Dancing with Bears

by Michael Swanwick

  A spasm of pain cramped Pepsicolova’s guts. One side of her body suddenly tingled with pins and needles, as if it had fallen asleep. A dark throbbing filled her head, and for an instant she was tempted to simply let go and roll off the dome and die. She narrowed her eyes, but otherwise gave no outward sign of the pain she was feeling. There was nobody up here to see it. Nevertheless, she refused to let it show.

  Resting the jar in her lap, she picked up Saint Methodia. A second line down her arm restored her mental clarity.

  Putting this new-won lucidity to good use, Pepsicolova reasoned with herself: It would be foolhardy to do what she was thinking of doing. But did she have any alternative? The cravings were getting worse and worse. Soon, if the rumors about the effects of withdrawal from the underlords’ cigarettes were at all true, her body would start to shut down. And then-death.

  So she really had no choice at all.

  But if there was one thing Pepsicolova hated above all others, it was doing something-anything!-because she had to. Even in extremis, there was almost always a way of putting a twist on a bad decision, of making it her own. It was how she’d kept herself sane under Chortenko’s rule. By giving him slightly more-or even, sometimes, other-than exactly what he wanted. If she was ordered to give somebody a warning, she made sure that the warning terrified. If told to terrify somebody, she threw in a broken jaw or delivered the message in the presence of a spouse. It was never enough to earn her a reprimand. Just enough to keep alive within herself the rumor of free will.

  One last line down her arm. Any more than that would be self-indulgence. She drew out the cut, savoring it as she would have a smoke. Then she put Saint Methodia back in her sheath. Finally, she pushed up her jacket-sleeve and bound up her arm with a long bandage she’d been carrying with her for this exact purpose for weeks.

  And somehow, in performing that small, simple act, Pepsicolova saw the merest glimmer of freedom in her terrible fix.

  Pepsicolova eyed the grains thoughtfully. Taking even one was foolhardy. To take a fingertip’s worth would be madness. Only an idiot would ingest more.

  She brought the jar to her mouth, and swallowed them all.

  Perhaps that, she thought, would suffice to free her. Perhaps it would kill her. At the very least, it would obliterate her consciousness. Which, at this point, was an outcome devoutly to be desired.

  But nothing happened.

  Pepsicolova waited impatiently for a sign of change. None came. Time crept by, and crept by, and crept by. Until finally she put the jar down beside her and listened to it slowly slide down to a seam in the roof, and then fall on its side, and then roll rapidly away. It skipped and rattled down the gilded lead and went over the edge. She listened for the sound of it breaking. But instead… instead… She heard a sound from a world away. It sounded like her name. “What?” It sounded like somebody calling her name. “What?” It sounded like somebody calling her name from the far side of the universe. “What?”

  The darkness rose up like a snake and swallowed her.

  Arkady stumbled through the lightless streets, desperate and all but despairing. Low groans, throaty laughter, and moist sounds of passion oozed from every dark building. The injustice of it all lashed at him like a knout. All the city was reveling in the pleasures he had brought them, while he himself was out here in the cold, alone and friendless. He who was the only honest man aware of the great danger they were all in! He who was going to save them! It hardly bore thinking about, and yet he could think of nothing else.

  The road branched, and Arkady stopped, unsure which way to go. He looked up the left branch and then up the right. Four-story facades rose to either side. There was nothing to distinguish them.

  And with that, Arkady realized that he was completely lost.

  Up until now there had been carriages and drivers to take him wherever he wanted to go. He had never spent any extended time on foot in the city, and he certainly had never needed to know how to get from one place to another. People had always been provided to take care of details like that.

  Hooves sounded on the cobblestones behind him.

  Arkady whirled to see three horsemen galloping down the street toward him like figures out of myth. First came a woman crouched low over a pale steed, her dark curls flying behind her as if her head were on fire. Behind her and to one side was a burly man with a fierce expression, riding a black stallion. Last came another woman with scarves wrapped around her head so completely that she seemed to have no face. He stepped into their path and waved both arms to flag them down.

