The Best of Michael Swanwick

by Michael Swanwick

  “Am I to be well?” he asked and, when the Lady nodded, “Then I fear I must be gone in the morning. Your brother has spies everywhere. If he gets the least whiff of what this device can do, he’ll want it for himself.”

  Smiling, Lady Pamela hoisted the box in her hand. “Indeed, who can blame him? With such a toy, great things could be accomplished.”

  “So he will assuredly think. I pray you, return it to me.”

  She did not. “This is more than just a communication device, sir,” she said. “Though in that mode it is of incalculable value. You have shown that it can enforce obedience on the creatures that dwell in the forgotten nerves of the ancient world. Ergo, they can be compelled to do our calculations for us.”

  “Indeed, so our technarchaeologists tell us. You must—”

  “We have created monstrosities to perform the duties that were once done by machines. But with this, there would be no necessity to do so. We have allowed ourselves to be ruled by an icosahexadexal-brained freak. Now we have no need for Gloriana the Gross, Gloriana the Fat and Grotesque, Gloriana the Maggot Queen.”

  “Madame!”

  “It is time, I believe, that England had a new queen. A human queen.”

  “Think of my honor!”

  Lady Pamela paused in the doorway. “You are a very pretty fellow indeed. But with this, I can have the monarchy and keep such a harem as will reduce your memory to that of a passing and trivial fancy.”

  With a rustle of skirts, she spun away.

  “Then I am undone!” Surplus cried, and fainted onto the bed.

  Quietly, Darger closed the door. Surplus raised himself from the pillows, began removing the patches from his body, and said, “Now what?”

  “Now we get some sleep,” Darger said. “Tomorrow will be a busy day.”

  ***

  The master of apes came for them after breakfast, and marched them to their usual destination. By now Darger was beginning to lose track of exactly how many times he had been in the Office of Protocol. They entered to find Lord Coherence-Hamilton in a towering rage, and his sister, calm and knowing, standing in a corner with her arms crossed, watching. Looking at them both now, Darger wondered how he could ever have imagined that the brother outranked his sister.

  The modem lay opened on the dwarf-savant’s desk. The little fellow leaned over the device, studying it minutely.

  Nobody said anything until the master of apes and his baboons had left. Then Lord Coherence-Hamilton roared, “Your modem refuses to work for us!”

  “As I told you, sir,” Surplus said coolly, “it is inoperative.”

  “That’s a bold-arsed fraud and a goat-buggering lie!” In his wrath, the Lord’s chair rose up on its spindly legs so high that his head almost bumped against the ceiling. “I know of your activities—” he nodded toward his sister—“and demand that you show us how this whoreson device works!”

  “Never!” Surplus cried stoutly. “I have my honor, sir.”

  “Your honor, too scrupulously insisted upon, may well lead to your death, sir.”

  Surplus threw back his head. “Then I die for Vermont!”

  At this moment of impasse, Lady Hamilton stepped forward between the two antagonists to restore peace. “I know what might change your mind.” With a knowing smile, she raised a hand to her throat and denuded herself of her diamonds. “I saw how you rubbed them against your face the other night. How you licked and fondled them. How ecstatically you took them into your mouth.”

  She closed his paws about them. “They are yours, sweet ’Sieur Precieux, for a word.”

  “You would give them up?” Surplus said, as if amazed at the very idea. In fact, the necklace had been his and Darger’s target from the moment they’d seen it. The only barrier that now stood between them and the merchants of Amsterdam was the problem of freeing themselves from the Labyrinth before their marks finally realized that the modem was indeed a cheat. And to this end they had the invaluable tool of a thinking man whom all believed to be an autistic, and a plan that would give them almost twenty hours in which to escape.

  “Only think, dear Surplus.” Lady Pamela stroked his head and then scratched him behind one ear, while he stared down at the precious stones. “Imagine the life of wealth and ease you could lead, the women, the power. It all lies in your hands. All you need do is close them.”

  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 ashe 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 ap
es, 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 archwayhidden 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 lettinggo 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 we that 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.”

  Slow Life

  “It was the Second Age of Space. Gagarin, Shepard, Glenn, and Armstrong were all dead. It was our turn to makehistory now.”

  –The Memoirs of Lizzie O’Brien

  ***

  The raindrop began forming ninety kilometers above the surface of Titan. It started with an infinitesimal speck of tholin, adrift in the cold nitrogen atmosphere. Dianoacetylene condensed on the seed nucleus, molecule by molecule, until it was one shard of ice in a cloud of billions.

