The Iron Dragon's Daughter (26 page)

She took a deep breath and put a hand on the push bar.

A sudden sense of dark unease swept through her, a heavy wash of
gravitas
that unsettled her stomach and left a bitter taste in her mouth.

Iron talons seized her shoulder. "Miss Alderberry."

It was Doctor Nemesis.

"Ma'am!" Stricken, she looked up into her adviser's face. The doctor's eyeglasses rode low on her beak, two luminous disks under a painfully weak pair of watery pink eyes. The effect was like being stared at by two separate creatures, one of which you pitied and the other feared.

"I have been going over your laboratory reports, Miss Alderberry." Dr. Nemesis put an arm through hers, and walked her toward the front. "They are, if I may confide in you, disappointing, most disappointing in a student of your potential."

"I've been having trouble with the sophic—"

"Exactly so." They strolled out the front entrance. Distractedly, Jane realized that, cloaked within the magnetic field of Dr. Nemesis's dignity, she had effortlessly bypassed security. What would have taken calculation, daring, and risk on her part, her adviser had accomplished without even noticing.

She walked Jane to a faculty elevator and unlocked the controls. It was snug as a nut within, walnut panels polished to a glassy smoothness. The doors closed noiselessly. Silently, they ascended. Jane could dimly see her own reflection in the wood with her adviser looming beside her like a storm cloud.

"You must surely realize why I am concerned for you."

"Well…" Jane didn't really, but that double glare bored into her, waiting for an intelligent response. "I'm here on a merit scholarship, so I suppose—"

"No!" Dr. Nemesis stamped her foot impatiently. As if in response the elevator door slid open. She steered Jane outside. They were on an office level now. The walls were decorated with large unframed oils of umbrellas and sides of beef. The runners on the hall floors smelled new. "I am not talking about mere money, but about your very
survival
! This is a Teind year, surely you must know that." Jane nodded, meaning no. "The department heads are even now assembling the list of those ten percent of the students who are… expendable. Your name, Miss Alderberry, is going to be on that list unless you straighten up and fly right." She glared at her: weakly, sternly.

"There's something I'm missing," Jane said rapidly. "It must surely be something elementary, something basic. If I could only understand it, if only I could see what it was, I'm certain I could keep up."

"I feel it may help, Miss Alderberry, were I to admit to you that at one time I was myself but an indifferent researcher. Oh, yes. Even I." Dr. Nemesis smiled vainly. "Lazy, unorganized, insolent—all the virtues a teaching assistant can have, I lacked."

"I was wondering could it maybe be the pontic water—"

"What set me straight was one particular incident. My adviser, none other than the wizard Bongay himself mind you, had obtained grant money from the Horned Man Foundation to create a divinatory engine in the form of a brazen head. This was, you will understand, very early in the history of cybernetics. It was all done with vacuum tubes then."

"It couldn't be my technique. I was ever so careful."

"We had taken over an unused handball court and fitted it with our equipment. There we spent most of a year, flirting with glory and never winning her. The final month of our funding—the Foundation had harsh penalties for failure—we literally moved into the lab. For three weeks straight we built, unbuilt, and rebuilt that monstrosity. Up all night, every night, and far into the dawn. We slept on cots and lived on take-out, eating cold pizza for breakfast, egg rolls and chocolate doughnuts at midnight. I lost count of the times we booted the creature up, got it to open its eyes, and coaxed it into moving its mouth, but to no purpose. It would not speak.

"After one particularly exasperating failure, Bongay declared himself in great need of sleep and staggered off to his cot. He left me awake, though, with stern warnings to watch the head and wake him immediately should it come to life.

"I was dull with fatigue myself, but I stayed up resoldering some circuits. Vacuum tubes were fussy things. You'd be surprised how often a problem could be resolved simply by ripping out a demonstrably complete circuit and replacing it with its twin.

"Not half an hour later, the head's eyes snapped open.

"Time is,"
he said.

