“Does this place have a name?” asked Ada.

“The Golden Gate at Machu Picchu,” said Savi as she touched the controls to bring them closer.

“What does that mean?” asked Daeman.

“I have no idea,” said Savi.

The sonie circled the northern tower—dull orange and scabrous rust-red in the bright sunlight here beyond the clouds—and floated slowly, carefully, to the top of the tower, touching down without a sound.

The forcefield died away. Savi nodded and everyone crawled out, stretched, looked around. The air was cold and very thin.

Daeman wandered over to the rusted edge of the tower top, leaning out to look. Growing up with Paris Crater as his home base, he had no fear of heights.

“I wouldn’t fall if I were you,” said Savi. “There’s no firmary rescue here. You die away from the faxnodes, you stay dead.”

Daeman lurched backward, almost falling in his haste to get back from the edge. “What are you talking about?”

“Just what I said,” said Savi, hoisting her pack to her right shoulder. “There’s no fax to the firmary here. Try to stay alive until you get back.”

Ada looked skyward to where both rings were visible through the high, thin air. “I thought the post-humans could fax us from anywhere if we . . . got into trouble.”

“To the rings,” said Savi, her voice flat. “Where the firmary heals you. To where you ascend after your Fifth Twenty to join the post-humans.”

“Yes,” Ada said weakly.

Savi shook her head. “It’s not the posts who fax you away when something bad happens, rebuilding you. All that’s myth. Or to be less polite—bullshit.”

Harman opened his mouth to speak but it was Daeman who spoke first. “I was just there,” he said, anger in his voice. “In the firmary. In the rings.”

“In the firmary, yes,” said Savi. “But not healed by post-humans. If they’re up there, they don’t care a whit about you. And I don’t think they’re up there anymore.”

The four stood on the rusted tower summit more than five hundred feet above the ruined roadway, eight hundred feet above the grassy saddle and stone ruins. Wind from the higher peaks buffeted them and blew their hair.

“After our last Twenty, we go up to join the posts . . .” began Hannah, her voice small.

Savi laughed and led the way toward an irregular glass globule blobbing up over the west end of the ancient tower top.

There were rooms and anterooms and stairways descending and frozen escalators and smaller rooms off the main chambers. Ada thought it strange that the sky and the orange towers and the hanging cables and glimpses of the jungle and roadway below were not tinted green through the material, nor was the sunlight streaming in turned green—the green glass somehow passed colors accurately.

Savi led them down and around from one green module to the next, from one side of the bifurcated tower to another through thin tubes that should have been swinging in the strong breeze, but weren’t. Some of the chambers extended thirty or forty feet out beyond the tower, and Ada had no clue how the green globule was attached to the concrete and steel.

Some of the rooms were empty. Others had—artifacts. A series of animal skeletons stood silhouetted against the mountain skyline in one room. In another, what appeared to be replicas of machines lined display counters and hung from wires. In yet another, plexiglass cubes held fetuses of a hundred creatures, none of them human but some disturbingly close to human. In another room, faded holograms of starfields and ringfields moved over and through the observers.

“What is this place?” asked Harman.

“A sort of museum,” said Savi. “I think most of the important displays are missing.”

“Created by whom?” asked Hannah.

Savi shrugged. “Not by the posts, I think. I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure that the bridge—or the original of this bridge, it may be a replica—once stood above water near a Lost Age city on what was then the west coast of the continent north of here. Have you heard of such a thing, Harman?”

“No.”

“Perhaps I dreamt it,” said Savi with a rueful laugh. “My memory plays tricks on me after all these centuries of sleep.”

“You mentioned sleeping through the centuries once before,” Daeman said, his tone sounding brusque to Ada. “What are you talking about?”

Savi had led them down a long spiral staircase in the green-glass tube strung between the suspension cables, and now she gestured to a line of what appeared to be crystal coffins. “A form of cryosleep,” she said. “Only not cold—which is silly, because that’s what ‘cryo’ meant originally. Some of these cocoons still work, still freeze molecular motion. Not through cold, but through some microtechnology that draws power from the bridge.”

“From the bridge?” said Ada.

“The whole thing is a solar power receiver,” said Savi. “Or at least the green parts are.”

Ada looked at the dusty crystal coffins and tried to imagine going to sleep in one and waiting . . . what? Years before waking? Decades? Centuries? She shuddered.

Savi was looking at her and Ada blushed. But Savi smiled. One of her sincerely amused smiles, Ada thought.

They climbed to a long green glass cylinder hanging from a frayed and rusted support cable that was thicker than Harman was tall. Ada found herself treading softly, trying to lift her weight by sheer will, afraid that their combined weight would bring the cylinder down, the cable, the whole bridge. Again she caught Savi watching her. This time Ada did not blush but frowned back, tired of the old woman’s scrutiny.

All four of them stopped a minute, alarmed. It appeared that they had walked into a meeting hall filled with people—people standing along the edges of the room, men and women in weird garb, people sitting at desks and standing at control panels, people who did not move or turn their gazes in the direction of the newcomers.

“They’re not real,” said Daeman, walking to the nearest man—dressed in a dusty blue suit with some sort of fabric at his throat—and touching the figure’s face.

The five walked from figure to figure, staring at the men and women dressed in odd clothes, people with strangely patterned hair and unusual personal adornment—tattoos, strange jewelry, dyed hair and skin.

“I read that once servitors came in the shape of human beings . . .” began Harman.

“No,” said Savi. “These aren’t robots. Only mannequins.”

“What?” said Daeman.

Savi explained the word.

“Do you know who they’re supposed to be?” asked Hannah. “Or why they’re here?”

“No,” said Savi. She stood back while the others explored.

At the end of the chamber, set in a glass alcove as if in pride of place, the figure of a man was posed in an ornate wood and leather-slung chair. Even seen sitting, it was obvious that this figure was shorter than most of the other male mannequins in the hall, and dressed in some sort of tan tunic that looked like a short, belted dress made out of rough cotton or wool. The figure’s feet were shod with sandals. The short man could have been comic, but his features—short, curly gray hair, hawk nose, and fierce gray eyes staring out boldly from under heavy brows—were so powerful that Ada found herself approaching the mannequin warily. The man’s forearms were shaped with such muscle and so many scars, the stubby fingers were curled easily but with much strength on the wooden arms of the camp chair—everything about the carved form gave an impression of such coiled strength—of will as well as body—that Ada stopped six feet away from it. The man was visibly older than humans chose to look in this age—somewhere between Harman’s Second Twenty and Savi’s old age. The man’s tunic hung low enough that Ada could see the graying hair on his broad, bronzed chest.

Daeman hurried forward. “I know this man,” he said, pointing. “I’ve seen him before.”

“From the turin drama,” said Hannah.