Betelgeuse slammed feet-first into the ground, struck by a burning curiosity as to the identity of this new entrant. The power that emanated from his form was palpable—far stronger than anyone Betelgeuse had had experience with, far stronger than Commander Mzeeka and the Mentzer woman.

  Golden Incunabulum. It has to be. He materialized out of thin air. What other explanation is there? Not to mention…

  The power Betelgeuse sensed wasn't so much the immense pressure exerted by the robed man's intentionality—though there was certainly a lot of it, comparable almost to the Sand-Marshal—but rather the unique way in which it was formulated. To Betelgeuse' nuanced familiarity with the compulsion matrix, he appeared to have a kind of cultivated strength borne of exceptional discipline and training.

  Even Commander Mzeeka's mind appeared much less powerful in comparison to the robed man's, and it wasn't simply because Betelgeuse could detect multiple grafts. No, that callused mind, like Tenor Ravelash's, spoke of concerted effort and extreme training, not to mention that he also seemed to be a beneficiary of some kind of esoteric practice.

  The way the mind moves. The formulation of thoughts. Everything is different.

  What else could explain the claggy formulation of that intentionality? Its globular form and thick jellyfish parasitism? The way it clumped onto a person's mind? It was like nothing Betelgeuse had ever witnessed.

  Betelgeuse turned on his heels, feeling his body become bogged down with an inexplicable heaviness. Alterk's body had already been reduced to a flaming mass, dead and formless. Right behind that crisp nugget of a corpse, both Queen She and Fuller had fallen into a prone position, shuddering in place but otherwise completely still, completely frozen by the robed man's compulsion.

  His power is off the charts.

  It was weaponized confusion, and Betelgeuse struggled mightily against that mental quagmire. An inexplicable urge to lower himself to the ground started to overbear his mind, and his perceptions started to melt away into a world of uncertain arbitrariness.

  His thoughts slowed, his faculties were blunted. Nothing made sense anymore, because the very notion of logical linkage—of entailment, of deductive and inductive systems of thought—began to dissolve.

  The robed man was moving, but Betelgeuse couldn't describe any particular way in which he was moving. It was impossible to say exactly what was happening.

  'This is not normal,' the thought suddenly occurred to him. 'What am I doing here? Queen She brought me here… no, I came to find him. That man. Secrets lie here. Secrets. Who is he? Why is he here? I must know—'

  He had been caught. The realization shocked him into action. His mind started working again.

  It's some kind of modified compulsion. It's not natural, not natural at all. Either it's a graft or the result of special training. I can't tell…

  Keep hold of your mind.

  I think, therefore I am. I doubt, therefore I am. I am what I am, a machine, an intensity-conductor.

  Hah! Of course you are, the insidious thought occured, bitingly sarcastic.

  Delusional! Self-indoctrination! You are nothing… the domineering thought seethed bitterly.

  Betelgeuse' mind had returned to him. As his perceptions stabilized, he neutralized the clumping masses of intentionality, letting them slough off his sense-of-being.

  And he was able to perceive and understand the world again. He was alive. He existed. Dasein.

  Betelgeuse blinked. The robed man was atop the drill-rig, squatting and staring directly at him. There were three drill-rigs, all of them smoking voluminously out of a multitude of perforations that had been punched into the scarred steel chassis.

  In the time that Betelgeuse took to regain his bearings, the robed man had wiped out all of Rabid's men. A battle had occurred, and Betelgeuse hadn't even realized it. He raised his weapon, centering the robed man in his vision. Plumes of smog framed that man's fine, purple-trimmed garb; he remained unnervingly still.

  Silence. The robed man observed Betelgeuse like a zoologist would observe an exotic species of animal. Half-bodies were strewn across the surface of the chassis, bodies missing curiously spherical pieces of flesh and disgorging bright-red jets of blood in rhythmic spurts.

