This information Harman was receiving was not entering through his eyes, ears, or any of the other human senses nature had evolved to bring data to the nerves and brain. It was not—strictly speaking—passing into him through touch, although the billion-billion pinpricks of information in the golden liquid passed through each pore of his skin and each cell of his flesh.

DNA, Harman knew now, likes the standard double helix model. Evolution had chosen the double helix for a variety of reasons to carry its most sacred cargo, but primarily because it was the easiest and most effective way for free energy to flow—forward or back—as that energy determines the folds, joins, forms, and function of such gigantic molecules as proteins, RNA, and DNA. Chemical systems always move toward the state of lowest free energy, and free energy is minimized when two complementary strands of nucleotides pair up like a double Shaker staircase.

But the post-humans who had redesigned the hardware and software of Harman’s branch of the old-style human genome had redesigned a sizeable percentage of the redundant DNA in his decanted species’ bodies. Instead of right-handed twisting B-DNA, the post-humans had set in place left-handed Z-DNA double helixes of the usual size, about two nanometers in diameter. They used these ZDNA molecules as keystones, lifting from them a scaffolding of more complex DNA helixes such as double-crossover molecules, tying these ropes of DX DNA together into leakproof protein cages. Within those billions upon billions of scaffolded protein cages deep within Harman’s bones, muscle fibers, gut tissue, testicles, toes, and hair follicles were biological reception and organizing macromolecules serving still more complex caged clusters of nanoelectronic organic memory storage clusters.

Harman’s entire body—every cell—was eating the Taj Moira’s library of a million volumes.

The Cabinet is formed of Gold And Pearl & Crystal shining bright And within it opens into a World And a little lovely Moony Night

The process hurt. It hurt a lot. Drowned and floating belly-up now like a dead carp in the golden liquid of the crystal cabinet, Harman felt the pain of a leg or arm that had gone to sleep and that was slowly, painfully coming awake again—the limb being pricked by ten thousand sharp, hot needles. But this was not just his leg or his arm. Cells in every part of his body, cells on every surface inside and out, molecules in every cell’s nucleus and every cell’s wall, were awakening to the data flowing the free energy route through the Yan-Shen-Yurke DNA circuits everywhere in the collective organism called Harman.

It hurt beyond Harman’s ability to imagine or contain such hurt. He opened his mouth repeatedly to scream from the pain, but there was no air in his lungs, no air around him, and his vocal cords merely vibrated in the golden liquid in which he’d drowned.

Metallic nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, and more complex nanoelectronic devices everywhere in Harman’s body and brain, elements that had been there since before his birth, felt current, were polarized, rotated, realigned in three dimensions, and began conducting and storing information, each complex DNA bridge out of the trillions waiting in Harman’s cells rotating, realigning, recombining, and securing data across the DNA backbone of his most essential structure.

Harman could see Moira’s face near the glass, her dark Savi-eyes peering in, her crystal-warped expression expressing something—anxiety? Remorse? Sheer curiosity?

Another England there I saw Another London with its Tower Another Thames & other Hills And another pleasant Surrey Bower

Books—Harman realized through the Niagral cascade of pain—were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

As a child in his crèche, Harman had taken rare sheets of vellum and even more rare markers called pencils and covered the sheets with dots, then spent hours trying to connect all the dots with lines. There always seemed to be another possible line to draw, another two dots to connect, and before he was done the sheet of creamy vellum had become an almost solid smear of graphite. In later years, Harman had wondered if his young mind had been trying to capture and express his perception of the fax portals he had stepped through since he was old enough to walk—old enough to be carried by his mother, actually. Nine million combinations rising from three hundred known faxnode pavilions.

But this connect-the-dots of information to storage macromolecule cages was thousands of times more complex and infinitely more painful.

Another Maiden like herself Translucent lovely shining clear Threefold each in the other closed—O what a trembling fear

O what a smile! a threefold Smile Filled me, that like a flame I burnd I bent to Kiss the lovely Maid And found a Threefold Kiss returnd

Harman knew now that William Blake had made his living as an engraver, and not that popular or successful an engraver at that. [Everything is context.] Blake died on a hot and muggy Sunday evening—August 12, 1827—and on the day of his death, almost no one in the general public knew that the quiet but often angry engraver had been a poet respected by several of his better known contemporaries, including Samuel Coleridge. [Context is to data what water is to a dolphin.] [Dolphins were a species of aquatic animal driven to extinction early in the Twenty-second Century A.D.] William Blake quite literally considered himself a prophet along the lines of Ezekiel or Isaiah, although he held nothing but contempt for the mysticisms, dabblings in the occult, or theosophies so popular in his day. [Ezekiel Mao Kent was the name of the marine biologist who was by the side of Almorenian d’Azure, the last dolphin, who died of cancer in the Bengal Oceanarium on the hot, muggy evening of August 11, 2134 A.D. The N.U.N. Applied Species Committee decided not to replenish the family Delphinidae from stored DNA but, rather, to let the species join all other Delphinidae and other great marine-cetacean mammals in peaceful extinction.]

The data itself, Harman found as he stared, naked, out from the center of his own crystal, was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.

I strove to sieze the inmost Form With ardor fierce & hands of flame But burst the Crystal Cabinet And like a Weeping Babe became

A weeping Babe upon the wild And Weeping Woman pale reclind And in the outward air again I filld with woes the passing Wind

Harman reached the limit of his ability to absorb such pain and complexity. He stirred his limbs in the thick, gold liquid, found that he had less mobility than an embryo, that his fingers had turned to fins, that his muscles had atrophied to weak rags, and that this pain was the true medium and placental fluid of the universe.

I am not a tabula rasa!! he wanted to scream at that bastard Prospero and that ultimate bitch Moira. This would kill him.

Heaven and Hell are born together, Harman thought and knew Blake had thought it first, knowing that Blake had thought it in refutation to Swedenborg’s Calvinistic belief in Predestination:

Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce And dost not know the Garment from the Man

Stop that! Stop it! Please God

Tho thou art Worshiped by the Names Divine Of Jesus & Jehovah: thou art still The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill

Harman screamed despite the fact that there was no air in his lungs to form the scream, no air in his throat to allow the scream, and no air in the tank to conduct the scream. [The naked device, one of six trillion, consists of four double helixes connected in the middle by two unpaired DNA strands. The crossover region can assume two different states—the universe often enjoys assuming a binary form. Rotating the two helixes a half turn on one side of the central bridge junction creates the so-called PX or paranemic crossover state.] Do this three billion times per second and one achieves a purity of torture never dreamt of by the most fanatical designers of the Inquisition’s most ingenious racks, clamps, extractors, and sharp edges.