“Stop it,” snapped Moira. “No one likes a showoff.”

“Where the hell are we?” asked Harman. He managed to get to his feet and shove back the drapes. They were passing through a beautiful wooded valley, the car moving along more than seven hundred feet above a winding river. Ancient ruins—a castle of some sort—were just visible along a ridgeline.

“We’ve just passed Cahors,” said Prospero. “We should be swinging south toward Lourdes at the next tower switching station.”

Harman rubbed his eyes but opened the glass door and stepped out. The forcefield deployed along the leading edge of the flat-sided cablecar kept him from being blown off the balcony. “What’s the matter?” he asked back through the open door. “Don’t you want to head north and visit your friend’s blue-ice cathedral?”

Moira looked startled. “How could you possibly know about that? There was no book in the Taj with that…”

“No,” agreed Harman, “but my friend Daeman saw the beginnings of that—the arrival of Setebos. I know from the books what the Many-Handed would do after he arrived in Paris Crater. So he’s still here… on Earth, I mean?”

“Yes,” said Prospero. “And he is no friend of ours.”

Harman shrugged. “You two brought him here the first time. Him and the others.”

“It was not our intention,” said Moira.

Harman had to laugh at that, no matter how much it made his head throb. “No, right,” said Harman. “You open an interdimensional door into darkness, leave it open, and then say ‘It was not our intention’ when something really vile comes through.”

“You’ve learned much,” said Prospero, “but you still do not understand all that you will have to if…”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Harman. “I’d listen to you more closely, Prospero, if I didn’t know that you’re mostly one of those things that came through the door. The post-humans spend a thousand years trying to contact Alien Others—changing the quantum setup of the entire solar system in the process—and get a many-handed brain and a retread cybervirus from a Shakespearean play instead.”

The old magus smiled at this. Moira shook her head in irritation, poured some coffee into a second cup, and drank without comment.

“Even if we wanted to drop by and say hello to Setebos,” said Prospero, “we could not. Paris Crater has no tower—has not had one since before the rubicon virus.”

“Yeah,” said Harman. He went back in, but stood looking out while he lifted his own cup and sipped coffee. “Why can’t I freefax?” he asked sharply.

“What?” said Moira.

“Why can’t I freefax? I know how to summon the function now without the training wheels symbol triggers, but it didn’t work when I got up. I want to jump back to Ardis.”

“Setebos shut down the planetary fax system,” said Prospero. “That includes freefaxing as well as the faxnode pavilions.”

Harman nodded and rubbed his cheek and chin. A week and a half of stubble, almost a real beard, rasped under his fingers. “So you two, and presumably Ariel, can still quantum teleport, but I’m stuck on this stupid cablecar until we get to the Atlantic Breach? You really expect me to walk across the ocean floor to North America? Ada will be dead of old age before I get to Ardis.”

“The nanotechnology that grants your people functions,” said Prospero, his old voice sounding sad, “did not prepare you for quantum teleportation.”

“No, but you can QT me home,” said Harman, looming over the old man where he now sat on the couch. “Touch me and QT. It’s that simple.”

“No, not that simple,” said Prospero. “And you’re literate enough now that you must know that you cannot compel either Moira or me to submit to threats or intimidation.”

Harman had accessed orbital clocks when he’d awakened and he knew he’d been unconscious for most of nine days. It made him want to smash the pot, cups, and table with his fist. “We’re on the eiffelbahn Route Eleven,” he said. “After we left Mount Everest, we must have followed the Hah Xil Shan Route up right past the Tarim Pendi Bubble. I could have found sonies there, weapons, crawlers, levitation harnesses, impact armor—everything Ada and our people need for their survival.”

“There were … detours,” said Prospero. “You would not have been safe if you had left the tower to explore the Tarim Pendi Bubble.”

“Safe!” snorted Harman. “Yes, we must live in a safe world, mustn’t we, magus and Moira?”

“You were more mature before the crystal cabinet,” said Moira with much disdain.

Harman didn’t argue the point. He set down his cup, leaned forward with both hands on the table, stared Moira in the eye, and said, “I know the voynix were sent forward through time by the Global Caliphate to kill Jews, but why did you posts store the nine thousand one hundred and fourteen of them and beam them into space? Why not just take them up to the Rings with you—or some other safe place? I mean, you’d already found the otherdimensional Mars and terraformed it. Why turn those people into neutrinos?”

“Nine thousand one hundred and thirteen,” corrected Moira. “Savi was left behind.”

Harman waited for an answer to his question.

Moira set down her coffee cup. Her eyes, just like Savi’s, showed every rush of anger she felt. “We told Savi’s people that they were being stored in the neutrino loop for a few thousand years while we cleaned up the untidiness on Earth,” she said softly. “They interpreted that to mean the RNA constructs everywhere left over from Dementia Times—dinosaurs and Terror Birds and cycad forests—but we also meant such little things as the voynix, Setebos, the witch in her city up in orbit…”

“But you didn’t clean up the voynix,” interrupted Harman. “The things were activated and built their Third Temple on the Mosque of the Dome…”

“We could not eliminate them,” said Moira, “but we reprogrammed them. Your people knew them as servants for fourteen hundred years.”

“Until they started slaughtering us,” said Harman. He turned his gaze on Prospero. “Which started after you directed Daeman and me on how to destroy your orbital city where you and Caliban were … imprisoned. All that to reclaim just one hologram of yourself, Prospero?”

“More the equivalent of a frontal lobe,” said the magus. “And the voynix would have been activated even if you had not destroyed the controlling elements in my city on the e-ring.”

“Why?”

“Setebos,” said Prospero. “His millennium and a half of being denied—of being kept and fed on alternate Earths and the terraformed Mars—had come to an end. When the Many-Handed opened the first Brane Hole to sniff the air of this Earth, the voynix reacted as programmed.”

“Programmed three thousand years ago,” said Harman. “The old-styles of my people aren’t all from Jewish descent like Savi’s folk.”

Prospero shrugged. “The voynix do not know that. All humans in Savi’s time were Jews, ergo… to the weak mind of all voynix… all humans are Jews. If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. If Crete is an island and England is an island, then…”

“Crete is England,” finished Harman. “But the rubicon virus did not come from a lab in Israel. That’s just another blood libel.”

“No, you are perfectly correct,” said Prospero. “The rubicon was indeed the one great contribution to science that the Islamic world gave the rest of the world in a two-thousand-year stretch of darkness.”

“Eleven billion dead,” said Harman, his voice shaking. “Ninetyseven percent of Earth’s population wiped out.”

Prospero shrugged again. “It was a long war.”

Harman laughed again. “And the virus got almost everyone but the group it was built to kill.”

“Israeli scientists had a long history of nanotech genetic manipulation by then,” said the magus. “They knew that if they did not inoculate their population’s DNA quickly, they could not do it at all.”

“They might have shared it,” said Harman.