“Aren’t you coming?” Harman called down to Ariel.

The sprite did not answer. Harman’s elevator continued rising into the tower.

The tower seemed to have three major landings. The first and broadest was just above the level of the jungle treetops. Harman looked across at a solid carpet of green. The elevator did not stop.

The second landing was high enough that the elevator was traveling almost vertically and Harman had moved to the center of the small cage. Looking up and out, he could see that a series of cables ran from the top of this tower and disappeared far to the east and west, sagging a bit in the distance. The elevator did not stop at the second landing.

The third and final landing was a thousand feet above the ground, just below the domed top of the tower with its spike of antennae. Here the elevator slowed and stopped—ancient gears ground and slipped, the elevator cage slipped back six feet, and Harman grabbed the wrought-iron bars of the cage and prepared to die.

A brake stopped the cage. The wrought-iron door slid back. Harman shakily crossed five or six feet of iron bridge with rotted wood planks. Ahead of him, a much more elaborate door—polished sections of mahogany set into a filagree of wrought iron—clanked, stirred, and then hissed open. Harman paused only a second before entering the darker interior. Any place was preferable to that exposed little bridge a thousand feet above the latticework of girders disappearing in a vertigo of iron below.

He was in a room. When the door hissed and clanked shut behind him, Harman realized that it was twenty or thirty degrees cooler here in the large room than outside in the sun. He stayed where he was for a few seconds, allowing his eyes to adapt to the relative dimness.

He was standing on a small, carpeted and booklined entry mezzanine as part of a larger room. From the mezzanine, a wrought-iron staircase spiraled down to the main floor of the room and up through the ceiling to what presumably was a second story.

Harman descended.

He’d never seen furnishings like this—oddly styled furniture, tufted, with red-velour fabric, thick drapes over a wall of windows on the south side of the room, the drapes dragging their gold tassels onto the elaborately designed red and brown carpet. There was a fireplace in the north wall—Harman stared at the design of black iron and green ceramics. A long table with elaborately carved legs ran for at least eight feet of the fifteen feet of window wall where the panes near the corners of the window were as complicated as the silk of a spider’s web. Other furniture consisted of overstuffed single chairs with overstuffed ottomans, carved chairs of gleaming dark wood with gold metal inlays, and everywhere examples of what Hannah had once told him was polished brass.

There was a strange firehose of a speaking tube with a bell-shaped polished brass snout; there were levers of polished brass set into cherry-colored wooden boxes on the walls; on the long plank table rose several brass instruments—some with brass keys to punch and slowly turning gears, farther down the table an astrolabe with circles of brass turning within larger circles of brass, a polished brass lamp glowing softly with light. There were maps laid out on the table with small hemispheres of brass holding them down, more maps curled into a brass basket on the floor.

Harman ran forward and stared hungrily at the maps, pulling more out and unfurling them, laying brass hemispheres on them.

He’d never seen maps like these before. Everything was on a grid but within those grid boxes were ten thousand wriggly parallel lines—some close together where the map ran brown or green, some lines far apart where the map showed expanses of white. There were irregular blobs of blue that Harman guessed were lakes or seas and longer, wigglier blue lines that he guessed were rivers with unlikely names penned next to them—Tungabhadra, Krishna, Godavari, Normada, Mahanadi, and Ganga.

On the east and west wall of the room, surrounding smaller but still multipaned windows, were more bookshelves, more books, more brass trinkets, jade statues, brass machines.

Harman ran to the shelf and pulled down three books, smelling the scent of centuries rising from the ancient but still firm paper and the thick leather covers. The titles made his heart pound—The Third Dynasty of Khan Ho Tep—A.D. 2601–2939 and Ramayana and Mahabharata Scripture Revised According to Ganesh the Cyborg and Eiffelbahn Maintenance and AI Interface. Harman laid his right palm on the top book, closed his eyes to bring up the sigl function, and then hesitated. If he had time, he would prefer to read these books—sounding out each word and guessing at the definitions of the words from context. It was slow, laborious, painful, but he always gained more from reading than from sigling.

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.