The Iron Dragon's Daughter

by Michael Swanwick

  It was late enough that the grigs and gaunts were out in force, rising up from the subway vents, service tunnels, and storm sewers, forming small cliques by the lampposts, watching the action from doorways. A wolf-boy stared at Jane, chewing on a finger. He spat out a knucklebone as they went past. "You don't know?" Puck said. "She was going to—"

  "Hey, college boy!" A behemoth slowed to a stop beside them and a grizzled old troll leaned his head out of the cab. He leered down at them, revealing brown teeth and hideous gums. "How come they ain't kicked you out yet?" He looked at Jane. "See ya got a new girlfriend."

  "Wicked Tom." Puck's grin was wary, insincere. "What's the good word?"

  They slapped hands and Jane caught a glimpse of a small plastic-wrapped package before it disappeared into her escort's pocket. The troll ran a hand over his brown-spotted head and in a lowered voice said, "Rumor is the bane has hit the street."

  Puck took a step back from the curb. "Oh no. I'm not touching that shit."

  "Nobody's asking ya to touch nothing," Wicked Tom said irritably.

  "Just find yourself somebody else."

  "Okay, okay."

  "I'm not in that business."

  "No? Well, too bad. There's good money in it."

  The behemoth snorted impatiently, and Wicked Tom disengaged the clutch and revved the engine to keep it in line. He winked at Jane. "Gotta go now—keep in touch, hear?"

  When the behemoth was gone, Jane asked, "What's the bane?"

  "Bad news. Don't get involved with it."

  In silence they returned to Hindfell and across the skywalk to Bellegarde. As Puck was turning away at the elevator banks, Jane said, "There's something I want to make clear. I am not a rich bitch, as you so charmingly put it."

  It took Puck a second to remember his earlier comment. When he did, he scowled. "Hey, I said I was sorry."

  "You listen to me! I'm here on scholarship, okay? I don't have any other source of income. No patrons, no job, no savings, no nothing. Only my scholarship, and the University just took that away. So what ebbs, must flow. The money's got to come from somewhere."

  "But your clothes—"

  "I stole them. These clothes are nice because if you're going to steal something, you might as well make it the best, right? So I just wanted you to know. I'm not rich or anything. I'm just doing my best to get by."

  "Hey, me too." Puck sounded amazed. "I mean, I'm not necessarily scholarship material, but my education means a lot to me. I'm going to the College of Pharmacology. I'm only going through all this crap to pay for it."

  "So okay. We understand each other now." Jane started to turn away. She was trembling a little, though whether from anger or the aftershock of fear, she did not know.

  But Puck lingered. "Um, listen. Maybe you'd like to go out sometime? We could go dancing, maybe." He saw her begin to shake her head, and lightly rapped his forehead with his knuckles. "What an idiot—I haven't charmed you yet." He dug about in his pockets, slapping his jeans, thrusting hands deep into his jacket. "You'll love this, it's as close to a foolproof charm as was ever made. If I can only—Ah. Here it is." From his jacket he removed the ghost of a rose. The petals were a red deeper than blood, with purple highlights. It was faintly but noticeably transparent.

  Bowing deeply, he presented it to her.

  When her fingers closed about the stem, the rose faded to nothing. And Puck was right. Jane was charmed.

  "So how about it?"

  He pocketed his shades and stared deep into her eyes. There was no mistaking his sincerity. Against her better judgment, Jane found herself liking Puck. There was solid stuff beneath his rough exterior. More than that, she felt enormously drawn to him. Something within her vibrated to his presence. "No," she said.

  * * *

  Jane was still a little stoned when she got back to her room from Jenny Greenteeth's study party. The radiator hissed and rattled, blowing little spit-bubbles from the air vent.

  It was a cold autumn afternoon. The City looked dull and inert through the window. Off in the distance, iron-dark anvil heads billowed. Black specks moved before them, storm hags in flight. A few leathery oak leaves, lofted high by who knew what winds, stuck wetly to the glass.

  Jane ratcheted the curtains shut and in the subdued light undressed herself. Monkey was away on a field trip and would not return until late tomorrow. She lay down on her bed and began to touch herself, unhurriedly caressing her breasts, running her palm down her belly. At first she thought about Puck, and then she thought about nothing at all.

