The device is mounted in an advanced super sailing ship, the Captain Morgan, which is run by an AI that interfaces with Alec as Capt. Henry Morgan, the famous pirate of yore. But Alec has some additional company along for the ride—all in his head! It eventuates that Alec was the third clone in a Company project. His prior two incarnations, Edward and Nicholas, lived in earlier centuries. Now they exist only as complete downloads of themselves, resident in Alec's wetware.

The Company seems to believe that Alec is dead, giving him lots of freedom in his quest. But one operative with a grudge against Alec, a nasty, deadly and smart Immortal named Joseph, still is searching for his quarry. When Alec and Joseph encounter each other, it'll be a fight to the death.

But until then, after finding and resurrecting Mendoza, Alec and his happy bride will bop from one era to another, planting various long-term seeds that they hope will result in the Company's ultimate downfall. They visit Shakespeare and Robert Louis Stevenson, Roaring '20s America and Colonial Jamaica, among numerous other spacetime locales. But two extremes of the continuum hold their attention. There's the year 2355, a barrier beyond which no one has ever penetrated. Special powers of Mendoza's might take them there, should they choose to go. And then there's Alpha and Omega, a secret Company facility in the year 500,000 BCE. One strange man is the sole staff there. But he's guarding something incredibly valuable that Alec and Mendoza desire.

Temporal pirates roam the seas of time

I would have given this zesty, witty, tragicomic romp an unqualified "A" save for one thing: its fragmentary nature.

Since her first book, 1997's In the Garden of Iden, Baker has been compiling her mosaic of the vast doings of the Company. This book is merely another piece, not really a whole esthetic unit. True, you don't need to be familiar with The Life of the World to Come to enjoy it. I, for one, had missed that previous installment. And yet I was soon brought up to speed by Baker's concise infodumps and contextual clues. And while the book does boast what is an arguably valid jump-on point—the recovery of Mendoza's shattered body—its ending is just too abrupt and arbitrary, a cliffhanger setting up the next installment. Moreover, certain scenes—such as when Alec and Mendoza nearly run into an earlier version of Joseph—simply don't resonate without reference to the Grand Design that not every reader will be familiar with.

But these are the inevitable perils of writing such a Braided Meganovel. Putting those aside, we find much to applaud in this latest outing.

Baker replicates, in her own distinct voice, the same devil-may-care, slangy insouciance of adventuresome godlings that was the special province of Philip Jose Farmer and Roger Zelazny. (Additionally, there's a bit of Moorcock influence, I believe, deriving from his more recent Multiverse books.) The banter between Joseph and Alec when they finally meet plays off nicely against the deadly stakes of their battle. And the carefree hedonistic moments that Alec and Mendoza enjoy, thanks to their stolen technology, are truly emblematic of some kind of posthuman liberation.

The struggle Alec has with his interior doppelgangers is dramatic and nerve-wracking—and pivotal to the climax. Capt. Morgan the AI is, like all free-willed beings, an intriguingly devious soul. Baker stages several slapstick or droll set pieces, such as when Alec and Mendoza go on a wild grocery-shopping spree, having been deprived of modern foodstuffs for too long. She's a spendthrift with neat ideas—robot dolphins, the Temporal Concordance that lists all history—and she can really nail a historical milieu or an action scene. So, given its small frustrations, the reader will find no dull moments in this lively, suspenseful frolic across the ages.