Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick

by Unknown Author

  The radio-men alone were oblivious. Goggled, gleaved, and leather-aproned, they bent protectively over their equipment, preparing it for disassembly and transport.

  Only Margarete knew the true meaning of what had been said.

  In the street, the crowds were noisy with talk, wild with gesticulation. "He said not a word about faith!" Father cried, scandalized. He shook his cane against the sun. "He said nothing of grace!"

  "You must not excite yourself," Mother said, taking his arm.

  He shook himself free and called to a passing friend, "Rog-genbach! Did you hear, did you hear—?"

  Since the sermon had been broadcast everywhere, there was nobody who had not heard Faust's terrifying words. The waves of parishioners leaving the church intersected other waves from other churches and formed small angry knots. He was denounced at every intersection, in every plaza.

  Yet Faust had his supporters, too, and they were almost all young. Arguments broke out on the streets between young and old, which was a terrible thing at any time and sacrilegious on a holy day.

  Margarete saw, and disapproved, and understood. It was perfectly natural that Youth, being given a new and revolutionary truth, should embrace it too eagerly, should defend it too loudly, should proclaim it in the extremest terms and without regard for the sensibilities of others. Natural, too, that Age, vested as it was in things as they had always been, should reject the truth as unsettling and dangerous. In the face of such strong emotions, the only sane thing to do therefore was to embrace the truth circumspectly, to hide one's new allegiance from one's elders.

  Only she knew that the sermon had been spoken to her and her alone.

  A trail of lilies led her through the night to Faust's quarters. She noticed them casually at first, a vase on a table in the hallway when she tiptoed out of her room and another where she paused, heart pounding, to listen at the top of the stairs. Her parents were both asleep. There were more lilies in the kitchen, and that seemed strange to her but of no particular import. Then she opened the back door into the courtyard, magically restored during her absence to a garden again.

  She caught her breath.

  In the pale moonlight, two white lines stretched from her door to Faust's workshop. Lilies had been planted along the one path, where less noble blooms lined the others. She had strolled here earlier, when sunlight had made all ways equally bright. Now the tightly furled blossoms gleamed beckoningly.

  Silently, she ran down the path. A faint sweetness rose up from the sleeping flowers. She pushed open the unlocked door and climbed the stairs—a fresh-cut lily had been laid upon each—to Faust's room.

  Margarete entered without knocking.

  The room was sparsely furnished with trunk, bed, and writing desk. But Faust had crammed into it a hundred vases from which billowed great masses—mountains! cloudbanks!— of roses. The curtains were drawn and in the light of a single candle they were all black, black as sin, but by their perfume, heavy and sensuous, she knew them to be red, red as blood. The bed-canopy was tied open; the sheets glowed like ivory.

  Faust was waiting for her.

  She froze. All her dreams and romantic fancies dissolved like mists before the shock of his presence. The Faust of her dreams had not had so solid and undeniably carnal a body. So close was he, so real that she could smell him! The consequences this rash night could bring came crashing in upon her. Disgrace! Pregnancy! Exile! She shivered with dismay, and that which was daring within her despised herself for a weakling.

  Had he come toward her then, Margarete would have bolted—run back to her room and slammed the door loudly enough to wake the entire household, parents and servants alike. She would have been safe then; a stormy enough protest that there was nothing—nothing!—between her and Faust would have ensured that they were never allowed alone together again.

  But he did not. He cocked his head in a listening attitude, and then—it was as if he knew her thoughts—drew back ever so slightly.

  She waited.

  He smiled and held open his arms for her.

  They were three paces apart. She took a quick, impulsive step forward. It was all the permission Faust needed. He crossed the remaining distance in a single stride, and swept her into his arms.

  They kissed.

  A long time later they drew apart, she with a smile and a sigh, he with a kind of growl. He undid her dress-front, tugging it gently away from the shirt beneath, pushing it gently back. The sleeves were puffed below the elbows, then tight at the wrists; he held the ends between thumb and forefinger while she pulled first one arm and then the other back and through. The top of her dress fell away.

