Ilium

62 Ardis

The sky continued to fall all that late afternoon into evening.

Ada had rushed out onto Ardis Hall’s long lawn to watch the bloody streaks slash the sky—sonic booms crashing and re-crashing across the wooded hills and river valley—and just stood there as the guests and disciples screamed and overturned tables and ran down the road toward the distant fax pavilion in their panicked eagerness to escape.

Odysseus joined her and they stood there on the grass, a two-person island of immobility in a sea of chaos.

“What is it?” whispered Ada. “What’s happening?” There were never fewer than a dozen fiery streaks in the sky, and sometimes the evening sky was all but occluded by the meteors.

“I’m not sure,” said the barbarian.

“Does it have something to do with Savi, Harman, and Daeman?”

The bearded man in the tunic looked at her. “Perhaps.”

Most of the burning trails scorched the sky and disappeared, but now one—brighter than the others and audible, screeching like a thousand fingernails dragged across glass—burned its way to the eastern horizon and struck, throwing up a billowing cloud of flame. A minute later a terrible sound rolled over them—so much louder and deeper than the fingernail scraping of the meteor’s passage that the rumble made Ada’s back teeth ache—and then a violent wind came up, knocking leaves off the ancient elm and tumbling most of the tents that had been set up in the meadow just beyond the driveway turnaround.

Ada gripped Odysseus’s powerful forearm and clung to it until her fingernails drew blood without her noticing or Odysseus saying anything.

“Do you want to go inside?” he said at last.

“No.”

They watched the aerial display for another hour. Most of the guests had fled, running down the road when they could find no available droshky or carriole or voynix to pull them, but about seventy disciples had stayed, standing with Ada and Odysseus on the sloping yard. Several more objects struck the earth, the last one more violent than the first. All of the windows on Ardis Hall’s north side shattered, shards raining down in the evening light.

“I’m so glad that Hannah is safe in the firmary right now,” said Ada.

Odysseus looked at her and said nothing.

It was the man named Petyr who came out of the manor at sunset to tell them that the servitors were down.

“What do you mean, ‘down’?” demanded Ada.

“Down,” repeated Petyr. “On the ground. Not working. Broken.”

“Nonsense,” said Ada. “Servitors don’t break.” Even with the meteor shower brighter now with the sun setting, she turned her back on the view and led Odysseus and Petyr back into Ardis Hall, stepping carefully across the broken glass and shattered plaster.

Two servitors were on the floor of the kitchen, one more in the upstairs bedroom. Their communicators were silent, their manipulators limp, the little white-gloved hands dangling. None responded to proddings, commands, or kicks. The three humans went out back and found two more servitors where they had fallen on the yard.

“Have you ever seen a servitor fail?” asked Odysseus.

“Never,” said Ada.

More disciples gathered. “Is this the end of the world?” asked the young woman named Peaen. It wasn’t clear who she was addressing.

Finally Odysseus spoke over the sky roar. “It depends on what’s falling.” He pointed his powerful, stubby finger at the e- and p-rings just visible behind the meteor storm pyrotechnics. “If it’s just some of the big accelerators and quantum devices up there, we should survive this. If it’s one of the four major asteroids where the posts used to live . . . well, it could be the end of the world . . . at least as we know it.”

“What’s an asteroid?” asked Petyr, ever the curious disciple.

Odysseus shook his head, waving the question away.

“When will we know?” asked Ada.

The older bearded man sighed. “A few hours. Almost certainly by tomorrow evening.”

“I never really thought about the world ending,” said Ada. “But I certainly never imagined it ending by fire.”

“No,” said Odysseus, “if it ends for us, it’ll end by ice.”

The circle of men and women looked at him.

“Nuclear winter,” muttered the Greek. “If one of those asteroids—or even a big enough chunk of one—hits the ocean or land, it’ll throw enough garbage in the atmosphere to drop the temperature by sixty or seventy degrees Fahrenheit in a few hours. Maybe more. The skies will cloud over. The storm will start as rain and then turn to snow for months, maybe centuries. This planetary tropical hothouse you’ve grown accustomed to in the last millennium and a half will become a playground for glaciers.”

A smaller meteor ripped low in the northern sky, striking somewhere in the forests there. The air smelled of smoke and Ada could see distant flames in all directions. She took a second to think about how unknown this whole world was to her. What was north of Ardis Hall in the forests there? She’d never walked more than a few miles from Ardis or any other faxnode, and then always with an escort of voynix for protection.

“Where are the voynix?” she asked suddenly.

No one knew. Ada and Odysseus circled Ardis Hall, checked the outer fields and driveway and lower meadow where the voynix usually stood waiting or walking perimeter duty. None were there. Nobody in the small group on the lawn remembered seeing any even before the meteor shower began.

“You finally frightened them away for good,” Ada said to Odysseus, trying to make a joke.

He shook his head again. “This isn’t good.”

“I thought you didn’t like voynix,” said Ada. “You cut one of mine in half your first day here.”

