“You didn’t phlegming answer my question.”

“It is not necessary to answer the gods, even ones, like you, who are insane and think they are not gods. Your mind is suffering from an interleaf conjunction. The memory should come back momentarily. Your avatar here knew me. I will be shamed if you have forgotten.”

At that moment, the second figure who had served as Second during the duel, Trey Soaring, came skipping over, her eyes dreaming and focused on nothing in particular. She was a purple-haired Sylph woman from the Third Millennium, the same millennium when Montrose himself was born, only a few centuries after he was. Around her floated her garment of hunger silk; it was a molecular disassembly array shaped like a deep sari and cloak, or perhaps like a swarm of purple wasps woven into a solid sheet. She stared at the bridge of his nose but did not flinch back like Mickey did at the sight of the posthuman intelligence burning in the gaze of Montrose.

“Hi!” she said vaguely. “You’ve changed again. You have to stop doing that. It’s weird.” And she took a strand of hair around her forefinger and stuck it between her lips, as if suckling on it. Trey craned her head back to watch a flock of scaly and feathered urvogel fly over, half-bird, half-saurian creatures originally from Venus: including the anchiornis, the xiaotingia, and the regal aurornis.

With her head turned up and away from Montrose, she spoke, “He’s your Best Man. It sours him when you forget.”

Mickey did not look sour, but he did raise one eyebrow, and the decorative right eye on his absurd pointed hat above his right eye raised an eyebrow as well, but much higher. “I found my demonstrations of power were augmented by erecting shrines to you, and my shadow grew strong at my feet because your name touched my name. For three seasons, I dwelled hidden among the earliest generation of the Swans, and my name was great among the resurrected Witches.”

Trey said, “I’ll translate from Icky-Mickey jabber to groundling: he got famed up because of you, Judge Montrose. It weirdered him.” She giggled and stared at her left hand, spreading her fingers. “Isn’t that a word? Made him weirder.”

Mickey said solemnly to Montrose, “Your life and mine were cast together in fate, Great One, intertwined like the DNA helix of the caduceus of the psychopomp. Then I dreamed a dream with the left lobe of my brain while my right lobe half was exalted by pharmaceutical—”

Trey jabbed her elbow sharply into Mickey’s side. “Vent it!” she snapped.

Montrose stared in surprise. Trey was small and waiflike, like all her race, with hollow bones, so it was like seeing an eel taunt a whale.

Mickey frowned judiciously, nodded his head to Montrose. “I am become as you, and sought remotest futurity to seek my one true love.” And he smiled down at Trey with such a smile that his shining eyes were almost lost in the folds and wrinkles of his cheeks.

Trey said, “And I came because I said I would. I want to see the wedding! Find out how the story ends.”

Montrose now noticed on the left hand of Trey was a gold band. Evidently the custom of exchanging rings had still been remembered in whatever year the two had wed.

“B-but—Mickey! I thought you are gunna marry a bosomy Nymph or something?”

She saw his gaze and held up her hand proudly, wiggling her fingers to make the ring catch the light and glitter. “He gave up witchcraft for me. We got chased into your tombs again, but the Witches were afraid of you and would not follow. One of the old bishops you saved married us. Named Father Talbot. Married us to each other, I mean! I had to give up threesomes. I am not sure they were a good for me.”

Montrose stared at the unlikely pair. The recollections of Montrose Number Five were settling into place in his associative memory.

7. A Glimpse of Memory

A.D. 67098

It had been not long ago. He (Montrose Number Five) and Mickey had spent an evening in a public house at the nearby Forever Village.

The village surrounded the foot of a beanstalk issuing from the tallest summit, a speaking peak called Baxianshan, high in the Mediterranean Mountains.

The oldest era of history maintained by the Eternity Circuits of the local Stability was from the time before the Great Silence, when the Teleological Conspectus had successfully crushed the soul of man. An immortal of the planet Odette called the Conservator of the Futurity had taken control of the bankrupt and mortgaged Tellus and had undertaken to organize all Earthly life for the benefit of far future generations, whose numbers and dispositions were planned in advance. The plan condemned certain bloodlines, cults, cultures, and peoples to slow extinction. In those long-lost centuries of yore, the Atavist were a dwindling people.

Those condemned by the Conservator included the sea-Atavists, the Nicors and Camenae, Rusalka and Merrow, and other remote descendants of the Melusine. Their place in the sea and aboard the Great Ships was taken by a Squaloid race of Moreaus. They were unwilling to live in houses on shore and were nostalgic for the undersea palaces in which their grandfathers dwelled before the Squids forced them into upright shore-shapes. In memory, they erected great structures in the hollow trunks of trees, coated all within with coral growths. For their own bodies, they assumed the shape of small, swift, delicate beings. This was in a vain attempt to produce breeds in their children low-mass enough to compete for berths on starships with the more microgravity-agile, but more massive, Squids.

It was a point in history when metal was obdurate and denied to men, so everything was grown rather than made. Thus the décor was elfin, fanciful, and alive. The chairs were obnoxiously large leaves, and the lamps were lightning bugs. There was a fire pit in the center so that the smoke wandered up the axis of the hollow tree trunk, with scattered tables and booths circling it. Coy and coquettish girls on stilts or dangling from wire harnesses served the human-sized customers on the floor or smaller-than-human patrons occupying shelves and nooks up the inner walls.

Odd as it was, the other quarters of the village, from centuries nearer to the current day, were more odd. They were dormitories and breeding stalls formed in blocky proportions that bespoke no concern for human notions of beauty, and with strangely uniform streets and tools, and neither cathouses with their red lamps nor chapels with their silver bells anywhere in evidence.

The two old friends had been drinking boilermakers, and Mickey was cheating by using a technique to absorb the excess alcohol out of his cells, and so he was steadily and slowly drinking Montrose under the table.

Montrose Five, if he had been doing his duty, allegedly was awake and active due to the activity of Montrose Six, who, if he had been doing his duty, allegedly to spy out what schemes, if any, Blackie was weaving while the calendar counted down to the day of her return.

As best as Six could find out, Blackie was running a gymnasium and fencing academy, to teach young and idle bravos the formalities and finer points of swordsmanship. It was apparently an art that never entirely vanished from human history. He also received a small stipend from a museum to give lectures about his past, and from a clioseum to give lectures about his future.

“So that is why Six took up with this false Rania,” said Montrose Five. “Boredom. He got tired of watching a retired tyrant.”

Instead of returning to slumber, as his contract with himself stipulated, Montrose Five hired a gunsmith, hunted up an armorer, and began making arrangements. His activity, in turn, came to the attention of whatever angel or ghost was guarding Trey’s tomb, and thawed her, which triggered Mickey’s thaw as well.