“Since when has this turned into a rescue mission?” asked Mahnmut. The Earth was a big, bright, blue sphere now, growing by the minute. The e—and p-rings were beautiful.

“Since we saw the photos showing human beings being slaughtered,” said Orphu and Mahnmut recognized the near-subsonic tones in his friend’s voice. Those rumbles meant either that Orphu was very amused or very, very serious—and Mahnmut knew that he wasn’t amused at the moment.

“I thought the idea was to save our Five Moons, the Belt, and the solar system from total quantum collapse,” said Mahnmut.

Orphu growled low tones. “We’ll do that tomorrow. Today we have a chance to help people down there.”

“How?” said Mahnmut. “We don’t know the context. We have no idea what’s going on down there. For all we know, those headless metallic creatures are just killer robots that humans have built to kill each other. We’d be meddling in local wars that are none of our business.”

“Do you believe that, Mahnmut?”

Mahnmut hesitated. He looked far, far down to where the ion engines out on their booms lanced blue beams in the direction of the growing blue and white sphere.

“No,” he said at last. “No, I don’t believe that. I think something new is going on down there, just as it is on Mars and on Ilium-Earth and everywhere we look.”

“I do, too,” said Orphu of Io. “Let’s go in and convince Asteague/Che and the rest of the Prime Integrators that they have to launch the dropship and submersible when we go around the backside of the Earth. With me aboard.”

“Just how do you plan to convince them to do this?” asked Mahnmut.

This time, the Ionian’s deep rumble was more in the amused spectrum of bone-rattling subsonics. “I’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

Harman tried to get as far away from the crystal coffin as he could. He would have returned to the eiffelbahn car but the winds outside were roaring—easily over a hundred miles per hour, enough to sweep him off the marble tabletop surrounding the Taj Moira—so he climbed through the spiraling levels of books instead.

The walkways were narrow and soon very high, each one a little farther out over the low-walled maze far below as the inside walls of the curved dome pressed the bookshelves and walkways farther in, and Harman would have been disturbed by the dizzying height beneath his feet on the open-iron catwalks if he hadn’t been so eager to put distance between himself and the sleeping woman.

The books had no titles. They were of uniform size. Harman estimated that there were hundreds of thousand of volumes in this huge structure. He pulled one out and opened it at random. The letters were small and printed in pre-rubicon English, older than any book or writing he’d yet encountered, and it took him minutes to sound out and guess at the first couple of sentences he encountered. He slid the book back in and set his palm on the spine, visualizing five blue triangles in a row.

It did not sigl. No golden words flowed down his hand and arm to settle in his memory. Either the sigl function did not work in this place or these ancient books were impervious to sigling.

“There’s a way you can read them all,” said Prospero.

Harman jumped backward. He’d not heard the magus approaching across the noisy catwalk. He was just suddenly there, not an arm’s length away.

“How can I read them all?” said Harman.

“The eiffelbahn car will be leaving in two hours,” said the magus. “If you’re not on it, it will be a while until the next one stops here at Taj Moira—eleven years, to be precise. So if you’re going to read all these books, you had best start at once.”

“I’m ready to go now,” said Harman. “It’s just too damned windy out for me to get to the car.”

“I’ll have one of the servitors rig a line when we are ready to leave,” said Prospero.

“Servitor? There are working servitors here?”

“Of course. Do you think the mechanisms of the Taj or the eiffelbahn repair themselves?” The magus chuckled. “Well, of course, in a way they do repair themselves, since most of the servitors are nanotech, part of the structures themselves and too small for you to detect.”

“All of our servitors at Ardis and the other communities quit working,” said Harman. “Just… crashed. And the power went out.”

“Of course,” said Prospero. “There are consequences to your destruction of the Firmary and my orbital isle. But the orbital and planetary power grid and other mechanisms are still intact. Even the Firmary could be replaced if you so choose.”

Harman was stunned to hear this. He turned and leaned on the iron railing, taking deep breaths, ignoring the long drop to the marble floor far below. When he and Daeman—with this magus’s instructions—had directed the huge “wormhole collector” into Prospero’s Isle nine months ago, it had been to destroy the terrible banquet table where Caliban had been feasting for centuries on the bodies and bones of Final Twenty old-style humans in the Firmary. Since that day, since the destruction of the Firmary and the knowledge that one would be faxed there after any serious injury and on every twentieth birthday, mortality had lain heavily on everyone’s spirit. Death and aging had become a reality for everyone. If Prospero was telling the truth now, virtual youth and immortality was once again an option. Harman didn’t know what he thought of this new option, but just the thought of choosing made him sick to his stomach.

“There’s another Firmary?” he said. He had spoken softly but his voice still echoed under the gigantic dome.

“Of course. There’s another on Sycorax’s orbital isle. It merely needs to be activated, as do the orbital power projectors and automated fax systems.”

“Sycorax?” said Harman. “The witch you said was Caliban’s mother?”

“Yes.”

Harman started to ask how they might get up to the orbital rings to activate the Firmary, power, and emergency fax system, but then he remembered that Savi’s sonie they kept at Ardis could fly to the rings. Harman took long breaths.

“Harman, friend of Noman,” said Prospero, “you need to listen to me now. You can leave this place when the eiffelbahn commences to run again in one hour and fifty-four minutes. Or you can go outside and leap to your death on the Khombu Glacier. All choices are yours. But it is as certain that night shall follow day that you shall never see your Ada again, nor return home to what is left of Ardis Hall, nor see your friends Daeman, Hannah, and the others survive this war with the voynix and calibani, nor ever again see a green Earth not turned blue and dead by Setebos’ hunger, if you do not waken Moira.”

Harman stepped away from the magus and balled both hands into fists. Prospero was leaning on his staff as if it was a walking stick, but Harman knew that one motion by Prospero with that staff would send him flying over the rail to his death on the jewel-encrusted marble walls hundreds of feet below. “There has to be another way to waken her,” he said through clenched teeth.

“There is not.”

Harman pounded the iron railing. “None of this makes any goddamned sense.”

“Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business,” said Prospero, his words echoing under the high vault. “At picked leisure, which shall be shortly, Moira will resolve you of every one of these happened accidents. But first you must wake her.”

Harman shook his head. “I don’t believe that I’m descended from this Ahman Whatshisname Khan Ho Tep,” he said. “How could I be? We old-styles were created by the posts centuries after Savi’s people disappeared in the Final Fax and…”

Prospero smiled. “Precisely. Where do you think your DNA templates and stored bodies were taken from, friend of Noman? Moira can explain it all to you and more. She is a post-human, the last of her kind. She knows how you can read all these books before our eiffelbahn car leaves this station. She may well know how you can defeat the voynix—or the calibani—or perhaps even defeat Caliban and his lord, Setebos himself. But you will have to decide soon whether your Ada’s life is worth one small infidelity. We now have one hour and forty-five minutes before the eiffelbahn starts running again. Fourteen hundred years of sleep and more cannot be shaken off in an instant. Moira will need some time to awaken, to eat, to understand our situation, before she will be ready to travel with us.”