Undine, he thought for no reason. Ysolt, Esme, Theodora — the women here have names like dried flowers or autumn leaves.
A gust of wind sent the flowerlight scurrying for the comers, hurrying back again. Undine kissed him furiously on the face, the neck, the eyes. The bed creaking beneath them, they rolled over and over one another, now on the bottom, now on top, and over again, until he lost track of who was on top and who on the bottom, of where his body ended and hers began, of exactly which body belonged to whom. And then at last she was Ocean herself, and he lost all sense of self, and drowned.
“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?”