No group or individual ever came forward to claim responsibility for the assault on Long Mountain. Perhaps the perpetrators were appalled at the magnitude of their results. Various candidates had been proposed: the Sons of Dixie, the Viridians, the New Adamists, the Hanoi Sozaboys, the Otaku League, the Yogini Mamas-But no one seemed inclined to take credit for the spectacular events that followed the terrorist act.

The diamond-clad lance that was the nuke dropped from low orbit unerringly down the gullet of the volcano. It penetrated all the way through to the magma chambers before exploding. The blast enlarged the outlets for the magma and sent incalculable amounts of molten rock surging upward. Mauna Kea soon joined in.

The eruption covered the entire island in radioactive lava. Millions of lives, both human and splice, were lost. Enough soot and cinders entered the atmosphere to create several years without summers, just after the noahs had finally stabilized the global climate.

Mauna Loa continued to convulse in diminuendo for the next two decades, rendering the whole chain of islands inhospitable to most kinds of life.

But not to all.

In the main caldera, swimming perpetually through the hot roiling orange currents, beneath a pall of sulphurous gases and steam, lived the Diamond Thinkers.

To the eye of any hypothetical observer, each Diamond Thinker presented a humaniform shape seemingly composed of pure diamond. In actuality, the diamond faade was a thin flexible smart integument surrounding and protecting a vulnerable lifeform within. The beings who chose to become Diamond Thinkers constituted a heterogeneous assortment of humans and splices.

Two of the latter happened to be named Thomas Equinas and Sweepea.

Inside his diamond armor, Sweepea cavorted through the boiling rockmelt. His senses were fed a steady stream of info-enhanced data on the world beyond his armor, through neural hookups. To Sweepeas eyes, he was plunging through a well-lit fiery color-stratified ocean. Crucial temperature data-it would not do to descend too deep, where his diamond skin would melt-registered continuously on his naked epidermis. His ears were filled with the seismic song of the massive volcano, rumbling up from deep below, chthonic chants.

Sweepeas job and delight in this new incarnation was simply to swim and to mate with his fellow Diamond Thinkers. By doing this, the Thinkers were performing a valuable service for the rest of the planet.

Their intelligent carapaces possessed vast processing power within their moletronic circuits, only a tiny fraction of which was used to support their inhabitants. The rest was devoted to customer-mandated computing tasks, extensive simulations and predictions. The heat-energy of the volcanic environment constituted a source of free power unmatched anywhere else. But more importantly, mapping the chaotic turbulence of the lava introduced valuable creative variables into the calculations, producing insights otherwise unobtainable. The neural hookups to organic brains provided a further complexification unobtainable by empty diamond suits.

And matings between the Thinkers added a further Darwinian edge to the diamondware.

When two Diamond Thinkers met and decided to mate, their shells fused, opening to a single interior, like sleeping bags zippering together. While the shells swapped and recombined data and algorithms, so the mortals within enjoyed a traditional biological fusion.

Sweepea, of course, derived an added benefit from these matings. He was able to assume the shape of whomever his sexual partner was, retaining that form until the next metamorphosis, thereby continuing his quest to add to his understanding of the deep nature of different splice and basal somatypes.

Sweepea and his Uncle Thomas had been living the lives of Diamond Thinkers for three months now, ever since driven from Scyphozoa City by the Manticore. (And hopefully that monster had perished in the grip of the big jellies.) Sweepea felt secure in this particular harsh oasis, anonymous in his blank-faced shell. Surely they could stay here until Sweepea completed his education and could assume the mantle and full responsibilities of the Teleological Ark.

Right this moment, however, Sweepea was intent on finding Saffron. This particular Diamond Thinker was his favorite computational partner, and it had been too long since they had shared sex.

As he tracked the unique identity signal emitted by Saffron through the liquid hell, Sweepea considered the latest lesson Uncle Thomas had imparted to him. It concerned something called the Categorical Imperative, which the old horse seemed to feel was essential to Sweepeas mission.

"This valuable insight derives from a basal human philosopher named Kant, child. Do you recall our discussion of his life?"

"Yes, Uncle. He never traveled more than a hundred kilometers from where he was born. Was Kant restricted then by a biome leash installed by his gembaitch?"

