The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus

by Michael Swanwick

  “You…you were…” The little man looked bewildered by her presence.

  “I couldn’t get what I need at home. It was only natural that I should look for it elsewhere. So it costs you a day of your life every time we make love! Aren’t I worth it? So it costs you three days to tie me up and whip me! So what? Most men would die for the privilege.”

  She pressed the gun into his hands.

  “If I mean so little to you,” she cried histrionically, “then kill me!” She darted back and struck a melodramatic pose alongside Darger. “I will die beside the man I love!”

  “Yes…” Belated comprehension dawned upon Monsieur’s face, followed closely by a cruel smile. “The man you love.”

  He pointed the pistol at Darger and pulled the trigger.

  But in that same instant, Mignonette flung herself before her lover, as if to shelter his body with her own. In the confines of so small a room, the gun’s report was world-shattering. She spun around, clutched her bosom, and collapsed in the bedroom doorway. Blood seeped onto the carpet from beneath her.

  Monsieur held up the gun and stared at it with an expression of total disbelief.

  It went off again.

  He collapsed dead upon the carpet.

  The police naturally suspected the worst. But a dispassionate exposition of events by the Dedicated Doctor, a creature compulsively incapable of lying, and an unobtrusive transfer of banknotes from Surplus allayed all suspicions. Monsieur d’Etranger’s death was obviously an accident d’amour, and Darger and Surplus but innocent bystanders. With heartfelt expressions of condolence, the officers left.

  When the morticians came to take away Monsieur’s body, the Dedicated Doctor smiled. “What a horrible little man he was!” he exclaimed. “You cannot imagine what a relief it is to no longer give a damn about his health.” He had signed death warrants for both Monsieur and his widow, though his examination of her had been cursory at best. He hadn’t even touched the body.

  Darger roused himself from his depressed state to ask, “Will you be returning for Madame d’Etranger’s body?”

  “No,” the Dedicated Doctor said. “She is a cat, and therefore the disposition of her corpse is a matter for the department of sanitation.”

  Darger turned an ashen white. But Surplus deftly stepped beside him and seized the man’s wrists in his own powerful paws. “Consider how tenuous our position is here,” he murmured. Then the door closed, and they were alone again. “Anyway—what body?”

  Darger whirled. Mignonette was gone.

  “Between the money I had to slip to les flics in order to get them to leave as quickly as they did,” Surplus told his morose companion, “and the legitimate claims of our creditors, we are only slightly better off than we were when we first arrived in Paris.”

  This news roused Darger from his funk. “You have paid off our creditors? That is extremely good to hear. Wherever did you get that sort of money?”

  “Ci, Ça, and l’Autre. They wished to be bribed. So I let them buy shares in the salvage enterprise at a greatly reduced rate. You cannot imagine how grateful they were.”

  It was evening, and the two associates were taking a last slow stroll along the luminous banks of the Seine. They were scheduled to depart the city within the hour via river-barge, and their emotions were decidedly mixed. No man leaves Paris entirely happily.

  They came to a stone bridge, and walked halfway across it. Below, they could see their barge awaiting them. Darger opened his Gladstone and took out the chrome pistol that had been so central in recent events. He placed it on the rail. “Talk,” he said.

  The gun said nothing.

  He nudged it ever so slightly with one finger. “It would take but a flick of the wrist to send you to the bottom of the river. I don’t know if you’d rust, but I am certain you cannot swim.”

  “All right, all right!” the pistol said. “How did you know?”

  “Monsieur had possession of an extremely rare chapbook which gave away our scheme. He can only have gotten it from one of Mignonette’s book scouts. Yet there was no way she could have known of its importance—unless she had somehow planted a spy in our midst. That first night, when she broke into our rooms, I heard voices. It is obvious now that she was talking with you.”

  “You are a more intelligent man than you appear.”

  “I’ll take that for a compliment. Now tell me—what was this ridiculous charade all about?”

  “How much do you know already?”

  “The first bullet you fired lodged in the back wall of the bedroom. It did not come anywhere near Mignonette. The blood that leaked from under her body was bull’s blood, released from a small leather bladder she left behind her. After the police departed, she unobtrusively slipped out the bedroom window. Doubtless she is a great distance away by now. I know all that occurred. What I do not understand is why.”

  “Very well. Monsieur was a vile old man. He did not deserve a beautiful creature like Mignonette.”

  “On this we are as one. Go on.”

  “But, as he had her made, he owned her. And as she was his property, he was free to do with her as he liked.” Then, when Darger’s face darkened, “You misapprehend me, sir! I do not speak of sexual or sadomasochistic practices but of chattel slavery. Monsieur was, as I am sure you have noted for yourself, a possessive man. He had left instructions that upon his death, his house was to be set afire, with Mignonette within it.”

  “Surely, this would not be legal!”

  “Read the law,” the gun said. “Mignonette determined to find her way free. She won me over to her cause, and together we hatched the plan you have seen played to fruition.”

  “Tell me one thing,” Surplus said curiously. “You were programmed not to shoot your master. How then did you manage…?”

  “I am many centuries old. Time enough to hack any amount of code.”

