Trying not to breathe loudly or faint from the stifling heat in this god-damned lizard suit, hoping that none of these Olympian Immortals is using deep gravitational radar or enhanced negative thermal imaging, I stand perfectly still, almost cheek to jowl with the mob of gods and goddesses, nymphs, Furies, Erinyeses, and demigods, and wait to hear what Zeus is going to say.

74.

Even before Harman stepped through the gash in the hull into the bow of the derelict ship, he had a pretty good idea what the thing was. The DNA-bound protein data packets in his body had a thousand references of thousands of types of seagoing craft across ten thousand years of human history. Harman couldn't make a perfect match based only upon the damaged bow, the debris field around the bow, and by looking at the breached sheaths of elastic sonar-stealth material encasing the morphable smart-steel of the hull itself, but it was fairly obvious that he was stepping into a submarine from some century late in the Lost Era: possibly something from after the rubicon release but before the first post-humans had been genetically brought into being. Dementia times.

Once inside, making his way down an only slightly canted corridor and breathing through his osmosis mask even though this part of the sunken ship was dry, he was sure it was a submarine.

Harman was standing in a room that was listing only about ten degrees from vertical but the ancient impact with the ocean bottom here only two hundred feet beneath the surface of the sea-long before there was an Atlantic Breach-had crumpled metal and tumbled half a dozen long canisters off their racks. Harman wouldn't need the pistol he was carrying. Nothing lived in this hulk. He pressed the pistol against the stick-tite patch on his right hip and extended a bit of thermskin elastic over it, securing it as surely as if he were wearing one of the holsters he'd seen in books via the crystal cabinet.

He cupped his right palm against the rounded edge of one of these tumbled canisters, curious to find if his data-seeking function would work through the molecule-thin thermskin gloves.

It did.

Harman was standing in the torpedo room of a Mohammed Mohammed-class warship submarine. The AI in the guidance system of this particular torpedo-"torpedo" being neither a word nor concept he had ever encountered until that millisecond-had gone dead more than two thousand years earlier, but there was enough residual memory in the dead microcircuits for Harman to understand that his palm was inches above a nuclear warhead tucked into the end of a thirty-four-thousand-pound high-speed, self-cavitating, hunt-until-it-kills-something torpedo. This particular torpedo warhead-"warhead" being another term he had never encountered until that instant-was a simple fusion weapon, packing only 475 kilotons, the equivalent of 950 million pounds of TNT detonating. The blast from the pearl-sized sphere a few inches beneath his palm would reach tens of millions of degrees within a millionth of a second. Harman could almost feel the lethal neutron and gamma rays crouching there, invisible dragon-eels of death, ready to leap in all directions at the speed of light to kill and infect every bit of human nerve or tissue they would encounter, tearing through them like bullets through butter.

He snatched his hand away and rubbed it against his thigh as if cleaning something filthy from his palm.

This entire submarine was a single instrument designed for killing human beings. His briefest encounter with the warhead's dead guidance AI had told him that the torpedo warheads were all but irrelevant to the machine and crew's real mission. But to understand what that mission was, he would have to pass out of the torpedo room, up the canted deck, through the wardroom and mess room, up a ladder and down a corridor past the sonar shack and integrated comm room, and then up another ladder into the command and control center.

But everything beyond the near half of the torpedo room was under water.

The beams of light from his chest lamps showed him where the north wall of the Breach began not fifteen feet ahead. The submarine had been lying here along this ocean ridge two hundred feet beneath the surface and fully filled with water for many centuries before whatever created the Breach had sucked the ocean out of these forward compartments, but nothing lived here anymore, not so much as a dried barnacle remained from the myriad of undersea life forms that must have thrived here for centuries, and there were no signs of human bones or other remnants of the crew. The forcefield that held back the Atlantic Ocean did not physically slice through the morphable metal of the submarine's hull or metal structure-Harman's lamps picked up the solid, uninterrupted line of deck overhead-but he could visualize the complete oval-slice of ocean inside the hull of the ship. The north wall of the Breach forcefield held back the sea in every open space, but a step beyond that...Harman could imagine the pressure down here at two hundred feet and see the wall of darkness ahead, his lamplights reflecting off it as if from a dark-burnished but still mirrored surface.

Suddenly Harman was filled with a sick and terrible terror. He had to clutch at the despised torpedo to keep himself from reeling, from falling onto the corroded plates of the deck. He wanted to run from this ancient warship out into the air and sunlight, to rip off his osmosis mask, and to be sick if he had to in order to get rid of this poison that had suddenly filled his body and mind.

