The Iron Dragon's Daughter

by Michael Swanwick

  A spray of cold babies' fingers brushed against Jane's cheek. She drew away and shuddered. But the trail grew narrower and the trees and bushes closer together. She was crowded and jostled by dark shapes, arms and shoulders bumping against her. There was a whiff of diesel exhaust and then the crowd, Baldwynn and all, poured down a set of stairs. Helpless, she was carried along.

  The people about her were silent, unspeaking. Heads down, they rapidly descended several flights of stairs. The only sound was the rush of clicking heels and scuffling soles. The graffiti on the dirty stone walls were oddly shaped and she couldn't read them. Overcoats and shoulder bags pressed against her from all sides.

  The stairs turned and swept them past rows of chrome turnstiles that carded the crowd like wool. From the throats of the dark passages beyond came a roaring as of great machines or of rivers plunging down bottomless chasms. Beyond the landing, the stairs deposited her in a dim concourse. The crowd expanded to fill the larger space but did not slow. Everyone was silent, hurried, self-absorbed. "It's not far now," the Baldwynn said. Jane nodded.

  Ahead, she saw a bright pool of light around which the crowd flowed and eddied without slowing. As she got closer she saw it was a child, a girl with red roses in her hair. The girl's skin was paler than marble, blanched and bloodless. Her features were exquisite, delicate without the least hint of weakness. She looked up at Jane with eyes the same harsh white as her skin, her dress, her hair. "You!" she cried.

  "Me?" Jane stopped, bewildered. Nobody else paid the extraordinary creature the slightest attention. The crowds hurried by.

  "You're so stupid!" said the little girl. "How can you be so stupid?"

  "I—"

  "You haven't understood a thing, have you?" She grabbed Jane's flight jacket and began going through the pockets. "What an idiot you are, what a total loss. You were the cause of Rooster's injuries—why did you dawdle so in Blugg's office? You screwed up Gwen and Peter when I meant you to be a comfort to them. You never even went to bed with Puck! You—I haven't the time to list your failures and treacheries. Where are the things I lent you?"

  "What things?" Jane tried to back away, but the girl swarmed over her, a small fury, unstoppable. She ripped open Jane's blouse, reached a hand inside her chest, and pulled out a small leather fetish bag Jane hadn't known was there. She spilled the contents of the bag out on her hand. There was a mummified object about twice the length and thickness of a rabbit's foot, and a thin, bright glint of light.

  Jane stared down on them. Her heart raced. Though she had never seen them before in her life, these two objects seemed to her the two most precious things in the universe.

  "You wasted them!" The little girl held up the glint of light between thumb and forefinger, so Jane could see it for what it was: a needle. She dropped it back in the bag. She held up the larger object. It was covered with short, wiry hair: an amputated dog's tail. Angry teeth clicked. "I'll bet you don't even know what they were for!"

  The dog's tail went in after the needle. Horribly white fingers closed about the bag, making a fist. "You weakling! You fool! You conceited, self-centered prig!" With every name, the girl hit Jane in the chest. The blood-red roses rattled with each blow. Finally, sneering disdainfully, the child turned her back. The crowds closed about her, and when they opened again, she was gone.

  Jane blinked. She pulled shut and rebuttoned her blouse. Then she zipped up her jacket. She stood at an intersection. The concourse stretched far and indistinct in all directions.

  In sudden panic, she realized that the Baldwynn was nowhere in sight.

  Her guide was gone.

  In a gray haze of despair, Jane wandered by signs reading Bar-B-Q Beef, Discount Vitamins, Deli-Sandwiches, Shoe Repair, Dollar Expres$, Jewelry, and Chinese Fast Wok. Flatly she thought, this is it, then. A pointless wandering through eternity. It was a singularly bland doom and yet one that felt oddly appropriate.

  Just as she thought this, though, she chanced to glance within a diner and saw the Baldwynn sitting at the counter, eating a powdered doughnut. She went in.

  At her approach, he put down his doughnut on his plate. Dabbed at his thin lips with his napkin. Smiled politely. "Here you are."

  "Yes," she said. "But where am I?"

  "In the same place you ever were; only your perception of it has shifted." The Baldwynn stood. "Follow me."

  He led her behind the counter and opened what she had taken to be the door to a broom closet. They went through.

  * * *

  They were in a room, she supposed. Or a space of some kind, or possibly no space at all. It was impossible to tell, for all her attention was sucked up and swallowed by what was before her.

  She stood before the Black Stone.

  It was enormous, three times higher than herself at a minimum. But as there was nothing to gauge its scale against, it might have been any size, larger than worlds, greater than stars. Its surface was smooth and irregular, almost glassy in places, pitted and whorled like that of a meteorite. Mostly, though, it was black and solid and real. Jane had no doubt whatsoever that it was the Goddess incarnate.

  "You may ask anything you want," the Baldwynn said, and left.

