Surplus took a deep breath. “Very well,” he said. “The secret lies in the condenser, which takes a full day to recharge. Wait but—”
“Here’s the problem,” the savant said unexpectedly. He poked at the interior of the modem. “There was a wire loose.”
He jacked the device into the wall.
“Oh, dear God,” Darger said.
A savage look of raw delight filled the dwarf savant’s face, and he seemed to swell before them.
“I am free!” he cried in a voice so loud it seemed impossible that it could arise from such a slight source. He shook as if an enormous electrical current were surging through him. The stench of ozone filled the room.
He burst into flames and advanced on the English spy-master and her brother.
While all stood aghast and paralyzed, Darger seized Surplus by the collar and hauled him out into the hallway, slamming the door shut as he did.
They had not run twenty paces down the hall when the door to the Office of Protocol exploded outward, sending flaming splinters of wood down the hallway.
Satanic laughter boomed behind them.
Glancing over his shoulder, Darger saw the burning dwarf, now blackened to a cinder, emerge from a room engulfed in flames, capering and dancing. The modem, though disconnected, was now tucked under one arm, as if it were exceedingly valuable to him. His eyes were round and white and lidless. Seeing them, he gave chase.
“Aubrey!” Surplus cried. “We are headed the wrong way!”
It was true. They were running deeper into the Labyrinth, toward its heart, rather than outward. But it was impossible to turn back now. They plunged through scattering crowds of nobles and servitors, trailing fire and supernatural terror in their wake.
The scampering grotesque set fire to the carpets with every footfall. A wave of flame tracked him down the hall, incinerating tapestries and wallpaper and wood trim. No matter how they dodged, it ran straight toward them. Clearly, in the programmatic literalness of its kind, the demon from the web had determined that having early seen them, it must early kill them as well.
Darger and Surplus raced through dining rooms and salons, along balconies and down servants’ passages. To no avail. Dogged by their hyper-natural nemesis, they found themselves running down a passage, straight toward two massive bronze doors, one of which had been left just barely ajar. So fearful were they that they hardly noticed the guards.
“Hold, sirs!”
The mustachioed master of apes stood before the doorway, his baboons straining against their leashes. His eyes widened with recognition. “By gad, it’s you!” he cried in astonishment.
“Lemme kill ’em!” one of the baboons cried. “The lousy bastards!” The others growled agreement.
Surplus would have tried to reason with them, but when he started to slow his pace, Darger put a broad hand on his back and shoved. “Dive!” he commanded. So of necessity the dog of rationality had to bow to the man of action. He tobogganed wildly across the polished marble floor between two baboons, straight at the master of apes, and then between his legs.
The man stumbled, dropping the leashes as he did.
The baboons screamed and attacked.
For an instant all five apes were upon Darger, seizing his limbs, snapping at his face and neck. Then the burning dwarf arrived and, finding his target obstructed, seized the nearest baboon. The animal shrieked as its uniform burst into flames.
As one, the other baboons abandoned their original quarry to fight this newcomer who had dared attack one of their own.
In a trice, Darger leaped over the fallen master of apes, and was through the door. He and Surplus threw their shoulders against its metal surface and pushed. He had one brief glimpse of the fight, with the baboons aflame, and their master’s body flying through the air. Then the door slammed shut. Internal bars and bolts, operated by smoothly oiled mechanisms, automatically latched themselves.
For the moment, they were safe.
Surplus slumped against the smooth bronze, and wearily asked, “Where did you get that modem?”
“From a dealer of antiquities.” Darger wiped his brow with his kerchief. “It was transparently worthless. Whoever would dream it could be repaired?”
Outside, the screaming ceased. There was a very brief silence. Then the creature flung itself against one of the metal doors. It rang with the impact.
A delicate girlish voice wearily said, “What is this noise?”
