“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?”
“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.”
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.”
Perhaps some of his old vulnerability to the glamour of the Nymphs still was buried somewhere in his nervous system, for Soorm said only, “Do you really think my fur is beautiful?”
6. In the Middle of a Duel
Soorm descended the handholds until he was halfway down the cliff, and he sprang into the air, his massive arms overhead, and his dark body taut as an arrow, his long tail straight. Down he flew, striking the water with a silver splash. His tail opened his flukes and slapped the surface and then he was gone.
“Showing off for you, was he? That was stupid,” said Menelaus. “Water ain’t that deep.”
Oenoe, smiling brightly, waved prettily toward the water. “A cautious man would not have volunteered at all. He will clear the way, and return.” There was silken rustle from her green mantilla as Oenoe, and the pleasing scent of Oenoe, drifted closer to him. She looked at him from the corners of her eyes, lids half closed, her ripe, red mouth pursed as if suppressing a shy smile. She whispered. “I alone of all this company know you, Your Honor.”
“If you have to use a fancy title, call me ‘Doctor’—and you’re not the only one. I have a very old and very fat friend from my brief days among the Witches. He programmed his coffin to open when mine did, so he could follow me into the future. And I told Soorm who I was.”
The Hermetic Millennia Page 30