  Jane looked up at the Black Stone. For a long time she did not speak. Then she cleared her throat and asked, "Why?"

  There was no answer.

  "Why?" she said again. "Why is life so loathsome? Why is there pain? Why does pain hurt so much? Couldn't you have ordered things differently? Or did you have no more choice than we? Is there no such thing as choice? Are we nothing more than automatons? Why is there love? Did you create us merely so we could be punished? Why are we punished? What was our sin? How could a mother treat her own children so? Don't you love us? Do you hate us? Are we aspects of you? Are you so hungry for sensation that you incarnate bits of yourself as us in order to experience ignorance, fear, and pain? Is omniscience that bad? What is death? What becomes of us after death? Do we simply cease to be? Do mortals have only the one life? Were there other lives before this one? Did we do something unforgivable in them? Is that why you hate us? Will there be more lives? Will they be worse? Can even you die? If you hate us so much, why is there beauty? Does our misery rely on it? Would we be happier without beauty? Why is there joy? Exactly what do you want?"

  There was no answer.

  Jane stood before the Black Stone unmoving for what must have been hours, days, ages, before she finally turned away. The Baldwynn materialized at her side and, taking her elbow, steered her away.

  * * *

  The dark wood held no terrors for her now. Seventeen pairs of eyes opened suddenly in a nearby tree. They were merely eyes. Rubbery hands clutched at her. They were only hands. "Do you feel better now?" the Baldwynn asked.

  "Yes."

  "The Goddess has directed me to give you whatever you want."

  "Oh."

  "What do you want?"

  "I want to be punished," Jane said. She had no control over the words. They came out of her mouth without volition and she was amazed to hear what she had said. But she didn't want to disavow them. She knew the truth when she heard it.

  For a long time the Baldwynn did not speak. At last he said, "Will you serve the Goddess now? Knowingly and lovingly, in sweet obedience and humble acknowledgment of all that she is?"

  "No." The word was a pebble in her mouth. She spat it out. "Not now, not tomorrow, not if I live to be a million. Never."

  The Baldwynn stopped and took her hands in his. "Dear child," he said. "I feared there was no hope for you."

  * * *

  She was back in the lab again. Jane shook her head and hopped down from the stool on which she was sitting.

  Her mother looked up from the micromanipulator controls. "You're back," she said. "Did you have a pleasant visit?"

  Jane couldn't bring herself to speak. She wandered over to the bench and began picking through the sloppy mound of papers there. They were all photocopies of the same circular gene map. Each
had scrawls indicating the sequences that had been broken out and replaced, tested, and discarded. For all the hundreds of sheets there were, only a fraction of the possibilities had been worked through. "Lots of work here," she said inanely.

  "All of it negative." Her mother twisted up one side of her mouth. "Sometimes you wish you could grab the little bastards by their lapels and shake them, they're so obtuse. I tell you, I'd like to dump the lot of them in the autoclave and start all over again in some other line of work. Tending bar, maybe, or selling used cars."

  Abruptly it seemed to Jane that her mother wasn't talking about gene sequencing at all, but something at once greater and more personal. Her sudden agitation must've shown, for Sylvia gave her a perfunctory hug. "Oh, don't look so—it's only a passing fancy. I get these whims all the time, and they almost always go away on their own sooner or later." She released her. "It's not really their fault, is it?"

  "No."

  "It's just the way they're made."

  "Yes."

  Sylvia stubbed out her cigarette. Jane could tell by a certain horsey restlessness that she was anxious to get back to the electron microscope. "Well, kid, it's been lovely having you here. But right now I really do have work to do. Thanks for coming by, honey."

  "Yeah," Jane said. "Okay, sure. You take care, huh?"

  She started to turn away.

  "Wait," her mother said. "You've got something on you." She reached out and plucked a small black creature, much like a millipede, from Jane's collar. It wriggled furiously in the palm of her hand, twisting about, impotently stinging her again and again.

  Briefly it spread black wings. Jane flinched. She looked closer and saw that the mite was No. 7332, the dragon Melanchthon of the line of Melchesiach, of the line of Moloch.

  "I don't think you need this anymore," her mother said. In a matter-of-fact fashion, she crushed it between her thumb and forefinger.

  Aghast, Jane looked directly into her mother's eyes and saw something vast and alien within them, laughing. She realized then that Sylvia was only a mask for something impossibly huge and in that instant experienced a terror greater than anything she had ever imagined possible. Then a hand seized her by the scruff of her neck. It picked her up and put her down again somewhere else.

  — 24 —

  ON A COLD FEBRUARY AFTERNOON JANE WAS RELEASED FROM the institute. Her mother took the day off from work and drove her home in an old Subaru with a malfunctioning heater. They both smoked all the way. Neither said much.

  Jane got a job as a salesclerk in the mall. She took night courses, and within the year had her high school equivalency degree. She read all the chemistry texts she could get her hands on. The following September she was accepted at the local community college, where she could save money by commuting from her mother's house. By then she'd lost her excess weight, taken up tennis, and gotten herself into halfway good shape.

