“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 Tan-trie 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.”
“What about the people who pay to be changed into sea-dwellers?”
“They don’t find him — he finds them. He’s looking for a special sort of person, isn’t he? Anxious to stay in the Tidewater, willing to change into a nonhuman shape to do so, ready to be convinced by Gregorian’s commercials, and rich enough to pay his prices. I’m sure he had a sucker list drawn up long ago.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Oh, it was years and years ago.” Her teeth played with his earlobe; her breath was warm on his cheek. “He was headed for Ocean when he finally left Madame, but he got no further than heliostat station seventeen. He met somebody there, and the next anybody heard, he was offplanet. Do you like this?” Her nails ran lightly up his sides.
“Yes.”
“Good.” She put her hands at the base of his spine and abruptly raked them up his back. He arced involuntarily, sucking in air. She’d left stinging tracks up his skin. “You like that too, and it surprises you, doesn’t it? I learned that with Gregorian; he became a god and taught me how close pleasure and pain lie to each other.” She laughed at him. “But one lesson per evening — pull out of me and lie down, I have something to show you.”