The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Chapter 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 pushed 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 consortand 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."

A spray of cold babies' fingers brushed against Jane's cheek. She drew away and shuddered. But the trail grew narrower and the trees and bushes closer together. She was crowded and jostled by dark shapes, arms and shoulders bumping against her. There was a whiff of diesel exhaust and then the crowd, Baldwynn and all, poured down a set of stairs. Helpless, she was carried along.

The people about her were silent, unspeaking. Heads down, they rapidly descended several flights of stairs. The only sound was the rush of clicking heels and scuffling soles. The graffiti on the dirty stone walls were oddly shaped and she couldn't read them. Overcoats and shoulder bags pressed against her from all sides.

The stairs turned and swept them past rows of chrome turnstiles that carded the crowd like wool. From the throats of the dark passages beyond came a roaring as of great machines or of rivers plunging down bottomless chasms. Beyond the landing, the stairs deposited her in a dim concourse. The crowd expanded to fill the larger space but did not slow. Everyone was silent, hurried, self-absorbed. "It's not far now," the Baldwynn said. Jane nodded.

Ahead, she saw a bright pool of light around which the crowd flowed and eddied without slowing. As she got closer she saw it was a child, a girl with red roses in her hair. The girl's skin was paler than marble, blanched and bloodless. Her features were exquisite, delicate without the least hint of weakness. She looked up at Jane with eyes the same harsh white as her skin, her dress, her hair. "You!" she cried.

"Me?" Jane stopped, bewildered. Nobody else paid the extraordinary creature the slightest attention. The crowds hurried by.

"You're so stupid!" said the little girl. "How can you be so stupid?"

"I"

"You haven't understood a thing, have you?" She grabbed Jane's flight jacket and began going through the pockets. "What an idiot you are, what a total loss. You were the cause of Rooster's injurieswhy did you dawdle so in Blugg's office? You screwed up Gwen and Peter when I meant you to be a comfort to them. You never even went to bed with Puck! YouI haven't the time to list your failures and treacheries. Where are the things I lent you?"

"What things?" Jane tried to back away, but the girl swarmed over her, a small fury, unstoppable. She ripped open Jane's blouse, reached a hand inside her chest, and pulled out a small leather fetish bag Jane hadn't known was there. She spilled the contents of the bag out on her hand. There was a mummified object about twice the length and thickness of a rabbit's foot, and a thin, bright glint of light.

Jane stared down on them. Her heart raced. Though she had never seen them before in her life, these two objects seemed to her the two most precious things in the universe.

"You wasted them!" The little girl held up the glint of light between thumb and forefinger, so Jane could see it for what it was: a needle. She dropped it back in the bag. She held up the larger object. It was covered with short, wiry hair: an amputated dog's tail. Angry teeth clicked. "I'll bet you don't even know what they were for!"

The dog's tail went in after the needle. Horribly white fingers closed about the bag, making a fist. "You weakling! You fool! You conceited, self-centered prig!" With every name, the girl hit Jane in the chest. The blood-red roses rattled with each blow. Finally, sneering disdainfully, the child turned her back. The crowds closed about her, and when they opened again, she was gone.

Jane blinked. She pulled shut and rebuttoned her blouse. Then she zipped up her jacket. She stood at an intersection. The concourse stretched far and indistinct in all directions.

In sudden panic, she realized that the Baldwynn was nowhere in sight.

Her guide was gone.

In a gray haze of despair, Jane wandered by signs reading Bar-B-Q Beef, Discount Vitamins, Deli-Sandwiches, Shoe Repair, Dollar Expres$, Jewelry, and Chinese Fast Wok. Flatly she thought, this is it, then. A pointless wandering through eternity. It was a singularly bland doom and yet one that felt oddly appropriate.

Just as she thought this, though, she chanced to glance within a diner and saw the Baldwynn sitting at the counter, eating a powdered doughnut. She went in.

At her approach, he put down his doughnut on his plate. Dabbed at his thin lips with his napkin. Smiled politely. "Here you are."

"Yes," she said. "But where am I?"

"In the same place you ever were; only your perception of it has shifted." The Baldwynn stood. "Follow me."

He led her behind the counter and opened what she had taken to be the door to a broom closet. They went through.
* * *

They were in a room, she supposed. Or a space of some kind, or possibly no space at all. It was impossible to tell, for all her attention was sucked up and swallowed by what was before her.

She stood before the Black Stone.

It was enormous, three times higher than herself at a minimum. But as there was nothing to gauge its scale against, it might have been any size, larger than worlds, greater than stars. Its surface was smooth and irregular, almost glassy in places, pitted and whorled like that of a meteorite. Mostly, though, it was black and solid and real. Jane had no doubt whatsoever that it was the Goddess incarnate.

