The Iron Dragon's Daughter

— 14 —

MONKEY HAD GOTTEN INTO JANE'S SECRET CACHE. SHE KEPT it in a cardboard box under her bed with a layer of old pantyhose on top as camouflage. Monkey had hauled it out, dumped its contents on the floor, and pawed through them. Furious, Jane began to pick them up. There was the book she had stolen for the Lamia and which she intended to return to the library someday soon, the bundle of credit cards and ID she'd lifted from Galiagante's wallet, the pipe, hashish, and baby oil she kept in reserve for when she had the time and privacy for them, and a few cherished oddments from her days with Peter and Gwen. Nothing was missing. Monkey had been snooping for information.

There was nothing in the box that would reveal its secrets to Monkey. Jane kept her things hidden not because she feared their discovery but because they had meaning for her and she didn't want anybody running their grubby mitts over them.

Even in her anger, though, Jane felt uneasy. Something was up. Monkey was planning mischief. Jane knew how her roommate's mind worked—this was a message.

There was a burst of laughter in the hall. The other Habundians were decorating their doors with kteis-wreaths in honor of the season. Later they would tear a hog's carcass apart and sprinkle its blood on all the lintels. Jane wasn't going to join them. Her mood was too dark these days for such simple pleasures. The dark and the cold had sunk their talons deep into her spirit. She had never known a winter to last so long.

She drew the shade, shucked her clothes, poured the baby oil down her front, and smeared it about. On her third match she managed to fire up the hash pipe. In her distracted state it took almost an hour before she could transport herself Elsewhere.

"Tell me something about yourself." Jane caught up with her mother walking along a river bank at dusk. She clasped her hands awkwardly behind her back. Her mother strode along with her arms folded. Neither dared to reach for the other.

"Well… I'm a beautician. Frank and I finally broke up seven years ago. Now I mostly live alone." She laughed raggedly. "It doesn't sound like much when it's put that way, does it? I do some volunteer work at the hospital."

"Oh, Mom." She stared down at the stones passing underfoot, at the lines of driftwood and crack vials and plastic drink containers that marked the limits of the gentle upriver tides. She wanted to ask her mother so many things: How did you feel when I disappeared? What did you think happened? Did you search for me, and where did you search, and when did you finally give up? Somehow, though, she wasn't able to ask any of these things. They just never seemed to connect.

"Is that a new blouse?" her mother asked suddenly.

"What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing's wrong with it. Why does something always have to be wrong? Only, don't you think it's a little plain? You could look so nice if you only took a little more care with your dress and your makeup. You have the bone structure for it."

"Look, I have plenty of boyfriends, I'm not exactly lacking for attention, okay? So let's not get started on the makeup again."

A sharp tone entered her mother's voice. "You aren't letting them take advantage of you, are you? That's the one thing I regret, that I didn't save myself for my wedding night. Don't you look at me like that. If you let them do what they want with you, they don't respect you afterward. Even your father. I'm convinced that if only—well, never you mind."

A tanker, mysterious in the dim light, was off-loading oil across the river. They stopped to look at it. "Mom, I've been thinking. Maybe you shouldn't drink so much."

Her mother stared at the ship, said nothing.

"Listen, Mom. I don't think I'm going to be able to see you for a while. Exams are coming up. I'm going to be awfully busy. I might not be able to visit again until the winter's over. Sometime in the spring."

Her mother shook her head, still not listening. "These dreams are so comforting to me," she said. "You have no idea. Even though I know they're not real, still I somehow feel that on some level they are. I'm afraid I'm not making myself very clear."

"They're not dreams, Mom."

"Hush, Jane."

"Someday I'll be here for real. I'm working on it now, learning all I can. Someday I'll be coming home."

"Don't." Softly, Jane's mother began to cry. "Don't, oh, don't. Don't do this to me."

Jane felt an indescribable outwelling of love and guilt gush up within her then. Without thinking, she reached for her mother and knocked over the bottle of baby oil. The cap went flying across the room, and the oil made such a mess that it took her hours to clean it all up.

"Get up, old stone!"

Dr. Nemesis slashed an ash-wood wand down on a gray chunk of rock. The wand broke into splinters. Her seminar students leaned over the counter, holding their breaths.

The stone stirred and flowed upward, its outline shifting. Halfway to its feet it froze into inertia again, a half-formed thing that might suggest to the discerning eye a bias toward the anthropomorphous but nothing more.

Brushing the ash-wand fragments to the floor, Dr. Nemesis said, "What have we proved?" Her fierce gaze swept through the students. None of them met it. "Miss Greenteeth. Answer immediately."