Thomas Equinas sighed. "There were no such things as biome leashes or gembaitches during Kants era, son. I fear your grasp of history is radically deficient as of yet."

"I am only seven months old, Uncle."

"Yes, yes, Im taking that into account. But let us continue with the Categorical Imperative. It comes in two forms, a double-sided rule. Here is the first. 'Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law of nature. Now, how do you interpret that?"

"Well, thats easy. My life must be a model for others."

"A simplistic interpretation, but good enough for a start. Now, the second formulation. 'So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of another, in every case as an end in itself, never as a means. Please give me your restatement of that, allowing for the extension of the word 'humanity to include splices as well."

"Honor all life," said Sweepea without hesitation.

Uncle Thomas seemed emotionally affected by Sweepeas swift instinctive directness. "Hmm, yes, that will do. I daresay Kant himself would approve. All right, child, you may consider todays lesson over ..."

A diamond veil swept up in front of Sweepeas eyes, sealing the partial face-to-face breach between his armor and that of Uncle Thomas. This was how they met for Sweepeas tutoring. They had never opened their diamond suits fully to each other, since that degree of intimacy would have signaled a desire for sexual union.

And although Sweepea loved his uncle and wanted to mate with him, something held him back from such a step. Perhaps a fear of not being reciprocated ....

Pondering the Categorical Imperative in all its permutations, Sweepea slipped effortlessly through the molten bath, riding thermo- clines of flame. Saffrons beacon swelled in intensity as he neared her, until finally she appeared within his telemetry vision, a scintillant humaniform gem.

Saffron bluetoothed Sweepea while he was still a few yards off. Her voice sounded as clearly as if they had already merged suits.

"Sweetling! Its been way too long!"

"How do you know how long its been, Saff? You havent even seen it yet!"

"Oh, my bad little supersplice! You didnt miss me, did you?"

"Open up, and Ill show you!"

Within the next minute, Sweepea and Saffron were encased in single large diamond egg. Sweepea had a brief flashback to some prenatal memory of his brood-pod before all non-erotic thoughts were swept away by Saffrons embrace.

True to her name, the naked Saffron was golden all over. Her own splice heritage consisted primarily of eagle and other raptors, admixed with human. Below the neck, she was a down-covered woman. But at her collarbones commenced a ruff of proud tawny feathers, cresting atop a beaked, big-eyed face. Tiny vestigial wings big as her outspread palms graced her back.

At the moment, Sweepea wore the guise he had adopted for his last mating: that of a male panda splice.

But as soon as he came within Saffrons pheromonal sphere, he began to metamorphose.

Within a minute, two birdpeople were engaged in a lusty coupling, constrained only by their limited space. As their orgasms neared, their wings begin to flutter faster and faster, blurring completely at the moment of climax.

Saffron and Sweepea spent a while in post-coital cuddling and talk, before Saffron said, "Im starved! Lets eat!"

"Good idea."

The pair resumed their separate armors and mentally triggered their feeding cycles.

To adopt the role of a Diamond Thinker, an individual had to be modified to become autotrophic: able to subsist on light, water, air and some inorganic material, just like a plant. All these desiderata were available in the lava, thanks to the extracting and recombining abilities of the smart armor, which could pull elements in through its skin.

Now Sweepeas eyes, nose and mouth were automatically capped. The close-fitting interior of his suit filled with light and a nutrient broth, both of which he absorbed through his skin. A sense of repletion filled him.

When he and Saffron were finished eating, Saffron suggested that they explore a different part of the lake of fire.

"Nipper told me about a new semi-stable convection node over in the northeast quadrant. Should be some strong plectic whorls there to stoke our qubits. And the more gnarly our processing, the more eft in our personal accounts."

Sweepea had never taken part in an economy that utilized units of credit before becoming a Diamond Thinker, and he still had little intuitive understanding of concepts such as "earning" and "spending." His own personal wealth meant little to him. But if Saffron wanted to boost her own earnings, he was all for helping her.

"Sure! Lets go."

