“My entire world, of which I am the father and the first, was a joke, a feint, a jest, merely meant to permit one afternoon of bloodshed, lasting from noon to the ninth hour, and years of torment to thousands of innocent Clades buried alive at the utmost bottom of the sea, merely so that that fourteen lines of code expressed in ninety-one symbols could be deduced.

“The knowledge drove Reyes, my creator, insane, and he returned to the comfort of the superstitions of his youth, and sought to save the souls of the soulless monsters he created. For this crime, his greater self and oversoul, the Dreagh Expastor, was murdered and consumed by the Dreagh Excoronimas, even as Man Pastor was slain by Man Coronimas. Reyes y Pastor died a martyr on the steps of his church, trying to defend the sacred bread of the altar from defilement.”

Ull was staring dumbfounded at him. “How can you know of these secret things, hidden since the dawn of time? You are a Hormagaunt and a monster. And whom do you address?” For the chameleon eyes of Soorm did not point the same direction when he spoke.

Soorm drew himself up, his scorpion tail lashing angrily. “I am the scion of Reyes y Pastor, and his masterwork! You are not worthy to touch the latchet of his shoes, much less fill those shoes! Judge of Ages, hear my prayer! I hold thee to thy oath! This pathetic blue dwarf occupies the throne of Master of the World of this Age. Judge him, O Judge of Ages! You said he would topple from his throne!”

Menelaus said, “One last thing he’s got to do, first. One little thing.”

Ull said to Menelaus, “Your control of the chamber weapons, Chimera, is nullified. Even with our nerve mites out of contact, yet our Followers outnumber the Thaws by more than twice over, armed against unarmed! We command, and on pain of death, you obey! Tell all in this chamber in their languages to reveal the Judge of Ages, or we begin to slay the innocent!”

Preceptor Naar, looking down from his perch on a nearby automaton, said sharply, “What do you mean, ‘we’? You are not a Simplifier. You are a Hermeticist, mazed in complexity and falsehood like a spider in a labyrinth, an architect of the Noösphere we shed. You are an enemy and opponent of every ideal for which we stand!” And for once, his languid, long features were tight and hot with passion.

All the Blue Men, faces expressionless, raised their fingers and pointed at Ull. Despite the radioactivity in the room, some of their coat-circuits must have been working, for flocks of gems fled from their coats, passing through the air like glittering snowflakes of many colors. With a chattering clatter, the gems affixed themselves to Ull’s coat, layer upon layer, until he was one bright multipatterned carpet of gemstones from neck to hemline, and all along his sleeves.

No matter how demoted, he was still a human, and Ull’s commands were still obeyed by the dog things in the chamber, for he cried out, “Followers! Bayonet the She-Nymphs!”

Two groups of seven dog things ran at the Nymphs, who, oddly, neither flinched nor fled. Instead the Nymphs began to dance, the women counterclockwise and the men clockwise, weaving and interweaving with rapid footfalls, and their mantillas floated like scarves, shedding white cherry blossom petals and white dandelion puffs. The dogs rushed into their midst, and the Nymphs screamed.

But they screamed with laughter, because the dog things were running in circles with the dance, weaving in and out, each chasing the tail of the dog thing before, barking happily, tongues lolling, tails wagging. The muskets and cutlasses were flung gaily to the golden floor, and Nymphs led dogs in a game of skipping and jumping over the muskets, from one side to the other.

Then Oenoe, who stood in the middle of circles of mad, dancing figures, raised her lovely arms overhead, and sang a single high note into the air, crystalline, perfect, pure. The music slowed, softened, and segued into a lullaby.

Even without understanding the words, all in the chamber understood the song promised the wonders of safety and satiety; mother’s love and lover’s kisses; roses and wine and feast-days without end; and slumber by the golden margins of mazy streams of cool, clear water beneath the dappled shadows of generous fruit trees, their luscious fruit a-shine with dewdrops; and, then, at sunset, dreams of pleasure merging into the beauty of the starlight.

And when the song was ended, the fourteen dog things were asleep in a puppy pile heaped in the center of the circle, and the male Nymphs, grinning like Satyrs, brandished four muskets, clutching them by the barrels as if they were clubs.

There was a murmur of admiration from the hags among the Witches, who nodded their hooded heads and clapped their hands in applause.

Ull cried wildly to Ydmoy, Yndech, and Yndelf, “Expelled of the order or not, a confluence of interests still commingles our actions! For your own reasons, to preserve your order and race, you must find the Judge of Ages.”

Ydmoy said gravely, “It may be so, but to spend human lives to achieve our goal, while efficient and useful, we reject as Locust thinking.”

Yndech said, “True, but then again, Locust Ull is correct—no objection can be raised to discovering the identity of the Judge of Ages and coercing him to preserve our race. The principle of Darwinian evolution proposes that to do otherwise would be to adopt a moral code that cannot reproduce itself and therefore cannot be carried into the future!” And he pointed his pistol at Menelaus. “Translate the command to the chamber!”

The Giant Bashan tilted his vast bald head down, his magnificent, beautiful eyes narrowed and his tiny grisly mouth bracketed by wrinkles in his orange-peel integument. Now he strode forward, the floor murmuring thunder beneath his footfalls, and stepped over the fountain in one stride. He was a tower, high and terrible, staring down with eyes like two suns, a gaze no one could meet. There was a rumble in his chest, almost subsonic, like the noise whales might make, a sound more easily felt in the teeth than heard in the ear. At the same time, there was a voice of human pitch that issued from his throat.

But the rumbling in his chest was a second voice box, which the Giants used for their long-range low-frequency speech. The sounds were too low for the ear hairs of the Blue Men to catch, but Menelaus heard this second voice, speaking in Merikan: “Where is the manual firing station?”

Menelaus had the arsenal index and weapon status information glowing in his mind. He was not certain, because the golden node capsule given him by the Linderlings had touched the data, if the information were accurate. He decided to trust it, because events were happening too fast, and there were no other options. He replied in Merikan, “A firing station at the corner balcony, up yonder, behind the statue of the Grim Reaper. Behind a secret panel, there is a big metal door that needs a key I don’t have.”

The Giant, with his other, high-pitched voice box, talked over the voice of Menelaus (who spoke words the Blue Men could not have understood even had they been loud and clear) and so was at the same time saying in Iatric, “O Fools! Your so-called principle of Darwinism is nothing to do with Darwin, or with any biological theory: It is an excuse for the evil you contemplate, and, like all evils, a lie. The lie says that if you merely do deeds evil enough, ruthlessly enough, you shall survive.

“Your Locust race did horrific deeds in the name of race survival, inflicting a despair upon the Hormagaunts, so that anyone not absorbed into a Locust hive mind was diverted from his true life and true mate, subtly made miserable, and exposed to influences both psychological and chemical to hinder reproduction. The Hormagaunts in those years were led by Cliometric webs of incentives first to lives of pleasure and sterile self-centeredness, then to underpopulation, and then to extinction. You killed a race: genocide. By Darwin’s logic, genocide is not merely acceptable, but laudable.