Menelaus said, “Anything to squelch your damned yammering! I’ll talk! Do you believe in the Hermetic Order?”

“Spooks and kooks who live in the great black yonder in a starship older than history? Dark Magicians who serve the Machine? Simon the Black and his secret of eternal life? C’mon, mate, don’t pork a porker. No such beastie.”

“Simon the Black is myth. Ximen del Azarchel is real.”

“Simon the Magician. Simon of the Moon. I know the name.”

“How do you know it?”

Larz said, “The same way I know about the Pharaohs of Egypt. Larz of the Gutter had to fight mummies and mesmerists and swamp zombies, not just gangsters and assassins. It’s just made-up stuff, R and R reads, not real.”

“Real enough to kill us all in the next hour.”

“No! It is a fairy tale for kids in boot camp. The world was burnt an aeon ago, and only Simon the Magician escaped; an aeon before that, the world was drowned to death, and only Noah the Navigator escaped.”

“Old Noah with his houseboat full of zoo animals?” said Montrose, astonished. “I used to have a toy when I was a whelp—how in the world is that story still around, by your day?”

“Aha! So you might ask! There is something behind those tales. Now, you might think the latest news is the least painted-up and liar-tilted. But no sirree! My take on it is”—and here Larz seemed to puff out his chest a bit, and assumed a philosophical expression—“in general the older tales can be more trusted, on account of the brass has had less time to hack them, right? Older tales had more time to spread around the world and lodge in nooks and cracks where the truth police cannot unnook nor uncrack them, not all of them, right? Of course right. And the truest tales come from the very beginning of the world.”

“Very beginning of the world?”

“You heard the one about the man named Man and the woman named Wife, and they lived in a garden called Peace? It seems a geneticist named Old Snake fed the wife a poison apple, so that her children would look like people on the outside, but be just like snakes on the inside, ’cause that is the only way the sterile Old Snake could reproduce. You know that one, right? Old stories never die, and not even the Chimerae can wipe them out.”

“That is a very old story,” said Menelaus. “My Ma used to tell it to me. Not sure if I believe it.”

“It explains why the world is just a damned snake pit, though, don’t it?”

“I allow that it might do that,” nodded Menelaus.

“You believe Simon the Black is real. Are you going to scoff at Old Snake and his everlasting poison?”

Menelaus sighed. “I can see that kiddie yarns are more educational than I thought. Well, some of those stories are real or near enough. I think Reyes y Pastor has been adding historical vectors to keep Bible stories afloat, the way I tried to do for yarns about Englishmen raised by apes. And the stories about the great ship Hermetic are true, or based on truth. The Hermeticists have been diddling with your history, and all the history periods before and after, and they are hunting for me.”

“What’d you do?”

“I defied them. It’s not just me. They are gunning for everyone who protects the Tombs, because we are the only thing keeping the past alive, and stopping them from running history any damn which way they please. So I had to hide my ID.”

“Why us? Why try to pass your sassafras ass as a big, bad Beta?”

“Simple. No one frats with a Chimera. I picked an era, the Social Wars, when the records were burnt or erased by electromagnetic pulse.”

“How come the brass didn’t glam your scam?”

Presumably Larz meant Daae and Yuen. “I trounced them,” answered Montrose, “and their Alpha pride could not admit a Kine can trounce a Chimera.”

“Ho! They is slow. I could tell you weren’t no Chimera at half a glance even without you dropping your pants.”

“For the love of God, I will pay you gold from the treasuries of the Judge of Ages if you will stop talking in rhymes. It makes me seasick. Yellow gold that shines like the sun. I swear by the circumcised and risen penis of Christ.”

Larz was so surprised that his voice dropped to a whisper. “You know about the White Christ?”

3. Depthtrain Station

At that point, the passage was blocked by a rock slide. The procession turned aside and entered a wide arch, and here were ramps meant for coffins to slide, not people to walk, and there was no conversation as the dogs and their prisoners clambered and stooped to pass through.

They entered a short, bright corridor leading to a broad platform. It was a depthtrain station.

A vast well, covered with one transparent airlock after another, dropped into infinite distance underfoot. Poised like a ship in dry dock, or a topsy-turvy rocket ship in an upside-down launch silo, was one of the ancient depthtrains: a bullet shape coated with as many magnetic spines as a metal porcupine. The vehicle was huge, a tower leaning nose-downward, and in the racks and rails overhead, other bullet-shaped carriages and train cars rested, titanic, shining, filling a vast space like the ammunition rack of cyclopean beings. In two great half circles surrounding the lip of the vacuum well, metallic parentheses, crouched the silent bulk of a magnetic-atomic linear accelerator. There was no thunderstorm smell of ozone, no throb of dynamos; the only hint of the vast power locked in those accelerators were little alert lights like fireflies burning steadily, as they had for millennia, on the steel faces of the main leads.

The next chamber, equally vast, was a warehouse with rectilinear crates and containers and lifts and power-trucks and trolleys idle to either side, positioned to maneuver the supplies through an upper loading dock to the waiting depthtrain cars. The train yard control booth was overhead, looking down through slanted glass windows, and its ceiling was a transparent globe, finely spiderwebbed with countless brachistochrone curves of the gravity-drops.

Menelaus looked left and right, noting which crates had been broken open, and memorizing the tracking numbers, and with each number, he gritted his teeth more grimly.

Beyond that, a second storehouse just of spare parts, braces, hulls, magnetic engines, coupling, and cables. Row upon row of fully robotic workshops loomed to the right. Vault upon vault of storage for dangerous radioactive or precious metals frowned from the left.

Larz continued the conversation. “No more rhyming, Simon, I swear it on my carrot. But you gotta tell me who or what you are. Why are the superhuman magicians from the night sky looking for you? They are pookas from children’s stories.”

“I experimented on myself to raise my intelligence, and I fell in love with the girl they had created like a Moreau. And they think I stole her from them.”

Larz said, “What are you? A little Giant?”

“Something like that.”

“I thought they had two noses.”

“I make do with one, just extra large, and it doubles as a can opener. Speaking of can openers, how the hell did you get the door open? The lock has so many levels of quantum encryption on it, not even the Machine can unpuzzle it.”

“Puzzle, wuzzle! I was given the passwords and challenge responses. When I was in the hospital.”

“You met Sir Guy? He wanted you to bring the Blue Men in?”

“I didn’t know his name. I don’t know what he wanted. He was a painted man, illuminated like an old book, all his face and skin covered over with inks. This man, whoever he was, the Blue Men chopped off all four of his limbs to put him in a talking frame of mind, and he didn’t talk no-how, so they coffined him up to regrow his limbs, and I guess they were going to try again. He wasn’t doing not a wringing thing for them, that’s a sure deal. He would not break. He was holy.”