"I find only one technical term appropriate to use in response to that viewpoint: bullshit." Michael delivered his technical term with great relish. "I am not saying that slaughter did not take place; I am not denying that we pollute - working as I do for the Environmental Perfection Agency, how could I? I do deny, however, that this was, in a manner of speaking, government work for the earthly paradise."

"Careful how you talk, there," I said. "You work for the government yourself, remember?"

Michael refused to be distracted. "Leaving aside the habits of the natives of the islands off the coast, whose tribal name gave English the word 'cannibal,' the two most prominent cultures in the Americas five hundred years ago were the Aztecs, also cannibals, who fueled themselves both theologically and in terms of protein through human sacrifice, and the Incas, whose theology was benign enough but who regimented themselves more thoroughly than the Ukrainians would have tolerated before their latest crisis."

"You're hitting below the belt, talking about peoples who didn't live in what's now the Confederation," I protested.

"What about the noble warriors and hunters of the Great Plains?"

"Well, what about them?" he asked. "The culture they now revere and think of as ancient did not exist and could not have existed before the coming of the Europeans because their own ancestors had hunted the American horse to extinction - hardly good environmental management, in my opinion. And the firearms they used to defend their territory - bravely - against encroaching whites were all bought or stolen from those same whites, because they did not know how to make them for themselves."

"Whoa, there." I held up a hand. "Blaming people for not having skills isn't fair. And the whites who took the land away from the natives weren't what you'd call saints. Conquest by firewater, deliberately spread smallpox, and mass exorcisms of the native Powers isn't anything to be proud of."

"You're right," he said. "But if Europeans had not found the Americas until, for example, the day before yesterday, they would not have found them much different from the way they were five hundred years ago. And that is precisely the point I am trying to make. Thanks to modem thaumaturgy, our present culture supports far more people at a higher level of affluence and greater material comfort than any other in the history of the world."

"Is that all you judge culture by?" I asked. "Seems to me there should be more to life."

"Oh, no doubt. But make note of this, David: as a general rule - not universal, I concede, but general - the people who show the greatest contempt for material comforts are those lucky enough to have them. The Abyssinian peasant starving in his drought-stricken field, the Canaanite cobbler suffering under a plague of gnats because no local sorcerer knows enough to properly control Beelzebub, the slum-dweller in D.StC. aching with a rotten tooth because her parents hadn't had the crowns to go to an odontomagus to affix the usual invisible shields to her mouth… they will not speak slightingly of the virtues of a full belly and a healthy body, things we take for granted despite their being historically rare."

"Wait a minute, Michael. You just cheated there. You were talking about how wonderful our culture is, and then one of your suffering examples comes straight out of our own slums. You can't have it both ways."

He didn't answer for a few seconds; he was getting the carpet off the freeway. Once he'd done that, though, he said, "I fail to see why not. I never claimed we were perfect. Perfection is an attribute of the divine, not the human. I said that, on the whole, we do better for more people than anyone else has. Our flaws notwithstanding, I hold to that position."

I thought about it. The only times I'd ever been hungry were at Yom Kippur fasts, and those I undertook for the sake of ritual, not because I had no food. I slept in a flat on a bed; I was protected against diseases and curses that had lain whole nations waste in ancient times. I said, "You have a point"

The other thing was, the Chumash Powers and the Aztedans wanted to restore the unpleasant old days. The trouble with that was that most of the millions of people in the Barony of Angels liked the new days better. What would happen to them? My limited acquaintance with the Chumash Powers didn't make me think they were that ferocious, but Huitzilopochtii - The Chumash Powers must have cut a deal with the Aztedan war god, I realized. I tried to imagine the secret dealings that must have happened on the Other Side. Huitzilopochtii was a much bigger fish than the Sky Coyote, the Lizard, or the demons of the Lower World, but they were extra powerful here because the Barony of Angels was their native territory. The combination could prove deadly.

I reached that unpleasant conclusion about the time Michael pulled into the parking lot across the flyway from the Devonshire dump. To my relief, three or four black-and-whites were already there, their synchronized salamander lanterns flashing red and blue.

X

People were standing on the sidewalk rubbernecking the way they always do when something goes wrong. Over on the dump side of the street, a couple of constables were laying down the ritual yellow tape that keeps rubberneckers from getting too close to the action.

Michael and I hurried across. The constables saw our EPA sigils and demystified a stretch of tape so we could cross the line. "Did you get a hazmat team here?" I asked one of them. "Yeah, we did," he said. I thought they had; there were more black-and-whites in the parking lot than constables outside the dump. But while his partner put the magic back into the line, the fellow went on, "The guy who runs the dump tried to get an EPA hazmat team, too, but it was already on an urgent call, worse luck."

Luck had nothing to do with it; I'd told Kawaguchi he was liable to need that team at Chocolate Weasel. And he was, God knows. But Tony Sudakis was liable to need it here, too.

No magic yet has made people able to be two places at the same time. They're working on it, I understand, with thaumatechnology based on what they've learned with ectoplasmic cloning, but so far it happens only in light-and-magic shows and sorcerous fiction stories. Too bad. Boy, could we have used it. The security guard recognized Michael and me. Without being asked, he brought out the footbridge so we could cross into the containment area. As soon as we did, he yanked it away as fast as he could. In principle, that was smart; you didn't want to weaken the magical containment scheme in any way. In practice, I was afraid it would do about as much good as sunglasses under the megasalamander blast Professor Blank had mentioned.

About three steps down the warded path that led to Tony Sudakis' office, I stopped dead in my tracks. Tony hadn't been kidding - you could see the Nothing from anywhere on the walkway now. You felt that if you leaned forward, you might fall straight toward it forever. And he'd been right about the feeling that pervaded the dump, too; it was as if the Nothing were an egg quivering on the verge of hatching.

But that wasn't the only thing that made me stop and stare. The constables from the hazardous materia magica team weren't working only from the warded path - they'd actually gone into the dump itself to come to grips with the Nothing.

Sure, they knew what they were doing. Sure, they were draped with so many different kinds of apotropaic amulets that they looked like perambulating Christmas trees. Sure, their shoes had cold-iron soles to insulate them from the thaumaturgic vileness that littered the place. All the same, they put their souls on the line, not just their soles. I wouldn't have gone out there for a million crowns.