Opening his eyes was a huge struggle and all it rewarded him with was a swirling vision of a billion golden words and ten billion throbbing images waiting to be born in his brain. He was vaguely aware of the six-sided glass panel of the flooded crystal cabinet and of a blurrier shape beyond which might have been Moira, or perhaps Prospero, or even Ariel, but these things were not important.
He still wanted to breathe air the correct way. If he had not been only semiconscious—tranquilized by the liquid in preparation for the trans-fer—his gag reflex alone would probably have killed him or driven him insane.
But the crystal cabinet reserved other means for driving him insane.
The information began pouring into Harman now. Information, Moira and Prospero had said, from a million old books. Words and thoughts from almost a million long-dead minds, more, because every book contained multitudes of other minds in its arguments, its refutations, its fervent agreements, its furious revisions and rebellions.
Information began to pour in, but it was like nothing Harman had ever felt or experienced before. He had taught himself to read over many decades, becoming the first old-style human being in uncounted centuries to make sense of the squiggles and curves and dots in the old books moldering away on shelves everywhere. But words from a book flow into the mind in a linear fashion at the pace of conversation—Harman had always heard a voice not quite his own reading each word aloud in his own mind after he learned to read. Sigling was a more rapid but less effective way to absorb a book—the nanotech function flowed the data from books down one’s arms into the brain like coal being shoveled into a hopper, without the slow pleasure and context of reading. And after sigling a book, Harman always found that some new data had arrived, but much of the meaning of the book had been lost due to absence of nuance and context. He never heard a voice in his head when sigling and often wondered if it had been designed as a function for old-styles in the Lost Era to absorb tables of dry information, packets of predigested data. Sigling was not the way to read a novel or a Shakespearean play—although the first Shakespearean play Harman had encountered was an amazing and moving piece called Romeo and Juliet. Until Harman had read Romeo and Juliet, he’d not known that such a thing as a “play” existed—his people’s only form of fictional entertainment had been the turin drama about the siege of Troy, and that only for the past decade.
But while reading was a slow, linear flow and sigling was like a sudden tickling of the brain that left a residue of information behind, this crystal cabinet was…
The Maiden caught me in the Wild Where I was dancing merrily She put me into her Cabinet And locked me up with a golden Key
This information Harman was receiving was not entering through his eyes, ears, or any of the other human senses nature had evolved to bring data to the nerves and brain. It was not—strictly speaking—passing into him through touch, although the billion-billion pinpricks of information in the golden liquid passed through each pore of his skin and each cell of his flesh.
DNA, Harman knew now, likes the standard double helix model. Evolution had chosen the double helix for a variety of reasons to carry its most sacred cargo, but primarily because it was the easiest and most effective way for free energy to flow—forward or back—as that energy determines the folds, joins, forms, and function of such gigantic molecules as proteins, RNA, and DNA. Chemical systems always move toward the state of lowest free energy, and free energy is minimized when two complementary strands of nucleotides pair up like a double Shaker staircase.
But the post-humans who had redesigned the hardware and software of Harman’s branch of the old-style human genome had redesigned a sizeable percentage of the redundant DNA in his decanted species’ bodies. Instead of right-handed twisting B-DNA, the post-humans had set in place left-handed Z-DNA double helixes of the usual size, about two nanometers in diameter. They used these ZDNA molecules as keystones, lifting from them a scaffolding of more complex DNA helixes such as double-crossover molecules, tying these ropes of DX DNA together into leakproof protein cages. Within those billions upon billions of scaffolded protein cages deep within Harman’s bones, muscle fibers, gut tissue, testicles, toes, and hair follicles were biological reception and organizing macromolecules serving still more complex caged clusters of nanoelectronic organic memory storage clusters.
Harman’s entire body—every cell—was eating the Taj Moira’s library of a million volumes.
The Cabinet is formed of Gold And Pearl & Crystal shining bright And within it opens into a World And a little lovely Moony Night
The process hurt. It hurt a lot. Drowned and floating belly-up now like a dead carp in the golden liquid of the crystal cabinet, Harman felt the pain of a leg or arm that had gone to sleep and that was slowly, painfully coming awake again—the limb being pricked by ten thousand sharp, hot needles. But this was not just his leg or his arm. Cells in every part of his body, cells on every surface inside and out, molecules in every cell’s nucleus and every cell’s wall, were awakening to the data flowing the free energy route through the Yan-Shen-Yurke DNA circuits everywhere in the collective organism called Harman.
It hurt beyond Harman’s ability to imagine or contain such hurt. He opened his mouth repeatedly to scream from the pain, but there was no air in his lungs, no air around him, and his vocal cords merely vibrated in the golden liquid in which he’d drowned.
Metallic nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, and more complex nanoelectronic devices everywhere in Harman’s body and brain, elements that had been there since before his birth, felt current, were polarized, rotated, realigned in three dimensions, and began conducting and storing information, each complex DNA bridge out of the trillions waiting in Harman’s cells rotating, realigning, recombining, and securing data across the DNA backbone of his most essential structure.
Harman could see Moira’s face near the glass, her dark Savi-eyes peering in, her crystal-warped expression expressing something—anxiety? Remorse? Sheer curiosity?
Another England there I saw Another London with its Tower Another Thames & other Hills And another pleasant Surrey Bower
Books—Harman realized through the Niagral cascade of pain—were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.
As a child in his crèche, Harman had taken rare sheets of vellum and even more rare markers called pencils and covered the sheets with dots, then spent hours trying to connect all the dots with lines. There always seemed to be another possible line to draw, another two dots to connect, and before he was done the sheet of creamy vellum had become an almost solid smear of graphite. In later years, Harman had wondered if his young mind had been trying to capture and express his perception of the fax portals he had stepped through since he was old enough to walk—old enough to be carried by his mother, actually. Nine million combinations rising from three hundred known faxnode pavilions.
But this connect-the-dots of information to storage macromolecule cages was thousands of times more complex and infinitely more painful.
Another Maiden like herself Translucent lovely shining clear Threefold each in the other closed—O what a trembling fear