Harman looked dubious but concentrated. An aerial representation of Ardis filled Harman’s oval, then a diagram of the layout of Ardis Hall. A stylized female figure was standing with a group of stylized men and women on the front porch of the manor.
“Ada,” said Daeman. “You were thinking of Ada.”
“Incredible,” said Harman. He stared at the image for a moment. “I’m going to visualize Odysseus,” he said.
The image shifted, changed magnitude, searched, but came up with nothing.
“Farnet doesn’t have a lock on Odysseus, according to Savi,” said Daeman. “But go back to Ada. Look where she is.”
Harman frowned but focused. The stylized cartoon of Ada was in a field a hundred yards or so behind Ardis Hall. There were scores of other human figures represented seated in front and around a void. Ada joined the crowd.
Daeman looked at Harman’s palm image. “I wonder what’s going on there. If Odysseus is in that empty spot, it looks as if the old barbarian’s addressing a crowd.”
“And Ada’s listening to him or watching him perform,” said Harman. He looked away from the palm oval. “What does this have to do with my question, Savi? Who are the calibani ? Why are the voynix trying to kill us? What’s going on?”
“A few centuries before the final fax,” she said, folding her hands together, “the post-humans got too clever by half. Their science was impressive. To all intents and purposes, they’d fled the Earth to their orbital rings during the terrible rubicon epidemic. But they were still masters of the earth. They thought they were masters of the universe.
“The posts had rigged the whole Earth with the limited form of energy-data transmission and retrieval that you call faxing, and now they were experimenting—playing really—with time travel, quantum teleportation, and other dangerous things. A lot of their playing around was predicated on ancient sciences from as far back as the Nineteenth Century—black-hole physics, wormhole theory, quantum mechanics—but what they relied on most was the Twentieth Century discovery that, at its heart, everything is information. Data. Consciousness. Matter. Energy. Everything is information.”
“I don’t understand,” said Harman. He sounded angry.
“Daeman, you’ve shown Harman the farnet function. Why don’t you show him the allnet?”
“Allnet?” repeated Daeman, alarm in his voice.
“You know, four blue triangles above three red circles above four green triangles.”
“No!” said Daeman. He thought off his own palm function. The blue glow winked out.
Savi looked at Harman. “If you want to begin to understand why we’re here tonight, why the post-humans left Earth forever, and why the calibani and voynix are around, visualize four blue triangles above three red circles above four green triangles. It gets easier with practice.”
Harman looked suspiciously at Daeman, but then he closed his eyes and concentrated.
Daeman concentrated on not visualizing those shapes. He forced himself to remember Ada naked as a teenager, to remember the last time he had sex with a girl, to remember his mother scolding him . . .
“My God!” cried Harman.
Daeman looked at the other man. Harman had stood, stumbling out of his chair, and was whirling, moving his head in jerks, staring open-mouthed at everything.
“What do you see?” Savi asked softly. “What do you hear?”
“God . . . God . . .” moaned Harman. “I see . . . Jesus Christ. Everything. Everything. Energy . . . the stars are singing . . . the corn in the fields is speaking, to each other, to the Earth. I see . . . the crawler’s full of little microbes, repairing it, cooling it . . . I see . . . my God, my hand!” Harman was studying his hand with a look of total horror and revelation.
“Enough for the first time,” said Savi. “Think the word ‘off.’ “
“Not . . . yet . . .” gasped Harman. He stumbled against the glass wall of the passenger sphere and clawed at it weakly as if trying to get out. “It’s so . . . so beautiful . . . I can almost . . .”
“Think off!” roared Savi.
Harman blinked, fell against the wall, and turned a pale, staring face in their direction.
“What was that?” he said. “I saw . . . everything. Heard . . . everything. ”
“And understood nothing,” said Savi. “But neither do I when I’m on allnet. Perhaps even the post-humans didn’t understand it all.”
Harman staggered to his chair and collapsed into it. “But where did it come from?”
“Millennia ago,” said Savi, “the real old-style humans had a crude information ecology they called the Internet. Eventually they decided to tame the Internet and created a thing called Oxygen—not the gas, but artificial intelligences floating in and over and above the Internet, directing it, connecting it, tagging it, leading humans through it when they went hunting for people or information.”
“Proxnet?” said Daeman. His hands were shaking and he hadn’t even accessed farnet or allnet tonight.
Savi nodded. “What led to proxnet. Eventually, Oxygen evolved into the noosphere, a logosphere, a planet-wide datasphere. But that wasn’t enough for the post-humans. They connected this super-Internet noosphere with the biosphere, the living components of the Earth. Every plant and animal and erg of energy on the planet, which—when connected to the noosphere—created a complete and total information ecology touching everything on, above, and within the Earth, a sort of sentient omnisphere that lacked only self-awareness and identity. Then the post-humans foolishly gave it that self-awareness—not just designing an overriding artificial intelligence, but allowing it to evolve its own persona. This super-noosphere called itself Prospero. Does that name mean anything to either of you?”
Daeman shook his head and looked at Harman, but even though the older man knew how to read books, he also shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Savi. “Suddenly the post-humans had an . . . opponent . . . that they couldn’t control. And it wasn’t over yet. The post-humans were using self-evolving programs and projects of other sorts as well, allowing their quantum computers to pursue their own goals. As impossible as it is to believe, they achieved stable wormholes, they achieved time travel, and they transported people—old-style humans as guinea pigs, since they’d never risk their own immortal lives—through timespace gates via quantum teleportation.”
“What does that have to do with the calibani?” persisted Harman, obviously still shaking the images from the allnet out of his head.
Savi smiled. “The Prospero noosphere entity either has an advanced set of irony or none at all. The sentient biosphere, he christened it Ariel—a sort of Earth spirit—and together, Ariel and Prospero created the calibani. They evolved a strain of humanity—not old-style, not post, not eloi—into that monster you saw on the cross tonight.”
“Why?” asked Daeman. He barely choked the single syllable out.
Savi shrugged. “Enforcers. Prospero is a peaceful entity, or so it likes to think. But its calibani are monsters. Killers.”
“Why?” This time it was Harman asking the question.
“To stop the voynix,” said the old woman. “To chase the post-humans off the Earth before they could do more harm. To enforce whatever whim the Prospero and Ariel points of the noosphere trinity wish enforced.”
Daeman tried to understand this. He failed. Finally he said, “Why was the thing on a cross?”