when she got back to Echo Courts, she found Miles, Dean, Serge and Leonard arranged around and on the diving board at the end of the swimming pool with all their instruments, so composed and motionless that some photographer, hidden from Oedipa, might have been shooting them for an album illustration.

"What's happening?" said Oedipa.

"Your young man," replied Miles, "Metzger, really put it to Serge, our counter-tenor. The lad is crackers with grief."

"He's right, missus," said Serge. "I even wrote a song about it, whose arrangement features none other than me, and it goes like this."

serge's song

What chance has a lonely surfer boy

For the love of a surfer chick,

With all these Humbert Humbert cats

Coming on so big and sick?

For me, my baby was a. woman,

For him she's just another nymphet;

Why did they run around, why did she put me down,

And get me so upset?

Well, as long as she's gone away-yay,

I've had to find somebody new,

And the older generation

Has taught me what to do—

I had a date last night with an eight-year-old,

And she's a swinger just like me,

So you can find us any night up on the football field,

In back of P.S. 33 (oh, yeah),

And it's as groovy as it can be.

"You're   trying   to   tell   me   something,"   said Oedipa.

They gave it to her then in prose. Metzger and Serge's chick had run off to Nevada, to get married. Serge, on close questioning, admitted the bit about the eight-year-old was so far only imaginary, but that he was hanging diligently around playgrounds and should have some news for them any day. On top of the TV set in her room Metzger had left a note telling her not to worry about the estate, that he'd turned over his execu-torship to somebody at Warpe, Wistfull, Kubitschek and McMingus, and they should be in touch with her, and it was all squared with the probate court also. No word to recall that Oedipa and Metzger had ever been more than co-executors.

Which must mean, thought Oedipa, that that's all we were. She should have felt more classically scorned, but had other things on her mind. First thing after unpacking she was on the horn to Randolph Driblette, the director. After about ten rings an elderly lady answered. "I'm sorry, we've nothing to say."

"Well who's this," Oedipa said.

Sigh. "This is his mother. There'll be a statement at noon tomorrow. Our lawyer will read it." She hung up. Now what the hell, Oedipa wondered: what had happened to Driblette? She decided to call later. She found Professor Emory Bortz's number in the book and had better luck. A wife named Grace answered, backed by a group of children. "He's pouring a patio," she told Oedipa. "It's a highly organized joke that's been going on since about April. He sits in the sun, drinks beer with students, lobs beer bottles at seagulls. You'd better talk to him before it gets that far. Maxine, why don't you throw that at your brother, he's more mobile than I am. Did you know Emory's done a new edition of Wharfinger? It'll be out——" but the date was obliter-ated by a great crash, maniacal childish laughter, high-pitched squeals. "Oh, God. Have you ever met an in-fanticide? Come on over, it may be your only chance."

Oedipa showered, put on a sweater, skirt and sneakers, wrapped her hair in a studentlike twist, went easy on the makeup. Recognizing with a vague sense of dread that it was not a matter of Bortz's response, or Grace's, but of The Trystero's.

Driving over she passed by Zapf's Used Books, and was alarmed to find a pile of charred rubble where the bookstore only a week ago had Stood. There was still the smell of burnt leather. She stopped and went into the government surplus outlet next door. The owner in-formed her that Zapf, the damn fool, has set fire to his own store for the insurance. "Any kind of a wind," snarled this worthy, "it would have taken me with it. They only put up this complex here to last five years anyway. But could Zapf wait? Books." You had the feeling that it was only his good upbringing kept him from spitting. "You want to sell something used," he advised Oedipa, "find out what there's a demand for. This season now it's your rifles. Fella was in just this forenoon, bought two hundred for his drill team. I could've sold him two hundred of the swastika arm-bands too, only I was short, dammit."

