“Osmond-you’re-drunk.” Humphrey says it so automatically it comes out as one word.
“To love, marriage, and virgin sacrifice. To this saintly girl, this woman, whose virtue we hold in our thrall.” Osmond folds his hands around the wine stem, saying grace. “Our baroness, who art in Wonland, forgive us for our vampirism, as our ruined family consumes you, forever and ever, amen.”
“Baroness, let me apologize for my brother. He can be quite cruel.”
“The cruelty is yours, mon frère. Perhaps she should marry me instead of your wretched son.”
“Fuck yeah! You guys would be perfect!” Ripple blasts out a laugh.
Pippi swiftly joins him: “What a charming sense of humor, Duncan. Like the old comedians: ‘Take my wife, please!’ But I’m dating myself. Humphrey, who did the sponge-painting in here? It’s exquisite.”
“I’d sooner see this maiden play the harlot to a den of Torchtown brigands than carry his slavering imbecility forward another generation.” Osmond sloshes in Ripple’s general direction. “And I would wager, so would she.”
A heat radiates from Swanny’s heart outward, a feeling like rage but not as unpleasant. She stares at Osmond, who shatters his now-empty glass on the floor and lunges for the nearest decanter. Impossible. In this house, she never would have expected it: he’s outraged on her behalf.
Pippi snaps her fingers. “Wheel him away, waiter,” she says, as if he’s the dessert cart.
Humphrey nods. “What she said.”
The staff scramble to oblige. The sommelier swings open the doors. The fromagier yanks the napkin from Osmond’s lap. The crumb scraper kicks loose the brake of his chair.
“Yegor, have the starfruit cobbler sent to my chambers!” Osmond shouts as the waiter steers him haphazardly toward the egress. “À la mode, s’il te plaît!”
“I’m Maxim,” says the waiter dryly. The doors swing shut again, but they can still hear Osmond shouting in the lobby.
“He will have no ice cream tonight,” says Katya. Of course, Katya herself hasn’t eaten anything at all.
* * *
After dinner, Humphrey and Pippi disappear in the direction of Humphrey’s office, Katya slinks off to bed, complaining of “heartburn,” and Ripple takes Hooligan and Swanny on a tour of the house. He doesn’t bother hooking Hooligan’s leash onto the collar. Swanny coldly regards the dog.
“Shouldn’t he take these jaunts outside? In case he needs to relieve himself?”
“Nah, he likes going where it’s climate controlled.”
“Your dog defecates inside the mansion? On the floor?”
“Sure, they’re always shampooing these rugs. It’s like somebody’s full-time job.”
They’re walking down a hall near the Man Cave, the carpet plushly patterned beneath their feet. Swanny wrinkles her nose.
“That is the most revolting thing I’ve ever heard.”
“You’ll get used to the smell.”
“No, I assure you, I will not.”
Ripple stops in his tracks. “Fem, do not tell my dog where to poop.”
“Or you’ll do what? Refuse to marry me?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I haven’t really decided yet. This is your audition.”
“My audition?” Swanny’s laugh is an ear-gouging little shriek. “Let’s abandon the pretense, Duncan. You’re terrified of your father, and of my mother. You’ll marry me even if every fiber of your being screams for an eleventh-hour reprieve.”
Ripple fakes a yawn. “Break another knickknack, Super Bitch.”
Swanny grabs an obliging candelabra from a nearby hall table and hurls it into an enormous gilt-framed mirror on the opposite wall. Glass shatters and rains to the ground.
“Tell them to clean that up!” she wails, and runs down the corridor.
Whoa. She must be stopped. Ripple blinks twice, gives chase. But Hooligan, catching on to the game, runs on ahead. They race past the entrances to the ballroom, the animatronic zoo, the mud baths. As Swanny rounds the corner into the Hall of Ancestors, surprisingly swift in heels, Hooligan vaults into the air and tackles her to the ground.
“Get it away!” She pummels Hooli even as he lands slurp upon slobbery slurp on her face and neck. His preternaturally human hands paw her cleavage.
“Down, boy,” says Ripple, yanking the dog back by the collar. “Swanny? You OK?”
