The Iron Dragon's Daughter

by Michael Swanwick

  For a long instant she hung on the edge of the precipice, ready to invoke Melanchthon by name. The syllables hovered a fraction of a second away from her tongue. But at even this faintest thought of them, nausea rose up within Jane, a perceptual queasiness so strong she almost threw up. Something half-uncoiled inside her brain.

  Her gaze unfocused and turned inward on the machine diagnostics, green lines unscrolling and multiplying upon themselves as if they had a life of their own. Schematicized, Melanchthon was a map of misery and disrepair, every break and gap where reconstruction was needed—lubricants, rewiring, replacement parts—glaringly obvious. There must have been a thousand such failures riddling the black iron body, and each one an obligation she had pledged her soul to heal.

  The presence of the dragon welled up beneath her, all iron and cold, cold blood. She felt like an ant on a moving mountaintop. An aura of sickness emanated from him, blackening the air, and the realization struck her for the first time that in his present state Melanchthon was a cripple, and like any crippled creature, dangerous in proportion to his strength and former vigor.

  Sanity returned to her, and with it, fear.

  With hands gone suddenly cold, Jane slapped off the interactives. The dragon's presence died away.

  It took her a while to pull herself together. When she did, she began to gather up her books. She was not going to invoke the dragon. Not tonight at any rate. Their next conversation would have to wait on a moment of far greater import.

  The printed pages, however, were unreadable to her now. Seven times she went over one before realizing she had not the slightest notion which text she had opened. She let it slip from her fingers, and rolled over on her back, staring blankly at the iron ceiling of the cabin.

  After a while she began to cry.

  Her loneliness seemed overwhelming, now, her isolation complete. Jane felt her inferiority like a physical blow. In a world filled with enchantment, she was nothing but a changeling girl, nothing but a high school kid, nothing but a little thief.

  — 7 —

  THE MATERIAL WORLD IS ULTIMATELY COMPOSED OF PRIMItive matter. No one has ever seen primitive matter, however, since it has only a potential existence until it is acted upon by form to create air, fire, water, and earth, and the near infinite number of elements that are admixtures of those four. Creation occurs in two exhalations. The Sun's heat acting upon the ocean causes a vaporous exhalation, which is both moist and cold, and its resultant compounds are therefore largely, but not entirely, composed of water and air. But when the Sun acts upon the land, there is a smoky exhalation, which is both hot and dry, and its compounds are mostly admixtures of earth and fire.

  Jane loved alchemy. She was fascinated by the elegance of it. From formlessness by way of two operations arose the four basic elements and all things that derived from them. An oak tree stripped down to its components was made up entirely of these four in combination. You could prove this by taking a log from that tree and applying sufficient heat. The unraveling would begin with the expulsion of flames and hot jets of air—the first two elements. As it burned, tarry liquids would bubble from the cut end of the log—water. Then, when calcination was complete, a residue of ash would remain, and this last was the final element of earth.

  "The smoky exhalation," said the pale man, "is masculine and the vaporous one feminine. Mercury is a womb in which embryonic metals can be gestated. This is why all the great alchemists are female."

  Female Jane wrote in her notebook, and underlined it three times.

  * * *

  "I don't see why anybody would want to be wicker queen anyway," Jane said.

  The others looked at her pityingly.

  "For the glory," Hebog said. "She gets to cut classes, skip finals, date whosofuckingever she wants, and ride in a great big float while everybody looks up at her and cheers. She even gets to wear a stupid little tiara." He hawked up a gob of phlegm and spat it out. "What's so hard to understand about that?"

  "Yes, but—"

  "Oh, don't be tedious." Salome skinned a slim pink cigarette from her purse and lit up without offering the pack around. She was a musty-smelling girl of vague origins with a long skull, perpetually damp hair, and the unfortunate habit of biting her toenails in class. Jane didn't exactly like her, but it wasn't as if she had a great deal of choice whom she could hang with. "This topic is boring me to distraction, daawling. Let's talk about something else."

