* * *
“Again,” she said.
“I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” the bureaucrat said amiably. “Someone considerably younger. But if you’re willing to wait twenty minutes or so, I’ll be more than happy to try again.”
She sat up, her magnificent breasts swaying slightly. Faint daggers of Caliban’s light slanted through the window to touch them both. The candle had long since guttered out. “You mean to say you don’t know the method by which men can have orgasm after orgasm without ejaculating?”
He laughed. “No.”
“The girls won’t like you if you have to stop a half hour every time you come,” she said teasingly. Then, seriously, “I’ll teach you.” She took his cock in her hand, waggled it back and forth, amused by its limpness. “After your vaunted twenty minutes. In the meantime I can show you something of interest.”
She threw the blanket lengthwise over her shoulders, as if it were a shawl. It made a strange costume in the dim light, with sleeves that touched the ground and a back that didn’t quite reach her legs, so that two pale slivers of moon peeped out at him. Naked, he padded after her into the clearing behind the hut. “Look,” she said.
Light was bursting from the ground in pale sheets of pink and blue and white. The rosebushes shimmered with pastel light as if already drowned in Ocean’s shallows. The ground here had been dug up recently, churned and spaded, and was now suffused with pale fire. “What is it?” he asked wonderingly.
“Iridobacterium. They’re naturally biophosphorescent. You’ll find them everywhere in the soil in the Tidewater, but usually only in trace amounts. They’re useful in the spiritual arts. Pay attention now, because I’m going to explain a very minor mystery to you.”
“I’m listening,” he said, not comprehending.
“The only way to force a bloom is to bury an animal in the soil. When it decomposes, the iridobacteria feed on the products of decay. I’ve spent the last week poisoning dogs and burying them here.”
“You killed dogs?” he said, horrified.
“It was quick. What do you think is going to happen to them, when the tides come? They’re like the roses, they can’t adapt. So the humane-society people organized Dog Control Week, and paid me by the corpse. Nobody’s about to haul a bunch of mutts to the Piedmont.” She gestured. “There’s a shovel leaning against my hut.”
He fetched the shovel. In a month this land would be under water. He imagined fishes swimming through the buildings while drowned dogs floated mouths open, caught head down in tangles of drowning rosebushes. They would rot before the hungry kings of the tides would accept their carcasses. At the witch’s direction, he shoveled the brightest patches of dirt into a rusty steel drum almost filled with rainwater. The dirt sank, and bright swirls of phosphorescence rose in the water. Undine skimmed the top with a wooden scraper, slopping the scum into a wide pan. “When the water evaporates, the powder that remains is rich in iridobacteria,” she said. “There’s several more steps necessary to process it, but now it’s in concentrated form, that can wait until I reach the Piedmont. It’s common as sin now, but it won’t grow up there.”
“Tell me about Gregorian,” the bureaucrat said.
“Gregorian is the only perfectly evil man I’ve ever met,” Undine said. Her face was suddenly cold, as harsh and stern as Caliban’s rocky plains. “He is smarter than you, stronger than you, more handsome than you, and far more determined. He has received an offplanet education that’s at least the equal of yours, and he’s a master of occult arts in which you do not believe. You are insane to challenge him. You are a dead man, and you do not know it.”
“He’d certainly like me to believe that.”
“All men are fools,” Undine said. Her tone was light again, her look disdainful. “Have you noticed that? Were I in your position, I’d arrange to contract an illness or develop a moral qualm about the nature of my assignment. It might be a black mark on my record, but I would outlive the embarrassment.”
“When did you meet Gregorian?” The bureaucrat dumped more dirt in the drum, raising mad swirls of phosphorescence.
“That was the year I spent as a ghost. I was a foundling. Madame Campaspe bought me the year I first bled—she’d seen promise in me. I was a shy, spooky little thing to begin with, and as part of my training, she imposed the discipline of invisibility. I kept to the shadows, never speaking. I slept at odd times and in odd places. When I was hungry, I crept into the homes of strangers and stole my food from their cupboards and plates. If I was seen, Madame beat me—but after the first month, I was never seen.”
