He allowed himself to search all the data stored in him after the crystal cabinet and found that death—the fear of death, the hope for surviving death, curiosity about death—had been the central spur for almost all literature and religion for the nine millennia of information he had stored. The religion parts, Harman could not quite comprehend—he had little context except for his current terror at the presence of Death. He saw the hunger there in a thousand cultures over thousands of years to have assurance—any assurance—that one’s life continued even after life so obviously had fled. He blinked as his mind sorted through concepts of afterlife—Valhalla, Heaven, Hell, the Islamic Paradise that the crew of the submarine behind him had been so eager to enter, the sense of having lived a Righteous life so as to live on in the minds and memories of others—and then he looked at all the myriad versions of the theme of being reborn into an Earthly life, the mandala, reincarnation, the Wu-Nine Path to Center. To Harmon’s mind and heart, it was all beautiful and as airy and empty as an abandoned spiderweb.

As he stumbled westward into the cold gathering shadows, Harman realized that if he responded to human views of Death now stored in his dying cells and very DNA, it was to the literary and artistic attempts to express the human side of the encounter—a sort of defiance of genius. Harman looked at stored images of the last self-portraits of Rembrandt and wept at the terrible wisdom in that visage. He listened to his own mind read every word of the full version of Hamlet and realized—as so many generations before had realized—that this aging prince in black might have been the only true envoy from the Undiscovered Country.

Harman realized that he was weeping and that it was not for himself or his imminent demise—nor even for the loss of Ada and his unborn child, who were never truly out of his mind—but it was simply because he had never had the chance to watch a Shakespearean play performed. He realized that if he were returning home to Ardis all hale and hearty, rather than as this bleeding, dying skeleton, he would have insisted that the community perform one of Shakespeare’s plays if they managed to survive the voynix.

Which one?

Trying to decide this interesting question kept Harman distracted long enough that he did not notice the sky above fading to deep twilight hues, nor did he notice when the slice of sky became only starfields and ring movement and he did not immediately notice that the cold in the deep trench he was staggering westward in was seeping into his skin first, then flesh, then his very bones.

Finally he could go on no longer. He kept stumbling over rocks and other unseen things. He could not even see where the walls of the Breach began. Everything was terribly cold and totally dark—a pretaste of death.

Harman did not want to die. Not yet. Not now. He curled into a fetal position on the sandy bottom of the Breach, feeling the grit and sand rubbing his skin raw as the reality that he was alive. He hugged himself, teeth chattering, pulled his knees higher up and hugged them, body shaking, but reassured that he was alive. He even thought wistfully about the rucksack he had left so far behind and of the thermal-blanket sleeping bag in it and of his clothes. His mind acknowledged the food bars left in it as well, but his stomach wanted no part of that.

Several times during the night, Harman had to crawl away from the nest in the sand he had made with his curled body and shake on hands and knees as he retched again and again—but dry heaves only. Anything he’d had in his stomach yesterday was long gone. Then he would crawl back slowly, laboriously, to his little fetal-shaped gouge in the sand, anticipating the slight warmth he would find again when curled up there the way he once might have anticipated a fine meal.

Which play? The first he had ever read had been Romeo and Juliet and it held the affection of first encounter. Now he reviewed King Lear—never, never, never, never never—and thought it perfectly appropriate for a dying man such as himself, even one who had not lived long enough to see his son or daughter, but it might be too much for the Ardis family in their first encounter with Shakespeare. Since they would have to be their own actors, he wondered who among them could even play old Lear… Odysseus-Noman was the only face that seemed right. He wondered how Noman fared this day.

Harman turned his face upward and watched the rings turn in front of the stars, a beauty he had never appreciated as much as he did this terrible night. A bright streak—brighter than the rest of the ring stars combined—a bold scratch against black onyx, moved across the p-ring and moved between the real stars before disappearing behind the Breach wall on the south side. Harman had no idea what it was—it lasted far too long to be a meteor—but he knew that it was so very, very far away that it could have nothing to do with him.

Thinking of death and thinking of Shakespeare, not yet decided on which play to stage first, Harman encountered these interesting lines stored deep in his DNA. It was Claudio speaking, Claudio from Measure for Measure, as the character confronted his own execution:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod, and the dilated spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendant world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling—‘tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathèd worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death.

Harman realized that he was sobbing—curled, cold, and sobbing—but not sobbing in fear of death or at the imminence of his own loss of everything and everyone, but weaping gratitude that he came from a race that could spawn a man who could write those words, think those thoughts. It almost—almost—made up for the human thought that had conceived, designed, launched, and crewed the submarine behind him with its seven hundred sixty-eight black holes waiting to devour all futures for everyone.

Suddenly Harman laughed aloud. His mind had made its own leap to John Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and he saw—he was not shown, but he saw on his own—the young Keats’s nod in Shakespeare’s direction with the lines to the singing bird—

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—To thy high requiem become a sod.

“Three cheers for the alliance of Claudio’s kneaded clod and Johnny’s earless sod!” cried Harman. The sudden attempt to speak made him cough again and when he peered at his hand in ringlight, he saw that he had coughed up red blood and three teeth.

Harman moaned, curled again in his womb of sand, shook, and had to smile again. His restless brain could no more quit poking at Shakespeare than his tongue could quit probing the three holes in his gums where his teeth had been. It was the couplet from Cymbeline that made Harman smile—

Golden lads and girls all must As chimney-sweepers come to dust.

He’d just gotten the pun. What kind of species of genius is it, wondered Harman, that can put such a childish, playful pun in such a sad dirge?

With that last thought, Harman slipped sideways into a cold sleep, insensate to the cold rain that had begun to fall on him.

He awoke.

That was the first marvel. He opened his blood-caked eyes onto a gray, cold gloomy predawn morning with the still-dark seawalls of the Breach rising five hundred feet or more on either side. But he had slept and now he waked.