Which led to the second question—how had Ariel brought him here? There had been no visible faxnode pavilion in the Golden Gate green globules. If there had been—if Savi had ever suggested a fax connection to the Bridge—he certainly wouldn’t have flown the sonie there to get the weapons and ammunition and try to get Odysseus to the healing crèche. No … Ariel had used some other means to transport him through space to this dark, rot-smelling, muggy, insect-filled place.
Since he was being dragged through the darkness not ten paces behind the biosphere avatar—or so Prospero had once identified Ariel—Harman realized he could just ask these questions. The worst the pale sprite—his/her body visibly glowing in starlight as they crossed the occasional small opening in the jungle—could do was not answer.
Ariel answered both questions, the second one first.
“I shall have thy company for only a few hours more,” said the small form. “Then I must deliver thee to my master, not long after we hear the strain of the strutting chanticleer—if strutting chanticleer there were in this wretched place.”
“Your master Prospero?” asked Harman.
Ariel did not answer.
“So what is the name of this wretched place?” Harman asked.
The sprite laughed, a sound like the tinkling of small bells, but not altogether a pleasant noise. “They should call this wood Ariel’s Nursery, for here ten times two hundred years ago, I came to be—rising into consciousness from a billion little sensor-transponders the old-old-style hu-mans—your very ilk, guest—called motes. Trees were talking to their human masters and to each other, chatting in the mossy old net that had become the nascent noosphere, gabbling on about temperatures and birds’ nests and hatchlings and pounds per square inch of osmotic pressure and trying to quantify photosynthesis the way a rheumy clerk counts his beads and bangles and thinks them treasure. The zeks—my beloved instruments of action, too many stolen from me for wasteful duty on the red world by that monster-magus master—rose likewise, yea, but not here, honored guest, not here, no.”
Harman understood almost none of that, but Ariel was talking—babbling—and he knew that if he could keep the creature engaged in conversation, he’d learn something important sooner or later.
“Prospero, your master, called you the avatar of the biosphere when I spoke to him, your master, nine months ago on his orbital isle,” said Harman.
“Aye,” said Ariel, laughing again, “and I call Prospero, whom you call my master, Tom Shit.” Ariel looked back at him, the small, greenish-white face glowing like some phosphorescent tropical plant as they plunged into a section of trail in total darkness under the encroaching leaves. “Harman, husband of Ada, friend of Noman, thou art, to mine eyes, a man of sin, a man whose destiny has import, in this lower world at least, less for what is in’t than for its pallid shape. Thou, ‘mongst all men, being most unfit to live—much less to live your full Five Twenty so like one of brother Caliban’s long-baked meals—since time and tides of time hath made you mad. And even with such valour, you know, men hang and drown their proper selves.”
Harman understood none of this and despite his asking many more questions, Ariel did not reply or speak again until dawn some three hours and many miles later.
An hour after Harman was sure that he had no energy left, they allowed him to stop and lean against a huge boulder to catch his breath. As the light came up, he realized that it was no boulder.
The boulder was actually a wall, the wall was part of a large building with levels set back as it rose, and the building was something that he guessed from his sigling was called a temple. Then Harman realized what his hands were touching and what his eyes were seeing.
Every inch of the large temple was carved. Some of the carvings were large—as wide as the length of Harman’s arm—but most were small enough that he could cover them with the palm of his hand.
In the carvings—each one becoming more clear as the tropical sunrise bled light through the jungle overhead—men and women were making love—having sex—as were men and more than one woman, men and men, women and women, women and men and what looked to be horses, men and elephants, women and bulls, women and women and monkeys and men and men and men….
Harman could only stare. He’d never seen anything like this in his ninety-nine years. On one level of carvings just at eye height, he could see a man with his head between a woman’s legs while another man, straddling the first, offered his erect penis to the straining woman’s open mouth, while behind her, a second woman wearing some sort of artificial penis was entering the first woman from behind while the first woman, servicing the two men and the woman behind her, was reaching her arm out to an animal Harman recognized from the turin drama as a horse, masturbating the excited stallion. Her other free hand was massaging the genitals of a human male figure standing next to the horse.
Harman stepped away from the temple wall, looking up at the vine-encrusted stone structure. There were thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of variations on this theme, showing Harman aspects of sex he’d never imagined, could never have imagined. Just some of the elephant images alone…. The human figures were stylized, faces and breasts oval, eyes almond-shaped, the women’s and men’s mouths curling in pleased and decadent smiles.
“What is this place?” he asked.
Ariel sang in a falsetto—
“Above, half seen, in the lofty gloom,
Strange works of a long dead people loom,
What did they mean to those who now are dust,
These rioting figures of love and lust?”
Harman tried again. “What is this place?”
For once Ariel answered simply. “Khajuraho.” The word meant nothing to Harman.
The biosphere sprite gestured, two of the little, green, largely transparent zeks touched Harman’s arm, and the procession moved away from the temple, following a barely discernible path through the jungle. Looking back, Harman caught a final glimpse of the stone building—buildings he realized now, there was more than one temple there, all of them carved with erotic friezes—and he noticed again how the jungle had all but reclaimed the structures. The coupling figures were bound about by vines, partially obscured by grass, and tightly constricted by roots and green feelers.
Then the place called Khajuraho disappeared in the green growth and Harman concentrated on plodding along behind Ariel.
As the sunlight illuminated the wild density of the jungle around them—ten thousand shades of green, most of which Harman had never imagined—all he could think of was how to get back to Ardis and Ada, or at least back to the Bridge before Petyr flew off in the sonie. He didn’t want to wait three days for Petyr’s return to pick up Hannah and the restored—if that crèche could restore life and health—Noman/Odysseus.
“Ariel?” he said suddenly to the small form that seemed to be floating at the front of the line of zeks ahead of him.
“Ay, sir?” The androgynous quality of the otherwise pleasant voice disturbed Harman.
“How did you transport me from the Golden Gate to this jungle?”