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birthdate, or his mother's, then he exists at my sufferance only for so long as it should please me!”
    “Yeah, right. What are these other thrones for, then?”
    “They are meant for the other versions of me!”
    “Pretty empty now, aren't they?”
    A terrible silence hung in the air.
    I said slowly, “You're becoming more and more unlikely now, aren't you? There are fewer and fewer alternates because you've eliminated the other possibilities. You've mucked around in the past so much that you've edited yourself out of the cosmos, haven't you? And you couldn't stop meddling in history, even when you knew it was destroying you…”
    “You will meddle when you become a Time Warden also. It is our nature. Pick up the cards, brother Time Warden. I command it.”
    “And if I say no?”
    His stood up, his cloak of mist writhing and billowing around his glinting mirrored armor as he stood. The voices from the mask were blurrier now, shouting: “Then you will die!”
    I don't know who fired first, me or the cataphract. The Time Warden threw his mist-cloak up, so that my shots and lines of hissing energy went into the mist, became uncertain, and vanished before they even reached the Time Warden.
    Without thinking, I switched to a special program, something small enough and fast enough—a few molecules wide, accelerated to light speed—to make it through the uncertainty mist of the cloak without being affected.
    He must have known it was coming. The Time Warden shrugged his cloak open and spread his arms wide, trying to catch my bolt on his chest. He had been ready even before I shot, because he was right in the way, in the exact spot, even before I aimed.
    Of course he was manipulating the chronostructure, playing probabilities and possibilities like a musical instrument.
    It was not until after my shot was absorbed into the surface of his breastplate that I realized what a fool I had been. Time Warden armor was made of destiny crystal. He could focus it to open into whatever time-space he had energy to reach and redirect the projectile there.
    And I knew exactly where and when that bolt would come back into normal space, and who it would shoot.
    I had even jumped forward as I was firing, so that I was standing in the spot where, both later and earlier, I would find traces of the body.
    Looking over my shoulder, I wondered why the cataphract's million-cycle energy bolts hadn't landed yet.
    Of course. Ugly Boy was frozen. A hundred arms of flame and energy, bullets and bolts, were motionless, radiating from him toward me. He had made movement enough to startle my gun into firing, but now he was wrapped in the deep red Doppler-shift of a time stop.
    He faded into darker reds and disappeared in a swirl of mist.
    The Time Warden had only needed the cataphract to get me to fire, and, out of the whole arsenal of my smartgun, he had only needed that one special projectile—the one with my name on it. With the precision of a master surgeon, he had plucked that one super-bullet out of the hails and streams and storms of weapon-fire pouring out of my gun, and sent just that one merrily on its way to kill me. As predicted.
    And this whole heavy-handed approach, breaking into my room at night, pushing me, getting me riled, was all just to make sure I was mad enough to have my smartgun drawn and set on reflex. Very neat. Very nice. And I was the goat for having walked into it with my eyes wide open.
    The image of the corpse vanished with the cataphract. They were chessmen no longer needed, and swept off the board. But for some reason, the D'Artagnan body was still around. Perhaps it was remotely teleoperated from inside the Time Warden's armor?
    I turned to the Time Warden. “Open your faceplate. You're me, aren't you? That's the way these damn time travel things always work out. I've been trying to think of what could make me change my mind—in the space of a few minutes—to make me want to join up with you and your rotten