"That stone is stronger than wood," Jenny replied, taking a chance. Often enough, Dr. Nemesis would accept a tautology, if it was delivered wittily enough.

"That certainly does not apply to ebony and pumice," Dr. Nemesis snapped. Her students cringed as they were struck by the rotting-meat smell of her displeasure. "Miss Alderberry. Don't stop to think about it."

"We've demonstrated that everything is alive." Dr. Nemesis frowned and Jane quickly emended her answer to, "That life is implicit in all matter. Even those things which seem inert to us are not so, but merely sleeping."

"Embellish your thesis with an exemplar."

"Uh, well, the vis plastica, for example. It's compounded of envivifying influences, so that mares and ewes standing in the leas with their backs to it are impregnated with new life. When it passes over the face of a cliff, the surface rock stirs with yearning for complex form and gathers into the images of uncouth beasts, of skulls and bones and coiled serpents that the ignorant take for archaic life ensorcelled into stone. Then the wind passes and with its enlivening influence gone, the normally low metabolism of stone returns and it falls into slumber again."

"How does this prove your case?"

"Because we know that nothing can be invested with qualities it does not possess. Purple light passing through a red lens can be made red through the removal of its blue component, but that same beam will not pass through a yellow lens, for yellow is not implicit to it. So life must be implicit in the stone if it can be made, even temporarily, to move and live."

Dr. Nemesis rounded on a finch-girl. "Miss Peck-a-Bit. Supposing that the vis plastica did not turn away from the cliff, but instead blew over it for days on end, what familiar life-forms would it generate?"

"Gargoyles and stonecrawlers."

"Defend your thesis."

"As was just said, things act in accord with their natures. The new life would retain its stony body and habits of mind. Which would include a fondness for vertical surfaces, a certain slowness of process and…"

The seminar room was small and its radiators were set too high. They clattered and moaned in operation, throwing off so much heat that the windows steamed and wept. The air was stuffy too. Jane waited until Dr. Nemesis was looking the other way and lifted a hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn.

Alerted by who knew what inner sense, Dr. Nemesis stiffened. She cast a sudden stern look over her shoulder at Jane. Those watery, pink-rimmed eyes hardened.

"Excuse me, I—" Jane began.

She stopped. The room was empty. Its warmth had fled. Gone was the pale winter light slanting through the windows, replaced by too large and dark a vista of entirely too many rooftops. It was, in fact, a different room altogether. She was in the graduate lounge on the top floor of Bellegarde. The embers of an industrial sunset burned low on the horizon.

It was night.

Numbly, Jane put her hand out to touch the plate glass window before her. It was reassuringly cool and solid. Pull it together, she told herself. What am I doing here?

"Jane?" somebody said. "Are you all right?"

A pale reflection swam up in the window beside her own. It rippled and resolved first into a skull and then into a face, slim and lovely, the sockets dark under the ceiling fluorescents. Jane's vision jerked back from the distance to focus on it.

It was Gwen.

With a gasp, Jane whirled. But behind her stood not Gwen at all but Sirin. She looked back at the window and could no longer make out Gwen's face in Sirin's image. "My dear!" Sirin took her arm. "Whatever is the matter with you?"

"I—" With her back to the window, Jane could see past empty couches into the hallway, where a murmurous flow of teachers and students was pouring through the doors of the Erlkönig Memorial Graduate Lecture Hall. "Dr. Nemesis tossed me out of her seminar. I can't remember anything since. I must have lost over half a day."

The consequences of Dr. Nemesis's fit of pique struck her then with the force of outrage. Everything she had done since that instant—most of a day's classes, all her studying, encounters with friends—had been stolen away from her. "That bitch," she muttered. Then, angrier, "Well, fuck her! Fuck her three ways from midnight."

"That's the spirit." Sirin draped a scholar's hood, the duplicate of her own, over Jane's head and steered her into the crowd. "Look pompous. I doubt anybody's expecting gate-crashers but…" She laughed. "Did you ever see so much tweed in your life?"

"It's not as if it were deliberate." They passed through the mahogany doorway without incident. "I tried to—hey. Where are we going, anyway?"

Jane favored seats near the top of the auditorium and to the side, where they were least likely to attract attention, but Sirin marched them down to row five left in the shadow of the podium, immediately behind four rows of faculty. Behind and to one side of the lectern the deans of the University sat patiently on folding chairs, like so many crows on a rail. "It's the Deep Grammar lecture, silly. I told you all about it at lunchtime, don't you remember?"