  She lazily stared down between her breasts, past the swelling plain of her belly. Luxuriant hair grew thickly upon the round hill of her pubic mound. Sometimes she liked to imagine it was a forest and she the most diminutive of explorers, wandering through it. Her fingers slipped down to the opening of her labyrinth, felt moistness, and lingered. It was an enchanted forest, and silent. Not even birds sang in the branches. She wandered it, gazing about in wonder. Her fingers moved a little more quickly. Everything was hushed, expectant, waiting. Her fingers slowed. They began to tease out her clitoris. Far ahead there was a rise. In no hurry at all, by roundabout forest paths, she approached it.

  Simultaneous with her fantasy, Jane was aware of the dorm room about her, of the bed beneath and the ceiling above. As she played with her button, she felt as though she were rising, the bed shooting up under her with gathering speed, rocketing straight into the sky. The room fell away, the University and the City and all its buildings crumbling and falling down, farther and farther.

  The ceiling throbbed and spread out, thinning and attenuating. The first stars of evening appeared through its vanishing haze. They multiplied and thickened. Jane gasped and writhed on the bed. The sheets were bunching up underneath her. Faster now. The sky purpled.

  She was soaring.

  With a heightened sense of expectation, she began running up the slope. Trees flew by to either side. Faster and faster, in time to the urgent movement of her fingers, she ran, one with the Jane who, worlds away, was rocketing into the sky. She topped the rise and stared in wonder and disbelief.

  There was a cottage below.

  It was a low house, white, and alien in design, and though surely she could never have seen such a building, it was as familiar to her as a recurrent dream. An outbuilding abutted it, windowless but with a door that filled one wall. A short road, wide as it was, led to that door. On the roof was what must have been a television antenna, for it lacked the warding hexes a lightning rod would have had.

  Entranced, Jane followed a slow, winding path to the back door. It opened with a push, and she stepped into the kitchen. Heartbreakingly familiar smells wrapped themselves around her.

  A woman was there, and while reason said she must be a total stranger, yet something leaped up happily within Jane at the sight of her. She sat at a Formica-topped table, hunched despondently, head down. A bottle of whiskey and a half-filled glass stood by one elbow, an ashtray by the other.

  Jane tiptoed inside, afraid to speak, compelled to draw closer. The woman—her hair was dark, cut midlength and curly—did not hear. Jane touched her elbow. "Mom?" With a little shriek, her mother looked up.

  — 14 —

  MONKEY HAD GOTTEN INTO JANE'S SECRET CACHE. SHE KEPT it in a cardboard box under her bed with a layer of old pantyhose on top as camouflage. Monkey had hauled it out, dumped its contents on the floor, and pawed through them. Furious, Jane began to pick them up. There was the book she had stolen for the Lamia and which she intended to return to the library someday soon, the bundle of credit cards and ID she'd lifted from Galiagante's wallet, the pipe, hashish, and baby oil she kept in reserve for when she had the time and privacy for them, and a few cherished oddments from her days with Peter and Gwen. Nothing was missing. Monkey had been snooping for information.

  There was nothing in the box that would reveal its secrets to Monkey. Jane kept her things hidden not because she feared their discovery but because they had meaning f
or her and she didn't want anybody running their grubby mitts over them.

  Even in her anger, though, Jane felt uneasy. Something was up. Monkey was planning mischief. Jane knew how her roommate's mind worked—this was a message.

  There was a burst of laughter in the hall. The other Habundians were decorating their doors with kteis-wreaths in honor of the season. Later they would tear a hog's carcass apart and sprinkle its blood on all the lintels. Jane wasn't going to join them. Her mood was too dark these days for such simple pleasures. The dark and the cold had sunk their talons deep into her spirit. She had never known a winter to last so long.

  She drew the shade, shucked her clothes, poured the baby oil down her front, and smeared it about. On her third match she managed to fire up the hash pipe. In her distracted state it took almost an hour before she could transport herself Elsewhere.

  * * *

  "Tell me something about yourself." Jane caught up with her mother walking along a river bank at dusk. She clasped her hands awkwardly behind her back. Her mother strode along with her arms folded. Neither dared to reach for the other.