"You may ask anything you want," the Baldwynn said, and left.

Jane looked up at the Black Stone. For a long time she did not speak. Then she cleared her throat and asked, "Why?"

There was no answer.

"Why?" she said again. "Why is life so loathsome? Why is there pain? Why does pain hurt so much? Couldn't you have ordered things differently? Or did you have no more choice than we? Is there no such thing as choice? Are we nothing more than automatons? Why is there love? Did you create us merely so we could be punished? Why are we punished? What was our sin? How could a mother treat her own children so? Don't you love us? Do you hate us? Are we aspects of you? Are you so hungry for sensation that you incarnate bits of yourself as us in order to experience ignorance, fear, and pain? Is omniscience that bad? What is death? What becomes of us after death? Do we simply cease to be? Do mortals have only the one life? Were there other lives before this one? Did we do something unforgivable in them? Is that why you hate us? Will there be more lives? Will they be worse? Can even you die? If you hate us so much, why is there beauty? Does our misery rely on it? Would we be happier without beauty? Why is there joy? Exactly what do you want?"

There was no answer.

Jane stood before the Black Stone unmoving for what must have been hours, days, ages, before she finally turned away. The Baldwynn materialized at her side and, taking her elbow, steered her away.
* * *

The dark wood held no terrors for her now. Seventeen pairs of eyes opened suddenly in a nearby tree. They were merely eyes. Rubbery hands clutched at her. They were only hands. "Do you feel better now?" the Baldwynn asked.

"Yes."

"The Goddess has directed me to give you whatever you want."

"Oh."

"What do you want?"

"I want to be punished," Jane said. She had no control over the words. They came out of her mouth without volition and she was amazed to hear what she had said. But she didn't want to disavow them. She knew the truth when she heard it.

For a long time the Baldwynn did not speak. At last he said, "Will you serve the Goddess now? Knowingly and lovingly, in sweet obedience and humble acknowledgment of all that she is?"

"No." The word was a pebble in her mouth. She spat it out. "Not now, not tomorrow, not if I live to be a million. Never."

The Baldwynn stopped and took her hands in his. "Dear child," he said. "I feared there was no hope for you."
* * *

She was back in the lab again. Jane shook her head and hopped down from the stool on which she was sitting.

Her mother looked up from the micromanipulator controls. "You're back," she said. "Did you have a pleasant visit?"

Jane couldn't bring herself to speak. She wandered over to the bench and began picking through the sloppy mound of papers there. They were all photocopies of the same circular gene map. Each had scrawls indicating the sequences that had been broken out and replaced, tested, and discarded. For all the hundreds of sheets there were, only a fraction of the possibilities had been worked through. "Lots of work here," she said inanely.

"All of it negative." Her mother twisted up one side of her mouth. "Sometimes you wish you could grab the little bastards by their lapels and shake them, they're so obtuse. I tell you, I'd like to dump the lot of them in the autoclave and start all over again in some other line of work. Tending bar, maybe, or selling used cars."

Abruptly it seemed to Jane that her mother wasn't talking about gene sequencing at all, but something at once greater and more personal. Her sudden agitation must've shown, for Sylvia gave her a perfunctory hug. "Oh, don't look soit's only a passing fancy. I get these whims all the time, and they almost always go away on their own sooner or later." She released her. "It's not really their fault, is it?"

"No."

"It's just the way they're made."

"Yes."

Sylvia stubbed out her cigarette. Jane could tell by a certain horsey restlessness that she was anxious to get back to the electron microscope. "Well, kid, it's been lovely having you here. But right now I really do have work to do. Thanks for coming by, honey."

"Yeah," Jane said. "Okay, sure. You take care, huh?"

She started to turn away.

"Wait," her mother said. "You've got something on you." She reached out and plucked a small black creature, much like a millipede, from Jane's collar. It wriggled furiously in the palm of her hand, twisting about, impotently stinging her again and again.

Briefly it spread black wings. Jane flinched. She looked closer and saw that the mite was No. 7332, the dragon Melanchthon of the line of Melchesiach, of the line of Moloch.

"I don't think you need this anymore," her mother said. In a matter-of-fact fashion, she crushed it between her thumb and forefinger.

Aghast, Jane looked directly into her mother's eyes and saw something vast and alien within them, laughing. She realized then that Sylvia was only a mask for something impossibly huge and in that instant experienced a terror greater than anything she had ever imagined possible. Then a hand seized her by the scruff of her neck. It picked her up and put her down again somewhere else.