Harman descended.
He’d never seen furnishings like this—oddly styled furniture, tufted, with red-velour fabric, thick drapes over a wall of windows on the south side of the room, the drapes dragging their gold tassels onto the elaborately designed red and brown carpet. There was a fireplace in the north wall—Harman stared at the design of black iron and green ceramics. A long table with elaborately carved legs ran for at least eight feet of the fifteen feet of window wall where the panes near the corners of the window were as complicated as the silk of a spider’s web. Other furniture consisted of overstuffed single chairs with overstuffed ottomans, carved chairs of gleaming dark wood with gold metal inlays, and everywhere examples of what Hannah had once told him was polished brass.
There was a strange firehose of a speaking tube with a bell-shaped polished brass snout; there were levers of polished brass set into cherry-colored wooden boxes on the walls; on the long plank table rose several brass instruments—some with brass keys to punch and slowly turning gears, farther down the table an astrolabe with circles of brass turning within larger circles of brass, a polished brass lamp glowing softly with light. There were maps laid out on the table with small hemispheres of brass holding them down, more maps curled into a brass basket on the floor.
Harman ran forward and stared hungrily at the maps, pulling more out and unfurling them, laying brass hemispheres on them.
He’d never seen maps like these before. Everything was on a grid but within those grid boxes were ten thousand wriggly parallel lines—some close together where the map ran brown or green, some lines far apart where the map showed expanses of white. There were irregular blobs of blue that Harman guessed were lakes or seas and longer, wigglier blue lines that he guessed were rivers with unlikely names penned next to them—Tungabhadra, Krishna, Godavari, Normada, Mahanadi, and Ganga.
On the east and west wall of the room, surrounding smaller but still multipaned windows, were more bookshelves, more books, more brass trinkets, jade statues, brass machines.
Harman ran to the shelf and pulled down three books, smelling the scent of centuries rising from the ancient but still firm paper and the thick leather covers. The titles made his heart pound—The Third Dynasty of Khan Ho Tep—A.D. 2601–2939 and Ramayana and Mahabharata Scripture Revised According to Ganesh the Cyborg and Eiffelbahn Maintenance and AI Interface. Harman laid his right palm on the top book, closed his eyes to bring up the sigl function, and then hesitated. If he had time, he would prefer to read these books—sounding out each word and guessing at the definitions of the words from context. It was slow, laborious, painful, but he always gained more from reading than from sigling.
He laid the three books reverently on the polished, dust-free tabletop, and bounded up the circular stairs to the high second floor.
This was a bedroom—the head of the bed made of cylinders of polished brass, the bedspread a rich red velvet with fringes of elaborate, swirling designs. There was another chair set next to a brass floor lamp—a broader, comfortable-looking chair with floral designs, a high tufted leather ottoman pushed against it. There was a smaller room—a bathroom with a strange porcelain toilet under a porcelain tank and a hanging chain with a brass pull, panes of stained glass on the west wall, brass fixtures on faucets and spigots on the sink, a huge, clawfooted white porcelain bathtub with more brass fixtures. Back out in the bedroom again, the north wall here was also made up of windows—no, paned-glass doors with wrought-iron doorhandles.
Harman opened two of the doors and stepped out onto a wrought-iron balcony a thousand feet above the jungle. The sun and heat hit him like a hot fist. Blinking, he did not trust himself to stand on the iron—he could see the latticework of the tower beneath, but it would take no more than a gentle push to send him out and into nothing but air, a thousand feet of air.
Still gripping the door, he leaned out far enough to see some iron furniture, red cushions strapped on, a table on the ten-foot-wide balcony. Looking up, he saw the bulge of iron above the two-story room, a huge metal flywheel just under the gold-mica dome at the top of the tower, cables thicker than his forearm and thigh running out to the east and west.
Squinting to the east, Harman could see another vertical line of a dark tower there—how far away?—forty miles at least, seen from this height. He looked to the west to where the dozen or so cables disappeared, but there were only blue-black clouds of a storm visible there on the horizon.
Harman stepped back into the bedroom, shut the doors carefully, and walked back to the staircase and down and around, wiping the sweat from his forehead and neck with the sleeve of his tunic. It was so delightfully cool in here that he had no urge to go back down to the jungle yet.
“Hello, Harman,” said a familiar voice from the gloom near the table and dark drapes.
Prospero was far more solid than Harman remembered from their meeting months earlier on the orbital rock high in the e-ring. The magus’s wrinkled skin was no longer slightly transparent as his hologram had been. His robe of blue silk and wool, embroidered all about with gold planets, gray comets, and burning stars of red silk, hung in heavier folds now and dragged behind him on the Turkish carpet. Harman could see the long silver-white hair cascading behind the old man’s sharp ears and noted the age marks on his brow and his hands as well as the slight, clawlike yellowing to his fingernails. Harman noted the seeming solidity of the carved, twined staff that the old magus clutched in his right hand, and how Prospero’s blue slippers seemed to have weight as they shuffled across the wooden floor and thick carpet.
“Send me home,” demanded Harman, stepping toward the old man.
“Now.”
“Patience, patience, human named Harman, friend of Noman,” said the magus, showing his yellowed teeth in a slight smile.
“Fuck patience,” said Harman. He’d had no idea until this instant how deep the fury in him went from being kidnapped from the Bridge by Ariel, taken away from Ardis and Ada and his unborn child, almost certainly on the orders of this shuffling figure in the blue robe. He took a step closer to the old man, reached out, grabbed a bit of the magus’s flowing sleeve…
And was thrown eight feet backward across the room, finally sliding from the carpet to the polished floor and coming to rest on his back, blinking away retinal after-images of orange circles.
“I suffer no one’s touch,” Prospero said softly. “Do not make me remonstrate with this old man’s stick.” He raised his magus’s staff ever so slightly.
Harman got to one knee. “Send me back. Please. I can’t leave Ada alone. Not now.”
“You already have chosen that course, have you not? No man made you take Noman to Machu Picchu, yet no man stopped you, either.”
“What do you want, Prospero?” Harman got to his feet, tried unsuccessfully to blink away the last of the red-orange circles in his vision, and sat in the nearest wooden chair. “And how did you survive the destruction of the orbital asteroid? I thought your hologram was trapped there along with Caliban.”
“Oh, it was,” said Prospero, pacing back and forth. “A small part of my self, perhaps, taken all for all, but a vital small part. You brought me back to Earth.”
“I …” began Harman. “The sonie? Somehow you loaded your hologram into the sonie’s memory?”
“Aye.”
Harman shook his head. “You could have called that sonie up to the orbital isle any time.”