In darkness?"
There was a strange, unworldly beauty to the song. Fleetingly Jane had a shivery glimpse of what it might be like to have Melanchthon subservient to her, broken to her will, undiminished in strength and intelligence but compliant. "Pussies!" Melanchthon roared. "If you had any self-respect, you'd eject those parasites and join with me. Cocksuckers! Slaves!" But the singing went right on, uninterrupted. A forest of chaotic waterspouts separated them from their pursuers, but by slow and steady increments the distance was shrinking.
"I'm not dead yet!" she shouted at them.
Heedless, her pursuers sang the dirge to completion. The song did not distract them from the business at hand but, rather, served to focus their concentration. When it ended, they were closer than they had been when they'd begun.
"Slide aside, Rocket," Hawk drawled, "and I'll loose an AAM."
"No."
"Hey, trust me on this one. I'm that close to a lock."
"No!"
"We're coming up on the turnaround point," Spitfire said. "We've got fuel enough for another two-three minutes if we expect to get back to base intact. Give us our target!"
"No, I've got her." Rocket's dragon hung tantalizingly on the edge of Jane's blind spot, flickering in and out of her peripheral vision. Ironically, his proximity was sheltering her from his comrades' missiles.
"Rocket, get the fuck out of my way!"
"A three-way convergence and release, boss-man. That's how the book calls it."
"I've got her, I tell you."
He was drawing slowly closer, into the hammerlock slot, where no conceivable evasive tactic could dislodge him. Even if Rocket's dragon weren't younger, stronger, faster—and Jane had no reason to doubt that he was—she was no pilot. She had not a fraction of Rocket's fighting skills.
Spiral Castle was getting closer, but slowly, too slowly.
"Here comes the moment of truth," Melanchthon muttered. On the navigationals Jane saw four pinpricks of light creeping up on a curved orange line—the extremes of the dragons' range. None could cross it and hope to return home alive.
Already, Hawk and Spitfire were reining in their frustrated mounts, veering off well short of the line. As their commander failed to follow, they called to him in voices suddenly fearful:
"Heads up, Rocket!"
"Yo, buddy! Turn back."
"Rocket!"
Jane squelched their fading voices. On virtual she saw Rocket's face, his eyes fixed on her own virtual image. In the false-color exteriors, she could make out the curved line of her own contrail, visible in the high UV and low IR frequencies, the superheated ion trace of a hundred true names painstakingly gathered and now being squandered in one prolonged and reckless burst of speed. Rocket's dragon was almost to the orange line.
"Now I'm giving you one last warning—turn back!"
"No chance," he said grimly. "We're going down together."
"You wish!" she crowed.
Over the screens Rocket looked like a young god. The battle-light blazed furiously about his face. It snapped and crackled in the cockpit. His fleeing fellow warriors must have said something to him, for his face suddenly twisted. "She's mine!" he yelled. "Nobody nails her but me!"
"Come and get me, loverboy!" Jane jeered. "Anything you can catch, you can have!"
Rocket's dragon crossed the line.
"Shit," Melanchthon muttered in so dark a tone that it cut right through Jane's exultation.
"Shit? What do you mean—shit?"
"Work it out for yourself."
8607 was in Jane's blind spot now, just off to one side of her exhaust, hanging out of range of her guns. But not out of range for his missiles. She slammed her dragon right, left, left again. Rocket hung onto her with effortless grace. He wasn't going to turn back. And Spiral Castle was still far, far away.
"We can't outfly him!" Jane cried in sudden despair. "We're not going to make it."
"Then give me the mestizo's true name."
"What?"
"His true name," Melanchthon growled. "I've got the programming and I know how to use it. Give me his name and I can command him to destroy his mount under himself."
"No!"
"I know you have it. It burns in your brain like a lodestar." The dragon reached dark tendrils into her. She could easily have shut him out by snapping his electrical systems quickly off and on. But at these speeds, they could not afford even the briefest distraction. It would have killed them both.
"Rocket," she cried. "Turn back! Turn!"