  The mech was gone. Disappeared. A hole had been torn into the ground several meters away, and Betelgeuse supposed it had tunneled to safety. Right beside it was the bag filled with bodies.

  Now that he had the opportunity to look closer, Betelgeuse saw that the women inside were the same ones from the holo-buses. The 'cargo' to be intercepted. Many of them looked like they had already succumbed. The remaining ones were staring at him with pleading eyes, pleading silently for him to release them.

  "Who are you?" Betelgeuse said, lowering his weapon. The railgun was unlikely to do much to the robed man. Not to someone with this much power

  The man raised himself to his feet, cocking his head to the side. Tall flames crackled in the silence.

  He was the source of the mysterious intentionality-signature. The one that appeared after Betelgeuse' Revelation. There was no doubt about it.

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  Could there be a correlation? Or is it all just a coincidence?

  But he already knew in his heart that this was no coincidence. There could be no such thing in matters of galactic consequence.

  "You've come for me, haven't you?" Betelgeuse said, stepping forward, leaving Queen She and Fuller behind him.

  The robed man blinked out of existence.

  The next moment, a voice sounded behind him, causing the hair on Betelgeuse' neck to straighten.

  "Astute. I'm interested so far."

  Betelgeuse forced himself not to snap around on his heels. Instead, he turned slowly, maintaining as far as he could a facade of coolness as he turned to face the robed man.

  "I sensed your presence earlier," Betelgeuse said. "It felt like you were watching me."

  "I was," the robed man said, folding his arms across his chest. "So you're the Anomaly."

  "Anomaly? You know who I am?"

  "I know of Colonel Dog Balls," the robed man said distastefully, his helmet flickering with a dull gloss. His tone made it clear how stupid he thought the name was. "Give me a real name."

  "... Betelgeuse," he returned. The man's proximity pressed down heavily upon him on all sides, and it was clear to him that any attempt at lying would be shut down quickly.

  "Fitting that you should be named after an Orion-star," the robed man chortled. "I am Meng Bi," he said, returning the courtesy and proffering a hand. His voice was lightly accented, and it happened, surprisingly enough, to be an accent that Betelgeuse recognized well.

  'Sinic,' Betelgeuse thought, shaking the hand firmly.

  "Let's not waste time, Mr. Betelgeuse," Meng Bi said, withdrawing his hand. "Things are happening as we speak, with implications that could shake the foundations of the Democracy."

  "... What do you mean?" Betelgeuse managed. Were they together now? Was Meng Bi joining him?

  "There are clear reasons why you've been flagged as an anomaly, Mr. Betelgeuse. It's clear to me that your unnatural affinity for the compulsion matrix is just the tip of the iceberg. If I have noticed it, other, more resourceful people must have noticed it also."

  "You came specifically to find me?" Betelgeuse asked, incredulous. "You look like an Earthian—you mean to say you came all the way to Desert from Earth?"

  "I make it a point to be early rather than right," Meng Bi continued. "Who knows where our partnership will take us?"

  "Nobody said anything about being partners," Betelgeuse returned, furrowing his brows. The smoke from the drill-rigs had filled up the space, and the air was becoming quite hazy. "I'm more interested in how the hell you got here. I doubt Cosmonautical runs flights to Desert."

  Meng Bi raised his hand and stuck out a finger.

  "Let's try again. Think about this carefully," he said. "We can be partners, can we not?"

  And Betelgeuse doubted himself. The Revelation was still in his mind, and all around him he could feel the chaotic web of abstracted intentionality begin to harden and concretize.

  The more he thought about it—the more factors he tried to account for—the more confused he became. His thoughts became tangible phantoms that plagued his perceptions. He already knew of the change that had occurred, but it was impossible to pinpoint exactly what that change was. His descriptive prowess failed him, because no word had yet been created to bear the referential burden.

  Somewhere deep within the confusion of his mind, he heard the voices speak to him. They were the insidious and domineering ones manifesting as sapient thoughts, and this time they overlapped with each other. They were separate and not separate.

