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what?” Gojiro asked as he hoisted Komodo onto his supraocular ridge, where the thinlegged Japanese liked to ride. From up there he could see over the ragged timberline to the turbid sea.
    “Oh, I don’t know . . .” Komodo shrugged, his head piercing the dense haze. “Who I am. Where I came from. How I came to be here with you. What we will do next.”
    “Little things like that.”
    “Little things like that,” Komodo replied with his high-pitched giggle.
    The next morning, the heat woke Komodo up. It was like a blast furnace against his face.
    “My friend!” Komodo screamed. “There is a terrible fire! We must put it out!”
    “No danger, my friend,” Gojiro said quietly. He was standing close to Komodo, his back turned.
    “But it smells like . . . something from the past. It frightens me.”
    “Don’t be afraid, my friend,” Gojiro said. “It’s all done, now.”
    He did it with the growth rings from a crosscut section of a giant metalfibrous tree he pulled from the ground beyond Reterritorialization Bay. He was careful to make sure he had the perfect trio: one big, one middle-sized, one small. He heated them with his own breath. That was a surprise. He knew something had happened to his throat, but he didn’t suspect he’d retained the Heater’s fury inside his lungs, that with one bellow he could hurl a city into flames. He held the rings between his claws and roared until they turned white-hot, then he pressed them to his chest.
    “My friend!” Komodo shouted, drawing near.
    “It’s all right.” Gojiro turned to Komodo.
    “Your chest . . .”
    Gojiro’s gaze did not waver. “The answers you seek are the answers I seek. This world you live in is the world I live in. What we’ll do, we’ll do together.”
    “Yes,” Komodo said, “my own true friend.”
    * * *
    That was the Triple Ring Promise. Then.
    Those were the Glazed Days, the onset of it all, when they stood on the bonewhite sands of their beach, peered out to the seething Cloudcover and knew: Out there was another world, a kingdom that held itself apart from them. Who and what ruled out there made them exiles, fugitives in the countries of their birth. But here, in this dark and ashy tract, they found refuge. Here they were safe. Safe and together in a realm where a twelve-year-old boy and a five-hundred-foot-tall lizard could pledge themselves to each other and be friends.
    That’s what the Triple Ring Promise said, then.
    Could it all have been so simple once, so innocent, a perfect democracy of youth? Or was it just another chimeric “memory,” tricked up by nostalgia’s ruthless hand? How long did those Glazed Days last, Gojiro wondered, when he and Komodo ran free to spin the full 360 ’neath the stiffblown banner of the Triple Rings?
    Two years, three, five? When did it begin to dissolve? At what point did their Promise begin the creep toward that grotesque Amendment? Gojiro’s head ached. The condemning evidence was so exhaustive, the steely finger of accusation pointed so firmly in his direction. His sins were manifold, his record longer than a Nazi’s arm. But the litany of iniquity was pitched on a grander scale than any simple rap sheet. The fact was, Gojiro knew, that the Triple Ring Promise had been cosmologized from existence.
    Coffee, tea, or milk? Chaos or Cosmo? That was the old joke round the ’cano, back in the days of what came to be called the Budd Hazard sessions. Good ole Budd Hazard! Gojiro liked the ring of the name. It had a downhomey touch, the smell of fatback frying up ’longside the Mahayana. A private gag of a tag: a greenneck called like a redneck, trancing out like a yellowneck. And, during those dark times, before Radioactive Island even had a sun to separate night from day, Budd Hazard filled a need: He pumped up the Cosmo, forged Design.
    “Be Budd Hazard,” Komodo would say as they clung together in the ’cano’s deepest well, the sludge squalls raging