The dragon's touch was deliberately foul in a crude and cartoonish way, like a hand dipped in black molasses and dragged across the front of a white cotton blouse. Quick as a wet rat on a garden wall, it scuttled into her hoard of memories.
It was totally irrational, she knew. There was no safe place he could go. "You've got to listen to me!" She heard him chuckle, a low and nasty noise compounded equally of desire and tears. "Rocket!"
The squeal of a second air-to-air being brought on-line sounded on the tracking systems. A sharp beeping as it searched for a radar lock. A glad cry as it found it.
"His name!" The dragon was closing on his prey. Jane resisted, throwing out random snapshot recollections in his way: Ratsnickle standing, prick in hand, sneering at her. Gwen trying on a new necklace. Smidgeon sitting in the shadows behind a scrap iron box, weeping, while Rooster looked on in disgust. Being dragged up the twisting spine of House Incol—Melanchthon snatched greedily at what he saw there.
"Kunosoura!" he cried, just as the missile was launched.
For the space of an eyeblink Jane saw a spherical wave front race away from them at Mach One. There must have been some tangential influence to Rocket's half sister's true name, for at its touch the missile veered crazily, spinning end over end toward the glowing ocean. A rising dome of blistered white touched it and without transition the missile simply ceased to be, melted back into its own potential. Lesya's true name as well collapsed upon its own syllables and ceased to be.
A third missile was being brought up. Jane could hear its voice in her earphones, and Rocket's too. He was crooning quietly to himself in a crazed kind of amalgam of anger, lust, and despair. "Come on, baby. A little closer. Yeah. Yeah, I've got you now. I've got you sweet and nasty." He held 8607 tight and steady behind her, just off-range from her guns. The beeping began. "Ohhh yeah, you're mine now."
"Does your word mean nothing?" Melanchthon demanded. "You've been lying to yourself all along, fantasizing that you could provoke your half-breed leman into stopping you from your actions, rescuing you from their consequences, knocking the dagger aside, sweeping you up in his arms and carrying you away to a pink, warm, satin-coverleted bed where you'll be as safe and comfy as two maggots in an acorn forever. Bullshit! It doesn't matter how he feels or what he wants. He can do nothing now but kill you. The universe has backed you into another corner—you can kill or die. There are no other choices. Doesn't that make you angry? Doesn't it make you want revenge? Or are you going to truckle to Dame Fate one more time, to be crushed and for all I know resurrected to run the maze of torment again and yet again? Stand up on your hind legs for once!"
A glad cry arose from the third missile.
"His name!"
It was inevitable. There was nothing else she could do.
"Tetigistus," Jane murmured.
Melanchthon roared his triumph as the missile, caught in the act of launching, exploded directly in front of 8607. Rocket's dragon tumbled away in pieces.
Jane couldn't watch. She was crying with rage.
Kill the Bitch, she thought desperately. The spikes were rising wildly about her, hundreds of them, twisting like tornadoes. If I have to die, let these be my last words, my final thought. Kill the fucking Bitch. Her heart was racing. Kill the Bitch kill the Bitch kill the Bitch kill the Bitch. The words ran together in her mind, becoming a scream, a mantra, a kind of hysteric prayer, a last grudging acknowledgment of the Goddess's power.
&nb
sp; Spiral Castle grew larger and larger, filling her vision with its chalky white walls. Jane felt like a gnat assaulting a continent. Melanchthon was laughing—laughing!—as they flew, all weapons firing, the pure embodiment of madness and destruction. The dragon's iron body shuddered spasmodically as two by two the missiles were launched. I am the shattering stone, Jane thought. I am the arrow in flight. It was her own thought, but it tasted like the dragon's. The cabin was heating up, sweat tickling down Jane's face and pouring from her armpits and down her sides, where her body was already slick and itchy. She didn't give a damn. This was what she had been born for, built for, plotted for tedious years of exile from the skies to attain.
This was the death of everything.
* * *
But as Spiral Castle continued to swell, filling the universe, and the ocean grew strangely still beneath them, something began to happen to the dragon.