The pair spent two whole days in the fertile convection node, a mini Jovian Red Spot, allowing their shells to integrate the weird Bernoulli and Landau-Kolmogorov effects. They would take breaks to link for sex, to eat, and to chant along with the geological chorus welling up from below.

On the third day, they detected an approaching visitor.

"Funny," bluetoothed Saffron, "I cant read his ID."

Sweepea wasnt worried. "Probably just a newbie who accidentally shut off his beacon."

But the next actions of the intruder dispelled any such innocent explanation.

The four-legged, spike-tailed diamond thing intercepted Sweepea and swept him up in a rigid embrace. The downward vector of the assailant continued, an invariably fatal path to the high-temperature zone.

"Sweepea!" yelled Saffron. "Whats happening!?"

Sweepea struggled to no avail. "I think it must be-"

Before he could finish speaking, he felt a portal open up in front of his face, where his suit touched that of his attacker.

The Manticores bmtish human face leered at Sweepea from inches away. His carrion breath laved Sweepeas nostrils. His dragon horns grazed Sweepeas cheeks.

The Manticores voice resembled the sound of gravel cmshed between gears. "Now at last you die!"

Then the facial portal sealed over, and they continued their suicidal, varicidal plunge to the regions where their suits would melt.

Sweepea called out hopelessly. "Saffron! Uncle Thomas! Help me!"

And with that call, somehow he was free.

Halting his own descent with some effort, he whirled around to look for the Manticore.

Already far below him, the killer bore a rider. Gripping the killer from above, Saffron clung implacably. Her head was pressed to the Manticores back.

Suddenly a roar of pain from the Manticore, followed by an exclamation, filled Sweepeas ears.

"It bites! It bites!"

Saffron must have opened a portal through which her sharp beak could wreak an injury.

But while her assault had resulted in the freeing of Sweepea, it had not altered the destructive downward course of the grappling combatants.

Evidently unclamping her beak from the Manticores flesh, Saffron managed a last communication.

"The heat, Sweepea-so rich-its our mothers womb-"

Out of range in the pyroclastic soup, Saffron and the Manticore disappeared from Sweepeas senses.

Weeping, cursing, Sweepea turned and homed in on Uncle Thomass beacon.

In Sweepeas day, the great Plains of North America were still home to herds of wild shoggoths.

The blimplike, amorphous, gelatinous creatures, each as big as a bam, had been sartorized from plasmoidal slime molds, with snippets of various fungi added. Essentially large bags of cytoplasm with multiple nuclei and assorted intracellular bodies, the humongous wobbly sacs- colored a pale matte grey and smelling of sperm-cruised in sizable herds up and down the middle of the continent, subsisting on nutrients extracted from the air and soil, leaving behind temporarily bald patches of earth and trails of fertilizing ooze.

The shoggoths did not reproduce in great numbers, thanks to the dictates of their original designers. But when they did, it was a sight to behold. Like their basal slime mold ancestors, they would go sessile, erecting large stalks containing fruiting bodies full of spores. Upon release, the spores would darken the skies like clouds of ancient passenger pigeons.

This extensive territory had been ceded to the shoggoths during the decades of mega-tomadoes, artifacts of the Greenhouse Effect. Gradually draining of population for a century, due to cultural factors, the American Midwest had been easy to finally empty out, in the face of the destructive storms. Humanity had chosen to migrate to bastions where they could huddle more safely while trying to repair the damaged climate. Recent successes along those lines meant that humans could probably re-populate the Great Plains now. But they seemed to be in no rush.

And anyway, their niche had already been occupied.

Sweepea knew that Uncle Thomas felt uneasy around the Centaurs. Their mixed horse and human composition echoed his in a twisted fashion. Whereas Thomas appeared mostly human below the neck, and horsey above, the Centaurs were fashioned on the opposite plan, resembling the classical Greek creatures of myth. But what bothered Thomas more than their mirror-image somatypes was their dumbness.

The Centaurs had been engineered with a minimum of intelligence, as mounts for various athletic competitions. They were hardly brighter than baseline equines, and Thomas experienced shame for that portion of his heritage which he shared with the capricious, balky, mute and rough-edged beasts. He was reminded too vividly of his own insensate days on the cell-phone plantation, before the coming of Petrina.