"Government surplus  swastikas?"  Oedipa  said. "Hell no." He gave her an insider's wink. "Got this little factory down outside of San Diego," he told her, "got a dozen of your niggers, say, they can sure turn them old armbands out. You'd be amazed how that little number's selling. I took some space in a couple of the girlie magazines, and I had to hire two extra nig-gers last week just to take care of the mail." "What's your name?" Oedipa said. "Winthrop Tremaine," replied the spirited entre-preneur, "Winner, for short. Listen, now we're getting up an arrangement with one of the big ready-to-wear outfits in L.A. to see how SS uniforms go for the fall. We're working it in with the back-to-school campaign, lot of 37 longs, you know, teenage kid sizes. Next season we may go all the way and get out a modified version for the ladies. How would that strike you?"

"I'll let you know," Oedipa said. "I'll keep you in mind." She left, wondering if she should've called him something, or tried to hit him with any of a dozen surplus, heavy, blunt objects in easy reach. There had been no witnesses. Why hadn't she?

You're chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl. She drove savagely along the freeway, hunting for Volkswagens. By the time she'd pulled into Bortz's subdivision, a riparian settlement in the style of Fangoso Lagoons, she was only shaking and a little nauseous in the stomach.

She was greeted by a small fat girl with some blue substance smeared all over her face. "Hi," said Oedipa, "you must be Maxine."

"Maxine's in bed. She threw one of Daddy's beer bottles at Charles and it went through the window and Mama spanked her good. If she was mine I'd drown her."

"Never thought of doing it that way," said Grace Bortz, materializing from the dim living room. "Come on in." With a wet washcloth she started to clean off her child's face. "How did you manage to get away from yours today?"

"I don't have any," said Oedipa, following her into the kitchen.

Grace looked surprised. "There's a certain harassed style," she said, "you get to recognize. I thought only kids caused it. I guess not."

Emory Bortz lay half in a hammock, surrounded by three graduate students, two male, one female, all sodden with drink, and an astounding accumulation of empty beer bottles. Oedipa located a full one and seated herself on the grass. "I would like to find out," she presently plunged, "something about the historical Wharfinger. Not so much the verbal one."

"The historical Shakespeare," growled one of the grad students through a full beard, uncapping another bottle. "The historical Marx. The historical Jesus."

"He's   right,"   shrugged   Bortz,   "they're   dead. What's left?" "Words."

"Pick some words," said Bortz. "Them, we can talk about."

" 'No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow,'" quoted Oedipa, " 'Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero.' Courier's Tragedy, Act IV, Scene 8."

Bortz blinked at her. "And how," he said, "did you get into the Vatican library?"

Oedipa showed him the paperback with the line in it. Bortz, squinting at the page, groped for another beer. "My God," he announced, "I've been pirated, me and Wharfinger, we've been Bowdlerized in reverse or some-thing." He flipped to the front, to see who'd re-edited his edition of Wharfinger. "Ashamed to sign it. Damn. I'll have to write the publishers. K. da Chingado and Company? You ever heard of them? New York." He looked at the sun through a page or two. "Offset." Brought his nose close to the text. "Misprints. Gah. Corrupt." He dropped the book on the grass and looked at it with loathing. "How did they get into the Vatican,

then?"

"What's in the Vatican?" asked Oedipa.

"A pornographic Courier's Tragedy. I didn't get to see it till '61, or I would've given it a note in my old edition."

"What I saw out at the Tank Theatre wasn't pornographic?"

"Randy Driblette's production? No, I thought it was typically virtuous." He looked sadly past her to-ward a stretch of sky. "He was a peculiarly moral man. He felt hardly any responsibility toward the word, really; but to the invisible field surrounding the play, its spirit, he was always intensely faithful. If anyone could have called up for you that historical Wharfinger you want, it'd've been Randy. Nobody else I ever knew was so close to the author, to the microcosm of that play as it must have surrounded Wharfinger's liv-ing mind."

"But you're using the past tense," Oedipa said, her heart pounding, remembering the old lady on the phone.

"Hadn't you heard?" They all looked at her. Death glided by, shadowless, among the empties on the grass.

