Mickey said, “And the entire nickel-iron core of the Earth is a computer? That works for you? Sorry. Only the inner core. I would not want to exaggerate your powers, and sound ridiculous.”

“Right. You’d be amazed what you can do with molten building materials on a molecular level. It is a lot like working with squishy gray matter. The trick is to continually regrow the lattices faster than the boiling motions tear them down.”

“And you still say you are not a demigod?”

“Right. Just a man who is good with figures who stuck a damned needle in his brain and went mad and got smart and fell in love and got puckered and peeved when my best pal backstabbed me. Really good with figures. Really smart. Really puckered.”

Oenoe spoke without looking up from the body of Larz, which she still plied with the salves and pumps and flowers and coffin fluid and intravenous bags she had found in the medical kit. “My turn. My question is for Soorm. How is it you can see us? How is it that the nerve-seeking mites slipped by the Blue Men into our food did not work on your nervous system?”

Soorm said, “Lovely lady, they did work! That is, they worked on the spare nervous system I keep in my body as a fake. I have two spares. They are only connected to enough organs—spare organs—so that invasives trying to sly-up my cell life will think they succeeded. My real nervous system is hardened and molecularly double-encrypted. Even I do not know which organ contains my real brain; that way no one can trick the location out of me. In this case, when my false-lobe in my number-two backup brain started editing out sounds and sights from the dais, I knew something weird was happening. Posthuman weird. And I followed the source of the mites being used to jinx the Blue Man nerve blocks.” He squinted his goatlike eye at Menelaus. “I followed it of my own free will, on a whim!”

Oenoe blinked. “Your precautions would normally seem over-elaborate, but no one can doubt they proved effective this day, handsome Soorm.”

“Elaborate? Hardly!” Soorm threw back his head and uttered a vast, jovial laugh. “Brother-loving al-TRU-ism! Do you know how old and wary I am? I am Asvid, the Man himself, the brother-loving Old Man of the Hermetic Gargantua! The first of my kind! Do you think simple tricks with nerve-seekers in the grub can fool me?”

Oenoe bent over Larz, who lay with his head in her lap, and his eyes had just opened. He whispered to her. She said in her sweet voice, “I don’t speak his langauge, but I think he has a question also.”

5. Phantasm

Mickey said, “Let me try. Some of the Chimerae speak Virginian.”

“Only the high-class ones,” said Menelaus. “Educated in dead languages.”

“Well, either he has to come over to you, or you have to get over to him,” said Mickey. “And right now both of you look like battered slabs of raw pork in the butcher shop widow.”

Soorm said to Mickey, “Stop. You are making me hungry.”

Menelaus said, “Don’t move him. Here. Hold this next to his ear.” And he tossed one of the talking boxes looted from Rada Lwa to Oenoe.

Larz whispered, “One eye.”

“Beg pardon?”

Louder, Larz said, “The coffin can regrow nerve tissue, right?”

Menelaus said, “I am trying to get a coffin in here as soon as I can. You’ll be fine.”

Larz said, “Not me. Yuen.”

Menelaus said, “Ah, no. He is suffering from disconnected head syndrome, so he will not be fine.”

“Yuen. So why didn’t Yuen get his eye grown back? Why didn’t the Blue Men repair him?”

“Everyone assumed it was an old war wound he was proud of, and wanted to keep. It is not like the Blue Men know how Chimerae think.”

“But Kine know,” smiled Larz weakly. “Regrowing optic affects the brain. He had something in his brain, an implant, he did not want the Blue Men to find and remove. He has been sending signals somewhere. He worked for your enemies.”

“That’s right. Is that why you took my side against him just now? I know you couldn’t follow what was said.”

Larz nodded weakly.

“But how did you know?”

