Dancing with Bears

by Michael Swanwick

  “I thought you was just keeping me from running away.”

  “Of course not, you had nowhere to go. No, I was reading you. Whenever we came to a turn and your muscles tensed up, I would say, “We turn here.” Then your eyes would dart in the direction you normally went, and in that direction I would go. By such small shifts and stratagems, I allowed you to lead me right here.”

  The boy spat out an unfamiliar word. Doubtless slang, and doubtless obscene.

  “Exactly. Now, you want to know why I insisted you be so generous to your friends. And, though you have not asked, you are wondering why I directed you to have the thousand-ruble notes converted to small bills.”

  “Yeah. The bastard at the bank made me give him twenty rubles for doing it, too. So why?”

  “As for your friends, simply because they are your friends. The man who lives by his skill and his wits must be able to trust his business associates and they him. When the swag is swept up at the end of the game, and everyone scatters, they all must know that their share of the take is as safe as houses. Otherwise your plans will fall apart in your hands. You see?”

  “I… guess so. What about changing the bills?”

  “Watch and learn.” Darger picked up the stack of bills and placed them in his billfold. “Now the game you just played, the Pigeon Drop, is a reliable money-maker in skilled hands, which works well with a necklace, a painting, or any similar prop. It can also be used with a lost wallet. Simply fan out the money like this, with the thousand-ruble note on top, and it will look like a fortune. Indeed, the other notes can be cut from newspaper, if you like. Though that requires that you wrap up the wallet like a package with your handkerchief and string before handing it over, to prevent the mark from examining the bills himself. Luckily, by that point he will be so blinded by avarice that he will not be thinking clearly. You can tell him it’s to keep him from stealing the money, and he won’t argue.” He extracted the money again and rolled it up into a wad. “For other games, it’s best you keep the money in a roll. It looks eye-popping”-he put it into a pocket and then pulled it out, giving Kyril only a brief glimpse before hiding it away again-“and, like a well-proportioned woman giving a mark the merest flash of forbidden flesh, wrests control of his thoughts away from the rational parts of his mind.”

  From an inner pocket of his jacket, Darger extracted a small sewing kit. He measured out a length of black thread, bit it off, and tied it around the wad. Sternly, he said, “You must not spend this. It is a tool which, properly employed, will bring you in much more money. And that you may then spend.”

  Kyril stared at the wad hungrily. “What’s with the thread?”

  “Keep your spending money in one pocket and this little horse-choker in another. Then when you’re in a tight fix in a public space… maybe the police are coming after you, maybe a con has gone hot and the mark is out for blood… you haul it out, slip your thumb between the thread and the bills like this…” He demonstrated. “And with a flick of your wrist, you break the thread and throw the money into the air, while shouting ‘Money!’ at the top of your lungs. What do you think happens then?”

  “Everybody starts leapin’ up in the air, snatching at the bills.”

  “Everybody. Including the police. While they’re doing that, you make your escape.” Darger handed over the money. “Now I know boys, and so I know you’re going to rush out right now and, against all my good advice, buy pocket knives and sweets and leather jackets and such. Try not to spend it all. It’s easier to make money when you have it.”

  Kyril clutched the wad with both hands. Then, suspiciously, he slipped it out of the thread and opened it up to determine that all the bills were still present.

  Darger laughed. “I admire your caution. But you must never do that before your business associates. They must believe that you trust them implicitly. You may need them to get you out of a tight situation some day.”

  “I can rely on my boys,” Kyril said. “We’re a circle of brothers, is what we are.”

  “Perhaps. Yet I have my doubts about one or two of them. However, let us not throw them away without testing them first. A true friend is a rare thing. You may go now.”

  In a flash, Kyril was halfway out the hole. He hesitated there, though, and asked over his shoulder, “Ain’t you going out too? To spend the money you got for the necklace?”

  “No,” Darger said.“I shall stay here and sort through the library’s many wonders. I have already found a copy of Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women and what I suspect may be Aristotle’s Dialogues. It is possible even that some of Homer’s lost epics lurk herein, to be discovered by my eager hand.”

