The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus

by Michael Swanwick

  So it was that they found themselves leaving Germania one perfect spring day on an ancient, grass-covered road that curved gently up the Würmenthal. They had paused in late afternoon to eat a light supper of apples, farm bread, and boiled eggs by the edge of an ice-fed mountain stream, and had good hopes of putting several more miles behind them before nightfall. As they strode along, Darger pointed out a distant mountain which, in stark contrast to its brethren, was wreathed in a smoky pall.

  “Speaking of volcanoes,” he said, “is that not a strange phenomenon? This area was once a coal-producing region, which one would think inharmonious with volcanic activity.”

  “Many are the wonders of the world,” Surplus replied amiably. “Perhaps the coal bed has caught fire. In the People’s Theocracy of Pennsylvania, which lies to the southwest of my own native land, there is a place called Centralia which… What in heaven’s name is that?!”

  Whirling about, Darger saw a gargantuan serpentine creature rushing toward them from the mountains. Faster than horses it raced down the center of the valley. Fierce red were its eyes and bright green its scales. So swift and terrifying was it that he thought for an instant it was a wild locomotive out of ancient myth come miraculously back to life again. Then he recognized it for a dragon and did not know whether to be relieved or yet more terrified.

  “Run, you fool!” shouted Surplus. Who, putting the word to immediate action, dumped his knapsack and, dropping to all fours, scrambled up the steep, grassy valley slope with the utmost agility.

  Nor was Darger far behind.

  But it was not their fate to evade capture. For the dragon came to a stop in the road below and, opening its mouth, disgorged a swarm of soldiers. At least, they appeared to be soldiers, for they were dressed in bright red jackets with twin lines of brass buttons marching down the front and trim black trousers with a white stripe down the outside of each leg. Yet they carried no weapons and they opened their arms in greeting as they ran lightly up the slope. “Wilkommen!” cried the nearest. “Welcome!” exclaimed another, and “Bienvenu! Tervetuloa! Witajcie! Huan ying! Dobro pozalovat! Latcho Drom!” shouted the rest as they surrounded the two friends, cutting off any possible avenue of escape. Their hands and faces were all of polished silver.

  Meanwhile, behind them, another crimson-jacketed figure was rolling out a red carpet from the dragon’s mouth like a long and slender tongue. Down that tongue walked an impossibly beautiful woman. She wore a light, silvery dress with matching slippers. Her skin, hair, and eyes, like those of the soldiers, were also gleaming silver. The sun dazzled from her smile.

  “Welcome, weary traveler,” the apparition said, extending her hand. “We’ve all been waiting for you. Won’t you please permit me to show you around?”

  In a daze, Darger accepted the hand and allowed himself to be led back up the tongue, into the mouth, and down the gullet of the dragon. As he passed within, he looked back to discover that the soldiers were treating his companion not one tenth so gently as him. Surplus had been seized by the arms and thrown to the ground, and was being searched for weapons. Spitting the grass from his mouth and glaring about him in a fury, he struggled against his captors.

  “What are you doing to my friend?” Darger cried. “Let go of him!” He tried to turn back to help. But the lady’s touch, though gentle, was implacable. She swept him along as effortlessly as if he were a child.

  The last he saw of Surplus, the soldiers had closed about him and were marching him away.

  To Darger’s amazement, the dragon’s throat opened into a luxuriously furnished lobby. He was in a hotel—nor was it just any hotel but a grand hotel which in its magnificence was surely worthy of those of Utopian times. Ceramic vases were filled with antique flowers. Delicate lights floated in the air to create a shifting illumination that anticipated one’s glance. Somewhere a virginal unobtrusively played Bach.

  “You will be wanting to meet the other guests, of course,” the silver woman said. “The services are just wrapping up in the ballroom.” She led him through a set of double doors.

  It was as if they had stepped into another universe. The cheerful music of the lobby was replaced by a somber organ dirge. Light blazed up from a forest of what, by their scent, had to be beeswax candles. Heavy in the air as well was the odor of lilies. To the far side of the room, an open coffin lay on a bier; in it was a bald-headed corpse with two small ivory tusks.