Ripple is not accustomed to seeing girls cry. At underschool, they had a class called Gender Differentiation, to make up for the fact there were no wenches in a three-mile radius (except for a couple of postmenopausal teachers, who had apparently taken vows of natural aging). By the end of term, they had learned all about stuff like Feminine Wiles, Estro-Rage, and Breast Tenderness, the illustration for which looms large over Ripple’s masturbation sessions to this day.
Still, nothing could prepare him for this.
Swanny does not just have a few tears trickling out of the corners of her eyes. She’s given herself over to a possession dark and voluptuous, which seizes her in gasping, heaving tides. Her body strains at its constrictive garments, like all that flesh has turned lycanthropish and is about to bust seams. And yikes, she’s got a lot of teeth.
Ripple’s scared, he can’t lie. Yet another part of him is curious, even a little turned on. He thought Abby was untamed because she doesn’t wear shoes or eat with a fork. But this one is wild on the inside.
“Hey—hey, um, don’t be sad.”
Swanny lunges to her feet; Ripple recoils.
“You’re intimidated by my intelligence! Mother warned me this might happen. She warned me, but I didn’t believe it. Because I am—so—beautiful!”
“Yeah! Yeah, super hot!” Ripple, backpedaling, can’t agree fast enough.
“But what does it matter,” she sniffles, “when you don’t even love me.”
“Look, I just met you. The beauty hasn’t had a chance to work on me yet.”
“One always falls in true love at first sight.”
“There’s a rule about this?”
“Have you read any of the books I recommended?”
Ripple vaguely remembers a lengthy missive titled “My Most Essential Personal Library,” with a numbered list that went well into the hundreds. “I’m a reluctant reader.”
She pronounces it as a verdict: “Unforgivable.”
“Wait—so you wrote all those letters? Yourself? I just figured they were from your mom. They had so many big words in them and stuff.”
“You haven’t even read my letters.” Swanny turns away, gazing dolefully up at the portraits on the walls. Hooligan shoves his head under Ripple’s hand, whimpers, but Ripple shushes him. They’re not done here.
The Hall of Ancestors isn’t Ripple’s favorite room in the house; it isn’t even in his top five. Back before reality, the only way to immortalize yourself was art, but executive portraiture doesn’t do much to bring a person back to life. The paintings are muddy and heavily shadowed, the Ripple men in them going back seven generations, bluish-pale and stiffly posed, pin-striped and cuff-linked, displayed in gold frames like open caskets leaned up against the walls. Even Humphrey—the only one still living, heart attacks take these pros out young—looks embalmed in his picture, too tranquil without the telltale vein pulsing in his forehead, giving off signs of a frustrated, pressurized life. It’s like a cemetery except for the eyes. The eyes follow you.
“How ghastly,” Swanny observes, gazing up at Ripple’s great-great-grandfather, who rests his gnarled hand protectively upon an indistinct globe. “It’s a monument to an obsolescent patriarchy.”
“I know, right?” Ripple dares to come up behind her, fairly close, to look over her shoulder. She smells like dry flowers, old leather, and teenage tantrum sweat. “Sad thing is, some of my grandmas were real damsels. But instead we have to look at all these bald dudes.”
Swanny clearly didn’t expect him to agree with her. She turns warily, her crinolines swishing. “Where will your portrait hang?”
“Right there.” Ripple points at the designated wall panel. “It’s not going to be boring like these, though. The guy I commissioned is a real artist. He did the extinction mural downtown, at the Center for Global Capital.* He’s going to mythologize the fuck out of me.”
Swanny raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you were so interested in visual art.”
“I’m interested in my image. I don’t want to go down like some loser.”
“I can’t imagine a Ripple being lost to history.” Swanny peers up at his actual grandpa, a potatoish man Ripple never met, whose business cards, even now, materialize inexplicably in the pockets of the family’s coats, between the cushions of the house’s various couches and divans. Networking from beyond the grave. “It must be fascinating to learn the intricacies of one’s family line. Mine is shrouded in mystery.”
“What?”