  "Yeah." Ratsnickle took a casual swipe at Jane's head. "Change the record, dipshit."

  "Hey, speak of the devil, here comes Peter," Hebog said. "Peter, my man! What's the word?" He was a red dwarf and like many of his kind his moods swung precipitously between surly fatalism and a puppyish eagerness to please that bordered on the grotesque.

  "Yeah, hi." Peter of the Hillside nodded vaguely down at the dwarf, ignoring the others, and then, to her amazement, addressed Jane. "Listen, I hear you know how to lift tapes from that store down to the mall."

  "Yes," said Jane. "I can do that."

  "Well, could you tell me how? This rusalka chick I'm seeing, you know what they're like. She wants me to get her this one particular tape, you know, and I'm flat out of money."

  "Jane never—" Hebog began.

  She quelled him with a look. It was her own decision to make, after all. To prove it, she said, "Okay. I've got this little red leather purse, see. I carry it in my right hand with the flap unsnapped, so I can slide in a cassette with my left when nobody's looking." The others, Salome in particular, were listening with interest; normally she didn't share her methodology. Ratsnickle's eyes were narrow slits of concentration.

  "But what about the security gate?"

  "That's why a purse instead of just shoving the cassette into your pocket. I go to the gate and just as I'm starting through, I see a friend out in the mall, okay? So I've got to call out to her, right? So it's like: Salome!" She squealed the name as if amazed and delighted, going up on her toes and waving her purse-hand high to draw her friend's attention. A step carried her through the imaginary gate and she brought her hand down. "You see? The purse actually goes over the gate, not through, but it all happens so naturally that store security doesn't think twice."

  Her friends laughed and clapped their hands. "She's got a million of 'em," Hebog said proudly.

  "That's no good," Peter said. "That'll only work for a girl." He started to turn away. "Well, thanks anyway."

  "Wait," Jane said. "What tape do you want?"

  "The new Conjunction of Opposites album. It's called Mythago."

  "I'll get it for you. As a favor. Come see me tomorrow."

  "Yeah?" He squinted, as if noticing her for the first time. "That's really nice of you."

  When Peter was gone, Ratsnickle said, "Why did you go and tell him a thing like that?"

  Jane didn't know why. She had acted on impulse. "He's kind of cute." She shrugged.

  "She's sweet on him," Hebog said. "Talk about hopeless! That boy is doomed. You can see it written on his face."

  "'As was prophesied Beneath the Mountain,'" Salome said mockingly, "'and y-carven in Runes ain spear's-haft deep even in its granite Heart.'"

  "Hey!" Hebog clenched his fists and glared up at her. "That's not funny."

  Ratsnickle stepped between the two and pushed them apart. "Shut up, Salome. You too, Hebog." He favored Jane with a withering look, as if it were somehow all her fault. "He's right, though. It's worse than hopeless. That rusalka bitch Peter's seeing, you know who she is?"

  "No," said Jane.

  The bell rang, signaling the end of recess. Salome threw down her cigarette. "Well, back to the mines."

  "Fuck you too," Hebog said.

  Jane caught up to Ratsnickle at the door, took his arm, and said, "Who?"

  He smirked. "Gwenhidwy the Green. Oh, come on now, don't shake your head like that. You know Gwen. Yes you do—it's the wicker queen herself."

  * * *

  Because she spent so much time in the mal
l, Jane aged more rapidly than the other girls in her class; it was possible to spend days on end within that glamourous domain and reemerge into a world no older than it was when she went in. Jane did a lot of schoolwork there. She was catching up in her studies, and only the predetermination by her teachers that she was stupid kept her from being promoted out of the pale man's tutoring sessions.

  "What happens to the wicker queen?" she asked him that afternoon.

  He stopped reading, looked directly at, through, beyond her. "You know what happens to the wicker queen."

  "Yes, but why?"

  "It's a tradition." He returned to the text. "Words which are transliterations from the Arabic via a metathetical process include 'Abric,' more accurately transcribed as al-kibrit, for sulphur; Alchitram,' from al-qitran, for pitch; Almagest,' or al-majisti for—"

  "Why is it a tradition?"

