Del Azarchel said, “A few decades without communication with Sol is a small enough price to pay. And I could have been more honest and caused a civil war or economic ruin on Rosycross to achieve my aims, but I will use deception when deceit is more efficient. What is more efficient than having a star vessel raise her sails? Then I simply ordered my admirals on Rosycross not to launch the next starfaring vessel until communication had been restored with Sol. Ah! But I see you glower, Praetor. You object? It is the inability of lesser men to see the large aims which alone grants me my right to rule, even if recent events have deprived me of my full exercise of those rights.”

Norbert turned his face away from Del Azarchel. “As I said, the Foxes have a distinctive flavor to their handiwork. So does the Master of the World. No one else works on such a grand scale with so little concern for the ordinary lives he ruins. So, by the way, do you, Your Honor. Legend says you have the habit of sacrificing pieces on the chessboard of history: First the Giants, then Pellucid the Potentate. You created the Fox race to introduce chaos into history, and then the Fox race created the Patricians, so that their chaos would become predictable again. I ran a few figures through my head just now. The Foxes will go extinct in less than a thousand years.… I assume the Judge of Ages did not tell you that,” he concluded, nodding his head toward Cazi.

She shrugged a pretty shrug. “He did. We have no secrets from each other.”

“I am sorry, ma’am.”

“There is no need for sorrow. I am not in love, like Meany, nor in hate, like Ximen, and so there is no one else for me to live for. Why should I live longer than my life? For what should I live, once life is ended? For what should my race live? We have served our purpose. I will use my totipotent cells one last time, and alter them to become cells that can no longer alter; I will diminish, and become human, and no fox will eat my brains and become me.” She ceased to smile, so that she looked almost human, and her eyes twinkled with mirth, but there seemed to be tears in them. “You must admit our custom is disgusting. I ate my predecessor’s brains fried in butter, with garlic sauce, and it was still disgusting. I will be human, and pass the test, and pass away.”

Norbert said, “What test?”

Cazi said, “Every race of man, from the First to the Fifth, faces the same test, and the monsters who dwell in the stars beyond Taurus likewise. After so many years of emptiness, of being a Fox Maiden, I will be maiden no more, but wife and mother. I will be loved and will love, and the terrible burden of living for myself alone will be taken from me.”

She stood up on the couch, and struck a pose, half turning from him, straightening one leg and flexing the other to cock her hips, putting her dark hands in her bright hair and arching her spine, and the circuits in her kimono made the fabric suddenly tighten across her form and shine like silk. The pearls floating near her head flamed brighter.

“Look at my bosom! It is fair and full, is it not? And these hips! They are round and full and nubile, fertile and eager. Am I not beautiful and bountiful? Do you not lust to take me, here and now, on the carpet? You can bite my neck!”

Norbert realized his face was hot. Either he was blushing, or the Fox was working some praxis of biotechnology on him. He regretted removing his mask. “You are as fair as any queen I have ever been privileged to behold, ma’am. Your maidenly modesty and demure reserve makes your charms all the more attractive.”

Cazi sank down into a kneeling posture again, knees together, eyes downcast, and folded her hands in her lap. “I have used such breasts for nothing nobler than to lure fools to destruction, and have never used them to nurse. These hips I have swayed in dance to uncover the sins of men, and never to bear new life.”

She raised her head and her eyes glinted like bright amber beads.

“Do not mourn the extinction of the Fox Maidens! We have served a higher purpose. We have freed Man and Moreau from the bondage of genetics, that hereafter each man will be whatever he will, a Swan when he meditates, a Myrmidon when he makes war, a Fox when he plays, a Man when he toils, a Patrician when he passes judgment on the age in which he lives and decrees what the future shall hold. What should any maiden do once her virginal task in life is done? What should any race do? It is time to celebrate the wedding feast, and maiden be no more.”

Norbert said, “The Judge of Ages is cruel if he created you only to die.”

Montrose spat again into the skull. “Ain’t my doing. I left that up to them.”

Cazi said, “Darwin says each race lives only to preserve itself, and he therefore calls each race to worship itself. How shall we bow to us, or I adore me? Me? A dull and tepid goddess to serve! We Foxes had a higher calling!”

Del Azarchel said, “Indeed. To create chaos in history.”

“You are a fool, Ximen, too foolish to realize you’ve been fooled. Nothing we did was at random. All the events we Foxes set in motion, everything Jupiter could not predict, it was testing the barriers and boundaries of the cliometry. We bent the strands of history to see how far they would bend. Mankind cannot tolerate to live in a world where all his acts are known beforehand, but neither can he live in chaos where nothing can be planned. By creating the Patrician race we finally created a form of man able to tolerate living in a structure of planned history without losing their liberty. The Patricians are as fertile as Fox Maidens are infertile. We can change ourselves to any race; they can change any race to them. All the Foxes are feminine and maidens, but all the Patricians are masculine and fathers—hence their name. We have mingled nanotechnological assemblers with their seed, so that any child can be changed genetically in the womb by the father. No matter what race the mother, the child fathered by a Patrician will have Patrician neural structures: a race that can see and select its own future!

“In the same way you made the Myrmidons based on the math of the Hyades found in the redacted version of the First Monument, the Patricians were based on the Rania math, those few sections which by accident or constraint the redactors could not remove of the original Monument message, whatever it was. Do you wonder why Jupiter could not predict us? At the very fundamental level, at the level where one and zero are defined, is and is not, his axioms are based on the edited Monument. The Patricians are based on the unedited. We have freed mankind. There is no one left to free. The Foxes are satisfied. We are done.”

Del Azarchel said, “But when the Patricians became the Golden Lords, and were given authority to define the future history of man, the Fox fate became clear again! Jupiter will soon control all of fate again. Mankind will never escape my control!”

Cazi looked angry and she laughed. “The Patricians have made their own calculation. Tau Ceti within a thousand years will have a working starbeam and direct it across the intervening lightyears to obliterate Jupiter. Igniting the Fourth Deceleration Burn now is the only act of his which can deflect that future from coming to pass.”

“Jupiter would not have permitted you to establish such a fork against him,” said Del Azarchel in an unperturbed voice. “He retains control of history, or will soon regain it.”

Cazi was one of those few women who look more beautiful when they are angry than when in repose, for her face and long neck blushed with passion, and her eyes danced and gleamed, and her bosom heaved. “Lies! Had Jupiter the power to oppose us, long ago he would have used it! He would not have allowed us to inflict the Tribulations on mankind for over a thousand years!”

“A thousand years to him are as a day,” said Del Azarchel blandly to her. “And a small annoyance, nothing more. I have seen Jupiter’s predictions. Does he not open his mind to me? Tau Ceti in times to come will be the most loyal servant of Hyades. Jupiter has been in communication with Iota Tauri and had engaged a Virtue to be dubbed the Beast to cross the star gulfs toward Tau Ceti. It will arrive in the Sixty-first Millennium. If will be a tyrant, an infinite despot, and worthy of its name. The Starfaring Guild will expand its capital at Tau Ceti, and slowly take on secular and cliometric authority, and Behemoth will make us secure, for like the English offering trinkets and beads, iron hatchets and silver looking glasses to the Red Indians of Manhattan, Hyades at long last will trade with us, and offer things nigh worthless to them, unbearably precious to us.”