It was a mere torpedo he was leaning against, designed for destroying other ships, a harbor at most, yet its thermonuclear yield was three times the full explosive power dropped on Hiroshima-another word and image that had just entered Harman's reeling mind-capable of destroying everything in a hundred-square-mile area.

Harman-always fair at judging distances and sizes even in his era that demanded no such skills-saw in his mind's eye a ten-by-ten-mile area in the heart of Paris Crater, or with Ardis Hall at the center of its bull's-eye. At Ardis, such a blast would not only vaporize the manor house and the new outbuildings in a microsecond, but blast away the hard-built palisades and roll its fireball to carry away the faxnode pavilion a mile and a quarter down the road less than a second later, turning the river at the base of the hills into steam and the forest into ash and fireball in an expanding circle of instant destruction ranging farther north than the Starved Rock he'd seen in his turin-cloth glimpse of Ada and the others.

Harman activated dormant biofeedback functions-too late-and received the message he dreaded. The torpedo room was filled with latent radiation. The damaged torpedo fusion warheads should have dropped beneath lethal leakage levels long ago, but in the process of doing so they must have irradiated everything in the forward part of the submarine.

No-the sensors told him that the radiation was worse straight ahead, aft of the torpedo room-the direction in which he would have to go if he wanted to learn more about this instrument of death. Perhaps the fusion reactor that had driven this obscene boat had been slowly leaking all these centuries. It was a radioactive hell ahead of him.

Harman knew just enough about his new biometric functions to realize that he could query the data monitors. He did so now, but only with the simplest question possible-Will the thermskin adequately shield me from this radioactivity?

The answer came back in his mind's own voice and was unequivocal-No.

It was insane to go forward. He also didn't have the courage courage to go forward through that black wall of water, into the maelstrom of radiation, through the rest of the submerged torpedo room, up through the dark and cold of the wardroom and mess room where ancient Geiger counters would have gone wild, needles pinned off their own dials, and then up again and down a corridor past the sonar and comm rooms, and then up another ladder that impossible, terrifying, bone-chilling, cell-killing distance into the submerged command and control center. to go forward through that black wall of water, into the maelstrom of radiation, through the rest of the submerged torpedo room, up through the dark and cold of the wardroom and mess room where ancient Geiger counters would have gone wild, needles pinned off their own dials, and then up again and down a corridor past the sonar and comm rooms, and then up another ladder that impossible, terrifying, bone-chilling, cell-killing distance into the submerged command and control center.

It was literally insane to stay in this malevolent hulk, much less to go deeper into it. It was death-death to himself, to the hopes of his species, to Ada's trust in his return, to his unborn child's need for a father in these most terrible and dangerous of times. Death to all futures.

But he had to know. The quantum remains of the torpedo warhead AI had told him just enough that he had to know the answer to a single, terrible question. So go forward is exactly what Harman did-one terrified step at a time.

After three days and nights in the Breach, this was the first time he had pressed through the forcefield wall. It was a semipermeable force-field, just like the ones he'd passed through before on Prospero's orbital isle-and now Harman knew that the "semipermeable" meant that it was designed to allow old-style human beings or post-humans to pass through an otherwise impervious shield-but this time he was stepping through from air and warmth to cold, pressure, and darkness.

Harman trusted the thermskin to keep him alive from the effects of the deep if not from the radiation, and this it did; he refused even to call up data he knew he had on how the thermskin was designed, on what made it work. He didn't care how it worked to keep the ocean pressure away-only that it did.

His chest lamps automatically increased their brightness to deal with the reflections and dense, particle-filled water.

The submerged parts of the submarine were as thick with living organisms as the dry parts of the torpedo room had been sterile. Whatever lived here now not only survived in heavy radiation but feasted on it, thrived on it. Every metal surface had been hidden beneath layers of mutated coraled fungus and masses of green, pink, and gray-bluish glowing living matter, their frills and tendrils waving slightly in unfelt currents. Crablike things scuttled from his lights. A blood-red eel lunged from a hole in what had been the aft torpedo room hatchway and then pulled its head back, leaving only its rows of teeth glinting in the light. Harman gave it room as he edged through that encrusted hatch.

