“Send me home,” demanded Harman, stepping toward the old man.

“Now.”

“Patience, patience, human named Harman, friend of Noman,” said the magus, showing his yellowed teeth in a slight smile.

“Fuck patience,” said Harman. He’d had no idea until this instant how deep the fury in him went from being kidnapped from the Bridge by Ariel, taken away from Ardis and Ada and his unborn child, almost certainly on the orders of this shuffling figure in the blue robe. He took a step closer to the old man, reached out, grabbed a bit of the magus’s flowing sleeve…

And was thrown eight feet backward across the room, finally sliding from the carpet to the polished floor and coming to rest on his back, blinking away retinal after-images of orange circles.

“I suffer no one’s touch,” Prospero said softly. “Do not make me remonstrate with this old man’s stick.” He raised his magus’s staff ever so slightly.

Harman got to one knee. “Send me back. Please. I can’t leave Ada alone. Not now.”

“You already have chosen that course, have you not? No man made you take Noman to Machu Picchu, yet no man stopped you, either.”

“What do you want, Prospero?” Harman got to his feet, tried unsuccessfully to blink away the last of the red-orange circles in his vision, and sat in the nearest wooden chair. “And how did you survive the destruction of the orbital asteroid? I thought your hologram was trapped there along with Caliban.”

“Oh, it was,” said Prospero, pacing back and forth. “A small part of my self, perhaps, taken all for all, but a vital small part. You brought me back to Earth.”

“I …” began Harman. “The sonie? Somehow you loaded your hologram into the sonie’s memory?”

“Aye.”

Harman shook his head. “You could have called that sonie up to the orbital isle any time.”

“Not true,” said the magus. “It was Savi’s machine and only makes orbital housecalls for humankind passengers. I do not qualify… quite.”

“Then how did Caliban escape?” asked Harman. “I know that it wasn’t in the sonie with Daeman, Hannah, and me.”

Prospero shrugged. “Caliban’s adventures are now solely Caliban’s concerns. The wretch no longer serves me.”

“He serves Setebos again,” said Harman.

“Yes.”

“But Caliban did survive and return to Earth after centuries.”

“Yes.”

Harman sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. He suddenly felt very tired and very thirsty.

“The wooden box beneath the mezzanine is a sort of cold-keeper,” said Prospero. “There is food in there… and bottles of pure water.”

Harman sat up straight. “Are you reading my mind, Magus?”

“No. Your face. There is no more obvious map than the human face. Go—get a drink. I will take a seat here by the window and await your return, refreshed, as interlocutor.”

Harman felt how shaky his legs and arms were as he walked to the large wooden box with the brass handle, then stared into the cold a minute at all the bottles of water and heaps of clear-wrapped food. He drank deeply.

Returning to the center of the red and tan carpet where Prospero sat at the table with the sunlight behind him, he said, “Why did you have Ariel bring me here?”

“Actually, in deference to accuracy, I had my biosphere sprite bring you to the jungle near Khajuraho since no faxing is allowed within twenty kilometers of the eiffelbahn.”

“Eiffelbahn?” repeated Harman, still sipping from the ice-cold water bottle. “Is that what you and Ariel call this tower?”

“No, no, my dear Harman. That is what we—or Khan Ho Tep, to be precise, since that gentleman built the eiffelbahn some millennia ago—called this system. This is just one of… oh, let me see… fourteen thousand eight hundred towers just like this.”

“Why so many?” asked Harman.

“It pleased the Khan,” said the magus. “And it takes that many Eiffel Towers to connect the cables from the east coast of China to the Atlantic Breach on the coast of Spain, what with all the trunk lines, spurs, side branches, and so forth.”

Harman had no idea what the old man was talking about. “The eiffelbahn is some sort of transport system?”

“An opportunity for you to travel in style for a change,” said Prospero. “Or I should say—for us to travel in style, for I shall travel with you for a small part of the way.”

“I’m not traveling anywhere with you until …” began Harman. Then he stopped, dropped the water bottle to the floor, and clutched the heavy table with both hands.

The entire two-story platform one thousand feet atop the tower had lurched. There was a grinding and tearing of metal, an horrendous screech, and then the entire structure tilted, lurched again, tilted further.

“The tower’s falling!” cried Harman. Beyond the many panes of glass in their elaborate iron frames, he could see the distant green horizon tilt, wobble, then tilt again.

“Not at all,” said Prospero.

The two-story living unit was falling—sliding right out of the tower, screeching and rending across dry metal as if giant metal hands were pushing it out into thin air.

Harman leaped to his feet, decided to run for the doorway on the mezzanine, but then fell to his hands and knees as the two-story unit fell free of the tower, dropped at least fifteen feet, and then jerked violently before beginning a slide to the west.

Heart pounding, Harman stayed on his knees while the huge living unit rocked perilously back and forth on its long axis, then steadied. Above them, the screeching turned into a high-decibal hum. Harman stood, found his balance, staggered to the table, and looked out the window.

The tower was to their left and receding, an open patch of sky visible where this two-story, one-thousand-foot-level apartment had been. Harman could see the cables overhead and now understood the hum to be connected with some sort of flywheel in the housing above them. The eiffelbahn was some sort of cablecar system and this large iron house of a structure was the car. The vertical line he’d seen to the east earlier had been another tower, just like the one they’d just left. And the car was moving quickly to the west.

He turned to Prospero and took a step closer but stopped before coming within range of the magus’s solid staff. “You have to let me get back to Ada,” he said, trying for firmness but hearing the detestable pleading whine in his voice. “The voynix are all around Ardis Hall. I can’t let her stay there in danger… without me. Please, Lord Prospero. Please.”

“It is too late for you to intercede there, Harman, friend of Noman,” said Prospero in his throaty, old-man’s voice. “What’s done is done at Ardis Hall. But let us put aside our sea-sorrow, sir, and not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that is gone. For we are embarked upon a new voyage now—surely the stuff of sea-change, friend of Noman—and one of us shall soon be the wiser, the deeper, fuller man, whilst our enemies—namely that darkness I bred and harbored out of Sycorax—shall drink of seawater and be forced to eat the withered roots of failure and the husks of scorn.”