“I interfered again. At the time of the Nameless Empire, I meddled with the Moreaus, and introduced by viral vector a gene-rewriting intron. It was an unselfish gene, a cooperation code. I had to make it so that the intelligent lion could lie down with the intelligent lamb in a democratic republic, because nothing else could ever stir the endless tyranny of the Wise over their fellow creatures and their fellow men.

“It worked for a while, but you know the next twist in that story: Narcís D’Aragó took that exact same bit of biotech engineering I had devised to make for himself new creatures, cooperating on a molecular level, half lion and half goat and all snake, and they ate up the lambs.

“A fourth solution was biochemical rather than biotechnical. It was used to formulate the original portable neurochemical biofeedback backpack systems called Greencloaks, which was my attempt to copy in a crude way the things done by the red amulets of the Hermeticists. It was not passed from father to son, because the Chimera eugenicists controlled who passed what from father to son. I had to do an end-run around their whole game. My game was a needle you stuck in your head. My signature move.

“Thanks to Sarmento, the boys in green, guys like Larz, who is right now drinking the medical fluid out of the coffin he is in trying to get his bender on, the next generation really liked sticking needles of all kinds up their heads; or whatever else they could take with alcohol, or patch or inhale or stuff up a nostril, or as a suppository. That was one civilization whose fall was not my fault: Sarmento was the exception again. He hated D’Aragó and wanted his little tin empire of little tin soldiers smashed as soon as possible and replaced it with Whoreworld, the Garden of Addict. Sarmento’s notion of paradise.

“The Wintermind techniques I taught to the Nymphs when their weather control system began to fail. This fifth solution was biosoftware—the training must be ingrained via training and biofeedback to establish the nerve paths, because obviously anything that comes out of a needle or in a pill, the Nymphs could control and block and make to do backflips. I broke their hold over their people so that those people would wake up out of their drunk drug-dreams, see the world was getting colder, and come up with a way to save themselves.

“Once again, I had to do it, because otherwise the society would crash and never recover. There were no metals left in digging range anymore, so if civilization did a Humpty Dumpy, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men—Does anyone here know who old Humpty is? That would make Alice sad. Yeah, Trey, Alice in Wonderland! I am glad that book survived as long as your era.

“Soorm scion Asvid, you know the next part of the story. Wintermind can be used not just to break unnatural additions, love philters, and memory snares the Nymphs impose; the technique can break the addictions Mother Nature kindly puts in us so that mothers love their babies and fathers love their mates, the sex drive and the family drive and the thing that makes man a political animal. Reyes y Pastor trained a generation of gladiators to kill and eat each other, and to use the Wintermind to abolish their addiction to human affections.

“And so I had to do something again. Prissy Pskov—your people, the Clades, exist because of me. The sixth solution was bioeconomic. The Hormagaunts could have controlled anything I introduced that was genetic or based on pheromones, but what I introduced was a fractional genetic banking system, a set of techniques that made it easier to reproduce by parthenogenesis than to try to find a wife you were not allergic to, and everyone was born in clusters with spare organs in all their twins, who suddenly had no strong reason to prey on each other. The Clade unity was a terrible solution, a hack, a kludge, but there was no other way to preserve civilization from the deluge of blood Reyes had unleashed, except in an Ark made of twins and triplets.

“But when the floodwaters of blood receded, there was nothing but that terrible, overwhelming need for unity. That is why Locusts are born oriented toward hive mind thinking and total altruism. They were just a logical extension of the notion of the Clades that, since toleration of differences proved impossible, total conformity is the price of peace.

“Expositor Illiance, you know what happened after that. Yes, I did break the Noösphere of the Locusts. I did it deliberately, and with malice aforethought. It was the most evil thing a man like me can imagine: mankind as an ant farm. A monster army with a million bodies with a million giraffe necks leading to one giant head like a bobbing balloon above them.

“The seventh and last solution was the most subtle of all my moves in this great game. It was not philosophical, nor computational, nor genetic, nor biochemical, nor neurolinguistic, nor bioeconomic. It was legal and informational—a set of universal protocols establishing a format for information exchanges across nonuniform data-regimes. It created very quickly a very powerful incentive for diversity within the mental environment: a good reason for the nest to tolerate useful inquiline species. An Inquiline Protocol.

“And Coronimas perverted my work, and used it to concoct this horrible cellular-level mind-control system, which the Melusine eventually perfected to make their remote control of other people’s minds and souls perfect and inescapable.

“I had a counter to that. I tried to introduce a new vector into the course of evolution five hundred and six years ago, which should have made this helotry of total mind control a dead end, and forced the whole species into a radical new direction. My mistake was a simple one: I released the viral carrying agent onto the oceans of the Earth, because that is where I thought the men would be living, and that they would carry it into the land areas, or any other place other members of their race would go.

“So it was my damn cleverest move yet—but nothing happened. I should have won by now. Instead the Melusine, as best I can tell, were totally unaffected, and they remain totally loyal to Ximen del Azarchel, who is in charge of the planet, or what is left of it.

“Alalloel of Lree—man, that is a hard name to say—she tells me each Tomb has a Melusine officer assigned to it, called a Paramount, who was going to thaw us all and absorb us into their gestalt, like Locusts.

“So we are buried alive here, waiting for the Melusine to come eat our brains. They will keep our memories and minds and personalities intact, and put us into a slavery so profound that it cannot even be imagined. A helotry of the mind, where the helot rejoices in his invisible chains, or thinks or believes whatever else the Paramount programs him to do, including loving his slavery.

“There you have it. There were a lot more maneuvers within each move, but that was the general outline of the chess game of history.

“You asked me why, Expositor Illiance. There were two sides in the game. My side was the side of human life, civilization, and liberty. Whenever that was threatened, I acted. His side was the side of machine existence, slavery, and for some reason I did not learn until today, barbarism.

“That is the why and the wherefore of it. Why did I interfere with your lives, and the lives of your ancestors and descendents over and over again? Why did I preserve the sick and the lost and those who fled into the exile of time here in my buried house where no time passes? That answer is really simple.

“Turn your heads and look at the portrait of the young lady yonder. I did it for her.

“She is my why.”

Menelaus was silent a moment, his head down, his eyes downcast and solemn. No one in the chamber spoke.

Without looking up, he said, “Expositor Illiance, is your question answered?”