“I delight in the name Oenoe Psthinshayura-Ah, and my displayed design is the Crocus twined with Clover and Forsythia, but my intimate design is Hyssop, Juniper, and Lily in an eternal knot. Do you know the flower language? It has remained unchanged since eldest recorded time.”

His eyes slid toward the Blue Men, and then glanced toward the dog things. “I know what oleander and orange blossoms stand for.”

She drifted back to her place on the far side of the lotus pool and cooed. “To understand and to be understood is its own delight, more intimate than other consolations.” She knelt on the grasses, but then went to her hands and knees, turning and turning again, like a kitten clawing a place to rest, and she collapsed slowly into a sinuous heap.

Oenoe plucked a grass blade, tickled her red lips with it, and then held it between her perfect teeth, twitching and chewing it thoughtfully. She lay on her stomach, thighs on the grass, feet upright and swaying slowly in the air, toes pointed toward the ceiling, which accentuated the curve of her calves. “The blue-pigmented dwarfs. What is wrong with them?”

“Aside from being Tomb-looters? They are eunuchs.”

She straightened up, eyes bright. “Then I am the captive in the harem of some brutal Sultan from Araby the Blessed, who means to use me ruthlessly for his pleasure?”

“Ah, no. They are neurochemically eunuched, except to particular mates. Ma’am, I am a historian, so I happen to know that there were no harems and no brutal Sultans anywhere on the planet for at least seventy centuries before your time. I also know the Nymphs don’t keep records or histories except for songs in your trees. How do you know about such things?”

She cocked her head to one side and smiled. “Sultanates may have passed away long since, but the wild romance-tales girls hear and swap have not changed.” Then she looked at him from beneath her absurdly long and dark lashes. “The blue eunuchs lead the dance here, not you? Even though you are a whole man?”

“I am their prisoner. I am translating for them.”

“Of your own will?”

“There are other things I’d rather be doing, ma’am.”

“Do they understand these words?”

“The young one speaks Natural, but not fluently. The boss, I don’t know. The dogs are intelligent creatures and carry vocal coder-decoder devices which could translate everything they hear, so it beats the hell out of me why I am even here.”

Oenoe seemed suddenly done with playfulness, for now she knelt again, buttocks on her heels and her curving spine upright, and she crossed her beautiful hands in her lap.

“What do they want of me? Do they wish their manhood restored? Ah! I would have to see their genetic codes, enzymatic and prostaglandin gestation history before I could say if a restoration is feasible. Of course I will donate my every effort. I am of the Order of Nature: our way is the way of love. Tell them not to despair.”

2. Mating, Matriarchy, Mantilla

Menelaus sighed and turned toward Illiance. In High Iatric he said, “She offers to make your rutting season year-round, and restore you to sexual promiscuity. She makes the offer out of the goodness of her heart. She’d have to see your medical records.”

Illiance blinked. “Tell her we are gladdened and ennobled by the offer, but do not see the advantage. We shall attempt to imitate and reciprocate her benevolence, which awes us.”

To Oenoe, Menelaus said in Natural, “They are damned impressed with the offer and will try to pay you back, but they say no.”

“Only one spoke. Is the other his child?”

“No, ma’am. The other one is his boss. Do you know that word?”

“A male Mother. I understand. An Alpha-of-Alphas.” She used the Chimerical word for Imperator-General. “Was he conscripted to serve as Matriarch, or did he put himself forward of his own will?”

“I don’t know whether he was picked. What difference does it make?”

“We regard the one from the other as distinct as birds from fish. To we who serve and who obey Nature, it is paramount to be led by servants, not to serve leaders.”

“Just assume the worst, ma’am, and you are less likely to be disappointed.”

“Such wisdom! Surprising that a race which could bring forth such sage and accomplished soldier-ants would be so easily sponged from the annals of time!” There was no word for fighting-men in her language, so she used her word for legionnaire ants, myrmidon.

“Now you are mocking me, ma’am.”

“Only because you are stiff and easy to tease, and too tongueless to reply. You said you are married. To whom? Your mother?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Introduction into the sexual arts is best done by a child’s mother, who can lead him gently through the exercises, with small chance of embarrassment.”

“No, ma’am. I didn’t marry my mother. I reckon I’d be plenty embarrassed if I had. A wife means more than a sexual partner: the bond is exclusive and lifelong.”

“I don’t know those words.”

“Exclusive means I cleave to her and forsake all others. Lifelong means it is unconditional and unbreakable; to cleave to each other in weal and woe, health and hardship, plenty and penury, at bed and at board till death us depart. Lifelong means no casting off just because she goes barren, or he comes back from the warfare blind or shy a leg or something.”

“By why would a partner want a maimed love-performer? Maimed folk look ugly!”

“It ain’t no damn partnership! Partners is folks you can give up on when they drop their side of the bargain. Marriage ain’t no damn bargain.” In another language, to himself, he muttered, “In more ways than one.”

Oenoe was unconvinced. “How can sex be exclusive? Its nature is all-giving!”

“If you give your all to one woman, there ain’t nothing left over to give to any other: stands to reason.”

“Fie on reason! As for it being lifelong, no man can hold an erection for that length.”

“You don’t know real men.”

“Your system sounds selfish and ungainly.”

“And yours, begging your pardon, ma’am, sounds like a grotesque overreaction against the tight sexual control of the Chimerae.”

“Ho hee! So you think your echoes live on in us? A flattering thought to you! Your race is long forgotten.”

“Forgotten or not, you set about doing everything the opposite of the race you were supplanting, but after they were gone, you kept on getting into a simpler and more easily transmitted version of your same practices and habits, until you ended up with a society where all friendships and family relations are sexualized. The first generation of Naturals merely wanted a revocation of the eugenics laws.”

“Not true!” Her enormous and shining eyes held a combination of wonder and mock-outrage. Then she smiled a sultry smile. “Surely we have always been as we are now. Our lack of history proves that there was nothing worthwhile to record.”

“My grandma told me once about a group called the Playboys. Their women dressed like bunny rabbits. They were obsessed with sex. They were an overreaction to a group called the Victorians, whose women dressed in black from neck to ankle. They were obsessed with modesty. In turn, they were an overreaction against a group called the Georgians, who were bawdier whoremongers than any period in history since the fall of Babylon. It’s a simple periodic cycle, like the swing of a pendulum, where the discontent of each era tries to solve itself by reversing the morals of the previous: but sometimes the pendulum gets stuck.”

Oenoe looked at him with her gleaming, mesmeric eyes, and for once her gaze was direct rather than flirtatious or playful. “You are a student of Cliometry? I had thought the study was lost when the Giants burned the world, the yesterdays before yesterday.”

Menelaus looked alert. “What do you know of it?”