Swanny sighs deeply. “You know I lost my father as an infant. When he died, the secrets of my ancestry died along with him. I have no proof, of course, but I believe he and my mother shared more than just a bed. They may have been cousins—perhaps even first.”
Hooligan chooses this moment to squat behind a potted ficus a few yards away. Whatever, Ripple will deal with that later. “I don’t think so.”
“We mustn’t judge them, Duncan. Their passion, though forbidden, made me what I am.”
“No, I mean, Dad studied your genome. He had the printouts all over his desk for weeks. No way he’d set us up if you had mutant blood.”
Swanny removes a finger from her mouth. “I did not claim to have ‘mutant blood.’ ”
“I just mean no way your parents were first cousins. Wait, I’ll show you.” Ripple takes the device out of the pocket of his Kevlar vest, prestidigitates the document onto the screen. “See?”
Pedigree: The Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg. A maze of lines, straight and squiggled, a flow chart of love and its consequences. Swanny squints as if she’s never seen one before, even though that’s impossible. At underschool, family trees hung framed in everybody’s rooms.
“Where are my parents?” she asks.
“Down here, at the bottom.” Ripple zooms in on the text. “Look, Chet Dahlberg—that’s your dad. Kid of Veronica Golden and Chase Dahlberg—scroll up, here’s who they’re related to. Those green dots stand for money. And see, your mom’s way over on this side. Coming out of nowhere. Penelope Gibich.”
“Let me see that.” Swanny snatches the LookyGlass. “Gibich? Am I even pronouncing that correctly? I always assumed Mother was born a Dahlberg.”
Ripple shrugs. “It’s just a name.”
“It’s her identity, Duncan. Names are lineage—linguistic DNA, passed down from parent to child—the cargo of words we carry from this life to the next. To be a Dahlberg…well, it’s something quite refined.”
“Shouldn’t you be glad you’re not inbred?”
Swanny runs her tongue over her teeth thoughtfully, like she’s making sure they’re all still there. “I suppose.”
Speaking of breeding: “Want to see what our kid looks like?”
“Pardon?”
“It’s just a projection, but the margin of error is slight.” Ripple steps close to her and adeptly strokes the LookyGlass in her hand. “Check it out. He’s got your eyes.”
The algorithmically derived infant shoots out of the device in three dimensions, a hologram hovering in a beam of light. They’ve mapped out every detail, down to the pendant of spit bubbles dangling from his chin.
“Dad says we have to name him Duncan Humphrey Ripple the Sixth, but I like Jutt better. I don’t even know if it’s a real name, I just like the way it sounds. Jutt.”
“Good lord, Duncan. You’re planning so far ahead.” Her cheeks color; she looks away. “I haven’t even started freezing my eggs yet. And I might prefer a girl.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa. She’s acting like he just made a declaration of love or something. Maybe their baby wasn’t the right thing to show her on a first date. He takes back the LookyGlass. “It’s not like I want him either. I just had to check that he wasn’t too ugly. He’s gotta extend my brand.”
Swanny circles the simulated rug rat, sizing it up from all angles. Appraising it. “When the time comes, we must be certain to give him the freedoms denied us.”
“Totally agreed.” But wait a minute, Ripple’s the one who wants out of here. “What would you do, if you could do whatever you wanted?”
“One can always do what one wants, Duncan. It’s just a question of calculating the consequences.”
Huh? He switches off the baby. “You mean like running away?”
“We all have our urges.”
“Yeah? Where would you go?”
“I suppose I would live among the common people and give myself over to a life of disgraceful hedonism. Or I’d go on a journey—but all the places I love best exist only in novels.” She sighs. “Perhaps I’d press myself between the pages of a book.”
Hedonism? Does that mean sex? Ripple always kind of thought sex and reading were mutually exclusive. But maybe Swanny’s got wires crossed in her brain somewhere and her fantasies take the form of words. Maybe all he would have to do is figure out the exact right thing to say and she’d be writhing in his arms, the way she was on the floor just now, only lustier. He’s far down this path before he remembers that he has an actual human waiting to fuck him upstairs.
“I’d be a fireman,” he declares brashly.
Swanny nods, unimpressed. “Oh yes, you mentioned that at dinner.”