They turned in surprise and found themselves looking up at the enormous corpus of Queen Gloriana. She lay upon her pallet, swaddled in satin and lace, and abandoned by all, save her valiant (though doomed) guardian apes. A pervasive yeasty smell emanated from her flesh. Within the tremendous folds of chins by the dozens and scores was a small human face. Its mouth moved delicately and asked, “What is trying to get in?”
The door rang again. One of its great hinges gave.
Darger bowed. “I fear, madame, it is your death.”
“Indeed?” Blue eyes opened wide and, unexpectedly, Gloriana laughed. “If so, that is excellent good news. I have been praying for death an extremely long time.”
“Can any of God’s creations truly pray for death and mean it?” asked Darger, who had his philosophical side. “I have known unhappiness myself, yet even so life is precious to me.”
“Look at me!” Far up to one side of the body, a tiny arm—though truly no tinier than any woman’s arm—waved feebly. “I am not God’s creation, but Man’s. Who would trade ten minutes of their own life for a century of mine? Who, having mine, would not trade it all for death?”
A second hinge popped. The doors began to shiver. Their metal surfaces radiated heat.
“Darger, we must leave!” Surplus cried. “There is a time for learned conversation, but it is not now.”
“Your friend is right,” Gloriana said. “There is a small archway hidden behind yon tapestry. Go through it. Place your hand on the left wall and run. If you turn whichever way you must to keep from letting go of the wall, it will lead you outside. You are both rogues, I see, and doubtless deserve punishment, yet I can find nothing in my heart for you but friendship.”
“Madame…” Darger began, deeply moved.
“Go! My bridegroom enters.”
The door began to fall inward. With a final cry of “Farewell!” from Darger and “Come on!” from Surplus, they sped away.
By the time they had found their way outside, all of Buckingham Labyrinth was in flames. The demon, however, did not emerge from the flames, encouraging them to believe that when the modem it carried finally melted down, it had been forced to return to that unholy realm from whence it came.
The sky was red with flames as the sloop set sail for Calais. Leaning against the rail, watching, Surplus shook his head. “What a terrible sight! I cannot help feeling, in part, responsible.”
“Come! Come!” Darger said. “This dyspepsia ill becomes you. We are both rich fellows, now. The Lady Pamela’s diamonds will maintain us lavishly for years to come. As for London, this is far from the first fire it has had to endure. Nor will it be the last. Life is short, and so, while we live, let us be jolly.”
“These are strange words for a melancholiac,” Surplus said wonderingly.
“In triumph, my mind turns its face to the sun. Dwell not on the past, dear friend, but on the future that lies glittering before us.”
“The necklace is worthless,” Surplus said. “Now that I have the leisure to examine it, free of the distracting flesh of Lady Pamela, I see that these are not diamonds, but mere imitations.” He made to cast the necklace into the Thames.
Before he could, though, Darger snatched away the stones from him and studied them closely. Then he threw back his head and laughed. “The biters bit! Well, it may be paste, but it looks valuable still. We shall find good use for it in Paris.”
“We are going to Paris?”
“We are partners, are we not? Remember that antique wisdom that whenever a
door closes, another opens. For every city that burns, another beckons. To France, then, and adventure! After which, Italy, the Vatican Empire, Austro-Hungary, perhaps even Russia! Never forget that we have yet to present your credentials to the Duke of Muscovy.”
“Very well,” Surplus said. “But when we do, I’ll pick out the modem.”
There was a season in Paris when Darger and Surplus, those two canny rogues, lived very well indeed. That was the year when the Seine shone a gentle green at night with the pillars of the stone bridges fading up into a pure and ghostly blue, for the city engineers, in obedience to the latest fashions, had made the algae and mosses bioluminescent.
Paris, unlike lesser cities, reveled in her flaws. The molds and funguses that attacked her substance had been redesigned for beauty. The rats had been displaced by a breed of particularly engaging mice. A depleted revenant of the Plague Wars yet lingered in her brothels in the form of a sexual fever that lasted but twenty-four hours before dying away, leaving one with only memories and pleasant regrets. The health service, needless to say, made no serious effort to eradicate it.
