The Iron Dragon's Daughter

by Michael Swanwick

  "We're slowing to a stop," Sirin said.

  In the foyer an ogre in a tuxedo barred their way, saying, "This is a closed floor, sir." Galiagante offhandedly flashed a gold card, and they were let by.

  The first thing Jane realized about Lac sans Oiseaux was that while Sirin might be appropriately attired for the club—casually, but in keeping with the rest—she herself was not. It was a rich crowd, Teggish and better, and not a one of them was wearing jeans. Just being among them made her stomach hurt. When Galiagante got a table, Jane slumped down in her chair, trying to look inconspicuous.

  Behind the bar was an enormous glass tank, lit by harsh fluorescents, where the rest of the club was bathed in red and purple. A horse was drowning in the tank. Legs churned up clouds of bubbles. Eyes bloodshot and wild, it craned its neck to lift agonized nostrils above the thrashing surface. It was excruciating to watch. The music was slow and romantic, but just loud enough that the horse struggled in silence.

  Jane shifted her chair so she wouldn't have to see. Galiagante looked amused. A kobold brought them brandies and was dismissed. "Would you like some coke?"

  "Of course we would," Jane said quickly, cutting off Sirin while she was still shaking her head.

  Mirror women glided through the crowd, bearing trays. Because their surfaces reflected whatever was before them, Jane couldn't tell whether they were entirely naked or merely mostly so. They were angular singularities, warping reality with their passage, leaving it unchanged in their wake. Galiagante snapped his fingers, and one bent low over their table.

  Light flashed from one chrome nipple as she offered the tray. Neat lines of powder were laid out ready to use. Galiagante laid his wallet on the table, and bent to snort up two, one per nostril. Sirin and Jane followed his example. He left several bills on the tray.

  "Dance?"

  Sirin accepted his arm and they moved out onto the floor.

  The wallet had been left behind on the table. It sat in a pool of light, almost breathing it was so imbued with life. The leather was decorated with a skull-and-rose tattoo. This small gesture, leaving the wallet behind, impressed Jane greatly. It implied much about Galiagante's resources.

  Casually, she glanced inside.

  Elves were volatile. It would be madness to rip one off. It would take a suicidal amount of nerve. She sipped her drink. Sirin danced beautifully, of course, and Galiagante held her close, murmuring in her ear. Her features were fine and aristocratic, and seeing her among her own kind Jane realized for the first time that Sirin was surely one of the Tylwyth Teg herself.

  The music was slow and, propelled by it, the two dancers were preternaturally graceful, like ice swans aglide on a pond. By degrees, though, Sirin's placid mood changed to distress. Her step faltered. She seemed to struggle against Galiagante's implacable grip.

  Jane watched them thoughtfully.

  When the dance ended, Sirin returned to the table and seized her purse. "I'm going to the power room. Are you coming, Jane?" There was a touch of demand in her last sentence.

  "We won't be long," she threw over her shoulder.

  Galiagante did not respond. He sat staring at the drowning horse, a small smile flickering like flame on his lips.

  * * *

  "Hold this for me." Sirin thrust her purse at Jane, and slammed into a toilet stall.

  Jane leaned back against a sink, studying the line of stalls. From one came the sounds of somebody puking. Ruby heels showed in the space beneath the door. Jane went into the next stall and slid shut the bolt.

  On the tiles by the vomiting elf-lady's knees was a beaded handbag. Slowly, carefully, Jane drew it closer with the toe of her shoe. Its owner was too involved in being sick to notice.

  There was a lot of money in the handbag. Jane took it all, and returned the bag to the floor. Sirin's purse had considerably less, but what there was she took. She tore Sirin's public elevator pass into shreds. The pieces floated for a moment in the toilet bowl. She flushed them away.

  When she emerged, Sirin was repairing her makeup in the mirror. Her face was ashen. She clutched Jane's arm fiercely.

  "We've got to get out of here. Now."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Galiagante. Jane, all the time we were dancing, he was talking to me, telling me things. Things that. Jane, you know me. I'm not a prude. But some of the things he said. About fishhooks and…" She stopped. "We've got to get out," she insisted.