Larz coughed and smiled, and whispered, “Don’t you read the cheaplies? Del Azarchel the Black Hermeticist wants to kill you with his own hands. Exarchel has no hands. So he just wants you dead. But the Machine cannot see you, can it? That is what it said in the Larz of the Gutter stories. You can point your finger and say, “Null,” and all record of you gets erased, all the cameras go blank, and the mikes go deaf. Only living people can see you. You exist entirely in the biosphere, and not at all in the infosphere. So the Machine needs to get someone else to do it. A seeing-eye dog. Always wanted to ask you. How’d you do it? The null trick. Invisible only to machines, not to people.”

“It’s a long story.”

“Tell me. I am not busy right now…,” smiled Larz.

Menelaus said, “Back when I was a crazy man with two personalities, my true self, who was truly crazy—call him Mister Hyde—wakes up in a computer gray room, and realizes his scat-for-brains sleepwalker self—call him Dopey Blinkers McBlindeye, the Champion Gull of the Land of Gullible—realizes he’s got his head stuck in a bear trap with a hair trigger.

“Del Azarchel has a crazy machine version of himself named Exarchel, which, if it cannot be made to work, Del Azarchel loses his world empire and everything he loves. Mr. Hyde realizes, point one, that if he cannot or does not fix the Machine, he is worthless to Blackie, who then either puts him on ice, hibernation-style, or puts him on ice, mortuary-style, got me? Mr. Hyde also realizes, point two, that if he does fix the Machine, he is again worthless to Blackie, because no one needs a doctor when no one is sick, besides which the Machine, once it is up and running, will be better at running maintenance on itself than an army of human mechanics. So what is the solution?”

Larz squinted. “Let me guess. Fix it a little bit, so it needs a little more work?”

“Good answer. But point three, Mr. Hyde realizes that this is exactly what Princess Rania did to get Blackie to cure Hyde and wake him up in the gray room; and there is just no damn way the same trick will work twice on the same guy, especially if the Machine brain is ramped up to posthuman levels, and would be smart enough to see the trick anyway. Hyde wanted to hide Rania’s trick; but Exarchel would have exposed it.

“Also, the clock is ticking, because Hyde is just too big for the brain of Dopey at this point in time.

“But, point four, here is Princess Rania, whom both he and Blackie are deeply in love with, not to mention in lust, with a little bit of hero-worship thrown in for good measure—heroine-worship?—whatever it is called. She is the key to the solution.”

Larz looked amazed. “The Swan Princess is real?”

“Wait. You are sitting here in a room with the god-plagued pus-stinking Judge of Ages, and you don’t think my wife is a real person? If you buy the one, don’t you have to buy the other?”

Larz spoke in a voice pale with exhaustion, but his tone was gentle. “Rania is the wise and beautiful virgin who went to the stars to vindicate the human race and save us. You are a mad god who kills people who dig up graves. It is easy to believe in things too scary to be true. Believing in what is too good to be true takes work. Continue with your tale.”

“She ain’t no virgin! I consummated her fair and square, and that is none of your damn business, so shut up. Where was I? So solution one is fix the Machine, but make sure the fix is in. Hyde put a Trojan Horse backdoor code in Exarchel’s perception system, built in as part of the thing that makes Exarchel not insane. Since all perceptions must be emoted and categorized before they are conceptualized (or otherwise they are meaningless raw data and not perceptions), therefore this level always has to be a subconscious level to the Machine. You know how the brain works, with the thalamus and the hypothalamus and the cortex? Well, never mind that. Point is, Exarchel can’t undo it of himself without undoing his own underpart of his brain, and I set it up so that the house collapses if you yank the foundations down. The phantasm itself is too small to be seen: even I could not remove it, even if I could find it, and I am the guy who built it. A few lines of code: just a blank-out jinx, a redactor with a fill-in editor like you have in dreams so that things that don’t make sense seem to make sense, and the whole thing works by association. When Exarchel sees me, or whatever too-near reminds him of me, like my shadow on the wall or footprints on the sand, he doesn’t see me. His subconscious just fills in any blanks with what he expects to see.