  Eagerly, then, he pulled her to him again and was kissing her, kissing her, kissing her.

  With surprise, Margarete found herself running her hands under his blouse, stroking the smooth, hard muscles of his back. She was fearless now, as fearless as Gretchen ever was, and as gloriously, selfishly content.

  Her dress somehow lay upon the floor. All in one motion, Faust scooped her up, whirled her about, and carried her to the bed. Her slippers fell lightly to the floor behind them.

  She knew enough to keep her knees up and apart, and trusted to him for the rest. Feeling like a wanton, she watched Faust strip out of his clothes, and she did not look away once. Daring, ignorant, she stretched out her arms. Then he was leaning over her, kissing her face and neck, reaching down between her legs to ease himself within her.

  It was not at all comfortable at first, but an experience she was willing to endure for Faust's sake. Something tore and she cried out in pain. "Shush," he whispered, and kissed her silent. Then he was gliding softly in and out of her, murmuring endearments, leaning on his elbows to spare her his weight. She was too shy to tell him that he was being overly cautious. That she wanted the full burden of his body, wanted to feel and support the whole of him, to bear him up and lift him free of the bonds of gravity and so be lifted by him, so that together they might fly up through the roof and into the gathering night.

  She thought of a boy she'd known years ago who'd had a pet snake he had let her handle—wonderously dry and smooth it was and, contrary to all she'd been taught, not at all evil: a simple creature, part of Creation, and beautiful in its way. Its eyes were dark garnets and a strange musky smell clung to it, like nothing she had ever known before. She had closed her eyes and leaned forward to inhale that scent, and when she opened them again the boy was staring at her.

  He was trembling.

  And so was she. A tension had seized them both at that instant. They had each wanted something then, and neither had known exactly what.

  Now, with Faust's body grown slippery in her arms, she knew the moment for what it had been, a foretaste of this sorcerous and inexpressible sensation.

  It was an odd thing, this physical expression of love. She hardly knew whether it was enjoyable or not. But she knew that she would do it again and not once or twice but many, many times.

  Had she known what it would be like, she would have fallen years ago. She wouldn't have waited for Faust at all.

  They lay together late into the night, touching, talking. Faust was built long in the torso, but with an artisan's muscularity and hardness. It thrilled her to run her fingertips lightly along the coarse bristles of his chest. Everything about him delighted her. Blushing with happiness, she explored the new continent of his body. "How did you get this scar?" she asked, tracing a thin silver river across the plains of his abdomen.

  "A student riot."

  "And this?"

  "When I served in Poland, a cannon blew up during artillery drill." He shrugged. "It was no great matter. I worked for hours on the survivors before I noticed that the blood on my doublet was not theirs but my own."

  A sudden wave of sorrow, sourceless and pure, came over Margarete. The world was so random and dangerous a place, inimical to lovers, hostile to the simplest ambitions. For an instant all the future seemed dark. "What's to become of us?" she asked softly
, unthinkingly.

  Faust laughed. "Become of us? Why, what do you think becomes of men and women who love each other? Marriage, and children. Surely you expected nothing less. I shall grow old and grey in your company and you shall grow old in mine—old and fat!" He pinched her thigh to make her laugh as well.

  And she did.

  But she did not believe his life—their lives now—would ever be so simple. She could not imagine it. He was a Titan, and meant for such struggles as the storm-giants knew; safer by far to marry a merchant, an honorable reed who could bend under the winds that would shatter an oak. Who would never draw lightning. Whose life would be one of homely joys and small sorrows, comfortable rather than great.

  Those were practical thoughts, however, and she did not want to be practical, not tonight nor ever again. She felt buoyed up by Faust's love and by the warmth of his love-making as well. Everything seemed possible. If she could do this, she thought, she could do anything.

  "I think we should have special names for each other," she said, and when Faust raised his eyebrows, "pet names, you understand, private endearments. As a sign of our love." She lowered her eyes. "I want you to call me Gretchen."

