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.”
“Not true,” said the magus. “It was Savi’s machine and only makes orbital housecalls for humankind passengers. I do not qualify… quite.”
“Then how did Caliban escape?” asked Harman. “I know that it wasn’t in the sonie with Daeman, Hannah, and me.”
Prospero shrugged. “Caliban’s adventures are now solely Caliban’s concerns. The wretch no longer serves me.”
“He serves Setebos again,” said Harman.
“Yes.”
“But Caliban did survive and return to Earth after centuries.”
“Yes.”
Harman sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. He suddenly felt very tired and very thirsty.
“The wooden box beneath the mezzanine is a sort of cold-keeper,” said Prospero. “There is food in there… and bottles of pure water.”
Harman sat up straight. “Are you reading my mind, Magus?”
“No. Your face. There is no more obvious map than the human face. Go—get a drink. I will take a seat here by the window and await your return, refreshed, as interlocutor.”
Harman felt how shaky his legs and arms were as he walked to the large wooden box with the brass handle, then stared into the cold a minute at all the bottles of water and heaps of clear-wrapped food. He drank deeply.
Returning to the center of the red and tan carpet where Prospero sat at the table with the sunlight behind him, he said, “Why did you have Ariel bring me here?”
“Actually, in deference to accuracy, I had my biosphere sprite bring you to the jungle near Khajuraho since no faxing is allowed within twenty kilometers of the eiffelbahn.”
“Eiffelbahn?” repeated Harman, still sipping from the ice-cold water bottle. “Is that what you and Ariel call this tower?”
“No, no, my dear Harman. That is what we—or Khan Ho Tep, to be precise, since that gentleman built the eiffelbahn some millennia ago—called this system. This is just one of… oh, let me see… fourteen thousand eight hundred towers just like this.”
“Why so many?” asked Harman.
“It pleased the Khan,” said the magus. “And it takes that many Eiffel Towers to connect the cables from the east coast of China to the Atlantic Breach on the coast of Spain, what with all the trunk lines, spurs, side branches, and so forth.”
Harman had no idea what the old man was talking about. “The eiffelbahn is some sort of transport system?”
“An opportunity for you to travel in style for a change,” said Prospero. “Or I should say—for us to travel in style, for I shall travel with you for a small part of the way.”
“I’m not traveling anywhere with you until …” began Harman. Then he stopped, dropped the water bottle to the floor, and clutched the heavy table with both hands.
The entire two-story platform one thousand feet atop the tower had lurched. There was a grinding and tearing of metal, an horrendous screech, and then the entire structure tilted, lurched again, tilted further.