“That sounds horribly cruel.”
“You are in no position to judge. I was watching from the heart of an ornamental umbrella bush the morning that Madame tripped over Gregorian. Literally tripped—he was sleeping on her doorstep. I learned later that he’d walked two days solid without food, he was so anxious to become her apprentice, and then collapsed on arrival. What a squawk! She kicked him into the road, and I think he broke a rib. I climbed to the roof of her potting shed and saw her harass him out of sight. Quick as a thought, I slid to the ground, stole a turnip for my breakfast from the garden, and was gone. Thinking that was the last of that ragged young man.
“But the next day he was back.
“She chased him away. He came back. Every morning it was the same. He scrounged for food during the day—I do not know if he stole, worked, or sold his body, for I was not quite interested enough to follow him, though by now I could walk down the center of Rose Hall in broad daylight without being noticed. But every morning he was back on the stoop.
“After a week, she changed tactics. When she found him on the doorsill, she would throw him some small change. The little ceramic coins that were current then, the orange and green and blue chips—they’ve gone back to silver since. She treated him as a beggar. Because, you see, he held himself very proudly, and there was a dirty gray trace of lace on the cuffs of his rags; she could tell he was haut-bourgeois. She thought to shame him away. But he’d snatch the coins from the air, pop them into his mouth, and very ostentatiously swallow. Madame pretended not to notice. From the attic window of the beautician’s shop across the street, I watched this duel between her stiff back and his nasty grin.
“A few days later I noticed a horrible smell by the stoop, and discovered that he’d been shitting behind the topiary bushes. There was a foul heap of his leavings studded with the ceramic coins she had been throwing him. So that finally Madame had no choice but to take him in.”
“Why?”
“Because he had the spirit of a magician. He had that unswerving, unbreakable will that the spiritual arts require, and the sudden instinct for the unexpected. Madame could no more ignore him than a painter could ignore a child with perfect visualization. Such a gift only comes along once in a generation.
“She tested him. You are familiar with the device used to give the experience of food to surrogates?”
“The line-feed. Yes, very familiar.”
“She had one mounted in a box. An offworld lover had wired it up for her. It was stripped down so that she could feed raw current into the nerve inductor. Do you know how it would feel to hold your hand within its field?”
“It would hurt like hell.”
“Like hell indeed.” She smiled sadly, and he could see the ghost of the schoolgirl behind her smile. “I remember that box so well. A plain thing with a hole in one side and a rheostat on top calibrated from one to seven. If I close my eyes, I can see it, and her long fingers atop it, and that damned water rat of hers perched on her shoulder. She warned me that if I took my hand out of the box before she told me to, she would kill me. It was the most terrifying moment of my life. Even Gregorian, ingenious though he was, could never top that.”
Undine skimmed more slop off the water. Her voice was soft and reminiscent. “When she moved the dial off zero, it felt like an animal had bitten right through my flesh. Then slowly, oh, excruciatingly slowly, she moved it up to one, and that was an order of magnitude worse. What agonies I suffered! I was crying aloud by three, and blind with pain by four. At five I yanked out my hand, determined to die.
“She gave me a hug then, and told me she had never seen anyone do as well, that I would someday be more famous than she.”
For a long moment the witch was silent.
“I slipped through an open window and into the next room when Madame led Gregorian in. More silent than a wraith, I drifted from shadow to shadow, leaving not the echo of a footfall behind. I left the door open one fingerspan, so I could peer from darkness into light. Then I retreated to a closet within the second room. Through the crack of the door I could see their distant reflections in the mantel mirror. Gregorian was skinny, barefoot, and dirty. I remember thinking how insignificant he looked alongside Madame Campaspe’s aristocratic figure.
“Madame sat him down by the hearth. A murmur of voices as she explained the rules. She drew away the fringed cloth that covered the box. Cocky as a crow, he placed his hand within.