  "Gretchen." His mouth caressed the word; his tongue savored it. He stroked her side languorously and grinned to see how her body responded to his touch. As pleased with himself as a cat that's tricked its way into the creamery. Men were simple creatures, Gretchen thought. They inhabited a world without consequences. "It's a lovely name. It suits you well."

  "Now give me one to call you."

  For a long moment Faust puzzled over the request. Gretchen had noted before how the learned seemed to have special trouble naming things—kittens, babies, books. It was as if the cultivation of subtlety made simplicity less accessible to them. His mouth pursed, twisted, and finally split in a wide, amused smile. "Jack," he said. "You must call me Jack."

  * * *

  APES

  With a clamor of bells that set the monkey screeching in terror, the parade began.

  Across town, Jakob Treutwein heard the bells as he was placing a long ladder against one of the city wall's towers. A window opened above him and a pole with wet laundry upon it was thrust out into the air. "Hallo up there!" he called with bluff good humor. "Be careful you don't impale me."

  "Who said that?" A housewife stuck her startled red face out the window. "What are you doing?"

  "Installing lightning rods. I've got a contract from the city."

  "Lightning rods!"

  "Yes, for every tower. It won't take long at all. We'll be out of your way before you know it." His sons, Daniel and Max, stood by the cart with the great spool of metal cable, the rods, tools, and mounting spikes, shifting from foot to foot with impatience. The old woman was a renter (for the towers were, strictly speaking, military emplacements, and only the chronic lack of living space within the walls led to them being let out) and had no say over what would and would not be done with the structure. But Treutwein was all smiles and patience. He knew how to handle people, knew how much trouble even the lowliest tenant could cause, knew above all what profits he could expect from a commission that would take months to fulfill.

  "Whatever you're up to, I can't be bothered!" the old woman snapped. "Take your lightning-trap away. I want no part of it."

  Treutwein laughed respectfully and removed his hat. "It's not like that, grandmother. It's the simplest of devices, an iron finial that goes on the tip of the spire to intercept the lightning and channel it harmlessly along a cable into the ground, like rainwater down the spout. You need never fear lightning-fires again. Sleep through thunderstorms! You'll be proof against their worst."

  "Well, I—"

  "Best of all, it costs nothing. The city council pays for it all."

  "Free, you say?" The old woman started to withdraw.

  "Absolutely without charge."

  She abruptly stuck her head out again. "This isn't one of Faust's devilish creations, is it?"

  "Oh, no, no, no." Treutwein put on a shocked expression. "It was invented decades ago. In Munich."

  There was confusion in the square before Saint Lorenz as the procession set out. But the chaos of human bodies pushing and stumbling into one another as they squeezed into the narrow street was momentary. Once out of the plaza, the marchers were swiftly metamorphosed into a living, rainbow-scaled serpent that glided smoothly and purposively through the city.

  First came the thurifer in full ecclesiastical robes, worn backwards and inside-out. Solemnly, chains clanking, he swung a censer that contained not myrrh but sulfur, so that the incense it sent up every nostril instead of elevating minds to thoughts of sanctity, sent them straight to its opposite. Behind him came the cross-bearer, his burden held upside down, with crimson ribbons streaming from the stigmata. Then two horned imps prancing and snarling. They carried baskets fat with pamphlets, which they flung by ones and twos into the crowd of spectators.

  Pfinzing the carriage-maker heard the shouting and came out of his workshop to see what was happening. His apprentices, great loutish fellows all of them, filled the doorway behind him, dusty with wood shavings, climbing over each other to look. "There's nothing to see! Nothing to see!" he cried, flinging out his arms to hold them back. Then trumpets blared and a tumbler spun by. Pfinzing blinked and laughed and shrugged and lowered his arms.

  The apprentices scattered like pigeons.

