The second marvel was that he could move, eventually, and after a fashion. It took Harman fifteen minutes to get to his hands and knees, but once there he crawled to the nearest boulder rising out of the sand and in another ten minutes managed to get to his feet and not quite fall again.
Now he was ready to walk west again, but he did not know which way was west.
He was completely turned around. The long Breach stretched away from side to side, but there was no clue to which way was east and which was west. Shaking, shivering, aching in ways he could never have imagined he could ache, Harman staggered in circles, hunting for his own footprints from the night before, but much of the seabed there was rock and the rain that had almost frozen him to death had wiped away any traces of prints of his bare feet.
Swaying, Harman took four steps in one direction. Convinced he was heading back toward the submarine, he wheeled and took eight steps in the other direction.
No use. Clouds hung low and solid above the Breach opening. He had no sense of east or west. Harman couldn’t bear the thought of walking back toward the submarine with all that evil lying in its belly, of losing the distance he had made so laboriously yesterday toward Ada and Ardis.
He staggered to the wall of the Breach—he did not know now whether it was the north or south wall—and stared at his reflection in the slowly thickening predawn glow.
Some creature that was not Harman stared back. His naked body already looked skeletal. There were patches of blood pooled under the skin everywhere—on his sunken cheeks, his chest, under the skin of his forearms, on his shaking legs, even a huge mottle on his lower belly. When he coughed again, two more teeth were expelled. It looked in the water’s mirror as if he had been weeping tears of blood. As if in an attempt to tidy himself, he brushed his hair to one side.
Harman stared at his fist for a long, empty moment. A huge swatch of hair had come away in his hand. It was as if he were holding a small dead creature made up completely of hair. He dropped it, brushed at his head again. More hair came loose. Harman looked at his reflection and saw the walking dead, already one-third bald.
Warmth touched his back.
Harman whirled and almost fell.
It was the sun—rising directly in the aperture of the Breach behind him. The sun, rising perfectly in the keyhole of the Breach, its golden rays bathing him in warmth in the few seconds before the clouds swallowed the orange sphere. What were the chances that the sun would rise directly down the Breach on this particular morning—as if he were a Druid waiting at Stonehenge for the equinox sunrise?
Harman felt so light-headed that he knew he’d forget which direction the sun had risen from if he did not act immediately. Aiming in the opposite direction of the warmth on his back, he began staggering west again.
By midday—the clouds parted between rain showers and gave hints of sunlight—Harman’s mind no longer felt connected to his staggering body. He was taking twice as many steps as he had to, staggering from the north wall of the Breach to the south wall, having to set his hands lightly against the buzz-jolt of the forcefield itself to set himself moving again down the endless trough.
He was wondering as he walked at what the future might be—or might have been—for his people. Not just the survivors of Ardis, but for all the old-style humans who might have survived the vicious voynix attacks. Now that the old world was gone forever, what form of government, of religion, of society, culture, politics, might they have created?
A protein memory module nestled deep in Harman’s encoded DNA—a memory that would not die until long after most of the other cells in Harman’s body had died and come apart—offered him this fragment from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks—“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.”
Harman laughed aloud and the single bark of a laugh cost him another front tooth. Morbid symptoms, indeed. The slightest scan of the context of that fragment told Harman that this Gramsci had been an intellectual promoting revolution, socialism, and communism—the last two theories having died and rotted away less than halfway through the Lost Era, abandoned for the naïve bullshit they were—but the problem of interregnums certainly had remained and now here it was again.
He realized that Ada had been leading her people toward some sort of crude Athenian democracy in the weeks and months before Harman had stupidly left his expecting beloved. They had never discussed it, but he was aware of her recognition that the four hundred people in the Ardis community then—this was before the slaughter by voynix he’d seen via the red turin cloth on the eiffelbahn—turned to her for leadership, and she hated that role, even as she fell into it naturally. By deferring things to constant votes, Ada was obviously trying to establish the basis for a future democracy should Ardis survive.
But if the red turin had given him true images—and Harman believed it had—Ardis as a real community had not survived. Four hundred people made up a community. Fifty-four ragged, starved survivors did not.
The radiation seemed to have sheared off much of the lining of Harman’s throat, and every time he swallowed now, he coughed up blood. This was a distraction. He tried to slow the pace of his swallowing to once every tenth step he took. His right hand, chin, and chest, he knew, were smeared with blood.
It would have been interesting seeing what social and political structures his race would have evolved. Perhaps the population, even before the voynix attacks, had—at a mere one hundred thousand men and women—never been sufficient to generate real dynamics such as politics or religious ceremonies or armies or social hierarchies.
But Harman didn’t believe this. He saw in his many protein memory banks the examples of Athens, Sparta, and the Greek entities long before Athens and Sparta ascended. The turin drama—what he now clearly saw as Homer’s Iliad—had borrowed its heroes from kingdoms as small as Odysseus’ isle of Ithaca.
Thinking of the turin drama, he remembered the altar quickly glimpsed on their trip to Paris Crater a year ago, just after Daeman was eaten by a dinosaur—it had been dedicated to one of the Olympian gods, although he forgot right then which one. The post-humans had served, at least for the last millennium and a half, as his people’s substitute for gods or a God, but what shapes and ceremonies would the future need for belief take?
The future.
Harman paused, panting, leaned against a shoulder-high black rock jutting out of the north wall of the Breach, and tried to think about the future.
His legs were shaking violently. It was as if his leg muscles were dissolving as he watched.
Panting, forcing breaths through his closing, bleeding throat, Harman stared ahead and blinked.
The sun was perched just above the cleft of the Breach. For a terrible second, Harman thought that it was still sunrise and that he had walked the wrong direction after all, but then he realized that he had been walking in a stupor all day. The sun had descended from the clouds and was preparing to set at the end of the long hallway of the Breach.
Harman took two more steps forward and fell on his face.
This time he could not rise. It took all of his energy to prop himself up on his right elbow to watch the sunset.
His mind was very clear. He no longer thought about Shakespeare or Keats or religions or heaven or death or politics or democracy. Harman thought about his friends. He saw Hannah laughing on the day of the metal pour by the river—remembered the specifics of her youthful energy and the glee of her friends as they poured the first bronze artifact created in how many thousand years? He saw Petyr sparring with Odysseus during the days the bearded Greek warrior would hold forth with his long statements of philosophy and odd question-and-answer periods on the grassy hill behind Ardis. There had been much energy and joy in those sessions.