Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick

  “She gave me a hug then, and told me she had never seen anyone do as well, that I would someday be more famous than she.”

  For a long moment the witch was silent.

  “I slipped through an open window and into the next room when Madame led Gregorian in. More silent than a wraith, I drifted from shadow to shadow, leaving not the echo of a footfall behind. I left the door open one fingerspan, so I could peer from darkness into light. Then I retreated to a closet within the second room. Through the crack of the door I could see their distant reflections in the mantel mirror. Gregorian was skinny, barefoot, and dirty. I remember thinking how insignificant he looked alongside Madame Campaspe’s aristocratic figure.

  “Madame sat him down by the hearth. A murmur of voices as she explained the rules. She drew away the fringed cloth that covered the box. Cocky as a crow, he placed his hand within.

  “I saw his face jump — that involuntary hop of the muscles — when she first touched the dial. I saw how pale he grew, how he trembled as she increased the pain. He did not take his eyes off of her.

  “She took him all the way up to seven. His body was rigid, his fingers spasming, but his head held straight and unforgiving, and he had not blinked. I think even Madame feared him then. Sitting there in his ragged clothes, his eyes burning like lanterns.

  “I was so still my heart did not beat. My immobility was perfect. But somehow Gregorian knew. His head rose, and he looked in the mirror. He saw me, and he grinned. A horrible grin, a skull’s grin, but a grin nonetheless. And I knew then that try though she might, she would never break him.”

  “I’m done now.” She set a piece of cheesecloth over the tray, and the bureaucrat followed her back inside, slim crescent moons winking at him one after the other from beneath the blanket.

  “What’s it good for?” he asked when they were both seated on the bed again, facing each other cross-legged, her vagina a sweet dark shadow within the protective circle of her legs. “The powder you make from dogs.”

  “We mix it with ink and inject it beneath the skin.” She rotated a hand before his face; in the shadows it was colorless, unmarked. “Each design represents a ritual the woman of power is entitled to perform, and every ritual represents knowledge, and all knowledge properly applied is control.” Suddenly a marking on her hand flared into light. It was a small fish, visible through the skin. “Turning the markings on and off at will is a reminder of that control.” One by one the tattoos flickered on: a pyramid, a vulture, a wreath of cocks. Stars flared into subdermal novae and struck fire to serpents, to moons, to alchemical elementals.

  “Mirandan microflora is all but incompatible with Terran biology. Injected beneath the skin, they can get enough nourishment to stay alive but not enough to grow. There they stay, starving and comatose until I awaken them.” Now all the tattoos were aglow. They climbed her arms almost to her shoulders.

  “How do you do that?”

  “Oh, that’s one of the very first things you learn, how to raise the temperature of your body. Here.” She lifted one of his hands. “It takes next to nothing. Concentrate on your fingertips, will them to be warmer. Think of hot things. Try to make them hot.” She waited, then said, “Well?”

  His fingertips tingled. “I’m not sure.”

  “You think it’s just power of suggestion.” A tiny starburst appeared at the tip of her finger, floated before his eye. “This is the first marking I received. Turn your finger hot, the goddess said, and it burst into light. I was so amazed. I felt then that my life had taken a great turn, that nothing would ever be the same again.” She was touching his leg gently, sliding fingers slowly up, rapidly down, stroke stroke stroke.

  “What goddess said?”

  “When someone teaches you that which is of spiritual value, you do not learn such things from a human: The person partakes of divinity, becomes as one with the godhead. Thus, when Madame Campaspe taught Gregorian and me, she was to us the goddess.” Her hand reached up, to stroke his penis, which almost without his noticing it had grown hard and aroused again. “Well! It’s time for me to be your goddess now.” She lay back, legs wide, and drew him atop her.

  “I want to talk about Gregorian,” the bureaucrat said uncertainly. She had him by both hands now, and was sliding him into her warm depths.