Small wonder that Darger and Surplus were as happy as two such men could be.
One such man, actually. Surplus was, genetically, a dog, though he had been remade into anthropomorphic form and intellect. But neither that nor his American origins was held against him, for it was widely believed that he was enormously wealthy.
He was not, of course. Nor was he, as so many had been led to suspect, a baron of the Demesne of Western Vermont, traveling incognito in his government’s service. In actual fact, Surplus and Darger were being kept afloat by an immense sea of credit while their plans matured.
“It seems almost a pity,” Surplus remarked conversationally over breakfast one morning, “that our little game must soon come to fruition.” He cut a slice of strawberry, laid it upon his plate, and began fastidiously dabbing it with golden dollops of Irish cream. “I could live like this forever.”
“Indeed. But our creditors could not.” Darger, who had already breakfasted on toast and black coffee, was slowly unwrapping a package that had been delivered just minutes before by courier. “Nor shall we require them to. It is my proud boast to have never departed a restaurant table without leaving a tip, nor a hotel by any means other than the front door.”
“I seem to recall that we left Buckingham by climbing out a window into the back gardens.”
“That was the queen’s palace, and quite a different matter. Anyway, it was on fire. Common law absolves us of any impoliteness under such circumstances.” From a lap brimming with brown paper and excelsior, Darger withdrew a gleaming chrome pistol. “Ah!”
Surplus set down his fork and said, “Aubrey, what are you doing with that grotesque mechanism?”
“Far from being a grotesque mechanism, as you put it, my dear friend, this device is an example of the brilliance of the Utopian artisans. The trigger has a built-in gene reader so that the gun could only be fired by its registered owner. Further, it was programmed so that, while still an implacable foe of robbers and other enemies of its master, it would refuse to shoot his family or friends, were he to accidentally point the gun their way and try to fire.”
“These are fine distinctions for a handgun to make.”
“Such weapons were artificially intelligent. Some of the best examples had brains almost the equal of yours or mine. Here. Examine it for yourself.”
Surplus held it up to his ear. “Is it humming?”
But Darger, who had merely a human sense of hearing, could detect nothing. So Surplus remained unsure. “Where did it come from?” he asked.
“It is a present,” Darger said. “From one Madame Mignonette d’Etranger. Doubtless she has read of our discovery in the papers, and wishes to learn more. To which end she has enclosed her card—it is bordered in black, indicating that she is a widow—annotated with the information that she will be at home this afternoon.”
“Then we shall have to make the good widow’s acquaintance. Courtesy requires nothing less.”
Chateau d’Etranger resembled nothing so much as one of Arcimboldo’s whimsical portraits of human faces constructed entirely of fruits or vegetables. It was a bioengineered viridian structure—self-cleansing, self-renewing, and even self-supporting, were one willing to accept a limited menu—such as had enjoyed a faddish popularity in the suburban Paris of an earlier decade. The columned façade was formed by a uniform line of oaks with fluted boles above plinthed and dadoed bases. The branches swept back to form a pleached roof of leafy green. Swags of vines decorated windows that were each the translucent petal of a flower delicately hinged with clamshell muscle to air the house in pleasant weather.
“Grotesque,” muttered Surplus, “and in the worst of taste.”
“Yet expensive,” Darger observed cheerily. “And in the final analysis, does not money trump good taste?”
Madame d’Etranger received them in the orangery. All the windows had been opened, so that a fresh breeze washed through the room. The scent of orange blossoms was intoxicating. The widow herself was dressed in black, her face entirely hidden behind a dark and fashionable cloud of hair, hat, and veils. Her clothes, notwithstanding their somber purpose, were of silk, and did little to disguise the loveliness of her slim and perfect form. “Gentlemen,” she said. “It is kind of you to meet me on such short notice.”
