There would be a book in it.

Peace negotiations were not going well.

"You attacked us!" said Vorbis.

"I would call it preemptive defense," said the Tyrant. "We saw what happened to Istanzia and Betrek and Ushistan."

"They saw the truth of Om!"

"Yes," said the Tyrant. "We believe they did, eventually."

"And they are now proud members of the Empire."

"Yes," said the Tyrant. "We believe they are. But we like to remember them as they were. Before you sent them your letters, that put the minds of men in chains."

"That set the feet of men on the right road," said Vorbis.

"Chain letters," said the Tyrant. "The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain-the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn."

Vorbis sat back.

"What is it you fear?" he said. "Here in your desert, with your . . . gods? Is it not that, deep in your souls, you know that your gods are as shifting as your sand?"

"Oh, yes," said the Tyrant. "We know that. That's always been a point in their favor. We know about sand. And your God is a rock-and we know about rock."

Om stumped along a cobbled alley, keeping to the shade as much as possible.

There seemed to be a lot of courtyards. He paused at the point where the alley opened into yet another of them.

There were voices. Mainly there was one voice, petulant and reedy.

This was the philosopher Didactylos.

Although one of the most quoted and popular philosophers of all time, Didactylos the Ephebian never achieved the respect of his fellow philosophers. They felt he wasn't philosopher material. He didn't bathe often enough or, to put it another way, at all. And he philosophized about the wrong sorts of things. And he was interested in the wrong sorts of things. Dangerous things. Other philosophers asked questions like: Is Truth Beauty, and is Beauty Truth? and: is Reality Created by the Observer? But Didactylos posed the famous philosophical conundrum: "Yes, But What's It Really All About, Then, When You Get Right Down To It, I Mean Really!"

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools-the Cynics, the Stoics, and the Epicureansand summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, "You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink. Mine's a double, if you're buying. Thank you. And a packet of nuts. Her left bosom is nearly uncovered, eh? Two more packets, then!"

Many people have quoted from his famous Meditations:

"It's a rum old world all right. But you've got to laugh, haven't you? Nil Illegitimo Carborundum is what I say. The experts don't know everything. Still, where would we be if we were all the same?"

Om crawled closer to the voice, bringing himself around the corner of the wall so that he could see into a small courtyard.

There was a very large barrel against the far wall. Various debris around it-broken wine amphorae, gnawed bones, and a couple of lean-to shacks made out of rough boards­suggested that it was someone's home. And this impression was given some weight by the sign chalked on a board and stuck to the wall over the barrel.

It read:

DIDACTYLOS and Nephew

Practical Philosophers

No Proposition Too Large

"We Can Do Your Thinking For You"

Special Rates after 6 pm

Fresh Axioms Every Day

In front of the barrel, a short man in a toga that must have once been white, in the same way that once all continents must have been joined together, was kicking another one who was on the ground.

"You lazy bugger!"

The younger one sat up.

"Honest, Uncle-”

"I turn my back for half an hour and you go to sleep on the job!"

"What job? We haven't had anything since Mr. Piloxi the farmer last week-”

"How d'you know? How d'you know? While you were snoring dozens of people could've been goin' past, every one of 'em in need of a pers'nal philosophy!"

"-and he only paid in olives."

"I shall prob'ly get a good price for them olives!"

"They're rotten, Uncle."

"Nonsense! You said they were green!"

"Yes, but they're supposed to be black."

In the shadows, the tortoise's head turned back and forth like a spectator's at a tennis match.

The young man stood up.

"Mrs. Bylaxis came in this morning," he said. "She said the proverb you did for her last week has stopped working."

Didactylos scratched his head.

"Which one was that?" he said.

"You gave her `It's always darkest before dawn.' "

"Nothing wrong with that. Damn good philosophy."

"She said she didn't feel any better. Anyway, she said she'd stayed up all night because of her bad leg and it was actually quite light just before dawn, so it wasn't true. And her leg still dropped off. So I gave her part exchange on `Still, it does you good to laugh.' "

Didactylos brightened up a bit.

"Shifted that one, eh?"

"She said she'd give it a try. She gave me a whole dried squid for it. She said I looked like I needed feeding up."

"Right? You're learning. That's lunch sorted out at any rate. See, Urn? Told you it would work if we stuck at it."

"I don't call one dried squid and a box of greasy olives much of a return, master. Not for two weeks' thinking."

"We got three obols for doing that proverb for old Grillos the cobbler."

"No we didn't. He brought it back. His wife didn't like the color."

"And you gave him his money back?" Yes."

"What, all of it?"

"Yes."

"Can't do that. Not after he's put wear and tear on the words. Which one was it?"

" `It's a wise crow that knows which way the camel points.' "

"I put a lot of work in on that one."

"He said he couldn't understand it."

"I don't understand cobbling, but I know a good pair of sandals when I wears 'em."

Om blinked his one eye. Then he looked at the shapes of the minds in front of him.

The one called Urn was presumably the nephew, and had a fairly normal sort of mind, even if it did seem to have too many circles and angles in it. But Didactylos's mind bubbled and flashed like a potful of electric eels on full boil. Om had never seen anything like it. Brutha's thoughts took eons to slide into place, it was like watching mountains colliding; Didactylos's thoughts chased after one another with a whooshing noise. No wonder he was bald. Hair would have burned off from the inside.

Om had found a thinker.

A cheap one, too, by the sound of it.

He looked up at the wall behind the barrel. Further along was an impressive set of marble steps leading up to some bronze doors, and over the doors, made of metal letters set in the stone, was the word LIBRVM.