  “Ah,” said Surplus, in a voice that indicated he was unwilling to admit unfamiliarity with the gun’s terminologies.

  “But why me?” Darger slammed a hand down on the stone rail. “Why did Madame d’Etranger act out her cruel drama with my assistance, rather than…than…with someone else’s?”

  “Because she is a cold-hearted bitch. Also, she found you attractive. For a whore such as she, that is justification enough for anything.”

  Darger flushed with anger. “How dare you speak so of a lady?”

  “She abandoned me,” the gun said bitterly. “I loved her, and she abandoned me. How else should I speak of her under such circumstances?”

  “Under such circumstances, a gentleman would not speak of her at all,” Surplus said mildly. “Nevertheless, you have, as required, explained everything. So we shall honor our implicit promise by leaving you here to be found by the next passer-by. A valuable weapon such as yourself will surely find another patron with ease. A good life to you, sir.”

  “Wait!”

  Surplus quirked an eyebrow. “What is it?” Darger asked.

  “Take me with you,” the gun pleaded. “Do not leave me here to be picked up by some cutpurse or bourgeois lout. I am neither a criminal nor meant for a sedentary life. I am an adventurer, like yourselves! I can be of enormous aid to you, and an invaluable prop for your illicit schemes.”

  Darger saw how Surplus’s ears perked up at this. Quickly, and in his coldest possible manner, he said, “We are not of the same social class, sir.”

  Taking his friend’s arm, he turned away.

  Below, at the landing-stage, their barge awaited, hung with loops of fairy-lights. They descended and boarded. The hawsers were cast off, the engine fed an extra handful of sugar to wake it to life, and they motored silently down-river, while behind them the pistol’s frantic cries faded slowly in the warm Parisian night. It was not long before the City of Light was a luminous blur on the horizon, like the face of one’s beloved seen through tears.

  On a hilltop in Arcadia, Darger sat talking with a satyr.

  “Oh, the
sex is good,” the satyr said. “Nobody could say it wasn’t. But is it the be-all and end-all of life? I don’t see that.” The satyr’s name was Demetrios Papatragos, and evenings he played the saxophone in a local jazz club.

  “You’re a bit of a philosopher,” Darger observed.

  “Oh, well, in a home-grown front porch sense, I suppose I am.” The satyr adjusted the small leather apron that was his only item of clothing. “But enough about me. What brings you here? We don’t get that many travelers these days. Other than the African scientists, of course.”

  “Of course. What are the Africans here for, anyway?”

  “They are building gods.”

  “Gods! Surely not! Whatever for?”

  “Who can fathom the ways of scientists? All the way from Greater Zimbabwe they came, across the wine-dark Mediterranean and into these romance-haunted hills, and for what? To lock themselves up within the ruins of the Monastery of St. Vasilios, where they labor as diligently and joylessly as if they were indeed monks. They never come out, save to buy food and wine or to take the occasional blood sample or skin scraping. Once, one of them offered a nymph money to have sex with him, if you can believe such a thing.”

  “Scandalous!” Nymphs, though they were female satyrs, had neither hoofs nor horns. They were, however, not cross-fertile with humans. It was the only way, other than a small tail at the base of their spines (and that was normally covered by their dresses), to determine their race. Needless to say, they were as wildly popular with human men as their male counterparts were with women. “Sex is either freely given or it is nothing.”

  “You’re a bit of a philosopher yourself,” Papatragos said. “Say—a few of our young ladies might be in heat. You want me to ask around?”

  “My good friend Surplus, perhaps, would avail himself of their kind offers. But not I. Much though I’d enjoy the act, I’d only feel guilty afterwards. It is one of the drawbacks of having a depressive turn of mind.”

  So Darger made his farewells, picked up his walking stick, and sauntered back to town. The conversation had given him much to think about.

  “What word of the Evangelos bronzes?” Surplus asked. He was sitting at a table out back of their inn, nursing a small glass of retsina and admiring the sunset. The inn stood at the outskirts of town at the verge of a forest, where pine, fir, and chestnut gave way to orchards, olive trees, cultivated fields, and pastures for sheep and goats. The view from its garden could scarce be improved upon.

  “None whatsoever. The locals are happy to recommend the ruins of this amphitheater or that nuclear power plant, but any mention of bronze lions or a metal man causes them only to look blank and shake their heads in confusion. I begin to suspect that scholar in Athens sold us a bill of goods.”

  “The biters bit! Well, ’tis an occupational hazard in our line of business.”

  “Sadly true. Still, if the bronzes will not serve us in one manner, they shall in another. Does it not strike you as odd that two such avid antiquarians as ourselves have yet to see the ruins of St. Vasilios? I propose that tomorrow we pay a courtesy visit upon the scientists there.”

  Surplus grinned like a hound—which he was not, quite. He shook out his lace cuffs and, seizing his silver-knobbed cane, stood. “I look forward to making their acquaintance.”

  “The locals say that they are building gods.”

  “Are they really? Well, there’s a market for everything, I suppose.”

  Their plans were to take a strange turn, however. For that evening Dionysus danced through the town.

