Before Harman or Petyr could move, Hannah’s hand and forearm were free again. The young woman stared in horror at a green-gold blob that remained in her fist. As the three humans watched, the organ deliquesced, seeming to flow into Hannah’s palm until it was gone.

Hannah gasped again.

“It is only a telltale,” said Ariel. “When your lover’s condition changeth, thee shall know it now.”

“How will I know it?” asked Hannah. Harman saw that the girl was pale and sweating.

“Thee shall know it,” repeated Ariel.

They followed the palely glowing figure out into the green buckyglas corridor and then up the stairs again.

No one spoke as they followed Ariel through corridors and up frozen escalators and then along a helix of globules attached to the underside of the great suspension cable. They stopped in a glass room attached to the concrete and steel cross-support high on the south tower. Just beyond the glass, voynix on this horizontal segment of the Bridge silently threw themselves at the green wall, clawing and scrabbling but finding neither entry nor purchase. Ariel paid them no heed as he or she led them to the largest room along this string of globules. There were tables and chairs here, and machines set into countertops.

“I remember this place,” said Harman. “We ate dinner here our one night at the Bridge. Odysseus cooked his Terror Bird right outside there on the Bridge… during a lightning storm. Do you remember, Hannah?”

Hannah nodded, but her gaze was distracted. She was chewing her lower lip.

“I thought all of you might wish to eat,” said Ariel.

“We don’t have time …” began Harman, but Petyr interrupted.

“We’re hungry,” he said. “We’ll take time to eat.”

Ariel waved them to the round table. She or he used a microwave to heat three bowls of soup in wooden bowls, then brought the bowls to the table and set out spoons and napkins. She or he poured cold water into four glasses, set the glasses in place, and joined them at the table. Harman tasted the soup warily—found it delicious, filled with fresh vegetables—and ate it with pleasure. Petyr tasted his and ate slowly, suspiciously, keeping one eye on Ariel as the biosphere avatar stood by the counter. Hannah didn’t touch her soup. She seemed to have flowed into herself, out of reach, much as the green-gold glob from Ariel had.

This is madness, thought Harman. This greenish… creature… has one of our party reach into his or her chest and remove a golden organ, and the three of us come up to have hot soup while the voynix scrabble at the glass ten feet away and the self-aware avatar of the planetary biosphere acts as our servitor. I’ve gone mad.

Harman acknowledged to himself that he may have gone mad, but the soup was good. He thought of Ada and continued eating.

“Why are you here?” asked Petyr. He’d pushed the wooden bowl away from him and was staring intently at Ariel. His bow was by his chair.

“What would thee have me tell you?” asked Ariel.

“What the hell is going on?” asked Petyr, never one for small talk or subtleties. “Who the hell are you, really? Why are the voynix here and why are they attacking Ardis? What is that goddamned thing that Daeman saw in Paris Crater? Is it a threat… and if so, how can we kill it?”

Ariel smiled. “Always among the first questions of thy kind… what is it and how can I kill it?”

Petyr waited. Harman lowered his spoon.

“It is a good question,” said Ariel, “ for if thee were the first men to leap up, instead of the last, thou shoulds’t cry, ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!’ But it is a long tale, as long as dying Odysseus’, I think, and hard to tell over cold soup.”

“Then start by telling us again who you are,” said Harman. “Are you Prospero’s creature?”

“Aye, I was once. Not quite slave, not quite servant, but indentured to him.”

“Why?” asked Petyr. It had begun to rain hard, but the water droplets found no more purchase on the curved buckyglas than had the leaping voynix. Still, the pounding of the showers on the Bridge and girders made a background roar.

“The magus of the logosphere saved me from that damned witch Sycorax,” said Ariel, “whose servant then I was. For it was she who had mastered the deep codes of the biosphere, she who summoned Setebos, her lord, but when I showed myself too delicate to act her earthy and abhorred demands, she—in her most unmitigable rage—anchored me to a single, cloven pine, in which rift I did remain a dozen times a dozen years before being released by Prospero.”

“Prospero saved you,” said Harman.

“Prospero released me to do his bidding,” said Ariel. The thin, pale lips curved upward slightly. “And then demanded my service for another dozen times a dozen years.”

“And did you serve him?” asked Petyr.

“I did.”

“Do you serve him now?” asked Harman.

“I serve no man or magus now.”

“Caliban served Prospero once,” said Harman, trying to remember everything Savi had said, everything that the hologram named Prospero had told him up there on that orbital isle. “Do you know Caliban?”

“I do,” said Ariel. “A villain I do not love to look on.”

“Do you know if Caliban is back on Earth?” pressed Harman. He wished Daeman were here.

“Thou know’st it is truth,” said Ariel. “He seeks to turn all Earth into his old filthy-mantled pool, make the frozen sky his cell.”

The frozen sky his cell, thought Harman. “So Caliban is ally of this Setebos?” he asked aloud.

“Aye.”

“Why did you show yourself to us?” asked Hannah. The beautiful young woman’s gaze was still distracted by sorrow, but she had turned her head to look at Ariel.

Ariel began to sing—

“Where the bee sucks, there suck I

In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

There I crouch when owls do cry.

On the bat’s back I do fly

After summer merrily:

Merrily, merrily, shall I live now

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.”

“The creature’s mad,” said Petyr. He stood abruptly and walked to the bridge-side wall. Three voynix leapt at him, struck the field above the buckyglas, and dropped away. One of them managed to sink its bladed hands into the Bridge concrete and arrested its fall. The other two disappeared in the clouds below.

Ariel laughed softly. Then he or she wept. “Our shared Earth is under siege. The war has come here. Savi is dead. Odysseus is dying. Setebos would fain kill everything I am and come from and exist to protect. You old-style humans are either enemies or allies… I choose the latter. You have no vote in the matter.”

“You’ll help us fight the voynix, Caliban, and this Setebos creature?” asked Harman.

“No, thee shall help me.”

“How?” said Hannah.

“I have tasks for thee. First, you came for weapons…”

“Yes!” said Hannah, Petyr, and Harman in unison.

“Those two who stay shall find them in a secret room at the bottom of the south tower, behind the old, dead computing machines. You will see a circle on the opaque, greenglass wall, having then a pentacle inscribed within. Say merely ‘open’ and you will find the room where sly Odysseus and poor, dead Savi did conceal their little Lost-Era toys.”

“You said the two who stay?” said Petyr.

“One of thee three should take the sonie home to Ardis Hall before yon Ardis falls,” said Ariel. “The second of thee should stay here and tend to Odysseus if he does not die, for he alone knows the secrets of Sycorax, since once he did lie with her—and no man lies with Sycorax without suffering a change. The third of thee shall come with me.”

The three people looked at each other. With the heavy rain and cloudy light, it was as if they were deep underwater, staring at each other through cold green gloom.