“Recall what?”

“You were reading the Monument, sight-reading it, without notes, at a glance, from before I was born. Once you had the rules for reading symbols out of logic patterns build into your nervous system, you could not help but see them. That was part of what drove you mad.”

“At a glance? But—I thought I was a failure!”

“You were. What you did to your brain was ill-considered, stupidly rash, idiotic.” He liked her smile, sure enough, but he was not sure how much he liked her needling him.

“But I could read the Monument!” he protested.

“It that a tribute to your genius, or theirs? It was built to be read.”

3. Flight of Ideas

Then they were both talking at once. It was one of those conversations where each sentence was only a fragment for the other person to finish, a team conversation, with him and her merely contributing ideas as the stream of thought seemed to rush along under its own effort. For the first time since he laid eyes on her, Menelaus forgot she was gorgeous, and when he talked over her or shouted her down or called some idea of hers stupid, he did not notice it, any more than he noticed her interrupting him, or lashing him with golden laughter for his slow-wittedness.

The conversation theorized that solving the Monument was not a decryption problem; it was an emulation problem. The Monument seemed to contain no symbols beyond the basics. After the opening sequence, it was all meta-symbolism, like a DNA string, meant to produce symbols through a series of logic gates, but the expression would be in terms of game-theory.

That was why a computer emulation of an analog thinking machine was needed. They needed to model the meta-symbols and see them in action to see what they meant: see what came out of the rules of the game written out on the Monument surface.

“Each symbol’s range of meanings could be expressed as a cup-length. Under the Leray-Hirsch Theorem, a cohomology monomorphism could be described to express the all polydimensional vector subspaces involved. The opening sequence of symbols could be manipulated, even if they were not understood, by the game rules described by the Theta Group of symbols.” So spoke the conversation. Menelaus did not realize that it was his side of the conversation speaking, himself, until she interrupted.

She could not shout him down, her voice was too delicate, but she put her gloved fingers on his lips to say something, and the perfumed touch of silken fingertips, fingers slender as a child’s, snapped him out of his trance.

Menelaus was brought up short.

“… cannot overlook the possibility that your own nervous system structure was affected by the same game-theory codes embedded in the Monument. What was the expression you used to program that antique mainframe back in your day? The one that did a pattern recognition on possible nerve reorganization paths?”

Menelaus heard himself answer, but he did not pay attention to his own words. Because he was looking at her face.

It was shining. The eyes, green like emeralds in this light, or hazel as amber when she turned her head, were flickering, jumping from point to point, as if the mind behind them could read an encyclopedia of information out of the visual data impinging on her optic nerve. Then the eyes would grow still, staring, motionless, as if fixed on a distant star, a point on the far horizon.

And she was blushing. Her cheeks were pink, her hairline was beaded with sweat, and she had that glow about her that pregnant women were said to have. The look of abundant life.

His own cheeks were burning, too. His heart was pounding. Menelaus felt as if he might faint any moment.

Menelaus stepped back from her, stopping in mid-syllable. She was too excited to notice, but kept talking about Schubert calculus, Grassmann manifolds, fibered subspaces, the E8 supersymmetries.

For a moment his mind reeled. He could not follow what she was saying. How had she jumped to that conclusion? He tried to picture the geometric rotations she rapidly uttered, but found he could not visualize them, not and keep up. He had been following along, sometime leaping ahead of her line of proofs not half a moment ago. But now he was back in his right mind, and the dizzying architecture of speculations, certainties, and guesses was too great to hold in his imagination. The next step … was it correct or not? What was that about astro-algorithmic logic-gate matrices? In what sense was it a specific application of a more general case of emulating a universal virtual machine in n-dimensional coordinates?

Then he noticed she had his ceramic knife in her hand. He did not member handing it to her. She was scratching diagrams and equations in neat rows of Greek and Latin letters, alephs and infinities, as well as the dots and triangles and Celtic knots of Monument hieroglyphs, all along the wallpaper. She was cutting figures into the wood underneath the wallpaper. This was not modern wallpaper, not smart fabric meant to be written on. This was some antique and horribly expensive stuff, probably hand-painted, probably by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo together, then touched up by Rembrandt, using solid gold paintbrushes.

And, of course, right next to her equations, in a larger, rougher handwriting, were his equations and notes. There was a deep scar where he had circled a particularly important multicovariable expression. And there were the slashes where he had put three exclamation points through the gold leaf into the wood paneling.

Next to him in the hallway was a crystal vase with flowers in it, carefully arranged. He plucked the bouquet out, hoisted the crystal jar, and dashed water into his own face.

The shock of the water helped somewhat. He no longer felt faint.

Princess Rania, who had been talking very loudly (for her), and very rapidly in an almost monotone singsong, now stopped. She turned.

All at once she was in his arms, on her tiptoes, and kissing him passionately.

It was like a bolt of lighting traveled up his spine. It was perfect.

And, then, just as suddenly, it was not perfect. She writhed out of his grasp, elusive as starlight, graceful as a sleek lioness, and danced back, her face blank.

He was looking right at her face when it happened: her expression returned to normal. It was like watching a ghost fade out of the body of some possessed person on those old faith healer shows everyone in his family save him used to watch so raptly. Like an actress turning off a character and surfacing. But not like an actress. There was nothing fake about it.

She was not panting, but Rania was breathing a little heavily. Long, slow breaths that made her bosom rise and fall.

“You’re the other one. Ah. Welcome back.”

This time, he understood how she slipped so effortlessly out of his hands: the point at which his two arms could trap her formed a folded set that could be expressed as a Hilbert space. Solving for the shortest vector distance, she leaned on his arm, and when he instinctively tightened it, she had put her center of balance elsewhere at the point of least resistance. It was as perfect as a ballet move. He wondered if the speed of her nerve impulses traveling to her muscles was momentarily increased, it was so smooth, and so rapid.

“Your are possessed, too, ain’t you? You are a Mrs. Hyde!”

Rania stared at him quizzically.

“Miss Hyde, I would prefer. I am a maiden yet.” She showed dimples when she smiled. “Unless you are proposing? I warn you, I am spoken for.”

Menelaus backed up, his arm raised as if to ward off a blow. “You are not in love with Del Azarchel!”

“I don’t recall saying I was.”

“You are in love with me.”

“Define your terms,” she said, favoring him with an arch look. She wiggled the knife at him playfully. He carefully took it from her gloved hand, and slipped it back up his sleeve.