“The posts had rigged the whole Earth with the limited form of energy-data transmission and retrieval that you call faxing, and now they were experimenting—playing really—with time travel, quantum teleportation, and other dangerous things. A lot of their playing around was predicated on ancient sciences from as far back as the Nineteenth Century—black-hole physics, wormhole theory, quantum mechanics—but what they relied on most was the Twentieth Century discovery that, at its heart, everything is information. Data. Consciousness. Matter. Energy. Everything is information.”

“I don’t understand,” said Harman. He sounded angry.

“Daeman, you’ve shown Harman the farnet function. Why don’t you show him the allnet?”

“Allnet?” repeated Daeman, alarm in his voice.

“You know, four blue triangles above three red circles above four green triangles.”

“No!” said Daeman. He thought off his own palm function. The blue glow winked out.

Savi looked at Harman. “If you want to begin to understand why we’re here tonight, why the post-humans left Earth forever, and why the calibani and voynix are around, visualize four blue triangles above three red circles above four green triangles. It gets easier with practice.”

Harman looked suspiciously at Daeman, but then he closed his eyes and concentrated.

Daeman concentrated on not visualizing those shapes. He forced himself to remember Ada naked as a teenager, to remember the last time he had sex with a girl, to remember his mother scolding him . . .

“My God!” cried Harman.

Daeman looked at the other man. Harman had stood, stumbling out of his chair, and was whirling, moving his head in jerks, staring open-mouthed at everything.

“What do you see?” Savi asked softly. “What do you hear?”

“God . . . God . . .” moaned Harman. “I see . . . Jesus Christ. Everything. Everything. Energy . . . the stars are singing . . . the corn in the fields is speaking, to each other, to the Earth. I see . . . the crawler’s full of little microbes, repairing it, cooling it . . . I see . . . my God, my hand!” Harman was studying his hand with a look of total horror and revelation.

“Enough for the first time,” said Savi. “Think the word ‘off.’ “

“Not . . . yet . . .” gasped Harman. He stumbled against the glass wall of the passenger sphere and clawed at it weakly as if trying to get out. “It’s so . . . so beautiful . . . I can almost . . .”

“Think off!” roared Savi.

Harman blinked, fell against the wall, and turned a pale, staring face in their direction.

“What was that?” he said. “I saw . . . everything. Heard . . . everything. ”

“And understood nothing,” said Savi. “But neither do I when I’m on allnet. Perhaps even the post-humans didn’t understand it all.”

Harman staggered to his chair and collapsed into it. “But where did it come from?”

“Millennia ago,” said Savi, “the real old-style humans had a crude information ecology they called the Internet. Eventually they decided to tame the Internet and created a thing called Oxygen—not the gas, but artificial intelligences floating in and over and above the Internet, directing it, connecting it, tagging it, leading humans through it when they went hunting for people or information.”

“Proxnet?” said Daeman. His hands were shaking and he hadn’t even accessed farnet or allnet tonight.

Savi nodded. “What led to proxnet. Eventually, Oxygen evolved into the noosphere, a logosphere, a planet-wide datasphere. But that wasn’t enough for the post-humans. They connected this super-Internet noosphere with the biosphere, the living components of the Earth. Every plant and animal and erg of energy on the planet, which—when connected to the noosphere—created a complete and total information ecology touching everything on, above, and within the Earth, a sort of sentient omnisphere that lacked only self-awareness and identity. Then the post-humans foolishly gave it that self-awareness—not just designing an overriding artificial intelligence, but allowing it to evolve its own persona. This super-noosphere called itself Prospero. Does that name mean anything to either of you?”

Daeman shook his head and looked at Harman, but even though the older man knew how to read books, he also shook his head.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Savi. “Suddenly the post-humans had an . . . opponent . . . that they couldn’t control. And it wasn’t over yet. The post-humans were using self-evolving programs and projects of other sorts as well, allowing their quantum computers to pursue their own goals. As impossible as it is to believe, they achieved stable wormholes, they achieved time travel, and they transported people—old-style humans as guinea pigs, since they’d never risk their own immortal lives—through timespace gates via quantum teleportation.”

“What does that have to do with the calibani?” persisted Harman, obviously still shaking the images from the allnet out of his head.

Savi smiled. “The Prospero noosphere entity either has an advanced set of irony or none at all. The sentient biosphere, he christened it Ariel—a sort of Earth spirit—and together, Ariel and Prospero created the calibani. They evolved a strain of humanity—not old-style, not post, not eloi—into that monster you saw on the cross tonight.”

“Why?” asked Daeman. He barely choked the single syllable out.

Savi shrugged. “Enforcers. Prospero is a peaceful entity, or so it likes to think. But its calibani are monsters. Killers.”

“Why?” This time it was Harman asking the question.

“To stop the voynix,” said the old woman. “To chase the post-humans off the Earth before they could do more harm. To enforce whatever whim the Prospero and Ariel points of the noosphere trinity wish enforced.”

Daeman tried to understand this. He failed. Finally he said, “Why was the thing on a cross?”

“It wasn’t on the cross,” said Savi. “It was in the cross. Recharging cradle.”

Harman looked so pale that Daeman thought the other man might be ill. “Why did the posts create the voynix?”

“Oh, they didn’t create the voynix,” said Savi. “The voynix came from somewhere else, serving someone else, with their own agenda.”

“I always thought they were machines,” said Daeman. “Like the other servitors.”

“No,” said Savi.

Harman looked out into the night. The rain had stopped and the lightning and thunder had moved over the horizon. A few stars were appearing between cloud tatters. “The calibani keep the voynix out of the Basin here,” he said.

“They’re one of the things that keeps the voynix away,” agreed Savi. She sounded pleased, her voice holding a teacher’s tone, as if one of her students had turned out not to be a total moron.

“But why haven’t the calibani killed us?” asked Harman.

“Our DNA,” said Savi.

“Our what?” said Daeman.

“Never mind, my darlings. Suffice it to say that I borrowed a snippet of each of your hair and that, along with a lock of my own, has saved us all. I made a deal with Ariel, you see. Allow us to pass this once, and I promised to save the soul of the Earth.”

“You’ve met the Ariel Earth-entity?” asked Harman.

“Well, not met him exactly,” said Savi. “But I’ve chatted with him across the noosphere-biosphere interface. We made a deal.”

Daeman knew then that the old woman was truly mad. He caught Harman’s eye and saw the same conclusion there.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Savi. She plumped her pack like a pillow and lay back and closed her eyes. “Get some sleep, my young darlings. You need to be rested tomorrow. Tomorrow, with any luck, we fly up, up, up to the orbitside layer.”

She was asleep and snoring before Harman and Daeman could exchange another worried glance.