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She aimed the laser so the mirror would bounce its beam into the sample chamber. Getting out hoses, she hooked up the co
She snapped a saline control into the sample clips and shut the chamber.
"Oh." Billy sounded baffled. "Hey, I lucked into a couple of tickets to an evisceration. I thought maybe you and I could—"
"No." Everything was in place. She popped the button on the laser and checked the photon counter. The readings were way off. Disappointment sharpened her answer. "Even if I wanted to witness such a thing—and I don't—I wouldn't, because you'd be wanting to go to bed with me afterward. And I don't want to have sex with you any more because that only encourages you."
Billy shuffled his feet behind her, said nothing.
"Why don't you ask Li
Billy flushed with embarrassment. She didn't need to look. "There's no need to be crude," he said in his stuffiest voice.
"Oh, but all the girls—" Turning, she saw his expression, and stopped. Those guileless eyes of his welled with hurt and loneliness. Abruptly she felt ashamed of herself. Only the knowledge that he wouldn't let it stop there, kept her from reaching out to him. "Okay, I'm sorry for teasing you. Pax, all right? Let's be friends again."
"Yah." Billy nodded shaggily, and Jane returned to her work.
If the problem was in the chromometer, on the other hand, there wasn't much she could do about it. The thing was factory-sealed and sold as a unit. But she'd seen Lampblack using this exact same piece of equipment only yesterday, and it had functioned perfectly then. What was she overlooking?
The mirror!
Sure enough, when she looked the mirror was subtly corroded and scattering a vital fraction of the beam. Jane set up a new one. She jiggled the power feed to check its seating. Pop. This time the numbers fit. She yanked the control, clipped in the sample from Puck's jacket, and left the control chamber open. She do
"About that evisceration," Billy said.
The excitation of free ions in the solution brought to life a tiny orange sprite. It floated in the watery green of Jane's vision like a weed lashed by undersea currents. The life span of such creatures was fleetingly brief; in the excitation of the laser light they were born and died thousands of times per second. The being she saw now as one was actually many, its movements an illusion of continuity similar to the generation of repeated images on a television screen. It was so delicate she hardly dared breathe. "What about it?"
"I thought maybe now that you've had the time to think it over, you might—you know."
Jane sighed, but did not look up. "Go away, Billy."
He stood for a while sadly jingling the coins in his pocket. Finally, he left.
Through a simple transform of contagion, the raman spirit would eventually take on the form of the being most intimately associated with the particles of thread from the patch. Jane waited while the sprite evolved through slow incremental changes, growing ever more familiar. Finally a minuscule Puck leered up into her goggled eyes, licked its lips, and grabbed its crotch. It was too much to expect subtlety from such a primitive creature.
Now that she had come to the point, Jane found that she was afraid. The laser was rigged to provide a carrier beam. She jacked a microphone into its side. She cleared her throat nervously. It had been a long time since she had used Rooster's true name.
"Tetigistus!" she cried.
The sprite leaped, as if a lash had been laid across its back. With a loud crack the flash tube burned out. The stench of burning plastic rose from the plug. Jane fell back with a cry as the laser shorted out, her arm flung out to cover her goggles.
But the damage was done. Clear and bright in the back of her brain shone the residual triune image of Rooster-Peter-Puck. Their eyes were clear and their skin like ivory. They lay wrapped in linen and their expressions were composed, assured, immaculate. They were all dead.
So it was true. Rooster was Peter was Puck.
It was late and the express elevators were closed for the night. Jane took a forty-five minute stand-up local home. All the way she did not so much think as grieve. She had believed that finally knowing one way or the other about Puck would set her free. Only now that he was denied to her could she acknowledge how badly she wanted him.
She was dead weary when she finally got back to her room. It had been a long day and all she wanted to do now was go to sleep.
Light spilled from the transom and seeped through the crack under the door. Voices sounded from within. Monkey was back. And she had a friend with her. It doesn't matter, Jane thought. Nothing can hurt me now. You could hit me in the face with a brick and I wouldn't feel a thing.
She opened the door.
An ungainly figure with red eyes and hair like straw was sitting on her bed. He looked up and gri
It was Ratsnickle.
— 15 —
THE WINTER PROCEEDED AT A SLOWNESS OF PACE THAT was entirely without precedent. The Lords of the City declared a third December, so that Black December passed into Ice December with the possibility of a fourth December at the back of every mind. Meanwhile, it was the Wolf Moon, and the Goddess had taken on her most hostile aspect. Sometimes it seemed the Teind would never arrive.
One week after Ratsnickle's reappearance, Jane went out window-shopping with him and Monkey. She trailed after them, anxious and unwilling, through the upscale stores of Gladsheim and Carbonek, elegant places like Horn Fair, Fata Padourii, and Maleficium, where Jane looked and felt hopelessly out of place. Ratsnickle stood back, jingling the keys in his pockets, a satisfied smile on his puffy lips, when some bright trinket caught Monkey's avaricious eye.
"Oh, look," she said then, "isn't it lovely?"
"Yes," Ratsnickle replied, looking steadily at Jane. "Isn't it?"
They wound up the evening at The Cave. It was open mike night, and every would-be bard and minstrel manqué for miles around was on hand with a sheaf of bad poetry. They sat around tables made from telephone cable spools, sipping espresso and waiting their turns. Undergrads in jeans and black turtlenecks brought fresh mugs and cleared away empties.
"Oh the gloves, the faun-skin gloves," Monkey enthused. "I'm doing all my shopping at la jettatura from now on." Reaching up to trace the line of Ratsnickle's jaw with a fingertip she purred, "Think how… sooofft they'd feel."
Up on the tiny stage, a poet who looked like he spent daytimes sleeping under haystacks recited:
The lady no longer crouched at his side,
But stood before him glorified,
Ratsnickle rolled his eyes. Then, picking up an earlier train of rhetoric, he said, "Sex is all about power. Mastery and surrender, that's the game in a nutshell."
"That's not how it is with us," Monkey said. "Is it, sweetie?"
He patted her hand indulgently. "Somebody has to take and somebody give. That's just the nature of things. The male is a natural aggressor. The female is passive and nurturing. Inevitably, love in action is a clash of hard and soft, seizing and yielding, a war in miniature. Everything else—courtship, estrangement, reconciliation—is but refinement and sublimation of these primal forces."