  “Well… I guess if it makes you happy.”

  “Oh, it does, my young friend. In fact, if I may confide in you, it is possible I am happier now than I have ever been in my life.” Darger returned to his book. “It’s a shame it cannot last.”

  Zoesophia slept late and awoke to find the day unseasonably mild. A cool, light breeze raised goose-bumps on her flesh and gently stirred the reddish-gold down on her mound of pleasure. She could have stayed like this for hours, luxuriating in the air, as if in a bath. Nevertheless, she arose and, in a brisk, businesslike fashion, dressed. On the cushions below her, Surplus stirred, stretched, and opened his eyes. When he saw that she was fully clad, his expression mingled regret and relief in proportions she found both perfectly appropriate and eminently satisfying.

  “Put your clothes on,” she said.“Our story is that we stayed up all night negotiating. You, of course, gave in on every point. Don’t bother saying a word. I’ll take care of it all. Just keep silent and look hangdog. That shouldn’t be hard for you.”

  Surplus obeyed without demur. This was, in Zoesophia’s abundant experience, how men inevitably reacted to being thoroughly bested in the sexual arena-with a quietly sulky submissiveness born of humiliation and the hope that it might happen again soon. It was such a primitive, animal response as to make her wonder if the old legend wasn’t true, that men-even dog-men-were descended from apes, while women were descended from the Moon.

  Still, there was an amused glint in the corner of the ambassador’s eye that Zoesophia could not account for.

  “Before we go down, let me see to your clothing.” With a few deft tugs, Zoesophia made Surplus look subtly bedraggled. “That’s better.”

  “Shall I unlatch the trap door now?”

  “What an extraordinary question.” Zoesophia widened her eyes in astonished hauteur. “I’m certainly not about to do it for myself.”

  When Surplus and Zoesophia came down the spiral stairs-Zoesophia like a goddess floating downward to Earth and Surplus like a man cast out of Heaven-they found the Pearls waiting for them all in a row. Six hard stares of accusation and angry speculation formed a wall of resentful pique. Behind them, the Neanderthals shuffled in embarrassment.

  “Well?” Russalka demanded. The word might have been carved from ice.

  “Ambassador de Plus Precieux was a firm and energetic negotiator,” Zoesophia said solemnly, “and he held out far longer than I had expected him to. But in the end, I wore him down. His determination wilted while I was still prepared to go on for as long as it took. The results, I am pleased to report, were everything that might be desired.”

  Russalka crossed her arms in a manner which would have thoroughly befuddled a male. “Yes, but what are they?”

  “In brief, the ambassador and I are going to the Terem Palace together this very next Tuesday morning. We will meet in private with the Duke of Muscovy, at which time I will present him with whatever proofs it takes…” She paused for emphasis. “Whatever proofs it takes to convince him that he would be completely mad not to bring us all to his bedchamber before moonrise that night.”

  The squeals of delight that arose from the Pearls were so shrill and prolonged that even the Neanderthals winced.

  There were five underlords in all.

  Though the bodies they inhabited were human,
it was not difficult to detect the machines within, for they so despised the flesh they wore that they would not condescend to wear it well. Their metal parts were not proportioned properly for the bodies they had gutted for disguise, but they refused to alter those mechanisms, simple though that would be for them to do. Gleaming steel stuck through here a shoulder and there a cheek, and an alert eye could occasionally glimpse tiny sparks of electricity through an open mouth or an empty eye-socket. They hunched when they stood, glided with an unnatural smoothness when they walked, and folded their arms tidily up and together before them, like unused tools, when they were still.

  Anya Pepsicolova knew immediately that something had gone seriously wrong when she showed up at the underlords’ conference room to discover all five of her inhuman masters gathered together to confront her. One was enough to conduct any business they might have. They showed up in force only when human suffering was in the offing.