The dead warhead AI had given him a rough schematic of the ship-at least enough to lead him to the command and control center-but the ladder he had to take up to the wardroom and eating area was gone. Most of this submarine had been built from super alloys that would last another two thousand years, even here beneath the sea, but the ladder-gangway his protein bundles told him it had been called-had long since corroded away. his protein bundles told him it had been called-had long since corroded away.

Sinking his fingers into the silt and waving fans on either side of the slanted stairwell, hoping that he wasn't putting his fingers into another eel's mouth, Harman laboriously pulled himself up through the green soup of the sea. Particles and bundles of radioactive living particles clung to his thermskin and had to be wiped from his goggles and osmosis mask.

He was close to hyperventilating by the time he reached the ward-room level. He knew from experience that the osmosis mask would keep feeding him fine, fresh oxygen, but this sense of pressure against every square inch of his body made him squirm. He didn't have to access memory modules to know that the thermskin would also protect him from the cold and pressure-the same type of suit had kept him alive in the zero-pressure of space-but outer space had felt cleaner cleaner.

I wonder if this slime coating my eyepieces was once part of the men and women who ran this boat?

He banished thoughts like that. They were not only ghoulish, they were absurd. If the crew had gone down with this boat, the ever-hungry denizens of the ocean had cleaned their bones in just a few years and then eaten and decomposed the bones themselves in not many more years.

But still- Harman concentrated on making his way aft through the litter of overgrown and collapsed bunks. He could only know this had been a sleeping area for human beings through the schematic in the warhead's decaying memory molecules; now it looked like an overgrown crypt, its fungus-thick gray shelves harboring mutated crab-things and light-fearing eel-things rather than the rotting bodies of Montagues or Capulets.

I have to actually read read more of this Shakespeare person. So many things in the data packets connect to his thoughts and writings, more of this Shakespeare person. So many things in the data packets connect to his thoughts and writings, thought Harman as he passed through an open hatchway, brushing aside stalagmites of slime, floating into what had been an eating area. What had once been a long dining table for some reason reminded him of Caliban's cannibal table up on Prospero's Isle so many months earlier. Perhaps it was because the fungus and mollusks here had mutated to a bloody pink color. thought Harman as he passed through an open hatchway, brushing aside stalagmites of slime, floating into what had been an eating area. What had once been a long dining table for some reason reminded him of Caliban's cannibal table up on Prospero's Isle so many months earlier. Perhaps it was because the fungus and mollusks here had mutated to a bloody pink color.

At the far end of the pink dining cavern, Harman knew, he had to go up a vertical ladder-a real ladder this time, no slanted gangway-to the integrated comm room before he could go aft through the sonar shack to the command and control center.

There was no ladder. And this time the narrow tube of a vertical corridor was clogged with green and blue marine growth, reminding Harman of Daeman's description of Paris Crater turned into a blue-ice nest.

But this was Earth ocean life that had woven this web, however mutated, and Harman began ripping it apart, pulling out centuries of life's slow encroachment and advancement in great, grunting handfuls, wishing all the time he had an axe. The water around him became so filled with glop that he couldn't even see his hands. Something long and slippery-another eel? Some sort of sea snake?-slid along the length of his body and was gone below. He kept pulling away clumps and globs of thick, sludgy, radioactive stuff, fighting his way up through the blinding murk.

He felt as if he was being born again, but this time into a much more terrible world.

It was such a struggle that for several moments after he'd clawed his way up and into the comm room level, he didn't know he'd arrived. Tendrils of green hung everywhere, the water was so filled with floating particles that his own searchlight beams blinded him, and he lay in the primordial ooze too exhausted to move.

Then-remembering that every moment he spent in this death-hulk meant a greater chance of death to him-Harman got to his knees, pulled vines and tentacles of old plant growth away from his shoulders and back, and began to shuffle aft.

The comm room was still alive.

Harman froze with the knowledge of it. Functions in his body that he hadn't even catalogued yet picked up the pulsing readiness of machines hidden under the living gray-green carpet of this room to reach and communicate. Not with him. These comm AI's did not acknowledge his presence-their ability to interact with human beings had long since died away with the shifting quantum core of their computers.

But they wanted to communicate with somebody somebody-most of all to receive orders from somebody, something. somebody, something.

Knowing that he would not find what he needed to know here in the integrated comm room, Harman half-walked, half-swam aft past the encrusted sonar and GPS shack. He didn't know why his bundle-memories wanted to call the little space a shack and he didn't want to know.

