A storm was raging far above them. The rings and stars had long since disappeared and lightning illuminated the vertical walls of water on either side and the obscenely pale slash of the Breach stretching away so far to the east and west that the lightning did not last long enough to show its immensity.

Now, however, the lightning flashes overlapped, thunder exploding and echoing down the hallway of energy-bound water, and, lying on his back snug in his silk-thin sleeping bag and thermskin, Harman could see the waves fifty stories above, rising and thrashing another hundred or so feet as the Atlantic Ocean threw itself into the frenzy of the storm. The whipping, writhing clouds were only a few hundred feet above the towering waves. And while the dark depths on either side stayed calm here more than five hundred feet below the surface, Harman could see the layers of agitation far above him. Also agitated were the funnel-bridges—he didn’t have a good name for the transparent tubes and cones and energy-bound tunnels of water that connected the Atlantic south of the Breach to the Atlantic north of it, and Moira simply called them “conduits.” There was such a funnel-bridge visible two hundred feet above the dry bottom of the Breach, visible when the lightning flashed at least, less than a half mile to the west of where they had camped and another a mile or so behind them to the east. Both water tunnels were broiling with activity, huge quantities of white water surging from one side of the Breach to the other. Harman wondered if more water was forced across the Breach during storms. Certainly there was more water falling on them now—the shifting energy walls kept the high waves from pouring over and drowning them, but the spray drifted down as a constant mist. Harman’s outer clothes were tucked away in his rucksack, which was completely waterproof he’d discovered, as was the thinskin sleeping bag, but he’d left the osmosis mask open on his thermskin cowl and his face was damp. Whenever he licked his lips, he tasted salt.

Lightning struck the floor of the Breach less than a hundred yards from them. The percussion from the thunder shook Harman’s molars.

“Should we move?” he shouted at Moira, who was in her own thermskin—she stripped naked and pulled on the thermskin right in front of him with no sign of embarrassment, almost as if they were lovers, which, he realized with a blush, they had been.

“What?” shouted Moira. His voice had been lost in the crash of wave and roars of thunder.

“SHOULD WE MOVE?”

She slid her sleeping skin closer and leaned over to speak close to his ear. She’d left her face exposed as well and was just lying on the sleeping bag, and the mist had soaked the outer layer of the skintight thermskin, showing every rib and rise of hipbone.

“The only place we can move to be safe,” she said loudly next to his ear, “is underwater. We’d be safe from the lightning there at the bottom of the ocean. Want to adjourn?”

Harman didn’t. The thought of stepping through the forcefield barrier into that almost absolute dark and terrible pressure—even if the magical thermskin would keep him from drowning or being crushed—was more than he wanted to deal with this night. Besides, the storm seemed to be letting up a bit. The waves up there only looked to be sixty or eighty feet tall now.

“No thanks,” he shouted back to Moira. “I’ll risk it here.”

He rubbed his face dry and pulled the film-thin osmosis mask in place. Without the salt sting in his eyes and mouth, it was easier to concentrate.

And Harman had a lot to concentrate on. He was still trying to sort out his new human functions.

Many of these newly acquired—although “identified” would be a better word—functions had been interdicted along with his freefax abilities. For instance, Harman clearly saw how he could trigger access to the logosphere to acquire information or to communicate with anyone anywhere, but those functions had been interrupted by whoever or whatever was running the rings these days.

Other functions worked just fine but did not necessarily add to Harman’s peace of mind. There was a medical monitor function that, when queried, told and showed Harman that his diet of food bars and water would lead to certain vitamin deficiencies if he continued it for more than three months. It also informed him that calcium was building up in his left kidney—resulting in a kidney stone in a year or less—that there were two polyps in his colon since his last Firmary visit, that his muscles were deteriorating because of age—it had, after all, been ten years since his last Firmary tune-up, that a strep virus was failing to set up a colony in his throat because of his genetic-cued defenses, that his blood pressure was too high, and that there was the slightest of shadows on his left lung that should demand immediate attention by Firmary sensors.

Great, thought Harman, rubbing his thermskinned chest as if the slight shadow that he was sure was lung cancer was already beginning to ache. What do I do with this information? The Firmaries are a little out of bounds to me right now.

Other functions served more immediate purposes. In the last few days he’d discovered that he had a replay function through which he could relive with amazing clarity—much more like experiencing something in reality than through memory—any point or event in his life, pinpointing the memory in a protein memory bundle rather than in his brain, uploading it, and timing the replay to the second. He’d already replayed a few minutes of his first meeting with Ada nine times (his memory couldn’t have told him that she’d been wearing that light blue gown on the evening he met her at a fax-in party) and had replayed moments from the last time they’d made love more than thirty times. Moira had even commented on his fixed stare and robotic walk when he’d been replaying. She knew what he was up to, especially since neither his thermskin nor outer clothes had hidden his reaction.

Harman had enough sense to know that this function was addictive and that he must use it very, very carefully—especially while hiking across the bottom of the ocean—but he’d flashed back to certain dialogues he’d had with Savi to mine more data out of things she’d said about the past or about the rings or about the world—things that had seemed nonsensical or mysterious then, but made more sense now after the crystal cabinet. He also realized, with a great sadness, that Savi had been working from very incomplete information in her centuries of attempts to get up to the rings to negotiate with the post-humans, including her lack of knowledge of real spaceships stored in the Mediterranean Basin or the proper way to contact Ariel via Prospero’s private logo-sphere connections.

Seeing Savi so clearly through replay vision also made Harman realize how much younger this Moira-iteration of Savi’s face and body were, but also how much alike the women were.

Harman trolled through the other functions. Proxnet, farnet, and all-net were all down with the fax and logosphere functions—evidently everything internal worked; anything demanding use of the planetary system of satellites, orbital mass accumulators, fax and data transmitters, and so forth did not work.

But why did his internal indicators tell him that the sigl function was not working? Harman would have thought that sigling was as body-dependent as his medical monitoring, which worked all too well. Did the sigl function depend upon relay satellites in some way? His crystal cabinet data did not explain this.

“Moira?” he shouted. Only after he’d shouted did he realize that the storm had all but passed over and that except for the slide-crash of waves far above, the sound had abated. Also, he was wearing his osmosis mask with its inset microphones so poor Moira had heard his shout in her cowl earphones.