  After the imps came the Dominicans, the Pope's black-and-white hounds transformed for the day into an order of clowns militant. Shaggy throws draped over their shoulders, gloves with patches of fur sewn to the backs, and crude masks made apes of them all. The more stolid monks were placed at the center of the street. The exuberant and outgoing went to the edges, where they might play mock with the crowd and pick imaginary lice from children's hair.

  Brother Josaphat walked among them, and despite the unseasonable heat, more appropriate to summer than late October, that made sweat itch and tickle its way down his face and under his cassock, his mood was gleeful. It was his work that had brought the Papal Nuncio to town. It was he who had, at his order's behest, dug through the dungheap of unread publications Faust had left behind him in Wittenberg, unearthing them from crates and dusty storage and even in one instance from within a bookseller's walls where they were serving as insulation, and brought to air the jewel of ordure around which the procession had been built.

  Beneath his mask he flushed and scowled with a guilty sort of satisfaction at the memory of how he had made the printer squirm.

  "This is blasphemous work, brother," he had told the man.

  "My art is all ink and cold type," the printer said defiantly. "Blasphemy I leave to those who understand such things."

  "I am agog with horror."

  "My conscience is clear. I have done nothing to cause you dismay."

  "My horror is not at what you have done, but at the laxity of local authority. You should have been brought before the archbishop, shown the tools of inquisition, and questioned as to your motives for printing such filth."

  The man turned pale, as well he might. "Sir, I swear I could not make front nor back of it! 'Twas all a mingle-mangle of air and folly, more than any sane man could decipher, polysyllabic nonsense—naught but words." He paused, swallowed, and weakly concluded, "Words."

  "Exactly so. Damnable words, words that are a peril to the immortal soul merely to read. I will require a thousand copies."

  The printer's eyes bugged. "S-sir?"

  "How else are the devout to know what danger they are in?" .

  Wolf Kreuzer, the noxious highwayman, Georg Scherm, the evil thief known as "Ironjaws," and Claus Meth, whose murderous rage knew no bounds, were crouched in the alley alongside the English spy's house, arguing over what use might best be made of a dead cat that had just been discovered, when they heard the trumpets. They stiffened with wonder.

  The cat was forgotten.

  "A parade!" Wolf breathed.

  "Let's go,
" said Georg.

  "Wait! We should have a horn of our own." Claus directed their eyes toward Wycliffe's house and its splendid new copper drainpipes, bright with brass wyvern fittings at the joints.

  Shouting like Arabs, they ran barefoot to the drainpipe, and began to rip it loose. It took all their energy and made a dreadful noise tearing free.

  Wooden shutters slammed open. A fierce bearded man stuck his head out of a second-floor window. "Leave go, you little gutter-rats!" he roared down at them.

  The pipe clattered to the ground. Wolf and Georg ran off with it slung over their shoulders, taking turns at hooting in its ends. Claus snatched up the wyvern fitting—it had been his target all along—and slid it up his arm, like an Aztec ornament. Then, with a whoop and an Italian hand-gesture, he was gone.

  * * *

  Faust reshuttered the window. "This hateful rabble," he muttered. Meaning not the boys but the crowds cheering the procession.

  Gretchen smiled fondly but did not look up from her accounts. "Do not hate anyone, sweet my love," she admonished. "This anger is not theirs by birthright. It is like a storm that rises up from a confluence of breezes and atmospheric anomalies. It cannot last. Their winds and thunders will soon die down into a more natural clemency."

  The room stank most gloriously of sex. But for all that, they were both demurely clothed and the door was open. There was work to be done, after all. Gretchen was compiling a flow chart of products to and from her father's factories, with an eye to seeing how these processes might be simplified. It was a task she found well suited to her temperament. But even at her most involved, she was intensely aware of her lover's presence, and content merely to be with him. She still felt the trace of his touch upon her skin.

  "In the meantime I cannot go abroad without being pelted with garbage," Faust grumbled. But when Gretchen turned to rise and comfort him, he placed both hands on her shoulders and pushed her gently back. "Have no fear, I shall be schooled by you. You are my conscience. You meliorate my rage, and blunt the sword of my anger."