Instead of the small rectangle of white-yellow light that the finder function generated, a large blue oval of light now floated six inches above his palm.

“Whoa!” cried Daeman, pulling his wrist from her grasp and flicking his hand wildly as if a huge insect had just landed in it. The blue oval flickered with it.

“Relax,” said Savi. “It’s blank. Just visualize someone.”

“Who?” Daeman actively did not like this sensation—his body doing something he did not know it could do.

“Anyone. Someone close to you.”

Daeman closed his eyes and visualized his mother’s face. When he opened his eyes again, the blue oval was busy with diagrams. Street grids, a river, words that he could not read—an aerial view of the black circle that could only be the crater in the heart of Paris Crater. The image zoomed and suddenly he was in a stylized structure, fifth floor, back domi near the crater—not his home. Two stylized human figures, cartoon characters but with real, human faces, were in bed, the female above the male, moving . . .

Daeman closed his hand into a fist, shutting off the oval.

“Sorry,” said Savi. “I forgot that no one’s using trace inhibitors these days. Your girlfriend?”

“My mother,” said Daeman, tasting bile. It had been Goman’s domi-complex across the crater—he knew the layout of the rooms from when he was a boy, playing in the inner rooms while his mother consorted with the tall, dark-skinned man with the wine-smooth voice. Daeman didn’t like Goman, and hadn’t known his mother was still seeing him. According to what Harman had said earlier, it was already night in Paris Crater.

“Let’s try to see where Hannah and Ada and the others are,” said Savi. She chuckled. “Although they may wish they’d activated farnet inhibitors as well.”

Daeman didn’t want to uncurl his fist.

“Recycle it,” said Savi.

“How?”

“How do you get rid of your arrow-finder?”

“I just think ‘off,’ “ said Daeman, mentally adding, “stupid .”

“Do it.”

Daeman thought, the blue oval winked off.

“You activate proxnet by thinking one yellow circle with a green triangle in it,” said Savi. She looked at her own palm and a bright yellow rectangle appeared above it.

Daeman did the same.

“Think of Hannah,” said Savi.

He did so. Both of their palms showed a continent—North America, but Daeman could not identify it—then a zoom to the south-central section, zoom north of the coastline, zoom to a complex series of unreadable words and topographic maps, zoom below stylized trees to a stylized female form with Hannah’s head on the cartoon body, walking alone—no, not alone, Daeman realized, for there was a question mark walking next to her.

Savi chuckled again. “Proxnet doesn’t know how to process Odysseus.”

“I don’t see Odysseus,” said Daeman.

Savi reached into his yellow holographic cube and touched the question mark. She pointed to two red figures at the edge of the cloud. “That’s us,” she said. “Ada and Harman must be off the grid to the north.”

“How do we know it’s Hannah?” asked Daeman, although he’d glimpsed the top of her head

“Think ‘close-up,’ “ said Savi. She showed him her palm cloud, which had zoomed lower, leveled out, and was watching the stylized Hannah with the real Hannah’s face walk between stylized trees, along a stylized stream.

He thought “close-up” and marveled at the clarity of the image. He could see the tree shadows on her features. She was speaking animatedly to the symbol—Savi had called it a question mark—floating next to her. Daeman was glad that he hadn’t found Hannah in the middle of sex.

Savi must have visualized Ada and Harman, for her yellow palm cloud shifted and showed two figures walking on topographic symbols somewhere north of the stationary red dots that she’d said were Savi and Daeman.

“Everybody’s alive, nobody eaten by dinosaurs,” said Savi. “But I wish to hell they’d get back so we could leave. It’s getting late. If this were the old days, I’d just call them on their palms and tell them to get their butts back here.”

“You can use this to communicate?” said Daeman, holding up his bare palm.

“Of course.”

“Why don’t we know that?” His voice came out sounding almost angry.

Savi shrugged. “You don’t know much of anything anymore, you so-called old-style humans.”

“What do you mean, ‘so-called old-style’?” demanded Daeman. He was angry now.

“Do you really think the lost-age humans, the old-styles, had all this genetically tweaked nano-machinery in their cells and bodies?” asked Savi.

“Yes,” said Daeman, although he realized that he knew absolutely nothing about the Lost Age old-styles, and cared less.

Savi said nothing for a minute. She looked tired to Daeman’s eye, but perhaps all ancient, pre-firmary humans looked this bad—he didn’t know.

“We should go fetch them,” she said at last. “ I’ll take Hannah and Odysseus, you get Ada and Harman. Set your palm on proxnet, activate your finder the usual way, and that’ll lead you to them. Tell them that the bus is leaving.”

Daeman had no idea what “bus” meant, but that wasn’t important. “Are there other functions?” he asked before she could walk off.

“Hundreds,” said Savi.

“Show me one,” challenged Daeman. He didn’t believe her—not hundreds—but even one or two more would make him popular at parties, of interest to young women.

Savi sighed and leaned back against the sonie. A wind had come up and stirred the sequoia branches far above them. “I can show you the function that finally drove the post-humans off the Earth,” she said softly. “The allnet.”

Daeman closed his fist again and pulled his hand away. “Not if it’s dangerous.”

“It’s not,” said Savi. “Not to us. Here, I’ll go first.” She lowered his arm, pulled his fingers open, and touched his palm in a way he found almost exciting. Then she set her own left palm next to his.

“Visualize four blue rectangles above three red circles above four green triangles,” she said softly.

Daeman frowned—that was difficult, the shapes skittered right at the edge of his ability to hold the image—but he managed at last, his eyes closed.

“Open your eyes,” said Savi.

He did so, wildly grabbing the sonie for support with both hands a second later.

There was no palm cloud. No unreadable maps or cartoon figures.

Instead, everything within his sight had been transformed. The nearby trees he had been ignoring except to borrow their shade were now towering complexities—transparent, layer upon layer of pulsing, living tissue, dead bark, vesicules, veins, dead inner material showing structural vectors and rings with columns of flowing data, the moving green and red of life—needles, xylem, phloem, water, sugar, energy, sunlight. He knew that if he could read the flowing data, he would understand exactly the hydrology of the living miracle that was that tree, know exactly how many foot-pounds of pressure it was taking to osmotically raise all that water from the roots—Daeman could look down and see the roots under the soil, see the energy exchange of water from the soil into those roots and the long voyage, hundreds of feet, from roots to the vertical tubules raising that water—hundreds of feet vertically! Like a giant sucking from a straw!—and then the lateral motion of the water, molecules of water in pipelines only molecules wide, out along branches fifty, sixty, seventy feet wide, narrowing, narrowing, life and nutrients in that water, energy from the sun . . .

Daeman looked up and saw sunlight for the discrete rain of energy it was—sunlight striking pine needles and being absorbed, sunlight striking the humus beneath his feet and warming the bacteria there. He could count the busy bacteria! The world around him was a torrent of information, a tidal wave of data, a million micro-ecologies interacting all at once, energy to energy. Even death was part of the complex dance of water, light, energy, life, recycling, growth, sex, and hunger flowing all around him.