Montrose had used an application of Rania’s Divarication solution to discover a game-theory method to allow the endocrinal and instinctive priorities of the Witches and their Moreaus to harmonize over generations, so that cooperation rather than coercion was a possible basis for human–Moreau relations. A civilization based on free trade and free inquiry followed naturally.

Menelaus bitterly remembered how, back in the forty-fifth century, he had so confidently assumed Blackie would never have clues enough to reverse engineer the mathematical tools used to reach the cooperation code solution from merely seeing the outcome, but not knowing how the outcome was reached. That assumption was disastrously false. It seemed the Witches were witches in truth: somehow able to intuit conclusions on partial information as if by magic, that normal reasoning could not reach.

In Rada Lwa’s text, the chain of statistical predictors describing what Montrose would do ended in a strange attractor—with a side note stating that, at this point, history had to be derailed due to direct intervention by a Hermeticist.

At this node a new race will be introduced by Narcís D’Aragó. The exact details cannot be predicted, but we can predict via multiparallel intuitive deduction that D’Aragó will take the solution, whatever it is, introduced by the Traitor in an earlier era and reselect the social variables for unification.

—and then, in broad strokes, the notes laid out what Menelaus recognized as the fundamental psychological skeleton of the Chimerical psychology and predictive history. He recognized it from his own attempts, made many centuries after this was written, to graph out the basics of Chimera historical nodes, nests, and attractors.

That prediction (or perhaps it was a command) was also accurate. D’Aragó had stolen and perverted Montrose’s work. D’Aragó had used it to make the men and animal-people one race, and as tolerant of diversity as any military order. (In Montrose’s day, there had been no beaneaters, Anglos, Odds, or Tejas in the service, only Texans; and no white men, black men, or red men in the cavalry, only horsemen.)

But D’Aragó had reversed the markers to install a Caste system, where each Caste was genetically programmed to be intolerant of other Castes.

Montrose smiled a sour smile. “Oh, Draggy, you always admired the Hindus, didn’t you? Never got over that envy you felt growing up in a world where the world’s foremost superpower, the Indosphere, had a caste system. Your Hispanosphere was trying so desperately to play catch-up and me-too. They had a caste system, and you thought you should have one too. It was so very efficient and scientific and fashionable and up to date … in the twenty-second century … eight thousand three hundred years ago.…”

Just the mention of the amount of time passed gave him a sensation of painful nostalgia. It had been only twenty years or so biological time for him. He wondered at all the things that were gone and would never come again: the palaces and pinnacles and towers and skyscrapers of civilizations that had faded and dispersed like so many columns of rising smoke, broken up in the wind.

Montrose picked up the unconscious Rada Lwa one last time, and awkwardly hauled him to his shoulder. As he walked, he talked aloud. “Sorry, Rada Lwa, Grampa was just talking to my old friend D’Aragó who I shot dead and put in the ground. Him and your boss, your real boss, the Machine Exarchel—and hell, let’s give dopey Melchor de Ulloa some credit too, he had a hand in this—y’all has me powerful confounded and bewildered.

“The Giants made the Simon Families—that is clear enough. Blackie snookered them into creating their own destroyers. That I did not figure. The Giants lashed out and burned all the places where you could hide a Xypotech—all but up on the Moon.

“Did the Simons create the Sylphs? Or was that a natural development?

“Don’t matter. In any case, the Giants were tickled, tricked, and led into putting in place restrictions on xypotechnology that created an impossible computational and social problem for the Sylphs in their airskiffs. A problem I solved using Rania’s work. Work Del Azarchel knew I had, but had never seen himself.

“The damn serpentines are eternal machines. But that was a side effect, a mistake. Del Azarchel should have cleaned up that clue from the stream of history, and buried legends of it. Or, hell, maybe he did, but in my damn Tomb system, the one you tried to destroy, Ratty Low, you low rat, I keep these little fragments of history, including people who don’t want to live through periods the Hermeticists control.

“Are you paying attention? Or am I just speaking to a sleeping man’s really pale butt? Lemme explain: De Ulloa, your Master, is a guy who (before you killed him for me) spent his whole life on a project, a real long life—but there was no project.

“The whole civilization of the Witches from start to stop—it was a smoke screen, a cover, a hoax.

“A hoax aimed at me. They put everything in that society, from their economics to their marriage customs to their tree-hugging, everything I would despise and want to … fix.

“Sure, I knew the Chimerae were reverse in their genetic-sociopsychology from the Witches, but I always thought the Witches used their own biotech to plant those elements in the Chimerae—they were gene-tinkerers, after all, and pretty good ones whenever their strict communist coven system broke down, and they’d have the resources to devote to research.

“But no. D’Aragó did it. That was the plan from the first. The damn society of the damn Witches was falling to pieces, and if civilization falls and don’t get back up again in time, then there is no one to fight the Hyades at the End of Days. So I had to do something!

“And Blackie knew I had to do something.

“Over a thousand years of war, genocides, mass manipulation of the gene plasm, ruined lives, world conquests, not to mention slavery and even cannibalism—it was all a plot, a plan, a fake. A thousand years of civilization forced into a particular channel just so that I would thaw out for a few months here and there and solve the mistakes in their genetic, psychological, and social order using one of the seven derived keys of Rania’s elegant solution to the divarication problem.

“But who manipulated the Witch civilization into such an plumb rank outhouse of a world piss-poorer than Job’s turkey? Wasn’t De Ulloa … That boy was dim, but damn sincere. He had sincerity on him like stink on a skunk.”

“Sweet Jesus up a tree! Did Blackie let an entire civilization across the entire world run itself into the ground and did he let De Ulloa get himself shot, burned, and nuked to bits just to winkle a bit of math code out of me?

“Or was De Ulloa in on it? Did he betray the whole civilization that was his brain child, all the Witches who thought he was their Washington and their Moses? Was that the real reason he shot himself?”

He again examined the scrap of Cliometric notes he had found. The Cliometric equations in the notebook cut off at the point in history that marked the revolt and the rise of the Chimerae (here called simply “projected biohomogenized race”).

De Ulloa had shown Rada Lwa the plan for the downfall of the Witches. De Ulloa revealed the mathematics of the apocalypse, and the final end days of his Witches, his beloved racial experiment in a world civilization based on communal harmony and kinship with lesser creatures. De Ulloa either did not know, or had not been shown, or simply did not share with his vassal Rada Lwa, the plan for history after his period.

The time stamp on the files in the notebook was A.D. 2580.

Presumably, that was about the time Del Azarchel went into long-term hibernation, and turned over control of history to Melchor de Ulloa. Montrose had sent out scholars and geneticists from his Tombs in A.D. 3950 to introduce the cooperation code and set in motion the chain of events leading to the founding of the Nameless Empire, one of his two attempts to save the Witch civilization from its own folly. The revolts of the Chimerae began in A.D. 4460, and the defeat of the Final Sabbat at Baffington’s Island was in A.D. 4888. But that attempt, that folly, those revolts, and that defeat had all been planned out two thousand two hundred years before: it would be as if Augustus Caesar had foreseen and planned the launch of the of the NTL Hermetic.