Soorm lifted his muzzle and stared off down the slope. In the distance was a slight figure in green, moving with a skater’s grace across the snow, and flower petals fell from her cloak as she walked. It was too far for Menelaus to smell the perfumes that surrounded her like a nimbus of silent music, but the nostrils of Soorm dilated.

4. Memory Trees

It was impossible to read any expression under his fur-coated face, his discordant eyes. “Why her?”

“For one thing,” said Menelaus, “she can open the doors. For another, she can survive the trip underwater, and I can’t. For third, she is clever. While she was playing all girly-girl and silly, just like what the Blue Men might have expected from a history book, she and I were communicating in her flower language. She caught on immediately. I would show her a flower-sign combination, and she would agree or disagree by dropping them to her left or right. We did it right in front of them, and they were too stupid to notice it. Fourth thing, she also understands the neural mechanisms in the dogs, and I think she has one of them under partial or total control. She has a neurobiotic direct interface, and she is dripping with capsules and strands of primed and weaponized biomachinery, and the Blue Men handed it to her right in front of me, because they didn’t know what it could do. She also is the only one who can talk to the door brains.”

“Talk how?”

“Back when you were a Nymph, you remember how the trees used to sing to you? How you did not need books or letters, because the trees remembered everything for you? Look around you. Recognize any of these species?”

Soorm did look up, and now his expression was easy to read, because his whole body shivered and crouched, and his fur and quills stood up, making him seem twice his breadth, and the claws of his fingers appeared and disappeared, like the claws of a nervous cat, and the bulb of poison on his lashing tail trembled and swelled and turned purple.

“There is a working neural system here?” Soorm said.

“I released some seeds out of the broken Tomb doors long ago, making it look like an accident, blending it with other random events, so that Blackie’s Machine would not see the pattern in events. His machine can intuit patterns, unlike mine, but I am still tricky enough to fool him, and it. This grove is all Nymph technology, and the trees all downhill and downstream, and yonder throughout the camp. Well? What’s your decision? You in? Are you with us?”

“Gah! I am in. But I am not copulating with her!”

“You don’t have to. She’s married.”

“Nymphs don’t get married. They don’t even have a word for it. I know. I used to be—”

“This lovely woman turns out—big surprise to me—turns out to be the wife of my best friend, the Grandmaster of the Ancient and Honorable Sovereign Military Hospitalier Order of Saint John, Sir Guiden von Hompesch zu Bolheim. He and all his men left perfectly happy lives in the Antecpyrotic world to come into exile in the abyss of time just out of a sense of duty. It is a hopeless exile, because our homelands are long dead and long forgotten, and there is no going home. She is Mrs. Von Hompesch, which has got to be one of the most crook-jawed ungainliest-sounding Krauthead names I ever heard ever. Sits on the ear like a bee sting, don’t it? Wish I had been at the wedding. Would have been his best man. The things you miss when you don’t program your thaw conditions right!”

“A married Nymph?” Soorm was still marveling.

“Is it so different from your Wintermind asceticism? Marriage is a mechanism for breaking a type of addiction. The Knights obey a law that forbids fornication. Oenoe knows enough about her own neurochemistry to make herself at least as monogamous as a Blue Man.”

“Ah. This is the same practice as the Red Hermeticist, is it not?”

“I think my Hospitaliers actually mean it. Pasty is big fraud.”

“‘Pasty’?”

“Pastor. The Learned Father Reyes y Pastor. Your Red Hermeticist.”

“Then their rites are known to me. Your Knight carried her over the threshold by force, and the Fathers poured magic water over her, and they rang bells to drive off evil spirits. I think there is ritual cannibalism involved. Disgusting!”

“It is not real cannibalism.”

“I should say not. Cannibalism should be honest and spontaneous! The prey must be fleeing in panic! Otherwise the neural chemicals and saliva juices are not in the proper receptive state.”

“The preachers bring out bread and wine, and call it the body and blood. Or, actually, they bring out this itsy wafer, and call it bread, and the one time I went to get hitched to Rania, I didn’t get no wine at all, and I was powerful a-thirst. Something about getting matrimonied up dries out a man’s mouth.”

“And having one rut-mate for life? That is just wrong too. Wrong and odd.” He blinked his goat eye and then squeezed his cuttlefish eye shut and open to blink it. Then Soorm shook his shaggy head so roughly that his quills clattered. “One mate for life? I don’t know who is creepier, the Nymph or the Knight. How exactly will she break open the internal doors?”

“Oenoe grew a set of interface jacks last night. She is going to plant little tree clippings in the input ports and wait for them to grow. They will draw nutriment out of this water, and when they are big enough, send out signals to the neural net in the trees. Then my passwords will work.”

“It will take days for the biotics to grow and mate with the door circuits. So we are not retreating into the Tombs today.”

“Not today. If we’re lucky, the Blue Men will not kill everyone just yet, and give us time to get set up. But I hope to get the radio working today.”

Oenoe the Nymph glided up to where they stood, and she had to tilt back her head to look at the tall man and the taller monstrosity, but her smile was as warm as sunshine and as radiant as a lightning bolt.

Beneath her long green mantilla, she was naked. The green cloak was radiating heat like a stove. Through the half-transparent mesh of green, the shadowed curves of her voluptuous body could be glimpsed. She wore no more than a twist of flowering vines around her hips, and oddly tall shoes.

Menelaus cleared his throat and turned to look at the river. Soorm scowled and stared.

Oenoe said in Natural, “My adored ones, delights of my heart, Anubis the Chimera said the overalls might be impregnated with signal or scent, and must be left behind.”

Menelaus sighed. “I knew you wouldn’t mind. Everyone in the future is a nudist.”

5. Glamour

And now she smiled up at Soorm, whose head was hunkered and scorpion tail was lashing in a menacing pose, but Oenoe seemed not to notice but stepped forward and ran her soft hand up and down the silky black fur of his chest, and her superbly dark pupils dilated.

“My beautifully furred and aquatic Soorm! You were of the Saffron sign, were you not? And Oakwhite, Oleander, Rocket, Mandrake! From these you took your Phastorling name, for they represent the calm wariness of excess, your independence of spirit, alertness to danger, as well as your courage and honor, which, even as a gay and gentle Nymph, your years implanted in your soul.”

Montrose knew the Nymph names reflected their internal biochemistry, but his admiration for Oenoe’s mantilla—or whatever system she was using to pick up information about Soorm’s fine internal structure with no more than a brush of her fingers—just went up a notch. She was good.

Soorm must have thought so also, for he stood as if stupefied, letting his scorpion tail droop, while she continued. Her words were ripples of light dancing over a brook.

“Heed me, I pray, beloved and adored, for such calm boldness is needed now. I must descend into the cold and watery depths whether I will or no—I can turn to none else to protect me during this grim effort. And we must make haste, for the deed must be done, and we must return to our tents, all footprints brushed away and all scent sponged from the wind, before the dogs blow reveille.”