Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [58]
The bureaucrat fell over backward in startlement, batting his hands wildly, thrashing at the dark.
Undine laughed again.
“Look! I want my questions answered.”
The rocks moaned. “Free the machines.”
“You have only one question,” the crone said. “All men have only one question, and the answer is always no.”
“What did Gregorian ask?” The spider still danced on his forehead.
“Gregorian. Such an amusing child. I had him perform for me. He was terrified, shy and trembling as a virgin. I put my hand deep inside him and wriggled my fingers. How he jumped!”
“What did he want?”
A distant sobbing that wandered the uneasy ground between misery and excitement.
“Nobody had ever asked that of me before. A younger self might have been surprised, but not I. Sweet child, I said, nothing will be held back from you. I filled him with my breath, so that he bulged and expanded like a balloon, his eyes starting half out of his head. Ah, you are not half so amusing as he.” The spidery touch ran down under his collar, swift as a tickle beneath his clothes, and came to a stop between his legs, a constant itch at the root of his cock. “Still, we could have fun, you and I.”
A drop of water fell into still water, struck a single high note.
“I’m not here for fun,” the bureaucrat said, carefully mastering an urge toward hysteria.
“Pity,” Undine’s voice said.
The slightest of waves slapped the ground at the bureaucrat’s feet. He became aware of the faint, pervasive smell of stagnant water, and with this awareness came a distant patch of phosphorescent light. Something floating toward him.
The bureaucrat could guess what was coming. I will not show emotion, he swore. The object came slowly nearer, and possibly into sharper focus, though it still strained the eyes to see it at all. Eventually it floated up to his feet.
It was a corpse, of course. He’d known it would be. Still, staring down at the floating hair, the upturned buttocks, the long curve of back, palest white, he had to bite his lips to hold back his horror. A wave tumbled her around, breasts and face upward, exposing bits of skull and rib where the flesh had been nibbled away by the angry slaves of the tides. One arm had been hacked clumsily away at the shoulder. The other rose from the water, offering him a small wooden box.
However hard he stared, the bureaucrat could not make out the face clearly enough to be sure it was Undine’s. The arm stretched toward him, a swan’s neck with box held in the beak. Convulsively, he accepted the gift, and the corpse tumbled away, leaving him lightless again.
When he had mastered his revulsion, the bureaucrat said, “Is this what Gregorian asked for?” His heart was beating fiercely. Sweat ran down under his shirt. Undine’s voice chuckled—a throaty, passionate noise ending in a sudden gasp.
“Two million years you’ve had, little ape, quite a run when you think about it, and it’s still death you want most. Your first wife. I’d scratch her eyes out if I could, she’s left you so hesitant and full of fear. You can’t get it up for memory of her. I’m old, but there’s juice in me yet; I can do things for you she never would.”
“Free the machines.”
“Yes, again, oh yes, yes.”
Fearfully he opened the box.
It was empty.
All three voices joined together in a single chord of laughter, full-throated and mad, that gushed up from the gullet, poured over him,