"I put down my soldering iron. To tell you the truth, I was not sure it had actually spoken, for the eyes clicked shut as soon as it was done and that noble brass face was as still as the tomb. It might have been a waking dream. But I had my orders and I went to the wizard Bongay and put my hand on his shoulder to waken him. Only then he rolled over and the blanket slipped from him and I saw how fearsomely aroused he was in his sleep.

"Bongay had the habit, you see, of gratifying his impulses as they arose. To sharpen his wits, you see. I was the first female laboratory assistant he had ever employed but I knew from experience that he would exact from me certain favors which he had grown accustomed to receiving from young male graduate students." She raised an eyebrow significantly.

"You mean—?" said Jane, not sure what she meant.

"Exactly. My hemorrhoids were in bloom. The thought of accommodating him was intolerable. So I decided I must have been mistaken. An hour passed. The head's eyes again opened. Again, he spoke:

"This time I was sure the head had spoken. But now—in addition to my perfectly understandable reluctance to arouse the wizard—I knew that I had committed a grievous error in not awakening him the first time. If I awoke him now, he must surely punish me for not awakening him sooner. I was in a quandary. I dithered for a good hour. At the end of which, the head spoke for a third and final time.

"
Time is past
, he said.

"His eyes rolled up and there was a burning smell. Heat radiated from the brazen head, greater and ever greater, until the metal did actually glow. I screamed and Bongay awoke.

"Is he aware? Bongay demanded. I must speak to him. There are things I must explain before—

"Then he saw how the head glowed and how the solder ran in little rivulets from the seams in its neck and with it the gold and silver of its circuitry. Then did the wizard Bongay himself scream, in such fury that I fled for fear of his wrath."

She laughed. "He lost tenure over that incident, and his life as well. That happened near the end of the fiscal year, and the University had been relying on that grant money. Everybody involved with that fiasco was executed by order of the Bursar."

"How did you survive?"

"They needed somebody to write the final report.
The Wizard Bongay, His Brazen Head and Fearsome Doom: Some Early Lessons Learned
. You may well have read it. But that was the incident that taught me. Never again was I so behindhand in my duties. Vigilance, Ms Alderberry! That must ever be our watchword—vigilance!"

"I'm sure I could catch up. If only I had a little
hint
what I'm doing wrong."

"Good, good," Nemesis said. "I knew our little chat would help. Only remember that we all have quotas to keep. We can show no favoritism. In order to retain you, we must let some other deserving student go. Surviving the Teind, however good a scholar you may be, is a privilege, not a right." They had come to her office. She unlocked the door, stepped inside, and turned. "And remember also, that my door is always open."

She closed it in Jane's face.

The undergraduate elevator from the classroom levels to the three floors collectively designated the Lady Habundia Residence for Female Scholars was crowded with several dozen chattering undergraduates, half of them with bicycles. Jane felt simultaneously inferior and superior to them. They were an unserious lot, most of them, and squandering their educations where she was studiously making the most of hers. On the other hand, there was no denying that they had fun and she largely did not.

A boom box came on. Riders began dancing to the skirl of elfpipes and synthesizer. Two froudlings with greyhound-lean faces, theater majors as like as not, went into a choreographed sword fight, spinning and kicking, leaping and parrying blows from imaginary sabers. Off in a corner several willies had formed a study group. Notebooks passed from hand to hand.

The elevator operator was a potato woman, her brown face so bulgy and lopsided that her scowl was lost in its hilly contours. She opened the doors onto the dorm lobby, and the Habundians surged forward, giggling. The two duelists crouched in their midst, trying to sneak in.

The potato woman was having none of it, though. She snatched up a broom and drove into the crowd, laying about her right and left, smashing the boys on their heads and arms until blood flew. She was a whirlwind, cursing and forcing the two back into the elevator. With a triumphant cackle she clanged the gates shut.

Jane went to her room and dropped her books on her bed. Monkey was out as usual, but at this time of evening there was always a gathering of girls out on the balcony, playing cards and gossiping. Jane sat down at her desk, resolved to put in an hour's study before joining them.

