"Four thousand three hundred and eleven years old - or at least the original of this was."

"...to travel back to 1478 A.D. to investigate an odd and interesting manuscript purchased by Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1586"

"They did not," Prospero said flatly. "You are the result of four thousand years of gene-tampering and nanotech splicing."

"More than two thousand e-years earlier, the first moravecs to be sent out to Jovian space to explore the moons and to contact the sentients known to be in the atmosphere of Jupiter were programmed by the first post-humans with elaborate full-sensory tapes of human history, human culture, and the human arts. The rubicon had already occurred, of course, and before that the Great Retreat."

"Eleven billion dead," said Harman, his voice shaking. "Ninety-seven percent of Earth's population wiped out".

"...he lingered only long enough to confirm it was after the rubicon release, during the Dementia years when the Global Caliphate was near its end..."

"But the rubicon virus did not come from a lab in Israel. That's just another blood libel."

"No, you are perfectly correct," said Prospero. "The rubicon was indeed the one great contribution to science that the Islamic world gave to the rest of the world in a two-thousand-year stretch of darkness."

"Terror Birds," said Savi. "Phorushacos. After the rubicon, the ARNists had a wild few centuries of such play."

The titles made his heart pound - The Third Dynasty of Khan Ho Tep - A.D. 2601-2939

Harman knew now that eleven million people had died because of that ancient experiment gone wrong.

He knew that less than a couple of hundred miles northeast of where the effelbahn ended there, there was a sixty-mile-wide circle of the terrain fused into glass where thiry-two hundred years ago the Global Caliphate had fought its determining battle with the N.E.U. - more than three million proto-voynix pouring over and past two hundred thousand doomed human mechanized-infantry knights.

"Where’d this Setebos come from?" asked Harman.

"Brought in from the dark with the voynix and other things," said Prospero. "A minor miscalculation."

Prospero: "the voynix reacted as programmed."

"Programmed three thousand years ago," said Harman.

(during a discussion of Delacourte's time machine)

"But the French and the New European Union gave the designs to the Caliphate," said Harman. "Why?"

"The Palestinian scientists were their friends."

All most Jovian moravecs knew of the fabled voynix was that the planet Earth had radiated unprecedented quantum phase-shift activity when the creatures had first been mentioned in monitored post-human neutrino communications more than two thousand e-years earlier.

"They had lasted for more than two and one-half millenia, but they were very unstable."

...he was stepping into a submarine from some century late in the Lost Era: possibly something from after the rubicon release but before the first post-humans had been genetically brought into being.

"the post-humans got too clever by half. Their science was impressive. To all intents and purposes, they’d fled the Earth to their orbital rings during the terrible rubicon epidemic."

More than two thousand e-years earlier, the first moravecs to be sent out to Jovian space to explore the moons and to contact the sentients known to be in the atmosphere of Jupiter were programmed by the first post-humans with elaborate full-sensory tapes of human history, human culture, and the human arts. The rubicon had already occurred...

"A thousand years before the final fax, the posts drained a sizable sea south of Europe - dammed it up between a rock called Gibraltar and the tip of North Africa"

"Something sank it here long before this groove in the Atlantic Ocean was created."

"They should call this wood Ariel's Nursery, for here ten times two hundred years ago, I came to be"

"Impossible," said Sycorax. "I sealed that wreck off inside a statis egg almost two millennia ago."

"You understand, don't you, that the voynix popped out of the temporalclastic cloud two centuries before the final fax,"

"I know the voynix were sent forward through time by the Global Caliphate to kill Jews,"

"We... the post-humans," said Moira, "asked Prospero and his... companion... to create a race of creatures ferocious enough to stop the replicating voynix from flooding the Mediterranean Basin and compromising our operations there.."

"Companion? Do you mean Ariel?"

"No, not Ariel," said Moira. "You see, fifteen hundred years ago, the creature we call Sycorax was not yet the..."

"That will do," interrupted Prospero.

"Moira is the last," said Prospero. "Come down from the p-ring more than fifteen hundred years ago."

"Do you know why moravec engineers gave up on developing quantum teleportation as a way to travel to the stars?" said Orphu.

"It’s not stable," said Mahnmut. "There’s evidence of some accident on Earth fifteen hundred or so years ago. The humans or post-humans were fooling around with quantum wormholes and it didn’t work and backfired on them somehow."

"We know that the post-humans accelerated their quantum research — fooling around, really — about the time we moravecs abandoned it, about fourteen hundred Earth years ago. They were punching holes in space-time left and right."

"So about fourteen hundred years ago on Earth, the post-humans - it had to be the post-humans, since our probes at the time were sure that there were just a thousand or so old-style humans left, like almost-extinct-species animals being kept around in a zoo - the post-humans began quantum teleporting people and machines and other objects."

"Where?" said Mahnmut. "I mean where did they send them? Mars? Other star systems?"

"No, you need a receiver as well as a transmitter with quantum teleportation," said the Ionian. "They just sent them from somewhere on the Earth to somewhere else on the Earth—or in their orbital cities—but they had a big surprise when the objects materialized."

"Goal Four - to find the alien entities who entered our solar system fourteen hundred years ago, the real gods behind these midget Olympian gods, as it were, and to reason with them," said General Beh bin Abee.

"You’ll see why I’ve come with two others after that first solo visit of mine to Atlantis more than a millennium ago."

"The calibani killed and ate the man and woman who came with me the time before that, almost three centuries ago."

“No shuttles. No evidence of ring-to-Earth neutrino faxing. And the convoy-bridge of heavy materials being accelerated between the rings and Mars—observed as recently as twenty Jovian years ago, two hundred forty-some Earth/pH ring years ago—is gone.”

"They terraformed it," Mahnmut said aloud. "The posts terraformed Mars."

"How long ago?" asked Orphu of Io. None of the Galileans had any special interest in Mars—in any of the Inner Worlds, for that matter (except for their literature)—so this could have happened any time in the twenty-five hundred terrestrial years since the break between moravecs and humanity.

"In the last two hundred years,” said Asteague/Che. “Perhaps in the last century and a half."

"The last time I came to Atlantis, I came on foot. From the north. It was a century and a half ago, and I brought two eloi with me"

The first head was erected almost an Earth-measured century and a half ago, at the base of Olympus Mons...

He confirmed Orphu’s earlier statement to Mahnmut—from their discussion when they’d been passing over the Asteroid Belt on their way to Mars—that sixty e-years ago the Ganymedan Koros III had been sent to the Belt by the Pwyll-based moravec Asteague/Che and the Five Moons Consortium.

"And Savi and I unsealed it more than a century ago," said Noman.

Odysseus shrugged. "Savi and I distributed the turin cloths almost ten years ago. I brought the prototype from… far away."

"Daeman smiled tiredly. About the woman who somehow missed the final fax fourteen hundred years ago and whos been condemned to wander the earth ever since? Of course. But I didnt know the woman in the legend had a name.

"When she saw Harman looking at her intently, she added, I was on a sort of sabbatical in a berg much like this when the final fax went on without me fourteen of your allotted life spans ago."

"But when my friends Pinchas and Petra were here in the last minutes before the final fax fourteen hundred years ago, there were tens of thousands of voynix suddenly active near the Western Wall."`