  "It just is."

  "But why?"

  The pale man sighed. It was a singularly passionless sigh, and yet the first ghost of emotion Jane had ever yet caught the pale man at, and as such shocking. He put the book aside. "There are things," he said, "which may be known, and these we study in order to gain in understanding and increase our power. Alchemy, metaphysics, and necromancy are such fields of knowledge, and on them and their sister sciences are based the whole of our industrial civilization. But there are other, darker things which will not yield to the intellect. The intent of the Goddess is neither known nor knowable. She makes us dance, male and female, in ever-converging gyres that bring us ultimately each to our own destiny, and that destiny is always the same and never escapable. She does not tell us why."

  "You said there were no outside forces ordering our lives. That there was nothing but chance and random occurrence."

  He shrugged.

  "You did!"

  "The Goddess is unknowable and her aims unfathomable, unpredictable, and ineluctable. They might as well be random. We live our brief lives in ignorance and then we die. That's all."

  "But the rest of us just die sometime. The wicker queen dies this year!"

  "Have you even listened to me?" With short, violent motions, he stabbed a fresh cigarette into his mouth and lit it, throwing the paper match away so that it bounced angrily from the chalkboard. "The Goddess wants blood. And what the Goddess wants, she shall have. One way or the other. If the occasional sacrifice averts her desire from us, why then it is a case of the greatest good for the greatest number."

  "Yes, but—"

  The pale man stood—it was the first time Jane had seen him stand—and strode to the window, tracing a fine blue line of tobacco smoke across the room. The panes were festooned with construction-paper flowers, priapi, eggs, taped up to welcome in the spring and already turning white at the edges. He stared through the streaked glass and the mesh grating, though there was nothing to be seen from here but the back of the gymnasium and the loading dock for the shop.

  "I am not from here," he said. "But where I did come from, there was a young fool who loved not a wicker queen but an orend who was chosen to be the blood-maiden for a new housing project. She had hair like flame and skin as clear and unblemished as a lampshade.

  "He was a scholar and wore a black robe. Like you, he thought that it was possible to outwit the Crow-god. So he made a simulacrum of his orend out of flowers. It was a brilliant piece of work. When the flower lass was burned she struggled and screamed most convincingly.

  "Covertly they moved to a far city where he found work as a substitute teacher. He rented a room with money we—they—had saved. He bought a mattress and a television first, and then later an icebox, a couch, and a bed. They were reasonably happy.

  "But a night came when the air was filled with owls and omens. The television set groaned and wept blood when they turned it on. There had been a fire in the housing project. Two hundred died. Her eyes turned a milky white then. Her hair lifted and sizzled with electricity. Oh Goddess, she cried, what have we done?

  "He comforted her as best he could—but how good was that? The facts could not be changed. She should have burned. There was no denying her guilt. It festered and turned to a fever so hot within her that her skin blistered and flaked. I—he—would wake in the night to find the bedclothes smoking and about to ignite. It was necessary to keep a bucket of water close to hand at all times.

  "Once I opened my eyes to a hideous blue light. She was an acetylene flare, hissing and spitting in the center of the room. In a panic I threw the blanket about her, smothering the flames. When she was herself again, I put her to bed. In the morning she would not speak to me. She wept and no tears came out. Only steam.

  "Day after day, this went on. I cropped her hair short to prevent spontaneous combustion. I threw away all the matches so she could not eat them. I unplugged the appliances for fear of an electrical fire. Before I left for work each morning, I drenched the rugs and threw water on all the walls. Then I locked her in and pocketed the key.

  "By that time her speech was barely intelligible. She sputtered and rattled like a teapot. Her skin had hardened and it crackled when she moved. She was more reptile than woman. Her eyes did not blink when she stared at me. Sometimes she was taken with the awen and would prophesize."

  Jane could barely breathe. "What did she say?"

  "You are too young."

  The pale man was silent for so long then that Jane half-thought he would never speak again.