Had he ever thought about submarines, which he never had, Harman would have probably guessed that such boats were built for traveling under water-he knew that the AI warhead had preferred a translation of the word "boat" to that of "ship"-that such underwater boats would have been made up of many small compartments, each one shut off with a door, a hatch, watertight, separate. This sub was not. The spaces were large in comparison to the volume of the ship itself, not overly capsulized or compartmentalized. If the ocean found a way in-as it obviously had-the deaths of the men and women in this machine would not have been by slow drowning, gasping for air near the ceilings, but in a massive, implosive pressure wave, killing all in seconds. It was almost as if the humans who had worked here had preferred the choice of instant death in larger spaces to slow drowning in smaller ones.

Harman quit swimming and let his feet sink to the deckplates when he realized he was in the middle of the command and control center.

There was less marine growth here, more bare metal. From just the warhead AI's cartoon schematic, he could make out the torpedo launch and weapons' control centers-vertical metal columns that would have projected a myriad of holographic virtual controls when the ship was in combat. Harman moved around the space, touching metal and plastic with his thermskinned palm, allowing the dead quantum brains embedded in the material to speak to him.

There was no chair, seat, or throne for the captain. That man had stood here, near the central holgraphic chart table, directly in front of a display console-virtual under the proper conditions, projected from within LCD plastic panels if the virtual system were damaged-into which every one of the ship's many systems and functions were channeled and shown.

Harman moved his gloved hand through the green murk and imagined sonar displays appearing...here. Tactical displays to his left...there. Several yards back the way from which he'd come, gray-glob mushrooms were the stools where the crewman had crouched in front of constantly changing virtual displays controlling and reporting on ballast and trim, radar, sonar, GPS relay, drone controls, torpedo readiness and launch controls, physical wheels for controlling the diving planes.... Several yards back the way from which he'd come, gray-glob mushrooms were the stools where the crewman had crouched in front of constantly changing virtual displays controlling and reporting on ballast and trim, radar, sonar, GPS relay, drone controls, torpedo readiness and launch controls, physical wheels for controlling the diving planes....

He jerked his hand away. Harman didn't need to know any of this crap. He needed only to know...

There.

It was a black metal monolith just aft of the captain's station. No barnacles, mollusks, coral, or slime had attached themselves to it. The thing was so black that Harman's lamps had not reflected back from it on his first several passes through that part of the command center.

This was the boat's central AI, built to interface in a hundred ways with the submarine's captain and crew. Harman knew that a quantum computer, even from this lost age, even one dead for more than two millennia, would be more alive at one percent capacity than most living things on the planet. Quantum artificial minds died hard and died slowly.

Harman knew that he would not have the codes to access the central AI's banks, perhaps not even the language to understand the codes he did not know, but he also knew that it didn't matter. His functions were developed and nanogenetically programmed into his DNA long after this machine had died. It would have no secrets from him.

The thought terrified him.

Harman wanted out of this flooded crypt. He wanted to get away from the radiation that must be pinging through his skin, brain, balls, guts, and eyes even as he stood here, frozen in indecision.

But he had to know.

Harman set his palm atop the black metal monolith.

The submarine was named The Sword of Allah The Sword of Allah. It had left its port on....

Harman skipped the log entries, dates, reasons for the ancient war-he lingered only long enough to confirm it was after the rubicon release, during the Dementia years when the Global Caliphate was near its end, the democracies of the West and Europe were already dead, the New European Union a fiction of gasping vassal states under the rising Khanate....

None of that mattered. What was in the belly of this submarine, as real as the fetus growing in the womb of his wife Ada, was what mattered.

Harman did pause long enough to listen to a fast-forward of the last testament of The Sword of Allah The Sword of Allah's twenty-six crew members. The Mohammed-class ballistic-missile submarine was so automated that it required a crew of only eight, but there had been so many volunteers that twenty-six of the Chosen had been allowed to go on its last mission.

They were all men. They were all devout. They all surrendered their souls to Allah as their doom approached-a cordon of Khanate attack submarines, aircraft, spacecraft, and surface ships as far as Harman could tell. The men knew that they had only minutes to live-that the Earth had only minutes before its destruction.

The captain had given the launch command. The primary AI had seconded it and relayed it.