  "Well… I'm a beautician. Frank and I finally broke up seven years ago. Now I mostly live alone." She laughed raggedly. "It doesn't sound like much when it's put that way, does it? I do some volunteer work at the hospital."

  "Oh, Mom." She stared down at the stones passing underfoot, at the lines of driftwood and crack vials and plastic drink containers that marked the limits of the gentle upriver tides. She wanted to ask her mother so many things: How did you feel when I disappeared? What did you think happened? Did you search for me, and where did you search, and when did you finally give up? Somehow, though, she wasn't able to ask any of these things. They just never seemed to connect.

  "Is that a new blouse?" her mother asked suddenly.

  "What's wrong with it?"

  "Nothing's wrong with it. Why does something always have to be wrong? Only, don't you think it's a little plain? You could look so nice if you only took a little more care with your dress and your makeup. You have the bone structure for it."

  "Look, I have plenty of boyfriends, I'm not exactly lacking for attention, okay? So let's not get started on the makeup again."

  A sharp tone entered her mother's voice. "You aren't letting them take advantage of you, are you? That's the one thing I regret, that I didn't save myself for my wedding night. Don't you look at me like that. If you let them do what they want with you, they don't respect you afterward. Even your father. I'm convinced that if only—well, never you mind."

  A tanker, mysterious in the dim light, was off-loading oil across the river. They stopped to look at it. "Mom, I've been thinking. Maybe you shouldn't drink so much."

  Her mother stared at the ship, said nothing.

  "Listen, Mom. I don't think I'm going to be able to see you for a while. Exams are coming up. I'm going to be awfully busy. I might not be able to visit again until the winter's over. Sometime in the spring."

  Her mother shook her head, still not listening. "These dreams are so comforting to me," she said. "You have no idea. Even though I know they're not real, still I somehow feel that on some level they are. I'm afraid I'm not making myself very clear."

  "They're not dreams, Mom."

  "Hush, Jane."

  "Someday I'll be here for real. I'm working on it now, learning all I can. Someday I'll be coming home."

  "Don't." Softly, Jane's mother began to cry. "Don't, oh, don't. Don't do this to me."

  Jane felt an indescribable outwelling of love and guilt gush up within her then. Without thinking, she reached for her mother and knocked over the bottle of baby oil. The cap went flying across the room, and the oil made such a mess that it took her hours to clean it all up.

  * * *

  "Get up, old stone!"

  Dr. Nemesis slashed an ash-wood wand down on a gray chunk of rock. The wand broke into splinters. Her seminar students leaned over the counter, holding their breaths.

  The stone stirred and flowed upward, its outline shifting. Halfway to its feet it froze into inertia again, a half-formed thing that might suggest to the discerning eye a bias toward the anthropomorphous but nothing more.

  Brushing the ash-wand fragments to the floor, Dr. Nemesis said, "What have we proved?" Her fierce gaze swept through the students. None of them met it. "Miss Greenteeth. Answer immediately."

  "That stone is stronger than wood," Jenny replied, taking a chance. Often enough, Dr. Nemesis would accept a tautology, if it was delivered wittily enough.

  "That certainly does not apply to ebony and pumice," Dr. Nemesis snapped. Her students cringed as they were struck by the rotting-meat smell of her displeasure. "Miss Alderberry. Don't stop to think about it."

  "We've demonstrated that everything is alive." Dr. Nemesis frowned and Jane quickly emended her answer to, "That life is implicit in all matter. Even those things which seem inert to us are not so, but merely sleeping."

  "Embellish your thesis with an exemplar."

  "Uh, well, the vis plastica, for example. It's compounded of envivifying influences, so that mares and ewes standing in the leas with their backs to it are impregnated with new life. When it passes over the face of a cliff, the surface rock stirs with yearning for complex form and gathers into the images of uncouth beasts, of skulls and bones and coiled serpents that the ignorant take for archaic life ensorcelled into stone. Then the wind passes and with its enlivening influence gone, the normally low metabolism of stone returns and it falls into slumber again."

  "How does this prove your case?"