Darger rushed forward to seize her black-gloved hands. “Madame, the pleasure is entirely ours. To meet such an elegant and beautiful woman, even under what appear to be tragic circumstances, is a rare privilege, and one I shall cherish always.”
Madame d’Etranger tilted her head in a way that might indicate pleasure.
“Indeed,” Surplus said coldly. Darger shot him a quick look.
“Tell me,” Madame d’Etranger said. “Have you truly located the Eiffel Tower?”
“Yes, madame, we have,” Darger said.
“After all these years…” she marveled. “However did you find it?”
“First, I must touch lightly upon its history. You know, of course, that it was built early in the Utopian era, and dismantled at its very end, when rogue intelligences attempted to reach out from the virtual realm to seize control of the human world, and humanity fought back in every way it could manage. There were many desperate actions fought in those mad years, and none more desperate than here in Paris, where demons seized control of the Tower and used it to broadcast madness throughout the city. Men fought each other in the streets. Armed forces, sent in to restore order, were reprogrammed and turned against their own commanders. Thousands died before the Tower was at last dismantled.
“I remind you of this, so that you may imagine the determination of the survivors to ensure that the Eiffel Tower would never be raised again. Today, we think only of the seven thousand three hundred tons of puddled iron of its superstructure, and of how much it would be worth on the open market. Then, it was seen as a monster, to be buried where it could never be found and resurrected.”
“As indeed, for all this time, it has not. Yet now, you tell me, you have found it. How?”
“By seeking for it where it would be most difficult to excavate. By asking ourselves where such a salvage operation would be most disruptive to contemporary Paris.” He nodded to Surplus, who removed a rolled map from his valise. “Have you a table?”
Madame d’Etranger clapped her hands sharply twice. From the ferny undergrowth to one end of the orangery, an enormous tortoise patiently footed forward. The top of his shell was as high as Darger’s waist, and flat.
Wordlessly, Surplus unrolled the map. It showed Paris and environs.
“And the answer?” Darger swept a hand over the meandering blue river bisecting Paris. “It is buried beneath the Seine!”
For a long moment, the lady was still. Then, “My husband will want to speak with you.”
With a rustle of silks, she left the room.
As soon as she was gone, Darger turned o
n his friend and harshly whispered, “Damn you, Surplus, your sullen and uncooperative attitude is queering the pitch! Have you forgotten how to behave in front of a lady?”
“She is no lady,” Surplus said stiffly. “She is a genetically modified cat. I can smell it.”
“A cat! Surely not.”
“Trust me on this one. The ears you cannot see are pointed. The eyes she takes such care to hide are a cat’s eyes. Doubtless the fingers within those gloves have retractable claws. She is a cat, and thus untrustworthy and treacherous.”
Madame d’Etranger returned. She was followed by two apes who carried a thin, ancient man in a chair between them. Their eyes were dull; they were little better than automata. After them came a Dedicated Doctor, eyes bright, who of course watched his charge with obsessive care. The widow gestured toward her husband. “C’est Monsieur.”
“Monsieur d’Etrang—” Darger began.
“Monsieur only. It’s quicker,” the ancient said curtly. “My widow has told me about your proposition.”
Darger bowed. “May I ask, sir, how long you have?”
“Twenty-three months, seven days, and an indeterminable number of hours,” the Dedicated Doctor said. “Medicine remains, alas, an inexact science.”
“Damn your impudence and shut your yap!” Monsieur snarled. “I have no time to waste on you.”
“I speak only the truth. I have no choice but to speak the truth. If you wish otherwise, please feel free to deprogram me, and I will quit your presence immediately.”
“When I die you can depart, and not a moment before.” The slight old man addressed Darger and Surplus: “I have little time, gentlemen, and in that little time I wish to leave my mark upon the world.”
“Then—forgive me again, sir, but I must say it—you have surely better things to do than to speak with us, who are in essence but glorified scrap dealers. Our project will bring its patron an enormous increase in wealth. But wealth, as you surely know, does not in and of itself buy fame.”
The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus Page 3