“That’s quite a reach in speculation,” said Asteague/Che.

“Yes,” said Orphu. “But so is the creature we photographed that looks like a giant brain scuttling around on giant human hands. An improbable evolution in any universe, wouldn’t you say? But Robert Browning had an impressive imagination.”

“Are we going to meet Hamlet down there on Earth?” asked Suma IV with an audible sneer. “Oh,” said Mahnmut. “Oh. Oh, that would be nice.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“Orphu, where did you get this whole idea?”

Orphu sighed. Instead of responding verbally, a holographic projector in the comm pod atop the huge Ionian’s pitted and scarred carapace created an image that floated above the chart table.

Six fat books sat in a virtual bookcase. One of the books—Mahnmut saw that it was titled In Search of Lost Time—Volume III—The Guermantes Way—fluttered open to page 445. The image zoomed in on the type on the page.

Mahnmut suddenly realized that Orphu was optically blind—he couldn’t see what he was projecting. It meant that he had to have all of Proust’s six volumes memorized. The idea made Mahnmut want to howl.

Mahnmut read along with the others as the font floated in midair—

“People of taste tell us nowadays that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painter. But in so saying they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even at the height of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter or the original writer proceeds on the lines of the oculist. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always pleasant. When it is at an end the practitioner says to us: ‘Now look!’ And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we formerly saw, because they are

Renoirs, those Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky; we feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest which is identical with the one which when we first saw it looked like anything in the world except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable hues but lacking precisely the hues peculiar to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter or writer of original talent.”

All the moravecs by the chart table stood in silence, broken only by the ventilator hums, machine sounds, and soft background communication of the moravecs actually flying the Queen Mab at that critical moment as they approached the equatorial and polar rings of Earth.

Finally General Beh bin Adee broke the silence—“What solipsistic nonsense. What metaphysical garbage. What total horse manure.”

Orphu said nothing.

“Perhaps it is horse manure,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “But it’s the most plausible horse manure I’ve heard in the last nine months of surreality. And it’s earned Orphu of Io a ride in the hold of the submersible The Dark Lady when the dropship separates and drops into the Earth’s atmosphere in… two hours and fourteen minutes. Let us all go prepare.”

Orphu and Mahnmut were heading for the elevator—Mahnmut walking in a sort of daze, the huge Orphu floating silently on his repel-lors—when Asteague/Che called out, “Orphu!”

The Ionian swiveled and waited, politely aiming his dead cameras and eye-stalks at the Prime Integrator.

“You were going to tell us who the Voice is that we rendezvous with today.”

“Oh, well …” Mahnmut’s friend sounded embarrassed for the first time. “That’s just a guess.”

“Share it,” said Asteague/Che.

“Well, given my little theory,” said Orphu, “who would demand in a female voice to see our passenger—Odysseus, son of Laertes?”

“Santa Claus?” suggested General bin Adee.

“Not quite,” said Orphu. “Calypso.”

None of the moravecs seemed to recognize the name.

“Or from the universe our other new friends came from,” continued Orphu, “the enchantress also known as Circe.”

Harman had drowned but was not dead. In a few minutes he would wish he were dead.

The water—the golden fluid—filling the dodecahedral crystal cabinet was hyperoxygenated. As soon as his lungs completely filled, oxygen began moving through the thin-walled capillaries of his lungs and reentering his bloodstream. It was enough to keep his heart beating—start beating again, one should say, since it had skipped beats and stopped for half a minute during his drowning process—and enough to keep his brain alive… dulled, terrified, seemingly disconnected from his body, but alive. He could not breathe in, his instincts still cried out for air, but his body was getting oxygen.

Opening his eyes was a huge struggle and all it rewarded him with was a swirling vision of a billion golden words and ten billion throbbing images waiting to be born in his brain. He was vaguely aware of the six-sided glass panel of the flooded crystal cabinet and of a blurrier shape beyond which might have been Moira, or perhaps Prospero, or even Ariel, but these things were not important.

He still wanted to breathe air the correct way. If he had not been only semiconscious—tranquilized by the liquid in preparation for the trans-fer—his gag reflex alone would probably have killed him or driven him insane.

But the crystal cabinet reserved other means for driving him insane.

The information began pouring into Harman now. Information, Moira and Prospero had said, from a million old books. Words and thoughts from almost a million long-dead minds, more, because every book contained multitudes of other minds in its arguments, its refutations, its fervent agreements, its furious revisions and rebellions.

Information began to pour in, but it was like nothing Harman had ever felt or experienced before. He had taught himself to read over many decades, becoming the first old-style human being in uncounted centuries to make sense of the squiggles and curves and dots in the old books moldering away on shelves everywhere. But words from a book flow into the mind in a linear fashion at the pace of conversation—Harman had always heard a voice not quite his own reading each word aloud in his own mind after he learned to read. Sigling was a more rapid but less effective way to absorb a book—the nanotech function flowed the data from books down one’s arms into the brain like coal being shoveled into a hopper, without the slow pleasure and context of reading. And after sigling a book, Harman always found that some new data had arrived, but much of the meaning of the book had been lost due to absence of nuance and context. He never heard a voice in his head when sigling and often wondered if it had been designed as a function for old-styles in the Lost Era to absorb tables of dry information, packets of predigested data. Sigling was not the way to read a novel or a Shakespearean play—although the first Shakespearean play Harman had encountered was an amazing and moving piece called Romeo and Juliet. Until Harman had read Romeo and Juliet, he’d not known that such a thing as a “play” existed—his people’s only form of fictional entertainment had been the turin drama about the siege of Troy, and that only for the past decade.

But while reading was a slow, linear flow and sigling was like a sudden tickling of the brain that left a residue of information behind, this crystal cabinet was…

The Maiden caught me in the Wild Where I was dancing merrily She put me into her Cabinet And locked me up with a golden Key