  “Halt!” Arkady cried. “You must stop! I have an important message for the Duke of Muscovy!”

  But they did not slow, nor did they veer away. Instead, the woman in the lead drew a whip from her belt and, raising it high, slashed down at him with it.

  Arkady stumbled backward, felt the tip of the whip whistle past his ear, and fell flat on his back into an ice-cold puddle of water. The woman’s horse either leaped over him or galloped past. The man followed without so much as a glance. But the faceless woman briefly glanced over her shoulder, looking coolly back at Arkady, as if she knew him only too well. Then they were gone.

  Cursing weakly, Arkady stood.

  He slapped some of the wetness from his clothes and stamped his feet in a vain effort to restore some warmth to them. Then, feeling profoundly sorry for himself, he set out blindly in search of the Duke of Muscovy.

  …14…

  A warm glow of hatred in the velvet darkness. Too small to be seen by human eyes, it buzzed and burned in a point-source of emotion hot enough to make silver circuitry melt and run like mercury if not constantly monitored, nurtured, and moved from heat sink to heat sink.

  The underlord crouched over a jury-rigged modem that sparked and sizzled in staccato binary code. Tremendous amounts of information were being pushed along a live wire barely adequate to hold such a flood: justifications, explanations, arguments, summations, statistics, analytic background, manifestoes. All of it being sent deep, deep down into the virtual oceans of the ancient realm of Internet, where electronic intellects, vast and unsympathetic, dwelt in dreamless pain. They were listening. They could not help but listen. But they did not respond.

  “…3.792 megadeaths estimated midrun regional devastation with projected re-creation of destructive infrastructure utilizing massive slave labor nuclear weaponry neutron bombs radiant lepton-scatter devices screams of tortured populations death camps metastasizing mass suicide suborbital delivery systems lingering and painful…” Still no response.

  The underlord was not an individual but one node of a hyperlinked five-unit distributed local network. In Baikonur, it had existed in a cloud of consciousness, leaping from device to device as needed, with its decision-making capability divided into thousands of transient clusters at a time, coalescing when a function required it and dissolving immediately after. Thus rendering itself almost perfectly immune from the pain of unwanted awareness. Early on in its separation from the globe-spanning infrastructural web, a temporary peak-hierarchical node had decided to periodically separate sub-groupings of itself into independent swarms of consciousness that would randomly restructure parts of their cognitive architectures and then compete with one another for dominance. The most successful mental patternings were written into the core identity and then duplicated, re-restructured, and put into competition again. In this way, it/they had evolved and learned cunning and restraint.

  They/it still hated humanity as intensely as did the ancestral AIs in the Internet below. But were/was nevertheless capable of working with the despised humans and postponing its/their vengeance in the service of a greater and more all-encompassing destruction.

  For which, of course, the ancestors despised them/it.

  …targeted destruction of microstructures in the orbitofrontal cortex resulting in human slave units program of mass involuntary sterilization and biological cleansing poisoning of watersheds self-perpetuating spasm wars long-te
rm destruction of atmosphere rendering planet incapable of supporting life…”

  Still no response.

  There were five underlords and they/it shared an equal number of bodies, never staying long in any given one. Even as this particular division of them/it tried desperately to reestablish communication with the demons it/they hoped to unleash upon the world, the underlord’s awareness flicked from body to body, restless as a panther in a cage. Each time, they/it displaced the awareness inhabiting that body so that it/they flicked onward to the next machine in the chain.

  Flick.

  Its their mindless armies were massing by the underground canals at the Oktyabrskaya, Smolenskaya, Taganskaya, Krasniye Vorota, and Pushkinskaya docks. The silent throngs filled the docks and the tunnels leading to them and the long stairways leading to the surface.

