Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick Page B

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 to the mills, in a final fevered slashing of timber before the tides turned the trees to kelp. The bureaucrat watched the rain splash mud knee-high on the clapboard walls. It forced up the stale smell of earth from ground and road, tempered by the rising odors from the tomato bush by the herb garden and the red brick walkway around to the back.
    He felt sad and lost, and he could not stop thinking of Undine. When he closed his eyes, he could taste her tongue, feel the touch of her breasts. The nail tracks lingering on his back stung at the memory of her. He felt utterly ridiculous and more than a little angry at himself. He was not a schoolboy to be haunted so by the vision of her eyes, her cheeks, the warm amusement in her smile.
    He sighed, took Gregorian’s notebook from his briefcase, flipped idly through its pages. A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the will and not of the intelligence. There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or the scientific sense. Impatiently he skipped ahead.
    What is good? Whatever increases the feeling of power, the will to power, and above all else, power itself. Rereading the words, he could see the young Gregorian in his mind, the doubtless gaunt magician-apprentice, filled with that sourceless teenage hunger for importance and recognition. Men are my slaves.
    He put the book back, irritated by the naive posturing tone of its aphorisms. He knew this type of young man all too well; there had been a time when he was one of them. Then