“I still don’t understand,” said Harman.

“His nest now is in Paris Crater, Chom, and these other provincial places where you humans party and sleep and waste your useless lives away,” said Prospero, “but he will feed at Waterloo, HoTepsa, Stalingrad, Ground Zero, Kursk, Hiroshima, Saigon, Rwanda, Cape Town, Montreal, Gettysburg, Riyadh, Cambodia, Khanstaq, Chancellorsville, Okinawa, Tarawa, My Lai, Bergen Belsen, Auschwitz, the Somme—do any of these names mean anything to you, Harman?”

“No.”

Prospero sighed. “This is our problem. Until some fragment of your human race regains the memory of your race, you cannot fight Setebos, you cannot understand Setebos. You cannot understand yourselves.”

“Why is that your problem, Prospero?”

The old man sighed again. “If Setebos eats the human pain and memory of this world—an energy resource I call umana—this world will be physically alive but spiritually dead to any sentient being… including me.”

“Spiritually dead?” repeated Harman. He knew the word from his reading and sigling—spirit, spiritual, spirituality—vague ideas having to do with ancient myths of ghosts and religion—it just made no sense coming from this hologram of a logosphere avatar, the too-cute construct of some set of ancient software programs and communication protocols.

“Spiritually dead,” repeated the magus. “Psychically, philosophically, organically dead. On the quantum level, a living world records the most sentient energies its inhabitants experience, Harman of Ardis—love, hate, fear, hope. Like particles of magnetite aligning to a north or south pole. The poles may change, wander, disappear, but the recordings remain. The resulting energy field is as real—although more difficult to measure and locate—as the magnetosphere a planet with a hot spinning core produces, protecting the living inhabitants with its forcefield from the harshest realities of space. So does the memory of pain and suffering protect the future of a sentient race. Does this make sense to you?”

“No,” said Harman.

Prospero shrugged. “Then take my word for it. If you ever want to see Ada alive again, you will have to learn… much. Perhaps too much. But after this learning, you will at least be able to join the fight. There may be no hope—there usually is none when Setebos begins devouring a world’s memory—but at least we can fight.”

“Why do you care?” asked Harman. “What difference does it make to you whether human beings survive? Or their memories?”

Prospero smiled thinly. “What do you take me for? Do you think I am a mere function of old e-mails, the icon of an ancient Internet with a staff and robe?”

“I don’t know what the hell you are,” said Harman. “A hologram.”

Prospero took a step closer and slapped Harman hard across the face.

Harman took a step back, gaping. He raised his hand to his stinging cheek, balled that hand into a fist.

Prospero smiled and held his staff between them. “If you don’t want to wake up on the floor ten minutes from now with the worst headache of your life, don’t think about it.”

“I want to go home to Ada,” Harman said slowly.

“Did you try to find her with your functions?” asked the magus.

Harman blinked. “Yes.”

“And did any of your functions work here on the cablecar, or in the jungle before it?”

“No,” said Harman.

“Nor will they work until you’ve mastered the rest of the functions you command,” said the old man, returning to his chair and carefully lowering himself into it.

“The rest of the functions …” began Harman. “What do you mean?”

“How many functions have you mastered?” asked Prospero.

“Five,” said Harman. One had been known to everyone for ages—the Finder Function, which included a chronometer—but Savi had taught them three others. Then he had discovered the fifth.

“Recite them.”

Harman sighed. “Finder function—proxnet, farnet, allnet, and sigling—reading through one’s palm.”

“And have you mastered the allnet function, Harman of Ardis?”

“Not really.” There was too much information, too much bandwidth, as Savi had said.

“And do you think that old-style humans—the real old-style humans, your undesigned and unmodified ancestors—had five such functions, Harman of Ardis?”

“I… I don’t know.” He’d never thought about it.

“They did not,” Prospero said flatly. “You are the result of four thousand years of gene-tampering and nanotech splicing. How did you discover the sigl function, Harman of Ardis?”

“I… just experimented with mental images, triangles, squares, circles, until one worked,” said Harman.

“That’s what you told Ada and the others,” said Prospero, “but that is a lie. How did you really learn to sigl?”

“I dreamt the sigl function code,” admitted Harman. It had been too strange—too precious—to tell the others.

“Ariel helped you with that dream,” said Prospero, his thin-lipped smile showing again. “We grew impatient. Would you like to guess how many functions each of you—every one of you ‘old-style humans’—has in your cells and blood and brainstuff?”

“More than five functions?” asked Harman.

“One hundred,” said Prospero. “An even hundred.”

“Teach them to me,” said Harman, taking a step toward the magus.

Prospero shook his head. “I cannot. I would not. But you need to learn them nonetheless. On this voyage you will learn them.”

“We’re going the wrong way,” said Harman.

“What?”

“You said the eiffelbahn would take me to the coast of Europe where the Atlantic Breach begins, but we’re heading east now, away from Europe.”

“We will swing north again two towers hence,” said Prospero. “Are you impatient to arrive?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be,” said the magus. “All the learning will happen during the trip, not after it. Yours will be the sea change of all sea changes. And trust me, you do not want to take the short route—over the old Pakistan passes into the waste called Afghanistan, south along the Mediterranean Basin and across the Sahara Marshes.”

“Why not?” said Harman. He and Savi and Daeman had flown east across the Atlantic and then over the Sahara Marshes to Jerusalem, then taken a crawler into the dry Mediterranean Basin. It was a place on Earth he knew. And he wanted to see if the blue tachyon beam still rose from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Savi had said it carried all of the coded information of all her lost contemporaries from fourteen hundred years ago.

“The calibani are loosed,” said Prospero.

“They’ve left the Basin?”

“They are freed of their old restraints, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Or at least upon that part of it.”

“Then where are we going?”

“Patience, Harman of Ardis. Patience. Tomorrow we cross a mountain range I believe you will find most enlightening. Then into Asia—where you may behold the works of the mighty and the dead—and then west and west enough again. The Breach will wait.”

“Too slow,” said Harman, pacing back and forth. “Too long. If the functions don’t work here, I don’t have any way of knowing how Ada is. I need to go. I need to get home.”

“You want to know how your Ada fares?” asked Prospero. He was not smiling. The magus pointed to a red cloth draped over the couch. “Use that. This one time only.”

Harman frowned, went to the cloth, studied it. “A turin cloth?” he said. It was red—all turin cloths were tan. Nor was the microcircuit embroidery the same.

“There are a myriad of turin-cloth receivers,” said Prospero. “Just as there are a myriad of sensory transmitters. Every person can be one.”

Harman shook his head. “I don’t give a damn about the turin drama—Troy, Agamemnon, all that nonsense. I’m not in the mood for amusements.”

“This cloth tells you nothing of Ilium,” said Prospero. “It will show you your Ada’s fate. Try it.”