She opened her Petrus Bonus and read: "Something closely analogous to the generation of alchemy is observed in the animal, vegetable, mineral, and elementary world. Nature generates frogs in the clouds, or by means of putrefaction in dust moistened with rain, by the ultimate disposition of kindred substances. Avicenna tells us—" She yawned, lost her place, found it again. "—tells us that a calf was generated in the clouds amid thunder, and reached the earth in a stupefied condition. The decomposition of a basilisk generates scorpions." Most of this was mere example-mongering, the establishment of authority by largesse of data. But there was no telling when a key concept might be dropped in the middle of a pageful of dross, so she had to read it all. "In the dead body of a calf are generated bees, wasps in the carcase of an ass, beetles in the flesh of a horse, and locusts in that of a mule." She skimmed over several more exemplars. "The same law holds good in the mineral world, though not to quite so great an extent."

Jane slammed shut the book and pushed back from her desk. This was too boring for words. She couldn't concentrate. Her stone was two weeks overdue, and she didn't think she could get another extension. Worse, somewhere along the line she was sure she had missed some basic concept, because with every class she could feel her understanding slipping steadily and inevitably behind. If she couldn't catch up fast, she was never going to catch up at all.

She needed a drink.

A glorious sunset was smeared across the horizon, visible in the thin slits between the buildings of the Great Gray City, reflecting gold from the windows to the east. Sirin was there, feet up on the balustrade, showing off her fine long legs, and Raven, Nant, and Jenny Greenteeth as well with a near-full case of Frog City at their feet.

Jenny was throwing beer to the gryphons. She cocked her arm and flung an unopened can as far as she could. It caught the sun and glittered as it spun toward the unseen street.

Shrieking desperately, three gryphons plunged after the can. The victor snapped it up in its beak. With a screech of tearing metal the can popped open. Beer gushed and fizzed. The gryphon hovered, wings working mightily, as it chewed and swallowed.

Gryphons, though they loved it dearly, had small tolerance for alcohol. Several of the creatures were plastered already, weaving erratically in the canyons between soaring stone high rises. One narrowly missed slamming into a walkway bridging two University buildings. Jane gasped.

Jenny laughed and belched and threw another can.

"Pull up a chair," Sirin said genially. "We were talking about things."

Jane leaned against the balustrade, staring into the endless stepped towers with their rounded shoulders, like so many termite mounds enchanted to monstrous size. Skywalks linked them in a complex web of relationships. Here and there specks of green marked balconies and rooftop gardens. The buildings were sufficient to the needs of their dwellers, with theaters and shops, hospitals and restaurants ringing their atria. It was possible—especially if you were a student—to go for weeks without ever seeing the street. Staring into the endless rows of windows, Jane felt a sense not of anonymity but of being one among millions, singular in a galaxy of singularities. She felt comfortable here, as she had no place else in her life. "What sort of things?"

"Anarchy and social justice."

"Gryphons' eggs."

"Boys."

Jane popped a beer, letting a little slop over onto the floor. She plopped down in an empty chair. Raven thrust a bowl of beetle crisps her way, but she shook her head. "I'm having trouble making a sophic hydrolith. I don't know what it is, maybe the pontic water isn't pure." The hydrolith was one-third of her final grade, but she carefully kept her tone of voice light. "Any of you guys know what I should do?"

"You're too tense," Sirin said airily. "Too serious. Too academic. You should go out and get laid more often."

"The world's got enough hydroliths anyway," Nant added. She was a black dwarf, and insanely politicized. "What it
needs
is a system of governance that's not simply the strong telling the weak what to do." She made the sign of the hammer with crossed forearms, not at all self-mockingly.

"That's not helpful, either of you."

"Oh well." Sirin stared upward and announced to the general universe, "Chrysoberyl told me that Billy Bugaboo has three balls."

"What?!"

"As if she'd know."

"He does not! Does he?"

"Well, I'm going to find out soon," Sirin said. "Chrys promised to set me up with a date." She raised a butterfly chip from a cellophane bag in her lap and closed her perfect mouth about it.