But Del Azarchel was filled with good humor as if the black cloud of deadly anger building in him had never been. “Ah! Such words. No one talks to me as an equal. Do you know that? It’s lonely.”

“I was kind of hoping I was talking to you unequal-like, sort of as a man speaks to a rat.”

“Your words are like the toreador’s barbs under the skin of a bull. No one else pierces the skin. They don’t have the skill. Just you. And, well. Her.”

Montrose felt some of the hate in him ebb, like an engine that cannot maintain a full head of steam. “Okay, Blackie. Speak your piece.”

“I will give you the Earth.”

“Come again?”

“Serve me. If you agree to kneel and serve me, and become my vassal, I will in reward make you the Master of this World, third from the sun. All her peoples and lands, resources and living things, beauties and manufactures, and all her Cliometric destinies forever and aye.”

“This is the world you are going to give to the Hyades when they come. The End of Days is only four hundred years off.”

“This world is nothing.”

“Not to you, you mean,” said Montrose. His eyes held a look of deep sorrow even while his lip curled in a sneer of contempt.

“So. You have figured it out!”

“I reckon I have.”

“Very good. None of my men have, and they have more clues than you. They are augmented by computer emulations who match them thought for thought, and so they are equally as intelligent as either of us—and yet they lack something we have, you and I. That inner fire. The fire of the gods. I expected no less. You know.”

“I do know,” admitted Montrose, “and I would have known sooner, but I just couldn’t—despite all your crimes—I just didn’t want to believe you’d ever be that low.”

“It was necessary.”

“Your own men! Hell, I knew these guys too, back from the training camp. Once they might have been my friends. And now you are making me feel sorry for them? Wow. I’ve shot most of them. All but one, actually, and I actually feel sorry for them, because they trust you. They admire you. Like loyal little dogs. They love you.”

Del Azarchel turned his eyes toward where the Seconds were gathered, looking on, no doubt wondering what the Judge of Ages and the Master of the World might be discussing. He said thoughtfully, “I can guess the day, maybe even the hour, when you deduced it. It was last night. You were gathered with your comrades, most of whom entered your Tombs to hunt you, but now they were won over. Loyal comrades. You have just survived deadly combat, and so there is that warmth that no man can feel who has not, alongside his brothers, looked in the face of death. And perhaps one of them says, O Judge of Ages, you who shape and shake men’s destinies, why is our world as it is? Could you not have shaped a better? And then you told them about our fencing match in the fog of history.”

“Fencing match? I think of it as a chess game. Move, countermove. A matter of logic.”

“That is why you lost, Cowhand. It is a matter of feints and fakes. And a chessboard has an edge, whereas fencers move to whatever part of the yard gives them advantage. Including off the planet altogether.”

“I did not lose, Blackie.”

“You lost last night, at four bells of the First Dog Watch.”

Which was eighteen hundred hours. Menelaus thought it odd that Blackie still every now and again, as if by slip, spoke in nautical terms; as if his life outside the hull of the Hermetic had no meaning. This was the hour that the white-hot iron mass had been shot into orbit from the depthtrain rail.

Blackie said, “Shall we discuss our game? Just the last two moves.”

Menelaus opened his mouth to say something sarcastic, but then he snapped it shut again. Fact of the matter was that he did want to discuss it. Very much so.

“Go on,” he said.

2. End Game

“Back in the Eightieth Century,” Blackie began, “and not long after you had your disgusting creature Elton Linder release the Inquiline Code into the Noösphere, I used a simple terraforming technique to lower the temperature of the world disastrously.

“You thought I meant to raise population levels in order to have the Locusts outbreed their competitors, since population growth correlates to a longer growing season, which correlates to raising rather than lowering world temperature.

“But ah, no. All a feint. I intended that you should attempt volcanic technology—an area where you excel—to counter-terraform. Not because I cared about the temperature. I knew you would release into the plate tectonic stress areas your Von Neumann crystals that only you know how to make and which only Rania knew how to describe mathematically. You took only the normal precautions to protect your depthtrain stations where you built you remaining Tombs. I made assaults at Mount Misery, Wright-Patterson, and here, at Devil’s Den. The crystals were near the surface, where I could get them. I found a nodule, in a shaft over six thousand feet long, of crystals in perfect condition.” Del Azarchel sighed with satisfaction. “That was my true purpose. The main dish of the main feast, so to speak! Killing you is merely the port and cigar after.”

“God, you make me want a smoke. Don’t talk that way.”

“The tobacco leaf is extinct only on Earth. It grows remarkably well under lighter gravity, even given the limitations of hydroponic gardening.”

The idea that Blackie had been to Mars or Titan, or other moons and worlds of this solar system walking the alien soil, while he, Montrose, had been spending countless years under the damn ground, buried alive, almost made him dizzy, he was so sick with envy.

Menelaus said stubbornly, “It ain’t over. I’ve still got one chessman to move.”

Blackie smiled and said expansively, “Not over, you say? I have struck you through the heart; your planetary core Xypotech is mine, or if you like, I have captured the rook behind which you castled. Do you really think there is any more game to play between us? Ah! But which game were we playing? When you were telling your loyal men about the chess game, and they understood that they were all pawns, I wager you did not tell them the truth. The whole truth. No, you told them it was a game between darkness and light, machine and man, tyranny and liberty, with myself cast into the role of the dark machine of tyranny. Do I guess wrong? I see from your face that I do not.”

“No…,” Montrose said slowly. “You guess aright. Looking back over all the centuries of our chess game, I realized you had made the same move over and over. One of your men builds a civilization. Then there is something that goes wrong, really wrong. And I wake up and step in to fix it. Just like I always did back when I was Crewman Fifty-One, your handy dandy little handyman madman.”

Del Azarchel spread his hands. “And did you see what it is I made go wrong with every civilization? There is only one pattern to civilization, but infinite ways to fall into barbarism.”

Montrose grunted. “You kept destroying your Church, over and over again. You kept undermining monotheism and monogamy.”

Del Azarchel nodded. “The first is the basis for the belief in a rational cosmos; the second is the only basis for a rational civilization. Niceties like the belief in the rule of law rather than the rule of men are side-effects of these deep truths. Even the highest-born Chimera was bred like a showdog. There is no deeper degradation imaginable than to turn a man’s most intimate and sacred relation with the opposite sex into something trivial, or man-made, or an article of commerce, or a pastime. Hah! The degradation of the Nymphs was even deeper. The Hormagaunts I convinced to eat their own children to expand their lives; the Locusts I convinced to eat their own souls—what could I have done that in a world wise enough to forbid divorce, contraception, or whatever else desecrates and trivializes the marital and maternal bond? Do you think a child raised by a loving mother could even dream of selling himself into Locust communion?”