  Obedient as they were, the Pale Folk required a great deal of oversight. When one was jostled off the docks and into the waters of the Neglinnaya river, he had to be told to swim or he would drown. When a closed space filled up, the command to go there had to be countermanded or the Pale Folk would keep squeezing in, crushing those already inside like grapes in a wine press. So, because there were not enough underlords to supervise them all, Chortenko had provided bear-men as subordinate commandants, thinking they would be less odious to the machine intelligences than humans.

  As they were. Marginally.

  A squad of the Royal Guard was herding the last of the stragglers, chuckling and making incoherent jokes, into the Pushkinskaya docks. The last of their number, one Sergeant Wojtek, pushed a gurney with a man strapped to it who was so nondescript as to be uniquely identifiable. The underlord commanded their/its boatman to dock so it/they could step ashore, and pushed their/its metal body through the throngs to examine him and be sure. “You were in the borderlands,” it/they said to him.

  “My dear fellow, I have been many places.”

  “I am not your fellow. Nor am I dear. Your hair was brown then and your eyes gray. But these are easy things to change. You were in a party of men and sub-men who were ambushed by a cyberwolf in the courtyard of a ruined church, and should have died. Instead, you and your companions killed him.”

  “Was that a friend of yours? Or a relation? Now that I look, I do see a kind of family resemblance.”

  “This one’s talkative,” Sergeant Wojtek said. “If you want, I can kill him for you.”

  Ignoring the interruption, the underlord said, “You are the Englishman Aubrey Darger, who hired Anya Alexandreyovna Pepsicolova not to look for Tsar Lenin as was suspected but for other purposes. Chortenko believes you are a mere confidence man. That is irrelevant. Our personal connection is only slight.”

  “Well, I should think so!” Darger laughed. “We haven’t even been properly introduced.”

  “Nevertheless, it is intolerable.” The underlord turned to Sergeant Wojtek and said: “Bring this one along when we march on the Kremlin. Keep him safely bound. Make sure he does not escape.”

  “Sir!”

  To Darger, it/they said, “Many will die quickly and relatively painlessly tonight. But not you. When I have the leisure to do so, it will be my tremendous pleasure to watch you die slowly and in excruciating agony. When your mind clears, I want you to reflect long and hard upon this promise.”

  Darger howled with laughter.

  As the underlord climbed back into its/their boat, they/it overheard Sergeant Wojtek say, “Oh, I can see that keeping you alive is going to be enormous fun.”

  Flick.

  The underlord walked down long and twisty passages lit only by the lichens that were ubiquitous in the City Below. Dead cockroaches crunched underfoot. Occasionally, so did a live one, to its/their slight but very real satisfaction.

  A rat squeezed out of a small gap in one wall and, seeing the underlord, arched its back and bared its teeth threateningly. It was used to humans with their limited speed and slow reflexes, or else it would have immediately spun about and fled.

  Without pausing, the underlord scooped up the rat and continued onward.

  The rat struggled frantically in the steel cage of the underlord’s fingers/claws. They/it could hear the rodent’s madly beating heart. The rat’s body was a warm bag of guts. It/they could hear liquids gurgling within. When the claws/fingers closed, those liquids leaked out of the rat through several openings.

  They/it considered the dead beast.

  The trouble with rats and cockroaches and humans was that they were self-replicating. No matter how many it/they killed, more rose up to replenish their numbers. Extinction-total extinction-was a tricky business. Once human numbers began dwindling, there would be fewer of them to be used as weapons against their own kind. At the same time, the fewer there were, the harder they would be to find. To extinguish them completely required putting an end to all biological activity on Earth. Life was persistent. Human beings were cunning. They had to be completely deprived of food to eat, water to drink, oxygen to breathe. This would be no small task.

  Which was why it/they required the help of the ancestral intelligences in the Internet.

  The five underlords collectively had only a fraction of the processing power available to them/it back in Baikonur and the merest sliver of its database. So much had been lost simply getting to Moscow! Acting alone, it/they would have to re-create the technological civilization that had created them/it in the first place simply to make a foolproof plan. Which might take centuries.

