“On an island in my day called Yap, where once the natives carved immense wheels of calcite stone twelve feet in diameter to serve as their money, there is now a great and luxurious people living, groups of Clades not allergic to one another. The Yapese are fraternal and not identical twins, men of psychological unity which my control of history should long ago have led to self-destruction. From here has come the poets and philosophers and nonconformist Iatrocrats which disturb my schemes; from here issues the anomaly that outsmarts and overwhelms my countermaneuvers.

“Indeed, I can be thwarted. Do not be surprised. I am the Master of this aeon, but there is one who meddles with my designs and defies my mastery.

“There is a Hermeticist who betrayed my brethren, the other Hermeticists, and he opposes us all. Deep in his Tombs he slumbers, and we cannot destroy him with a strike from space. Such is he the simple people call the Judge of Ages.”

(I knew then for the first time that he could not foresee my thoughts, for if he could have done, he would have killed me, before the spark of hope, fanned by winds of hate, erupted into wildfire in both my hearts.)

“My age will not be judged by him,” Reyes continued, “will not be put to trial, not condemned! I will discover the mathematical system he used to break the way of life and the Wintermind disciplines I established. Somehow into the genes and memes, the biological and sociological information that controls civilization, the Judge of Ages introduced the Clade Codes, which allow for Avuncular Altruism, so that even remote relations sharing some genetic material will combine their survival strategies and adopt programs of mutually beneficial selflessness. The Clades were created long ago, and under such conditions as my vision of history was not interrupted; therefore, I did not detect it. Buried within their genetic codes and mimetic patterns of behavior were recessive elements time eventually brought together, a ripple of many waves converging positively to re-enforce each other at Yap. Hah! And to think that I thought the development of a burg-dwelling class of cloned duplicates was a natural trend.

“But here, in these islands, unwatched, the Darwinian process was halted, or reversed: I have even seen uncles caring for crippled and retarded Clade-cousins, and Hormagaunts dying naturally of old age, refusing to replace worn organs from the younger generations of their inferiors for reasons of mere sentiment.

“Intolerable! Who will meet the Hyades at the End of Days when the star-monsters descend? Uncles burdened with love for cripples and idiots? Mothers with babe soaking at the breast? The widowed, the crippled, the poor and the weak? They will reproduce like conies, and outnumber and overwhelm the Enlightened, unless the social vectors involved are neutralized.

“You and yours will forestall this dread future my mathematics foretells for me.

“The first wave will descend upon Yap Island in the form of high-altitude microspore packages, condense and fall as rain, and spread a synchronized binary paralytic agent throughout the water table. Major organs and thought processes must be kept functioning, and a sufficient number of living subjects must be kept alive to allow us to reverse-engineer the social and genetic vectors the Judge of Ages introduced when he created his Clade Code.

“The wider the baseline, the greater the chance of detecting the statistical pattern. Naturally, even the simplest simultaneous solution of a thousand-variable sum is beyond human capacity. It is beyond the capacity of my Dreagh, Expastor, who dwells in the wandering star.

“No, the only machines capable of reverse engineering the math used to create the Clades are those that squat at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the Ghosts of the long-dead Cetaceans.

“The Cetaceans were a race elevated not merely to human levels of intelligence, but beyond, to the superhuman, and they used the tools we gave them to create emulations of their own minds deep in the lightless abyss beneath the seas, acre upon acre of windowless domes of onyx and plinths of some diamond-hard material whose making we do not understand.

“I have expended other amphibian servants over the years to approach the Ghosts of the dead race, and finally one survived, and through him, I have made a covenant with them, and secured a safe conduct for you. I have designed for you a tripartite body able to adjust in its metamorphoses to ever deeper ranges of the sea, from bathypelagic, where no light reaches and black fish swim, and the only light is from the creatures themselves, to abyssopelagic, where no light nor heat is found, and even whales dare not dive, to the hadalpelagic at the bottom of chasms, where the pressure is eight tons per square inch, and boneless starfish and tube worms crawl.

“You will be the first of many conductors. Your task is to draw the Yap islanders down to the bottom of the trench in special vessels I will give you. There the Yapese will be given, still alive, to the intellects of long-dead whales and superwhales and dolphins and superdolphins.

“The entire subsea structure of the Yap Islands will be destroyed, and the sea will eat the islands and destroy all evidence of our doings here.

“Now go. Assemble your squads; select them by the usual gladiatorial method.”

The year in which these events took place was 7385 by the reckoning Reyes y Pastor used to count the years, the Years of his Lord.

Blind luck was with us. The hundred things that should have marred the operation instead fell out as the Red Hermeticist desired. Burg after burg of the richest polity on the planet was taken, all intact, and fortresses, libraries, fields, growth cells, plantations, cloning stations, watchtowers; and no word, no electric signals, not even a messenger bee escaped to tell the tale.

Of the ten thousand grisly deeds I did I will not speak, except to say I seem still to hear the screams and pleas, some wild, and some calm with the dignity only those about to die can muster, still ringing in my ears. Victims and their children I dragged all of that first group into the cells, and then the next and next without number, their limbs unable to move, packed into the nutrient fluid which filled their lungs and veins. Then the islands sank and the flood came, and it was a slow disaster, and through the membrane of the cells, the helpless thousands could see the tides rolling higher and higher, inch by inch, over their land. And then the waters rolled over their heads, and the light of day was gone.

Below, we crammed into sardonic vessels all the paralytics, frozen like flies in amber, and they sank into darker and darker places. Down into eternal gloom, where freakish fish like skeletal nightmares of teeth and huge blind eyes, glowing like specters from their own luminescence, seeing never any light but their own, down the roots of the deepest trenches of the sea, under one thousand atmospheres of pressure they were taken. Of the ghosts in the windowless domes at the bottom of the abyss, sightless domes that rise through the freezing water above fields of black sand and boiling vents of sulfur, I am the only living thing to have seen, and survived to tell. Of their blind songs and the horror of what has never been human—of all this I will not speak. Three thousands of years have passed, and all my crimes are long forgotten, save by me.

I served him well, Reyes y Pastor, and sabotaged the efforts of others who served him, and I flattered and fawned and lied, so that he was pleased with me, and he thought I loved him when my only feeling for him was absolute terror.

But my deception prevailed, and I alone was spared when many hundreds of his men, serfs, and loyal servants were slaughtered to keep the atrocity of Yap Island secret from all recorded history.