The system was so elegant, but so radically different in its axioms and conclusions than anything human beings had ever thought about the nature of thought, that Menelaus regarded it as the best thing he had ever done, the most clever work, to come up with a science to allow the philosophy of negative cognition to be used by the human nervous system. It was better than his most brilliant work in long-term hibernation Divarication; it was certainly better than his work in intelligence augmentation, which had been an insane—literally—failure.

Montrose felt like some crusty old miner who, chipping his way through the snow of the Japanese Winter, finds an unbombed and unplagued mansion from the days of the First Space Age all intact; and breaking in through a window, discovers the owner had kept under glass some lost book or lost painting whose existence was only suspected from references to surviving books; and returning carefully to civilization, he becomes the toast of the town and the hero of the hour, his treasure brought with respect to the municipal or civic Hall of Lost Days, where anything recovered from before the Little Dark Ages was studied with reverence and kept with love. Such was the pride and pleasure Montrose felt at having discovered a nugget of revolutionary scientific information among the endless undeciphered acres of alien hieroglyphs.

Del Azarchel was the only mind on Earth, except, perhaps, for the Giants yet unthawed in his deepest Tombs, who could actually appreciate the rarity of the find and the cleverness of its application. Others might be able to like it, or use it, but only someone steeped in Monument lore and learning, and able to do a calculation of six billion variables in his head, could see the recursive symmetry of the positive and negative patterns involved, or delight in the graceful elegance of the final proof, as short and yet as profound as a haiku.

Menelaus had actually expected not merely compliments, but praise, from Del Azarchel for the find. With a sensation of shame he realized that this man, his deadly enemy, was the one man on Earth whose good opinion he wanted to win. It was that important to him.

9. One Last Answer

Menelaus was frustrated. “Look, Blackie, we’re old friends. Stop dithering around with me. Our game is over. I just don’t understand your checkmate move, or how you escaped mine. I thought I had won. Hell! I thought I had crushed you. So I am asking you, please, curiosity is strangling me. Maybe you can tell me, now that it is over, why it did not work?”

“Why what did not work?” Del Azarchel gave him a withering look, also mingled with frustration. “I do not even know what your question is! Are you asking me why you cannot sink a battleship with a paper airplane? Why did the Anchorites start wars they could not win? Why did they drill down into the lakes buried under glaciers, the seas buried under the crust? What was your plan?”

Menelaus did not know what wars Del Azarchel was talking about. There was no need for war in any of the variations of the vector he introduced. He said, “My plan was to stop the spread of the system by making Helotry possible on a metalogical and semiotic basis … The philosophical problem of the mind and body relation has more than one set of…”

But Blackie was hardly listening. “Ha! Philosophy! Were your Anchorites merely going to talk in Socratic syllogisms to the flood waters, and explain the benefits of mental liberty and freethinking? Where they going to stop the wars they provoked by—? What? Sweet reason? Your anarchists were fighting helots of the mind, zombies, slaves whose every smallest thought was so tightly controlled, one might as well have reasoned with a rockslide, or halted a sniper’s stealthrocket in midflight with an enthymeme! One might as well try to stop the Fall of Ganymed with a word, when it nearly destroyed all life on Earth!”

Montrose tried to hide his reaction, which was one of jarring disorientation, like stepping for a stair that was not there.

Del Azarchel was convinced that Montrose had merely introduced a philosophical idea, no different from any other idea, which spread through a culture as one person after another was convinced and converted, or was raised from a child to believe it.

The Anarchist Vector was not a new thought, nor a new neural architecture to hold thought. It was a new technology of thought: the mind-body relation revisited and revised.

Menelaus had intended for the Mental Anarchists to develop a means of storing thoughts in the negative information spaces between manifest thought forms, a mental activity that could not, even in theory, be decrypted, and would probably not even be detected unless the psychoscopic investigator knew exactly what to look for.

And Blackie did not know what to look for.

He had not stopped Montrose. He had not even been aware. Blackie had no idea.

He had not the slightest idea what had happened to mankind, here in this final act of history before the End of Days, over the last five hundred years.

Del Azarchel was staring at him intently. “You are hiding something.”

10. Moonfall

Montrose said, quite candidly, “I would only be hiding something if our great game were still going on. But according to you, it is over, ain’t it?”

“According to you, you still have one move left. I am wary enough of you to believe it. What is it?”

Montrose spread his hands. “Wait and see.”

“You are bluffing. This is a feint of yours!”

“No, Blackie, only you feint, because you are fencing with me. You rely on your opponent’s dimwittedness. But I am playing chess with you. I don’t feint. That is why you will lose!”

“You seem confident, Cowhand, but it is false confidence, I assure you. Right now, all the tau values for the world culture are flatline zero: this society is a perfectly balanced self-regulating hierarchy that will never change, except to improve, and will never fall. When no party can introduce any further change into the matrix, the game is ended.” Del Azarchel straightened up from their ice pond full of equations. “Ended, with myself the victor! I would not have won so handily had not your last two moves been senseless and erratic to the point of madness. I have been trying to find out what you meant by them. Even now, at the end, when one of us will surely die, and both of us might, will you not say?—or perhaps you have, at last, as I always expected, returned to your old insanity, Crewman Fifty-One.”

“Or perhaps I have outsmarted you and you are going to lose your life, and all your Hermetic work is going to come undone, Crewman Two, because I am just that much smarter than you.”

“Bah!”

“You know, I ain’t sure I know anyone ’cept you who says ‘bah.’”

“And I surely know of none save you who says ‘ain’t.’”

“Be that as it may, Blackie, I said I would answer one question if you answered one of mine. Whether you know it or not, you did in fact answer. So. Ask your—wait a minute—” he interrupted himself. “Two moves? The Anarchist Vector was one move. What was the other?”

Del Azarchel looked up from where he had been frowning at the equations. “The Fall of 1036 Ganymed. I’d certainly like to hear the reasons, the strategy, that propelled you to perform such a deadly and violent act. I have been puzzling over it for years. What motivated you to do such a terrible deed? I did not think you capable of such magnificence.”

Montrose was dumbfounded. “What motivated … me?”

“In magnitude, it was almost an act worthy of, well, myself.”

Montrose said weakly, “Funny. I was thinking it was an act worthy of you, too, I guess.”

“I was a little surprised to see you use the same method twice,” Del Azarchel confided in him. “You are so proud of originality, working with computerpathy in this century, genetic in the next, biohardware one aeon, biosoftware the aeon after. Same thing twice? Not your standard method of approach, is it? Of course, when the Giants decivilized the world, they left nature standing, and they arranged for a lot of city dwellers to be snatched out of harm’s way before the fires started in earnest. You could have done something like that this time. But using an inhabited moon to make an asteroid-drop weapon onto an inhabited world! I suppose the sheer inhumanity of it was new. The brutality. And you mock me for using the contraterrene space lance to irradiate a few dozen rebel cities in order to unify my rule and impose world peace.”