Of necessity, since Kage Baker intends to tie up every loose strand of plot, this book leaps nimbly among a plethora of venues and among a wide host of characters, almost all of them familiar from past books.

But we begin with what I believe is a brand-new personage (although I'm at the disadvantage of not having read every single one of the preceding volumes, and might have missed her): Princess Tiara, the charming young female member of a non-human race of smallish beings the Company has exploited for millennia. Think of them as elves or fairies and you won't be far off. Living in her hidden "elfhill," Tiara has stumbled upon Lewis, a Company operative thought to be dead. But she revives his quiescent biomechanicals and he becomes her mentor and platonic boyfriend. But their love will be doomed should any other member of "the kin" discover them.

Meanwhile, two chief protagonists—our castaway lovers, Alec and Mendoza—have come to a unique solution to their biggest problem. Alec's body is harboring three separate contentious personalities. But with the help of Alec's loving AI, Captain Henry Morgan, a startling procedure is developed to split them off. Once that's accomplished, the quartet can set about the simple task of thwarting the Company and attaining omnipotence.

But the Board of Directors are not just twiddling their thumbs. Far in the future, in the year 2355, which holds the dreaded moment of "Silence," when all the records of the time travelers cease, Freestone, Rappacini, Bugleg, Rossum and the other evil spiders at the center of the web are launching their own schemes. They intend to fatally poison every cyborg simultaneously and shut down the Company, living off their accumulated spoils.

But about a half-dozen other rival factions scattered up and down the timestream also have their own notions of how things will sort out.

Shaking off the chains of history

Prior to this capstone volume, the books I've read in this series have struck me as freewheeling metaphysical adventure novels in the manner of Zelazny, Farmer, Harness and van Vogt. Godlike players employing a variety of historical milieus as their battleground. I suppose the Highlander film and television series should be mentioned as well.

But this final volume departs somewhat from the feel of the previous books. It's a tad airless and cloistered, in that all the various factions seem almost isolated in their little bubbles or pocket universes. There's no additional solid use of the colorful historical milieus that Baker employed so well in the other books. We jump around from elfhill to Board Room to 500,000 B.C., where Alec and Mendoza are hiding out, and then around the loop again, each time making progress, but statically, if that makes any sense. There's no longer any sense of inhabiting history per se, except in tiny bits and set pieces (dismantling a cemetery, etc.).

Remember Fritz Leiber's great time-travel novel The Big Time (1961), part of his Change War series, which must have been an inspiration to Baker? All the action of Leiber's book took place on a single set, so to speak. Baker's novel feels like a dozen iterations of Leiber's book jammed back to back.

It's kind of like Asimov's The End of Eternity (1955) rewritten by E.R. Eddison. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a different thing from its predecessors.

But I certainly enjoyed the parts with Princess Tiara, which had a kind of humorous Richard Calder decadence about them. And Baker lovingly and resonantly bestows appropriate fates on all her characters, and she tidies up humanity's lot as well.

So despite a somewhat fragmentary ride, the payoffs here will not disappoint.