“They’re up to something,” said Odysseus. “Their time may have come ’round at last.”

“What?”

“Nothing, Ada Uhr.” He took her hand and patted it. Like a father, thought Ada and, stupidly, shockingly, began to cry. She kept thinking about Harman and how confused and angry she’d been when he’d told her he wanted to help her choose him as a father for her child, and how he wanted the child to know that he was the father. What had seemed an absurd idea—almost obscene—now seemed so very, very sensible to Ada. She gripped Odysseus’ hand tightly and wept.

“Look!” cried the girl named Peaen.

A less brilliant meteor was descending right toward Ardis, but at a shallower angle than all the others. It still trailed a fiery trail against the darkening sky—the sun had finally set—but this meteor tail looked more like real flames than screaming, heated plasma.

The glowing object circled once and seemed to fall out of the sky, crashing with audible impact somewhere beyond the line of trees above the upper meadow.

“That was close,” said Ada. Her heart was pounding.

“That wasn’t a meteor,” said Odysseus. “Stay here. I’m going to walk up there and check it out.”

“I’m going with you,” said Ada. When the bearded man opened his mouth to argue, she said simply, “It’s my land.”

They walked up the hill together into the deepening twilight, the sky above them still alive with silent flame.

The flames and smoke were visible just beyond the edge of the upper meadow, just past the line of trees, but Ada and Odysseus didn’t have to go searching in the darkness there. Ada saw them first—two bearded, emaciated men walking toward them from the forest. One of the men was naked, skin glowing palely in the dim twilight, ribs visible from fifty feet away, and he appeared to be caring a bald, blue-suited child in his arms. The other skeletal, bearded man was dressed in what Ada immediately recognized as a green thermskin suit, but the suit itself was so torn and filthy she could barely see the color of the material. This man’s right arm hung uselessly at his side, palm forward, and his bare wrist and hand were dull red with blood. Both men were staggering, struggling to stay upright and to keep moving.

Odysseus drew his short sword halfway from its scabbard on his belt.

“No,” cried Ada, pushing Odysseus’ hand and sword down. “No, it’s Harman! It’s Daeman!” She ran toward them through the high grass.

Harman started to pitch forward as she approached and Odysseus sprinted the last twenty paces, catching Harman’s burden as the man fell forward. Daeman also went to his knees.

“It’s Hannah,” said Odysseus, laying the semiconscious young woman in the grass and setting his fingers on her neck to find her pulse.

“Hannah?” repeated Ada. This woman had no hair or eyelashes, but the eyes under flickering eyelids were Hannah’s.

“Hi, Ada,” said the girl on the ground.

Ada went to one knee and crouched next to the fallen Harman, helping him roll over onto his back. He tried to smile up at her. Her lover’s face was bruised and cut under the whiskers, his cheeks and forehead all but covered with caked blood. His eyes were sunken, skin an unhealthy white, and his cheekbones too sharp above his beard. Harman shivered with fever and his eyes burned at her. His teeth chattered when he spoke. “I’m all right, Ada. God, I’m glad to see you.”

Daeman was in worse shape. Ada couldn’t believe that these two battered, bloodied, emaciated men were the same two who had set forth so casually a month earlier. She put one arm under Daeman’s arm to keep him from pitching facefirst into the ground. He swayed on his knees.

“Where’s Savi?” asked Odysseus.

Harman shook his head sadly. He seemed too tired to speak again.

“Caliban,” said Daeman. His voice sounded twenty years older to Ada’s ear.

The worst of the meteor storm had abated, the audible impacts and more fiery falls having moved off to the east. A few dozen minor streaks crossed the zenith west to east almost gently, looking more like August’s annual Perseid showers than the violence of earlier in the evening.

“Let’s get them back to the house,” said Odysseus. He stood, lifted Hannah easily in both arms, and gave his right shoulder to Daeman to lean on as he rose. Ada helped Harman to his knees and then to his feet, putting his right arm over her shoulder and holding much of his weight as they all headed down the darkened meadow toward the lights of Ardis Hall where Odysseus’ disciples and Ada’s friends had lighted candles.

“That arm looks bad,” Odysseus said to Daeman as the four of them and the unconscious girl descended. “I’ll cut the thermskin off and take a look at it when we get in the light.”

Ada used her free hand to reach and gently touch Daeman’s bloodied arm, and the gaunt man moaned and almost swooned. Only Odysseus’ strong shoulder and Ada’s right hand slid quickly to the small of his back kept Daeman upright. The young man’s eyelids fluttered for a few seconds, but then he focused, smiled at her, and kept walking.

“These are serious injuries,” said Ada, feeling close to tears for the second time that evening. “You should both be faxed to the firmary.”

She didn’t understand at all when both men started laughing, hesitantly and painfully at first, more coughing than laughing for a moment, but then the barking changing to pure laughter, increasing in volume and sincerity until the two battered, bearded men sounded almost irritatingly drunk in the throes of their own private amusement.