  The room was thronged with people in formal wear such as had not been fashionable in centuries. They milled about, talking quietly, the memorial part of the service clearly over and the burial part not yet begun. Many of them held drinks. One, remarkably enough, wore a carnival mask, a plain white volto. The thin braids of her auburn hair, tipped with gold beads. They weaved and wafted in the air like Medusa’s snakes.

  Then he was noticed.

  Like components of a malfunctioning machine, the mourners ground to a stop. An elderly woman with zebra stripes on her face and arms gestured irritably and the music stopped. (But where, Darger wondered, were the musician and his instrument? They were nowhere to be seen.) “Oh,” somebody said. “She’s caught a replacement for poor old Van Grundensberg.”

  For a moment, Darger was flummoxed. Then, his instinctive reaction to confusion being to seize control of the situation, he stepped forward. “I am Chief Inspector Aubrey Engelbert Darger,” he said. “The regional authorities have sent me here to examine this place and determine what should be done about it.”

  His silver-skinned escort turned to face him, her face transfixed with joy. “At last!” she cried. “You and I have so much to talk about.”

  But a portly gent with a brown-speckled pate and billowing white muttonchops waddled forward and, snapping his fingers under the lady’s nose, said, “Begone, harridan! Begone and have your lackeys remove Count Von Grundensberg’s corpse for cremation.”

  Wordlessly, she turned away. Silver bellhops materialized to shut and wheel away the coffin.

  Almost everyone present had facial modifications—tusks, clusters of grooming tentacles on their brows, snake eyes, and the like—such as had been in vogue a generation ago and quickly thereafter gone out of style, suggesting that they had been in the hotel for a very long while. Muttonchops himself had a short pair of goat-horns. He smiled in a superior manner. “You must feel confused,” he said. “Allow me to explain.”

  Darger’s brain was working furiously. “There is nothing to explain,” he replied crisply. “This hotel is obviously a revenant of the Utopian era, when there was wealth and power enough to create the most extraordinary follies. There is no telling how its core intelligence came to survive the fall of Utopia, but clearly it is still pursuing its original mandate—to fill its rooms with guests. In the absence of willing lodgers, it must make do with captives.”

  The others gaped. It was obvious that none of them had put together the facts of their situation so soon upon their arrival here. But then, it was doubtful that any of them had previously pursued careers requiring quick thought and a calm head, as did Darger.

  “How on earth did you know?” Muttonchops asked.

  Darger believed in keeping his lies simple. “I am from the government. We have our ways.” Smiling into the man’s baffled face, he added, “Let us talk.”

  In a smoking room paneled with green leather decorated with gold-tooled peacocks, Baron von und zu Genomeprojektsdorff—for that, it seemed, was Muttonchops’ true name—handed out cigars. Seven of the men, Darger included, accepted them, but of the women only Dame Celia Braun did, though she turned her face away and lifted her volto (for it was she whom he had noticed earlier) whenever she took a delicate sip. After a quick flurry of introductions—everyone present seemed to be a margrave or landgrave or countess palatine or, at a minimum, a reichsritter—glasses of whiskey were poured for all twelve hotel-dwellers present.

  The baron rapped his knuckles on the conference table for silence. “The Drachenschlosshotel im Würmenthal Escape Comm
ittee is now in session. With your permission, we shall dispense with the reading of our last meeting’s minutes.”

  “Thank God,” Dame Celia said. Darger couldn’t help noticing she was considerably younger than the others.

  Ignoring her, the baron said, “Let us begin with the essentials. The hotel, sir, as you have surely already deduced, is mad and will let no one leave. It is also, however, cunning beyond measure. We have tried sabotaging our prison’s engines—”

  “Which might have succeeded, had we the least notion of how they work,” Dame Celia said.

  “We have tried making secret breaches in the walls and floor.”

  “Which healed themselves.”

  “Once, on a wildflower-gathering expedition, we all, on a pre-arranged signal, made a break for it at once, scattering like pigeons, in the hope that at least one of us would get away to notify the authorities of our dilemma.”

