Menelaus gestured toward the snowy ridges and trees in which direction the camp lay. “Even a non-supergenius can see that. If you tried to protect the Judge of Ages when you did not know he was in the room with you, why would you turn on him when he was?”

“Perhaps because I overestimated his powers. Summon up your Knights and Giants and thinking machines, exorcists and archbishops, djinn and efreets, aftergangers and cacodemons, mummies, sorcerer-kings and walking dead. Bring out your magic needle and stab yourself in the head to unleash your inner daemons. Create the antimatter and obliterate your foes.”

“Damn but I’m impressive! I’d give my left nut to meet me, if I was actually able to do pox like that.”

“You are a prisoner here, then. How is it that you serve them as a translator, instead of as sliced meat garnished with peppers and cloves on the feast table?”

“Don’t talk like that. You’re making me hungry. It’s been eight thousand four years since I had a square meal. I don’t count a lavish fish dinner I had in A.D. 3089, because I was on the lam, and had to snatch bites while looking over my shoulder. A restaurant called Phantom de Casa Curial served delicious Cajun redfish spiced with bell pepper, onion, celery, and dried cayenne pepper. This was a floating barge-city anchored over the sunken ruins of Newer Orleans.”

“What can you do, Posthuman, aside from talk about extinct forms of foodstuffs?”

“No, no. I was surprised by the extinction of the tobacco leaf. Won’t make that mistake again. Got the recipe, and all those organisms for the ingredients I have preserved somewhere in my Tomb system. Hibernation is not just for people, you know.”

“Point taken. What can you do aside from talk about nonextinct forms of foodstuffs? By the lovingkindness of the long-suffering, is everyone older than a few thousand years insufferably garrulous?”

“What can I do? If you are asking whether I can track down and delete every copy of a posthuman machine intelligence, which is nothing but a gestalt-pattern of information that can be copied, transmitted, stored in a wide variety of media, all I can say is nine thousand years of trying to track down and destroy Exarchel have won me nairn, nary, none, and beans in the kitty.”

“Go back to pretending you are a Chimera. You talk blithering nonsense when you are not someone else. Or is this done to awe the simple with your ineffable incomprehensibility?”

“I cannot promise to kill Reyes y Pastor or allay his ghost, but I can promise, that if he is the Master of the World during this era of history, to knock him off his throne. I can stop him.”

Soorm stood still, looking at Menelaus very carefully. “What is it like?”

“What is what like?”

“Knowing the posthumans. The Hermeticists and starfarers. What are they like, the gods of our world?”

“Sick bastards.”

“Yet you were once one of them, or so Reyes told me at the last.”

“So I am a sick bastard too. People that like to experiment on their own brains are not usually the most balanced of critters, if’n you take my meaning.”

“Why do they rule history? By what right?”

“Pestilence! No right at all.”

“Why them? How did they achieve control of fate and world-destiny, so that they decide what empires fall and rise? Why was this power not placed in the hands of someone more—I don’t know the word for it.”

“Altruistic?”

“That is a swearword in my language.”

“Piss-poor language, if you can’t say nothing worth saying in it. The Hermeticists? Blackie and his Black-Robed Creeps? They didn’t start out bad, but outer space—years of close confinement falling through light-years of black nothing, drinking recycled pee water—it drove them stir-crazy. The Captain announced they would never return to Earth, to save Earth from discovery by the Hyades, and they mutinied and killed him for it. You know the End of Days, the year when we get invaded by Principalities, Virtues, and Powers sent out by the Hosts and Dominions of Hyades? They brought that down upon us.”

Montrose paused, frowning, then continued, “They might have been passable fair-to-middling as human beings before the mutiny—but after? It had punctured their souls.

“When they came back to Earth, they had secret knowledge beyond human, and everyone they knew was dead and long done for, and they were attacked by greedy Earthmen. The Earth they knew was gone, and the Earth they found was gone bad.

“The techniques I’ve developed over the years to make it easier for Thaws to acclimate to currents and for currents to welcome Thaws—there was nothing like that then. ‘Thaw shock’ it’s called or ‘future grief.’ And these shocked and grieving boys were armed with weapons more dangerous and techniques more sophisticated than anything on Earth, not to mention the Swan Princess.

“They bombed cities, killed millions, and soon they had the world under their boot heel, soon they had power and prestige and toilet bowls of gold to sit on, and that rusted away their punctured souls into jagged bits of crud. They were so jealous of me and my magic brain, that they killed themselves experimenting on themselves, at least sixty of them, one after another after another. What kind of man does that? Rather die than admit someone else has a leg up on smarts? They’re twisted as screws.”

Soorm grunted. “I knew part of this, but I heard a strangely changed version. But what are they themselves like? I mean—what sort of—?”

“What? You asking about their hobbies and love affairs and suchlike? Pox! I got no idea. It’s not like I talked to any of these folk for more than a few moments in the last eight thousand years. I remember them from space camp back when I was twenty-five calendar, twenty-four bio. That was in A.D. 2234. We did jumping jacks together and studied orbital mechanics and pressure emergency drills and how to pee in a diaper. It was a five-month training regime. I talked to them for a while again in A.D. 2399, in a powwow we had. We yakked about math. Sort of funny, but I don’t know these guys. Not personally. Now I am eighty-three hundred and five years old calendar and fifty biological. The only one I really got to know is … Ximen del Azarchel.”

Montrose sighed, and shook his head, and said, “Hm. Blackie ain’t totally rotten, but that kinda makes him worse, in a way. But they all think, Blackie too, that we are just their cattle.”

“We?”

“We humans. Us. Normal people. Why are you laughing?”

“For no reason, fellow normal human. Tell me how I can help you.”

“Simple. Spill what you know about Reyes. History is screwed up and haywire, not to mention the climate and evolutionary changes; and I need to find the point of deviation to set it right. I am hoping it was recent, b’cause that means less work for me.”

“Then I will tell you of my last moot first; and this was also when I learned that you were real.”

4. The Atrocity of the Yap Islands

To the Blue Men, I lied. My bioelectric cells could more than compensate for their crude lie-detection electroencephalograph. I had no apprentice named Soorm when the final summons came, but I did call forth the great host of those beholden to me, and we did see the burning of the world-forest beyond its capacity for self-repair. There would be grasslands and wasteland again, heath and bog and chaparral, and to the north, taiga and tundra. I knew enough predictive ecology to see that much.

Another lie: I went, and did not flee. There is no way to resist the instinctive homing-call that my Master infused into the message-chemicals he sent. And the way was long, ah! It was travail indeed.

It was in the archipelago east of the Cipangu Islands I met the Master of World of the Hormagaunts for the final time. I traveled north, and across the polar sea—in those days, there was no ice cap, as now—to the Chukchi Sea, and across the isthmus to the Bering Sea, then down by coasts of Rus and Cathay, past Annam and Loulan, to the Spice Islands.