Of course, what the Centaurs lacked in intelligence, the Cynocephali more than supplied.

An individual Cynocephalus resembled nothing so much as the Egyptian god Anubis: jackal head on a human frame. As a race, they were sharp-witted, sardonic, proud and excitable, capable of great acts of bravery.

Their lifestyle demanded the latter. For the Cynocephali, along with their Centaurs, had adopted the ways and technologies of the pre-Columbian Native Americans, migrating to follow the shoggoth herds on which they lived.

And bringing down a shoggoth was no easy task.

Right now, Sweepea was about to participate in his own first hunt.

Sitting on his Centaur mount amidst his fellows, beneath the rich blue bowl of the sky, Sweepea appeared indistinguishable from his companions. His frequent matings within the tribe had locked his somatype into their mode.

(Oh, he had tried mating with one of the Centaurs when he and Uncle Thomas had first arrived at their new refuge, after their escape from Mauna Loa. But although he had succeeded in mimicking a Centaur in shape, in mass he was no match for the big splices, metamorphosing into a dwarf version that could hardly sustain the forces of mating in either male or female form. Sweepea couldnt summon mass out of nowhere, helpful as it would have been. After all, his abilities werent magic!) Bare-chested, wearing his facial paint and breechclout, holding his feather-decorated spears, Sweepea shared the fierce pride of the Cynocephali males who were on the verge of risking their lives to supply their kin with sustenance.

Off in the distance, the herd of shoggoths marked as targets rolled slowly across the grasslands, producing squelching noises, thunderous crepitations. Breezes carried their scent to the hunters.

Sweepeas own lonely and singular relative, Uncle Thomas, swam into the boys mind now. Elderly before Sweepea had been born, the old mosaic had been failing of late. Their haunted hegira through the harsh oases had taken much out of him. Sweepea wondered sadly if Uncle Thomas would even live to see his protege attain his first birthday next week. That milestone seemed particularly important to the old philosopher, for some reason. Thomas had striven of late to impart so much knowledge to Sweepea that the boys head was frequently left churning with novel ideas and startling facts. One reason he had insisted on taking part in the hunt today was actually to escape further lessons, to give his overworked brain a chance to rest.

On the lead Centaur, the tribes chief signaled the commencement of the hunt Chief Creekborn was a wiry, scarred veteran of a thousand such assaults on the amoeboid behemoths, and Sweepea felt confidence in his planning.

Lighting their torches from live coals contained in clay pots, the torchbearers set out first, followed by the spear-carriers.

As the hunters approached the shoggoths, the yeasty monsters began to exhibit an elephantine skittishness, alerted by whatever crude senses they possessed. They began to rumble off helter-skelter, seeking to flee their predators. But even their impressive speed was no match for the fleeter mounts of the warriors.

Soon Creekborn had selected the runtiest member of the herd as his victim. The torch-bearers began to peel it off further off from its mates. The moist shoggoths were intensely averse to fire, and could be maneuvered with some precision.

Once the shoggoth was isolated, the spear-carriers surged in.

Sweepea found himself losing all fear in the thrill of the assault. He darted in on a tangent, the hooves of his Centaur kicking up sweet-smelling divots, eventually coming close enough to slice into the shoggoth s thick redolent hide. Cytoplasm welled out the cut. Lacking any central organ or ganglia that could serve as fatal target, the shoggoth would instead die by scores of individual slashes that robbed it of cellular integrity.

Sweepea reined in his mount at the end of its arc and turned for another pass.

At that moment, the shoggoth reared up, forming the lower half of its body into a pseudopod. When it came down, it landed on three warriors, crushing them lifeless into the earth.

The Cynocephali did not pause to mourn, but maintained their fierce pricking assault After half an hour without any further loss of life, the tribespeople met victory. Deflating like a tent deprived of its supports, the shoggoth expired in a giant puddle of its contents.

Now the female tribespeople arrived, to butcher and dress out the blubbery meat, and transport it back to camp.

Chief Creekborn sought Sweepea out personally to congratulate him.

The jackal mask of the chief expressed pleasure, long pink tongue lolling out. Sweepea found himself responding in kind.