“Can you show me how to do this sharing function you were talking about?” asked Harman. He was determined not to lose his temper with this woman who looked so much like Savi and spoke in her voice. “Or show me how to fax without faxnode pavilions,” he added. “The way Ariel does it.”
“Ah, Ariel,” said Moira. She glanced at Prospero. “The old-styles have forgotten how to freefax?”
“They’ve forgotten almost everything,” said Prospero. “They were made to forget. By your people, Moira. By Vala, by Tirzah, by Rahaba—by all your Urizened Beulahs.”
Moira tapped the flat of her knife against her palm. “Why did you use this person to wake me, Prospero? Has Sycorax consolidated her power and freed your monster Caliban from your control?”
“She has and he is free,” Prospero said softly, “but I felt it was time you woke because Setebos now walks this world.”
“Sycorax, Caliban, and Setebos,” repeated Moira. She drew in a long breath, hissing it between her teeth.
“Between the witch, the demidevil, and the thing of darkness,” Prospero said softly, “they would control the moon and Earth, decide all ebbs and flows, and deal all power to their command.”
Moira nodded and chewed her full lower lip for a moment. “When does your eiffelbahn car depart again?”
“In one hour,” said the magus. “Will you be on it, Miranda dear? Or will you be sleeping in the fax-coffin of time again, allowing your atoms and memories to be restored in such a meaningless loop forever?”
“I’ll be on your damned car,” said Moira. “And I’ll take from the update banks what I need to know about this brave new world I’m born into yet again. But first, young Prometheus has his questions to ask and then I have a suggestion on what he can do to regain his function status.” She glanced toward the apex of the dome.
“No, Moira,” said Prospero.
“Harman,” she said softly, putting her soft hand on the back of his, “ask your questions now.”
He licked his lips. “Are you really a post-human?”
“Yes, I am. That is what Savi’s people called us before the Final Fax.”
“Why do you look like Savi?”
“Ah … you knew her, then? Well, I will learn her health or fate when I call up the update function. I knew Savi, but more important, Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep was in love with her and she returned no love for him—they were of separate tribes, so to speak. So I took her form, her memories, her voice… everything… before coming here to the Taj.”
“How did you take her form?” asked Harman.
Moira looked at Prospero again. “His people do know nothing, don’t they?” To Harman she said, “We post-humans had reached the point where we had no bodies of our own, my young Prometheus. At least none that you would recognize as bodies. We needed none. There were only a few thousand of us, but we had bred ourselves out of the human gene pool, thanks to the genetic skills of the avatar of the cyberspace logosphere here…”
“You’re welcome,” said Prospero.
“When we wanted to take a human form—always a female human form, I might add, for all of us—we just borrowed one.”
“But how?” said Harman.
Moira sighed. “Are the rings still in the sky?”
“Of course,” said Harman.
“Polar and equatorial both?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think they are, Harman Prometheus? There are more than a million discrete objects up there… what do your people think they are?”
Harman licked his lips again. The air here in the great temple-tomb was very dry. “We know our Firmary, where we were rejuvenated, was up there. Most of us think the other objects up there are the posts—your people’s—homes. And your machines. Cities on orbiting islands like Prospero’s. I was there last year on Prospero’s Isle, Moira. I helped bring it down.”
“You did?” She looked at the magus again. “Well, good for you, young Prometheus. But you’re wrong in thinking that the million orbiting objects, most of them much smaller than Prospero’s Isle, were habitats for my kind or machines serving solely our purposes. There are a dozen or so habitats, of course, and several thousand giant wormhole generators, black hole accumulators, early experiments in our interdimensional travel program, Brane Hole generators… but most of the orbiting objects up there are serving you.”
“Me?”
“Do you know what faxing is?”
“I’ve done it all my life,” said Harman.
“Yes, of course, but do you know what it is?”
Harman took a breath. “We’d never really thought about it, but on our voyages last year Savi and Prospero explained that the faxnode pavilions actually turn our bodies into coded energy and then our bodies, minds, and memories are rebuilt at another node.”
Moira nodded. “But the fax pavilions and nodes are not necessary,” she said. “They were simply ruses to keep you old-style humans from wandering in places you shouldn’t go. This fax form of teleportation was staggeringly heavy on computer memory, even with the most advanced Calabi-Yau DNA and bubble-memory machines. Do you have any idea how much memory is required to store the data on just one human being’s molecules, much less the holistic wavefront of his or her personality and memories?”
“No,” said Harman.
Moira gestured toward the top of the dome, but Harman realized that she was actually gesturing toward the sky beyond and the polar and equatorial rings turning up there now against the dark blue sky. “A million orbital memory banks,” said the woman. “Each one dedicated to one of you old-style humans. And in many of the other clumsy orbital machines, the black-hole-powered teleportation devices themselves—GPS satellites, scanners, reducers, compilators, receivers, and transmitters—somewhere up there above you every night of your life, my Harman Prometheus, was a star with your name on it.”
“Why a million?” asked Harman.
“That was thought to be a viable minimum herd population,” said Moira, “although I suspect there are far fewer of you than that today since we allowed each woman to have only one child. In my day, there were only nine thousand three hundred and fourteen of your subspecies of humans—those with nanogenetic functions installed and active—and a few hundred thousand dying old-old-style humans, those like my beloved Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep, the last of his royal breed.”
“What are the voynix?” asked Harman. “Where did they come from? Why did they act as silent servants for so long and then start attacking my people after Daeman and I destroyed Prospero’s Isle and the Firmary? How do we stop them?”
“So many questions,” sighed Moira. “If you want them all answered, you will need context. To gain context, you need to read these books.”
Harman’s head jerked and he looked up and down at the curving inner dome lined with books. He could not do the mathematics on the square or cubic feet of books here, but he imagined—wildly, blindly—that there must be at least a million volumes on these shelves.
“Which books?” he asked.
“All of these books,” said Moira, lifting her hand from his to gesture in a circle toward everything. “You can, you know.”
“Moira, no,” Prospero said again. “You’ll kill him.”
“Nonsense,” said the woman. “He’s young.”
“He’s ninety-nine years old,” said Prospero, “more than seventy-five years older than Savi’s body was when you cloned it for your own purposes. She had memories then. You carry them now. Harman is no tabula rasa.”
Moira shrugged. “He’s strong. Sane. Look at him.”
“You’ll kill him,” said Prospero. “And with him, one of our best weapons against Setebos and Sycorax.”
Harman was very angry now, but also excited. “What are you talking about?” he demanded, pulling his hand back when Moira threatened to touch it again with hers. “Are you talking about me sigling all these books? It would take months… years. Decades, maybe.”