Harman had to smile. Moira could be… no, was … annoying with her many little in-jokes and obscure references, but he understood now why she kept calling him “my young Prometheus.” Prometheus, according to Hesiod, meant “foresighted” or “prophetic” and the character Prometheus in Aeschylus, and in the works of Shelley, Wu, and other great poets, was the Titan revolutionary who stole essential knowl-edge—fire—from the gods and brought it down to the groveling human race, elevating them into something almost like gods. Almost.

“That’s why you disconnected us from our functions,” Harman said, not even realizing that he was speaking aloud.

“What?”

He looked at the post-human woman walking next to him in the gathering gloom. “You didn’t want us to become gods. That’s why you never activated our functions.”

“Of course.”

“Yet all of the posts except you chose to go off to another world or dimension and play at being gods.”

“Of course.”

Harman understood. The first necessity and prerogative for a god, small “g” or capital “G,” was to have no other gods before him or her. He concentrated on his thoughts again.

Harman’s thinking had changed since the crystal cabinet. Where it once centered on things, places, people, and emotions, it now was mostly figurative—a complicated dance of metaphors, metonymies, ironies, and synecdoches. With billions of facts—things, places, and peo-ple—set into his very cells, the focus of his thoughts had shifted to the connections and shades and nuances and recognition side of things. Emotions were still there—stronger, if anything—but where his feelings had once surged like some big, booming bass overpowering the rest of the orchestra, they now danced like a delicate but powerful violin solo.

Much too much murky metaphor for a mere measly man, thought Harman, looking with irony at the presumption of his own thoughts. And an awful lot of alliteration from an anxious asshole.

Despite his self-mockery, he knew that he now owned the gift of being able to look at things—people, places, things, feelings, himself—with the kind of recognition that can only come from maturing into nuance, growing into oneself, and in the learning how to accept ironies and metaphors and synecdoches and metonymies not only in language, but in the hardwiring of the universe.

If he could reconnect with his own kind, get back to any old-style human enclave, not just back to Ardis, his new functions would change humankind forever. He would not force them on anyone, but since this iteration of homo sapiens was very close to being eradicated from this post-postmodern world, he doubted if anyone under attack by voynix, calibani, and a giant, soul-sucking brain skittering around on multiple hands would object too strenuously to gaining new gifts, powers, and a survival advantage.

Are these functions—in the long run—a survival advantage for my species?

Harman asked himself.

The answer, which came in his own mental voice, was the clear cry of a Zen master hearing a stupid question from one of his acolytes—“Mu!”—meaning roughly, “Unask the question, stupid.” This syllable was often to followed by the equally monosyllabic “Qwatz!” which was the Zen master’s cry simultaneous with leaping and striking the stupid student about the head and shoulders with the heavy, weighted teacher’s staff.

Mu. There is no “long run” here—that will be for my sons and daughters and their children to decide. Right now, everything—everything—exists in the short run.

And the threat of being disemboweled by a humpbacked voynix tends to focus the mind wonderfully well. If the functions were turned back on—Harman knew why the old functions, including the finder function, allnet, proxnet, farnet, as well as sigling, were not working—someone up there in the rings had turned off the transmissions as surely as they’d switched off the fax machines.

If the functions were turned back on…

But how could they be turned back on?

Once again, Harman studied the problem of getting back up to the rings and switching everything back on—power, servitors, fax, all of the functions.

He needed to know if there were others besides Sycorax up there, waiting, and what their defenses were. The million books he’d ingested in the crystal cabinet had no opinion on this crucial question.

“Why won’t you or Prospero QT me up to the rings?” asked Harman. He turned to look at Moira and realized that he could just barely see her in the failing light. Her face was illuminated mostly by ringlight.

“We choose not to,” she said in her most maddening Bartleby fashion.

Harman thought of the slug-throwing gun in his pack on the back. Would brandishing a weapon in her direction—and allowing her to read the sincerity in his face since the post-humans had their own functions for reading and understanding human reactions—would that combination convince her to quantum teleport him to Ardis or the rings?

He knew it wouldn’t. She would never have given him the gun if it were a threat to her. She had some countermeasure built into the weapon—perhaps she could keep it from firing just by the force of her post-human thoughts, some simple brainwave circuitry built into the firing mechanism—or something equally as foolproof and bulletproof built into her.

“You and the magus went to all that trouble to kidnap me, ship me across India to the Himalayas, just to stick me in the crystal cabinet, drown me, and educate me,” said Harman. These were the most words he’d strung together since they’d begun hiking the Breach, and he realized how banal and redundant they were. “Why did you do that if you don’t want me to prevail against Setebos and the other bad guys?”

Moira did not smile again. “If you’re meant to get to the rings, you’ll find a way up there.”

“ ‘Meant to’ sounds like some sort of Calvinist predestination,” said Harman, stepping over a low lump of desiccated coral. The Breach so far had been surprisingly easy—iron bridges over the few ocean-bottom abysses they’d encountered, paths blasted or lasered into rocky or coral ridges, gentle inclines for the most part and metal cables to help them descend or ascend where the going was steep—so Harman had not had to spend much time watching his feet. But it was hard to see detail in this falling light.

Moira had not responded or visibly reacted to his feeble witticism, so he said, “There are other Firmaries.”

“Prospero told you that before.”

“Yeah, but it’s just sunk in. We old-styles don’t have to die or rebuild medicine from scratch. There are more rejuvenation tanks up there.”

“Yes, of course. The post-humans prepared to serve an old-style population of one million. There are other Firmaries and blue-worm tanks on other orbital isles in both the equatorial and polar rings. Surely this is obvious.”

“Yes, obvious,” said Harman, “but you have to remember that I have all the savvy of a newborn babe.”

“I have not forgotten that,” said Moira.

“I don’t have specific data on where the other Firmaries are,” said Harman. “Can you pinpoint them for me?”

“I’ll point them out for you after we douse the campfire tonight,” Moira said drily.

“No. I mean on a chart of the rings.”

“Do you have a chart of the rings, my young Prometheus? Is that part of what you ate and drank back at the Taj?”

“No,” said Harman, “but you can draw one for us—orbital coordinates, everything.”

“Are you pondering immortality so soon after birth then, Prometheus?”

Am I? wondered Harman. Then he remembered his last thought before the realization that other Firmaries were in mothballs up there in the post-human rings—it had been of Ada, pregnant and injured.

“Why were all the operative fax-in/fax-out healing tanks on Prospero’s isle?” he asked. Even as he asked the question, he’d seen the answer like a memory of a forgotten nightmare.