The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus

by Michael Swanwick

  “You lied to me, Papatragos,” Darger said sternly. “The Evangelos bronzes were yours all along.”

  Papatragos pulled an innocent face. “Why, whatever do you mean?”

  “I’ve seen the lions and the bronze man,” Surplus said. “It is unquestionably the statue of Lord Nelson himself, stolen from Trafalgar Square in ancient times by the rapacious Grecian Empire. How can you possibly justify keeping it?”

  Now Papatragos looked properly abashed. “Well, we’re sort of attached to the old thing. We walk past it every time we go to worship. It’s not really a part of our religion, but it’s been here so long, it almost feels as if it should be, you see.”

  “Exactly what is your religion?” Surplus asked curiously.

  “We’re Jewish,” Papatragos said. “All satyrs are.”

  “Jewish?!”

  “Well, not exactly Orthodox Jews.” He shuffled his feet. “We couldn’t be, not with these cloven hooves. But we have our rabbis and our shuls. We manage.”

  It was then that Dionysus began to play his panpipes and the crowd of nymphs and women from the temple flowed onto the former battleground. Surplus’s ears pricked up. “Well, it seems the night will not be a total waste of time, after all,” Papatragos said brightly. “Will you be staying?”

  “No,” Darger said, “I believe I will return to our inn to contemplate mortality and the fate of gods.”

  Yet Darger was no more than halfway back to town when he came upon a wagon piled high with feather mattresses, pulled over to the side of the road. The horses had been unharnessed so they could graze, and sweet sighs and giggles came from the top of the mattresses.

  Darger stopped, appalled. He knew those sounds well, and recognized too the pink knee that stuck out here, the tawny shoulders draped with long black hair that arched up there. It was Theodosia and Anya. Together. Alone.

  In an instant’s blinding insight, he understood all. It was an old and familiar situation: Two women who loved each other but were too young to embrace the fact in all its implications, and so brought a third, male, partner into their dalliances. It hardly mattered who. Unless, of course, you were the unimportant male himself. In which case, it was a damnable insult.

  “Who’s there?” The two women pulled apart and struggled up out of the mattresses. Their heads appeared over the top of the wagon. Hair black and blond, eyes brown and green, one mouth sweet and the other sassily sticking out a little pink triangle of tongue. Both were, implicitly, laughing at him.

  “Never mind about me,” Darger said stiffly. “I see the way the wind blows. Continue, I pray you. I retain the fondest memories of you both, and I wish you nothing but well.”

  The women stared at him with frank astonishment. Then Theodosia whispered in Anya’s ear, and Anya smiled and nodded. “Well?” Theodosia said to Darger. “Are you joining us or not?”

  Darger wanted to spurn their offer, if for no other reason than his dignity’s sake. But, being merely human—and male to boot—he complied.

  So for a space of time Darger and Surplus stayed in Arcadia and were content. Being the sort of men they were, however, mere contentment could never satisfy them for long, and so one day they loaded their bags into a rented pony-cart and departed. For once, though, they left behind people who genuinely regretted seeing them leave.

  Some distance down the road, as they passed by the ruins of the Monastery of St. Vasilios, the pony grew restive and they heard the music of pipes.

  There, sitting atop the wall, waiting for them, was Dionysus. He was wearing a peasant’s blouse and trousers, but even so, he looked every inch a god. He casually set down his panpipes. “Bach,” he said. “The old tunes are best, don’t you agree?”

  “I prefer Vivaldi,” Darger said. “But for a German, Bach wasn’t bad.”

  “So. You’re leaving, are you?”

  “Perhaps we’ll be back, someday,” Surplus said.

  “I hope you’re not thinking of returning for the bronzes?”

  It was as if a cloud had passed before the sun. A dark shiver ran through the air. Dionysus was, Darger realized, preparing to assume his aspects of godhead should that prove necessary.

  “If we were,” he said, “would this be a problem?”

  “Aye. I have no objection to your bronze man and his lions going home. Though the morality of their staying or returning is more properly a matter for the local rabbis to establish. Unfortunately, there would be curiosity as to their provenance and from whence they had come. This land would be the talk of the world. But I would keep our friends as obscure as possible for as long as may be. And you?”

