Harman stepped away from the temple wall, looking up at the vine-encrusted stone structure. There were thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of variations on this theme, showing Harman aspects of sex he’d never imagined, could never have imagined. Just some of the elephant images alone…. The human figures were stylized, faces and breasts oval, eyes almond-shaped, the women’s and men’s mouths curling in pleased and decadent smiles.

“What is this place?” he asked.

Ariel sang in a falsetto—

“Above, half seen, in the lofty gloom,

Strange works of a long dead people loom,

What did they mean to those who now are dust,

These rioting figures of love and lust?”

Harman tried again. “What is this place?”

For once Ariel answered simply. “Khajuraho.” The word meant nothing to Harman.

The biosphere sprite gestured, two of the little, green, largely transparent zeks touched Harman’s arm, and the procession moved away from the temple, following a barely discernible path through the jungle. Looking back, Harman caught a final glimpse of the stone building—buildings he realized now, there was more than one temple there, all of them carved with erotic friezes—and he noticed again how the jungle had all but reclaimed the structures. The coupling figures were bound about by vines, partially obscured by grass, and tightly constricted by roots and green feelers.

Then the place called Khajuraho disappeared in the green growth and Harman concentrated on plodding along behind Ariel.

As the sunlight illuminated the wild density of the jungle around them—ten thousand shades of green, most of which Harman had never imagined—all he could think of was how to get back to Ardis and Ada, or at least back to the Bridge before Petyr flew off in the sonie. He didn’t want to wait three days for Petyr’s return to pick up Hannah and the restored—if that crèche could restore life and health—Noman/Odysseus.

“Ariel?” he said suddenly to the small form that seemed to be floating at the front of the line of zeks ahead of him.

“Ay, sir?” The androgynous quality of the otherwise pleasant voice disturbed Harman.

“How did you transport me from the Golden Gate to this jungle?”

“Did I not do my spriting gently enough, O Man?”

“Yes,” said Harman, fearing that the pale figure was going to launch into more nonsense babble. “But how?”

“How dost thou travel from place to place, when you are not lying abelly in your sonie saucer?”

“We fax,” said Harman. “But there was no fax pavilion at the Golden Gate… no faxnode.”

Ariel floated higher, brushing branches and sending a shower of droplets down onto the zeks and Harman. “Did your friend Daeman go to a fax pavilion when the allosaurus ate him ten months ago?”

Harman stopped in his tracks. The zeks still holding his arms stopped with him, not yet pulling him on.

Of course, thought Harman. It had been in front of him all his life. He’d seen it all his life—but he’d been blind. When someone faxed up to the rings on any of his or her normal four Twenties of life, you went to the nearest fax pavilion. When someone wanted to fax anywhere, you went to the nearest faxnode pavilion. But when someone was injured—or killed, devoured as Daeman had been, torn apart in some freak accident—the rings faxed you up.

Harman had been there, on Prospero’s Isle, in the Firmary tanks where naked bodies arrived, were fixed by the bubbling nutrient and blue worms, and were faxed back. Harman and Daeman had done the faxing themselves, on Prospero’s instructions, destroying the servitors and setting the virtual dials and levers to fax as many of the bodies-under-repair home as they could.

Humans could be faxed without going to a fax pavilion, without starting from one of the three-hundred-some known faxnodes. Harman had seen this his entire life—almost one hundred years—but had never seen what he could see. The thought was too entrenched that the post-humans were calling you home when you were injured or killed before your Fifth Twenty. Faxnodes were science; going to the Firmary for emergency repair was something like religion.

But the Firmary on Prospero’s Isle had machinery that could fax anyone from anywhere without relying on nodes and pavilions.

And Harman and Daeman had destroyed the Firmary and Prospero’s Isle.

The zeks tugged at Harman’s arms to get him moving again, but gently. Harman did not move quite yet. The intensity of his thoughts made him dizzy; if the zeks had not been clutching him, he might have fallen to the jungle floor.

Prospero’s Isle was destroyed—he and all the old-style humans had watched the pieces burn through the night sky for months—but Ariel could still fax—a sort of free-fax, independent from nodes, portals, and pavilions. Something up on the rings—or on Earth itself—found the sprite, coded him, and faxed him, and today Harman with him, from the Bridge to here, wherever here and Khajuraho were. On the opposite side of the Earth if nothing else.

Harman might yet be able to fax home to Ada, if he could only get Ariel to reveal the secret of this free-faxing.

The zeks pulled again, gently but insistently. Ariel was far ahead, floating toward a patch of bright sunlight in the jungle. Harman did not want to get the zeks in trouble. Nor did he want to lose sight of Ariel—the sprite was his fax-ticket home.

Harman rushed, stumbling, to catch up with the avatar of Earth’s biosphere.

When they first emerged into the clearing the sun was so bright that Harman squinted and covered his eyes, not seeing the structure looming above him for several seconds. When he did see it, he froze in his tracks.

The thing—structure—it wasn’t quite a building—was gigantic, rising up for what Harman estimated—and his estimates on the size of things had always been uncannily good—for at least a thousand feet. Perhaps a little more. It had no skin; that is, the entire structure was a lacy, open-latticework skeleton of dark metal girders, rising inward from a huge square base that connected via semicircular metal arches at treetop level, then continuing to curve inward until it became a pure spire, its dark knob of a summit far, far above. A phrase that the metal-working Hannah had once described came to his mind—wrought iron. Harman felt sure that the trusses, arches, girders, and open latticework he was staring at here in the hot, jungle sun were all made of some sort of iron.

“What is it?” he breathed. The zeks had released him and stepped back into the shade of the jungle, as if afraid to go closer to the base of the incredible tower. Harman realized that nothing grew on the acre or more at the base of the tower except for low, perfectly manicured grass. It was as if the strength of the structure itself was keeping the jungle at bay.

“It’s seven thousand tons,” said Ariel in a voice much more masculine than any the biosphere sprite had used before. “Two and a half million rivets. Four thousand three hundred and eleven years old—or at least the original of this was. There are more than fourteen thousand of these in Khan Ho Tep’s eiffelbahn.”

“Eiffelbahn…” repeated Harman. “I don’t…”

“Come,” snapped Ariel. His voice was powerfully masculine now, deep, threatening, not to be disobeyed.

There was a sort of wrought-iron cage at the base of one of the arched legs.

“Get in,” said Ariel.

“I need to know…”

“Get in and you’ll learn everything you need to know,” said the biosphere avatar. “Including how to get back to your precious Ada. Stay here and you die.”

Harman stepped into the cage. An iron grating slid shut. Gears clanked, metal screeched, and the cage began rising on the curve, following a series of cables and iron tracks.