“That distance is nothing to me.” He peered at the map. “I can cross it in an eighth of a watch.”

“I don’t know your measurements of time. How many minutes would that be? A minute is one sixtieth of a sidereal day.”

“Twenty or so.”

“Twenty? No boasting, friend. We are not talking about a straight-line sprint. The corridors will be dark, and you’ll have to grope your way.”

“Not to me. I have an alternative form for deeper oceans. I can shed light and use dolphin echolocation. Pastor modified me to be able to talk to those empty Ghost memories who sing about their desire to die, and cannot die. Does your posthuman body grow posthuman lungs? You cannot survive where I pass.”

“I don’t mean to. Oenoe is the one you are taking along.”

Soorm gave a shiver of skepticism. “A dancing girl! The darkness, the cold of the water will panic her. I don’t think she is fit for this task.”

“Nymphs have the lung capacity for this.”

“Those are mammary glands, not lungs.”

“Very funny. Both the oxygen-carrying capacity in their blood, and the convolutions of their lung tissues in many bloodlines of Nymphs were modified, so that they could perform water ballets when seducing sailors. Oenoe is coming now. She is the one who will open the internal doors.”

3. Liberty and History

Soorm said, “I will abandon her to drown when she panics, and Darwin will be served.”

“She has nerves of steel.”

“How was that modification accomplished? The world supply of metallic ore was exhausted before her day.”

“I mean, Oenoe is a veteran military officer who has seen and survived action. You seem surprised.”

Soorm said, “I come from the last days, when the Nymphs were dying. The thousand years of endless summer had passed, for the albedo-altering organisms in the Arctic, Antarctic, and Tropics were corrupted and becoming extinct, and they had lost control of the Gulf Stream. The Winter Queens betrayed all the principles of their earlier generations, embraced the need for violence, and used alchemy to stir up battle frenzy in their berserkers during the Depravation Wars. But then in the summertime, it was the old time again, and all was sponged away from thought and remembrance. I thought this was a recent and desperate innovation. All my life I thought so. The endless summer of the summer years—surely they were times of peace? She cannot be a veteran!”

Menelaus said, “She is, and a cunning one. She told me her secret flower combination. Hyssop wards off evil spirits, Juniper means protection, and Lily keeps unwanted visitors away. That is the heraldic sign for their Protective Service. Secret police, Nocturnal Council, whatever you want to call it. The Protectors are the people who stuff troublemakers into hibernation, and kill any rebels they cannot subdue with drugs. People who take care of unwanted visitors. Her people maintained the social order.”

“That means she is an police maiden, not a warrior. Their world was drugged into perfect pacifism!”

Menelaus said, “There were no standing armies nor major land battles during the Nymph period in history, but they sure as hell had a militia, and riot police, and flying squads who kept the peace. There were pitched battles, blockades, sieges, sniper duels with wee little wasp creatures—I mean, come on, they were still human beings! There were even naval actions against privateers with marine cavalry riding the backs of sea-dragons, who turned out not to be just ornamental.”

“How could they keep it secret?”

“The soldiers would quaff the cup of victory after the successful fight. Hell! And anyone who escaped chemical control still obeyed unwritten social control. He’d be ashamed to speak his piece: why spoil the party? The technique you call Wintermind, which allows you to resist memory alterations, and stay lucid when drugged or addicted, that did not exist yet.”

Soorm’s goat eye blazed and his cuttlefish eye wobbled so violently in its socket that it looked ready to pop out. In the strangled voice he cried, “How do you expect me not to hate these creatures? With their balloon breasts and honeyed lips, they have no more heart than Venus flytrap plants!”

Menelaus looked surprised, perhaps a little amused, perhaps a little sad. “We’re talking about something that happened in your childhood—how old are you? Biologically speaking? You cannot be worried about something so long ago?”

“How long ago did you last see your wife, the Swan Princess, O Judge of Ages? Were there still Pyramids in Egypt in those days, or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Or had they not yet been built?”

Menelaus opened his mouth to object, but could think of nothing. (He noticed that Soorm, raised by Father Reyes, knew the names of biblical places. Eerie to think that those ancient spots were remembered long after New York the Beautiful and Newer Orleans had been swallowed by time and forgotten.) So he said: “Uh, good point. But calm down anyway.”

Soorm snarled, “Calm? Why? Does everyone get to run my life but me? I was eager, willing to eat meat, willing to kill men, willing to practice abstinence, willing to do any and every perverse thing I was raised and commanded not to do— Arg! I even became a teetotaler, something so horrible, Nymphs don’t even make jokes about it!—I did all these ghastly things merely for the chance to study the Mind of Winter hypnogogy. I became the slave of Pastor merely to escape their slaveries.”

Montrose said thoughtfully, “From where did Reyes y Pastor learn it, to teach it to you?”

Soorm said, “From Nymphs of the Winter days, when their weather control failed.”

Montrose cursed.

Soorm goggled one eye at him. “What is it?”

“Outsmarted again. Those Hermeticists you hate for creating your world? Turns out, I help them to create it. They winkled the secret out of my people, who I tried to free from Nymph control, back when the Nymph system refused to self-correct to account for changed climatic conditions.”

Soorm stared. “The Nymphs all believe you protect and adore them. You helped destroy their world?”

“I helped draw them back from racial suicide, yes. Pastor told you about the Cliometric calculus?”

“He did indeed. How he would cluck and rub his hands and grin when he would tell me how his little webs of math control all destiny and history. He was so proud of us, you see, his monsters. My race was created to serve him, and was destined for eternal sorrow, eternal struggle, eternal bloodshed, and eventual extinction that we might give rise to a greater race!” Soorm clenched his lizard-scaled webbed hands into two great fists and raised them toward the gray clouds above, a gesture of silent rage. “Will there never be an era when men can be free? When I can be free?”

Menelaus shrugged the shrug of a philosopher. “Everyone I know is controlled by someone. Witches obey their Crones, Chimera obey their Imperator-General, Hormagaunts obey their patrons, the Hermeticists obey Blackie.”

Soorm growled. “Do not mock me. Voluntary obedience is not the same as a slavery so complete and so degrading that one does not even know what the shepherds of history have determined to be your fate, or the fate of the herd around you that carries you along.”

“Well, then: The Domination in the Hyades cluster claims the Earth and all her works and all her ways to be an indentured servant forever and aye. And Hyades is owned by a Dominion in the Praesepe cluster. And they are owned by an Authority seated in the globular cluster M3 in Canes Venatici, which is outside the pestiferous Milky Way galaxy! If you want to escape from the Authority of M3, we have to get out of this prison camp first, which means dealing with the dogs and the wire. So, what are you going to do? We need help from the Nymphy secret policewoman. So you have to help her, even though you do not like her one bit. We are big, grown-up men in a big deep horseshit pit of trouble, and if we are not tall enough, the brown goo of defeat is going to close over our faces.”