“Is it true she plucked the Diamond Star out of the heavens? That she flies to a star beyond the galaxy to plead with the star-monstrosities for the emancipation of mankind? Are all the children’s stories true?”

Montrose looked at Soorm oddly. “You worked for Reyes y Pastor, that snake-oil-selling preacherman. You know all this stuff is real. Besides, M3 is a globular cluster, not a star.”

Soorm shook his shaggy head. “It still takes some getting used to. Meeting you, it is easy to believe you are a death-god from the underworld, bent on vengeance. But to think you are married to a woman born beneath a distant sun! A princess who brought the only era of world peace the world has ever known!”

Montrose nodded glumly. “I take it back. She is too good to be true. I don’t know why she married me, but I’ve done sworn I ain’t gunna disappoint her. Die, maybe. Disappoint her, never.”

They reached their destination and stood on the height of the cliff, overlooking the cold stream that rushed out from a narrow doorway leading into the mountain.

As it had been yesterday, in the distance, two upright coffins stood like sentries to either side of the flooded door from which roaring waters poured. In the stream almost directly beneath Soorm and Montrose the several broken machines of the Blue Men lay. The white and rippling water played around their dented hulks and crooked legs, and rust and trails of icicles accumulated.

What had not been here yesterday was a set of parallel deep scars or gouges in the cliff face under their feet, in a line leading down to where the broken machines were heaped. Each scar was about nine inches long, and an inch or two deep into the rock.

“Can you climb down this cliff? Your feet are adapted for swimming, not climbing,” said Menelaus.

Soorm said, “I could not pass this point before. Where the machines fell is as far as I could go. In addition to those two by the door, there are some active coffins lying on the floor of the streambed. I saw their lights shining, and they put little red dots on me.”

“Aiming laser dots?”

“It was not a technology I knew. I retreated.”

“Smart man. Did you come from above, from where we are now?”

Soorm shook his head, an oddly human gesture for his dark and furry otter-shaped skull. “From downstream.”

“There are clusters of sensors buried in the cliff wall downstream, and they paint incoming objects as targets for the coffins and door circuits. Scaling down the cliffside avoids the clusters, so we should only have to deal with short-range reactions. Can you make it down these handholds?”

Soorm went to all fours, dipped just his head over the edge of the cliff, and sniffed cautiously. “I can scale the wall. You cut this ladder. It has your scent. When?”

“Last night, when everyone was asleep.”

“How? The stone is melted. This was done by an energy weapon.”

Menelaus pointed at the door. “You cannot see it from here, but there is a hundred-kilowatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser in the lintel.”

“How did you get it to cut the handholds?”

“My skill as a toreador. I dangled my cloak over my elbow to get it to shoot. It is programmed to find the center of body mass, and I had to throw off its estimate so the beam would land between my arm and my torso and hit the rock. It was not fun.”

Soorm’s face did not allow him to show much expression, but disbelief seemed to crackle through his fur. “Impossible.”

“The lethal kilolaser is cut off from its mainframe, so it is actually easy to fool, if you know the limitations. Which I do, since I built the dumb thing. And I could do the math in my head to calculate the beam path.”

Soorm grunted. “For such a poor superman, you seem to be able to do unusual feats. What else did you build?”

“Most of this is my work, though it mutates when I slumber. The lethals won’t see you. You need to worry about the nonlethals. There are three. First, hidden behind the panels to either side of the door are millimeter-wave radiation emitters. Make you feel like your skin is on fire. But stay submerged. Water droplets will disperse the beam. Second, there are acoustic weapons mounted farther down, beyond the mouth of the door, but their projection horns are underwater, so they probably won’t go off. If they do, the whole camp will hear us and scamper back up here.”

“And third?”

“A shock barrier. Shoots sixty electrified lancets at the same time. I stood in the water last night freezing my ass off for about an hour, until it ran out of ammo. I was holding my cloak on a stick in front of me and the lancets could not penetrate. Dumb machine. It fired until it ran out of ammo. It takes it three whole goddam days to grow another batch, and that is if and only if the feed lines connecting it to the liquid biometal are not cut, which I am not sure of. Why did I even bother putting in such a stupid system? I reckon I got a little overly enthused at the drawing board. Once you get in the door, the whole corridor is flooded.”

“And then the coffins will swarm over me and kill me.”

“In theory, all my clients have a right to go back in, so the automatics should let any of you pass,” said Menelaus.

“In theory, the Judge of Ages is not a complete nincompoop who locked himself out of his own stronghold. I still don’t understand how you can be this godlike being, capable of unimaginable depth and breadth of thought, and yet you are here clinging to a snowy cliff like a rat, trying to nibble your way into a grain box.”

“I’ll point out I am smart enough to talk you into a plan where I get to stay here where it is safe, while the nonlethals scald your private parts with searing pain.”

“The brilliance of your posthuman thinking grows ever less clear as time passes.”

Menelaus pointed. “I also did some tests last night and took some measurements. The doors broke open sixty years ago from the water pressure behind. Half my Tomb site there is a damn lake,” Menelaus said, shaking his head, “and there is an incoming underground artesian flood on the north side that keeps pouring in the same rate this pours out. The radio shack is on the fourth level right at the annex. You’ll be traveling against the current. The bad part is this: You see how the water swirls as it rushes out the door? Remember the specific recurring pattern of vortices and their periods. And then look at this.”

He tapped the back surface of the groundcloth he wore as part of his robe. A blueprint diagram formed as if below the surface, adjusted to the peculiarities of Soorm’s mismatched eyes to create a three-dimensional illusion in his brain.

Soorm put his webbed fingers before his muzzle. “Stop doing things like that!”

“Things like what?”

“Weird posthuman things!”

“Sorry, but take a garner at the map. The smartmetal fabric has a way to create visible light from the thumbnail overlap of each microscopic cell, and all I did was formulate a program to use laser interference to create holographic images in eyes like yours, since you can see polarization. I thought a three-D model would be useful. Anyway, compare the map to the door down there. You can tell from the vortex formation periods of the current that three of the internal doors along this corridor as locked down and shut. That was the bad part I mentioned.”

“What? How can I tell?”

“Because the water leaving the mouth of the door would have a different resonance pattern if those doors were open. You never played a flute or blew across the top of a pop bottle?”

“Yes, I played the double-flute quite expertly, and no, I cannot deduce the shape and depth of flooded corridors by glancing at the swirlies the water makes when it gushes out.”

“So take it on faith that my map here is accurate and to scale. There is where you go inside; here is the radio shack. How long would it take you to swim that distance? And can you take someone with you?”