Great, thought Harman, rubbing his thermskinned chest as if the slight shadow that he was sure was lung cancer was already beginning to ache. What do I do with this information? The Firmaries are a little out of bounds to me right now.
Other functions served more immediate purposes. In the last few days he’d discovered that he had a replay function through which he could relive with amazing clarity—much more like experiencing something in reality than through memory—any point or event in his life, pinpointing the memory in a protein memory bundle rather than in his brain, uploading it, and timing the replay to the second. He’d already replayed a few minutes of his first meeting with Ada nine times (his memory couldn’t have told him that she’d been wearing that light blue gown on the evening he met her at a fax-in party) and had replayed moments from the last time they’d made love more than thirty times. Moira had even commented on his fixed stare and robotic walk when he’d been replaying. She knew what he was up to, especially since neither his thermskin nor outer clothes had hidden his reaction.
Harman had enough sense to know that this function was addictive and that he must use it very, very carefully—especially while hiking across the bottom of the ocean—but he’d flashed back to certain dialogues he’d had with Savi to mine more data out of things she’d said about the past or about the rings or about the world—things that had seemed nonsensical or mysterious then, but made more sense now after the crystal cabinet. He also realized, with a great sadness, that Savi had been working from very incomplete information in her centuries of attempts to get up to the rings to negotiate with the post-humans, including her lack of knowledge of real spaceships stored in the Mediterranean Basin or the proper way to contact Ariel via Prospero’s private logo-sphere connections.
Seeing Savi so clearly through replay vision also made Harman realize how much younger this Moira-iteration of Savi’s face and body were, but also how much alike the women were.
Harman trolled through the other functions. Proxnet, farnet, and all-net were all down with the fax and logosphere functions—evidently everything internal worked; anything demanding use of the planetary system of satellites, orbital mass accumulators, fax and data transmitters, and so forth did not work.
But why did his internal indicators tell him that the sigl function was not working? Harman would have thought that sigling was as body-dependent as his medical monitoring, which worked all too well. Did the sigl function depend upon relay satellites in some way? His crystal cabinet data did not explain this.
“Moira?” he shouted. Only after he’d shouted did he realize that the storm had all but passed over and that except for the slide-crash of waves far above, the sound had abated. Also, he was wearing his osmosis mask with its inset microphones so poor Moira had heard his shout in her cowl earphones.
He pulled the osmosis mask free and breathed in the rich scent of the ocean again.
“What, oh mighty-lunged one?” replied Moira in soft tones. Her sleepingskin bag was about four feet away.
“If I use the touch-sharing function with my wife—with Ada—when I get home, will my unborn child receive the information as well?”
“Counting your fetus chickens before they’re hatched, my young Prometheus?”
“Just answer the damned question, would you?”
“You’ll have to try it,” said Moira. “I don’t recall the design parameters right now and I haven’t ever touch-shared with preggoes, and we godlike post-humans can’t get pregnant—nor did it help in that department that we were all female—so give it a try if and when you get home. I do remember though that there were safety nets installed in the genetic touch-share function. You can’t pour harmful information to a fetus or a young child—replaying her own moment of conception, for instance. We don’t want the little tyke in therapy for thirty years, now do we?”
Harman ignored the sarcasm. He rubbed his stubbled cheeks. He’d shaved before starting on this trip—the thermskin cowl was less than comfortable over a beard, he’d learned on Prospero’s Isle more than ten months earlier—but two days of stubble rasped under his palm.
“You have all the functions you gave us?” he said to Moira, adding the rising inflection of the question mark at only the last instant.
“My dear,” purred Moira. “Do you think we’re fools? Are we going to give mere old-style humans some ability we lack?”
“So you have more than we do,” said Harman. “More than this hundred you built into us?”
Moira did not answer.
Harman had discovered complex nanocameras and audioreceivers built into his skin cells. Some DNA-bound protein bundles could store this visual and auditory data. Other cells had been altered into bioelectronic transmitters—good for only short range because they were powered just by his own cellular energy, but easily strong enough to be picked up and boosted and retransmitted.
“The turin drama,” he said aloud.
“What’s that?” Moira said sleepily. The post-human woman had been dozing.
“I realize how you transmitted the images from Ilium—or your transvestite god-sisters did—and how we were able to receive them through the turin cloths.”
“Well… duh,” said Moira and went back to sleep.
Harman saw how he would no longer need a turin cloth to receive such transmissions. Between logosphere voice-over protocols and this multimedia connection, he could share both voice and full sensory data with any other human being who volunteered to uplink the input stream.
What would that be like, linked to Ada, while we made love? wondered Harman and then chided himself for being a dirty old man. A horny, dirty old man, he corrected himself.
Besides the logosphere function, there was another function he could trigger that offered a complicated sensory interface with the biosphere. Since it was satellite-dependent and interdicted at the moment, he could only guess how it worked and what it felt like. Was it like a chat with Ariel or did a person suddenly become one with the dandelions and hummingbirds? Could he communicate directly and at a distance with the Little Green Men that way? Feeling serious again, Harman remembered Prospero saying that Ariel was using the LGM to hold off the thousands upon thousands of attacking calibani along the southern fringes of Old Europe, and he immediately saw how he could use such a connection to ask the zeks for help fighting the voynix.
All this function-searching was giving Harman a worse headache. Almost by accident, he checked his medical monitor function and saw that indeed, his adrenaline levels and blood pressure combined was high enough to give him the headache he’d suffered with for two weeks now. He activated another medical function—this one more active than mere monitoring—and tentatively allowed some chemicals to be released into his system. Blood vessels in his neck dilated and relaxed. Warmth flowed back into his icy fingertips. The headache receded.
A teenaged boy could really use this function to chase away unwanted erections, thought Harman. He realized that he really was a horny, dirty old man.
Not so old, really, thought Harman. The medical monitor had told him that he had the physical body of an average slightly out-of-shape thirty-one-year-old man.
Other functions floated onto his mental checklist: figure-ground enhancement, enhanced empathy, another that he thought of as the berserker function—a temporary spiking of adrenaline and all other physical and strength-multiplying abilities, probably to be used as a last resort in a fight or if one had to lift a ton or two off one’s child. Besides the already used and misused memory replay function, Harman saw that replay data inputted through someone else’s sharing function. There was a function that would allow him to put his body into a sort of hibernation, a temporary slowing of everything to the point of stasis. He realized that this wasn’t a quick way to catch a nap but designed to be used with something like the crystal coffin in the Taj Moira if one needed to remain alive but inert for long periods of time—in Moira’s case, very long periods of time—without suffering bedsores, muscle atrophy, morning breath, and the other side effects of normal human unconsciousness. Harman saw at once that the real Savi had used this function many times in her time crèche on the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu and elsewhere to survive and thrive over the fourteen centuries of her hiding from the voynix and the post-humans.