It started as a failing responsiveness at the tips of his wings and spread rapidly. Columns of alphanumeric readouts sank toward zeros. His extremities numbed. All feeling was lost on the skin. Great masses of status data went flat. Wisps of white mist obscured the quantum ocean below. They were flying through a tepid, oxidizing milkiness. Patches of corrosion grew upon the dragon's exterior. Holes appeared in his skin.
The atmosphere was eating away Melanchthon from the outside in.
"What's happening?" Jane cried. "What's happening?"
The controls did not respond.
"Torment and buggery!" the dragon howled. "Damnation, death, and red agony, I say—fuck the elves, fuck the Tegs, fuck the dwarves, kobolds, Nimble Men, and grims. Fuck them all in every rank and degree. I fix on them the eye of death. I call down on them the word of wrath. I curse them with the cry of guilt. Damned be they and all their lords and powers and masters and matriarchs."
"What can I do? Tell me what to do!"
Great chunks of the dragon's substance tore away. Jane was deafened by the hideous screeching sound of metal being ripped apart. An engine exploded and fell away. She was slammed one way and then the other. Most of the dragon had broken up and what remained was melting away and still he raged, raged against the Goddess, against life, against the very fact of existence.
"Tell me!"
Melanchthon's voice rose in a wordless howl as he unraveled toward nullity.
"I'm sorry," Jane said quietly. "I'm sorry it had to end this way."
No words remained to the dragon. His language systems had been destroyed. But the empathy between him and Jane was great enough that she could still decode the emotion modulating his dying cry: It was satisfaction that she was going to die too and regret that it would be quick.
The scream was the last to go, growing suddenly faint and then rapidly trailing off into a whimper and then silence.
He was no more.
For the briefest instant, Jane continued going without him. Momentum carried her forward with undiminished speed through the lukewarm whiteness. Their destination was growing infinitely larger without getting at all closer; she might fly forever and never reach it. Jane had just time enough to realize that they had never really had a chance at all, that Spiral Castle was by its very nature proof against the very best efforts of women and dragons.
Then she died.
— 23 —
SYLVIA, WEARING A STAINED WHITE LAB SMOCK, WAS LEANing over an electron microscope.
"Mom?" Jane said wonderingly.
"Shhh." Without looking up, Sylvia jabbed a cigarette in the corner of her mouth. "Light this for me, would you, sweetie?"
Jane complied.
"Little buggers." Her mother sucked deep, blew the smoke out her nose. "They really do try, but it's so hard to make the cretinous things understand what I want of them."
The laboratory was alarmingly ordinary-looking: Cinder block walls painted an undistinguished beige, ebony-topped lab benches, no windows. It was inexplicable. The last thing Jane remembered, Melanchthon was falling apart in the white mists above the quantum ocean. And now this. Her head buzzed. She had that same strange, spacey feeling she always got about an hour after dropping acid, just before the rush hit. "Where am I?" she breathed.
"You're in Spiral Castle," said a male voice.
She whirled.
The newcomer was dressed in a pin-striped suit with unfashionably narrow lapels. He wore a dapper black derby whose brim curled up in two short horns. For all that his face was wrinkled and wizened, a lively amusement sat deep in his eyes. His mouth puckered up into a smile.
"Miss Jane," the Baldwynn said. "A pleasure to see you again."
Jane gaped at him.
"If you'll permit me." He took her arm. "It is my honor to be your cicerone."
"My what?"
"Your guide." With a tip of the hat to Sylvia, he began leading Jane toward the door. "Spiral Castle is so very large, after all, and there are parts of it you wouldn't want to stumble into by mistake." His stride was long and vigorous. Jane hurried to keep pace.
* * *
"When I was young I had a Trans Am." The Baldwynn's voice was warm and confidential but not particularly strong. Jane had to walk with her head down to hear him. The empty silence after the slam of a screen door echoed in her ears, but she had no memory of hearing the screen door slam.