“I was just about to enlist when they shut down the department.”
That wasn’t exactly how it happened. A few years after the first dragon attacks—when the volunteer fire department was experiencing its first real drop-off in numbers, as fallen members no longer proved so easy to replace—the city adopted a radical tactic: mandatory conscription into the cause for any local male over the age of sixteen. The girls were spared, in the hope that their potential for healthy pregnancy would prevent the city from depopulating still further, but the families of boys like Ripple either had to see their sons off to likely death and disfigurement in a state-issued yellow slicker, or, at great cost, purchase a series of exemptions, which gave the pro in question a one-year reprieve, renewals available. Humphrey had done the latter, of course, but when Ripple was in the process of flunking underschool, Ripple made a series of impassioned and unsuccessful appeals to let his exemption expire. As the videographers rolled, he argued that he wasn’t made for “bookwork,” that his dad should let him out of his “guilted cage” so he could soar to the heights of heroism. The Sprawl ate it up, and Ripple was actually scrolling through some flattering ratings numbers when Humphrey came by his room one unfilmed afternoon.
“I assume you were just grandstanding for the cameras.” Humphrey picked up a bag of BacoCrisps from the floor, saw that it was empty, and dropped it again. “But if you feel that risking your life for a transparently shortsighted and foolhardy cause would force you to buckle down and impose some discipline on yourself, far be it from me to stand in your way.”
“Uhhhhhhh…” Ripple drew out the null syllable as long as he could.
Humphrey nodded. “That’s what I thought.”
After that, Ripple never brought up the Metropolitan Fire Department onscreen again. It was lucky for him that public opinion was shifting away from conscription around the same time. Exposé sites kept uncovering new abuses and excesses; the firemen tried to form some kind of union, which got shut down immediately. Ripple didn’t follow any of it closely. Then, about six months ago, midway through his final semester of underschool, the dragons torched the Gemini Building and an army of mutinous conscriptees dispatched to the scene stormed out in protest without extinguishing it. The ensuing blaze reportedly killed dozens, including charismatic Fire Chief Paxton Trank, and the flames of Empire Island have been unattended ever since. Ripple thinks of what Kelvin said: a total wasteland. Water and
power are probably next.
“What a pity,” Swanny says now. “It might have made a real man of you. But at least you have your—image.”
“We are way too sober for this,” Ripple observes.
* * *
Ten minutes later, they’re in the herb garden on the fifth-floor terrace, smoking out of a pipe made from an old Voltage bottle. The smoke is scented with the sickly sweet citrus of the long-gone drink. Just beneath that lies the odor of the loam itself, peaty and musty and decayed, poisonously abandoned: something between a dorm-house shower curtain and an old cedar chest. Though he likes getting swamped as much as the next guy, Ripple’s never gotten used to the taste; he could never be a twenty-four-hour marshie like his uncle Osmond. But Swanny, though a first-timer to the substance, seems to be taking to it just fine. She coughs, delicately at first, then with the phlegm-rattling intensity of a show-off emphysemic.
“Good lord,” she murmurs. She stretches out one of her ringlets and watches it spring back. “Is this what average intelligence is like?”
“No way,” says Ripple. “This scrip makes you dumb.”
Absently stroking the lapel of her chinchilla coat, Swanny rises from the hemlock glider and minces toward the terrace railing. Her feet no longer seize the ground with a conquistador’s purpose. The night is dark and misty, and the dragons all but invisible; only the white-hot, sizzling lines of their breath assert their presence in the lower city. Swanny leans toward them, four floors and the sheer cliff face of the Heights falling away before her.
“Baroness, do not widow me.” Ripple hacks out his last hit. Hooligan, lying at his feet, looks up with concern. “Siddown. Gravity is not your friend.”
“ ‘The Sky Is Yours.’ Ha. It’s quite extraordinary that my mother became successful peddling such lines of patent nonsense. ‘The Sky Is Yours.’ No wonder she’ll go to her grave with her name a lie. Gibich. The sky isn’t mine. The sky belongs to the dragons. Even before they came, it was just waiting for them. It was as though they made reservations.”
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