  Surplus sighed. “It is hard to put this into words. It would be a violation of our professional ethics not to return for the bronzes. And yet…”

  “And yet,” Darger said, “I find myself reluctant to reintroduce this timeless land to the modern world. These are gentle folk, their destruction of St. Vasilios notwithstanding, and I fear for them all. History has never been kind to gentle folk.”

  “I agree with you entirely. Which is why I have decided to stay and to protect them.”

  “Thank you. I have grown strangely fond of them all.”

  “I as well,” Surplus said.

  Dionysus leaned forward. “That is good to hear. It softens the hurt of what I must say to you. Which is: Do not return. I know what sort of men you are. A week from now, or a month, or a year, you will think again of the value of the bronzes. They are in and of themselves worth a fortune. Returned to England, the prestige they would confer upon their finders is beyond price. Perhaps you have been guilty of criminal activities; for this discovery, much would be forgiven. Such thoughts will occur to you. Think, also this: That these folk are protected not by me alone, but by the madness I can bring upon them. I want you to leave this land and never come back.”

  “What—never return to Arcadia?” Surplus said.

  “You do not know what you ask, sir!” Darger cried.

  “Let this be an Arcadia of the heart to you. All places abandoned and returned to must necessarily disappoint. Distance will keep its memory evergreen in your hearts.” Now Dionysus reached out and embraced them both, drawing them to his bosom. In a murmurous voice, he said, “You need a new desire. Let me tell you of a place I glimpsed en route to Greece, back when I was merely human. It has many names, Istanbul and Constantinople not the least among them, but currently it is called Byzantium.”

  Then for a time he spoke of that most cosmopolitan of cities, of its mosques and minarets and holographic pleasure-gardens, of its temples and palaces and baths, where all the many races of the world met and shared their lore. He spoke of regal women as alluring as dreams, and of philosophers so subtle in their equivocations that no three could agree what day of the week it was. He spoke too of treasures: gold chalices, chess sets carved of porphyry and jade, silver-stemmed cups of narwhal ivory delicately carved with unicorns and maidens, swords whose hilts were flecked with gems and whose blades no force could shatter, tuns of wine whose intoxicating effects had been handcrafted by the finest storytellers in the East, vast libraries whose every book was the last surviving copy of its text. There was always music in the air of Byzantium, and the delicate foods of a hundred cultures, and of a summer’s night, lovers gathered on the star-gazing platforms to practice the amatory arts in the velvety perfumed darkness. For the Festival of the Red and White Roses, streams and rivers were rerouted to run through the city streets, and a province’s worth of flowers were plucked and their petals cast into the flowing waters. For the Festival of the Honey of Eden…

  Some time later, Darger shook himself from his reverie, and discovered that Surplus was staring blindly into the distance, while their little pony stamped his feet and shook his harness, anxious to be off. He gripped his friend’s shoulder. “Ho! Sleepy-head! You’ve wandered off into the Empyrean, when you’re needed here on Earth.”

  Surplus shook himself. “I dreamed…what did I dream? It’s lost now,
and yet it seemed vitally important at the time, as if it were something I should remember, and even cherish.” He yawned greatly. “Well, no matter! Our stay in the countryside has been pleasant, but unproductive. The Evangelos bronzes remain lost, and our purses are perilously close to empty. Where shall we go now, to replenish them?”

  “East,” Darger said decisively. “East, to the Bosporus. I have heard—somewhere—great things of that city called…called…”

  “Byzantium!” Surplus said. “I too have heard wondrous tales—somehow—of its wealth and beauty. Two such men as ourselves should do marvelous well there.”

  “Then we are agreed.” Darger shook the harness, and the pony set out at a trot. They both whooped and laughed, and if there was a small hurt in their hearts they did not know what it was or what they should do about it, and so it was ignored.

  Surplus waved his tricorn hat in the air. “Byzantium awaits!”