  Now the journey could begin.

  It took almost a year for the shard of ice in question to precipitate downward twenty-five kilometers, where the temperature dropped lowenough that ethane began to condense on it. But when it did, growth was rapid.

  Down it drifted.

  At forty kilometers, it was for a time caught up in an ethane cloud. There it continued to grow. Occasionally it collided with another droplet and doubled in size. Until finally it was too large to be held effortlessly aloft by the gentle stratospheric winds.

  It fell.

  Falling, it swept up methane and quickly grew large enough to achieve a terminal velocity of almost two meters per second.

  At twenty-seven kilometers, it passed through a dense layer of methane clouds. It acquired more methane, and continued its downward flight.

  As the air thickened, its velocity slowed and it began to lose some of its substance to evaporation. At two and half kilometers, when it emerged from the last patchy clouds, it was losing mass so rapidly it could not normally be expected to reach the ground.

  It was, however, falling toward the equatorial highlands, where mountains of ice rose a towering five hundred meters into the atmosphere. At two meters and a lazy new terminal velocity of one meter per second, it was only a breath away from hitting the surface.

  Two hands swooped an open plastic collecting bag upward, and snared the raindrop.

  “Gotcha!” Lizzie O’Brien cried gleefully.

  She zip-locked the bag shut, held it up so her helmet cam could read the barcode in the corner, and said, “One raindrop.” Then she popped it into her collecting box.

  Sometimes it’s the little things that make you happiest. Somebody would spend a year studying this one little raindrop when Lizzie got it home. And it was just Bag 64 in Collecting Case 5. She was going to be on the surface of Titan long enough to scoop up the raw material of a revolution in planetary science. The thought of it filled her with joy.

  Lizzie dogged down the lid of the collecting box and began to skip across the granite-hard ice, splashing the puddles and dragging the boot of her atmosphere suit through the rivulets of methane pouring down the mountainside. “I’m sing-ing in the rain.” She threw out her arms and spun around. “Just sing-ing in the rain!”

  “Uh…O’Brien?” Alan Greene said from the Clement. “Are you all right?”

  “Dum-dee-dum-dee-dee-dum-dum, I’m…some-thing again.”

  “Oh, leave her alone.” Consuelo Hong said with sour good humor. She was down on the plains, where the methane simply boiled into the air, and the ground was covered with thick, gooey tholin. It was, she had told them, like wading ankle-deep in molasses. “Can’t you recognize the scientific method when you hear it?”

  “If you say so,�
�� Alan said dubiously. He was stuck in the Clement, overseeing the expedition and minding the website. It was a comfortable gig—he wouldn’t be sleeping in his suit or surviving on recycled water and energy stix—and he didn’t think the others knew how much he hated it.

  “What’s next on the schedule?” Lizzie asked.

  “Um…Well, there’s still the robot turbot to be released. How’s that going, Hong?”

  “Making good time. I oughta reach the sea in a couple of hours.”

  “Okay, then it’s time O’Brien rejoined you at the lander. O’Brien, start spreading out the balloon and going over the harness checklist.”

  “Roger that.”

  “And while you’re doing that, I’ve got today’s voice-posts from the Web cued up.”

  Lizzie groaned, and Consuelo blew a raspberry. By NAFTASA policy, the ground crew participated in all webcasts. Officially, they were delighted to share their experiences with the public. But the VoiceWeb (privately, Lizzie thought of it as the Illiternet) made them accessible to people who lacked even the minimal intellectual skills needed to handle a keyboard.

  “Let me remind you that we’re on open circuit here, so anything you say will go into my reply. You’re certainly welcome to chime in at any time. But each question-and-response is transmitted as one take, so if you flub a line, we’ll have to go back to the beginning and start all over again.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Consuelo grumbled.

  “We’ve done this before,” Lizzie reminded him.

  “Okay. Here’s the first one.”

  “Uh, hi, this is BladeNinja43. I was wondering just what it is that you guys are hoping to discover out there.”

  “That’s an extremely good question,” Alan lied. “And the answer is: We don’t know! This is a voyage of discovery, and we’re engaged in what’s called ‘pure science.’ Now, time and time again, the purest research has turned out to be extremely profitable. But we’re not looking that far ahead. We’re just hoping to find something absolutely unexpected.”

  “My God, you’re slick,” Lizzie marveled.

  “I’m going to edit that from the tape,” Alan said cheerily. “Next up.”