Menelaus was burning to speak with them, because of Alpha Daae’s cryptic unfinished sentence: “It is far more important that we get underground as soon as possible. You see, we found something dreadful. The gray twins discovered it…”

What had they said to Daae?

Said? Rather, since they shared no language in common, what had they shown him?

Menelaus turned to the man and the woman, and said in Intertextual, “Do you happen to understand this language?”

Seen closely, the gray skin was many-hued and subtle, like the color of a pigeon’s wing, or silvery silk. Highlights and subtle shadings of pearl and platinum differentiated the eyelids, cheekbones, and jawline, lending the faces a peculiar exaggeration and vivacity. This close, Menelaus could see through the slits of their goggles that the pupils of their eyes were as silvery-white as polished foil. The blue and cerulean hair formed a handsome contrast. Their faces were like works of art, and their features were stamped with the signs of refined and energetic personalities.

The man said, “All Locusts are programmed with the applicable prenatal speech templates.”

Menelaus, with some surprise, said, “You are Locusts?”

A smile answered him: “Yes, if isolated individuals without tendrils, and with no connection to any outside mental environments, can be called Locusts. I am Linder Keir and this is my daughter Linder Keirthlin. We call ourselves ‘Linderlings’ or Reestablishmentarians, since we still hope to restore the disintegrated Noösphere to working coherence. We adhere to protocols devised by a man named Elton Linder, and became Inquiline. As nonessentials, we entered hibernation at the time of the Reductions, in order to escape the coming of the ice.”

Menelaus looked back and forth. Daughter? She looked like a twin sister. Cloning? Gene manipulation? It implied a longevity technique that not merely slowed aging, but halted it altogether. That implied a sophisticated genetic correction system, which, in turn, implied Xypotechnology.

Eager as he was to learn what they had shown to Daae, he thought it best to follow up this other thread first.

Menelaus said, “An inquiline is a bug that lives in an ants’ nest or termite mound without being one of them.”

Keir said, “Such is the relation of our order to the planetary neurocybernetic mental hierarchy. Inquiline are in the Noösphere but not connected to it.”

Keirthlin spoke up for the first time. “Do you also speak English?” She had a flawless Oxonian accent.

Menelaus looked even more surprised. “I’ll be hornswoggled. How could y’all possibly know English?”

Keirthlin said, “Earlier, we were placed in close confinement with the Savant called Ctesibius. He has a fully functioning emulation broadcast path woven into his brain from cortex to brainstem, with pinpoint emitters that were only switched off, not removed. I was able to pick up a signal through a short-range resonance, and induce signal flow from his cache. The traces were enough to use a holographic memory technique—you understand this technique works both for endogamic and exogamic memories?—to build up a perception of his language structure.”

“He only spoke Pre-Anglatino.”

“But the earlier language forms can be deduced from traces, residuum, and atavisms. I used a negative information intuition procedure to fill in the patterns. It took the better part of a day. Language patterning is not my strong suit.”

Keir patted her hand with fatherly affection. “There, there. Under less adverse conditions, results would have differed; and we judge by intention and effort, which you can control, rather than by any result influenced by factors no one can control.” He lowered his slitted goggles onto his nose, and, peering over the top of them, transfixed Menelaus with his bright, silvery eyes. It seemed an oddly avuncular or professorial gesture. “Can you understand us at a conversational level?”

“Uh, sure. It was an ancient language in my day, but I reckon I can speak it well enough.”

Keirthlin fixed him with a particularly penetrating gaze, her head tilted to one side, as if toying with a thought. “You reckon so, do you? It is your native language. I cannot determine whom you want to fool. I assume it is the Witches. Anyone from a time later than the Chimerae would see your deviations from their behavior standards. As for contemporaries, well, Mr. Slewfoot Larz the Pinkerton—that is the correct term in English?—the Pinkerton knew immediately you were not a Chimera when you failed to punish him for remaining seated while you stood…”

Menelaus said, “Wait, wait. You saw my interview with Larz?” Thunderstruck, he realized these two had some implanted system to pick up what the Blue Men were recording or sending to each other with the gems on their coats. They had been spying on the camp. They knew the Blue Men’s plans. “What are the Blue Men planning?”

Keir said placidly, “Our ability to intrude is hindered by those rather complex codes of behavior that the Blue Men have decided no longer to follow. Some of their information is proprietary, and since the Blue Men have violently trespassed on our integrity, we can audit certain streams of it, in certain ways, but our retaliation has to fulfill specific requirements before we can act more directly. Take my daughter’s hand.”

Menelaus shook her hand. It was small and slender in his fist. Keir looked at his daughter, and said, “Well?”

She puffed out her cheeks in a sigh. “I can detect that he has a short-range electromagnetic aura of the first complexity. It should allow him to neurointerface with certain simple circuits and switches, but he lacks the direct thought-to-thought inputs of a Locust. He is not legally an Inquiline because he has some active wiring, but he is not ethically or aesthetically one of us, because we can never reciprocate his mental information. But I think we have to trust him in certain areas, more than what would be expected by the intersection of our limited altruism precept against zone-of-privacy considerations.”

“Do you guys run through this kind of rigmarole every time you decide to answer a question?” Menelaus asked sardonically. “My rock-bottom respect for the Blue Men has lifted a half centimeter from the floor of hell. You are the people they are trying to live more simply than?”

Keir said sternly, “The complexity you mock is the byproduct of a successful attempt to sculpt laws and customs to a sufficient level of detail as to allow for both world peace and personal liberty, considering both the complication of every possible scenario of human interaction and considering the innate depravity of the human race. The difficulty of all previous cultural systems was that they were insufficiently tailored to reality: all laws had to be broad stereotypes to be simple enough to rational men to anticipate what conduct was permitted, but Divarication ensured laws soon would become corrupt. In contrast, Xypotechnological modeling and emulation of major possible behavior patterns is more efficient than having legislators make laws, or allowing blind chance to establish arbitrary or historically specific customs and cultural habits. The Noösphere makes this level of detail possible.”

Menelaus said sharply, “Your Noösphere was based on Xypotechnology?”

Keir said, “We are reconciled to a certain degree of cooperation with the Exarchel Machine, and allow it to influence our legislative modeling process.”

Menelaus said, “The Machine means to exterminate the human race. Ctesibius thinks it has already done so, and that now all that need doing is to clean up the biological life left—us relicts from the past, in other words.”

Keir said, “If the humans are guided slowly and gently to underpopulation, and then extinction, where is the harm? If the process is voluntary on all sides, no specific rights are being violated.”