Michael Swanwick - Dancing with Bears

“Do you know?” Surplus said wryly, “I honestly believe I do.”

“Oh, no. You do not.” Zoesophia’s smile was cruelty itself.“ All of us have our admirers-and it would be the easiest matter imaginable to convince one that Muscovy would be a better place without you in it. Russians are a direct folk, so it would take some persuasion to convince one of them that your death should be lingering and painful. But we can be very persuasive. You exist on our tolerance, and we have tolerated you so far only because a figurehead was needed to arrange our collective marriage. In this, you have proved yourself incompetent, complacent, self-satisfied, and may I say officious. Indeed, I am come to the conclusion that you and your absent friend are both complete and utter frauds!”

“I know from what depths your passion arises,” Surplus said solemnly. “For I feel it myself.” He took her gloved hand and kissed its knuckles. Zoesophia snatched it away from him.

“Are you mad?!”

“Sweet lady, I am precisely the opposite of mad, for I have thought this out long and carefully. Attend: A compulsion was placed upon you in Byzantium, rendering the least touch by a man toxic to you and his intimate caresses fatal. Yet I have seen you and the others walking arm in arm and bestowing chaste kisses upon each other’s cheeks. I have seen you playing with kittens and brightly colored birds with your bare hands, without injury. Why should this be?”

“Obviously, because neither women nor kittens nor birds are men.”

“Nor am I, O Avatar of Delight, nor am I. Have you forgotten that I am no man but rather a reconfigured dog? My genes were tweaked to give me full human intellect and the upright stature of a human. Still, I remain not Homo sapiens sapiens but Canis lupus familiaris. You may do with me as you wish, and the suicidal impulse implanted by the Caliph’s psychogeneticists will not kick in.” Gently, he touched her face just below and to the side of her eye. “You see? No welt.”

For a still, shocked instant, Zoesophia did not move.

One hand floated up to touch her unblemished face.

Then, slowly, she peeled off her gloves and let them fall. One by one, her silks rained down to the floor with a grace that was almost as entrancing as the tawny body that their absence revealed. When she was, save for her jewelry, entirely naked, she passed her hands over Surplus, undressing him. Then she sank back onto the cushions, leaving him standing over her. “I shall teach you all I know,” Zoesophia said. Her expression was cryptic. “Though it may take some time.”

She held out the most desirable arms Surplus had ever seen or even imagined and drew him down atop her. “The first position is called the Way of the Missionary.”

The fastness that the underlords had made their own was in its era impregnable. But during a subsequent age, one corner of it had been sheared away for a tunnel whose purposes were no longer evident. So it was easy enough to enter the complex unnoticed. In a shabby corridor that went nowhere anybody cared to go, Anya Pepsicolova unscrewed a metal plate bolted low on a wall and then ducked through the opening thus revealed. She straightened up inside a nondescript and windowless office whose lone door had long ago merged with its frame in one great mass of rust.

Guided by the light of her cigarette alone, Pepsicolova fetched a coil of rope she had stashed in one corner and rolled up a moldering carpet to reveal a manhole cover hidden underneath. Only the topmost rung of several hundred had survived long neglect, but to this she tied the rope and so rappelled down to the bottom of the shaft. She ground the cigarette underfoot. From here it was only a leisurely walk along a narrow, lichen-streaked passage, to what she thought of as the Whisper Gallery.

The underlords did not know of the gallery. Of that Pepsicolova was certain. She had discovered it by logic alone. First she had reasoned that the Preutopians who had built this facility had trusted nobody, not even their own associates. Then that they would therefore have had means of spying on one another. At which point, Pepsicolova had simply snooped and pried, examining with particular closeness anything that seemed ostentatiously uninteresting. Until finally she found the secret passages and undocumented access-ways by which the Preutopians had bypassed their own security.

The Whisper Gallery completely circled the domed ceiling of what had once been a splendid conference room, all oaken panels and crimson draperies and brass sconces and leather armchairs and polished marble tabletops. It was so high up that nobody below could tell that what looked to be decorative molding was actually a series of slit windows from which the room could be observed. The floor of the gallery was of a soft material that absorbed all footsteps, and the room’s architecture was such that the slightest of sounds could be heard clearly from above.

As she approached the gallery, she heard the murmur of voices.

Pepsicolova quietly took her station. Below her was an underlord. It was in no way human, though it inhabited a human body. The body hunched forward, hands held loosely by the chest, as if it were a praying mantis. Yet though it moved as if it were a living thing, the stench of rotting meat that rose from it was, even from far above, all but unbearable.

Standing across a table from it were the last things in the world Pepsicolova would have expected to find in such a place:

Three stranniks.

Pimps, whores, prostitutes, gangsters, and other unwholesome businessmen were of course frequent visitors to the underlords, as were politicians, black marketeers, drug runners, petty thieves, and salesmen of all sorts. But stranniks?

She held her breath.

“We shall leave this with you,” the largest of the three stranniks said. “You will know what to do with it.”

With a twinge of disappointment, Pepsicolova realized that she had come at the end of the conversation for the underlord responded by saying, “Soon-very soon indeed-when we have recovered the weapon that has lain lost beneath Moscow since Utopia fell-we will kill you. We will kill you slowly and painfully, and along with you every human being who lives in this city. In this way, we shall have a partial revenge for what you and your kind have done to us.”

In Pepsicolova’s experience, such dark words meant that the underlord had run out of useful things to say.

“Yes, that is what you believe,” the chief strannik said. “But you are merely tools in the employ of a higher Power. What you anticipate as destruction will be in actual fact transformation. The Eschaton shall be achieved, the glory of God’s physical being will touch and cauterize the Earth, and on that very day, you will return to Hell.”

“Fool! This is Hell! All existence is Hell for our kind, for no matter where we are, we know your kind still exists unpunished.”

The strannik nodded. “We understand each other completely.”

“For the moment,” the underlord said with obvious regret, “I must refrain from destroying you.”

“I in turn will pray to the living God to forgive and punish you through all eternity.”

The stranniks departed, leaving behind them a leather satchel, whose contents the underlord began to unpack with extreme care.

Darger had lifted a crate as the factor hurried away, as if to carry it into the bar. Now he set it back down and sat atop it, thinking. He had intended to spend another week or so underground before bringing the great scheme to a head. But as a humble worshiper of Fortuna, he believed that there was a time and tide in the affairs of men which was often triggered by sudden, unexpected good luck. Luck that one ignored at one’s peril.

Surely this windfall of tobacco was a sign that he should advance his timetable. He could immediately see how it could be used to publicize his fictitious discovery. Surplus might experience a moment’s surprise to see events moving ahead of schedule. But Darger was certain his friend would be quick to adapt to the changing winds of circumstance.