"Randy walked into the Pacific two nights ago," the girl told her finally. Her eyes had been red all along. "In his Gennaro suit. He's dead, and this is a wake."

"I tried to call him this morning," was all Oedipa could think of to say.

"It was right after they struck the set of The Courier's Tragedy," Bortz said.

Even a month ago, Oedipa's next question would have been, "Why?" But now she kept a silence, waiting, as if to be illuminated.

They are stripping from me, she said subvocally— feeling like a fluttering curtain in a very high window, moving up to then out over the abyss—they are strip-ping away, one by one, my men. My shrink, pursued by Israelis, has gone mad; my husband, on LSD, gropes like a child further and further into the rooms and endless rooms of the elaborate candy house of himself and away, hopelessly away, from what has passed, I was hoping forever, for love; my one extra-marital fella has eloped with a depraved 15-year-old; my best guide back to the Trystero has taken a Brody. Where am I? "I'm sorry," Bortz had also said, watching her. Oedipa stayed with it. "Did he use only that," pointing to the paperback, "for his script?"

"No." Frowning. "He used the hardcover, my edition."

"But the night you saw the play." Too much sunlight shone on the bottles, silent all around them. "How did he end the fourth act? What were his lines, Driblette's, Gennaro's, when they're all standing around at the lake, after the miracle?"

" 'He that we last as Thurn and Taxis knew,'" recited Bortz, " 'Now recks no lord but the stiletto's Thorn,/And Tacit lies the gold once-knotted horn.' " "Right," agreed the grad students, "yeah." "That's all? What about the rest? The other cou-plet?"

"In the text I go along with personally," said Bortz, "that other couplet has the last line suppressed. The book in the Vatican is only an obscene parody. The ending 'Who once has crossed the lusts of Angelo' was put in by the printer of the 1687 Quarto. The 'White-chapel' version is corrupt. So Randy did the best thing —left the doubtful part out altogether."

"But the night I was there," said Oedipa, "Driblette did use the Vatican lines, he said the word Trystero."

Bortz's face stayed neutral. "It was up to him. He was both director and actor, right?"

"But would it be just," she gestured in circles with her hands, "just some whim? To use another couple lines like that, without telling anybody?"

"Randy," recalled the third grad student, a stocky kid with hornrims, "what was bugging him inside, usu-ally, somehow or other, would have to come outside, on stage. He might have looked at a lot of versions, to develop a feel for the spirit of the play, not necessarily the words, and that's how he came across your paper-back there, with the variation in it."

"Then," Oedipa concluded, "something must have happened in his personal life, something must have changed for him drastically that night, and that's what made him put the lines in."

"Maybe," said Bortz, "maybe not. You think a man's mind is a pool table?"

"I hope not."

"Come in and see some dirty pictures," Bortz invited, rolling off the hammock. They left the students drinking beer. "Illicit microfilms of the illustrations in that Vatican edition. Smuggled out in '61. Grace and I were there on a grant."

They entered a combination workroom and study. Far away in the house children screamed, a vacuum whined. Bortz drew shades, riffled through a box of slides, selected a handful, switched on a projector and aimed it at a wall.

The illustrations were woodcuts, executed with that crude haste to see the finished product that marks the amateur. True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals.

"The artist is anonymous," Bortz said, "so is the poetaster who rewrote the play. Here Pasquale, remem-ber, one of the bad guys? actually does marry his mother, and there's a whole scene on their wedding night." He changed slides. "You get the general idea, notice how often the figure of Death hovers in the background. The moral rage, it's a throwback, it's mediaeval. No Puritan ever got that violent. Except possibly the Scurvhamites. D'Amico thinks this edition was a Scurvhamite project." "Scurvhamite?"

