The official business of Dr. Zeus is the "finding", for a fee, of artifacts and living things thought lost to time, which have actually been carefully collected by the cyborgs known as Preservers, aided by the fixers, conmen and masters of deception known as Facilitators.

With the aid of his AI helper "Captain Morgan" and their time travelling schooner using technology stolen from Dr. Zeus, he aims to find her wherever and whenever she is.

This is complicated by the fact that he is hosting the personalities of his two dead clones, Nicholas Harpole and Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, in his own partially cyborged body.

Nicholas is a religious zealot, Edward a cold-blooded killer, and Alec is the squeamish product of a culture that prohibits or represses everything enjoyed by humans in the past, including religion, sex, and violence.

As Budu re-assembles his shattered body, Joseph plunders the archives of Dr. Zeus, learning about the Adonai project which created Alec, Nicholas and Edward.

Executive Facilitator Suleyman is using his power base in North Africa to prepare for the year 2355, when the Company apparently suffers such a setback that no transmissions from the time beyond have ever been received.

Budu is enduring the decades-long process of self-repair, having been buried for 370 years, body cut apart, in rubble after the San Francisco earthquake.

At the end of The Life of the World to Come, Alec Checkerfield, aboard his schooner the Captain Morgan, crewed and piloted by the eponymous AI he created from a teaching computer given to him as a child, had escaped from Dr. Zeus' installation on Santa Catalina Island with information stolen from the Company databases.

Instead of being placed in suspended animation like the other Enforcers, he was sent to run Options Research where he systematically disassembles cyborgs and subjects them to horrendous treatments in an attempt to destroy them.

Becoming a rogue like Joseph, he roamed Europe until the Black Death gave him the idea of using disease to cull humanity of its violent members.

Contacting his various recruits, like Labienus, he formed the Plague Cabal, which began creating diseases designed to kill target populations quickly and then die out before spreading to the rest of humanity.

Labienus, however, had visions of reducing human population on a global scale, committing genocide, and caused Budu's downfall at the hands of Victor, who had unwittingly been made into a carrier of targeted viruses.

Joseph, horrified by what he sees and failing to find Mendoza, returns to the 24th century and contacts Suleyman, who mounts a mission to rescue the cyborgs held at Options Research and expose it to all the other active Company operatives still alive.

With knowledge supplied by Budu, Joseph begins to ransack Company databases for information about Mendoza, his friend Lewis, and the Adonai project which created Alec, Edward and Nicholas.

One side effect is that the Company conditioning which suppressed her paranormal abilities has been removed, and she constantly creates temporal anomalies around her when her emotions are aroused.

Before doing this Alec insists on a vacation, and since he is obsessed with his romantic vision of pirates, he decides to go to Port Royal, Jamaica, in its heyday before being destroyed by an earthquake in 1692.

Joseph sets himself up in the less rowdy inland community of Spanish Town, ready to wait years for their arrival, equipped with a device that can detect and jam the Captain's signals.

Alec arrives with Mendoza, though he is quickly repelled by the place, and is only able to continue with help from Edward and Nicholas, who are not bothered by such horrors as abattoirs, meat markets, pet animals, thugs and pirates.

By way of celebrating their impending triumph over Dr. Zeus, Alec and Mendoza, helped considerably by Nicholas' passion and poetry, marry themselves and enjoy a belated honeymoon in a harbor inn.

Finally raiding Alpha-Omega, on an island in 500,000 BCE, they bypass the AI and the single human attendant it protects, and recover the Adonai genetic template.

This volume is heavy on plot exposition but also returns to earlier themes, allowing the author to revel in her knowledge of Elizabethan English once more, as in In The Garden of Iden.

Suleyman and his allies are mostly on the sidelines, bearing witness to the coming of a future they dread as the long-awaited signs, such as the Company issuing badges consisting of a clock with no hands, begin to appear.

The appearance of a live ichthyosaur at the end echoes Mendoza's discovery of a recently dead member of that species during her exile on Santa Catalina Island, as recounted in The Life of the World to Come.