Like a model on a runway (one who has forgotten to actually put on the latest Paris fashion she's supposed to be displaying), the woman in the street pivoted on the balls of her feet, bu**ocks tensing with lovely silken ease, creating momentary crescent-shaped hollows. She began to walk back, the eyes just below the straight cut of her bangs fixed on some distant horizon, her hair swinging beside ears that were without other ornament.
"When I found someone with a prick, I f**ked him," Mia said. "That much I had in common with the demon elemental who first tried to have congress with your soh and then did have congress with your dinh, and that also accounts for my lie, I suppose. And I found your dinh passing fair." The tiniest bit of greed roughened her voice as she said this. The Detta in Susannah found it sexy. The Detta in Susannah bared her lips in a grin of gruesome understanding.
"I f**ked them, and if they couldn't break free I f**ked them to death." Matter-of-fact.After the Grand Coulee, we went to Yosemite. Would you tell your dinh something for me, Susannah? If you see him again?"
"Aye, if you like."
"Once he knew a man - a bad man - named Amos Depape, brother of the Roy Depape who ran with Eldred Jonas in Mejis. Your dinh believes Amos Depape was stung to death by a snake, and in a way he was...but the snake was me."
Susannah said nothing.
"I didn't f**k them for sex, I didn't f**k them to kill them, although I didn't care when they died and their pricks finally wilted out of me like melting icicles. In truth I didn't knowwhy I was f**king them, until I came here, to Fedic. In those early days there were still men and women here; the Red Death hadn't come, do ye ken. The crack in the earth beyond town was there, but the bridge over it still stood strong and true. Those folk were stubborn, trying not to let go, even when the rumors that Castle Discordia was haunted began. The trains still came, although on no regular schedule - "
"The children?" Susannah asked. "The twins?" She paused. "The Wolves?"
"Nay, all of that was two dozen centuries later. Or more. But hear me now: there was one couple in Fedic who had ababy. You've no idea, Susannah of New York, how rare and wonderful that was in those days when most folk were as sterile as the elementals themselves, and those who weren't more often than not produced either slow mutants or monsters so terrible they were killed by their parents if they took more than a single breath. Most of them didn't. Butthis baby!"
She clasped her hands. Her eyes shone.
"It was round and pink and unblemished by so much as a portwine stain - perfect - and I knew after a single look what I'd been made for. I wasn't f**king for the sex of it, or because in coitus I was almost mortal, or because it brought death to most of my partners, but to have a baby like theirs. Like their Michael."
She lowered her head slightly and said, "I would have taken him, you know. Would have gone to the man, f**ked him until he was crazy, then whispered in his ear that he should kill his molly. And when she'd gone to the clearing at the end of the path, I would have f**ked him dead and the baby - that beautiful little pink baby - would have been mine. D'you see?"
"Yes," Susannah said. She felt faintly sick. In front of them, in the middle of the street, the ghostly woman made yet another turn and started back again. Farther down, the huckster-robot honked out his seemingly eternal spiel:Girls, girls, girls! Some are humie and some are cybie, but who cares, you can't tell the difference!
"I discovered I couldn't go near them," Mia said. "It was as though a magic circle had been drawn around them. It was the baby, I suppose.
"Then came the plague. The Red Death. Some folks said something had been opened in the castle, some jar of demonstuff that should have been left shut forever. Others said the plague came out of the crack - what they called the Devil's Arse. Either way, it was the end of life in Fedic, life on the edge of Discordia. Many left on foot or in waggons. Baby Michael and his parents stayed, hoping for a train. Each day I waited for them to sicken - for the red spots to show on the baby's dear cheeks and fat little arms - but they never did; none of the three sickened. Perhaps theywere in a magic circle. I think they must have been. And a train came. It was Patricia. The mono. Do ya ken - "
"Yes," Susannah said. She knew all she wanted to about Blaine's companion mono. Once upon a time her route must have taken her over here as well as to Lud.
"Aye. They got on. I watched from the station platform, weeping my unseen tears and wailing my unseen cries. They got on with their sweet wee one...only by then he was three or four years old, walking and talking. And they went. I tried to follow them, and Susannah, I could not. I was a prisoner here. Knowing my purpose was what made me so."
Susannah wondered about that, but decided not to comment.
"Years and decades and centuries went by. In Fedic there were by then only the robots and the unburied bodies left over from the Red Death, turning to skeletons, then to dust.
"Then men came again, but I didn't dare go near them because they werehis men." She paused. "Itsmen."
"The Crimson King's."
"Aye, they with the endlessly bleeding holes on their foreheads. They went there." She pointed to the Fedic Dogan - the Arc 16 Experimental Station. "And soon their accursed machines were running again, just as if they still believed that machines could hold up the world. Not, ye ken, that holding it up is what they want to do! No, no, not they! They brought in beds - "
"Beds!" Susannah said, startled. Beyond them, the ghostly woman in the street rose once more on the balls of her feet and made yet one more graceful pirouette.