“So Blackie fooled me twice. I used the self-correction code to perfect the serpentines—Damn, and Sir Guy even warned me this would happen!—Blackie reverse engineered it, and that is how he finally made emulations of his surviving men. I helped him create the posthuman versions of the Hermeticists I have been fighting all these millennia.

“De Ulloa used my Prometheus intelligence augmentations on animals, and increased their intellect to human levels, but created a world of hell, because intelligent bunnies and intelligent wolves cannot sit down in a Town Hall and vote what to have for lunch. The Witch setup could never have worked, because the problems with a multispecies culture were built in at a structural level. Herbivores just don’t think like carnivores. They place a different value on risk and loyalty and different ideas of courage and different toleration for cruelty and on and on.

“But with the Nameless Empire period, I actually cobbled together something to allow the Witch system to work. Problem-solver Crazy Montrose, that’s me! I introduced a new type of coven called a ‘familia’ with one patriarch leader, and a harem of one and only one wife, and with children under the coven leader’s strict control. And property was ‘sacred’ to the lares, the household gods, of each familia. Pretty clever, eh, Ratty Low? They were Witches in name only, but they actually had families and private property and rule of law.

“But that was the surface. Below the surface, I had to reengineer the Moreaus, so they would breed themselves toward more cooperative forms. And I had to use another part of Rania’s divarication solution to do it. The cooperation code. And D’Aragó used that in a twisted backward way to create his Chimerae. And then … I thawed—”

Another thought struck Menelaus, a thought he should have seen years, or centuries before, if not millennia.

“And then … I thawed out again, because of D’Aragó. He broke into the Tombs to try to kill me as I slept, and I had to stop him. And so I had to teach him a hard lesson. And, of course, while I was awake, I saw the problem with the Chimera civilization, and the screwed-on-backwards-headedness their organizational principles, and I saw the rot and corruption caused by divarication both genetic and sociological and…”

When reduced to a mathematical code, the social, political, and biological errors of the Chimera system formed a classical problem in divarication: a positive feedback violence loop or negative-sum game.

It could be, of course, analyzed in terms of another divarication problem, to which Montrose could apply yet another one of Rania’s seven keys of her general solution.

The solution was to introduce into every information unit a “dyad” or permanent pair of mutually reinforcing units so that one unit cannot reproduce of itself. The second unit of the pair interrupts negative-sum cycles. In biology, this was done by evolving from asexual to sexual reproduction; but in sociology, by introducing a second carrier outside the normal education channels, without which the social information cannot be carried to the next generation, such as an oral tradition, church, or mass-media entertainment complex: in this case, he used the Lotus Cults he had already found among the lower ranks of Chimera society.

And that was when Montrose had introduced the original Greencloak portable neurochemical biofeedback backpack systems, which is the first (and in some ways, least significant) part of the Hermetic Secret of Youth, a system for preventing, or even artificially reweaving and restoring, lost telomere length. The restorative also contained an enzyme code to produce a mild euphoric, something to prevent the buildup of adrenaline-habituated rage patterns in the endocrine system. It was a euphoric that also lengthened life span, and because it was chemical rather than genetic, none of the normal Chimera techniques of breeding away undesirable characteristics would work to prevent its spread.

The attempt was meant to expand Kine and Chimera life spans to Witch longevity levels or beyond, so as to break the Chimera out of the perverted version of the cooperation code Narcís D’Aragó had genetically hardwired into their nervous systems. The idea was that a long-lived race would react to long-term incentives and disincentives, and begin to learn the futility of war, and become more peaceful—

“Sweet Jesus up a tree! Did Blackie send D’Aragó into the Tombs to kill me just to trick me into waking up during that period of time? Blackie let one of his own men get shot to death by me, just in the hope that when I walked away from the killing ground, I might look around at the suffering and see what was wrong with the Chimera civilization and see what needed to be done to fix it?”

For the second time in his life, Menelaus felt that frozen, helpless, wrathful sensation which must have been (he was sure) Blackie Del Azarchel’s constant companion: the realization that there was someone smarter than he was, more ruthless, more willing to do whatever it took, whether to sacrifice or betray friends or loyal followers or whole worlds of innocent men—the realization that the foe was colder than ice on Pluto, harder and stronger than carbon-quenched steel, deadlier than a rattlesnake and twice as poisonous.

The first time had been when Blackie won their first duel.

Menelaus used to have a recurring nightmare that he was called out to a duel, standing and waiting for dawn in some deserted graveyard or empty park, to find himself not only without his gun, but without his clothing as well, and he had to explain to the seconds and the judges and doctor watching the duel why he left his pants and his gun at home. The feeling that crawled like a nest of bugs through his stomach at that moment was one he recognized from that nightmare.

It was cold as he stepped outside. Menelaus looked up and realized that there was no one around him. The village of seashell buildings silent and motionless was all about him.

3. Deserted

The smartwire fence was to his right, but there were no watchmen in the towers, no guards at the gate, which was hanging open. Through the wire, the prison yard was not only deserted, it was empty. The tents had been broken down, folded up, and hauled off. The power plant at one corner of the wire enclosure was still there, and the coffin yard, now unguarded. Trees and rises in the ground hid the rest of the camp from view.

He turned his head. The airfield was also empty. The large helicopter-bladed ironclad Mickey had called the Albatross was not there. The eleven rear-screwed biplanes and triplanes with their painted wings were gone. The snow was rutted and rerutted with tracks showing that the takeoffs had been recent enough that the wind had not yet covered up the traces: minutes rather than hours ago.

His weapons banging and robes clattering, and Rada Lwa jouncing on his shoulder, Menelaus jogged to the large pink seashell he supposed to be the hospital, where Sir Guy and the Giant, the two most dangerous prisoners, had been kept.

He stepped in the pink oval opening hung with tent-cloth material that served as a door. Inside, he saw a floor with lines of chewed tread marks scarring it, and empty bags with dangling needles of medical material hanging from the rafters. Crates made of wood and packing material made of transparent fabric lay strewn everywhere. Midmost, something that looked like an operating table and diagnostic machinery were pulled away from the wall and unbuckled from their power supplies. The power batteries themselves were not in evidence. Along the walls were strips of input-output ports, epoxied to the seashell too well to be quickly torn down, and feeds for the absent coffins that had been parked here. The far wall was simply blown open, with fragments of abalone dangling down, twisting in the wind. Snow had blown in and was puddled here and there on the broken floor.