Jane shook her head. Unheeding, Sirin said, "They only give this lecture once every ten years. The rest of the time they keep the speaker stored in the catacombs, sealed in a jar of olive oil."

"Oh, they do not."

"Seriously. I know a teaching assistant who helped decant him."

A goat-headed administrator took the lectern. He cleared his throat. "There are too few heroes in Natural Philosophy. Yet tonight I present you not merely a hero but a warrior, indeed an academic berserker, one who has made a direct assault on the Goddess's most privy secrets. When he and his companions set out to assail her fastness and force her to surrender knowledge to them, they knew that this attempt might destroy not only they themselves, but the upper and lower worlds as well. But this did not deter them for an instant. For they had the courage of their convictions. They had intellectual honesty.

"Only one of that glorious company returned. He stands before us now. Is there anyone who less needs an introduction than my distinguished colleague? Let me present to you the most exalted of scholars, a living intellectual treasure, and the finest specimen in our collections—" Sirin nudged Jane with her elbow. "Professor Tarapple."

In the ensuing applause he gracefully retreated to an empty chair and a wizened figure climbed up on the dais.

Even for the School of Grammarie, which was widely held to have pushed the concept of liberal arts to an extreme, Professor Tarapple was grotesque. A burnt and crisped cinder of a creature was he, blackened and small, his limbs charred sticks, his torso rendered, reduced, and carbonized. His mouth hung open and his step was slow and painful. He seemed a catalog of the infirmities of age.

He felt for the microphone. His hand closed about it with a soft boom, then retreated. The charred sockets of his eyes rose toward the ceiling. Jane realized that he was blind.

"Gentles," he said, "scholars, and powers." His voice was weak and reedy, but the amplification system carried it throughout the auditorium. From below, his head seemed huge atop those scrawny shoulders, a melon balanced on a fence post and in danger of falling. He clutched the lectern with both hands. "The world may be perceived in three states, which states may often seem to be at cross-purposes with each other. They are—" He faltered, almost stalled, and struggled to continue. "They are—are—are first of all the unquestioned state. That which a child sees, in which bread is bread and wine is wine.

"The second state is—" He swayed slightly. "—is consensus reality, that set of conventions by which we agree that bread is a meal and wine is camaraderie." There was a small, polite laugh. "The third is the examined state, that with which our colleagues in the Schools of Sorcery deal, the interplay of forces which they hold to be the ultimate reality." A louder, more robust laugh. "Yet let us ask ourselves, what lies beyond them all? What is the true state of what we might call hyperreality?"

A long silence. "First slide, please."

The lights went down and from the projection booth in the rear came a distinct click. On the wall behind him appeared a bright vision of what might be some monstrous bleached seashell, large as a mountain, hanging over a limitless ocean. The audience was totally silent.

Professor Tarapple groped for a laser pointer, leaving sooty handprints on the lectern top. He directed the pointer toward the slide with motions as jerky and unconvincing as a rod puppet's. The red dot of light jiggled off to the side of the screen. "This is—" The head wobbled. "This is—is Spiral Castle itself." Nobody so much as breathed. "No one but I myself has ever delved so deep into the Goddess's mysteries. The Ocean above which it is suspended is Time itself, and so far as could be determined with our limited instrumentation extends to infinity in all directions. Next slide."

Click. A drawing of a ribbon twisted in a figure eight, afloat in the void. "This is a Möbius strip with one kink."

Click. A more complex figure. "With two."

Click. Another. "With sixteen."

Click. A glass retort, something like an alembic with its beak curving into itself then emerging at the far end so that its inside became its outside. Though again there was no background, it was as bright with reflected colors as a soap bubble. "This is the three-dimensional equivalent of the first slide."

Click. Another soap bubble, infinitely more complex. "The six-dimensional equivalent of the second slide."

Click. A third bubble that was worse than the first two combined. "The twelve-dimensional equivalent of the third slide."

Click. "Spiral Castle again." This time its physical configuration was clearly that of a higher-order solid in the line of progression suggested by the earlier slides. Its curves were involute and dizzying to follow. "You will note how it folds in upon itself. This recursive complexity extends through at least thirteen dimensions. A visitor following the simple curve of a single passage might be physically inverted so that he entered right-handed and departed left-handed. Following that same passage backwards, however, would not necessarily undo the damage; it might, rather, perform a second inversion so that one's exterior was internalized, leaving the skin on the inside and the guts, so to speak, on the outside.

"But what—what—what does this mean practically?