“I saw his face jump—that involuntary hop of the muscles—when she first touched the dial. I saw how pale he grew, how he trembled as she increased the pain. He did not take his eyes off of her.
“She took him all the way up to seven. His body was rigid, his fingers spasming, but his head held straight and unforgiving, and he had not blinked. I think even Madame feared him then. Sitting there in his ragged clothes, his eyes burning like lanterns.
“I was so still my heart did not beat. My immobility was perfect. But somehow Gregorian knew. His head rose, and he looked in the mirror. He saw me, and he grinned. A horrible grin, a skull’s grin, but a grin nonetheless. And I knew then that try though she might, she would never break him.”
* * *
“I’m done now.” She set a piece of cheesecloth over the tray, and the bureaucrat followed her back inside, slim crescent moons winking at him one after the other from beneath the blanket.
“What’s it good for?” he asked when they were both seated on the bed again, facing each other cross-legged, her vagina a sweet dark shadow within the protective circle of her legs. “The powder you make from dogs.”
“We mix it with ink and inject it beneath the skin.” She rotated a hand before his face; in the shadows it was colorless, unmarked. “Each design represents a ritual the woman of power is entitled to perform, and every ritual represents knowledge, and all knowledge properly applied is control.” Suddenly a marking on her hand flared into light. It was a small fish, visible through the skin. “Turning the markings on and off at will is a reminder of that control.” One by one the tattoos flickered on: a pyramid, a vulture, a wreath of cocks. Stars flared into subdermal novae and struck fire to serpents, to moons, to alchemical elementals. “Mirandan microflora is all but incompatible with Terran biology. Injected beneath the skin, they can get enough nourishment to stay alive but not enough to grow. There they stay, starving and comatose until I awaken them.” Now all the tattoos were aglow. They climbed her arms almost to her shoulders.
“How do you do that?”
“Oh, that’s one of the very first things you learn, how to raise the temperature of your body. Here.” She lifted one of his hands. “It takes next to nothing. Concentrate on your fingertips, will them to be warmer. Think of hot things. Try to make them hot.” She waited, then said, “Well?”
His fingertips tingled. “I’m not sure.”
“You think it’s just power of suggestion.” A tiny starburst appeared at the tip of her finger, floated before his eye. “This is the first marking I received. Turn your finger hot, the goddess said, and it burst into light. I was so amazed. I felt then that my life had taken a great turn, that nothing would ever be the same again.” She was touching his leg gently, sliding fingers slowly up, rapidly down, stroke stroke stroke.
“What goddess said?”
“When someone teaches you that which is of spiritual value, you do not learn such things from a human: The person partakes of divinity, becomes as one with the godhead. Thus, when Madame Campaspe taught Gregorian and me, she was to us the goddess.” Her hand reached up to stroke his penis, which almost without his noticing it had grown hard and aroused again. “Well! It’s time for me to be your goddess now.” She lay back, legs wide, and drew him atop her.
“I want to talk about Gregorian,” the bureaucrat said uncertainly. She had him by both hands now, and was sliding him into her warm depths.
“No reason we can’t do both.” She clasped him tight and rolled him over, so that she sat on top. “The ritual you are about to learn from the goddess, the way of controlling ejaculation, is known as the worm ouroboros, after the great serpent of Earth which eats its own tail forever and is replenished thereby: a perfect closed system, such as does not exist on the mundane realm, not even your floating metal cities.” She moved up and down on him slowly, graceful as a swan in moonglimmer, and he reached up to caress her breasts. “It has physical benefits that extend beyond the obvious, and is an excellent introduction to the Tantric mysteries. What specifically do you want to know about Gregorian?”
His hands slid down the front of her body, touched gently the tip of her pinkness, moved to clasp her as she eased herself down on him: nipples, breasts, belly, chin. “I want to know where I can find him.”
“Somewhere downriver, I’d guess. People say he has a permanent place in Ararat, but who can say? He doesn’t really need a permanent address, because he never allows people to find him.”