“Talk ’em to death, do you?”

“I am a Kine and I don’t mind. You Chimerae can do sheepdoggery drudgery, and I’ll run in the herd! But I was in uniform back in the day. I’ve served in private security and public unrest, spook and mook, and twelve years in Intelligence Command out of Kang Key, Eighth Division. You know Alpha Captain Stheno Alleret Anju of First and Second Bull Run? Family springs from a cadet mutation of the Anjusri Line, and I think that his kin got some tiger in their cocktail. I served under him, and he had me cleaning toilets in the stockade for a month. Served under his daughter, too, but not in the same capacity, and when the Chastity Police found out, I discovered scientifically that you can fit a five-foot-two-inch man through a foot-and-a-half-square window overlooking a three-story drop in two seconds, and there is nothing in your pants you really need to go back for, but some things it might be smarter to keep in your pants. Got me?”

Menelaus looked at the ceiling again and sighed again, and spoke in a monotonic drone. “You come from an era when the number of persons volunteering or being selected for long-term hibernation is statistically anomalous. As a native of that time, and an eyewitness, do you have any personal theories backed by evidence you’d care to describe, concerning the cause of this anomaly?”

“Lance-Corporal, you’re chewing my scrotum, right? That’s why you guys thawed me?”

Menelaus jerked his eyes down from the ceiling and laughed scornfully. “Lepers and scabs! You think I am dithering you? Me? Look what is talking! Shut your yap and open your ears, yammermouth! Look around you! We’re prisoners. The Blue Men are in charge, and they plan to kill us as soon as they get what they want. So smarten up and eyes front, Kine, if you want to see the end of the week. Whatever is happening is about to happen fast. You want to sober up, and talk without so much vinous crapulent goldbricking flummoxery?”

The man’s face fell. He spoke in a slow and serious tone. “So … we are in a deep hole, are we, Lance-Corporal?”

“Six feet deep and there to stay, safe behind wooden walls, unless we find a way to climb out. If you have a God you don’t believe in, start cursing him now.”

“Might die soon?”

“More than likely.”

“Then, um—those jewels and stuff you pulled off the dwarf’s coat? Guy who’s about to die don’t need ’em, so I’d be doing you a favor, taking them off your hands, check? They worth anything?”

Menelaus turned to Illiance and said in Iatric, “The man knows nothing of value.”

Illiance said, “Inquire of him concerning the other questions alluring us. Ask of the Tombs, and their architect, and of the Judge of Ages, if he has heard of him.”

Menelaus translated the question.

Larz Quire leaned back in his chair and spread his legs and let out a gush of laughter. “Hoo, boy! Did you ever find the right guy! The Judge of Ages? Heard of him! I used to work for him! I know everything there is to know about him! He might forget, but he hired me once. I bet you I could sit right in front of him, talking his ear off, and he’d never think about me. Never notices little people! That’s the kind of guy he is. No fun to work for, and we did not part on exactly friendly terms, no, sir! So I’ll tell you everything!

“His real name is Menelaus Montrose.”

4. The Name of the Judge

What! You did not think his family name was Judge, first name The, and that he proved himself in a battle called Ages did you? Nope, this is a real person, a real man, not a god or a demigod like the lying Witches say, and he invented the long-term hibernation process—and the first person he used it on was himself.

Why? Pass around some of this dandy hooch, gather round, round up your ears, and I’ll tell you the why and the wherefore and the who and the how and the how much it cost ’em!

He was born in Texas back before the days of fire, in AUCR 473 by the soldier calendar, but that would be A.D. 2210 by the civilian calendar. It was a little town called Nowhere, and the name suited. He had a dozen brothers, one mother, no father, and his sweetheart was a Princess of Monaco who was also the Captain of the White Ship.

Yes, that White Ship, the ship with silver star-sails, the one and only human-crewed interstellar vessel this poor planet ever produced, and that ship is real, and it’s coming back someday.

The Chimeras say that she was the first Chimera, the first artificial Homo sap created from Monument code, but I don’t believe it. I don’t think she was two genetic lines crosspatched together like they are. She was more than them. She was an Odd John, a Nietzsche-man, a Next, an Ugly Duckling meant to grow into something finer. A Swan!

Y’understand, this Menelaus Montrose was a bit of a Next himself, because he hackled on his own brain to bloom his intelligence, and at one point he ruled the world, and he had a monopoly on the world energy supply. He had everything, and it meant nothing.

So he was smart, and powerful, and rich, and all meant jakeswash to him, because his Swan Princess took the world’s one and only starship, and her one and only self, and she was called away to the stars to plead for the human race in the court of an Authority beyond the rim of the Milky Way, and she ain’t coming back no time soon.

I’m telling you this so you’ll understand his mind. Tom needs his pussycat, and bull needs his cow and a boar needs his sow, so you see where I am heading with this? Here is this bloke with the fattest brain and the richest poke the world’s ever known, and he is carrying a tentpole in his trousers for his chip, and any man stands in his way, stands under the treads of an avalanche.

Man could do most anything by himself, that’s the kind of cove he is, but when he woke up in a strange world, and he needed a fix, he came to find a fixer, and the one he found was me.

5. The Final Fix

So I was hired to do this fix for him, see? It was my last job. My final.

Not that hard, not for a man of my talents and tie-ins, but it had to be smooth and it had to be hush, and he, when he said secret, he meant tight as the lid of a napalm can. Airtight. But all it was, was a slip-and-slide job, just moonshining past the shore patrol, avoid the deepers, and go: no other package than one passenger. Him. He was the flash stash I had to pass without fuss or fash, and my fix was to glide him out of Norfolk without tripping over the watchdog’s nose.

It was December of 5884 when I first clapped eye on him. So you figure he is over three thousand years old, but he spent the years in the Witches’ Tombs, where they are frozen, and they freeze time—but you knew that part! So he is looking good. Armed to the teeth. Not only has he got a knife in either sleeve, a shiv in his glove, and a springwhip as a belt with a heater for a buckle, a matched set of hissers tucked into it, but he is also carrying not one but two powder pieces bigger than the sprong of a whale in heat: each one was a hogleg hand-cannon like the breed you only read in history books, and only if you take the time to read. Each was a rocket-launcher, I kid you not, shot eight autogyro missiles in one go, and blew chaff and camo to paint the air. I saw it work!

There is nothing like it these days—I mean, my days.

Those days. His smokewagon was from the ancient world, before the Thinking Machines, before the Giants and their augmented brains, before the Witchwives and their expanded lives. Those Americans were one gun-happy crew, and this gunner was their happiest, I tell you.

Why does a man pay top dollar, hard cash up front, to haul himself and his boom-finger all the way across the gray Atlantic, stealth at night and submerge by day, using a low-flow cold drive? To kill someone, of course!