannah.

Daeman opened his hands in an echo of his mother’s graceful shrugging gesture. “We called her that. I forget her real name. A crazy woman. Obviously in her last Twenty . . .” He shot a glance toward Harman. “People begin losing touch with reality in their later years.”

Harman smiled and ignored the gibe. “You don’t remember this woman’s name?”

Daeman gestured again, less gracefully this time. “No.”

“Where did you meet her?” asked Ada.

“The last Burning Man. A year and a half ago. I forget where it was held . . . somewhere cold. I just followed friends from Chom when they faxed there. Lost Age ceremonies never interested me very much, but there were many fascinating young women at this gathering.”

“I was there!” Hannah said, her eyes bright. “About ten thousand people came.”

Harman pulled a much-folded sheet of paper from a tunic pocket and began spreading it on the padded ottoman between them. “Do you remember which node?”

Hannah shook her head. “It was one of the half-forgotten nodes. One of the empty ones. The organizers sent the node code around the day before the ceremony began. No one lived there, I think. It was a rocky valley surrounded by snow. I remember that it was light all day, all night, for the five days of Burning Man. And cold. The servitors had set up a Planck field over the whole valley and heaters here and there in the valley itself, so it wasn’t uncomfortable, but no one was allowed beyond the edges of the valley.”

Harman looked at his faded and folded sheet of microvellum. The page was covered with squiggly lines, dots, and arcane runes like those found in books. He stabbed a finger down on a dot near the bottom. “Here. In what used to be Antarctica. A node called ‘The Dry Valley.’ “

Daeman looked at him blankly.

“This is a map I’ve been working on for fifty years,” said Harman. “A two-dimensional representation of the Earth with all the known faxnodes mapped on it, along with their codes. Antarctica was a Lost Age name for one of the seven continents. I have seven Antarctic faxnodes recorded, but only one of them—this dry valley that I’ve heard of but never visited—is free of snow and ice.”

This obviously did nothing to enlighten Daeman. Even Ada and Hannah looked confused.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Harman. “But if the sun was out all day and all night, this dry valley is the probable faxport. During the polar summers, there are days when the sun doesn’t set there.”

“The sun doesn’t set in June in Chom,” Daeman said, obviously bored. “Is that near your dry valley?”

“No.” Harman pointed to a dot near the top of the map. “I’m pretty sure that Chom is on this large peninsula up here, above the arctic circle. Near the north pole, not the south.”

“North pole?” said Ada.

Daeman looked at the two women. “And I thought the witch at Burning Man was crazy.”

“Do you remember anything else this woman, this witch, said?” asked Harman, obviously too excited to be insulted.

Daeman shook his head. He looked tired. “Just babble. We’d been drinking a lot. It was the night of the burning and we’d been awake for days and nights in that damned daylight—catching a few hours of nap in one of the big orange tents. It was the last night and there are usually orgies on the last night and I thought that perhaps she . . . but she was too old for my tastes.”

“But she talked about a spaceship?” Harman was visibly trying to be patient.

Daeman shrugged again. “Someone there . . . a young man, about Hannah’s age . . . was bemoaning the fact that we didn’t have sonies to fly around in since the final fax, and this . . . witch . . . who had been very quiet but who was obviously also very drunk . . . said we did, that there were jinkers and sonies if you knew where to look for them. She said she used them all the time.”

“And the spaceship?” prompted Harman.

“She said she’d seen one, is all,” said Daeman, rubbing his temples as if they hurt. “Near a museum. I asked her what a museum was, but she didn’t answer.”

“Why did you call this older woman a witch?” asked Hannah.

“I didn’t start it. Everyone called her that.” Daeman sounded a bit defensive. “I think it’s because she said she hadn’t faxed in, but had walked, when it was obvious that she couldn’t have . . . there were no other nodes or structures around the valley and the Planck field sealed it off.”

“That’s true,” said Hannah. “That last Burning Man may have been in the most remote place I’ve ever faxed to. I’m sorry I didn’t meet this woman there.”

“I only remember her there two nights,” said Daeman. “The first and the last. And she kept to herself except for this one crazy exchange.”

“How did you know that she was old?” Ada asked softly.

“You mean other than her obvious insanity?”

“Yes.”

Daeman sighed. “She looked old. As if she had been to the firmary too many times . . .” He paused then and frowned, obviously thinking about his own recent visit there. “She looked older than anyone I’ve ever seen. I think she actually had those grooves on her face.”

“Wrinkles?” said Hannah. The girl sounded envious.

“But you don’t remember her name?” said Harman.

Daeman shook his head. “Someone by the fire called her by name that night but I can’t quite . . . I’d been drinking too, you know, and not sleeping.”

Harman glanced at Ada, took a breath, and said, “Could it have been Savi?”

Daeman’s head came up quickly. “Yes. I think it was. Savi . . . yes, that sounds right. Unusual.” He saw Harman and Ada exchange meaningful glances again and said, “What? Is this significant? Do you two know her?”

“The Wandering Jew,” said Ada. “Have you heard that legend?”

Daeman smiled tiredly. “About the woman who somehow missed the final fax fourteen hundred years ago and who’s been condemned to wander the earth ever since? Of course. But I didn’t know the woman in the legend had a name.”

“Savi,” said Harman. “Savi’s her name.”

Marina came in with two servitors carrying mugs of mulled wine and a tray of cheese and breads. The uncomfortable silence was broken by small talk while they ate and sipped.

“We’ll fax there tonight,” Harman said to Hannah and Ada. “To the dry valley. There might be some clue left.”

Hannah held her steaming mug in both hands. “I don’t see how. That Burning Man was, as Daeman said, more than eighteen months ago.”

“When’s the next one?” asked Ada. She never went to such dementia-era ceremonies.

It was Harman who answered. “One never knows. The Burning Man Cabal sets the time and notifies people only days before the event. Sometimes they’re a few months apart. Sometimes a dozen years. The one in the dry valley was the last one. If you’ve been to any of the previous three, you’re invited. I missed it because I was hiking in the Mediterranean Basin.”