"Here we must make a brief digression into metempsychosis—I'll spare you the actual math, I promise!" He paused for a laugh that did not come. "Not all who enter Spiral Castle leave it again. But those who do may be reborn again as easily in the past as in the future. It has—has been demonstrated that as many as six avatars of an individual may exist at any given moment. Though it would not be advisable for them to meet." Two or three of the senior faculty chuckled, as if at an abstruse joke.

Jane was having a hard time following the lecture. The harsh white image of Spiral Castle was like a magnesium flare. It swelled and dwindled in her vision, as if softly breathing. Her eyes pulsed, aching when she tried to follow the logic of its involutions. She had to look away.

In the pale reflected light of the slide, all faces were gray and composed, as if their possessors were entranced. Jane found herself staring at the side of Sirin's face. She could intuit the shape of the skull beneath the skin, and it seemed to her that the similarity to Gwen was stronger than ever.

Could she indeed be Gwen?

It was an alarming and tantalizing thought. But not a new one. Jane had suspected as much for some time. If what Professor Tarapple said was true, it was entirely possible that Gwen had been reborn in Sirin. In which case the charged polarities of their opposed fates would inevitably bring them together in common orbit about a shared doom.

Jane liked Sirin a lot. She was open and generous and, no doubt about it, Jane's intellectual superior. Sirin had the makings of a crackerjack alchemist in her. There was a lot Jane could learn from her. But Jane dared not involve herself in Sirin's life if it meant a possible replay of the earlier tragedy.

Then again, if Sirin weren't Gwen reborn, there was no need to avoid her. The problem was that there was simply no way of knowing.

Puck, though, was another matter altogether.

"Toadswivers! Curly-mounted bobtail jades! Codheaded pigfuck bastards!"

With a start, Jane came to herself. Throughout the auditorium, the audience members were rousing themselves. A Teggish professor directly before Jane's seat straightened with a lurch and a snort. A gnome to her left passed a hand over his mushroom-spotted pate.

Professor Tarapple had abandoned his lecture in a rage. He was berating his audience. "Only one being—one! me!—has ever delved so far into the Goddess's secrets and returned to talk of them. By cannon-fire, holy water, and bells, listen to me! I risked more than life and sanity to bring you these photographs. I—I—I was once young and tall and handsome. I had friends who died in this expedition and will never be reborn. We were caught and punished and punished again. I alone escaped. Look at me! See the price that I paid! So many times I have tried to tell you! Why do you never listen?"

He was weeping now. "Woe!" he cried. "Alas for those who seek after Truth, for such is the Goddess's most hoarded treasure. Ah, she is cruel and unfathomable, and bitter, bitter is her vengeance."

The lights came gently up. The applause was thunderous.

Jane knew what to do now.

The only light in the p-alk lab came from the equipment storage room, whose door Jane had left open. Overhead, the stuffed crocodile turned slowly in otherwise undetectable currents of air. Charged and buoyed by the plan engendered by the Deep Grammar lecture, Jane had managed to steal all the keys, equipment, and time she needed to run the experiment in only three days.

She set out the argon ion laser on the lab bench to her left and the sample chamber to the right. The chamber had a monochromometer mated to a photon counter at the far end. Those two and an optical mirror were the principal components of her experiment. What she had in mind was elegantly simple.

The door rattled. A lank, big-headed, and unreasonably tall figure could be dimly seen through the frosted glass.

She unlocked the door.

"I got the thing you wanted." Billy Bugaboo slouched in apologetically, smelling of cheap soap, imported cigarettes, and limp hope. He opened his hand. A rumpled Seaborne First Leviathan patch lay within. The last time Jane had seen that patch it had been on Puck's jacket shoulder. She remembered noticing that it was coming loose.

"Thanks." Jane picked a few threads from the patch and stuffed them into a sample tube.

"How come you know Puck?" Billy asked.

"How come you do?"

"Sirin introduced us."

Jane slowly poured aqua regia over the threads and capped the tube. Royal water was supposed to be used only as a solvent for gold and platinum, but it really did a number on the threads. She shook the tube and watched them break up into a cloudy swirl of particles. "How come Sirin knows Puck then?"

"He's just one of those people everybody knows." Billy shrugged. "She might've bought some sacred mushrooms from him. He could've done some work on her bicycle. He's a hustler. He gets around."

She aimed the laser so the mirror would bounce its beam into the sample chamber. Getting out hoses, she hooked up the connections to the cool hood and the laser's water jacket. When she was sure of them, she twisted the spigots open. "Well, that's how it was with me too."

