"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.
— 15 —
THE WINTER PROCEEDED AT A SLOWNESS OF PACE THAT was entirely without precedent. The Lords of the City declared a third December, so that Black December passed into Ice December with the possibility of a fourth December at the back of every mind. Meanwhile, it was the Wolf Moon, and the Goddess had taken on her most hostile aspect. Sometimes it seemed the Teind would never arrive.
One week after Ratsnickle's reappearance, Jane went out window-shopping with him and Monkey. She trailed after them, anxious and unwilling, through the upscale stores of Gladsheim and Carbonek, elegant places like Horn Fair, Fata Padourii, and Maleficium, where Jane looked and felt hopelessly out of place. Ratsnickle stood back, jingling the keys in his pockets, a satisfied smile on his puffy lips, when some bright trinket caught Monkey's avaricious eye.
"Oh, look," she said then, "isn't it lovely?"
"Yes," Ratsnickle replied, looking steadily at Jane. "Isn't it?"
They wound up the evening at The Cave. It was open mike night, and every would-be bard and minstrel manqué for miles around was on hand with a sheaf of bad poetry. They sat around tables made from telephone cable spools, sipping espresso and waiting their turns. Undergrads in jeans and black turtlenecks brought fresh mugs and cleared away empties.
"Oh the gloves, the faun-skin gloves," Monkey enthused. "I'm doing all my shopping at la jettatura from now on.
" Reaching up to trace the line of Ratsnickle's jaw with a fingertip she purred, "Think how… sooofft they'd feel."
Up on the tiny stage, a poet who looked like he spent daytimes sleeping under haystacks recited:
The lady no longer crouched at his side,
But stood before him glorified,
Ratsnickle rolled his eyes. Then, picking up an earlier train of rhetoric, he said, "Sex is all about power. Mastery and surrender, that's the game in a nutshell."
"That's not how it is with us," Monkey said. "Is it, sweetie?"
He patted her hand indulgently. "Somebody has to take and somebody give. That's just the nature of things. The male is a natural aggressor. The female is passive and nurturing. Inevitably, love in action is a clash of hard and soft, seizing and yielding, a war in miniature. Everything else—courtship, estrangement, reconciliation—is but refinement and sublimation of these primal forces."
"You're a brute." Monkey pouted. Then, in a wheedling tone she said, "But, honeypie, nobody likes to be ordered around all the time."
"In a threesome, of course," Ratsnickle said thoughtfully, "things are different. It can go either way, but most commonly you end up with two people on top. To maintain balance, whoever winds up on the bottom has to accept twice the dominance. She has to learn to grovel. To crawl. She has to be made to cherish her own humiliation."
Monkey looked quickly at Jane. Her eyes were hard and bright, like jet buttons, and her nostrils flared. Then she shook her head and turned away. "That's perverse."
"Oh yes," Ratsnickle agreed. "But then, so many things are."
Jane stared hard into the candle sconce. Watching the flame vanish and reappear in the thick red glass. Like a moth struggling to escape. "You said you had something to tell me."
Shining and tall and fair and straight
The Iron Dragon's Daughter Page 24