  But when he did speak, his voice was normal once more, emotionless and flat. "One evening I came home and found she had put towels at the bottoms of the doors and windows, turned on the gas, and stuck her head in the oven. All my efforts had been for nothing. She had died, but not well.

  "I bowed to the Crow-god then, and made my sacrifice to him." He shrugged. "Let me be frank. By then, it was a relief."

  The pale man picked up his book and returned to the lesson. But Jane could not concentrate. Her mind was full of the vision of Gwenhidwy the Green, clad only in her beauty, swinging within a wicker cage hung over the fifty-yard line. The bleachers were full, and all the school assembled. She smelled the gasoline. Flames leapt up. Everyone roared.

  Gwen was burning like a moth in a candle, and screaming too.

  * * *

  It was a vision that stayed with Jane through her classes and all the way home. The ground crunched underfoot where she crossed the landfill, rusty tin cans grinding against each other beneath the soil. She walked carefully, afraid of turning an ankle. Inside the dragon, she kicked a stack of underwear from the pilot's couch and patched herself into his sensorium.

  "Hello," she whispered. "It's me again."

  No response.

  7332's vision was focused tightly on the ground. Jane started to raise it up and then, curious, returned it to the original settings. It took her a minute to figure out what he was up to.

  He was watching the meryons.

  Jane had never paid much attention to the six-legged folk. They were the smallest of all intelligent creatures, the remote descendants of pixies, reduced by the evolutionary processes of aeons to the stature of ants. Simplification had stripped them of passion, gallantry, honor, and ambition. Their wars were butchery. They had no literature or songs. They loved nothing but toil. She could not understand why 7332 would be watching them.

  Tiny figures scuttled through the weeds, lugging scraps of metal thrice their size. Wisps of smoke from their underground forges rose here and there among the weeds, faint and blue. They'd be mistaken for ground haze at a distance.

  A meryon trundled down an almost invisible trail pulling a wagon laden high with three chokecherries. Where a dirt bike had left a rut in the ground, two straws had been laid across it an axle's width apart to form a bridge. At the far end stood a minuscule amazon with a metal-tipped spear the length of a carpet needle. She waved the laborer past.

  The carter pulled his load to the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner emerging from the dirt and disappeared within its maw. Jane blinked and in an instant of
perceptual giddiness she realized that what looked like a scattering of trash beneath the trees was actually a well-ordered village. Here a pipe stem served as a fireplace for a buried hut with an egg carton roof and acorn-cap chimney pot. A coffee can half-sunken in the ground was a Quonset hut, within which were stabled a matched pair of field mice, broken to harness and available to haul the really big loads. Roads were being devised, widened, and camouflaged with plant cuttings. A rusting sadiron attached by a hundred threads to straining teams of June bugs served as a grader for the larger thoroughfares.

  The meryons were everywhere in motion, tireless microengineers, wee masters of bricolage. A mayonnaise jar, shaded by three oak leaves stitched into a conical roof, held a reservoir of water, and a system of soda straws was being devised to pipe that water into every hidden house and den in the hamlet.

  Jane was entranced.

  She watched them until the light failed and there was naught to be seen but the occasional glowworm spark of a lantern carried in the invisible fist of a border guard and the ghostly light from a prototype methane gas production plant. For all their lack of individual complexity, meryon society taken as a whole was as intricate and inherently fascinating as a crystal pocketwatch.

  Abruptly Jane looked up and realized that she was stiff and tired and still had homework to do. Well, she could afford to miss the occasional assignment; it wasn't as if any of them were expecting anything much from her.

  Then she remembered that she had promised Peter she would lift the Conjunction of Opposites tape for him that night. "Shit!" There was still time to catch the shuttle to the mall, but only just. Anyway, she really didn't want to have to run to make the connection at this time of night, skip into the Cineplex for a quick nap so she wouldn't make any foolish mistakes, buzz the music store, cop a tin of something-or-other to kill her hunger, find a free bench and crack the books, then hurry back out to catch the Red Eye Express. It was too much work for just a casual promise.