Menelaus looked around and, seeing no other chair, gathered his metallic robes and sat on the fragile-looking table, which wobbled under his weight. The black Sheepdog watching the oscilloscope bared her teeth at him, flattening her ears, but did not voice any objection.

Ull said more calmly, “The Simplifiers eschew psycholinguistic rigidities. My words happen to be suggestions, which, should you follow, produce a benevolent coincidence.”

“Well,” said Menelaus, “whether it is a coincidence or not, I know his language and can translate for you. I suggest you record everything, so you can send it to your Intelligence Bureau later for confirmation and analysis—”

Illiance said, “No formal military institution sends us.”

“I meant your University Department. Or your Editor-in-Chief. Or your Chief Priest. Or maybe your Pirate Chief.”

Ull made a small but irked motion of his fingers. “We come to question, not to be questioned.”

“Roger that. What questions do you have?”

The man gave his name as Soorm scion Asvid.

2. The Phastorling

The conversation was in Leech:

“I don’t understand why you carry a rock. Your name is not Rock, is it?”

“No, Soorm scion Asvid. My name is Sterling Xenius Anubis, Beta. Call me Anubis, which is my agnomen or victory title. I just carry a rock so my superiors won’t cite me for being out of uniform. It’s my weapon.”

“Not impressive! My weapons cannot be taken from me. Let my sterile intrusives and life-codes be brought forth out of my Tomb, and I can equip you with stench glands that will spray a stinging foam, and melt a foeman’s eyeballs and his brain lobes behind them.”

“Tempting. No one likes a sterile intrusive better than I! But I don’t have access to the Tombs. I am, like yourself, for the moment, a prisoner here, at the beck and call of the wee blue lordlings.”

Soorm narrowed his cuttlefish eye and goggled with his goat eye when Menelaus said for the moment.

“So my name is not Rock, but my name will be Mud, if you do not answer the Blue Men’s questions. The older one in the plain coat is Ull, and the one in the jeweled coat is Illiance. The one with fewer gaudies on his coat is the boss, but they pretend as if no one is in charge.”

“He is not the boss.”

“What do you mean?”

“How well do they understand our tongue?” This time Soorm pointed both his eyes at Ull. He also opened his mouth and flicked one of his two tongues, as if tasting the air like a snake.

“They can follow the gist. Many of the words are cognates.”

“Then I mean that he is not the boss.”

“Do you have electroreceptor organs, as a shark does, to sense electrical activity? Radio waves? To find the transmission point of signals reaching this camp?”

Soorm made a huge snorting, snuffling noise, and spread wide his massive arms. “What makes you think I would trick myself out with such trumpery and folderol? Do you take me for a spy? I am fisherman. The very idea is comedic to excess!”

“I am from before your time, and so if I offend, it is unintentional. I was given to understand that the Hormagaunts trafficked in such things.”

“Hermenu-gargant is not the correct term. Mine is a life concocted of high and secret craft. Correct to call me a Hermeneutic Gargantua; even more correct, a Phastorling.”

Menelaus looked down at Illiance and said in High Iatric, “He says he is not a Hormagaunt but a Phastorling.”

Illiance said back in the same tongue, “The word itself means scion or masterwork of Pastor. Ask him if he is a follower of a biotic scientist, mentor, and philosopher named Reyes y Pastor.”

The eyes of Menelaus grew bright at that name, but he raised his hand to his face, pretending to wipe his nose, so that the mortals in the room would not look into his eyes, and quail. When his eyes were dim, and that ferocity of superintelligence gone, he lowered his hand.

Soorm said in Leech, “I understood that question. Yes, I am one of Cunning Pastor’s clients—or, to be specific, the client of his client. My patron Asvid is under fealty to Cunning Pastor’s brood-hold, an organization which is called the Hermetic Order. My full name is Soorm scion Asvid scion Pastor.”

Illiance said, “This relict is the earliest form of Hormagaunt than any of which we have record. Ask him for what cause he deviated from the biological practices of the Naturalists?”

When Menelaus translated the question, Soorm puffed out his chest, and Menelaus wondered how the creature’s rib cage was constructed, since it was able to swell out far wider than a man’s chest.

Soorm said angrily, “We have performed a biotic dialectic with the Natural Order, by our antithesis to nature, we have overcome and incorporated their unique legacies and traits! Darwin favors us! Our creations shall rise to oppose the Hyades on the Last Day! The Naturals swerved from the man-fate, not us! They are anachronisms, the atavists, the past-lookers! They are the deviants!”

Menelaus made a placatory gesture. “At ease, mister, please! No one is accusing you of anything! Not only do I not know who or what you are talking about, but those conflicts, whatever they were about, were settled four thousand years ago. Thousand, as in ten centuries of years. No one is blowing a trumpet for those battles now.”

Soorm subsided like a sullen volcano, and then his skull almost split in an alarmingly sharkish grin. “Don’t itch your rash, Old-stock! I have a tweaked neuroendocrinal system, oriented to aggress, and if I build up a head of steam, I got to blow the whistle, or blow a gasket. You should be nape-hairs-up around me only when I am not making any noise.”

Illiance said to Menelaus in High Iatric. “Translate that last, if you please. Is he a Cyborg? I happen never to have heard of steam-powered biomechanisms. I ventured to believe such things were children’s fictions.”

Menelaus said, “It is a metaphor. He means that unexpressed anger continues to exasperate him subconsciously, and therefore it is safer to express it on impulse.”

Illiance shook his blue head doubtfully. “Surely the mind-structures of the early men cannot be so different from our own! We have no such preservation of the unexpressed. Is this a metaphysical belief? Among us, to quell an untoward impulse of action is not to act. Quelling is considered the Left Hand of Life: to be still, to be silent, to be unmindful. This is the open door toward serenity.”

Menelaus answered in the same language: “Preceptor, I am just telling you he operates by the model that says unexpressed emotions continue to exist in his brain somewhere, and can act on their own without his leave. It’s not something Chimerae believe either. We don’t trifle with ideas that sound like demon-possession or blame-passing. That is Witch-stuff. Or maybe he has extra brain matter that acts on its own.”

Mentor Ull raised his hand and spoke. “This is not to allure our attention. Ask him about the Tombs.”

“Pretty damn cold,” was Soorm’s comment, once the question was translated. “Old too, or so I hear.”

Deep lines appeared to either side of the slightly quivering mouth of Menelaus as he translated the remark.

Illiance and Ull nodded sagely. “He answers simply, as we would,” said Ull to Illiance in Locust Intertextual. “Let us proceed with awe and caution: he may be profound, despite that he is a relict of the before-time.”

“Don’t make the translator laugh,” muttered Menelaus through tense lips in Natural to Soorm, which was the language of the Nymphs. Soorm just cocked his overlarge cuttlefish eye at him in reply.

Ull and Illiance debated the wording of a more precise question in soft and liquid tones.

Eventually, Soorm answered: