“You’re welcome,” said Prospero.

“When we wanted to take a human form—always a female human form, I might add, for all of us—we just borrowed one.”

“But how?” said Harman.

Moira sighed. “Are the rings still in the sky?”

“Of course,” said Harman.

“Polar and equatorial both?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think they are, Harman Prometheus? There are more than a million discrete objects up there… what do your people think they are?”

Harman licked his lips again. The air here in the great temple-tomb was very dry. “We know our Firmary, where we were rejuvenated, was up there. Most of us think the other objects up there are the posts—your people’s—homes. And your machines. Cities on orbiting islands like Prospero’s. I was there last year on Prospero’s Isle, Moira. I helped bring it down.”

“You did?” She looked at the magus again. “Well, good for you, young Prometheus. But you’re wrong in thinking that the million orbiting objects, most of them much smaller than Prospero’s Isle, were habitats for my kind or machines serving solely our purposes. There are a dozen or so habitats, of course, and several thousand giant wormhole generators, black hole accumulators, early experiments in our interdimensional travel program, Brane Hole generators… but most of the orbiting objects up there are serving you.”

“Me?”

“Do you know what faxing is?”

“I’ve done it all my life,” said Harman.

“Yes, of course, but do you know what it is?”

Harman took a breath. “We’d never really thought about it, but on our voyages last year Savi and Prospero explained that the faxnode pavilions actually turn our bodies into coded energy and then our bodies, minds, and memories are rebuilt at another node.”

Moira nodded. “But the fax pavilions and nodes are not necessary,” she said. “They were simply ruses to keep you old-style humans from wandering in places you shouldn’t go. This fax form of teleportation was staggeringly heavy on computer memory, even with the most advanced Calabi-Yau DNA and bubble-memory machines. Do you have any idea how much memory is required to store the data on just one human being’s molecules, much less the holistic wavefront of his or her personality and memories?”

“No,” said Harman.

Moira gestured toward the top of the dome, but Harman realized that she was actually gesturing toward the sky beyond and the polar and equatorial rings turning up there now against the dark blue sky. “A million orbital memory banks,” said the woman. “Each one dedicated to one of you old-style humans. And in many of the other clumsy orbital machines, the black-hole-powered teleportation devices themselves—GPS satellites, scanners, reducers, compilators, receivers, and transmitters—somewhere up there above you every night of your life, my Harman Prometheus, was a star with your name on it.”

“Why a million?” asked Harman.

“That was thought to be a viable minimum herd population,” said Moira, “although I suspect there are far fewer of you than that today since we allowed each woman to have only one child. In my day, there were only nine thousand three hundred and fourteen of your subspecies of humans—those with nanogenetic functions installed and active—and a few hundred thousand dying old-old-style humans, those like my beloved Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep, the last of his royal breed.”

“What are the voynix?” asked Harman. “Where did they come from? Why did they act as silent servants for so long and then start attacking my people after Daeman and I destroyed Prospero’s Isle and the Firmary? How do we stop them?”

“So many questions,” sighed Moira. “If you want them all answered, you will need context. To gain context, you need to read these books.”

Harman’s head jerked and he looked up and down at the curving inner dome lined with books. He could not do the mathematics on the square or cubic feet of books here, but he imagined—wildly, blindly—that there must be at least a million volumes on these shelves.

“Which books?” he asked.

“All of these books,” said Moira, lifting her hand from his to gesture in a circle toward everything. “You can, you know.”

“Moira, no,” Prospero said again. “You’ll kill him.”

“Nonsense,” said the woman. “He’s young.”

“He’s ninety-nine years old,” said Prospero, “more than seventy-five years older than Savi’s body was when you cloned it for your own purposes. She had memories then. You carry them now. Harman is no tabula rasa.”

Moira shrugged. “He’s strong. Sane. Look at him.”

“You’ll kill him,” said Prospero. “And with him, one of our best weapons against Setebos and Sycorax.”

Harman was very angry now, but also excited. “What are you talking about?” he demanded, pulling his hand back when Moira threatened to touch it again with hers. “Are you talking about me sigling all these books? It would take months… years. Decades, maybe.”

“Not sigling,” said Moira, “but eating them.”

“Eating them,” repeated Harman, thinking, Was she mad before she entered the time coffin or have the centuries of being replicated there, cell by cell, neuron by neuron, made her mad?

“Eating them,” agreed Moira. “In the sense that the Talmud spoke of eating books—not reading them, but eating them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you know what the Talmud is?” asked Moira.

“No.”

Moira pointed toward the apex of the dome again, some seventy stories above them. “Up there, my young friend, in a tiny little cupola made of the clearest glass, there is a cabinet formed of gold and pearl and crystal and I have the golden key. Within, it opens into a world and a little lovely moony night.”

“Like your sarcophagus?” asked Harman. His heart was pounding.

“Nothing like my sarcophagus,” laughed Moira. “That coffin was just another node on your faxing merry-go-round, replicating me through the centuries until it was time to wake and go to work. I’m talking about a machine that will allow you to read all these books in depth before the eiffelbahn car leaves the Taj station in …” She glanced at her palm. “Fifty-eight minutes.”

“Do not do this, Moira,” said Prospero. “He will do us no good in the war against Setebos if he is dead or a drooling moron.”

“Silence, Prospero,” snapped Moira. “Look at him. He’s already a moron. It’s as if his entire race has been lobotomized since Savi’s day. He might as well be dead. This way, if the cabinet works and he survives, he may be able to serve himself and us.” She took Harman’s hand again. “What do you most want in this universe, Harman Prometheus?”

“To go home to see my wife,” said Harman.

Moira sighed. “I can’t guarantee that the crystal cabinet—the knowledge and nuance of all these books that my poor, dead Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo accumulated over his centuries—will allow you to freefax home to your wife… what is her name?”

“Ada.” The two syllables made Harman want to weep. It made him want to weep twice—once for missing her, again for betraying her.

“To Ada,” said Moira. “But I can guarantee that you will not get home alive to see her unless you take this chance.”

Harman stood and stepped out onto the railingless marble ledge three hundred feet above the cold marble floor below. He looked up at the center of the dome almost seven hundred feet above but could see nothing except a sort of haze there where the last of the metal catwalks converged like black and almost invisibly thin spiderwebs.

“Harman, friend of Noman …” began Prospero.

“Shut up,” Harman said to the magus of the logosphere.

To Moira he said, “Let’s go.”