Next came the Chimerae marching through the doors, bows strung and spears ready.

Menelaus caught the gaze of Daae and Lady Ivinia, and saw that they were ready, too. Alpha Yuen had his bone truncheon in his hand, not hidden, but he was staring at the floor, his one eye sullen, his posture tense with anger.

Mickey the Witch strode ponderously through the door as if to grand and inaudible music. The crones next came stalking in, grave and solemn in black, leaning on their charming wands, and the more mundane menfolk in their various heraldic robes came after, and fierce Demonstrators in their coats of human-skin leather. Mickey, less solemn than the rest, gave Menelaus a cheery smile, and an eye-decoration on his ridiculous pointed hat winked. He mouthed the words what’s going on? The other Witches were behind his broad back, and did not see his facial contortions.

Menelaus could think of no way to answer the question.

2. Scipio in Storybook Land

Scipio, seated on the throne of the Judge of Ages, raised his hand to cover his mouth, and said softly, “Okay, First Ancestor, I take back what I said about your cartoon. Looks like it came true. This menagerie doesn’t have a single unmodified nonfreak in the lot. Who the pox are the half-naked dancing girls in flowers, and the dead-eyed SS troopers in samurai drag whose girls are dressed like Minerva and the Drum Majorettes? And the gross hags looking like they were stretched on racks? And that thing with no head? Are those space aliens?”

“Lemme sum up,” sighed Montrose. “The sequence of extinctions goes like this: That girl with antennae and weird eyes is a Melusine, and her kind wiped out the two gray dwarfs in the parkas toward the front, called Linderlings. The gray dwarfs and the blue dwarfs are part of a race of black dwarfs called Locusts, who are radio-telepaths that formed a mass mind and are color-coded for your convenience. The Locusts exterminated the Hormagaunts, who are the biotech monstrosities there. The Hormagaunts are Nymphs gone mad, who are the Geisha girls and the sissy-looking boys. The Nymphs drugged the Chimerae, who are the Spartan Nazis there. The Chimerae wiped out the Witches, who are the tall ugly women there, and that whole group from Halloweenland. The Witches wiped out the Giants, whom you know all about and I can hear one coming now. We also have coming a Savant and a Scholar from your times, and, if God is in a good mood and decides to stop cat-playing with my life, my knight will be here too. He’s from the poxy Middle Ages.”

“You have got to be poxy kidding me. Chimerae and Witches and Nymphs and knights? Plagues of Locusts and the Seven Dwarfs? What is this, the Land of Storybooks? Those cannot be their real names.”

“It is not what they call themselves, but, by the prickly cap of bleeding Christ, that is what they really are. The way to remember who is who is that the Witches want to sacrifice babies, the Chimera want to breed them like dogs, the Hormagaunts want to eat them, and the Locusts want to absorb their brains. What the Melusine want, I have no idea, and that worries me.”

“None of ’em sound like nice people,” said Scipio.

Menelaus gave him a sickly grin. “They are damned sick, believe you me. But no worse than the folk from our day, mister.”

“Our day was civilized!”

“Meaning we threw rockets instead of rocks. Civilization makes it easier to earn ourselves the mark of Cain, which is the goddam star-spangled banner of the human race. Remember how many World Wars the Cryonarchy fought? Four? Five? How many cities of innocent civilians were wiped out by atomic or antimatter space-bombardment? Man has not progressed a whisker’s length in all this time: Like a mad dog on a chain tearing up a circle centered on his stake, all we’ve done is change and change. Ain’t moved. Ain’t bettered us none. Ah, is that him—?”

Montrose was staring in naked eagerness.

3. A Familiar Face

The old knight entered. Menelaus increased the visual cortex activity in his brain to allow himself to see his old friend clearly.

The eyebrows and short, square beard of Sir Guy had turned white with age, but the heavy muscles of his youth had not yet vanished. The rest of his face was obscured with colorful designs of ink, some of them gleaming with luminescence. The short beard on his cheeks was oddly colored by the skin beneath, where the inks painting his jawline gleamed through.

He wore a cowl or coif of metal links covering his head and neck, with system jacks and fittings to mate with the inside of a large helmet. He wore a skintight one-piece of flexible gray smartmetal, the type an astronaut might wear beneath his space suit, and it also was fitted with jacks to mate with the interior of powered armor.

Over this, he wore a surcoat of black, and his cape was black. Both surcoat and cape were blazoned with a large white Maltese Cross. The white crosses stood out starkly in the hanging lanterns in the wide gloom overhead, and their reflections in the gold tiles underfoot.

He wore no boots, and his gloves were tucked in his belt. His hands and feet were baby-pink, and formed a bland contrast with the bizarrely complex glowing tattoos and inks of his face. Menelaus recalled that Larz said the Blue Men had dismembered Guy, and regrew the severed limbs later. It seemed an act of pointless cruelty. There were no ink-artists available to restore his lost designs, for the craft of tattooing with variable-property smart-inks had passed away over seven millennia ago. It was as if someone had effaced the cave paintings of Lascaux with a sandblaster.

His scabbard and holster were empty: the Blue Men had returned his clothing, but not his weapons.

Menelaus was struck by joy so potent that it felt like unto grief to see Sir Guy again, and he had to raise his hand to his eyes, which stung with unshed tears.

With his eyes closed, he suddenly recognized something odd about the way the dog things were moving.

Opening them again, he opened up the visual receptors in his nervous system to their maximum, and induced a pattern-finding gestalt in the reticular complex of his midbrain. There! The pattern was unmistakable! To double-check, he reduced the walking and standing and head-motions of each of the two hundred Moreaus in the chamber to an algorithm, made a few guesses about the architecture of their lower nervous system, and ran the equations through his head at high speed. The dogs were strict about escorting some people, and maintaining an average space of distance from them—Menelaus could graph in a simple relation how far a prisoner could step before the dog growled. But other people were allowed much greater latitude: Alalloel the Melusine, Linder Keir the Gray, Soorm the Hormagaunt, Oenoe the Nymph, Mickey the Witch, Rada Lwa the Scholar, Ctesibius the Savant, and, oddly enough, Alpha Yuen the Chimera.

Their latitude to Alalloel and Oenoe and Mickey he thought he understood: Mickey knew subtly how to manipulate their subconscious reflexes; Oenoe could work a similar trick by using scent codes. But the others? Why were they afraid of Alalloel?

4. Hear Ye

Illiance was surprised, because not everyone had entered the chamber yet, when at that moment Menelaus stepped forward and called out, his voice ringing to the walls.

“Hear ye! You are called to the appointed time and trial of the Judge of Ages.

“Each of you, your millennium and species will be scrutinized. Whomever finds favor in his eyes will be released in greatest numbers from this and other Tomb sites, together with your beasts and crops and ecology most favorable to you.

“He will reorganize the weather and climate to suit. Those who find no favor, you will be returned to slumber, to await, if ever, the pleasure of the inheritors of the Earth to thaw you for their purposes.