Robert Scurvham had founded, during the reign of Charles I, a sect of most pure Puritans. Their central hangup had to do with predestination. There were two kinds. Nothing for a Scurvhamite ever happened by accident, Creation was a vast, intricate machine. But one part of it, the Scurvhamite part, ran off the will of God, its prime mover. The rest ran off some opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute automa-tism that led to eternal death. The idea was to woo converts into the Godly and purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite. But somehow those few saved Scurv-hamites found themselves looking out into the gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and fasci-nated horror, and this was to prove fatal. One by one the glamorous prospect of annihilation coaxed them over, until there was no one left in the sect, not even Robert Scurvham, who, like a ship's master, had been last to go.

"What did Richard Wharfinger have to do with them?" asked Oedipa. "Why should they do a dirty version of his play?"

"As a moral example. They were not fond of the theatre. It was their way of putting the play entirely away from them, into hell. What better way to damn it eternally than to change the actual words. Remem-ber that Puritans were utterly devoted, like literary critics, to the Word."

"But the line about Trystero isn't dirty."

He scratched his head. "It fits, surely? The 'hal-lowed skein of stars' is God's will. But even that can't ward, or guard, somebody who has an appoint-ment with Trystero. I mean, say you only talked about crossing the lusts of Angelo, hell, there'd be any number of ways to get out of that. Leave the country. Angelo's only a man. But the brute Other, that kept the non-Scurvhamite universe running like clockwork, that was something else again. Evidently they felt Trystero would symbolize the Other quite well."

She had nothing more then to put it off with. Again with the light, vertiginous sense of fluttering out over an abyss, she asked what she'd come there to ask. "What was Trystero?"

"One of several brand new areas," said Bortz, "that opened up after I did that edition in '57. We've since come across some interesting old source material. My updated edition ought to be out, they tell me, next year sometime. Meanwhile." He went looking in a glass case full of ancient books. "Here," producing one with a dark brown, peeling calf cover. "I keep my Wharfinger-iana locked in here so the kids can't get at it. Charles could ask no end of questions I'm too young to cope with yet." The book was titled An Account of the

Singular Peregrinations of Dr Diocletian Blobb among the Italians, Illuminated with Exemplary Tales from the True History of That Outlandish And Fantastical Race.

"Lucky for me," said Bortz, "Wharfinger, like Milton, kept a commonplace book, where he jotted down quotes and things from his reading. That's how we know about Blobb's Peregrinations."

It was full of words ending in e's, s's that looked like f's, capitalized nouns, y's where i's should've been. "I can't read this," Oedipa said.

"Try," said Bortz. "I have to see those kids off. I think it's around Chapter Seven." And disappeared, to leave Oedipa before the tabernacle. As it turned out it was Chapter Eight she wanted, a report of the author's own encounter with the Trystero brigands. Diocletian Blobb had chosen to traverse a stretch of desolate mountain country in a mail coach belonging to the "Torre and Tassis" system, which Oedipa figured must be Italian for Thurn and Taxis. Without warning, by the shores of what Blobb called "the Lake of Piety," they were set upon by a score of black-cloaked riders, who engaged them in a fierce, silent struggle in the icy wind blowing in from the lake. The marauders used cudgels, harquebuses, swords, stilettos, at the end silk kerchiefs to dispatch those still breathing. All ex-cept for Dr Blobb and his servant, who had dissociated themselves from the hassle at the very outset, pro-claimed in loud voices that they were British subjects, and even from time to time "ventured to sing certain of the more improving of our Church hymns." Their escape surprised Oedipa, in view of what seemed to be Trystero's passion for security.

"Was Trystero trying to set up shop in England?" Bortz suggested, days later.

Oedipa didn't know. "But why spare an insuffer-able ass like Diocletian Blobb?"

"You can spot a mouth like that a mile off," Bortz said. "Even in the cold, even with your blood-lust up. If I wanted word to get to England, to sort of pave the way, I should think he'd be perfect. Trystero enjoyed counter-revolution in those days. Look at England, the king about to lose his head. A set-up."