  "Because we know that nothing can be invested with qualities it does not possess. Purple light passing through a red lens can be made red through the removal of its blue component, but that same beam will not pass through a yellow lens, for yellow is not implicit to it. So life must be implicit in the stone if it can be made, even temporarily, to move and live."

  Dr. Nemesis rounded on a finch-girl. "Miss Peck-a-Bit. Supposing that the vis plastica did not turn away from the cliff, but instead blew over it for days on end, what familiar life-forms would it generate?"

  "Gargoyles and stonecrawlers."

  "Defend your thesis."

  "As was just said, things act in accord with their natures. The new life would retain its stony body and habits of mind. Which would include a fondness for vertical surfaces, a certain slowness of process and…"

  The seminar room was small and its radiators were set too high. They clattered and moaned in operation, throwing off so much heat that the windows steamed and wept. The air was stuffy too. Jane waited until Dr. Nemesis was looking the other way and lifted a hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn.

  Alerted by who knew what inner sense, Dr. Nemesis stiffened. She cast a sudden stern look over her shoulder at Jane. Those watery, pink-rimmed eyes hardened.

  "Excuse me, I—" Jane began.

  She stopped. The room was empty. Its warmth had fled. Gone was the pale winter light slanting through the windows, replaced by too large and dark a vista of entirely too many rooftops. It was, in fact, a different room altogether. She was in the graduate lounge on the top floor of Bellegarde. The embers of an industrial sunset burned low on the horizon.

  It was night.

  Numbly, Jane put her hand out to touch the plate glass window before her. It was reassuringly cool and solid. Pull it together, she told herself. What am I doing here?

  "Jane?" somebody said. "Are you all right?"

  A pale reflection swam up in the window beside her own. It rippled and resolved first into a skull and then into a face, slim and lovely, the sockets dark under the ceiling fluorescents. Jane's vision jerked back from the distance to focus on it.

  It was Gwen.

  With a gasp, Jane whirled. But behind her stood not Gwen at all but Sirin. She looked back at the window and could no longer make out Gwen's face in Sirin's image. "My dear!" Sirin took her arm. "Whatever is the matter with you?"

  "I—" With her back to the windo
w, Jane could see past empty couches into the hallway, where a murmurous flow of teachers and students was pouring through the doors of the Erlkönig Memorial Graduate Lecture Hall. "Dr. Nemesis tossed me out of her seminar. I can't remember anything since. I must have lost over half a day."

  The consequences of Dr. Nemesis's fit of pique struck her then with the force of outrage. Everything she had done since that instant—most of a day's classes, all her studying, encounters with friends—had been stolen away from her. "That bitch," she muttered. Then, angrier, "Well, fuck her! Fuck her three ways from midnight."

  "That's the spirit." Sirin draped a scholar's hood, the duplicate of her own, over Jane's head and steered her into the crowd. "Look pompous. I doubt anybody's expecting gate-crashers but…" She laughed. "Did you ever see so much tweed in your life?"

  "It's not as if it were deliberate." They passed through the mahogany doorway without incident. "I tried to—hey. Where are we going, anyway?"

  Jane favored seats near the top of the auditorium and to the side, where they were least likely to attract attention, but Sirin marched them down to row five left in the shadow of the podium, immediately behind four rows of faculty. Behind and to one side of the lectern the deans of the University sat patiently on folding chairs, like so many crows on a rail. "It's the Deep Grammar lecture, silly. I told you all about it at lunchtime, don't you remember?"

  Jane shook her head. Unheeding, Sirin said, "They only give this lecture once every ten years. The rest of the time they keep the speaker stored in the catacombs, sealed in a jar of olive oil."

  "Oh, they do not."

  "Seriously. I know a teaching assistant who helped decant him."

  A goat-headed administrator took the lectern. He cleared his throat. "There are too few heroes in Natural Philosophy. Yet tonight I present you not merely a hero but a warrior, indeed an academic berserker, one who has made a direct assault on the Goddess's most privy secrets. When he and his companions set out to assail her fastness and force her to surrender knowledge to them, they knew that this attempt might destroy not only they themselves, but the upper and lower worlds as well. But this did not deter them for an instant. For they had the courage of their convictions. They had intellectual honesty.