The ears of the dog things drooped, and they shuffled their legs uncertainly. The Blue Man smiled gently and spoke aloud in a language of liquid syllables. The Collie made an adjustment to his speaking machine, and answered in the same tongue. The Blue Man laughed and waved his hand. The dogs crouched, tails lowered, and with many a suspicious glare at Menelaus, backed out of the chamber.

The Blue Man now bowed toward Menelaus and gestured for him to seat himself on the richly patterned carpet.

Menelaus grunted heavily, and slowly lowered himself into a cross-legged position.

The Blue Man drew out what looked like a glass needle and put in on the carpet between them. He took out a gem-encrusted directed-emission pistol, cracked open the breech, and drew out a small cylinder, maybe a power cell. He placed the opened pistol on the carpet between them, and also the power cell.

He spoke, in a voice surprisingly deep for one of his slight size, in the language of the Hormagaunts, which was called Iatric. “This weapon, in your language, is called venom, and that weapon is named after the lightning bolt. They are programmed for defensive events only. I have done no murders. Illiance, Preceptor, is my external referent and task category.”

“Pleased to meet you. You know the customs of the Chimerae.”

The Blue Man tilted his head sideways, bringing his right ear toward his right shoulder, and then tilted it the other way, bringing his left ear toward his left shoulder. It was neither a nod nor a head shake. The gesture meant nothing to Menelaus.

“Well,” said Menelaus, “I had a weapon called Rock earlier this evening, but I dropped it. I guess I’ve killed a lot of people. My name is Sterling Xenius Anubis, proved by service in the battle of Mt. Erebus. I am a High Beta–rank Chimera from A.D. 5292, the fifty-third century. You know, there is really no point to having bodyguards if you are not going to listen to their advice about dangerous situations.”

“You comprehend the intertextual exolanguage of the Locusts? This is a remarkable accomplishment for a Chimera, who did not specialize in intellectual augmentation neurobiomanipulations.” (This last phrase was a simple, two-syllable word in Iatric: skullvork.)

“I comprehend dogs.”

“Eie Kafk Ref Rak, you notice, has not had his speech box since the odd events of last night. He was assigned to patrol the Tomb site. Will you return it once you are done studying it?”

“Would that be the Irish Wolfhound? They didn’t give me their names.”

“You do not deny the theft, then?”

From beneath his voluminous robes of tent material, Menelaus drew out one of the speaking machines, a black rectangle the size of a man’s palm inset with a touch screen, and tossed it lightly to the carpet between them. “I doubt we should call it ‘theft’ exactly. I consider the object to be an anthropological artifact, which I took aside for study.”

“No human being of the first or second rank of augmentation would be able to read the linguistics from the data core of this instrument, much less teach himself our vocabulary, semantics, and grammar, in less than twelve hours, without a Locust interface.”

Seen up close, the Blue Men were clearly the same race as the locusts, except tendrilless, and with a different pigment scheme. “Are you a Locust?”

“No. I have renounced, and live in simplicity.”

“What happens to people who do not renounce?”

“Their skins are shaded a more conforming hue,” said Illiance with a slight smile. “The Locusts form a neuroinfosphere, a single interconnected system. We are apart.”

“Is that thing you call a talking box part of their technology?”

“Indirectly. The talking box is based on a decentralized system; following the self-corrective code, and provided a continual source of repair materials, such units are effectively immortal.”

Menelaus tried to hide his shock. He had to balance the nerve impulses going to his eyes in order to avoid the posthuman effect of making normal mortals unable to stare him in the face. He had to close his eyes for a moment to regain his control. The self-corrective code was the one seventh of Rania’s divarication solution he had used to prevent the serpentines of the Sylphs from evolving into Xypotechs, self-aware machines. And yet here it was again, in the talking boxes. Effectively immortal? Immortal machines? Passing down from aeon to aeon unchanged?

How had such a disturbance in the Cliometric predictions of history existed for so long without Pellucid’s model of history detecting the anomaly?

He opened his eyes to see that Preceptor Illiance was watching him unblinkingly. Illiance said, “It is remarkable that a human being could take something from the person of one of the Followers without his being aware.”

“Like I said. I comprehend dogs.”

“Do you think it wise to appropriate belongings that are not yours?”

“Oh ho. Look who is asking! You and yours are meddling with artifacts from my age, such as biosuspension coffins, some of which contain people and their possessions. Including me. I happen to know Alpha Yuen was buried with an ancestral serpentine worth at least ten thousand medallions of our money. It is called Arroglint; it is a named weapon and it has its own device in the College of Heralds, and it should have its own collectible bubble gum card. So where is it?”

“I find I am an archaeologist. I peer with great interest at the relicts and remnants of your era.”

“Well, I am returning the favor, and doing a bit of peering of my own. I am an academic myself, and a damn good one too.”

“I am pleased that you say so. Will you confess that there is a brotherhood of scholars that can and must reach across all the ages of history?”

“Brotherhood?”

“A unity of interest, and a common purpose?” The little Blue Man leaned forward, his eyes intent.

“Well … what exactly are we talking about?”

“You must answer.”

“Must I? Okay. Yes. All scholars of all ages have something in common. We are all curious bastards, and we poke into things we shouldn’t.”

That answer seemed to satisfy the little Blue Man. He leaned back and smiled his small, cryptic smile.

“The admission permits me to impose a moral obligation on you. I solicit your assistance and advice.”

“My advice is to stop poking where you have no business before something really bad happens to you.”

“While no doubt sound enough, I require your advice in another field of mental effort.”

“Like what?”

“Man called Beta Anubis, among your other accomplishments, you are a skilled linguist, are you not? You know the spoken language forms of several races of man.”

“Do I?”

“You speak Iatric, the language of the Middle Period of the Configuration of Iatric Clades, called the Hormagaunts; you speak Chimerical, the language of the Eugenic Emergency General Command of the Commonwealth of Virginia, called the Chimerae; you speak that which by the highborn is called the Tongue of the Wise, but by the common called Virginian, which is the language of the Delphic Acroamatic Progressive Transhumanitarian Order for the study of Longevity, called the Witches; and that dialect of Merikan called Korrekthotspeek, used of old only by the Order of Psychics, who were a servant race of the Hermetic World Concordat and the earliest known artificial race of man. The Hermeticists in turn used two languages that once were ancient dialects of Anglatino, whose names I do not know. This is noteworthy.”

“Must be. You took notes.”

“Your knowledge seems extraordinary, as your era is remembered as a Dark Age, when much learning would have been lost to you and your people.”

“Well, Dark Ages are when some people make extra-especial efforts not to let some things get forgotten. Lots of sitting around copying old manuscripts by hand goes on.”