“I have no idea.”

“When will we be allowed to return?” asked Hector.

“Never,” I said. I was sure of this and my voice reflected that certainty. I’m not sure I ever spoke two syllables with such certainty before or since.

At that moment, the second of the three impossible things of the day occurred—the first being, by my count, the falling of Ilium into a different universe.

It had been cloudy since the city landed on the ridgeline—solid clouds spread from east to west—and the twilight darkness had come more quickly because of the cloud cover. But now the wind that had borne the smell of vegetation was moving the entire cloud mass from west to east, clearing the early night sky above us.

We heard the men—Achaeans and Trojans both—exclaiming for long seconds before we realized that they were looking and pointing skyward.

I became aware of the strange light even before I looked up at the skies. It was brighter than any night under a full moon that I’d ever experienced and it was a richer, milkier, and strangely more fluid sort of light. I found myself looking down at our multiple, moving shadows on the rock beneath us—shadows no longer thrown by torchlight—when Hector himself prodded my arm to make me look up.

The clouds had all but passed. The night sky was still Earth’s night sky; I could see Orion’s Belt, the Pleiades, Polaris, and the Big Dipper low in the north, all more or less in their proper places, but that familiar late winter sky and the crescent moon rising above tumbled Troy to the east were paled to insignificance by this new source of light.

Two broad and moving bands of stars were moving and crossing above us, one band in our south and obviously moving quickly west to east, the other ring directly above us and moving north to south. The rings were bright and milky but not indistinct—I could make out thousands upon thousands of bright individual stars in each ring even as some long-lost memory from a science column in some newspaper reminded me that on the clearest night from most places on Earth, only about three thousand separate stars were visible up there. Now there were tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of individual stars visible—all moving together and crossing in two bright rings above us, easily illuminating everything around us and giving us a sort of half-evening-light, the kind of half-light I’d always imagined they played softball by at midnight in Anchorage, Alaska. This may have been the most beautiful thing I’d seen in two lifetimes.

“Son of Duane,” said Hector, “what are these stars? Are they gods? New stars? What are they?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

At that moment, with more than a hundred and fifty thousand men in armor rubbernecking, staring openmouthed and fearful at the amazing new night sky of this other Earth, men closest to the beach started shouting about something else. It took several minutes for us to realize that something was happening at the westernmost reaches of the mob of men, and then it took those of us at Hector’s conference more minutes to make our way west to a rocky rise—perhaps the edge of the original beach here thousands of years ago in Ilium’s day—to see what the Achaeans were still shouting about.

For the first time I noticed that the hundreds of burned black ships were still here; they had passed through the Brane Hole with us—the scorched wrecks near no water now, beached forever on the scrubby ridges here high above the alluvial marsh to the west—and then I noticed what the hundreds of men were yelling about.

Something black and inky but which reflected the turning starlight above us was creeping across the floor of the missing sea from the west, something moving silently toward us along the bottom of the dry basin, something flowing and sliding eastward with the subtle, slow, but sure certainty of Death. It filled up the lowest points as we watched, then encircled the wooded hilltops in the distance near the horizon—quite easily visible in the light from the new rings above us—and within minutes those hilltops had been surrounded by the dark motion until they ceased being hilltops and became the islands of Lemnos and Tenedos and Imbros once again.

This was the third strange miracle of this seemingly endless day.

The wine-dark sea was returning to the shores of Ilium.

Harman held the pistol to his forehead for only a few seconds. Even as his finger touched the weapon’s trigger, he knew that he wasn’t going to end things that way. It was a coward’s way out, and however terrified he felt right then at the imminence of his own death, he did not want to exit as a coward.

He pivoted, aimed the weapon at the hulking bow of the ancient submarine where it emerged through the north wall of the Breach, and squeezed the trigger until the weapon stopped firing nine shots later. His hand was shaking so badly he didn’t even know if he’d hit the huge target, but the act of shooting at it both focused and exorcised some of his rage and revulsion at the folly of his own species.

The soiled thermskin came off slowly. Harman did not even consider trying to wash the thing, but simply cast it aside. He was shaking from the aftermaths of the vomiting and diarrhea, but he didn’t even consider putting on his outer clothes or boots as he rose, found his balance, and started walking west.

Harman didn’t have to query his new biometric functions to know that he was dying quickly. He could feel the radiation in his guts and bowels and testicles and bones. The final weakness was growing in him like some foul homunculus stirring. So he walked west, toward Ada and Ardis.

For several hours, Harman’s mind was wonderfully quiescent, becoming aware only to help him avoid stepping on something sharp or to lead him to the correct path through ridges of coral or rock. He was vaguely aware that the walls of the Breach on both sides were growing much higher—the ocean was deeper here—and that the air around him was much cooler. But the midday sun still struck him. Once, in midafternoon, Harman looked down and saw that his legs and thighs were still soiled, mostly with blood, and he staggered to the south wall of the Breach, reached his bare hand through the forcefield—his fingers feeling the terrible pressure and cold—and scooped enough saltwater out of the sea to clean himself. He staggered on toward the west.

When he did begin thinking again he was pleased to note that it was not just about the obscenity of the machine and its cargo of planetary death that were now out of sight behind him. He began to think about his own life, one hundred years of it.

At first Harman’s thoughts were bitter—scolding himself for wasting all those decades on parties and play and an aimless series of faxing to this social event or that—but he soon forgave himself. There had been good times there, real moments even amidst that false existence, and the last year of true friendships, real love, and honest commitment had made up at least in part for all the years of shallowness.

He thought of his own role in the last year’s events and found the capacity to forgive himself there as well. The post-human who called herself Moira teased him about being Prometheus, but Harman saw himself more as a sort of combined Adam and Eve who—by seeking out the one Forbidden Fruit in the perfect Garden of Indolence—had banished his species from that mindless, healthy place forever.

What had he given Ada, his friends, his race, in return? Reading? As central as reading and knowledge had been to Harman, he wondered if that one ability—so much more potentially powerful than the hundred functions now stirred to wakefulness in his body—could compensate for all the terror, pain, uncertainty, and death ahead.

Perhaps, he realized, it did not have to.

As evening darkened the long slot of sky far above, Harman stumbled westward and began thinking about death. His own, he knew, was only hours away, perhaps less, but what of the concept of death that he and his people had never had to face until recent months?