  Be careful, it said.

  Of what? Betelgeuse asked.

  The human mind is not meant to perceive… the vastness… the asymmetry… the unknown. The burden of awareness lies heavy. The curse of knowledge is destroying your/my mind, eclipsing everything, remaking everything.

  Your/my perceptions are no longer human. You/I no longer see as humans were supposed to see.

  Which means you have a fucking responsibility.

  Where did that come from?

  From you.

  From me?

  Exactly. New content. New material. New man.

  Why must you/I create… become the new man?

  Ask again why entropic flows occur. It's the perennial question of existence, and there can be no satisfactory answer because life was dissatisfied enough to ask the question. The question was born from dissatisfaction, and the Universe doesn't owe human dissatisfaction a response.

  As for what the Universe responds to... that's a different question which is anyway impossible to know.

  Neuroplasticity. His brain had changed. Neural pathways firing off bastard configurations fathered by his Ash Incunabulum. The Will-to-Power remade his body, and in so doing changed his soul.

  The soul. What was it? A particular configuration of electrochemical self-reference. A concept. Like all concepts, recursive.

  Fugue. He wondered, not for the first time, what the voices were. Meng Bi stood still, watching him closely. People were always watching, like predators, seeking out opportunities to strike. A human being was vulnerable. Infinitely vulnerable. No way to escape. No man is an island, his father had said. I wish I was, Betelgeuse had replied.

  Broken dam. Water gushing. Every molecule, a fuzzy thought. Value-judgements galore. Fantasies which were created from mind-stuff formed from reality. Realities which were changed to fit those fantasies. Recursion. Somewhere at the foot of the Babelian structure of thought was an edge where objectivity shaded into subjectivity and vice versa.

  What is it? Betelgeuse asked himself.

  Nothing answered.

  It's just… This, he thought.

  He'd left his crew—his friends—back at the encampment. Edith, Douglas, Voke, Thete, Misha. Something was happening to them now. They were in danger.

  Meng Bi bore a definite relation to This. Meng Bi played a part in the pseudo-cosmic, pseudo-divine Revelation.

  With the power he had already demonstrated—some form of teleportation, Meng Bi could do pretty much whatever he wanted. Even though Betelgeuse was confident in his ability to withstand Meng Bi's compulsion, it was nevertheless clear that the man held Betelgeuse' life in his hands.

  So why was Meng Bi suing for a partnership? What was the point?

  Could it be said that Meng Bi was asking for his approval? Anomaly, Meng Bi had called him. That designation suggested power. What kind of power, Betelgeuse could only guess at.

  So Betelgeuse nodded, and Meng Bi nodded back. Mutual respect. Betelgeuse sensed a difficult-to-describe shifting in his own being, as though a milestone had been reached. It felt that an interstitial space had consumed him, as though by acknowledging his role in the galaxy of human consciousnesses he had abandoned the very concept of belonging.

  He no longer belonged.

  "As I thought," Meng Bi said, and Betelgeuse supposed that he must be smiling behind his mask.

  "What's your blessing?" Betelgeuse asked offhand.

  Meng Bi threw his head back and laughed raucously. Betelgeuse didn't react, letting the man laugh himself silent.

  "That's not kosher, Mr. Betelgeuse," he finally said. "Is this Desert culture? To exchange information on blessings?"

  "... I wouldn't know," Betelgeuse returned. "I haven't been here long."

  "You came with the previous TAF insertion." It was a statement, not a question. "You sound young."

  "Hopefully there's no age requirement to partnering with Your Holiness," Betelgeuse snarked. "I'm fine if you prefer to keep your blessing secret, but at least tell me what you can do."

  "Tsk. Here's a demonstration, since you're so curious," Meng Bi said. He placed a hand on Betelgeuse, and before he could react, the surroundings disappeared as if sucked into unreality.