Michael Swanwick - The Dragons of Babel

" 'Carnivore of my delight, I would not have fallen in love with you

had I needed to ask that question.'

" 'But have you been faithful to us?' asked she who was the most intelligent.

" 'I'm still alive, aren't I?' I said. Oh I was fearless! I shook out my mane so they could admire it. I stood and stretched so they could see the muscular perfection of my body. 'A glance would have told you I was unworthy. Your teeth would have met in my throat. Your claws would have ripped open my hide, so that my blood would fountain upon the ground. Yet still I live.'

"Great was their arousal at my words. A collective growl rose up from them all. Finally, the shyest of them all stood forward and murmured, 'Then you may have us.' "I did not move. 'When?' I asked.

"A look of mingled amusement and appreciation passed around the circle and I knew that I had passed their final and most cunning test. The loveliest of the lot lowered her eyes before me. 'Now,' she said.

"So we celebrated our nuptials then and there in that very spot and instant, and long has our marriage been, and happy as well. Then —not long ago as I reckon these things, but beyond the memory of your kind — my ladies became pregnant. Now, the female is at her most vulnerable when she is pregnant and though there are few creatures that would dare attack ones such as they... Well, when your gestation period is measured in eons, it pays to take no chances. So in the manner of our kind, they sought out a mountain and dug burrows deep down to its very roots, there to sleep and await their day of delivery.

"I stood guard.

"Sometime I wandered away briefly to hunt or on a call of nature, but never for long. Before I left. I would plant an apple's worth of seeds to measure the time. Always I returned before the resulting orchard had died. Such was my vigilance.

"But one day I returned from a brief excursion to discover the mountain half carved away and masons and carpenters and stonecutters at work on a massive edifice atop the very spot where my beloved wives lay buried! Overseeing it all was a monarch who was large of stature by your standards, though a mere pippin of a creature by mine.

"What's this?" I asked the little king. He was one of the flesh folk and they were new to the world at that time.

Rather nervously—for I had knocked him over and placed a paw on his chest lest he attempt to escape—Nimrod (for such, he said, was his name) explained his great project, its sacred purpose, the many prophesies of its central place to the Thousand Races and inevitable domination of the globe, the elegance of its architecture, and so on and on. During the course of our conversation several of his soldiers loosed spears and arrows, which of course rattled harmlessly off my sides, and I waited until they had drawn carelessly close and crushed them to jelly. But Nimrod I did not destroy, for even in the face of outrage my self-control is absolute.

"With the aid of his draftsmen, the blueprints, and many a fervent oath, Nimrod was able to convince me that the foundations of Babel did nor delve deeply enough to harm my sleeping brides. Indeed, upon reflection, it occurred to me that planting a massive city overtop their sheltering-space only made them all the more secure from harm.

"So I stayed my wrath.

"Now at last my wives' time has come. Sometimes you may feel a tremor that lightly shakes the Tower and makes its steel-beam framework moan. That means that one is experiencing a contraction. Someday—tomorrow, perhaps, or a hundred thousand years from now—they will go into the true labor that takes no time to speak of and is over in a week. Then shall they shake off the weight of stone and mortar that lies atop them, and the Dread Tower shall fall and all those who dwell within it will die. My wives will burrow to the surface and feast on the bodies, and I shall lick my cubs into life. But that happy day is not yet, so I abide I took this job guarding the library, and though the salary is small, my needs are few. It suffices. However long I must endure, I shall. I am patience incarnate."

Will was silent for a while. Then he nodded toward the other lion and said. "And your associate? I assume his story is much the same?"

"Him?" the lion said, surprised. "I wouldn't know. I never asked."

"Ah." Will returned to his reading.

According to the book, hippogriffs ate both grain and flesh. Though there was no shortage of purveyors of each in Babel, Alcyone would doubtless buy from a single provider. Their stables required both access to the open sky and a grassy exercise yard. So there was a second lead as well. A rough-and-tumble elf-girl who could pass as high society shouldn't be as hard to locate as she was turning out to be. So he might want to look for her through her harness-maker. Hippogriffs were far rarer than either the griffins or horses whose crossbreed they were, and thus there were correspondingly fewer artisans catering to the market. Alcyone could be expected to patronize only the best.

It took Will several hours to work his way through to the end of the last book. He put down The Aristocracy of the Air, yawned, stood, and stooped to gather up his stack.

Will had only gone a few steps when a child slammed into his legs.

"Unca Will! Unca Will!" It was Esme. She caught her breath and said, "Pop-Pop says don't go home to our apartment." These days she thought Nat was her grandfather. "He says it's important."

Will stooped so he could speak to Esme eye to eye. "Was this recently?"

She shrugged "I don't know."

"Did he say anything more?"

"Yes, but I forget what."

Will couldn't help but smile. "Of course you do. I—" There was a sudden weight on Will's shoulders and hips. With a strange sense of discontinuity, he realized that he was wearing a rubberized cloth helmet with a plastic visor. He looked down and found himself clothed in a white moon suit with rubber gloves. A waist unit pumped fresh air through PVC. tubing into his helmet.

Inexplicably, Nat Whilk was standing in front of Will. He, too. wore a white biohazard suit. "Whatever you do, don't take off the hood," he said "Or you'll be frozen timeless like everyone else in the city."

Everything felt odd "Nat," Will said, "what the hell am I doing in this thing? What's going on here?"

"Take a look." Nat stepped to the side so he wasn't blocking Will's sight.

All the city was motionless. Traffic had ceased. The crowds of pedestrians on the sidewalk were a petrified forest. Flower petals that the wind had blown from a window box were fossilized in the air, like ants in amber. Esme, caught in mid-hop, balanced on one toe.

Nat took a nickel from his pocket and held out before him. When he snatched his hand out from under it, the nickel did not fall. "Major juju, huh? The Lords of the Mayoralty have frozen an instant of time and moved their police and rescue forces into it. This is world-class stuff. You're lucky to be seeing it. A spell of this magnitude is cast only once in a decade, and even then only under gravest need. It's a real budget-breaker."

Nat snatched the nickel out of the air. "Let's go." "My books..."

"I already returned them. One of the advantages of stopping time is that you've got the opportunity to catch up on all those little chores."

"What about Esme?"

"She'll keep." Will followed Nat down the street, not asking obvious questions but, rather, answering them for himself. How did Nat know about the time-freeze? Nat had connections. Obviously, he had a mole in the Mayoralty or even the Palace of Leaves. Where had he gotten the moon suits? From the same source. What was he planning now? It was extremely unlikely he knew. Nat always said he did his best thinking on the fly.

The city was silent, and beautiful, too.

A scattering of pigeons was a stairway rising from the street. Nat took one from the air and gently folded its wings. After which he stuffed it down the trousers of a nearby boggart. Gleaming droplets of water were a spreading string of bright diamonds pendant beneath an air-conditioner. Nat plucked them one by one. brushed them into a single sphere of water the size of a child's fist, and slipped it inside a policeman's hat. He snatched a blackfly out of the air and placed it in an ogre's nostril.