The leader of the brigands, after collecting the mail sacks, had pulled Blobb from the coach and ad-dressed him in perfect English: "Messer, you have wit-nessed the wrath of Trystero. Know that we are not without mercy. Tell your king and Parliament what we have done. Tell them that we prevail. That neither tempest nor strife, nor fierce beasts, nor the loneliness of the desert, nor yet the illegitimate usurpers of our rightful estate, can deter our couriers." And leaving them and their purses intact, the highwaymen, in a cracking of cloaks like black sails, vanished back into their twilit mountains.

Blobb inquired around about the Trystero organi-zation, running into zipped mouths nearly every way he turned. But he was able to collect a few fragments. So, in the days following, was Oedipa. From obscure philatelic journals furnished her by Genghis Cohen, an ambiguous footnote in Motley's Rise of the Dutch Re-public, an 8o-year-old pamphlet on the roots of mod-ern anarchism, a book of sermons by Blobb's brother Augustine also among Bortz's Wharfingeriana, along with Blobb's original clues, Oedipa was able to fit to-gether this account of how the organization began:

In 1577, the northern provinces of the Low Coun-tries, led by the Protestant noble William of Orange, had been struggling nine years for independence from Catholic Spain and a Catholic Holy Roman Emperor. In late December, Orange, de facto master of the Low Countries, entered Brussels in triumph, having been invited there by a Committee of Eighteen. This was a junta of Calvinist fanatics who felt that the Estates-General, controlled by the privileged classes, no longer represented the skilled workers, had lost touch entirely with the people. The Committee set up a kind of Brussels Commune. They controlled the police, dic-tated all decisions of the Estates-General, and threw out many holders of high position in Brussels. Among these was Leonard I, Baron of Taxis, Gentleman of the Emperor's Privy Chamber and Baron of Buysinghen, the hereditary Grand Master of the Post for the Low Countries, and executor of the Thurn and Taxis mo-nopoly. He was replaced by one Jan Hinckart, Lord of Ohain, a loyal adherent of Orange. At this point the founding figure enters the scene: Hernando Joaquin de Tristero y Calavera, perhaps a madman, perhaps an honest rebel, according to some only a con artist. Tris-tero claimed to be Jan Hinckart's cousin, from the Spanish and legitimate branch of the family, and true lord of Ohain—rightful heir to everything Jan Hinckart then possessed, including his recent appoint-ment as Grand Master.

From 1578 until Alexander Farnese took Brussels back again for the Emperor in March, 1585, Tristero kept up what amounted to a guerrilla war against his cousin—if Hinckart was his cousin. Being Spanish, he got little support. Most of the time, from one quarter or another, his life was in danger. Still, he tried four times to assassinate Orange's postmaster, though without suc-cess.

Jan Hinckart was dispossessed by Farnese, and Leonard I, the Thurn and Taxis Grand Master, rein-stated. But it had been a time of great instability for the Thurn and Taxis monopoly. Leery of strong Protestant leanings in the Bohemian branch of the family, the Emperor, Rudolph II, had for a time withdrawn his patronage. The postal operation plunged deeply into the red.

It may have been some vision of the continent-wide power structure Hinckart could have taken over, now momentarily weakened and tottering, that in-spired Tristero to set up his own system. He seems to have been highly unstable, apt at any time to appear at a public function and begin a speech. His constant theme, disinheritance. The postal monopoly belonged to Ohain by right of conquest, and Ohain belonged to Tristero by right of blood. He styled himself El Deshe-redado, The Disinherited, and fashioned a livery of black for his followers, black to symbolize the only thing that truly belonged to them in their exile: the night. Soon he had added to his iconography the muted post horn and a dead badger with its four feet in the air (some said that the name Taxis came from the Italian tasso, badger, referring to hats of badger fur the early Bergamascan couriers wore). He began a sub rosa campaign of obstruction, terror and depreda-tion along the Thurn and Taxis mail routes.

Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Ran-dolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some pros-thetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to what-ever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay—any stub-born quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst,  some  last  scramble  up  through  earth,  just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes—that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had any-thing to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger—maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined—sex, money, illness, despair with the his-tory of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps—she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart—perhaps, spring-ing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette!

But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

Beyond its origins, the libraries told her nothing more about Tristero. For all they knew, it had never survived the struggle for Dutch independence. To find the rest, she had to approach from the Thum and Taxis side. This had its perils. For Emory Bortz it seemed to turn into a species of cute game. He held, for instance, to a mirror-image theory, by which any period of insta-bility for Thum and Taxis must have its reflection in Tristero's shadow-state. He applied this to the mystery of why the dread name should have appeared in print only around the middle of the 17th century. How had the author of the pun on "this Trystero dies irae" overcome his reluctance? How had half the Vatican couplet, with its suppression of the "Trystero" line, found its way into the Folio? Whence had the daring of even hinting at a Thurn and Taxis rival come? Bortz maintained there must have been some crisis inside Tristero grave enough to keep them from retaliating. Perhaps the same that kept them from taking the life of Dr. Blobb.

But should Bortz have exfoliated the mere words so lushly, into such unnatural roses, under which, in whose red, scented dusk, dark history slithered unseen? When Leonard II-Francis, Count of Thum and Taxis, died in 1628, his wife Alexandrine of Rye succeeded him in name as postmaster, though her tenure was never con-sidered official. She retired in 1645. The actual locus of power in the monopoly remained uncertain until 1650, when the next male heir, Lamoral II-Claude-Francis, took over. Meanwhile, in Brussels and Ant-werp signs of decay in the system had appeared. Private local posts had encroached so far on the Imperial licenses that the two cities shut down their Thurn and

Taxis offices.

How, Bortz asked, would Tristero have responded? Postulating then some militant faction proclaiming the great moment finally at hand. Advocating a takeover by force, while their enemy was vulnerable. But con-servative opinion would care only to continue in op-position, exactly as the Tristero had these seventy years. There might also be, say, a few visionaries: men

above the immediacy of their time who could think historically. At least one among them hip enough to foresee the end of the Thirty Years' War, the Peace of Westphalia, the breakup of the Empire, the coming descent into particularism.

"He looks like Kirk Douglas," cried Bortz, "he's wearing this sword, his name is something gutsy like Konrad. They're meeting in the back room of a tavern, all these broads in peasant blouses carrying steins around, everybody juiced and yelling, suddenly Kon-rad jumps up on a table. The crowd hushes, 'The salvation of Europe,' Konrad says, 'depends on com-munication, right? We face this anarchy of jealous German princes, hundreds of them scheming, counter-scheming, infighting, dissipating all of the Empire's strength in their useless bickering. But whoever could control the lines of communication, among all these princes, would control them. That network some-day could unify the Continent. So I propose that we merge with our old enemy Thurn and Taxis——' Cries of no, never, throw the traitor out, till this barmaid, little starlet, sweet on Konrad, cold-conks with a stein his loudest antagonist. 'Together,' Konrad is saying, 'our two systems could be invincible. We could refuse service on any but an Imperial basis. Nobody could move troops, farm produce, anything, without us. Any prince tries to start his own courier system, we suppress it. We, who have so long been disinherited, could be the heirs of Europe!' Prolonged cheering."

"But they didn't keep the Empire from falling apart," Oedipa pointed out.

"So," Bortz backing off, "the militants and the conservatives fight to a standstill, Konrad and his little group of visionaries, being nice guys, try to mediate   , the hassle, by the time they all get squared away again, everybody's played out, the Empire's had it, Thurn and Taxis wants no deals."

And with the end of the Holy Roman Empire, the fountainhead of Thurn and Taxis legitimacy is lost   forever  among   the   other   splendid   delusions. Possibilities for paranoia become abundant. If Tristero has managed to maintain even partial secrecy, if Thurn and Taxis have no clear idea wh............