Menelaus looked again.

Ctesibius had mentioned Melusine occupying the depthtrain network and a vast underground archeology: those were the ancestors of the Infernals. Their growth patterns, and the society that grew like a strange fractal crystal, matched the equations Del Azarchel described.

As for the Melusine in the oceans, they could not possibly have failed to have been exposed to the genetic-mimetic influence of his Anarchist Vector spread by the migrating terns. One generation, or two, and the genetic change would remain dormant, and then the group instinct would have started to influence events, first of those with the gene, and then those without it. That is what produced the pioneer spirit which led to the Anchorites, and their attempt to recolonize the surface land area.

And the vector could be spread by any means over any boundary, physical or psychological: if the Infernal Melusine beneath the crust of the planet had any physical contact or electronic signal traffic whatsoever with the Anchorites, then the radiotelepaths among the Melusine would have spread the vector in less than a generation.

He looked at Del Azarchel’s hieroglyphs. The crucial equation that described the dark mind technology which should have been present in the Anchorites was not in the formula.

When Menelaus factored the missing element back into the equations written before him, the result was stunning and simple: the Mind Helot system could not have arisen among the Oceangoing Melusine, nor could they have been conquered by the mental warfare system Del Azarchel had just mentioned.

The world of the Helots could not exist.

Del Azarchel was smirking. Montrose looked up from the impossible paradox of symbols he was seeing. “Okay, Blackie. I give. How did you do it? How did you get from the Anchorite world to the Helot world? What did you do with the Anarchist Vector I introduced?”

7. Change of Mind

Del Azarchel said, “I am not sure what aspect of what you introduced you mean. Are you still taking credit for the rise of the Anchorite cult among the Oceangoing Melusine? Which you did by what means again, exactly? Turning red rock moss black and leaving trails of migratory bird-droppings in the wave? Are you sure you want to claim credit for them? They were never more than one-tenth of one percent of the population, never had any particular influence, never shaped events—the Infernals tolerated them because they were far away, formed no threat, did nothing, and meant nothing.

“But the belligerence you built into their social scheme—if you are still taking credit for having done this—merely led them, one step at a time, to their inevitable destruction. Did you design the cult to self-destruct? I have done such things in the past, but I did not expect it from you.”

Menelaus was staring in wonder at what Del Azarchel had written in the surface of the ice puddle. Had he made a mistake in his math? Or had Del Azarchel? Where was the Anarchist Vector in this sum result? It should have had the same effect on the path of events as a supermassive black hole in space would have on the orbits of a solar system it passed through.

Del Azarchel was still talking: “Your Anchorites launched physical attacks against the undersea brain colonies in the buried oceans. Considering how far down your pet anarchists had to drill even to reach the uppermost of the buried lakes or sunless oceans of the inner world, I would say your attempt to concoct a race to supersede mine ended about as badly as your first attempt with the Giants. What am I saying? Far worse. The last Anchorite, Eumolpidai, died in captivity in A.D. 10099. The whole career of the race, from start to finale, was less than a hundred years.

“What were you imagining? What were you thinking? As a Cliometric vector, creating a cult of belligerent aggressive anarchists, who could neither coordinate their assaults nor work for their common defense, against the most well-organized set of nested mental empires Earth has ever known—madness!

“Have you gone mad, my friend? Again? This was the most awkward bit of math I’d ever seen you do!” Blackie shook his head, remembering, wondering. “Why, the last time I saw you so, so, amateurish, was back when you and I were just starting to learn Cliometrics, and we did not have any easy way set up, either of us, for factoring six billion variables.”

Montrose said, “Childish, my Uncle Jack’s jackass’s ass-jack! You are just trying to get my goat! That was the most subtle thing I’ve ever done, undetectable, unstoppable. It … Why! You must have suffered not one stroke of genius, but a dozen in a row, even to begin to come up with a counter-strategy!”

“What in the world are you talking about, Cowhand? The war? Is this vector you introduced the thing that made the Anchorites start a war with the Infernals?”

Montrose was bent over the Cliometric formulae which formed their chessboard, looking for what had become of the missing chessman who had defined his promised checkmate of Blackie. There was no trace. The math was correct up to a certain point, and then …

He drew his head up. War? What war? The history scheme he had set in motion would not have ended in any organized large-scale violence. It could not have.

“Childish!” Blackie was scoffing. “It was like something a human with a computing machine would do, not artists like us. You merely changed all the attractor field values to the positive, one after another after another, and anyone, anyone could have seen that this was a Cliometric manipulation, an unnatural imposition of a new social dynamic by force. To retaliate, I merely added a subduction vector, and it smoothed out the spline variables—in this case, by reducing the source to zero. You know the result.”

“No, I was in hibernation at the time. What was the specific manifestation of this subduction vector?”

“I changed my mind.”

“Sorry, come again?”

“The ice caps which reach almost to the tropic zone, all this snow: it is all me. Exarchel and I are one system. I melted, flooded the coastal areas where the Anchorites kept their hermitages, overthrew their burgeoning civilization in one swift week of rising flood waters. Ah! The Earth enjoyed exactly one year and a half of summer! Such dancing, such gaiety! The land-dwelling infrastructure was wiped out, and the Anchorite dolphins, whales, and mermaids, shorn of half of their group, were swept back to the deep sea and reabsorbed. Then I froze the world again. I chose Midsummer’s Day in the northern hemisphere to start the first snowstorms over the Atlantic. It is amazing what you can do with a starship, an entire world covered with nanotechnological fluid you can directly control with your mind, and a coherent theory of weather prediction and control developed by the Japanese back in 2211—the year you were born, was it not?”

“No. Year before.”

Del Azarchel said, “Friend, there is no need to be coy with me. The game is over. What was the point of that move? Why have your creatures drill down through the icepacks into the buried oceans? It was stupid. Why provoke a war you could not win? What were you trying to accomplish by introducing this Anchorite cult factor into history, and then having it self-destruct?”

8. The Dark Mind Discipline

It should have worked!

The whole idea for his Mind Anarchy Vector had come straight off one of the cartouches of the Monument in the Omega Segment of the southern hemisphere, hidden among acres and acres of glyphs and signs and patterns which, Montrose knew for certain, neither Del Azarchel nor any other human person had ever translated. Unlike all the surrounding and unreadable mysteries, this one was written in the simple and clear glyphs of the Kappa Segment. Montrose theorized that the Monument Builders, and perhaps all starfaring civilizations, used the technique to prevent any one information system or library or set of philosophical virus-ideas from utterly dominating any other.