  There had only been one when she’d looked down from the Whisper Gallery not half an hour ago. She’d been kept waiting after she made her roundabout route to the underlords’ stronghold. Obviously, they had assembled for her.

  She lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one and flicked away the butt without bothering to put it out. The smoke helped, a little, to cover the stench of their decaying bodies. “You sent for me. You must have something to say.”

  One of the underlords leaned forward over the ancient mahogany conference table, placing its hands flat on the smooth surface. The velvet hangings on the wall behind it had been ripped and shredded by time, and the clothes it wore were only slightly less tattered. Candles flickered in brass sconces which had once held electric lights, casting a meager and gloomy light over the scene.

  Slowly the second underlord leaned forward, beside the first. Then the third, the fourth, the fifth. The first creature’s mouth clacked open and shut twice in its lifeless white face. At last it said, “Do you fear us?”

  “You obey us.” “But obedience is not the same as fear.” “You must fear us.”

  “Tell us that you fear us, Anya Alexandreyovna.”

  “More than you can imagine,” Pepsicolova said insincerely. In fact, she did fear them-some. Only not as much as they required from her. Nobody who answered directly to Sergei Nemovich Chortenko could entirely fear demon machines that had stitched themselves into human corpses. They might be sadistic, homicidal, and driven by unreasoning and unquenchable hatred, but since it was their nature rather than their choice, they still fell short of absolute evil. That was only Pepsicolova’s opinion of course-but by now, she was something of an expert on such matters.

  “If you truly feared us, you would be filled with dread and terror to learn that we no longer require your services.”

  “But you find us faintly comic, do you not?”

  “Terrifying but also laughable, in a bleak, nihilistic way. Do not try to deny it.”

  “We understand human beings better than humans do themselves.”

  “Nevertheless, you are indeed filled with dread and terror at the prospect of what we might do now that you are no longer useful to us.”

  Pepsicolova drew deeply on her cigarette, buying time to think. She was sure she could kill one and with luck maybe two of the underlords, before the others could take her down. But never all five. Despite their grotesquely misshapen bodies, those things could be blindingly fast when need arose. She was as good as dead, if they wished her so. “This has something to do with the stranniks, doesn’t it? Something to do with the satchel of vials they brought you.”

  The underlords grew very still. “You are bluffing.”

  “Somehow you discovered that stranniks brought us a satchel of vials.”

  “This would not be impossible to learn.” “Stranniks talk too freely.”

  “What do you know about the stranniks?”

  “Enough.” Pepsicolova blew a smoke ring at her interrogators. It floated almost to their faces before dissolving in the air. Making up lies at random, she said, “I’ve known two of them for years. The third I met only recently, but after I confessed my sins to him, he called me his ghostly daughter and swore he would be my guardian angel and protector in all things from that day onward.”

  “This is consistent with the known behavior of stranniks.”

  “Religion is superstition and stranniks are superstitious.”

  “The feelings of superiority an older man would have, hearing in detail the socially unsanctioned behavior of a younger woman, would be conducive to his emotionally bonding with her.”

  “Possibly they would then fornicate.”

  “You will immediately tell us everything you know.”

  “What’s my incentive?” Pepsicolova said defiantly. “Are you promising to kill me quickly and painlessly if I do?”

  The first underlord pulled back, dragging its hands across the conference table. Steel claws left ten deep gouges in the wood. The others followed suit. “No, Anya Alexandreyovna, we will not. We hate you too deeply for that.”

  “Then you will simply have to live without the knowledge.”

  The five underlords were very still for the length of a very long breath. They were communing, Pepsicolova suspected, by means of that ancient necromancy bearing the unlikely name of radio. At last the first underlord lowered its arms so that she would have an unobstructed view of the ruins of its face and said, “Shall we show her?”

  “She will not like what she sees.”

  “It will cause her great mental distress.”

  “It will fill her waking hours with despair and her sleep with nightmares.”

  “Follow us, Anya Alexandreyovna.”

