Soon the two enemies were chatting and exclaiming. Smiling together, heads bent down, they looked like magicians bent over the rune circles used to conjure familiar spirits, the patterns of glyphs that conjured and controlled the fates themselves.

4. Anchorites

The first group of signs showed the results exactly like what Montrose would have expected had his vector been introduced and flourished without detection: institutional anarchists. Ultra-freedom-lovers.

Among the Melusine (so said the social vector equations), the Anchorite, or Hermit, custom was to have the male sever all social and whale-pod ties with the surrounding society, and live in the wilderness entirely by himself with only food he caught himself, and only living in a sea-tower or land-tower he grew himself.

“When the Anchorite movement started among the Oceangoing Melusine,” Blackie added offhandedly, “they broke away from their normal deep sea haunts, and traveled first to coastal areas, and then upriver, and established their many hermitages among the ruins of the civilizations slain by the Fall of Ganymed. Melusine houses can still be found, empty, ruined, here and there among the wastelands. They last for hundreds of years, despite weather and decay, because they are alive, as houses of the Nymphs before the Blight. Where a river has dried up, or changed beds, you can find them standing ashore.”

Montrose said, “They look like seashells.” One of the Blue Men had mentioned the houses outside the camp wire had not been their making. Montrose felt the fool for not having put the clues together. That camp had been a Melusine mansion with its outbuilding, or, specifically, a hermitage of the Anchorites. Only the fence and the watchtowers had been constructed by the Blues and their dogs.

Blackie pointed at the central hieroglyph, functionally interconnected with all others: the mating and childrearing customs that defined the basic values for any culture. “Anchorite pentads were only allowed to marry another pentad if all the members of the other group were correctly opposite the first group. There were many possible groups, only some of which were legal. Groups were classed as male and female according to social expectations. A pentad might, for example, consist of a postwhale cow, a merman, a male Inquiline, and a male dolphin, and might still be considered female; whereas the same group with different augmentations, a male postdolphin but a whale cow of only human-level intellect, would be legally masculine.

“Female pentads seeking mates examined the land-houses and sea-houses to see how well the male pentad could succeed while using nothing but his own raw talent and willpower. Since the so-called isolated individual was actually a group of five, they got a fair amount of hauling and labor done, including ploughing.”

“Ploughing?”

“The whale ploughed.”

“In the sea?”

“No. Don’t be silly. On land.”

“How?”

“What do you mean, how? He grew legs.”

“Oh. Of course.”

“The effort was very difficult and some of them did die. But since there was no other way to attract a high-status female mating group, the incentives that drove the Anchorites into hermitage were very strong.”

Blackie pointed at another group of symbols that spun out of the marriage customs. “Their women pentads had a similar ritual of discipline. They took a vow of silence, and entered into trade or finance, using their bodies as living ships to haul goods all up and down the coast. But the laws and customs expressed in this equation here granted a monopoly to anyone who opened a new market: frontier trade was much, much more lucrative than protecting the established trade. When they were apprentices, these she-pilgrims of peddling took a vow of silence, because, for some odd reason, the Anchorite culture despised the art of persuasion and salesmanship. Each article bought and sold had to speak for itself, without the salesmaiden influencing her customer’s thoughts via radiotelepathy. When she had accumulated her fortune, she offered it as a dowry to her selected mate.

“Back when this crazy little fringe group existed, their political leadership was selected by a like method. In those days, only one who departed civilization and had no contact and no self-interest tied to any clan or faction could be conscripted to service. They only chose leaders from among the pool of candidates who actively attempted to flee into the uncharted coastal seas or inland rivers to avoid public service. If the fleeing candidate were not beloved by enough people to form a hunting party, he did not serve.”

“Not a bad custom,” muttered Montrose. “I can think of a few politicians I would not mind seeing run into the wild and not be called back.”

“Easier to establish a World Concordat whose supreme leader can destroy incompetent public servants with a nod of his crown,” said Del Azarchel stiffly.

Menelaus gave him a dark look. “Sure, and amputating a leg is a fine way to stop bunions on your toes. Can we get back to the equations? That looks like a inverted supply-demand function.”

“It is. Among the Anchorites, the marriages were happy enough, simply because it was so hard to woo. Men esteem lightly what they win easily; and that is true for Melusine. The joke ran that, once the maiden was a bride, and her vow of silence ended, she filled the seas and rivers of the coast with song and talk and chatter, and all the gossip she had gathered; and once the youth was a bridegroom, and his vow of toil and solitude was done, he never stirred a flipper or a finger again to get anything for himself, but spent his time in congregations with his cronies, lazy as lions who make the lionesses do all the hunting.”

“Actually,” said Montrose, “lions have a bad reputation. They are so lazy during the day because they spend all night fighting hyena packs, protecting the women and children.”

“Well, your male Anchorites did much the same. Look at that glyph there. The violence index. The male pentads drove off the Infernals, protecting the cows and the calves. All the zombie-masters living in the seas below the Earth had endless ranks of mind-controlled Helots to send against them.

“And, between their seasons of warring with Helots, the Anchorites, when offended, would settle matters one-on-one, or, rather, to be accurate, five-on-five, selecting a stretch of abandoned river for the field of honor, and encountering each other with jaw-mounted rockets and energy weapons, or just encountering each other jaw to jaw. The human-shaped components would await on shore, or meet with swords or pistols, and when one of them clutched his head, amputated from his mental link, merely of human intelligence again forever and nine-tenths of his memories gone, they would know the Cetacean had died and the pentad was broken.

“If the affront was particularly egregious, the duelists would not meet in the rivers, but select instead a spot beyond the continental shelf. They would sink together at the assigned place; and perhaps the flash of weapons could be glimpsed in the depths by the witnesses as they dashed against each other like dragons, fire in their jaws.”

“That’s why you agreed to have Alalloel be our judge of honor, ain’t it?” asked Montrose suddenly. “She is descended from one of these groups, isn’t she?”

Del Azarchel nodded. “Her family, the Lree, are civilized now, but they have not forgotten their barbaric past: a past you created. They understand us. Meeting in the darkness far below the waves, one would rise to the sunlit waters again, or neither; but even in death, honor lived on.”

“Sounds like my kind of people,” said Montrose sadly. “Sorry I missed them.”

Montrose pondered. These strange people with their strange customs, mermen emerging from the sea to reclaim the land so long ago annihilated by the apocalyptic fall of 1036 Ganymed, were much like the pioneers and frontiersmen that shaped his own land, his own background. They had been retracing those brave steps of that first feeble lungfish, the Neil Armstrong of evolution’s march, who emerged from the sea in remote prehistory and colonized the lifeless land of early Earth.