Four years and longer I sought, drawn by the summons. And I came upon Reyes y Pastor in on Millennium Island, the easternmost of the uninhabited atolls forming the Line Islands. He had recently descended from heaven: the landing craft was floating in the bay, sleek as an arrowhead.

As I swam near his craft, wondering, a machine from the deepest ocean rose and snared me with many metal tentacles, and then, breaking the surface in an explosion of spray, carried me aloft and screaming toward the isle. Through the transparent hull, I saw a woman dressed in red hunger silk, and she had strands of the same material woven through her hair. Her hair was modified to reach yards upon yards, and she could manipulate all the controls of her half-living flying machine at once. She was a Medusa from the age of myth.

But she did not strangle me, or allow her garment to flay me and drink my blood. Instead her airskiff reach down with its tentacles, and I was placed gently among the strangest assemblage I had ever seen.

(You do not know who the Medusae are? They were once a race of evil Sylphs, striking out from their fortresses beneath the north polar ice, where the Giants could not find them. Over the years, the Medusae hunted the Sylphs one by one through the skies like sharks among fish, in black airskiffs printed with the sign of the Pallid Hand, for the Moon is sacred to them.)

There were tens of thousands of Hormagaunts gathered there, the Asvidlings (as I said) and also his other champions and their scions, janissaries, and fighting-slaves: abominations and hairy men from the pine trees, many-colored serpent men from the palm trees. But here were also machines who spoke, and dreadful Ghosts, and Albinos more cunning than human, and Witches who could command the beasts, and Medusae in their amphibious airskiffs, Chimerae in their ferocity. Strange men from the far past.

The interview was in Father Pastor’s outlandish and soaring house he had grown out of shining pearl and mother of pearl, spire upon spire reaching skyward like his starship; but, within, a strange image of a tortured and unmodified man affixed by spikes to a tree occupied the far wall, and a circle of barbs was on his head: I assume this was a memorial of some particularly sadistic execution Reyes had ordered, and he wished the memento to appall and cow his servants.

This was not our first meeting, and in my brain, I knew that Reyes y Pastor was an Old Stock, unmodified Homo sapiens, and yet somehow in my hearts I was still surprised to see and smell him in his flesh, with facial hair and fingernails and toes upon his feet and a thousand other useless atavisms. It was like seeing a moving illustration from an antique living scroll step off the paper.

And yet, no matter what alterations are made to our neural chemistry, his awkward and ancient body looked right to me, and my magnificent body looked wrong. But we all know that seeing beauty is a mere chemical flocculation in the brain, the release of neural colloids from suspension. Why could no change in neurochemistry change the image of man?

He wore the scarlet robes and bore the shepherd’s crook of that most ancient coven called god-eaters, who worship a spirit called Anointed. But beneath this red mantle, what he wore was black as night and fine as silk, and it had fittings for helm and gauntlets, and I saw it was the garb of a star voyager, and so I fell at his feet.

As I crouched, Reyes reached down a hand to me. On his right wrist he wore an amulet of metal the hue of blood that sucks at the witch-marks in his wrist, affixed to nerve and vein, and with this he speaks in unseen waves to what dwells on the dark side of the Moon.

The Master bade me rise, saying, “I am but a servant of servants here. What you see before you, this flesh, is the least part of me. Far greater is my own Ghost, thought of my thought and soul of my soul, which occupies a flying star that hangs above the heavens here. When she is above the horizon, I am more than human; but when not, I am merely a tired old man of an extinct race.”

I towered over him, an ape towering above a puny child. From the way he moved, the things toward which he turned his head, I saw once again how he was nearsighted, and his ears were duller and nose dimmer than mine. And yet he frightened me.

“Do not speak!” he commanded gently. “I can anticipate your questions, beloved servant, and foresee your thoughts, and it will save time if I merely answer.”

He stooped and pried a pebble from the floor, and held it up before my eyes. “Coral is one of the great building materials of the Hormagaunts. To escape the eternal twilight, thorns, and deadly fruit of the world-forest, there were certain Clades who had created or expanded atolls and islands here in the Philippines and Micronesia using coral. The eternal trees cannot take root here, and therefore I cannot gather intelligence as to the goings-on.

“Would that I had watched this empty quarter of the world more closely! I saw the number of islands multiplying, and thought no ill of it. But these Insular Clades of the Pacific had long ago departed the One True Way, for they departed from the Wintermind and sought out the old psychological matrices of unmodified man. They married and raised their young without consuming them or selling them.

“These Insulars have resurrected the long-dead filial relationships: they have uncles and aunts, cousins and clans, and they erected totems to their clanholds, flags and heraldries, special images and names as if their holds were living things—and emotional set from before the times of the Nymphs, a Chimera configuration called patriotism which long I sought to destroy utterly.

“From clan totems to sacred idols is a small step. Worship, a emotional set of the Witches, was reborn, for the Insulars began to slaughter sacrifices and to burn incense and do the other things that those who hold this world is not the sole and final world are wont to do: and so the endless Darwinian wars of this world lost their fascination to them.

“Being a rational and philosophically inclined people, the Insulars reversed the order of nature, where lower things by evolution leads to higher, and conceived that their many little gods and idols were avatars and descendants of a single and perfect one God—embracing an order not of nature. And this was the emotional set of the Giants, and of earlier orders, including my own. All the progress of history was undone. For they had learned kinship, kindness, patriotism, paternity, worship, and prayer.

“Peace answered their prayers, and so they wax great and powerful, and revolutions in political economics, philosophy, and military sciences followed. Even the nature of man and his purpose in the world was questioned.

“The repercussions over the last century spread across the globe, and reached even your home in Albion. All these recent wars and genocides are a seismic adjustment to the social forces set in motion by the nonconformist and divergent Clades of these Pacific Insulars.

“Long years of statistical analysis crept by. Finally, I located the epicenter of the disturbance to the calculus of history: I know which island the Judge of Ages used to spread the new vector into the patterns of events. But I do not understand the math he used.

“So I could not move against the divergents erenow. There is a machine at the core of the world that watches and studies all that I do on the surface as closely as I watch and study the doings of my Hormagaunts. But the machine cannot intuit patterns in events, and sees no patterns other than what it is programmed to look for.

“By encouraging wars and assisting the horrors of war to mount ever higher, I have created sufficient confusion in the pattern of history—a white noise—that the world-core machine will not detect. It will not see, amid all the other statistical anomalies and onetime events that wars create, the anomaly of this, my raid, and the mysterious disappearances I now orchestrate.