  "Of course we will. We'll leave right now."

  * * *

  They burst through the club's double doors and ran to the elevator bank. Sirin pushed the call button. She looked anxiously over her shoulder. Galiagante had not yet noticed that they were late returning from the john.

  "There's a car coming. I can hear the cables."

  "It can't come any too soon for me." Sirin took out her wallet and opened it. Her face twisted in dismay. "I don't have any money! We'll have to use the public—" She rummaged in her purse with growing panic. "Where's my elevator pass?"

  "Take it easy, Sirin."

  "We're trapped. Jane, you don't know what he wants me to do—what he wants both of us to do!"

  "It's okay, Sirin. Really it is."

  "You can't imagine. It's so…"

  The elevator arrived, and a dwarf in livery—not the same one as earlier—scowled up at them. Jane shoved Sirin within, and snapped, "Skywalk level to Bellegarde. Step on it." To Sirin she said, "It's okay, I've got enough money to cover it. My treat."

  Sirin collapsed, weeping, on her shoulder.

  * * *

  At Jane's insistence they didn't go directly back to the dorm but went to the Pub instead. The Pub was a student bar not many floors beneath Habundia. It was crowded and noisy and safe. Jane ordered a pitcher of beer, and Sirin knocked back three mugs one after the other.

  Beer always made Sirin maudlin. "I'm so grateful to you. For the elevator, for getting me out of there. Jane, you can't imagine what you saved me from, what kinds of things he wanted to do."

  "Don't even think of it. It's nothing."

  "No, really. What would I have done without you? I'm in your debt. Anything you want, if I can do it—it's yours." She fell silent a moment and then a small, fey smile floated up to the surface. "Not that I wouldn't like to… someday. Only I don't think I was ready for it just yet."

  Jane stared down into her mug, at the bubbles rising up through the beer, slowly at first and then with gathering speed. They shone like tiny galaxies, each bubble its own universe. She tipped the mug back and drank deep. I am become death, she thought, the destroyer of worlds. Aloud, she said, "That line of bullshit Galiagante gave me about green thumb syndrome won't work, will it? That was just so much noise."

  "Well, it could work, I suppose. It just wouldn't be very practical."

  "Then what's the secret?"

  "Oh, Jane, I've given you enough hints. Please don't make me—"

  "You said anything I want, right? I saved you, remember?"

  "Yes, but I didn't know you'd ask me something like this. It's simply not permitted. It's—"

  "Hush." Jane stroked Sirin's hand, touched her knees under the table with her own. Gazing deep into those unfocused eyes, she murmured, "You're very beautiful."

  "What?"

  Jane was hardly drunk at all and she understood that to communicate with somebody who was required broad gestures, ruthless simplification, bright primary colors. Touching foreheads, she whispered, "Come on, Sirin, I'd do it for you. I'm your friend, aren't I? You can trust me. Give."

  Sirin blushed and stared down at their mingled hands. "I cheat. I cook the results."

  Jane continued caressing her fingers. She felt a little dirty doing this, but it wasn't as if she had any other options. "Tell me how."

  Sirin's eyes blurred and turned a milky white, the pupils and irises breaking into tiny motes and dissolving to nothing. In a husky voice that was not her own, she said, "Do you know the distinction between exoteric and esoteric al
chemy?" Jane shook her head. "Everything you've been doing, all the lab work, all the p-alk and organic alike, is exoteric—concerned with the transmutation of matter. It is the outer tradition. Are you following this?"

  "Yes."

  "Esoteric alchemy is the inner tradition. It's the other side of the coin. There aren't any classes for esoteric alchemy, but a researcher must necessarily learn it on her own. Esoteric alchemy is concerned with the transmutation of the spirit. This can be accomplished in many ways—through pain or terror or monastic discipline, for example—but is most easily achieved through the measured application of sex."

  "Tell me how it works. The practical side of it."

  Sirin's voice had by degrees hardened and deepened. It was no longer a female voice. "The procedure has two parts."

  "Two parts."