  The independent port city and (some said) pirate haven of New Orleans was home to many a strange sight. It was a place where sea serpents hauled ships past fields worked by zombie laborers to docks where cargo was loaded onto wooden wagons to be pulled through streets of crushed oyster shells by teams of pygmy mastodons as small as Percheron horses. So none thought it particularly noteworthy when for three days an endless line of young women waited in the hallway outside a luxury suite in the Maison Fema for the opportunity to raise their skirts or open their blouses to display a tattooed thigh, breast, or buttock to two judges who sat on twin chairs watching solemnly, asked a few questions, thanked them for their time, and then showed them out.

  The women had come in response to a handbill, posted throughout several parishes, that read:

  SEEKING AN HEIRESS

  ARE YOU…

  A YOUNG WOMAN BETWEEN THE AGES OF 18 AND 21?

  FATHERLESS?

  TATTOOED FROM BIRTH ON AN INTIMATE PART OF

  YOUR BODY?

  IF SO, YOU MAY BE ENTITLED TO GREAT RICHES

  INQUIRE DAYTIMES, SUITE 1, MAISON FEMA

  “You’d think I’d be tired of this by now,” Darger commented during a brief break in the ritual. “And yet I am not.”

  “The infinite variety of ways in which women can be beautiful is indeed amazing,” Surplus agreed. “As is the eagerness of so many to display that beauty.” He opened the door. “Next.”

  A woman strode into the room, trailing smoke from a cheroot. She was dauntingly tall—six feet and a hand, if an inch—and her dress, trimmed with silver lace, was the same shade of golden brown as her skin. Surplus indicated a crystal ashtray on the sideboard and, with a gracious nod of thanks, she stubbed out her cigar.

  “Your name?” Darger said after Surplus had regained his chair.

  “My real name, you mean, or my stage name?”

  “Why, whichever you please.”

  “I’ll give you the real one then.” The young woman doffed her hat and tugged off her gloves. She laid them neatly together on the sideboard. “It’s Tawnymoor Petticoats. You can call me Tawny.”

  “Tell us something about yourself, Tawny,” Surplus said.

  “I was born a carny and worked forty-milers all my life,” Tawny said, unbuttoning her blouse. “Most recently, I was in the sideshow as the Sleeping Beauty Made Immortal by Utopian Technology But Doomed Never to Awaken. I lay in a glass coffin covered by nothing but my own hair and a strategically placed hand, while the audience tried to figure out if I was alive or not. I’ve got good breath control.” She folded the blouse and set it down by her gloves and hat. “Jake—my husband—was the barker. He’d size up the audience and when he saw a ripe mark, catch ’im on the way out and whisper that for a couple of banknotes it could be arranged to spend some private time with me. Then he’d go out back and peer in through a slit in the canvas.”

  Tawny stepped out of her skirt and set it atop the blouse. She began unlacing her petticoats. “When the mark had his trousers off and was about to climb in the coffin, Jake would come roaring out, bellowing that he was only supposed to look—not to take advantage of my vulnerable condition.” Placing her underthings atop the skirt, she undid her garters and proceeded to roll down her stockings. “That was usually good for the contents of his wallet.”

  “You were working the badger game, you mean?” Surplus asked cautiously.

  “Mostly, I just lay there. But I was ready to rear up and coldcock the sumbidge if he got out of hand. And we worked other scams too. The pigeon drop, the fiddle game, the rip deal, you name it.”

  Totally naked now, the young woman lifted her great masses of black curls with both hands, exposing the back of her neck. “Then one night the mark was halfway into the coffin—and no Jake. So I opened my eyes real sudden and screamed in the bastard’s face. Over he went, hit his head on the floor, and I didn’t wait to find out if he was unconscious or dead. I stole his jacket and went looking for my husband. Turns out Jake had run off with the Snake Woman. She dumped him two weeks later and he wanted me to take him back, but I wasn’t having none of that.” She turned around slowly, so that Darger and Surplus could examine every inch of her undeniably admirable flesh.

  Darger cleared his throat. “Um…you don’t appear to have a tattoo.”

