Michael Swanwick - Dancing with Bears

The great river of incoming bodies here split into several streams. Kyril found himself carried along, like a cork in the current, down a hallway, up a set of stairs, and into yet another dim hallway. There the pressure eased somewhat as Pale Folk grabbed and pushed individuals into short lines before the open doors of what must have originally been rooms for the hospital’s patients. In each room were rotting gurneys. In some the Pale Folk were strapping their blissful captives onto them. In others, they were performing surgery. Without anesthesia, Kyril judged from the sounds he heard.

“Go to the last room in the hall,” Darger sang, gesturing theatrically at the furthest doorway. Through it could be glimpsed, by the light of a single candle, a single figure bent low over a body that struggled and giggled and choked all at once.

“The one that’s got no line at all. Do as I say, and we’ll be okay,

We won’t ask her, we’ll unmask her and she’ll fall.”

Lacking any plans of his own, Kyril shoved Darger before him, toward the final doorway. Luckily, there was a great deal of jostling and confusion in the throng. Some of the captives doubled over with merriment, overtopped, collapsed to the ground, and had to be goaded back to their feet. Others clung to each other to keep from falling. So he drew no particular notice. When they were in the near-lightless room, Darger slapped his knee, apparently overcome by some joke known only to himself and bumped the door half-closed with his bum. Straightening, he staggered backward, and the door slammed shut.

The surgeon didn’t notice. With emotionless intensity, she was drilling a hole in the skull of a man who, for his part, was making a strangled, wheezing noise-though whether of pain or amusement, probably not even he could say. Darger raised his eyebrows and put a finger to his pursed lips. Obediently, Kyril stood and watched. He had seen some rough sights in his short life. Several steps of this operation, however, made him want to throw up.

But at last it was over. The pale surgeon unstrapped her patient. She did not place a mask like her own on him. On a table by the gurney was a bowl of silver-gray marbles. She took one and stuck it in the man’s ear.

The new unit of the Pale Folk stood up. His expression was blandly happy and perfectly without volition. He went to the door, paused briefly as if puzzled at finding it shut, then carefully opened it and left. Kyril kicked it shut again with the back of his heel, before any of the lost souls outside could start forming a new line before it.

The surgeon looked at Darger and then gestured toward the gurney.

Now Darger shuffled forward, smiling as if he wanted nothing more than to have his skull drilled through and his brain operated upon. When he was motioned to lie down, he giggled. Then he wrapped his arms about the surgeoness, holding her motionless. “Quickly! Remove her mask!” he commanded.

Kyril did so. Soon, the surgeon was lost in whatever pallid shadow of joy the Pale Folk were capable of experiencing.

Darger released her. Then, with a whimsical little flip of his wrist, he plucked two of the marbles from the bowl. He held one to his ear, and for an instant all amusement fled from his face. But it very quickly returned, and when it did, he offered the second marble to Kyril.

Warily, Kyril raised the thing to his ear. Exit the room, a tinny voice said. Turn left. Follow the others to the Pushkinskaya docks.

He whipped his hand away and stared down at the metal device. “What the hell?”

“It is an ancient form of scrying or telepathy called radio.” Darger stuck his marble in his ear. “Well? Put it in, boy, put it in! Then we shall know exactly where the mysterious forces behind all this misbehavior wish us to go.” He winked in a comically exaggerated manner. “Knowing which, we can then go in the opposite direction.”

Reluctantly, Kyril followed suit. Exit the room, the voice repeated. Turn left. Follow the others to the… Doing his best to ignore it, he said, “Tell me something.”

“Anything, thou most inquisitive of underage ruffians! Anything at all.”

“How do you know what to do? I mean, how can you? Everybody else, they’re so happy you can cut their throats and they don’t care. Hell, even I was like that after a few minutes. Without this mask, I’d be a giggling idiot. What makes you different from the rest of us?”

“Ahhh, but you see,” Darger said, “I am a depressive. There has been many a morning when my life seemed so hopeless that I lacked the will even to get out of bed. Perforce, I developed the strength of character to confront the savage black dog of despair and get about my business anyway. Compared to that, ignoring happiness is a jolly walk in the park.” As if to demonstrate which, he began to skip in a little circle, clapping his hands rhythmically.

“Stop that!” Kyril said.

It was like following in the trail of a vengeful army. Everywhere Pepsicolova went, she found the remains of squats that had been emptied out by the Pale Folk. The cardboard shanties were all ripped open and their contents scattered and trampled underfoot. If there’d been a campfire, the meager treasures of the squatters had been piled atop it until it was smothered, leaving a smoldering heap of blankets and trash. The pettiness and pointlessness of this vandalism-by any human standard-told her that it had been done by command of the underlords.

Pepsicolova scrabbled through the charred piles of clothing and the crushed cardboard boxes, but in none of them did she find what she was looking for.

She was skulking down a long, narrow passage, sucking on the butt of her final cigarette when a gingerly extended leg touched an invisible strand of barbed wire stretched knee-high from wall to wall. Cautiously, she knelt to touch it. Taut. Such a defensive measure meant that she was coming up on a settlement. So there would be a lookout nearby.

Who would of course be incapacitated by whatever had rendered everybody in the City Below but Anya Pepsicolova and a few fellow tobacco addicts into giggling half-wits.

She stepped over the wire.

Something came slashing toward her out of the darkness. With the barbed wire behind her, she couldn’t move away from it. So she stepped forward, rising to grab the wrist and arm of her attacker just under the weapon and guide the thing down and to one side while she twisted frantically out of its path.

Metal clashed on concrete, sending up sparks. Pepsicolova released her attacker’s wrist and kicked, sending the weapon clattering away.

Then she had both her hands about a throat and was choking hard.

Arms thrashed wildly, clawed at her face, tried to choke her in return. But finally the body went limp in her arms. Pepsicolova lowered it to the ground.

Breathing heavily, more from the shock than the exertion, she searched out the weapon. It was a crowbar as long as her forearm that had been sharpened along one edge for most of its length. Nasty little bugger. She threw it away. Then she went back to the lookout she had throttled and lit a match so she could examine him. He was, she now saw, a weak old man with toothpick arms and a face as wrinkled as an apple in January. Harmless, so long as he didn’t catch you by surprise. Pepsicolova bent low over his foul-smelling, toothless hole of a mouth and could hear him breathing. So he was still alive.

She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

There was an empty pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. In a nearby puddle formed by the slow drip of a leaky water paper, five cigarette butts floated uselessly. Pepsicolova chose to interpret this as a hopeful sign that she was getting closer to her goal.

All senses alert, she continued down the passage. It dead-ended at the top of a rotting metal ladder that she doubted would hold her weight. Firelight flickered from below. Pepsicolova looked out and down into a large and irregular storage space hacked out of the bedrock and forgotten centuries before she was born.