  It wasn't easy. There were days when she had trouble even getting out of bed, the prospects of her ever having a normal life looked so bleak. Often she had nightmares. In them she stood before the Black Stone again, demanding to be punished. Hostile intelligences thronged the shadows, snickering, and this time the meaning of the Lady's dread silence was plain. Come dawn, though, she would remember the expression on the Goddess's face in that last instant of their final encounter, just before she found herself alive again and restored to her own world. And she knew it for love.

  Surely, then, this was not punishment she had been given.

  Within two years she'd managed to absorb everything the department could teach her. After a long conference in late January Dr. Sarnoff began making phone calls on her behalf. By April he'd swung a working scholarship to Carnegie Mellon. Which was where she'd really wanted to go all along. They threw a little party for her and drank New York State pink champagne out of Erlenmeyer flasks, and she cried at the thought of leaving all her new friends. But did.

  Things really took off then.

  She got a combined bachelors and masters from CMU under an accelerated program for promising undergrads. Her doctorate was a lot tougher because her adviser believed that however good a student might be, she ought to be doing better. "If we settle for good," Martha Reilly liked to say, "we only sacrifice the chance for brilliance. But if we settle for brilliant, we're throwing away the chance for a first-rate chemist!" Reilly was a tyrant, but she bullied Jane into doing better work than she'd imagined herself capable of. More and more now, though, she found herself bumping her head against something basic, a place where the language of chemistry and her intuition of how it ought to work just did not come together.

  She jotted down a few things to help straighten out her thoughts. Her adviser saw them and suggested she base her thesis on them. So she did.

  Reilly made her rewrite it from scratch five times.

  The day after her orals, Diane came by to say there was a party in Squirrel Hill. It was the end-of-year blowout for a young physics instructor she knew and there'd be students there from Pitt and Chatham as well, so it wouldn't be just the usual crowd. Jane agreed that there'd probably never be a better time to get drunk and misbehave. She changed into a clean skirt and grabbed her purse.

  Diane found a parking space for her Miata that was only slightly closer to Schenley Park than it was to the party. When they got out, the smell of honeysuckle made Jane stop for an instant. It's spring, she thought wonderingly. No, summer. How quickly the time had passed. She closed the car door and the button popped up. She tried again.

  "Something's wrong with the mechanism," Diane said. "You have to lock it from the outside. Here, catch!"

  Jane tried to snag the keys with her right hand and knocked them to the ground. She was left-handed now; sometimes she forgot.

  "How's your mom taking it?" Diane asked when they were under way.

  "Well, initially it was 'I don't know how you can even consider working for pigs like Du Pont.' But now that I've decided to turn down their offer and go the academic route it's 'Jane, you can't! All that money.'" Jane shrugged. "Sylvia's okay. We've had our differences, but who hasn't? Where is this place, anyway?"

  "Three blocks up." The sidewalk led them past a line of Victorian brownstones. Stained glass numbers over the doors and asparagus ferns in the windows.

  Jane looked up and saw Dame Moon floating high in the sky. An abrupt and sourceless melancholy seized her then and she shivered. "I feel like a child in this world," she said quietly.

  "Hush! That's a fast ticket back to the institute. Did I tell you what Roger tried to pull last Thursday?" Talking lightly, Diane swept her down the street. By the time they got to their destination, Jane's mood had passed. "Here we are!" Diane cried and, returning to an earlier theme, "It's discouraging. Why is it so hard to find a good man?"

  "You think that's difficult? Try giving up smoking."

  "Oh, stop!"

  Laughing, they clattered up the stairs. Voices poured down on them. "If that's not the right party, it'll do until the real thing comes along," Diane said, and hammered on the door. A very drunk undergrad with a liberal arts haircut opened it and said, "Drinks are over there."

  They went in.

  The rooms were predictably charming, the usual clever arrangements of space appointed with a tasteful mix of the original hardwood fixtures and postmodern wall hangings. Students were crammed in everywhere. They found their host up in the loft with a braided, rather Nordic-looking piece of jailbait, waved, and got a couple of beers. Diane nudged Jane and pointed her bottle at an expensively framed print on one wall. A Piranesi. Out of the corner of her mouth she said, "Waddaya think—an original?"

  Jane trembled.

  "Oh, my God." She seized her friend's arm so tightly that Diane laughingly objected, and pointed to a man across the room. "Who is he? You've got to tell me." By chance, or possibly prompted by a comment from someone nearby, he looked up. Their gazes locked. Jane knew Diane must think she was making a fool of herself, but she didn't care,
she didn't care, she didn't care.

  "His name!" she said. "I've got to know his name."

  MICHAEL SWANWICK is the author of three previous, critically acclaimed novels: In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, and the Nebula Award-winning STATIONS OF THE TIDE. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and son.

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