  “No reason we can’t do both.” She clasped him tight and rolled him over, so that she sat on top. “The ritual you are about to learn from the goddess, the way of controlling ejaculation, is known as the worm ouroboros, after the great serpent of Earth which eats its own tail forever and is replenished thereby: a perfect closed system, such as does not exist on the mundane realm, not even your floating metal cities.” She moved up and down on him slowly, graceful as a swan in moonglimmer, and he reached up to caress her breasts. “It has physical benefits that extend beyond the obvious, and is an excellent introduction to the Tan-trie mysteries. What specifically do you want to know about Gregorian?”

  His hands slid down the front of her body, touched gently the tip of her pinkness, moved to clasp her as she eased herself down on him: nipples, breasts, belly, chin. “I want to know where I can find him.”

  “Somewhere downriver, I’d guess. People say he has a permanent place in Ararat, but who can say? He doesn’t really need a permanent address, because he never allows people to find him.”

  “What about the people who pay to be changed into sea-dwellers?”

  “They don’t find him — he finds them. He’s looking for a special sort of person, isn’t he? Anxious to stay in the Tidewater, willing to change into a nonhuman shape to do so, ready to be convinced by Gregorian’s commercials, and rich enough to pay his prices. I’m sure he had a sucker list drawn up long ago.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Oh, it was years and years ago.” Her teeth played with his earlobe; her breath was warm on his cheek. “He was headed for Ocean when he finally left Madame, but he got no further than heliostat station seventeen. He met somebody there, and the next anybody heard, he was offplanet. Do you like this?” Her nails ran lightly up his sides.

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” She put her hands at the base of his spine and abruptly raked them up his back. He arced involuntarily, sucking in air. She’d left stinging tracks up his skin. “You like that too, and it surprises you, doesn’t it? I learned that with Gregorian; he became a god and taught me how close pleasure and pain lie to each other.” She laughed at him. “But one lesson per evening — pull out of me and lie down, I have something to show you.”

  She guided him over on his side, gently lifted one of his knees, and lowered her head between his legs. Playfully she kissed the tip of his penis, slid her tongue down its stalk, teased his balls with her lips. “Down here, this soft spot midway between your scrotum and your anus.” She tickled it with her tongue. “Can you feel it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Ease your left hand down here — no, from behind, that’s good. Now push at the spot I just showed you with the tips of your forefinger and middle finger. A little harder. Just so.” She reared up on her knees. “Now I want you to breathe in deeply the way I do, not from the lungs but from the abdomen.” She demonstrated, and the bureaucrat smiled at the solemn beauty of her breasts in the pale moonlight. Gently but firmly she moved his hand away. “It’s your turn now. Sit up for this. Draw in deeply and slowly.”

  He obeyed.

  “From the stomach.”

  He tried again.

  “That’s the way.” She leaned back on her hands, put her legs about his waist, and drew him close. “This time I want you to pay attention to your body. When you feel ready to ejaculate — not when it’s already begun, but just before — reach back and push down on yourself as I showed you. At the same time breathe in deeply, slowly. It should take about four seconds.” She waved a hand back and forth slowly four times, counting out the beats. “Like that. You can slow down while you’re doing that, but don’t stop entirely, okay?
”

  “If you say so,” the bureaucrat said dubiously.

  The tip of his cock was touching her. Undine steadied it, and slid forward, atop it. “Ahhh,” she said. Then, “You think it’s too easy, that if something so simple were as effective as I say, your mommy would have told you about it, eh? Well, whether you believe me or not is of no importance. As long as you do as I say, you can postpone ejaculation indefinitely.”

  He clasped her tightly, lay back beneath her. “I think—”

  “Don’t.”

  He followed the exercise faithfully, listening to his body and stopping the ejaculation whenever it threatened. The moon rocked crazily through the window. Then an astonishing thing happened. Shortly after one of the near-ejaculations, he had an orgasm. The sensation took him, and he cried out, seizing Undine with all his strength, and felt the small taste of God wash through him. Then the orgasm was through, and he hadn’t come yet. He was still erect, and strangely clearheaded, preternaturally aware and alert.