  “Yeah, I saw through that one right away. Talked to some of the girls you’d interviewed and they said you’d asked them lots of questions about themselves but hadn’t molested them in any way. Not all of ’em were happy with that last bit. Particularly after they’d gone to all the trouble of getting themselves inked. So, putting two and four together, I figured you were running a scam requiring a female partner with quick wits and larcenous proclivities.”

  Tawny Petticoats put her hands on her hips and smiled. “Well? Do I get the job?”

  Grinning like a dog—which was not surprising, for his source genome was entirely canine— Surplus stood, extending a paw. But Darger quickly got between him and the young woman, saying, “If you will pardon us for just a moment, Ms. Petticoats, my friend and I must consult in the back room. You may use the time to dress yourself.”

  When the two males were secluded, Darger whispered furiously, “Thank God I was able to stop you! You were about to enlist that young woman into our conspiracy.”

  “Well, and why not?” Surplus murmured equally quietly. “We were looking for a woman of striking appearance, not overly bound to conventional morality, and possessed of the self-confidence, initiative, and inventiveness a good swindler requires. Tawny comes up aces on all counts.”

  “Working with an amateur is one thing—but this woman is a professional. She will sleep with both of us, turn us against each other, and in the end abscond with the swag, leaving us with nothing but embarrassment and regret for all our efforts.”

  “That is a sexist and, if I may dare say so, ungallant slander upon the fair sex, and I am astonished to hear it coming from your mouth.”

  Darger shook his head sadly. “It is not all women but all female confidence tricksters I abjure. I speak from sad—and repeated—experience.”

  “Well, if you insist on doing without this blameless young creature,” Surplus said, folding his arms, “then I insist on your doing without me.”

  “My dear sir!”

  “I must be true to my principles.”

  Further argumentation, Darger saw, would be useless. So, putting the best possible appearance on things, he emerged from the back room to say, “You have the job, my dear.” From a jacket pocket he produced a silver filigreed vinaigrette and, unscrewing its cap, extracted from it a single pill. “Swallow this and you’ll have the tattoo we require by morning. You’ll want to run it past your pharmacist first, of course, to verify—”

  “Oh, I trust you. If y’all had just been after tail, you wouldn’t’ve waited for me. Some of those gals was sharp lookers for sure.” Tawny swallowed the pill. “So what’s the dodge?”

  “We’re going to work the black money scam,” Surplus said.

  “Oh, I have alway
s wanted a shot at running that one!” With a whoop, Tawny threw her arms about them both.

  Though his fingers itched to do so, Darger was very careful not to check to see if his wallet was still there.

  The next day, ten crates of black money—actually, rectangles of scrap parchment dyed black in distant Vicksburg—were carried into the hotel by zombie laborers and then, at Surplus’s direction, piled against the outside of Tawny’s door so that, hers being the central room of the suite, the only way to enter or leave it was through his or Darger’s rooms. Then, leaving the lady to see to her dress and makeup, her new partners set out to speak to their respective marks.

  Darger began at the city’s busy docklands.

  The office of the speculator Jean-Nagin Lafitte was tastefully opulent and dominated by a Mauisaurus skull, decorated with scrimshaw filigree chased in silver. “Duke” Lafitte, as he styled himself, or “Pirate” Lafitte, as he was universally known, was a slim, handsome man with olive skin, long and flowing hair, and a mustache so thin it might have been drawn on with an eyebrow pencil. Where other men of wealth might carry a cane, he affected a coiled whip, which he wore on his belt.

  “Renting an ingot of silver!” he exclaimed. “I never heard of such a thing.”

  “It is a simple enough proposition,” Darger said. “Silver serves as a catalyst for a certain bioindustrial process, the precise nature of which I am not at liberty to divulge to you. The scheme involves converting bar silver to a colloidal slurry which, when the process is complete, will be recovered and melted back into bar form. You would lose nothing. Further, we will only tie up your wealth for, oh, let us say ten days to be on the safe side. In return for which we are prepared to offer you a ten percent return on your investment. A very tidy profit for no risk at all.”

  A small and ruthless smile played upon the speculator’s lips. “There is the risk of your simply taking the silver and absconding with it.”