  The underlords led Pepsicolova down a series of corridors and through the great room where cigarettes were deconstructed, doctored, and repackaged. But the crates of cigarettes had been cleared away, along with everything else connected with that enterprise. Instead, the Pale Folk were lashing tight bundles of straw to sticks, creating something like a cross between a besom and a broom. These were dunked repeatedly into cauldrons of liquid paraffin, kept warm by small fires underneath, and then carefully set aside. Others were cutting and sewing leather into narrow curving cones as long as a human forearm, with straps and buckles at the open end. These they stuffed with dried herbs held in place by wads of cheesecloth.

  A dozen or so figures already wore the leather cones strapped to their lower faces like masks. With the appearance of the underlords, the Pale Folk put aside their work and did likewise. Then they joined their masters, some before and some behind. One in ten of these bird-beaked homunculi picked up a torch and lit it from the warming fires. In solemn silence, they filed out of the great room, looking for all the world like some cultic religious procession out of the fevered hindbrain of ancient Rus.

  “You’re making torches and masks now, instead of cigarettes.” Pepsicolova found this alarming on more than one level. “Why?”

  No answer. “Do I need a mask?”

  No answer.

  They passed out of the installation. As they did, more and more Pale Folk joined the procession. They were a near-silent, shuffling mass, torchlit in outline, dark and unknowable at the core.

  For over an hour, they passed through what, for lack of a better word, might be called farmlands. Here, passages and rooms had been filled with trays of human manure, on which grew pale blue mushrooms, tended by bird-beaked Pale Folk. The smell made Pepsicolova’s head swim, but she lit up a cigarette and the sensation went away. Occasionally, the underlords paused to hand something to a mushroom farmer. Maybe it was a vial. The torchlight was never steady enough for Anya to tell.

  At last the subterranean farms were left behind. Down stairways and slanting passages the silent flow of bodies went, like an underground river seeking the center of the earth. Until, at a level far deeper than Pepsicolova had ever gone before, they came to a metal wall. In its was a crudely cut hole. Metal shavings littered the floor.

  One at a
time, the underlords ducked within. Pepsicolova followed. The Pale Folk stayed behind.

  The space within was perfectly lightless.

  Pepsicolova waited for her eyes to adjust, but they could not. She could sense the underlords to either side of her, but she could not see a thing.

  “If you want to show me something,” she said at last, “you’re going to have to get one of your flunkies in here with a torch.”

  “Ah, but first we must prolong your mental agony, Anya Alexandreyovna.”

  “It must surely be excruciating already.” “But it can still get worse.” “Much worse.’

  “Trust us.”

  Silence stretched as taut as a violin string about to snap. Pepsicolova could feel the hatred crackling soundlessly in the air about her. It was almost a physical force. As was the conviction that she was about to be shown something unspeakable. The moment went on and on until, just as she was about to burst into hysterical laughter, one of the Pale Folk stepped into the room, bearing a torch.

  “Behold, Anya Alexandreyovna, the weapon with which we shall destroy Moscow, Muscovy, and all Russia as well.”

  Pepsicolova stared in disbelief.

  Back in the Hotel New Metropol, Arkady found that he was still unable to purge the images from his mind. The things he had done! His stomach churned at the thought of them. Yet, at the time, his traitorous body had gloried in those filthy actions. “I don’t understand, holy one,” he said to Koschei. “There were men present and I used them as I would a woman. And I…” His voice thickened with shame. “I…I let them use me in the same manner.”

  “Why does this puzzle you, my son?” “Because I am not…” “Yes?” “Not…well…one of them.”

  “One of whom?”

  Arkady blushed red as a beet and blurted out, “An ass-bender! Okay? I’m not a goddamned faggot!”

  “The human body is a vile thing, when you reflect on it, is it not?” Koschei said. “An ancient prophet wrote that Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement-and what is that place of excrement but the Earth? The world is a dung heap, and those who crawl about on it are vermin who are fortunate only in that their stay upon it is brief.