  “What was that?” he asked in amazement.

  “Now you understand,” Undine said. “Orgasm is more than just a squirt of salt fluid.” She was moving atop him, like a ship in the swell before the storm, her eyes half-lidded, her mouth open slightly. She licked her lips, smiled almost jeeringly. Her hair and breasts were sweaty. “You haven’t mentioned Gregorian recently. Have you run out of questions?”

  “Just the opposite, I’m afraid.” He played with one breast, tracing circles about the aureole, lightly tugging at the nipple with thumb and forefinger. “My questions multiply with each answer. I don’t understand why your mistress mistreated Gregorian so, why she tried to break him with pain. Surely that was counterproductive.”

  “With Gregorian it was,” she agreed. “But had it worked . . . There’s really no way to make you understand this without undergoing a similar experience. You’ll have to take my word for it. But when the goddess claims your life, the first thing she has to do is to shatter your old world, in order to force you into the larger universe. The mind is lazy. It’s comfortable where it is, and can only be driven into reality with pain or fear.

  “But this is never done with malice, but with love. At the end of her test, Madame hugged me. I thought she despised me, I believed I was about to die, and then she hugged me. I can’t tell you how good that hug felt. Better than anything we’ve done tonight. Better than anything I’d ever felt before. I cried. I felt wrapped in love, and I knew that I would do anything to be worthy of it. I would have died for that woman in that instant.”

  “But this didn’t happen with Gregorian.”

  “No.” She rocked slightly from side to side, moving him within her. “She never broke Gregorian. She tried many times, and each failed attempt made him stronger and more savage. And that’s why he’s going to kill you.” Abruptly she rolled him atop her. For a second he was afraid he’d hurt her with his weight. “Well, in the meantime,” she said, “I have my own uses for you.”

  He had four more orgasms before he finally came, and that final time was of an order of magnitude more intense than anything he’d ever felt before.

  He did not so much fall asleep as pass out.

  When he awoke, Undine was gone. Groggily he looked about the room: The furniture remained and a few discarded oddments. The fantasia lay on the floor, sad and a little tattered, several of the long rainbird plumes already broken. But there was an emptiness, a sense of abandonment, about the room; all personal touches were gone. He dressed and left.

  It was late in the morning. Prospero was already high in the sky, and the town was empty. Doors hung open. Bedthings lay where they’d been flung in the grass. The husk of last night’s fantasias littered the streets, like abandoned cicada shells. The bureaucrat strolled back to the center of Rose Hall, head clearing slowly, and felt like singing. His body ached, but pleasantly; his cock felt pink and raw. All he needed was a good breakfast to put him right with the world.

  Chu stood by a truck with the NEW BORN KING painted on the fender, and ARSHAG MINTOUCHIAN’S STRING THEATER and ILLUSARIUM OF HEAVEN AND HELL, THE TEN MILLION CITIES AND THE ELEVEN WORLDS in seven garish colors on the van’s sidewall. The bureaucrat remembered seeing it last night, shutters open and a puppet play in progress. Chu was talking to a fat, sweaty man with a fastidious little mustache. Arshag Mintouchian himself, evidently. “Have a good night?” she asked, and abruptly burst into laughter.

  The bureaucrat stared at her in astonishment. Then Mintouchian too began laughing.

  “What the hell’s so funny?” the bureaucrat demanded, offended.

  “Your hand,” Chu said. “Oh, I see you’ve had a night to remember!” Then they were off again, the two of them, soared aloft on gusts of laughter like kites.

  The bureaucrat looked at his hand. There was a fresh new tattoo there, a serpent that circled the middle finger of his left hand three times and then took its tail in its mouth.

  6. Lost in the Mushroom Rain

  “I’m the biggest thing you’ve ever seen,” Mintouchian’s thumb said. “Hey, I don’t want to brag, babe, but you’re gonna be sore in the morning.” It paraded back and forth, proud as a rooster.

