It never came up, transmitted Orphu of Io.
“I did not quite follow all the logical connections there in the verbal part before you tightbeamed your friend,” said Asteague/Che, “but pray continue. I believe you said that you had three compelling reasons why you should be included.”
“The third reason I deserve a chair on the dropship,” said Orphu, “figuratively speaking, of course, is that I’ve figured it out.”
“Figured what out?” asked Suma IV. The dark buckycarbon Ganymedan wasn’t visibly checking his chronometer, but his voice was.
“Everything,” said Orphu of Io. “Why there are Greek gods on Mars. Why there’s a tunnel through space and time to another Earth where Homer’s Trojan War is still being fought. Where this impossibly terraformed Mars came from. What Prospero and Caliban, two characters from an ancient Shakespearean play, are doing waiting for us on this real Earth, and why the quantum basis for the entire solar system is being screwed up by these Brane Holes that keep popping up… everything.”
56
The woman who looked like a young Savi was indeed named Moira, although in the next hours Prospero sometimes called her Miranda and once he smilingly referred to her as Moneta, which added to Harman’s confusion. Harman’s embarrassment, on the other hand, was so great that nothing could add to it. For their first hour together, he could not look in Moira’s direction, much less look her in the eye. As Moira and he ate what amounted to breakfast as Prospero sat at the table, Harman finally managed to look in the woman’s direction but couldn’t raise his gaze to her eye level. Then he realized that this probably seemed as if he was staring at her chest, so he looked away again.
Moira seemed oblivious to his discomfort.
“Prospero,” she said, sipping orange juice brought to them by a floating servitor, “you foul old maggot. Was this key to my awakening your idea?”
“Of course not, Miranda, my dear.”
“Don’t call me Miranda or I’ll start calling you Mandrake. I am not now, nor was I ever, your daughter.”
“Of course you are and were my daughter, Miranda, my dear,” purred Prospero. “Is there a post-human alive whom I did not help become what they are? Were not my genetic sequencing labs your womb and your cradle? Am I therefore not thy father?”
“Is there another post-human alive today, Prospero?” asked the woman.
“Not to my knowledge, Miranda, dear.”
“Then fuck you.”
She turned to Harman, sipped coffee, sliced at an orange with a frighteningly sharp knife, and said, “My name is Moira.”
They were at a small table in a small room—a space more than a room—that Harman had not noticed before. It was an alcove set within the booklined wall halfway up the inside of the great inward-curving dome, at least three hundred feet above the marble-walled maze and floor. It was easy to understand why he hadn’t seen the space from below—the walls of this shallow alcove were also lined with books. There had been other alcoves along the way up, some holding tables like this one, others containing cushioned benches and cryptic instruments and screens. The iron stairways, it turned out, moved like escalators or it would have taken much longer for the three of them to climb this high. The exposure—there were no railings and the narrow marble walkways and the wrought-iron escalator steps were more air than iron—was horrifying. Harman hated to look down. He focused on the books instead and kept his shoulders against the shelves as he walked.
This woman was dressed much as Savi had been the first time he’d seen her—a blue tunic top made of cotton canvas, corded trousers, and high leather boots. She even wore a sort of short wool cape similar to the one he’d seen on Savi when they met, although this cape was a dark yellow rather than the deep red the older woman had worn. However, its complicated, many-folded cut seemed to be the same. The major difference between the two women—besides the vast difference in age—was that the older Savi had been carrying a pistol when they met, the first firearm Harman had ever seen. This version of Savi—Moira, Miranda, Moneta—he knew with absolute certainty, had not been armed when he first met her.
“What has happened since I first slept, Prospero?” asked Moira.
“You want a summary of fourteen centuries in as many sentences, my dear?”
“Yes. Please.” Moira separated the juicy orange into sections and handed a section to Harman, who ate it without tasting it.
“ ‘The woods decay,’ ” intoned the magus Prospero, “ ‘the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.’ ”
He bowed his balding and gray-haired head a bit.
“ ‘Tithonus,’ ” said Moira. “Tennyson before breakfast always makes my bowels ache. Tell me, is the world sane yet, Prospero?”
“No, Miranda.”
“Are my folk all dead or changeling’d then, as you say?” She ate grapes and redolent cheese and drank from a large goblet of ice water the floating servitors continued to refill for her.
“They are dead or changeling’d or both.”
“Are they coming back, Prospero?”
“God knows, my daughter.”
“Don’t give me God, please,” said Moira. “What about Savi’s nine thousand one hundred and thirteen fellow Jews? Have they been retrieved from the neutrino loop?”
“No, my dear. All the Jews and rubicon survivors in this universe remain a blue beam rising from Jerusalem and nothing more.”
“We did not keep our promise then, did we?” asked Moira, pushing her plate away and brushing crumbs and juice from her palms.
“No, daughter.”
“And you, Rapist,” she said, turning to the blinking Harman, “do you have any other purpose in this world than taking advantage of sleeping strangers?”
Harman opened his mouth to speak, thought of nothing to say, and shut his mouth. He felt actively ill.
Moira touched his hand. “Do not reproach yourself, my Prometheus. You had little choice. The air inside the sarcophagus was scented with an aerosol aphrodisiac so potent that Prospero sent it off with one of the original changelings—Aphrodite herself. Lucky for both of us its effects are very temporary.”
Harman felt a surge of relief followed by fury. “You mean I had no choice?”
“Not if you carried the DNA of Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep,” said Moira. “And all males of your race should.”
She turned back to Prospero. “Where is Ferdinand Mark Alonzo? Or rather, what was his fate?”
The magus bowed his head. “Miranda, beloved, three years after you entered the loop-fax sarcophagus, he died of one of the wildcat variants of rubicon that swept through the old population every year as surely as a summer zephyr. He was interred in a crystal sarcophagus next to yours—although all the fax equipment could do was keep his corpse from rotting then, since the Firmary tanks had not yet learned how to deal with rubicon. Before the vats could educate themselves, a score of Caliphate mandroids climbed Mount Everest, evaded the security shields, and began looting the Taj. The first thing they looted was poor Ferdinand Mark Alonzo’s heavy coffin—throwing it over the side.”