Moira laughed again. “Are you ready to go the rest of the way up to the crystal cabinet?”
The clear cupola at the top of the Taj Moira was much larger than it had appeared from below—Harman guessed it was at least sixty or seventy feet across. There were no marble walkways here and the iron-stairway escalators and black-iron catwalks all ended at the center of the dome, everything glowing in the sunlight from the clear windows encircling the Taj’s pointed cupola.
Harman had never been so high—not even on the tower of the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu seven hundred feet above the suspended road-way—and he’d never been overwhelmed by such a fear of falling. This platform was so high that he could look down and hide the entire circle of the marble floor of the Taj with his outstretched hand. The maze and the crypt entrance on the main floor were so far below that they looked like the microcircuit embroidery on a turin cloth. Harman forced himself not to look down as he followed Moira up the last stairway out onto the web of catwalks to the wrought-iron platform in the cupola itself.
“Is that it?” he asked, nodding toward a ten—or twelve-foot-tall structure in the center of the platform.
“Yes.”
Harman had expected this so-called crystal cabinet to be another version of Moira’s crystal sarcophagus, but this thing looked nothing like a coffin. It was faceted with glass and metal geodesic struts the color of old pewter. The word “dodecahedron” came to mind, but Harman had learned that from sigling rather than from reading and wasn’t sure if it was the correct term. The crystal cabinet was a multifaceted, twelve-sided object, roughly spherical except for the flat faces, made of a dozen or so slabs of clear glass or crystal framed by thin struts of burnished metal. Scores of multicolored cables and pipes ran from the walls of the cupola into the black metal base of the thing. Scattered on the platform near the cabinet were metal-mesh chairs, odd instruments with dark screens and keyboards, and micro-thin slabs of vertical clear plastic, some five or six feet high.
“What is this place?” asked Harman.
“The nexus of the Taj.” She activated several of the screened instruments and touched a vertical panel. The plastic disappeared as a holographic virtual control panel took its place. Moira’s hands danced on the virtual images, there was a deep sound from the walls of the Taj, and a golden liquid—not yellow but liquid gold, apparently no thicker than water—began pouring into the base of the crystal cabinet.
Harman walked closer to the dodecahedron. “It’s filling with liquid.”
“Yes.”
“That’s crazy. I can’t go in there now. I’d drown.”
“No, you won’t,” said Moira.
“You expect me to be in that cabinet when it has ten feet of this golden liquid in it?”
“Yes.”
Harman shook his head and backed away, stopping six feet from the edge of the metal platform. “No, no, no. That’s too crazy.”
“As you will, but it is the only way you can gain the knowledge of these books,” said Moira. “The fluid is the medium which allows the transmission of the contents of these million volumes. Knowledge you will need if you are to be our Prometheus in the struggle against Setebos and his kind. Knowledge you will need if you are to educate your own people. Knowledge you will need, my Prometheus, if you are to save your beloved Ada.”
“Yes, but if the water fills it—whatever the liquid is—it’ll be ten feet deep or deeper. I’m not a good swimmer …” began Harman.
Suddenly Ariel was standing next to them on the platform, although Harman hadn’t heard his steps on the metal floor. The small figure was carrying something bulky wrapped in what looked to be a red turin cloth.
“Ariel, my darling!” cried Moira. Her voice carried a tone of delight and excitement that Harman had not yet heard from her—nor even from Savi in the time he’d known her.
“Greetings to Miranda,” said the sprite, removing the red cloth and handing Moira some sort of antique instrument with strings. Harman’s people played and sang some music, but knew few instruments and made none.
“A guitar!” said the post-human woman, taking the oddly shaped instrument from the greenish-glowing sprite and touching the strings with her long fingers. The notes that issued forth reminded Harman of Ariel’s own voice.
Ariel bowed low and spoke in formal tone—
“Take This slave of Music, for the sake Of him who is the slave of thee. And teach it all the harmony In which thou canst, and only thou,
Make the delighted spirit glow, Till joy defines itself again, And, too intense, is turned to pain; For by permission and command Of thine own Prince Ferdinand, Poor Ariel sends this silent token Of more than ever can be spoken.”
Moira bowed toward the sprite, set the resonating instrument on a table, and kissed Ariel on his green-glowing forehead. “I thank thee, friend, sometimes friendly servant, never slave. How has my Ariel fared since I went to sleep?” And said:
“When you died, the silent Moon, in her interlunar swoon, Is not sadder in her cell Than deserted Ariel. When you live again on earth, Like an unseen star of birth, Ariel guides you o’er the sea Of life from your nativity.”
Moira touched his cheek, then looked at Harman, then back to the sprite—avatar of the biosphere. “Have you two encountered one another before?”
“We’ve met,” said Harman. “How is the world, Ariel, since I left it?” asked Moira, turning away from Harman again. Ariel said,
“Many changes have been run, Since Ferdinand and you begun Your course of love, and Ariel still Has tracked your steps, and served your will.”
In a less formal voice, as if concluding some official ceremony, the biosphere sprite said, “And how is it with you, my lady, now that you are born unto us again?”
Now it seemed to be Moira’s turn to sound more formal and cadenced than Harman had ever heard in Savi’s voice—
“This temple, sad and lone, Is all spared from the thunder of a war Foughten long since by giant hierarchy
Against rebellion: this old image here, Whose carved features wrinkled as he fell, Is Prosper’s; I Miranda, left supreme Sole Priestess of this desolation.”—
To his horror, Harman saw that both the post-human woman and inhuman biosphere entity were openly weeping.
Ariel stepped back, bowed again, swept his hand in Harman’s direction, and said, “This mortal man who’s done no harm, despite all the contrary his name implies, has he come to the crystal cabinet to be executed?”
“No,” said Moira, “to be educated.”
59
The Setebos Egg hatched during their first night back at the ruins of Ardis Hall.
Ada was shocked to see the devastation at her former home. She’d been unconscious when flown away on the sonie the night of the attack and because of her concussion and other injuries had only partial memories of the horrible hours before. Now she saw the ruins of her life and home and memories in stark daylight. It made her want to fall to her knees and weep until she slept, but because she was leading the group of forty-four other survivors as they came up the last hill toward Ardis, the sonie hovering with eight of the most severely ill and wounded above, she kept her head up and her eyes dry as she walked past the scorched ruins, glancing left and right only to point out articles and remnants that could be salvaged for their new camp.
Her home, the great manor of Ardis Hall, two thousand years of her family’s pride, was all but gone—only soot-blackened timbers and the stone remnants of the many fireplaces left—but there was a surprising amount to salvage elsewhere.
There were also the rotting bodies of their friends—at least bits and pieces of them—left in the fields.
Ada conferred with Daeman and a few others and they agreed that the first priority was creating a fire and shelter—first a rough lean-to and warm place for the ill and injured to be treated and brought to before the short winter day was over, a shelter large enough for all of them to make it through the night without freezing. While Ardis Hall was lost to them, segments of several of the barracks, sheds, and other outbuildings erected in the last nine months before the sky fell were partially intact. They might have crowded into one of these shacks, but they were too near the forest, too hard to defend, and too far from the well that had been right outside Ardis Hall.