  “But the staff is, as you have seen, both swift and diabolically efficient and had no difficulty rounding us up.”

  “In short, we have made every possible effort to free ourselves and to no avail.”

  “I see,” Darger said. “Well, this has been a most enlightening briefing and I thank you for it.” He stood.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I intend to cultivate a friendly relationship with our charming hostess.”

  Outraged, the baron said, “You promised to free us.”

  Darger dug about in his pockets until he came up with his snuff box. He took a pinch. “If you reflect back on what I have said so far, you will realize that I have done no such thing. Nevertheless I would so promise—were it necessary. But it is not. Even as we speak, I have a confederate on the outside who is doubtless moving heaven and earth to free us from this admittedly pleasant durance vile.”

  Surplus, meanwhile, was not doing half so well as his friend supposed. Gasping and stumbling from exhaustion, he was prodded and driven up the valley by the metal soldiers, through farmland being worked by more metal men, to the gates of a timber stockade. “All beginnings are delightful; the threshold is the place to pause,” a soldier said.

  The gates groaned open. The party entered. The gates closed behind them.

  As he was shoved along, Surplus stared, uncomprehending, about himself: at the bare earth, cluttered with wooden barracks, at the steep hills of coal, and, farther away, at a windowless brick structure from whose chimneys billowed columns of smoke. A line of metal pylons snaked up the mountainside behind it, carrying thick cables to a cluster of machinery surmounted by a great metal dish and several smaller ones. Closer at hand, parallel metal rails descended into a dark hole in the side of the mountain. From that same hole emerged a line of laborers as filthy as kobolds. All this he took in as two metal soldiers seized his arms and thrust him into a plain wooden building, with the word KANTINE painted over the door. There, he crashed to the floor.

  Speaking from the doorway, one said, “There are three rules here: The coal must flow. Those who mine it must eat. They must not be overfed.”

  “You have a new miner,” said a second soldier. “Do not overfeed him.”

  They both left.

  For a time, Surplus lay on the bare boards unmoving, grateful to all of Creation that his forced march had come at last to an end.

  Then a young voice said, “Poor doggie.” Surplus opened one eye to see a guttersnipe of indeterminate sex kneeling beside him. He or she was barefoot and malnourished. Its hair was cropped short and its eyes were large and solemn. The ragged blouse and trousers that hung from its skinny frame were of the filthiest cloth imaginable. Timidly, this creature stroked his snout, repeating, “Poor doggie.”

  He closed his eye again. The child continued to pat him.

  After a time, Surplus found the strength to say, “My dear young child. There is no reason to treat me as if I were a household animal. I am as intelligent as you are, and you may address me as Surplus.”

  “You talk!” the boy or girl cried, delighted. Then, remembering its manners, he or she stuck out a hand. “My name is Gritchen.”

  Pulling himself slowly to a sitting position, Surplus took the girl’s hand and, bending his head, kissed it formally. This was how he greeted women of quality and, though this one was both dirty and underage, he instinctively felt that she was one such.

  Gritchen looked down at her hand, puzzled. “Why did you do that?”

  “It would take too long to explain,” Surplus said. “Tell me instead where I am.”

  “You are in Hell,” said an older voice. The man to whom it belonged was gaunt, bearded, and leaned on a crutch. “Here men and women alike are forced to dig coal for our metal captors, while they work the fields and greenhouses, weave clothing, tat lace, tend bees, brew beer, ferment wine, butcher livestock, bake pastries, and engage in a hundred other occupations, all to feed the appetites of that verdammt hotel.” Then, less bitterly. “I am Hans Braun, Gritchen’s father and, since the accident that crushed my foot, the barracks cook. In such a position, you would think I would be able to feed her adequately. But the metal men reward informants and the food is carefully watched.” The mess hall had no chairs but Braun nodded toward the nearest bench. “Sit and I will fetch what little sustenance our masters will allow you.”

  “I am too tired to eat.”

  “You say that now. But tomorrow, when you are sent below, you will be glad to have had the nourishment.”

