The Infinite Matrix | Michael Swanwick & Francisco Goya | The Sleep Of

Reason 61

05.08.03

the sleep of reason

by Michael Swanwick

with illustrations by

Francisco JosÉ de Goya y Lucientes

Click image to enlarge

Digital image © copyright

Davison Art Center,

Wesleyan University

DAC permission required

for any other use.

61. [Plate 60]

Elena's Playful Side

All work and no play makes a girl - well, Elena was never dull.

Sometimes, however, she just had to let her frisky side out. Sometimes

she needed to get naked and romp. Today was one of those days. She called

up a certain archbishop of her acquaintance and said, "Get your ass

you-know-where, pronto!"

"Y-yes, mistress," quavered the sinner.

"And wear your robes!"

It was a beautiful spring night, so they began with a spot of

devil-worship. Not that Elena subscribed to a patristic view of Evil. But

there are certain things that it's fun to watch an ordinarily-dignified

man do with goats and cats and human skulls.

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Then they got down to sex. "Have you ever been fisted?" Elena asked.

"Well, actually, last month you-"

"Through your ear?"

"Good Lord, no!" the archbishop cried in horror.

But protest though he might, Elena would not be gainsaid. She squeezed

the tip of her little finger into his ear and tickled his tympanum,

making it boom like a drum. Then she slit the membrane with her nail, and

pushed the finger in a little deeper.

The archbishop screamed.

"Don't focus on the pain," Elena advised him. "This is nothing compared

to what's coming."

She squeezed in a second finger alongside the first. And then a third.

Soon enough, she had her entire hand all the way up to the wrist inside

the archbishop's brain.

"Ooh!" she giggled. "It's squishy! Like warm mud!"

She wriggled her fingers.

Synapses sparked and misfired within the archbishop's brain like roman

candles. One of the cats looked up at him and, in the voice of an altar

boy he had once known perhaps too intimately, said, "Well, so much for

God."

"T-this is a hallucination," his eminence stuttered.

"You'd best pray it is," said the cat. "After the life you've led, a

random and meaningless universe without afterlife or any moral

accountability at all is the best you can hope for."

"I can still be forgiven!" that desperate man cried. "God is all-loving

and all-merciful!"

"He's also all-just," the cat replied. "And He wasn't born yesterday."

Then, turning his back, he settled down to licking his fur clean.

Elena withdrew her hand from the archbishop's brain.

"That was fun!" she cried girlishly. "But I've got work to do." She laved

her hand with water from a nearby jug, donned her clothing again, and

headed for the limo.

"Same time next month?" she threw over her shoulder.

"Oh, yes," the poor schlub said, weeping and clutching his head with

palsied hands. "Please."

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This is the 61st of 80 stories by Michael Swanwick written to accompany

Francisco Goya's Los Caprichos. For a listing of the most recently

available stories, go to The Sleep of Reason.

Eileen K. Gunn.

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