Only Sarmento i Illa d’Or did not doubt. “I believe you, my master! I will not listen to this traitor dog! When has he ever been sane?”

Mickey the Witch said softly, “What? Just because he wears a tent instead of clothing, and goes around pretending he is someone else?”

Montrose whispered sideways through his gritted teeth, “You are not helping.” But he started laughing to himself, and he wondered if perhaps he were mad after all, to laugh at a time like this.

Ximen del Azarchel must have thought so too, for he chuckled and raised his hand. Such was his magnetism and authority, that even when stirred to bewildered anger, the Hermeticists fell silent before his glance. “I order you not to believe him. I order you not to think.”

There was some muttering. Narcís D’Aragó said, “If the Judge of Ages is mad, surely so is the Master of the World. You order us to do what?”

Del Azarchel said in a calm, conversational tone of voice, as if it were a matter of no import, “I will erase your short-term memories because it suits me to do so. I have done such things many times in the past. I have even told you this many times in the past, because it does not matter what you think or what you do in a span of a moment of your lives, for it is a moment I can wash clean with a sweep of my hand. All your thoughts are written in dust. Do you still imagine I am your leader, or merely the first among equals? I am your master and you are my hounds. You are my possessions.”

But he turned to Sarmento i Illa d’Or, saying, “Not you, for obvious reasons. I don’t have anything in your head.”

And, hearing the noise of disgust and horror from Montrose, Del Azarchel turned his head a little more, saying, “You look askance, Cowhand? You, of all people? This is an art I learned from you! I have phantasms of my own to serve me.”

Montrose stepped forward, but not toward Del Azarchel: to Alalloel. He said, “He must die and I must kill him. Let us proceed.”

2. Man of Honor

At that moment, Narcís D’Aragó approached Montrose and bowed his head. “Learned Montrose, I know I have no right to ask. And yet, I remind you that my previous version—a man like me in all ways, in personality and spirit and sense of honor, did not run from you when the time came for him to face you, pistol in hand. While it is true that he lives on in me, it is also true he died the death. It was a death he willingly faced. Will you allow me to speak to you, as one man of honor to another?”

Montrose could not suppress a spasm of hatred for the man. He said archly, “What kind of honor are we talking about? What kind of man? I would ask Captain Grimaldi about the perfect performance of your honorable duties aboard ship, but he is quite dead, seeing as how you rose up with the other mutineers and murdered him. So he is not around to ask.”

D’Aragó did not look up. His voice, normally as thin and cold as an icicle, was thick with shame. “These are … old questions, no longer visited.”

“Old as you and me, brother. You was there. You did the deed. You never paid for it, never got hanged, never got caught, and when you came back to Earth y’all were the princes of the world. Prince? A god! Hell, you even got your very own period of one thousand years as your own private lab and breeding grounds, stockyard, and gladiatorial circus, and you played with mankind like a girl playing with goddam paper dolls, instead of, oh, something like, dying in chains breaking rocks in the hot sun.”

D’Aragó said in his cold voice, “I was loyal to the Captain until he … you know that he ordered us not to ignite the launching laser so that we could never return to Earth. He ordered us to die.”

“The Hyades would never have discovered Earth had you done that.”

“Truly? No further expedition ever would have sought out a nugget of contraterrene the size of a star? The most precious, most dangerous substance in nature?” He looked up, his cold eyes twinkling. “Come now: surely it was better to be warned, and have these millennia to prepare a defense, than let Captain Grimaldi in his madness have his way, and for us to die with the human race uninformed, unwarned, unprepared? Did I not have duties of honor to my home?”

“So what if Earth was warned? You think fighting the Hyades is completely futile.”

“But you do not.”

Montrose was not sure what to say to that. The argument sounded fishy, but he wanted to get back to the business of shooting Del Azarchel, so he said, “Fine. You are a pox-ridden man of honor. Whoop-dee-do and yee-haw and bully for you. Speak your piece, you syphilitic whoreson.”

Much to the embarrassment of Montrose, Narcís D’Aragó fell to his knees, and clasped his hands in prayer. “Save us.”

“Pustules on the burning balls of Satan in Hell! What the hell you asking me?”

“Save us from Del Azarchel. There must be some Divarication failure. He is suffering a mental disease, and he has absolute power over us, even to our inmost thoughts.”

“He ain’t crazy, he’s just evil. There’s a difference.” Menelaus looked up and sighed. Del Azarchel was standing with the other Hermeticists. Sarmento i Illa d’Or was standing behind his master, broad as a bull and breathing through his nostrils like one. The others, crouching and cringing in various postures of panic, were talking in a shrill confusion of voices. Del Azarchel was answering them back in the cool, distant, polite tones of a professor in a classroom explaining a scientific problem with no particular application to any human life, of merely intellectual interest only. He was describing the means he would use to toy with their minds and memories and souls, since they were, after all, actually minds housed in computer mainframes he controlled. And he was smiling and laughing and his eye glinted with mirth and sadism.

“Okay,” Menelaus said to D’Aragó with a sigh. “Let’s compromise. He’s evil and crazy.”

D’Aragó said, “It was a technology evolved while we were in hibernation aboard the Emancipation.”

“The Mind Helot tech. I know. So you want me to save your sorry evil asses from your evil boss, on account of now you are on the receiving end of his evil. All but Sarmento, who looks like he is just having a fine old time. Even if I agreed—”

But Narcís D’Aragó now had a smile on his thin face. It was a crooked smile, because he clearly had little practice making his face fold into that shape, but it was a human smile. “You will agree. For better or worse, you cannot help but solve problems, Crewman Fifty-One. Your soul is large.”

“Your mouth is large. By rights, I should stand aside and watch you squirm just for the sheer cussed-mindedness of it. But since I came up here with my gun and my Seconds to blast Blackie to Hell so that his daddy, the Devil, can rump-plunge him until his eyes pop, I don’t even know why you are flapping your damn gums at me.”

“I came, Learned Montrose, because I know that you destroy those who challenge you. Am not I, myself, one whom you destroyed? You alone can overcome the Senior Del Azarchel. Whether you believe me or scorn me, I came because to stand by, saying nothing, knowing you would duel with Del Azarchel, and by killing him, grant us life—to get this gift of life from you, and freedom, and to have restored to us the possession of our souls—to have all this from your hand, Learned Montrose, and not to have asked it of you, well, that were low indeed. I ask you for my life because it is more honorable to ask, even though I know you have your own reasons to wish him dead. Now I too have reasons. Kill him also for me.”

“But you killed Grimaldi.”

“So I did, and do not regret the deed, dark as it was. I killed my superior officer because he went mad and meant to kill us all. Now Del Azarchel is mad and means us all to die, or worse. The same logic applies.” And, with no further word, he stiffly turned and marched back to where the Hermeticists were gathered, where he stood, thin as a birch tree in winter, and as silent.