The Iron Dragon's Daughter (28 page)

Beer always made Sirin maudlin. "I'm so grateful to you. For the elevator, for getting me out of there. Jane, you can't imagine what you saved me from, what kinds of things he wanted to do."

"Don't even think of it. It's nothing."

"No, really. What would I have done without you? I'm in your debt. Anything you want, if I can do it—it's yours." She fell silent a moment and then a small, fey smile floated up to the surface. "Not that I wouldn't like to… someday. Only I don't think I was ready for it just yet."

Jane stared down into her mug, at the bubbles rising up through the beer, slowly at first and then with gathering speed. They shone like tiny galaxies, each bubble its own universe. She tipped the mug back and drank deep. I am become death, she thought, the destroyer of worlds. Aloud, she said, "That line of bullshit Galiagante gave me about green thumb syndrome won't work, will it? That was just so much noise."

"Well, it could work, I suppose. It just wouldn't be very practical."

"Then what's the secret?"

"Oh, Jane, I've given you enough hints. Please don't make me—"

"You said anything I want, right? I saved you, remember?"

"Yes, but I didn't know you'd ask me something like
this
. It's simply not permitted. It's—"

"Hush." Jane stroked Sirin's hand, touched her knees under the table with her own. Gazing deep into those unfocused eyes, she murmured, "You're very beautiful."

"What?"

Jane was hardly drunk at all and she understood that to communicate with somebody who was required broad gestures, ruthless simplification, bright primary colors. Touching foreheads, she whispered, "Come on, Sirin, I'd do it for you. I'm your friend, aren't I? You can trust me. Give."

Sirin blushed and stared down at their mingled hands. "I cheat. I cook the results."

Jane continued caressing her fingers. She felt a little dirty doing this, but it wasn't as if she had any other options. "Tell me how."

Sirin's eyes blurred and turned a milky white, the pupils and irises breaking into tiny motes and dissolving to nothing. In a husky voice that was not her own, she said, "Do you know the distinction between exoteric and esoteric alchemy?" Jane shook her head. "Everything you've been doing, all the lab work, all the p-alk and organic alike, is exoteric—concerned with the transmutation of matter. It is the outer tradition. Are you following this?"

"Yes."

"Esoteric alchemy is the inner tradition. It's the other side of the coin. There aren't any classes for esoteric alchemy, but a researcher must necessarily learn it on her own. Esoteric alchemy is concerned with the transmutation of the spirit. This can be accomplished in many ways—through pain or terror or monastic discipline, for example—but is most easily achieved through the measured application of sex."

"Tell me how it works. The practical side of it."

Sirin's voice had by degrees hardened and deepened. It was no longer a female voice. "The procedure has two parts."

"Two parts."

"The first part is esoteric. It involves sex. While you're fucking, you must visualize the experiment, start to finish, step by step. If your familiar comes before you're done, you must start over again."

She could not free herself from Sirin's cold hands. A numbing energy flowed up her arms and down her spine, returning to Sirin where their knees touched. It was mesmerizing. The table faded away underneath her, and the chair she was sitting on. There was nothing in all the universe but the voice and the resonant circuit of Sirin and herself.

"The second part is exoteric. When you assemble the experiment and as you run it, picture what you were doing as you imaged it in the first part. Where you held your familiar, how you felt. This will create a feedback loop. You will find yourself growing aroused. For purely social reasons it will be best if you hide this aspect of your work.

"Creation of the sophic stone is entry-level sex magick. As you advance in exoteric learning you will need to acquire more sophisticated esoteric skills. But for now your simple animal drives will suffice."

Out of nowhere, it seemed, a window had been opened into Jane's world, and the alien landscapes it revealed made no sense to her at all. How could it be, she wondered. How could the one affect the other? Where and by what mechanism did they connect?

She recalled a bright summer day, cloudless and without shadow, so immediate that the air felt like a membrane stretched over the yolk of an egg, full to bursting. One prick of a fork and the other side would come spilling out to fill all the world. She was sure then that the seen world was only surface, that deeper and darker things lurked beneath the surfaces, whales sounding under the sidewalks, faces larger than worlds mugging behind the sky.

