3. MELUSINE IS WEARY OF SERPENTS AND SHE DREAMS OF ENGINES

Melusine let her hand with the quill in it slip down over the porcelain edge of her bathtub. This vessel stood in the middle of a great tower bathroom lined with tile and pearls. Here, every Saturday, she could shed her heavy clothes and headdress and loosen her pen. The brass shower-head rose before her. Behind her was a towel rack hanging towels of silver and azure. At her right was a table full of combs and brushes. At her left was a table full of inkpots and books: on city planning, on engineering, on automata, on strangeness, on falcons and famuli, on the things of nature and the secrets of women, on the origin of species and the manifesto of cyborgs. At her left shoulder was dark, sibilant Rumor. At her right was Truth in her golden crown, transparent, barely visible or audible. Through her you could see the door that Melusine's spying husband would put a hole in, and in the west window glittered the Waterford clock. It said two twenty in the afternoon of a Saturday: nine hours and forty minutes until transformation. Melusine pressed her notebook flat against the board stretched in front of her, shifted her scaly coils under the water, and started writing again. For she was consumed on her lonely Saturday vigils with robots and the devices of men. She had grown weary of her own potent mixture--on the cusp between human and serpent--and longed for other hybrids. The intersection between human and engine moved her deeply, and since, when she sat in this bath, she had time to consider the genius of many ages past and future, she pitied the cast-off android women of scientific men: changelings of technology. It was their bodies that captivated her. Metal, brass, plaster: men of natural philosophy could truck with the bodies of women and women couldn't.

"Lilith isn't mechanical," whispered airy Truth, but Rumor spoke simultaneously: "I can bring them all before you."

"Lilith was made of earth," Melusine explained to Truth, and to Rumor: "Can you?"