Oenoe said, “I don’t take your meaning, beloved Judge of Ages.”

“Nah. You wouldn’t. So he ’poons my wife’s twin sister, and then dangles her my way to play come-hither-eyes at me, and at that point I am fed up so I went to call him out.

“One of my rare miscalculations,” Montrose continued, shaking his head. “Don’t seem fair he should be sharp as a razor in math and be some super athlete with muscles like a bull. He says doing weights helps him think, and he thinks pretty hard. Thought of a way to pack his pistol better than mine. He was a pretty damn good shot, and cool as a cucumber staring down a barrel, so what can I say?

“By rights, I should be dead. I can show you the scar.

“My wife’s twin sister had two more sisters—they were trial runs, jobs that did not come out so perfect. Named Aura-Ah and Riana-Ah. They were still Rania clones, and looked a lot like her, and all programmed by the Monument to be able to read pretty damn far into the Monument. And the three ladies had read some mathematical model about the relationship of the mind and body that enabled them to make half a dozen breakthroughs in medical and biotechnological and bioneuropsychiatric sciences, including all the stuff that allowed the Nymphs to domesticate every damn living thing from inchworms to sharks, and train raccoons and fawns to do housework, giraffes to carry parasols, and kangaroos to carry parcels, and they even taught crows to sing.

“But their breakthroughs also included the stuff they did to bring me back from nine-tenths dead and put me back on my feet. So I made some deals with the ladies, and with their daughters, and they helped me revolutionize the hibernation process. I mean, their understanding of biology was, well, you know, unbepustulevable. And the Nymphs ruled the only period of history that did not care about the past and did not care about the future, and so they did not try to dig up my damn Tombs.

“That’s where all the stories about how much the Judge of Ages loves the Nymphs and their Natural Order of Man comes from. For once in all the millennia of time, in my buried house, I had a neighbor living on my roof, what you call your world, what was friendly and neighborly.

“And I could unload a hefty parcel of medical Thaws on them, and get my patients all cured-up, and some of them stayed for a season up topside to play with the native girls, but came down again to sleep and dream to a better future, and some of them got addicted and stayed topside for life.

“So the harlotocracy of Nymphland was sick and wrong, but never did wrong to me, and I let it be.”

3. The Game of Fates of Races and Empires

Expositor Illiance said, “The deaths you encompassed of your peers and fellow posthumans, the Hermeticists, are of biographical interest, indeed. But a deeper question hangs over every soul born since the time of the Giants, who knew the science of predictive history. It is a science you know, and the Hermetic Order, and so all human destiny, was shaped to your designs as a channel guides the canal-stream. We in this chamber represent all the races of Man. We need and yearn to know the answer to the riddle. This opportunity, to learn the mind of a mind beyond man, will never come again. Instruct us.”

Menelaus said, “I don’t understand what your question is.”

“My question concerns human destiny. It is simple to ask.”

“Yes? What about human destiny?”

“—why?—”

A silence hung over the buried chamber. Menelaus looked at the gathered people.

He sighed and spoke. “I did a lot of things in your history; and every event in history, no matter how nice the intention, had bad side effects.

“Sorry, Scipio, but it started when I smashed the Cryonarchy. Blackie had your foot in the bear trap, and the only way out was to gnaw your foot off. He did to me what Rania did to him: set up a situation where the only solution was to step down. He tried to hang on to power, and so his Concordat was shattered forever. I gave power away, and it brought forth a race of Giants. Maybe you think I should not have done it. But it would have been worse had I done nothing. Do you still want to take a poke at me?”

Scipio, one arm around Trey Azurine, waved his hand in the air as if brushing away cigarette smoke. “What year is this again, Old Timer? I cannot stay mad at General Santa Anna about the Alamo and stay mad at you, too. Besides, you are FBC, and it ain’t right to paste no crazy man.”

Menelaus nodded thoughtfully, as if allowing the wisdom of those words. He went on: “Like I said, it would have been worse if I had done nothing; far worse. The world would have been covered in gold logic crystal, and Earth been nothing but a planet of ghosts, had I not released the first part of the Rania Solution to the Selfish Meme Divarication problem to Thucydides. The Self-Corrective Code was universal and philosophical, and it applied to every field of study: it could be used to fix Divarication in man and machine alike.

“Sorry, Ctesibius, if you thought the world of gold would have been Utopia. It would have been, but not for you. You know now that the Machine only meant to eat the Ghosts you donated to him.

“Sorry, Trey Azurine. I did not give the order to burn the world, but I made the Giants who gave the order, and I built the Xypotech, Pellucid, who could do a passing fair impersonation of me over the wire, and send out the evacuation plans. My authority and prestige was the only thing that made a hesitating world agree to such a mad and desperate plan. Everybody and his wife thought the posthuman was such a smart guy! Everyone trusted me! That was the last period in history anyone ever did. So it is my fault you never set foot in a house, never had neighbors, never walked down a street or slept in the same meadow twice.”

Trey stood with her head on the shoulder of Scipio, and she looked up, and smiled brightly. She spoke in a wondering tone of voice, as if her thoughts were elsewhere. “I don’t think about things like that. We are Drifters. We drift with the wind. Sometimes we fish. Or we interface with the fun-line. You can use up whole days playing yourself in little cartoons. Or we can drop into the sea and kill the whales. They serve the Machine. I hate whales. That Machine is satanic. It does not have a soul. Burning the cities was like amputation.” And she must have remembered Brother Roger the Jesuit astronomer, for she said: “If your eye offends you, pluck it out. It is better that a man enter paradise one-eyed than that he descend into hell with two eyes.”

At these words, Sir Guiden crossed himself; but Scipio scowled at him and shouted an amen; and Mickey the Witch scowled at them both.

Menelaus inclined his head to Trey, and raised his voice once more to fill the chamber.

“That universal Self-Corrective Code solution I mentioned allowed Blackie to make the Dreagh, the special posthuman Ghosts that have been running all the eras and aeons of history ever since, Exulloa and Exarago, Exillador and Expastor. And Ull’s emulation that replaced Expastor. So it is my fault that the last eight thousand years did not grow naturally, but were engineered into their shapes by the Hermetic Order.

“The second solution I released to save the Sylphs, because otherwise either the Giants would have killed them, or they would have fallen into total preindustrial barbarism. It allowed the serpentine Mälzels to copy each other’s solutions and perpetuate any useful change of code—forever. It was a bit of straight computer engineering, but I devised by accident an eternal form of self-repairing tool.

“Melchor de Ulloa used this technique and applied it to living things, such as for re-copying iterations of Witch genetic information back onto unraveled telomeres, and returning cells to totipotency, and performed parallel experiments in uplift to create more Moreaus than just whales. Horses and elephants and dogs and swine: soon everything was talking. And taking orders. And on the backs of the slave armies of animal people, the labyrinthine edifice of the Witches reared its envious head.