Jane felt close to something basic, so close that she could almost touch it, taste it, feel it. She was trying to frame a question when the power behind Sirin's words spoke again.

"You've been flirting with great mysteries. Watch that they do not crush you." Sirin's eyes fluttered open and in her normal voice she said, "I feel sick."

Like a tide ebbing the alien presence withdrew. Once again the bar closed about her, as real as a packing crate and as confining.

Jane refilled her mug. When it was empty, she poured another. At some point she looked up and Sirin was gone. There was a pleasant-faced nondescript talking to her. She vaguely recalled him introducing himself as Jake Shakestick. He was telling a joke. She couldn't follow it, but she was pretty sure she'd be able to guess when she was supposed to laugh. It looked as if she were on her own, to make whatever decision she would.

There was a hopeful smirk in the corner of Jake's mouth.

Well, she thought, as well him as another. Anyway, she'd been chanting the birth control spell faithfully every day without fail for over a year.

It seemed a pity to let it go to waste.

Two days later she ran the experiment again. This time it worked perfectly.

JANE CAUGHT BILLY BUGABOO'S LAST SPURT OF SEMEN ON a watch glass, then drew up a measured amount in a Sahli pipette. "Ahhh." She diluted it with saline solution and rocked the pipette to mix the two. Then she let a drop fall into the chamber of a cytometer, slapped on a cover slip, and clipped it onto the microscope stage. "Let's see what the omens are."

Billy rolled over and watched as she pulled up her jeans and panties and bent over the microscope. The sheets rustled mournfully.

"I can't figure you out."

"You're not supposed to."

Without removing her eye from the microscope, Jane groped for her brassiere. She snapped it around her stomach then twisted it right side around, straightening momentarily to fit herself into it. Her blouse was draped across the same chairback as the brassiere had been. "Make yourself useful and button me up," she said. Billy obeyed.

"I know you've got other guys. Are you like this with them too, or is it just me?"

"My roommate's due back from class any minute now," Jane said coldly. "Time you got dressed, stud-muffin."

With a sigh, Billy groped under the bed for his trousers. One at a time, he folded and unfolded his legs like a stork to fit them in. He was of a rarefied type, rawboned and spindle-shanked as a scarecrow. Sitting, his head reached almost to the ceiling. Standing, he stooped.

The door rattled in its frame, then boomed as it was struck by angry fists. "That's probably her now. Get the dead bolt, why don't you?"

Before Billy could reach the door, though, the transom pushed open. Monkey came clambering through. Impulsively, he seized her under the arms and, swinging her around like a doll, set her atop her own desk. She stood there, face darkening like a fireplace coal. Billy grinned a snaggle-toothed welcome at her that curled around either side of his face. It was at times like this, when he was at his most amiable, that he looked the most grotesque. Monkey scowled past him at Jane.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing, locking me out of my own fucking room?"

The signifiers in the slide were not good. Then again, Teind year omens never were. If you tested a sample—a clipping of hair, urine, horn scrapings, anything—in a spectrophotometer, the resulting spectrum inevitably showed a thick black bar marking the Teind's approach. Even if you survived the winnowing yourself, odds were you'd lose somebody close to you. "I was preparing a slide," she muttered distractedly. Billy buckled his belt and hastily buttoned his shirt. "Couldn't have you bursting in, right in the middle of things, now could I?" Technically, she wasn't supposed to be applying esoteric techniques to Intermediate Scrying, but doing so would save her countless hours staring into a pool of ink or poring over goat entrails.

"You've been getting mighty pushy lately, Miss Do-What-I-Will Alderberry." Monkey hopped down from the table. "I don't recall giving you permission to use my room for any fucking private assignations."

"Uh, listen, I gotta go now, I'm kind of late. For a class." Billy bundled his shoes and socks under one arm. Bobbing awkwardly, he backed out of the room, a leaf before a storm. "'Bye."