  “Mmmm, I can see that,” said Mintouchian’s other hand, the one held closed with a long vulval slit between thumb and forefingers slightly ajar. “Come here, big boy!” He gaped it suddenly wide.

  Everybody laughed.

  “Modeste!” Le Marie called. “Arsene! Come and look at this.”

  “This isn’t really the sort of thing children should witness,” the bureaucrat demurred softly. Two pig farmers and one of the evac planners looked at him, and he reddened.

  But none of the youngsters came in from the next room. They were watching television, engrossed in a fantasy world in which people traveled between stars not in lifetimes but in hours, where energies sufficient to level cities were wielded by lone altruists, where men and women changed sex four and five times a night, where everything was possible and nothing was forbidden. It was a scream straight from the toad buried at the base of the brain, that ancient reptile that wants everything at once, delivered to its feet and set ablaze.

  The children sat in the darkness, saucer-eyed and unblinking.

  “I’m so good. I’m gonna stretch you all out of shape.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  It was raining outside, but the kitchen was an island of warmth and light. Chu leaned against a wall, drink in one hand, careful to laugh no more than anyone else. The room smelled of fried pork brains and old linoleum. Under the table Anubis noisily thumped his tail. Le Marie’s wife bustled about clearing away the dishes.

  The landlord himself brought out two more pitchers of blood mixed half and half with fermented mare’s milk. “Have another glass! I can’t give it away!” The skinny old man set a glass before Mintouchian. With a small, tipsy smile and a nod, the puppeteer interrupted his performance to accept it. He drank deep, leaving a thin transient line of foam on the bottom edge of his mustache. Other roomers held forth their glasses as he returned his thumb and fist to combat.

  “Don’t you want any?”

  “No, no, I’m stuffed.”

  “Try some! Do you have any idea how much this costs down North?”

  Smiling, the bureaucrat held up his hands and shook his head. When the old man shrugged and turned away, he slipped backwards out onto the porch. As the door was closing, Mintou-chian’s fist spat out a limp and subdued thumb.

  It giggled. “Next!”

  Raindrops fell like small hammers, so hard they stung when they struck flesh. The bureaucrat stood on the lightless porch, staring through the screens. The world was all one color, neither gray nor brown but something that partook of both and neither. A sudden gust of wind parted the rain like curtains, and gave him a glimpse of the barges anchored on the river, then hid them away again. A house and a half down the street, all of Cobbs Creek faded to nonexistence.

  Cobbs Creek was all hogs and lum
ber. The last of the pigs had already been butchered and hung in the smokehouses, but logs still floated down the creek to the mills, in a final fevered slashing of timber before the tides turned the trees to kelp. The bureaucrat watched the rain splash mud knee-high on the clapboard walls. It forced up the stale smell of earth from ground and road, tempered by the rising odors from the tomato bush by the herb garden and the red brick walkway around to the back.

  He felt sad and lost, and he could not stop thinking of Undine. When he closed his eyes, he could taste her tongue, feel the touch of her breasts. The nail tracks lingering on his back stung at the memory of her. He felt utterly ridiculous and more than a little angry at himself. He was not a schoolboy to be haunted so by the vision of her eyes, her cheeks, the warm amusement in her smile.

  He sighed, took Gregorian’s notebook from his briefcase, flipped idly through its pages. A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the will and not of the intelligence. There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or the scientific sense. Impatiently he skipped ahead.

  What is good? Whatever increases the feeling of power, the will to power, and above all else, power itself. Rereading the words, he could see the young Gregorian in his mind, the doubtless gaunt magician-apprentice, filled with that sourceless teenage hunger for importance and recognition. Men are my slaves.

  He put the book back, irritated by the naive posturing tone of its aphorisms. He knew this type of young man all too well; there had been a time when he was one of them. Then something tugged at his mind, and he took the notebook out again. There was an early exercise captioned The Worm Ouroboros. He read through the instructions carefully: The magician places his wand in the chalice of the goddess. The handmaid herself. … Yes, under the newly transparent allegory was the same technique Undine had taught him the other day.

  The people in the kitchen laughed again.