Why hadn't the missiles launched? Harman searched the AI to its quantum guts and could find no reason why the missiles had not launched. The human command had been given, the four sets of physical keys had been turned, the AI target-package coordinates and individual launch commands had been confirmed and relayed, the missiles had been denoted in the proper launch sequence, the switches-both virtual and literal-had closed. All of the massive-metal missile hatches had been successively opened by redundant hydraulics-only a thin, blue, fiberglass dome had separated the missile tubes from the ocean, and each of these launch tubes had been filled with nitrogen to equalize the pressure to keep that ocean from rushing in until the actual instant of launch. The forty-eight missiles should have been propelled out of their creches by the nitrogen gas generators, a twenty-five-hundred-volt charge igniting the nitrogen discharge. The gas itself would have produced more than eighty-six thousand pounds per square inch of pressure in less than a second, sending the missiles hurtling upward within their own rising bubbles of nitrogen until they popped out of the sea like rising corks, and then the solid rocket propellant in each missile would have been ignited the second the missiles hit open air above. There were redundant and double-redundant launch and ignition initiators. The missiles should have roared and flown to their targets. The AI's launch indicators were all red. In each of the forty-eight missile silos back in the pregnant belly of The Sword of Allah, The Sword of Allah, the sequence had proceeded properly from the sequence had proceeded properly from HOLD HOLD to to DENOTE DENOTE to to LAUNCH LAUNCH to to SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCHED SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCHED.

But the missiles were all still sitting in their tubes. The dead and decaying AI knew that and communicated something like shame and chagrin through Harman's tingling palm.

Harman's heart was pounding so fiercely and he was breathing so raggedly that the osmosis mask had to lower the oxygen input so he wouldn't hyperventilate.

Forty-eight missiles. Forty-eight warhead-platforms. Each warhead was MRVed and carried sixteen separate reentry vehicles. Seven hundred sixty-eight actual warheads, all armed, primed, safeties off, set to go. They had been targeted at seven hundred and sixty-eight of the world's remaining cities, ancient monuments, and dwindling rubicon-survivors' population centers.

But these were no mere thermonuclear warheads such as carried in The Sword of Allah's The Sword of Allah's torpedoes. torpedoes.

Each of the seven hundred sixty-eight actual warheads still aboard this sub carried a tenuously contained black hole. The human race's and the Global Caliphate's ultimate weapon at that point in time-its ultimate detergent, thought Harman with a noise that was part sob, part giggle. thought Harman with a noise that was part sob, part giggle.

The black holes in themselves were small. Each not much larger than what one of the dead crewmen had described in his urgent and religious farewell speech as "the soccer ball I grew up kicking around the ruins of Karachi." But when they escaped their containment spheres and dropped on their targets, the result would be much more dramatic than a mere thermonuclear weapon.

The black hole would plunge into the earth, creating a soccer-ball-sized hole in the center of whatever target city it arrived at. But the second it was exposed there would be a plasma implosion a thousand times worse than a thermonuclear explosion. The descending black hole, turning all earth, rock, water, and magma ahead of it into a rising cloud of steam and plasma, would also suck in behind it the people, buildings, vehicles, trees, and actual molecular structure of its target city and hundreds of square miles around it.

The black hole that had created the kilometer-wide hole in the center of Paris Crater had been less than a millimeter wide and unstable-it had eaten itself before reaching the Earth's core. Harman knew now that eleven million people had died because of that ancient experiment gone wrong.

These black holes were not meant to eat themselves. They were meant to ping-pong back and forth through the earth, reemerging into atmosphere, plunging back through the planet. Seven hundred sixty-eight plasma and ionizing-radiation surrounded spheres of ultimate destruction coring and recoring the Earth's crust, mantle, magma, and core again and again and again, for months or years, until they all came to rest at the center of this dear, good Earth and began eating the fabric of the planet itself.

The twenty-six crewmen's voices Harman had listened to had all celebrated this outcome to their mission. They would all be reunited in Paradise. Praise God!

Wanting only to be sick within his constraining osmosis mask, Harman forced himself to keep his hand on the black-monolith AI for another full, endless, eternal minute. There had to be some instructions here for finding some way to disarm these activated blackholes.

Their warhead containment fields had been very powerful, designed to last for centuries if they had to.

They had lasted for more than two and one-half millennia, but they were very unstable. Once one of the black holes escaped, they all would. It did not matter one iota whether they began their voyage to the Earth's core and beyond from their targets or from this place along the north wall of the Atlantic Breach. The outcome would be the same.

