Michael Swanwick - Dancing with Bears

“An army?” Arkady asked, mystified.

“An army or the beginnings of one. There are powers which hate humanity, and they are resolved to destroy Moscow tonight.”

“Nor will it end there,” Chernobog said.

“Nor will it end there. The survivors will carry the sacred flame with them, out into Muscovy, into Russia, into the world!”

“Everybody will die?”

“Yes. But thanks to your hard work, most of Moscow will be filled with the divine spark of rasputin. Briefly, its citizens will be in a state of perfect grace. Now, man being a sinful brute, almost all will rapidly fall from that grace once the rasputin leaves their bloodstreams. But, to their great good fortune, the flames will reach them first and they’ll die in a state of grace. Which is all that God really cares about.”

“No,” Arkady said.

“Yes.” Koschei sounded genuinely amused. “The details He leaves to underlings.”

“You talk about armies and death and setting fire to Moscow, and then you claim it’s what God wants?” Arkady said with growing anger. “How do you know what God wants?”

“You don’t believe I know?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Well, if you don’t believe me, you can always ask Him yourself.” Smiling benignly, Koschei held out his hand. In it was a vial of rasputin.

“Madness and buggery!” Arkady swore in an agony of enlightenment. He saw it all now, and the sight made him want to tear out his eyes with his own hands. “You are not the holy man I believed you to be! You are an agent of the Devil himself, and your drug leads not to Paradise but to the slippery slopes of Hell. Well, I shall stop you. I swear I will. Mark my words.”

“Stop me?” Koschei’s eyes shone with benevolent love, even as his tone turned stern and scornful. “You think I would have given a young mooncalf like you the means to thwart the will of God? I have told you as much as I have only because it is already too late to stop anything.”

“Far, far, far too late,” Chernobog amplified.

Svarozic leaned back in his chair and kicked his feet in soundless laughter.

With a cry of despair, Arkady fled from the room, from Koschei, from his past, from all he had ever been or was or aspired to be.

Down the canted hotel hallways and out onto the reeling streets he ran. Blindly he fled through dark buildings that crested and fell with each staggering step he took. What to do? He had betrayed his new city and government. He was a traitor to all humanity! He was a new Judas, a villain beyond all possible redemption!

There was only one possible solution. He must warn the Duke of Muscovy.

Kyril woke up feeling optimistic and scowled. He had never in his life had anything to feel optimistic about, so naturally he distrusted this feeling. Kicking off the gunnysack he’d been using for a blanket, he crawled out from behind a crate of silk that decades ago had been stashed in a smuggler’s vault deep in the City Below and left to rot when its owner met with a now-unknowable fate. The feeling of well-being grew stronger, and he was suddenly struck by the urge to sing. He lurched to his feet in alarm. “This ain’t right,” he said, and slapped himself as hard as he could, twice.

A grin as warm as sunshine blossomed on his face, accompanied by an overwhelming sense that all was right with the world. This was terrifying. “There’s some kind of weird shit in the air,” he said in mingled fear and wonder. “Bugger me up the fucking ass like a goddamn man-whore if there ain’t.”

Kyril had slept in the new suit-green velvet, with yellow piping-that he’d bought with some of the proceeds of his first confidence game, so all he needed to do was to lace up his shoes and run.

He grabbed the shoes and, not bothering to put them on, ran like hell.

As Kyril ran, he found himself growing happier and happier until, against all his better judgment, he slowed to a trot and then a walk and finally a dawdle. “Definitely something in the air,” he chuckled. “Pretty funny stuff, whatever it is.”

One of the Pale Folk plodded lifelessly by. But this one had a bird-head! Kyril couldn’t help laughing. On an impulse, he raced after the sad parody of a human being and positioned himself directly in front of it. It stopped and stared at him until, still laughing, he stepped out of its way with a little bow. Then, when it tried to walk by, he stuck out his foot and tripped it.

Down it went, in the drollest possible manner.

Kneeling on the sad being’s back, Kyril merrily undid the leather mask. The beak was filled with herbs and had two meshed slots or nostrils. Laughing dementedly, he strapped it on.

When Kyril had the mask secured on his own face, he leaped back to see how his pallid victim would respond. The creature stood slowly. An odd, puzzled look entered its eyes. Its face relaxed into the faintest shadow of a smile. Then it leaned back against the marble wall. Its eyes slowly crossed. After a bit, its jaw went slack and it began to drool.

That was pretty funny. But what was even funnier was that by slow degrees Kyril’s mood was darkening. Experimentally, he tried punching the wall. “Fuck! Piss! Cunt! Shit! Prick!” he said. It hurt like a motherfucker.

He dared not take off the mask to suck on the skinned knuckles. But he felt a lot better for being able to feel a lot worse.

Now that he could think clearly again, Kyril was sure that he’d been breathing in spores from the funguses that the Pale Folk grew. You didn’t have to be much of a geneticist to grow happy dust-though giving it away free was a new wrinkle. And if the mushrooms were just beginning to broadcast that shit, that meant that the City Below would be a madhouse for at least a day. During which time, the Pale Folk would be free to do who-knew-what.

However, all he had to do was get to the surface, where the spores would be harmlessly dispersed by the winds, and he’d be fine.

Only…

Only, nobody drugged strangers out of the goodness of their heart. Happy dust was valuable. Whoever was pumping it out would want a return on their investment. Which, for the moneyless tribes living underneath the streets of Moscow meant enslavement, death, or-presuming that such a thing were possible-worse. Well, fuck them. Kyril didn’t owe anybody anything. Especially his so-called friends. The sonsabitches had stabbed him in the goddamned back, pissing themselves with laughter as the cocksucking goats hauled him off screaming to jail, just to keep their fucking mitts on a few shitty rubles that he’d earned for them in the first place. The cunts.

There was, however, one man who had played it straight with him. Who could have simply ripped him off, but had not. Who had taught him useful skills and shown him a possible path out of squalor. Who, devious and unreliable though he might well be, had very carefully shown Kyril the line up to which he could be trusted, and beyond which all bets were off.

Who right now doubtless was sitting like a lump in Ivan the Terrible’s library with his nose buried in a book, oblivious to the world around him and all its strange and gathering dangers.

Well, Kyril didn’t owe him anything either. He had told Darger so to his face. To his goddamned face!

Still…

Feeling like an absolute turnip, Kyril turned away from the long stairway that led up to the surface and headed back toward the lost library.

The orange glow of the reading lantern showed Darger chortling, snorting, and snickering like a fool. He had a scroll unrolled across his lap and was shaking his head in merriment over what was written thereon. Occasionally, he paused to wipe the tears of laughter from his eyes.

“You simply must read this,” he said when Kyril crawled into the library. “What Aristotle had to say about comedy, I mean. One does not commonly conflate philosophical greatness with ribald knee-slappers and yet-”