“Setebos?” said Harman.
“Oh, yes.” Prospero placed his aged hand on the broad page of the book, set a long leaf in as a bookmark, closed the book gently, and rose, leaning on his staff. “Setebos, the many-handed as a cuttlefish, is here at last, on your world and mine.”
“I know that. Daeman saw the thing in Paris Crater. Setebos has woven some blue-ice web over that faxnode and a dozen others, including Chom and…”
“And do you know why the many-handed has come now to Earth?” interrupted Prospero.
“No,” said Harman.
“To feed,” Prospero said softly. “To feed.”
“On us?” Harman felt the cablecar slow, then bump, and he noticed the next eiffelbahn tower surrounding them for a second, the two-story structure of the car fitting into the landing on the thousand-foot level just as it had on the first tower. He felt the car swivel, heard gears grind and clank, and they slid out of the tower on a different heading, traveling more east than north now. “Has Setebos come to feed on us?” he asked again.
Prospero smiled. “Not exactly. Not directly.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means, young Harman human, that Setebos is a ghoul. Our many-handed friend feeds on the residues of fear and pain, the dark energy of sudden terror and rich residue of equally sudden death. This memory of terror lies in the soil of your world—of any warlike sentient creatures’ world—like so much coal or petroleum, all of a lost era’s wild energy sleeping underground.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It means that Setebos, the Devourer of Worlds, that Gourmet of Dark History, has secured some of your faxnodes in blue stasis, yes—to lay his eggs, to send his seed out across your world, to suck the warmth out of these places like a succubus sucking breath from a sleeping soul—but it’s your memory and your history that will fatten him like a many-handed blood tick.”
“I still don’t understand,” said Harman.
“His nest now is in Paris Crater, Chom, and these other provincial places where you humans party and sleep and waste your useless lives away,” said Prospero, “but he will feed at Waterloo, HoTepsa, Stalingrad, Ground Zero, Kursk, Hiroshima, Saigon, Rwanda, Cape Town, Montreal, Gettysburg, Riyadh, Cambodia, Khanstaq, Chancellorsville, Okinawa, Tarawa, My Lai, Bergen Belsen, Auschwitz, the Somme—do any of these names mean anything to you, Harman?”
“No.”
Prospero sighed. “This is our problem. Until some fragment of your human race regains the memory of your race, you cannot fight Setebos, you cannot understand Setebos. You cannot understand yourselves.”
“Why is that your problem, Prospero?”
The old man sighed again. “If Setebos eats the human pain and memory of this world—an energy resource I call umana—this world will be physically alive but spiritually dead to any sentient being… including me.”
“Spiritually dead?” repeated Harman. He knew the word from his reading and sigling—spirit, spiritual, spirituality—vague ideas having to do with ancient myths of ghosts and religion—it just made no sense coming from this hologram of a logosphere avatar, the too-cute construct of some set of ancient software programs and communication protocols.
“Spiritually dead,” repeated the magus. “Psychically, philosophically, organically dead. On the quantum level, a living world records the most sentient energies its inhabitants experience, Harman of Ardis—love, hate, fear, hope. Like particles of magnetite aligning to a north or south pole. The poles may change, wander, disappear, but the recordings remain. The resulting energy field is as real—although more difficult to measure and locate—as the magnetosphere a planet with a hot spinning core produces, protecting the living inhabitants with its forcefield from the harshest realities of space. So does the memory of pain and suffering protect the future of a sentient race. Does this make sense to you?”
“No,” said Harman.
Prospero shrugged. “Then take my word for it. If you ever want to see Ada alive again, you will have to learn… much. Perhaps too much. But after this learning, you will at least be able to join the fight. There may be no hope—there usually is none when Setebos begins devouring a world’s memory—but at least we can fight.”
“Why do you care?” asked Harman. “What difference does it make to you whether human beings survive? Or their memories?”
Prospero smiled thinly. “What do you take me for? Do you think I am a mere function of old e-mails, the icon of an ancient Internet with a staff and robe?”
“I don’t know what the hell you are,” said Harman. “A hologram.”
Prospero took a step closer and slapped Harman hard across the face.
Harman took a step back, gaping. He raised his hand to his stinging cheek, balled that hand into a fist.
Prospero smiled and held his staff between them. “If you don’t want to wake up on the floor ten minutes from now with the worst headache of your life, don’t think about it.”
“I want to go home to Ada,” Harman said slowly.
“Did you try to find her with your functions?” asked the magus.
Harman blinked. “Yes.”
“And did any of your functions work here on the cablecar, or in the jungle before it?”
“No,” said Harman.
“Nor will they work until you’ve mastered the rest of the functions you command,” said the old man, returning to his chair and carefully lowering himself into it.
“The rest of the functions …” began Harman. “What do you mean?”
“How many functions have you mastered?” asked Prospero.
“Five,” said Harman. One had been known to everyone for ages—the Finder Function, which included a chronometer—but Savi had taught them three others. Then he had discovered the fifth.
“Recite them.”
Harman sighed. “Finder function—proxnet, farnet, allnet, and sigling—reading through one’s palm.”
“And have you mastered the allnet function, Harman of Ardis?”
“Not really.” There was too much information, too much bandwidth, as Savi had said.
“And do you think that old-style humans—the real old-style humans, your undesigned and unmodified ancestors—had five such functions, Harman of Ardis?”
“I… I don’t know.” He’d never thought about it.
“They did not,” Prospero said flatly. “You are the result of four thousand years of gene-tampering and nanotech splicing. How did you discover the sigl function, Harman of Ardis?”
“I… just experimented with mental images, triangles, squares, circles, until one worked,” said Harman.
“That’s what you told Ada and the others,” said Prospero, “but that is a lie. How did you really learn to sigl?”
“I dreamt the sigl function code,” admitted Harman. It had been too strange—too precious—to tell the others.
“Ariel helped you with that dream,” said Prospero, his thin-lipped smile showing again. “We grew impatient. Would you like to guess how many functions each of you—every one of you ‘old-style humans’—has in your cells and blood and brainstuff?”
“More than five functions?” asked Harman.
“One hundred,” said Prospero. “An even hundred.”
“Teach them to me,” said Harman, taking a step toward the magus.
Prospero shook his head. “I cannot. I would not. But you need to learn them nonetheless. On this voyage you will learn them.”
“We’re going the wrong way,” said Harman.
“What?”
“You said the eiffelbahn would take me to the coast of Europe where the Atlantic Breach begins, but we’re heading east now, away from Europe.”
“We will swing north again two towers hence,” said Prospero. “Are you impatient to arrive?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be,” said the magus. “All the learning will happen during the trip, not after it. Yours will be the sea change of all sea changes. And trust me, you do not want to take the short route—over the old Pakistan passes into the waste called Afghanistan, south along the Mediterranean Basin and across the Sahara Marshes.”