There were no procedures in the AI or anywhere in The Sword of Allah The Sword of Allah for disarming them. The singularities existed-had for almost two hundred and fifty of Harman's standard Five Twenties-and in a world where old-style humans' highest technology consisted of crossbows, there was no way to reset their containment fields. for disarming them. The singularities existed-had for almost two hundred and fifty of Harman's standard Five Twenties-and in a world where old-style humans' highest technology consisted of crossbows, there was no way to reset their containment fields.

Harman pulled his hand away.

Later, he had no memory of finding his way out of the submerged parts of the submarine, or of staggering out through the dry forward torpedo room, through the rent in the hull, out onto the sunny strip of muddy dirt that was the Atlantic Breach.

He did remember peeling off his cowl and osmosis mask, dropping to his hands and knees, and vomiting for long minutes. Long after he'd gotten rid of the little substance in his belly-the food bars were nutritious but left little residue-he continued dry retching.

Then he was too weak even to stay on his hands and knees, so he crawled away from his own vomitus, collapsed, and rolled onto his back, looking up at the long, thin blue strip of sky. The rings were faint but clear, revolving, crossing, moving like the pale hands of some obscene clock mechanism counting down the hours or days or months or years until the warhead containment spheres just yards from Harman decayed to collapse.

He knew that he should get away from the radioactive wreck-crawl west if he had to-but his heart had no will to do so.

Finally, after what must have been hours-the strip of sky was darkening toward evening-Harman activated the function to query his own biomonitors.

As he'd suspected, the dosage he'd received had been lethal. The dizziness he felt now would only grow worse. The vomiting and dry retching would soon return. Blood was already pooling under his skin. Within hours-the process had already begun-the cells in his bowels and guts would begin sloughing off by the billion. Then would come the bloody diarrhea-intermittent at first but then constant as his body began literally to shit his dissolved guts out into the world. Then the bleeding would become primarily internal, cell walls breaking down completely, entire systems collapsing.

He'd live long enough to see and feel all this, he knew. Within a day he'd be too weak even to stagger along between the episodes of diarrhea and vomiting. He'd be prostrate in the Breach, his stillness broken only by involuntary seizures. Harman knew that he wouldn't even be able to look at the blue sky or stars as he died-the biomonitors already reported the radiation-induced cataracts building on the surface of both his eyes.

Harman had to grin. No wonder Prospero and Moira had given him only a few days' worth of food bars. They must have known he wouldn't need even that many.

Why? Why make me Prometheus for the human race with all these functions, all this knowledge, all this promise to give Ada and my species, only to let me die alone here...like this?

Harman was still sane and conscious enough to know that billions of human beings no more elect than himself had hurled similar final thoughts toward the unanswering skies in the hours and minutes before their death.

He was also wise enough now to be able to answer his own question. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Adam and Eve tasted of the fruit of knowledge in the Garden. All the old creation myths told versions of the same tale, exposed the same terrible truth-steal fire and knowledge from the gods and you become something more than the animals you evolved from, but still something far, far below any real God.

Harman at that second would give anything to rid himself of the twenty-six last personal and religious testaments by the madmen who crewed The Sword of Allah. The Sword of Allah. In those impassioned farewells he felt the full weight of the burden he had been about to bring back to Ada, to Daeman, to Hannah, to his friends, to his species. In those impassioned farewells he felt the full weight of the burden he had been about to bring back to Ada, to Daeman, to Hannah, to his friends, to his species.

He realized that all of the last year-the turin-cloth story of Troy that had been Prospero's little joke-gift to the old-humans, passed on through Odysseus and Savi, their various mad quests, the deadly masque on Prospero's Isle up in the e-ring, his escape, the Ardis Manor people's discovery of how to build weapons, fashion some crude beginnings to society, discover politics, even grope toward some religion...

It had all made them human again.

The human race had returned to Earth after more than fourteen hundred years of coma and indifference.

Harman realized that his and Ada's child would have been fully human-perhaps the first real human being to be born after all those comfortable, inhuman, watched-over-by-false-post-human gods' centuries of stasis-confronted by danger and mortality at every turn, forced to invent, pressured to create bonds with other human beings just to survive the voynix and the calibani calibani and Caliban himself and the Setebos thing... and Caliban himself and the Setebos thing...

It would have been exciting. It would have been terrifying. It would have been real real.

And it all would have led, could have led, might have led, back to The Sword of Allah The Sword of Allah.