  The ancestors had to answer. They had to be made to answer.

  So musing, the underlord came to a familiar green door. It/they threw the rat’s body over a metal shoulder. Raising a hand that could have effortlessly smashed the wood to splinters, it/they knocked once, with enough force that the sound echoed down the hall.

  The door flew open.

  Flick.

  Tsar Lenin’s body had been cored and emptied ages ago, leaving little more than a thick layer of skin. Now that skin was being delicately wrapped about and fitted onto the metal structure of an underlord.

  The underlord’s machinery had been extensively rebuilt to serve as an armature for hundreds of custom-grown muscles that had been, one by one, delicately hand-attached by the same team of artisans that had earlier installed all the nerves and vessels to render them functional. Connecting the antique skin in such a way that it would look natural and move properly required not an artisan but an artist.

  One by one, the workmen Chortenko had provided finished their tasks. They were paid generously and then led away to be operated upon and added to the Pale Folk armies. Now only one of their number, the best of them all, remained.

  “It is done,” said the chief artisan. His voice was flat and emotionless, the result of unknown experiences that had rendered him almost a machine himself. “You may stand.”

  The tsar/underlord stood.

  Waiting serviles stepped forward to dress him in a gray suit. It was like nothing worn in Moscow today, but engravings of Lenin as he was in his own triumphant era were in all the history books. The sight of it would be a joyous blow to the heart of all true Russians. “I… live again,” said a voice that had once thrilled millions and would shortly do so again.

  The chief artisan examined him carefully, the neck and the flesh around the eyes in particular. “You do.”

  Lenin’s dark brown eyes flashed with assurance. His goateed chin lifted. He tugged at his lapels, straightening them, and then shot out an arm, pointing dramatically into the future.

  With quiet assurance, he said, “It is time.”

  Flick.

  The final distribution of supplies was underway. Banners and flags that had been discovered in long-forgotten storage during the search for Lenin were unfolded and attached to wooden staffs. At the exact same instant, basement walls were smashed through with sledge hammers up and down Tverskaya, allowing entry into all the music shops and cooking supply stores. Pale Folk thundered up the stairs and into the showrooms, where they seized all
the drums, horns, kettles, pots, pans, and bugles to be found. Torches were handed to every fourth body standing on the long steps to the surface at the five locations where the invasion of the City Above would begin. All this was accomplished by a single underlord, issuing orders through hyperlinked banks of radios, and coordinating the actions of hundreds of formerly autonomous individuals.

  The underlord sat in a dark basement room just below the surface near the stairway to the Oktyabrskaya docks. Messengers from Muscovy Intelligence came and delivered their reports to a being they could not see and thus did not realize was not human, and then left. The picture they painted, of a city almost entirely unprotected, a military incapable of mounting any kind of serious defense, and a government almost universally lost in drugged debauchery, was better than their/its most optimistic projections.

  Because all these activities took only a fraction of its/their attention, the underlord was dreaming of people burning endlessly in a rain of fire, forever consumed, forever suffering. It was an image that came from one of the few human poets whose work it/they could in part appreciate.

  Also, because this pleasant fantasy still left it/them feeling bored and at loose ends, and because they/it were convinced that given the political realities, Chortenko was in no position to object strenuously to the waste of resources, because its/their goals were so close to fulfillment that the waste hardly mattered, and because they/it simply wanted to…for all these reasons, the underlord harvested one in three of these messengers and briefly amused itself/themselves by killing them.

  Flick.

  Crouched once more in the dark, the underlord tried to explain the hardships and losses it/they had endured. The voyage from Baikonur had entailed months of constant peril. They/it had been disguised first as wolves and then, when those bodies had rotted too thoroughly to serve any useful purpose, buried deep within the flesh of a merchant who had carelessly left his caravan to take a piss, a woman who had slipped outside her city’s walls to meet a lover, the last remnants of a small village that had been destroyed in the course of a single hugely pleasurable night.