  "The first part is esoteric. It involves sex. While you're fucking, you must visualize the experiment, start to finish, step by step. If your familiar comes before you're done, you must start over again."

  She could not free herself from Sirin's cold hands. A numbing energy flowed up her arms and down her spine, returning to Sirin where their knees touched. It was mesmerizing. The table faded away underneath her, and the chair she was sitting on. There was nothing in all the universe but the voice and the resonant circuit of Sirin and herself.

  "The second part is exoteric. When you assemble the experiment and as you run it, picture what you were doing as you imaged it in the first part. Where you held your familiar, how you felt. This will create a feedback loop. You will find yourself growing aroused. For purely social reasons it will be best if you hide this aspect of your work.

  "Creation of the sophic stone is entry-level sex magick. As you advance in exoteric learning you will need to acquire more sophisticated esoteric skills. But for now your simple animal drives will suffice."

  Out of nowhere, it seemed, a window had been opened into Jane's world, and the alien landscapes it revealed made no sense to her at all. How could it be, she wondered. How could the one affect the other? Where and by what mechanism did they connect?

  She recalled a bright summer day, cloudless and without shadow, so immediate that the air felt like a membrane stretched over the yolk of an egg, full to bursting. One prick of a fork and the other side would come spilling out to fill all the world. She was sure then that the seen world was only surface, that deeper and darker things lurked beneath the surfaces, whales sounding under the sidewalks, faces larger than worlds mugging behind the sky.

  Jane felt close to something basic, so close that she could almost touch it, taste it, feel it. She was trying to frame a question when the power behind Sirin's words spoke again.

  "You've been flirting with great mysteries. Watch that they do not crush you." Sirin's eyes fluttered open and in her normal voice she said, "I feel sick."

  Like a tide ebbing the alien presence withdrew. Once again the bar closed about her, as real as a packing crate and as confining.

  Jane refilled her mug. When it was empty, she poured another. At some point she looked up and Sirin was gone. There was a pleasant-faced nondescript talking to her. She vaguely recalled him introducing himself as Jake Shakestick. He was telling a joke. She couldn't follow it, but she was pretty sure she'd be able to guess when she was supposed to laugh. It looked as if she were on her own, to make whatever decision she would.

  There was a hopeful smirk in the corner of Jake's mouth.

  Well, she thought, as well him as another. Anyway, she'd been chanting the birth control spell faithfully every day without fail for over a year.

  It seemed a pity to let it go to waste.

  Two days later she ran the experiment again. This time it worked perfectly.

  — 13 —

  JANE CAUGHT BILLY BUGABOO'S LAST SPURT OF SEMEN ON a watch glass, then drew up a measured amount in a Sahli pipette. "Ahhh." She diluted it with saline solution and rocked the pipette to mix the two. Then she let a drop fall into the chamber of a cytometer, slapped on a cover slip, and clipped it onto the microscope stage. "Let's see what the omens are."

  Billy rolled over and watched as she pulled up her jeans and panties and bent over the microscope. The sheets rustled mournfully.

  "I can't figure you out."

  "You're not supposed to."

  Without removing her eye from the microscope, Jane groped for her brassiere. She snapped it around her stomach then twisted it right side around, straightening momentarily to fit herself into it. Her blouse was draped across the same chairback as the brassiere had been. "Make yourself useful and button me up," she said. Billy obeyed.

  "I know you've got other guys. Are you like this with them too, or is it just me?"

  "My roommate's due back from class any minute now," Jane said coldly. "Time you got dressed, stud-muffin."

  With a sigh, Billy groped under the bed for his trousers. One at a time, he folded and unfolded his legs like a stork to fit them in. He was of a rarefied type, rawboned and spindle-shanked as a scarecrow. Sitting, his head reached almost to the ceiling. Standing, he stooped.

  The door rattled in its frame, then boomed as it was struck by angry fists. "That's probably her now. Get the dead bolt, why don't you?"