"That was a very serious muscle car, and I'd put a lot of work into it. I had a gig at the Navy Yard then as a welder, and whenever they laid us off for a few weeks, I'd get a buddy to go in on the gas with me and we'd drive down to Fort Lauderdale on U.S. 1, taking turns at the wheel, with a thermos of black coffee and a pocketful of amphetamine to save us having to spring for a motel. We'd crank the radio up loud and listen to, oh, Queen, T. Rex, maybe a little early Springsteen. Whatever the local deejays were putting out. Zooming along with that wash of electrons singing down on us from the ionosphere, as if the machineries of the night had been given voice. When you've been driving long enough, the highway gets behind your eyes and you feel a kind of floating Zen sensation. You become very still. Only your hands move, and the steering wheel. The world flows by beneath you."
Jane frowned, trying hard to follow his narrative through the tangle of unfamiliar terminology. A branch cracked underfoot. She looked up and saw they were treading a path through a dark wood. The branches of the trees were leafless and ended not in twigs but human body parts. One nearby was all hands, unmoving in the breathless air. A clear fluid gathered under the nails, formed drops on the fingertips, and fell to the loam with a sad, final plop.
"One time, passing through the Carolinas somewhere between 2:00 and 3:00 A.M., Jerry-D and I picked up a white Lotus with two blonds in it. We honked and waved. They gave us the finger and put the pedal to the metal. I did the same, of course, but even with dual carbs it was no contest. We had a muscle car but they had a sex machine. They made us eat their dust."
The land rose to either side of the trail. Jane looked up at the distant, slanting trees and saw no horizon. She raised her sight higher and higher, until finally she saw the woods looping far overhead and down on the other side again. They were walking through an immense tube or tunnel. It twisted dizzyingly, an artery fleeing the dark heart of some unimaginably huge body. The chimeric, half-human trees closed about them.
"Ten-fifteen miles down the road we saw the Lotus in a Roy Rogers lot. We pulled in for some take-out burgers. There they were. We struck up a conversation. When we left, Jerry-D went with the driver of the Lotus. Her friend went with me."
"This wasn't our world, was it?" Jane managed to ask the question only with difficulty. When the Baldwynn was speaking, his words carried her along compulsively; she followed him effortlessly. Otherwise, it was hard for her to concentrate. "Not the upper world, I mean. It must've been in the lower world."
"Oh, you don't believe there's any serious difference between the two, do you? Anyway, there I was, a blond in pink hot pants rubbing up against me. I had my foot to the floor, her tongue in my ear, and her hand down my pants. I pu
shed up her halter top and squeezed her breasts. The air shimmered with the immanence of revelation. Little Richard was singing 'Tutti-Frutti' on the radio and it somehow seemed significant that what I was hearing had been electromagnetically encoded, transmitted as modulated radiation, reconstructed by the radio as sound, and only reinterpreted as music somewhere within the dark reaches of my head. I felt then that the world was an illusion and a rather shabby one at that, an image projected upon the thinnest of membranes, and that were I to push at it just right, I could step out of the world entirely.
"I unbuttoned her shorts. She wriggled a little to help. I slid my hand under her panties. I was thinking that everything was information when I found myself clutching an erect penis.
"I whipped my head around. The blond was grinning wildly into my face. My hand involuntarily tightened about her cock. Her hand tightened about mine. They might have been the same hand. We might have been one person twinned. The car was up to about 100 mph. I wasn't even looking where we were going. I didn't care.
"It was in that instant that I achieved enlightenment."
Something turned underfoot. Jane stumbled and, turning, saw that a hand sprouting from the roots of a nearby tree had seized her shoe.
She gasped and snatched her foot away.
The shoe fell free. The hand pushed it into a mouth that opened in the trunk and began to gnaw it down. Jane made no effort to regain the shoe, but hobbled after the unflappable Baldwynn. "I did my best to stop your coming here," he remarked. "Spiral Castle can be particularly dangerous when you arrive early."
"I don't understand!" she cried. "What does your story mean? Tell me what it means."
"But such things can only be explained by the Goddess," the Baldwynn said in a genially puzzled tone. "Who am I to speak for the Goddess? I am but her consort—and I am far from being the only one, I assure you. You can ask any questions you like when you meet her."
"I thought there wasn't any such thing as the Goddess. I thought she was a metaphor."
"Most certainly the Goddess exists. I am taking you to her now."
The Iron Dragon's Daughter Page 39