Ian Watson: Stalin's Teardrops

"Run away from you ?"

"That might be best."

"What should frighten me?"

"You'll see."

"I'm seeing!" Oh her body. Oh his, aquiver, arrow notched and tense to fly into her. He laughed. "I hardly think I'm impotent."

"Even so." She lay back upon the blue silk sheets.

Yet as soon as he started to stroke her limbs…

At first he thought absurdly that Masha had concealed an inflatable device within her person: a dildo-doll made of toughest gossamer so as to fold up as small as a thumb yet expand into a balloon with the dimensions of a man. This, she had liberated and inflated suddenly as a barrier, thrusting Peterkin aside…

What, powered by a cartridge of compressed air? How risky! What if the cartridge sprang a leak or exploded? What if the compressed air blew the wrong way?

The intruder had flowed from Masha in a flood-from her open and inviting legs. It had gushed out cloudily, spilling from her like pints and pints of leaking semen congealing into a body of firm white jelly.

He gagged, in shock. "Wh-what-?"

"It's ectoplasm," she said.

"Ectoplasm-"

Yes, he had heard of ectoplasm: the strange fluidic emanation that supposedly pours out of a psychic's nostrils or ears or mouth, an amorphous milk that takes on bodily form and a kind of solidity. It came from her vagina.

Pah! Flimflammery! Puffs of smoke and muslin suspended on strings. Soft lighting, a touch of hypnosis and auto-suggestion.

Of course, of course. Went without saying. Except…

What now lay between them could be none other than an ectoplasmic body.

A guard dog lurked in Masha's kennel.

A eunuch slept at her door. She wore a chastity belt in the shape of a blanched, clinging phantom. Peterkin studied the thing that separated them. He poked it, and it quivered. It adhered to Masha, connected by…

"Don't try to pull it away," she warned. "You can't. It will only go back inside when my excitement ebbs."

And still he desired her, perhaps even more so. He ached.

"You're still excited?" he asked her.

"Oh yes."

"Does this… creature… give you any satisfaction?"

"None at all."

"Did a witch curse you, Masha? Or a magician? Do such persons live in your country?"

Perhaps Masha belonged to somebody powerful who had cast a spell upon her as an insurance policy for those times when she crossed the in-between zone to such places as the park. If composers could map that other land with their concerti, or painters with their palettes, why not other varieties of magic too?

She peered around the white shoulder of the manifestation. "Don't you see, Peterkin? It's you. It's the template for you, the mould."

What did she mean? He too peered at the smooth suggestion of noble features. His ghost was enjoying-no, certainly not even enjoying!- Masha. His ghost simply intervened, another wretched obstacle to joy. A twitching lump, a body equipped with a nervous system but lacking any mind or thoughts.

"And yet," she hinted, "there's a way to enter my country. A medium is a bridge, a doorway. Not to any spirit-world, oh no. But to: that other existence."

"Show me the way."

"Are you quite sure?"

How he ached. "Yes, Masha. Yes. I must enter."

As his thoughts and memories flowed freely-of old desires, of canvases never painted and bodies never seen, of stuffed dumplings and skewered lamb and interminable cartographic projections-so he sensed a shift in his personal centre of gravity, in his prime meridian.

He felt at once much closer to Masha, and anaesthetized, robbed of sensation.

His body was moving; it was rolling over on the bed, flexing its arms and legs-no longer his own body to command.

Equipped with the map of his memories, the ghost had taken charge.

Now the ghost was making Peterkin's body stand up and put on his clothes; while he-his kernel, his soul-clung against Masha silently.

That body which had been his was opening and shutting its mouth, uttering noises. Words.

"You go along Polnoch Place -" Masha gave directions and instructions; Peterkin couldn't follow them.

He himself was shrinking. Already he was the size of a child. Soon, of a baby. As an Arabian genie dwindles, tapering down in a stream of smoke into a little bottle, so now he was entering Masha.

"I shall be born again, shan't I?" he cried out. "Once you've smuggled me over the border deep into the other country, inside of you?"

Unfortunately he couldn't hear so much as a mewling whimper from what little of him remained outside of her.

All he heard, distantly, was a door bang shut as the phantom left Masha's room.

Warm darkness embraced his dissolved, suspended existence.

Only at the last moment did he appreciate the worries of the persons in that other, free domain-who had been forced into existence by the frustrations of reality and who depended for their vitality upon a lie, which might soon be erased. They, the free, were fighting for the perpetuation of falsehood. Peterkin had been abducted so that a wholly obedient servant might be substituted in his place in the cartography department of the secret police. Only at the last moment, as he fell asleep-in order that his phantom could become more conscious-did he understand why Masha had trapped him.

Church bells were ringing out across the city in celebration, clong-dong-clangle. The great edifice on Dzerzhinsky Square was almost deserted with the exception of bored guards patrolling corridors. In the mahogany-panelled office of the head of the directorate of censorship, General Mirov rubbed his rubicund boozer's nose as if an itch was aflame.

"How soon can we hope to have an accurate Great Atlas?" he demanded sourly. "That's what I'm being asked."

Not right at the moment, however. The six black telephones on his vast oak desk all stood silently.

Valentin blinked. "As you know, Comrade General, Grusha's disappearance hasn't exactly speeded the task. All the damned questioning, the interruptions. Myself and my staff being bothered at our work as though we are murderers."

The ceiling was high and ornately plastered, the windows taller than a man. A gilt-framed portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky, architect of terror, watched rapaciously.

"If," said Mirov, "a newly appointed deputy-chief cartographer-of reformist ambitions, and heartily resented because of those, mark my words!-if she vanishes so inexplicably, are you surprised that there's a certain odour of rats in your offices? Are you astonished that her well-connected parents press for the most thorough investigation?"

Valentin nodded towards the nobly handsome young man who stood expressionlessly in front of one of the embroidered sofas.

"I'll swear that Peterkin here has undergone a personality fluctuation because of all the turmoil." dangle, dong, clong. Like some mechanical figure heeding the peal of a carillon, Peterkin took three paces forward across the oriental carpet.

"Ah," said Mirov, "so are we attempting to clear up the matter of Grusha's possible murder hygienically in private? Between the three of us? How maternal of you, Colonel! You shelter the members of your staff just like a mother hen." The General's gaze drifted to the intruding object on his desk, and he frowned irritably "Things have changed. Can't you understand? I cannot suppress the investigation."

"No, no, no," broke in Valentin. "Peterkin used to be a bit of a dreamer. Now he's a demon for work. That's all I meant. Well, a demon for the old sort of work, not for cartographic revisionism…" As if realizing that under present circumstances this might hardly be construed as an endorsement, Valentin shrugged.

"Is that thing supposed to be a sample of his most recent work?" The General's finger stabbed accusingly towards the decorated egg which rested on his blotting paper, geometrically embellished in black and ochre and yellow. "Reminds me of some tourist souvenir on sale in a foetid East African street. Some barbaric painted gourd."