  Before Billy could reach the door, though, the transom pushed open. Monkey came clambering through. Impulsively, he seized her under the arms and, swinging her around like a doll, set her atop her own desk. She stood there, face darkening like a fireplace coal. Billy grinned a snaggle-toothed welcome at her that curled around either side of his face. It was at times like this, when he was at his most amiable, that he looked the most grotesque. Monkey scowled past him at Jane.

  "What the fuck do you think you're doing, locking me out of my own fucking room?"

  The signifiers in the slide were not good. Then again, Teind year omens never were. If you tested a sample—a clipping of hair, urine, horn scrapings, anything—in a spectrophotometer, the resulting spectrum inevitably showed a thick black bar marking the Teind's approach. Even if you survived the winnowing yourself, odds were you'd lose somebody close to you. "I was preparing a slide," she muttered distractedly. Billy buckled his belt and hastily buttoned his shirt. "Couldn't have you bursting in, right in the middle of things, now could I?" Technically, she wasn't supposed to be applying esoteric techniques to Intermediate Scrying, but doing so would save her countless hours staring into a pool of ink or poring over goat entrails.

  "You've been getting mighty pushy lately, Miss Do-What-I-Will Alderberry." Monkey hopped down from the table. "I don't recall giving you permission to use my room for any fucking private assignations."

  "Uh, listen, I gotta go now, I'm kind of late. For a class." Billy bundled his shoes and socks under one arm. Bobbing awkwardly, he backed out of the room, a leaf before a storm. "'Bye."

  The secret to successful scrying was to realize that the future was not fixed and there was no way of predicting it. None. All one could do was to identify what already existed unacknowledged. Lovers pledged themselves to each other long before their first kiss. Murder was implicit in friendship. A carcinoma that looked like a speck of dust on the X-ray spelled death. So much of what appeared to be random event was simply the working out of consequences. Jane began jotting down her observations in her lab book.

  Monkey snatched the pencil from her hand and snapped it in two.

  Jane closed her eyes and traced the sigil of Baphomet with her inner vision. When she was calm again, she slid open a drawer.

  "All right." There was a pair of latex gloves within. "I wasn't going to do this." She pulled them on. "But you don't exactly give me much choice, do you?"

  Credit where credit is due, Monkey didn't back down. There was a touch of the trickster in her heritage, and the trickster gene was a dominant. She licked her lips nervously as Jane pretended to lift an invisible box from the drawer. "You don't scare me."

  "Good." Jane swung a hinged lid back and reached within. "It works best if you don't believe."
She removed an equally imaginary scalpel and held it up between thumb and forefinger, admiringly turning it one way and the other.

  "What are you going to do with that?"

  Jane smiled. "This!"

  She slammed her fist into Monkey's stomach. The small goblin doubled over in pain and Jane was on top of her, ignoring her shrieks and forcing her down on the floor. She yanked Monkey's blouse up over her head and removed from a pocket a small bladder she had prepared for just this occasion. "A little higher," she said, jabbing stiff forefingers into the exposed abdomen. "There!"

  She crushed the bladder.

  Blood gushed. A dark crimson stain spread over Monkey's crotch and belly. Jane stepped back, the broken bladder in her hand. It looked for all the world like a scrap of body tissue. Monkey struggled up, tugging down her blouse, just as Jane popped it in her mouth. Jane chewed and swallowed.

  It was done.

  With swift efficiency then, Jane put away the scalpel in its box and returned both to the drawer and oblivion. She stripped off the gloves and threw them in the wastebasket. She was done. Leaning back against her desk, she waited to see if her roommate had bought it.

  Monkey came to her feet. "What the fuck did you just do?"

  "Hopefully, I bought myself a little peace and quiet."

  "You don't fool me—that was just sleight of hand."

  "Believe what you will."

  Picking up a heavy stapler, Monkey advanced on her. "Suppose I hit you over the head with this, huh? I'll bet you anything it would hurt you more than it would me.

  "There's only one way to find out."

  Monkey chewed her lip indecisively. Then, with disgust, she threw the stapler to the floor and herself into a chair. "Shit." She was all fists-and-eyes with rage. Then, abruptly, all tension left her body and she chuckled to herself. With elaborate casualness she said, "I met an old friend of yours today."