Oenoe shrugged prettily, gazing at him sidelong through half-lowered lashes, any directness once more hidden. “If you were a woman, we could have an intelligent discussion of the matter. But men only like women who are free of care and thought.”
“Only bachelors think women are dumber than men. Besides, I don’t want to like you. I just want to ask you some questions.”
Oenoe shook her head and lifted her nose. “Again you mention marriage! You are obsessed.”
“I hope so.”
“Is she alive, this exclusive lifelong love-partner of yours?”
“I hope so.”
“Where is she, this exclusive lifelong partner?”
“I don’t think she is buried at this site. But I’ll find her. No matter how long. Even if I have to count to trillion first. No matter what. If I have to break the world in two, I’ll get her back.”
Oenoe hugged herself, her lovely eyes glittering. “She will share you with me! Then she and I will disport ourselves, and you may watch or join as you wish. There is no barrier to pleasure except the pleasure of breaking barriers. Will she find me irresistible, do you think?”
“Ma’am, she fell for me, and at that point I stopped trying to understand womenfolk—so who knows what she’d do? My wife is very kindly predisposed toward all human beings and some beings not so very human, and her heart is bigger than her mind, and that’s saying something, because she is sharp as a whip crack and twice as fast, and I can’t keep up with her.”
Illiance raised a finger. “I am having trouble following the conversation. What is being discussed now? You have exchanged many words. Why are you discussing your mate?”
Menelaus said in Iatric, “The lady wants to copulate with me, you, him, half the dog things in the room, and maybe the signal tower in the airfield, if she can climb that high. I am trying to be polite without nickering at her. We are talking about mating because that is all Nymphs talk about.”
“Does she suffer a glandular imbalance?”
“Well, for one of her race, she’s actually quite temperate and reserved. Nymphs exchange bodily fluids with chemical cues in them in order to maintain their chain of command. Or whatever they have for a chain of command. Their social order. They don’t use their sex organs for sex. They use them to say hello.”
Illiance said, “We are well aware of the peculiarities of the psychology of the Natural Order. Did you find out why she unclothed herself?”
Menelaus turned back to Oenoe. “He wants to know why you threw your prison uniform at the dog.”
“To strike the canine in the nose. The act is self-explanatory.”
“Sorry, ma’am, I mean, he wants to know why you took off the uniform to begin with.”
“Ah! I reject his suitor-gifts as unworthy, and my intent was to push a sharp thorn into his feelings. His glamour in the public eye must dwindle.”
“Why is that, ma’am?”
“I am highly beloved, praiseworthy among my kind, and have often been conscripted. This creates a corresponding set of pleasures and displeasures in those around me splendid as the wings of a butterfly, and the blue eunuchs fail to step their part in the dance!”
“Sorry, what? Is that a metaphor, or are you talking about a real dance?”
“It would diminish my pleasure to speak more plainly. The protest would be obvious to an open-songed heart!”
“No offense, ma’am, but I am a Chimera, and these blue snarks are plunderers, Tomb-robbers, and slavers, so if there is an open-songed heart anywhere in earshot, it must be among the dog things. You should explain, whether it delights or not, please. Because otherwise we won’t understand, and that would, um, not delight us in our delight-seeking pleasing pleasure-seeking pleasurable-ness. Get it?”
“Now is it you who mock me?” Her eyes flashed anger, but she smiled when she said it.
“Well, ma’am, maybe you got some stiffnesses of your own.”
She pouted. “I was entombed with my mantilla.”
“I don’t know that word.”
“It is the veil of brides of the world, held up by a comb, and it trails down the shoulders and back like a pelisse or short cloak. Those of greater glamour, theirs hang to the hips. Those of greatest glamour, theirs hang to midthigh. Mine came to my heels, and I had to wear cothurni, or to train dormice to carry the train.”
“A royal robe?”
“More! A companion! My mantilla was a living cloak, cellular-keyed to my biochemistry, and no one else can use it, and it bore the life-code of ten thousands. It was green and emerald and viridescent, a dance of leaf and woven fiber, and it assisted me in photosynthesis, and bloomed with scent and pheromone and it painted the world around me with all comeliness. The ruff alone contained blue roses of a breed hybridized only for me, found not elsewhere in the world. It was a robe of high estate, and it is a grievous insult to me, a wound, a stumblefooted dance-step, to give me mere dead fibers made of cotton, I who am a Conscript Lady, Mother, Matriarch, May-Queen, and Coryphaeus of my kind. They must return what was taken from my Tomb to me! They must!”
“Or else, what? You’ll flash your naked breasts at them? I don’t think that will scare them, huge as they are.”
“Or else they will have left the path of delight and giving delight. Did not the younger one establish that he willed to match my generous love with an act of love? To restore me mine is justice! And justice is but one type of love.”
Menelaus turned to Illiance. “Did you follow any of that? She wants her green cloak back. It’s made of leafy material. Some sort of symbiotic life.”
Illiance looked solemn. “The matter has several ramifications. To be frank, we cannot determine what molecular mechanisms the bioartifact contains, or what all of them can do. Some may be disturbing to our purposes, or be able to concoct deadly influences. The head-comb contains a neural interface we cannot decipher.”
Menelaus said, “If I were not so easygoing, I’d be offended. You have armed Chimerae in your camp. Between the three of us, we have a rock, and a bone club, and a stick. And I think the Gamma has a sling by now. Our womenfolk are pretty hard-core too. We could kill everyone in this camp if our honor demanded it. You also let a heavyweight Hormagaunt run around, and he has venom sacs and skunk glands and porcupine quills like a walking Swiss Army knife o’ Death, not to mention tusks and fangs and claws and a stinger on his tail. And you are afraid of some wiggly comfort girl from a pacifist era whose theory of military political economics consists of singing love songs, taking swims, eating fruit, and then snuggling each other’s sex organs till they squirt?”
Mentor Ull spoke with ponderous inflection. “Beta Anubis of the Chimera! Your opinion of our policy and judgment is of course of profound significance to yourself. Albeit, the significance to us, being proportionate to your very limited knowledge and your fixed and unimaginative principles of thought, enjoins us to ponder it with no more than the attention it merits.”
“Thanks, Ull. Likewise and so’s your mother, I’m sure. But you could have one of your dog things with his talky box sitting here instead of me—because it is not the words you really need translated, it’s the psychology behind them, right? Well, if so, hear my advice. This minx’s cloak of petals and perfumes was designed to interact with ecological structures that went extinct about three thousand years ago. The trained poop-burying pussycats her scent-calls can call have been dead for thirty centuries, and probably aren’t in sniff-range anyhow. If you want her to open up about anything she knows, whatever she knows, return what you took.”
Illiance said, “Much is unknown of this mantilla.”
Menelaus threw up his hands. “Oh, hell! You robbers are poking in the Tombs without the slightest idea of who the hell or what the hell you might wake up from hell knows how long ago. I thought we were scholars, you and me, and that means we keep poking at the Unknown until it goes off, and then we carefully measure the blast radius. Don’t you think it is a little late to grow a sense of caution now? Isn’t that—what do you guys call it when you do things for artificial reasons?—isn’t that a little unsimplistic of you?