Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [34]
The bureaucrat stared at her in astonishment. Then Mintouchian too began laughing.
“What the hell’s so funny?” the bureaucrat demanded, offended.
“Your hand,” Chu said. “Oh, I see you’ve had a night to remember!” Then they were off again, the two of them, soared aloft on gusts of laughter like kites.
The bureaucrat looked at his hand. There was a fresh new tattoo there, a serpent that circled the middle finger of his left hand three times and then took its tail in its mouth.
6
Lost in the Mushroom Rain
“I’m the biggest thing you’ve ever seen,” Mintouchian’s thumb said. “Hey, I don’t want to brag, babe, but you’re gonna be sore in the morning.” It paraded back and forth, proud as a rooster.
“Mmmm, I can see that,” said Mintouchian’s other hand, the one held closed with a long vulval slit between thumb and forefingers slightly ajar. “Come here, big boy!” He gaped it suddenly wide.
Everybody laughed.
“Modeste!” Le Marie called. “Arsène! Come and look at this.”
“This isn’t really the sort of thing children should witness,” the bureaucrat demurred softly. Two pig farmers and one of the evac planners looked at him, and he reddened.
But none of the youngsters came in from the next room. They were watching television, engrossed in a fantasy world in which people traveled between stars not in lifetimes but in hours, where energies sufficient to level cities were wielded by lone altruists, where men and women changed sex four and five times a night, where everything was possible and nothing was forbidden. It was a scream straight from the toad buried at the base of the brain, that ancient reptile that wants everything at once, delivered to its feet and set ablaze.
The children sat in the darkness, saucer-eyed and unblinking.
“I’m so good. I’m gonna stretch you all out of shape.”
“So you keep saying.”
It was raining outside, but the kitchen was an island of warmth and light. Chu leaned against a wall, drink in one hand, careful to laugh no more than anyone else. The room smelled of fried pork brains and old linoleum. Under the table Anubis noisily thumped his tail. Le Marie’s wife bustled about clearing away the dishes.
The landlord himself brought out two more pitchers of blood mixed half and half with fermented mare’s milk. “Have another glass! I can’t give it away!” The skinny old man set a glass before Mintouchian. With a small, tipsy smile and a nod, the puppeteer interrupted his performance to accept it. He drank deep, leaving a thin transient line of foam on the bottom edge of his mustache. Other roomers held forth their glasses as he returned his thumb and fist to combat.
“Don’t you want any?”
“No, no, I’m stuffed.”
“Try some! Do you have any idea how much this costs down North?”
Smiling, the bureaucrat held up his hands and shook his head. When the old man shrugged and turned away, he slipped backwards out onto the porch. As the door was closing, Mintouchian’s fist spat out a limp and subdued thumb.
It giggled. “Next!”
* * *
Raindrops fell like small hammers, so hard they stung when they struck flesh. The bureaucrat stood on the lightless porch, staring through the screens. The world was all one color, neither gray nor brown but something that partook of both and neither. A sudden gust of wind parted the rain like curtains, and gave him a glimpse of the barges anchored on the river, then hid them away again. A house and a half down the street, all of Cobbs Creek faded to nonexistence.
Cobbs Creek was all hogs and lumber. The last of the pigs had already been butchered and hung in the smokehouses, but logs still floated down the creek