The secret to successful scrying was to realize that the future was not fixed and there was no way of predicting it. None. All one could do was to identify what already existed unacknowledged. Lovers pledged themselves to each other long before their first kiss. Murder was implicit in friendship. A carcinoma that looked like a speck of dust on the X-ray spelled death. So much of what appeared to be random event was simply the working out of consequences. Jane began jotting down her observations in her lab book.

Monkey snatched the pencil from her hand and snapped it in two.

Jane closed her eyes and traced the sigil of Baphomet with her inner vision. When she was calm again, she slid open a drawer.

"All right." There was a pair of latex gloves within. "I wasn't going to do this." She pulled them on. "But you don't exactly give me much choice, do you?"

Credit where credit is due, Monkey didn't back down. There was a touch of the trickster in her heritage, and the trickster gene was a dominant. She licked her lips nervously as Jane pretended to lift an invisible box from the drawer. "You don't scare me."

"Good." Jane swung a hinged lid back and reached within. "It works best if you don't believe." She removed an equally imaginary scalpel and held it up between thumb and forefinger, admiringly turning it one way and the other.

"What are you going to do with that?"

Jane smiled. "
This
!"

She slammed her fist into Monkey's stomach. The small goblin doubled over in pain and Jane was on top of her, ignoring her shrieks and forcing her down on the floor. She yanked Monkey's blouse up over her head and removed from a pocket a small bladder she had prepared for just this occasion. "A little higher," she said, jabbing stiff forefingers into the exposed abdomen. "There!"

She crushed the bladder.

Blood gushed. A dark crimson stain spread over Monkey's crotch and belly. Jane stepped back, the broken bladder in her hand. It looked for all the world like a scrap of body tissue. Monkey struggled up, tugging down her blouse, just as Jane popped it in her mouth. Jane chewed and swallowed.

It was done.

With swift efficiency then, Jane put away the scalpel in its box and returned both to the drawer and oblivion. She stripped off the gloves and threw them in the wastebasket. She was done. Leaning back against her desk, she waited to see if her roommate had bought it.

Monkey came to her feet. "What the fuck did you just do?"

"Hopefully, I bought myself a little peace and quiet."

"You don't fool me—that was just sleight of hand."

"Believe what you will."

Picking up a heavy stapler, Monkey advanced on her. "Suppose I hit you over the head with this, huh? I'll bet you anything it would hurt you more than it would me.

"There's only one way to find out."

Monkey chewed her lip indecisively. Then, with disgust, she threw the stapler to the floor and herself into a chair. "Shit." She was all fists-and-eyes with rage. Then, abruptly, all tension left her body and she chuckled to herself. With elaborate casualness she said, "I met an old friend of yours today."

"Now that," Jane said, "is what I call a truly stunning non sequitur." Rubbing a speck of blood from her chin, she went back to her microscope. But try as she would, she could not ignore Monkey's remark. It niggled in her brain. Finally she sighed and added, "Who was it?"

"That's for me to know and you to find out."

Monkey's voice was gleeful, mocking, triumphant. Without taking her eyes from Jane, she lifted one corner of her bloodstained blouse and began to suck on the cloth.

Jane spent a long hour staring at the flimsy before she set out. The yellow paper was already fading at the creases where she'd folded it. Bad news always came on the cheap, in gray print with the proper names and specifics badly typed in third-generation carbon capital letters that floated slightly above the line. She'd read and reread the thing a dozen times since receiving it yesterday.

To: Magister/Mistress ALDERBERRY

From: Office of Penitence and Truth, Division of Financial Assistance

In these times of fiscal austerity, it is necessary that we all do what we can to reduce or eliminate all such expenses as will not adversely affect the quality of your education. Thus, as a cost-cutting measure, we are eliminating such portions of your MERIT SCHOLARSHIP as are covered by this office. We know that you join with us in wishing the University a swift recovery from its temporary financial woes, and strongly encourage you to investigate the many means open to you of financing your education through the private sector. A schedule of your obligations will be posted to you in THREE WEEKS.