"You are taxing us into the driven future"

(524.22-526.15)  Today's reading begins with Tom's voice finishing his brief monologue.  He picks up on Coppinger's image of 12 fish in a "cunifarm school of herring" swimming along, "[b]utting, charging, bracing, backing, springing, shrinking, swaying, darting, shooting, bucking and sprinkling their dossies sodouscheock with the twinx of their taylz" (McHugh notes that these fishy actions correspond with the 12 zodiac signs, which I think is pretty cool) on their way to "a libidous pickpuckparty."  This, Tom says, is how Coppinger "visualises the hidebound homelies of creed crux ethics."  Hmm.

The old men begin to argue about this monologue.  One suggests that Shaun, channeling Tom, is an "absexed" heretic.  Another has trouble following this "otherwise accurate account" and asks what kind of fish was involved and wonders whether Shaun is "taxing us into the driven future."  One of them makes the connection between the fish and "Parasol Irelly" (HCE, aka Persse O'Reilly), the father of nations who spawns "ova and fry like a marrye monach all amanygoround his seven parish churches."  This prompts Shaun, now as Hosty, to compose a new verse about the fishy HCE/O'Reilly, which focuses on his lechery:

There's an old psalmsobbin lax salmoner fogeyboren Herrin Plundehowse.
Who went floundering with his boatloads of spermin spunk about.
Leaping freck after every tom and wet lissy between Howth and Humbermouth.
Our Human Conger Eel!

After the verse is sung, the old men see HCE and try to catch him in a fishnet.  He gets away, having "skid like a skate and berthed on her byrnie," but one of the old men says "never a fear," for eventually HCE will be caught, "slitheryscales on liffeybank," when he washes ashore from "the bubblye waters of, babblyebubblye waters of" (language recalling the memorable end of the Wake's first Book) the Liffey and sleeps on the sand.

But, one of the old men asks, could the two fishermen (one on each side of the bank) coexist without "their tertium quid" (third part)?  Shaun answers this question with another verse, indicating the manner in which he and his brother, Shem, form a unified, trinitarian whole via the aid of that third part (another form, or effect, of HCE):

Three in one, one and three.
Shem and Shaun and the shame that sunders em.
Wisdom's son, folly's brother.