She snapped a saline control into the sample clips and shut the chamber.

"Oh." Billy sounded baffled. "Hey, I lucked into a couple of tickets to an evisceration. I thought maybe you and I could—"

"No." Everything was in place. She popped the button on the laser and checked the photon counter. The readings were way off. Disappointment sharpened her answer. "Even if I wanted to witness such a thing—and I don't—I wouldn't, because you'd be wanting to go to bed with me afterward. And I don't want to have sex with you any more because that only encourages you."

Billy shuffled his feet behind her, said nothing.

"Why don't you ask Linnet? She's a cunning little stunt, from all reports." Was it possible she was getting the wrong amperage from the laser? She fussed with the fittings, looking for a short, hoping it was something simple. If the flash tube was malfunctioning, she was up the creek. "I'll tell her you have three balls."

Billy flushed with embarrassment. She didn't need to look. "There's no need to be crude," he said in his stuffiest voice.

"Oh, but all the girls—" Turning, she saw his expression, and stopped. Those guileless eyes of his welled with hurt and loneliness. Abruptly she felt ashamed of herself. Only the knowledge that he wouldn't let it stop there, kept her from reaching out to him. "Okay, I'm sorry for teasing you. Pax, all right? Let's be friends again."

"Yah." Billy nodded shaggily, and Jane returned to her work.

If the problem was in the chromometer, on the other hand, there wasn't much she could do about it. The thing was factory-sealed and sold as a unit. But she'd seen Lampblack using this exact same piece of equipment only yesterday, and it had functioned perfectly then. What was she overlooking?

The mirror!

Sure enough, when she looked the mirror was subtly corroded and scattering a vital fraction of the beam. Jane set up a new one. She jiggled the power feed to check its seating. Pop. This time the numbers fit. She yanked the control, clipped in the sample from Puck's jacket, and left the control chamber open. She donned a pair of laser goggles. With the device tuned to 514 angstroms, the goggles would filter out everything but the raman from the sample and she'd be able to look on it direct.

"About that evisceration," Billy said.

The excitation of free ions in the solution brought to life a tiny orange sprite. It floated in the watery green of Jane's vision like a weed lashed by undersea currents. The life span of such creatures was fleetingly brief; in the excitation of the laser light they were born and died thousands of times per second. The being she saw now as one was actually many, its movements an illusion of continuity similar to the generation of repeated images on a television screen. It was so delicate she hardly dared breathe. "What about it?"

"I thought maybe now that you've had the time to think it over, you might—you know."

Jane sighed, but did not look up. "Go away, Billy."

He stood for a while sadly jingling the coins in his pocket. Finally, he left.

Through a simple transform of contagion, the raman spirit would eventually take on the form of the being most intimately associated with the particles of thread from the patch. Jane waited while the sprite evolved through slow incremental changes, growing ever more familiar. Finally a minuscule Puck leered up into her goggled eyes, licked its lips, and grabbed its crotch. It was too much to expect subtlety from such a primitive creature.

Now that she had come to the point, Jane found that she was afraid. The laser was rigged to provide a carrier beam. She jacked a microphone into its side. She cleared her throat nervously. It had been a long time since she had used Rooster's true name.

"Tetigistus!" she cried.

The sprite leaped, as if a lash had been laid across its back. With a loud crack the flash tube burned out. The stench of burning plastic rose from the plug. Jane fell back with a cry as the laser shorted out, her arm flung out to cover her goggles.

But the damage was done. Clear and bright in the back of her brain shone the residual triune image of Rooster-Peter-Puck. Their eyes were clear and their skin like ivory. They lay wrapped in linen and their expressions were composed, assured, immaculate. They were all dead.

So it was true. Rooster was Peter was Puck.

It was late and the express elevators were closed for the night. Jane took a forty-five minute stand-up local home. All the way she did not so much think as grieve. She had believed that finally knowing one way or the other about Puck would set her free. Only now that he was denied to her could she acknowledge how badly she wanted him.

She was dead weary when she finally got back to her room. It had been a long day and all she wanted to do now was go to sleep.

Light spilled from the transom and seeped through the crack under the door. Voices sounded from within. Monkey was back. And she had a friend with her. It doesn't matter, Jane thought. Nothing can hurt me now. You could hit me in the face with a brick and I wouldn't feel a thing.

She opened the door.

An ungainly figure with red eyes and hair like straw was sitting on her bed. He looked up and grinned nastily. "How ya doin', Maggie?"

It was Ratsnickle.