"I'm sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it's too late now. You've torn down the gates; the barbarians are in." [Illustration][Illustration] XXIII The colored turbulence faded into the gray of hyperspace; five hundred hours to Tanith. Guatt Kirbey was securing his control-panel, happy to return to his music. And Vann Larch would go back to his paints and brushes, and Alvyn Karffard to the working model of whatever it was he had left unfinished when the _Nemesis_ had emerged at the end of the jump from Audhumla. Trask went to the index of the ship's library and punched for _History, Old Terran_. There was plenty of that, thanks to Otto Harkaman. Then he punched for _Hitler, Adolf_. Harkaman was right; anything that could happen in a human society had already happened, in one form or another, somewhere and at some time. Hitler could help him understand Zaspar Makann. By the time the ship came out, with the yellow sun of Tanith in the middle of the screen, he knew a great deal about Hitler, occasionally referred to as Schicklgruber, and he understood, with sorrow, how the lights of civilization on Marduk were going out. Beside the _Lamia_, stripped of her Dillinghams and crammed with heavy armament and detection instruments, the _Space Scourge_ and the _Queen Flavia_ were on off-planet watch. There were half a dozen other ships on orbit just above atmosphere; a Gilgamesher, one of the Gram-Tanith freighters, a couple of free-lance Space Vikings, and a new and unfamiliar ship. When he asked the moonbase who she was, he was told that she was the _Sun Goddess_, Amaterasu. That was, by almost a year, better than he had expected of them. Otto Harkaman was out in the _Corisande_, raiding and visiting the trade-planets. He found his cousin, Nikkolay Trask, at Rivington; when he inquired about Traskon, Nikkolay cursed. "I don't know anything about Traskon; I haven't anything to do with Traskon, any more. Traskon is now the personal property of our well loved--very well loved--Queen Evita. The Trasks don't own enough land on Gram now for a family cemetery. You see what you did?" he added bitterly. "You needn't rub it in, Nikkolay. If I'd stayed on Gram, I'd have helped put Angus on the throne, and it would have been about the same in the end." "It could be a lot different," Nikkolay said. "You could bring your ships and men back to Gram and put yourself on the throne." "No; I'll never go back to Gram. Tanith's my planet, now. But I will renounce my allegiance to Angus. I can trade on Morglay or Joyeuse or Flamberge just as easily."