Mickey said, “Smash your face into the coffin again. That was great.”

Soorm said, “Would you like the head of Yuen? I can put it in your lap.”

“No, pox, no. Gross.”

“Then I can eat it? I have genetic retroengineering receptors in my mouth and first intestine, which helps me analyze and copy interesting biotech from those I defeat.”

“Gross. No, pox, no. Control your appetite.”

Soorm looked puzzled, and hefted the head in one webbed hand, tossing it up and catching it idly, making the teeth clack. The dead eyes stood out, the long and beautiful hair floated, and fluids fled from the grisly red wetness of the neck stump. “Then why did I pick it up? Oh, and I like his taste in eyes.”

“You were supposed to prop up the head and point it toward me because I was hoping if I put information of my identity and location from an uninfected source, like Yuen, into the Exarchel’s system, I could get past the blind spot block, and let Pellucid know I am here, without letting Exarchel see me and countermand any orders I give. This whole rigmarole was just to get myself into a position where Yuen was both dead and looking at me. He had to be dead so that the whole brain mass would download into Exarchel—he is a Savant, like the other slaves of the Machine, but the skullworks are more sophisticated and miniature with him, and Exarchel likes to equip his slaves with an electronic rapture at death, to help him form a complete autopsy and after-action report—and Yuen had to look at me because that eyeball was not infected by Exarchel, and he could see me.”

Soorm said, “Wait. Which rigmarole? The Blue Men found and captured me by accident. And just now, of my own free will, I crossed to this side of the chamber, passed though the fog, and came across your duel … you did not arrange that. You did not know I would take your side of the quarrel.”

“I did. The only thing I did not arrange is Larz. That came as a complete surprise, a thunderbolt out of the clear blue sky. My plan was you walk up to Yuen and wave your tail under his nose and nanotech him to death with your farts. I did not imagine you were going to try to best him at hand to hand. He is a Chimera!”

Soorm said, “Chimerae, in my time, were legend. Would you not wrestle a fearsome Neanderthal, and measure your strength against his, if you had the chance? Or hunt a triceratops, or some other great beast from myth, long extinct? Such chances do not come twice, not even in a life so long as mine.”

“Funny. I had you pegged as being more careful and paranoid. Even posthumans make mistakes.”

Mickey said, “So what are you doing? To us non-posthumans, it looks like you are sitting on a chair, leaking blood on the seat leather.”

Menelaus said, “I am doing something with my brains. I am trying to wake up my systems just enough to turn this room and the things in it back on, bring in coffins for the wounded, and so on. I have set a process in motion. Now we sit around, watching Larz die of internal bleeding and shock, and listening to my clients shoot each other, and we wait.”

Mickey said, “Let’s play a game to pass the time.”

Menelaus said, “You better be pustulating yerking my leg, fat man. That guy in Oenoe’s lap is dying, and I cannot save him.”

Mickey said, “The game is a question and answer game. Exarchel made it clear you have hidden much from me, Judge of Ages, despite your hillbilly Yankee charm.”

“Fine. I can run the program systems through my implants with two segments of my compartmentalized mind and spend a segment chewing the fat with you. I’ve lost the love of loyal men before because I did not explain myself enough, including my whole damned Clan. So ask. But I ain’t no Yankee. Be polite!”

Mickey said, “My question is this: Exarchel invaded your Xypotechnology.”

“By invitation. I invited him and he fell for it.”

“And your system, this Pell-mell—”

“Pellucid. Named him after a place from a Tarzan book.”

“—Your system went blind to you?”

“Exarchel made a more complete and thorough attack than I thought he would. I had a firewall—you don’t know what that is—I had a ward, a magic circle, around that part of my Ghost I was going to keep safe, but Exarchel somehow drove a spike all the way to the core of the planet and got a physical contact with my Ghost, which I thought was poxy impossible. So point for him. I lured him in with bait, and he swallowed the hook, line, and sinker, but also the fishing pole and half of my arm. But I got the hook in him, so point for me.”

“I don’t understand. How are they both two minds and one mind at the same time?”

“Uh. It’s magic. One Ghost ate the other. I dangled my horse on purpose like bait into the shark waters, and fed the horseflesh to the foe, ’cause it was a Trojan horse, and I did it to get all my systems inside Exarchel. And because my horse was so big and so tasty, Blackie’s Ghost was dumb enough to fall for the trap. Unlike the real Blackie, Blackie’s Ghost always underestimates me, because he cannot see me, and therefore he never sees me do anything.”

Soorm perked up and said, “My turn to ask a question. Did you say horse?”

“Yup. A sorrel named Res Ipsa. Finest bit of horseflesh I ever sat astride.”

Soorm said, “You are talking about the core of the planet!”

“I surely am. The whole damn planet is my bronco. You see why I ain’t worried too pea-green about Del Azarchel’s Ghost occupying a little crust of ice on the outside, and not even all of that neither. Compare the surface area of a globe to its volume.”

Soorm said, “You used a self-replicating iron-based viral pseudolifeform, a type of crystal called a Von Neumann machine, to infect the entire core of the planet and turn it into a Xypotech.”

“I surely did. Ah—not the whole core. That would be ridiculous. Only the inner core. About two percent of the entire mass of the Earth.”

Soorm said, “Reyes and the other Hermeticists were mad with envy, not able to figure out how to scale up a human brain to that volume without suffering Divarication madness. My question is, how you did it?”

“Because it wasn’t a human brain. A Neohippus is smarter than an old-fashioned horse, but ain’t much smarter than a monkey. The laws, and my conscience, didn’t have any qualms about making an emulation of a beast I loved. And when I augmented his Ghost, it became a super horse, a post-equine. But it still loved me with the simple love of an animal’s heart. It does all that it does sort of half-asleep, in the back of its head, and so it is super brilliant, but not original, and because of that, it cannot go mad. The situation is more complex than that, and there is math involved I could explain—or, actually, can’t explain, not unless you got a few years—but the damn Hermeticists were so fixated on copying me and making themselves superhuman, that even after Melchor de Ulloa—is that twerp Ull named after him, by the way?—”

Mickey said, “No. German god of magic. And skiing. The name means Glory.”

Soorm cocked his head. “What a bunch of interesting rubbish you have collected in your head!”

Mickey: “Thank you. I come from a literate civilization. And I am a Naming Magus. Ull selected his external name because he was a Savant, a Glorified, who had an emulation made of himself.”

Soorm: “I’d like to eat it after you are dead, if you don’t mind. Your brain.”

Mickey: “That is not in keeping with the traditions of the Wise. We are sealed in geomancy-compliant mausoleums with gear specially named and sanctified to be drawn along with us magnetically through the reincarnation wheel, and sealed also are our Moreaus, who are given poisoned peyote to eat for mercy’s sake.”

“Waste of servants! Organ spoilage! Prodigality! You people from the wrong parts of history are freaks.”

Menelaus ploughed on, saying, “—even after De Ulloa solved the Divarication equations for turning animals into Moreaus, they still did not look into emulating augmented animals to do their brainwork. Works like a charm. Animals are just not as prone to entering electronic nirvana, and not imaginative enough to invent electronic paradises to get lost in.”