I thought it was a damn good speech, and I was thinking maybe I should have shot the Judge in the back and let the Hermeticist win, but the Judge just laughed that kind of laugh that snaps you back to yourself.

“Wow. You are positively and absolutely and in every other way totally convincing. I will buy your used car, tulips from Holland, and the Brooklyn Bridge from you, and then I will invest my life savings in your South Seas corporation. Because you—seeing as how you are the first Alpha of this whole pack of foamy-mouthed murdering war-dogs—why then, you must be even more willing than they are to die. Shoot me, and nothing stands between you and an endless future of endless war. Now is your chance. Put your money where your mouth is, you quibbling and quivering little carrion-eater, and pick up that gun.”

The Hermeticist said, “No. There is something you want me to say, some information you want, or you would not have talked and listened this long.”

The Judge nodded. “Hey, you are smart after all. Well, your little space program here worries me. As best I can tell, you are shipping tons and tons of Von Neumann machine crystals out into space somewhere. Yours is the only space program on the planet at the moment, and I have no way to get into the wild black yonder to see what you are doing. Whatever it is, it is outside of the range of any of my detectors—and I have a considerable array of them, more than you might believe. I’ll let you live if you tell me what is going on. Just talk, and I let you walk out the door.”

(I had this Hermetic guy pegged as a bit of coward, so I was as shocked as the Judge when he just shook his head.)

“I believe in what I stand for,” said the Hermeticist, “and even if I fall, the other members of the Hermetic Order will stop you. History will go as we wish, not as you wish, and the race that greets the Hyades when they come will yield to them, and live. The Chimera stage of evolution is leading upward to something you cannot imagine.”

He walked over and picked up one of the guns. So did the Judge. They both waited politely while they checked the weapons. They took up their positions, and one of them had his wristwatch sing out a countdown. Neither of them pulled early. Perfect gents to the last.

Then there was a chuff of noise, and black smoke from both weapons sprayed into the room, deflecting their aims and confusing their bullets. The room was gray streamers, and where they stood was black cotton. I could not see anything. And then they fired. It was a noise like the end of the world, and it set off all the alarms on the base.

Natch, I was watching all this through my palm unit, because I had left the gun running on automatic so I could watch the scene while slipsliding out of there. By that time, I was back with the wounded, and we managed to get everyone back into the stealthboat, and limp our way on screws the hell away from there.

You see, I knew that Judge was not letting that spaceport stay in business if whatever it was shipping into space was so important that the Hermeticist was willing to die rather than spill it. I knew it was time to leave before the place blew.

The whole fort was on fire by the time we surfaced some distance away, and the second time we surfaced, even farther away, some of the fires must have made a breach in the containment, because the Geiger counters were reading in the red. After that, we kept low and deep, and hoped the seawater would absorb some of the extra particles.

So, submerged the whole time, we crept down the coast until we reached a clear spot, where I could loop in a buddy of mine. Oh-No pussed up, and we didn’t dare take him to the real hospital, or else the Chimerae would ask questions. The Lotus King was able to keep Oh-No happy, so he died giggling and kicking his heels like a baby. Hesp was downgraded to fertilizer early on, and I hated him more when he was a corpse, stinking up our floating coffin of a boat, than I ever did when he was alive.

Afters, Sugar-n-Slice was feeling lonely and in the need of male comfort, and we were the only surviving owners of this boat that contained maybe two dozen radically useful inventions that were worth millions of medallions to the black market quartermasters.

So I lived happily ever after.

10. The Search Is Ended

The trio of Blue Men—Yndelf, Yndech, Ydmoy—had a number of questions, which Menelaus translated with great precision and exactitude as Kine Larz got more and more surly and incoherent, throwing bowl after bowl of steaming-hot rice wine down his throat; and the responses from Larz of the Gutter Menelaus translated with equal precision, but he often failed to explain circumlocutions, allusions, metaphors, or ambiguities.

Eventually Ull raised his left hand and called a halt to these proceedings. “Beta Sterling Anubis! I suspect a deceptive intent on your part. A complications of motives leads to null sets of morally correct action-reaction—” And he used an expression from the Monument math, a description of a game-theory situation where any move led to mutual loss.

Menelaus spread his hands, “You caught me. I was wondering how long it would take you to figure out this prisoner is a bilko.”

“A what?”

“A sleek, a schemer, a scammist, a skunk, a yardbird, a goldbrick, a sadsack gob who takes the brevet for another man’s job. Do you guys really have no word for this in your language? A dishonest person who benefits from the credulity of others.”

Ull looked puzzled. “We have poets and artisans, of course, but their excesses are guided by a strict notation of coherence to accepted forms.”

“Ah, no. Well, on second thought, artists are actually a kind of— No, no! Wait! Your society does not have fraud?”

Ull favored him with a cold and snakelike stare, but Illiance answered, his voice light and serene. “Of course we have fraud. We are human, and suffer the limitations of human nature and their attendant miseries.”

“What do you do to perpetrators of fraud? Family impalement Chimera-style? Or are you like the Nymphs, and you just drug them up until they puke and apologize, and pay back what they took?”

“We register our discontent.”

“Uh—wow, you sure suffer the misery of human nature.”

Illiance said, “The configuration you are using is called sarcasm, where you say the opposite of your meaning? You honor us, if you think us so far above the wretchedness of mortal suffering. If one of our Order provokes sufficient discontent, the secular arm acts, and the malefactor is returned to the Locusts.”

“Sounds painful. What’s involved?” Menelaus asked Illiance.

Ull made a preemptory gesture. “Enough! Beta Sterling Anubis, you are altering your mode of translation to allure us to certain conclusions which we are competent to establish independently.”

“Then why are you asking this pook-jerker so many questions? He is making up his answers.”

Ull said, “We are exploring the negative information spaces. For example, we have already deduced that Fear Island is Foehr Island, one of the North Frisian Islands on the German coast of the North Sea. The location was one of the strongholds of the Nobilissimus, the first true world-ruler, during the period of his exile in A.D. 2409 to 2413, and before this was merely an aerodrome. His tale, independent of any falsehoods, indicates a breakdown of the ancient depthtrain system that bored below the crust was far earlier than previously believed. Further, we can deduce from the fact that the Cities in Space were still aloft in this period, that the Hermeticists were keeping them staffed despite the long-term economic losses and political instability involved: which means that shipping Von Neumann self-replicating macromolecules into space was not merely a policy of the Hermeticists, but their prime priority at that time. The subject’s lies and exaggerations concern only himself and his own prowess, and therefore distort the visualization modeled from his thought-environment only in trivial respects, of no present concern to the Order of Simplification.”