Harman was almost on his back, staring up at the polar ring moving north to south above them—the tens of thousands of individual components burning startlingly bright in the clear, thin air at this altitude. “Yes,” he said.

Savi shook her head. “This is a sonie, not a spacecraft. The p-ring is high. Why would you want to go up there?”

Harman ignored the question. “Do you know where we could find a spacecraft?”

The old woman smiled again. Watching Savi carefully, Ada was noticing the variety of the woman’s expressions—the smiles with real warmth, those with none, and this kind, that suggested something actively cold or ironic.

“Perhaps,” she said, but her tone warned against further questioning.

Hannah asked, “Did you actually meet post-humans?”

“Yes,” said Savi, raising her voice slightly to be heard above the sonie’s hum as they hurtled northward. “I actually met some.”

“What were they like?” Hannah’s voice was slightly wistful.

“First off, they were all women,” said Savi.

Harman blinked at this. “They were?”

“Yes. A lot of us suspected that only a few posts ever came down to earth, but that they used different forms. All female. Perhaps there were no male post-humans. Perhaps they didn’t retain gender as they controlled their own evolution. Who knows?”

“Did they have names?” asked Daeman.

Savi nodded. “The one I knew best . . . well, the one I saw the most . . . was named Moira.”

“What were they like?” Hannah asked again. “Their personalities? Their looks?”

“They preferred floating to walking,” Savi said cryptically. “They liked to throw parties for us old-styles. They tended to speak in delphic riddles.”

There was silence for a minute except for the wind rushing over the polycarbon hull and the forcefield bubble. Finally Ada said, “Did they come down from their rings much?”

Savi shook her head again. “Not much. Very rarely toward the end, in the last years before the final fax. But it was rumored that they had some installations in the Mediterranean Basin.”

“Mediterranean Basin?” said Harman.

Savi smiled and Ada thought it was one of her amused smiles.

“A thousand years before the final fax, the posts drained a sizable sea south of Europe—dammed it up between a rock called Gibraltar and the tip of North Africa—and made it out of bounds for old-styles. A lot of it was turned to farmland—so the posts told us—but I did some trespassing there before being discovered and tossed out, and I found that there were . . . well, cities might be the best description, if something solid state can be called a city.”

“Solid state?” said Hannah.

“Never mind, child.”

Harman was prone again, on his elbows. He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of this Mediterranean Basin. Or Gibraltar. Or . . . what was it? North Africa.”

“I know you’ve discovered a few maps, Harman, and learned how to read them . . . after a fashion,” said Savi. “But they were poor maps. And old. The few books that the post-humans allowed to survive to this postliterate age were vague . . . harmless.”

Harman frowned again. They flew north in silence.

The sonie carried them out of the polar night into afternoon light, away from the dark ocean, and across land at a height they could only guess at and at a speed they could only dream of. The p-ring faded as the sky grew blue and the e-ring became visible to the north.

They crossed land hidden by tall white clouds, then saw high, snow-covered peaks and glacial valleys far below. Savi swooped the sonie lower, east of the peaks, and they flew a few thousand feet above rain forest and green savannahs, still moving so quickly that more peaks appeared like dots above the horizon and then grew into mountains in mere minutes.

“Is this South America?” asked Harman.

“It used to be,” said Savi.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that the continents have changed quite a bit since any of the maps you’ve seen were drawn,” said the old woman. “And they had quite a few more names since then as well. Did the maps you saw show this landmass connected to the one called North America?”

“Yes.”

“No more.” She touched the holographic symbols, twisted the handgrip, and the sonie flew lower. Ada rose up on her elbows, hair against the forcefield bubble, and looked around. Silently, except for the rush of air over their force bubble, the sonie flew just above treetop height—cycads, giant ferns, ancient, leafless trees flicked past. To the west rose the foothills along the line of high peaks. Farther east, rolling grasslands were dotted with more of these primitive trees. Large animals lumbered like mobile boulders near the rivers and lakes. Grazing animals with improbable snouts were streaked with white, brown, tan, red. Ada could identify none of them

Suddenly a herd of these grazing animals stampeded past a hundred feet beneath the sonie, all panicked, fleeing for their lives. After them loped half a dozen birdlike creatures—massive, eight feet tall or taller, Ada guessed, with wild feather plumage flying back from the largest beaks and the ugliest faces Ada had ever seen. The grazing animals were running fast—thirty or forty miles per hour Ada guessed in the seconds before the sonie carried them out of sight—but the birds were moving faster, perhaps sixty miles per hour, four times as fast as any droshky or carriole that Ada or the other three had ever ridden in.

“What . . .” began Hannah.

“Terror Birds,” said Savi. “Phorushacos . After the rubicon, the ARNists had a wild few centuries of such play. It’s sort of fitting, since the real Terror Birds wandered these plains and hills about two million years ago, but that kind of recombinant crap—like your dinosaurs up north—plays havoc with the ecology. The posts promised to clean it all up during the final fax Hiatus, but they didn’t.”

“What’s an ARNist?” asked Ada. The animals—red-beaked Terror Birds and prey alike—were out of sight behind them. Larger herds with larger animals were visible now to the west, being stalked by tigerish-looking things. The sonie swung higher and turned toward the foothills.

Savi sighed as if weary. “RNA artists. Recombinant freelancers. Social rebels and merry pranksters with sequencers and bootleg regen tanks.” She looked over at Ada, then at Harman, then back at Daeman and Hannah. “Never mind, children,” she said.

They flew another fifteen minutes above steaming forests and then turned west into a mountain range. Clouds moved around and between the mountain peaks below them and snow whipped around the sonie, but somehow the forcefield kept the elements at bay.

Savi touched a glowing image; the sonie slowed, circled, and turned west toward the late-afternoon sun. They were very high.

“Oh my,” said Harman.

Ahead of them, two sharp peaks rose on either side of a narrow saddle covered by grassy terraces and truly ancient ruins, stone walls with no roofs. A bridge—also from the Lost Age but obviously not as ancient as the stone ruins—ran from one of the sharp-toothed peaks to the other above the ruins. There was no road beyond the suspension bridge—the roadway ended in a wall of rock at both ends—and the foundations were sunk into rock between the ruins below.

The sonie circled.

“A suspension bridge,” whispered Harman. “I’ve read about them.”

Ada was good at estimating the size of things, and she guessed that the main span of this bridge was almost a mile in length, although the roadbed had broken away in a score of places, showing rusted rebar and empty air. She guessed the two towers—each showing ancient orange paint, but sporting mostly rust—to be more than 700 feet tall, the top of each tower rising higher than the mountains at either end. The double-towers were green with what looked to be ivy from a distance, but as the sonie circled closer, Ada could see that the “growth” was artificial—green bubbles and stairways and globs of flexible glasslike material, wrapping around the towers, strung along the heavy suspension cables, even trailing down the support cables and hanging free above the ruined roadway. Clouds moved down from the high peaks and mixed with the fog rising from the deep canyons below the ruins on the hilltop, curling and writhing around the south tower and obscuring the roadway and hanging cables there.