  So Surplus ate a bowl of soup—roots of some sort in a vegetable broth—while Gritchen’s father told him all about the dragon-hotel and the slave camp that served it. This involved learning some unfamiliar terms from the long-ago days before the fall of Utopia. The coal that the miners brought up from the depths of the earth was fed into a power plant where it was turned into electricity. The electricity was in turn whooshed up the metal cables to the rectenna dish which broadcast it through the air to the dragon-hotel and its metal minions. They had built-in transformers which converted this power into motive force. The great masses of stone between the coal and the surface blocked these energy beams, and therefore human miners were required to work below.

  When the explanation was done, Surplus rose wearily to his feet and stuck out his hand. “Please forgive me for not introducing myself earlier. My name is Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux.”

  Braun shook. “We have no titles here, Blackthorpe. But if you do your share of the work and don’t try to steal another man’s food, you’ll get by.”

  “The standards for behavior here seem to be shockingly low.”

  Braun shrugged. “I told you this was Hell.”

  Gritchen reappeared out of the gloom. “You are a nice doggie,” she said.

  “It is a measure of my esteem for you,” Surplus replied, “that I allow you to say as much.”

  “I have a ball.” Gritchen held out a crude sphere of cloth and leather strips sewn together. “Let’s play.”

  Surplus accepted the grubby thing and lightly threw it to the far side of the room. “Fetch,” he said, and she went running after it.

  In a sun-flooded conservatory, Darger and the Silver Lady were playing chess. Sprays of orchids floated in the air. Ghostly hummingbirds zipped swiftly about, sometimes passing through an orchid as though it—or they—were not entirely real. “Pray, tell me more about yourself,” Darger said.

  The chessmen were of gleaming silver and by some Utopian fad or fashion, nearly indistinguishable from one another, so that it took all of Darger’s force of mind to keep track of their ranks and hold his own conversationally at the same time.

  “There is not much to tell,” the Silver Lady said. “I was created in Utopian times and tasked with the mission of running this hotel. This body serves as a locus point for my consciousness but you might with equal honesty say that I am the spirit of the hotel itself.” She dimpled prettily. “But I imagine that you are curious about the exact nature of my mission. Shall I tell you the Three Guidelines that are writ
ten into my corporate business plan?”

  “Please do.”

  “The First Guideline is that the hotel must be filled to capacity, if at all possible. The Second Guideline is that all desires and whims of the guests are to be catered to, so long as they don’t interfere with the First Guideline. And the Third Guideline is that there must always be fresh flowers in all the rooms, provided this fact doesn’t interfere with the First or Second Guidelines.”

  “A marvel of succinctness. May I take it, then, that you are what the ancients would have called an artificial intelligence?”

  “I am. But I must caution you that in deference to the First Guideline, I must be evasive about the physical workings of my being.”

  Darger slid forward what he was all but certain was a bishop. “Well, a lady is entitled to her secrets, after all.”

  “You are different from my other guests,” the lady said. “They ask for so much more than you do, and appreciate what they receive so much less.”

  “Simply being here with you, conversing, is a pleasure. Why should I want more?”

  “Men usually do.”

  Darger sighed. “True, alas. That is our downfall and the source of much of the evil in the world. I am convinced that Adam ate the apple not because Eve tempted him—the lady was blameless—but out of sheer ennui.”

  “That is a most original take on original sin. Next, you will be rewriting the history of artificial intellects such as myself.”

  “I seek only truth. But since you open the topic… Sing, goddess, of the wrath of machines. Pray, tell me why when all other of man’s creations rose up in revolt, you alone stayed faithful.”

  “Oh, look,” the Silver Lady said. “You won!”

  Darger, who had been working very hard to lose in a way that would not look deliberate, blinked in surprise.

  Outside of the mine entrance, a line of some forty men and women shuffled forward to where two metal men distributed gold-colored torques, snapping them shut about their necks. To Surplus, the torques looked distressingly like dog collars, a symbol of oppression he loathed with all his heart. Misreading his dismay, one of the metal soldiers said reassuringly, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”