  Darger was writing a melancholy letter home when the first shouts sounded outside his room. He heard cries of “Pan! Great Pan!” and wild skirls of music. Going to the window, he saw an astonishing sight: The townsfolk were pouring into the street, shedding their clothes, dancing naked in the moonlight for all to see. At their head was a tall, dark figure who pranced and leaped, all the while playing the pipes.

  He got only a glimpse, but its effect was riveting. He felt the god’s passage as a physical thing. Stiffening, he gripped the windowsill with both hands, and tried to control the wildness that made his heart pound and his body quiver.

  But then two young women, one a nymph and the other Theodosia, the innkeeper’s daughter, burst into his room and began kissing his face and urging him toward the bed.

  Under normal circumstances, he would have sent them packing—he hardly knew the ladies. But the innkeeper’s daughter and her goat-girl companion were both laughing and blushing so charmingly and were furthermore so eager to grapple that it seemed a pity to disappoint them. Then, too, the night was rapidly filling with the sighs and groans of human passion—no adult, apparently, was immune to the god’s influence—and it seemed to Darger perverse that he alone in all the world should refuse to give in to pleasure.

  So, protesting insincerely, he allowed the women to crowd him back onto the bed, to remove his clothing, and to have their wicked way with him. Nor was he backwards with them. Having once set his mind to a task, he labored at it with a will.

  In a distant corner of his mind, he heard Surplus in the room down the hall raise his voice in an ecstatic howl.

  Darger slept late the next morning. When he went down to breakfast, Theodosia was all blushes and shy smiles. She brought him a platter piled high with food, gave him a fleet peck on the cheek, and then fled happily back into the kitchen.

  Women never ceased to amaze Darger. One might make free of their bodies in the most intimate manner possible, handling them not only lustfully but self-indulgently, and denying oneself not a single pleasure…yet it only made them like you the better afterwards. Darger was a staunch atheist. He did not believe in the existence of a benevolent and loving God who manipulated the world in order to maximize the happiness of His creations. Still, on a morning like this, he had to admit that all the evidence was against him.

  Through an open doorway, he saw the landlord make a playful grab at his fat wife’s rump. She pushed him away and, with a giggle, fled into the interior of the inn. The landlord followed.

  Darger scowled. He gathered his hat and walking stick, and went outside. Surplus was waiting in the garden. “Your thoughts trend the same way as mine?” Darger asked.

  “Where else could they go?” Surplus asked grimly. “We must have a word with the Africans.”

  The monastery was less than a mile distant, but the stroll up and down dusty country roads gave them both time enough to recover their savoir-faire. St. Vasilios, when they came to it, was dominated by a translucent green bubble-roof, fresh-grown to render the ruins habitable. The grounds were surrounded by an ancient stone wall. A wooden gate, latched but not locked, filled the lower half of a stone arch. Above it was a bell.

  They rang.

  Several orange-robed men were in the yard, unloading crated laboratory equipment from a wagon. They had the appearance and the formidable height of that handsomest of the world’s peoples, the Masai. But whether they were of Masai descent or had merely incorporated Masai features into their genes, Darger could not say. The stocky, sweating wagoner looked like a gnome beside them. He cursed and tugged at his horses’ harness to keep the skittish beasts from bolting.

  At the sound of the bell, one of the scientists separated himself from the others and strode briskly to the gate. “Yes?” he said in a dubious tone.

  “We wish to speak with the god Pan.” Darger said. “We are from the government. ”

  “You do not look Greek.”

  “Not the local government, sir. The British government.” Darger smiled into the man’s baffled expression. “May we come in?”

  They were not brought to see Dionysus immediately, of course, but to the Chief Researcher. The scientist-monk led them to an office that was almost spartan in its appointments: a chair, a desk, a lamp, and nothing more. Behind the desk sat a girl who looked to be at most ten years old, reading a report by the lamp’s gentle biofluorescence. She was a scrawny thing with a large and tightly co
rnrowed head. “Tell her you love her,” she said curtly.

  “I beg your pardon?” Surplus said.

  “Tell her that, and then kiss her. That’ll work better than any aphrodisiac I could give you. I presume that’s what you came to this den of scientists for—that or poison. In which case, I recommend a stout cudgel at midnight and dumping the body in a marsh before daybreak. Poisons are notoriously uncertain. In either case, there is no need to involve my people in your personal affairs.”

  Taken aback, Darger said, “Ah, actually, we are here on official business.”

  The girl raised her head.

  Her eyes were as dark and motionless as a snake’s. They were not the eyes of a child but more like those of the legendary artificial intellects of the Utopian era—cold, timeless, calculating. A shudder ran through Darger’s body. Her gaze was electrifying. Almost, it was terrifying.

  Recovering himself, Darger said, “I am Inspector Darger, and this is my colleague, Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux. By birth an American, it goes without saying.”

  She did not blink. “What brings two representatives of Her Majesty’s government here?”

  “We have been despatched to search out and recover the Evangelos bronzes. Doubtless you know of them.”

  “Vaguely. They were liberated from London, were they not?”

  “Looted, rather! Wrenched from Britain’s loving arms by that dastard Konstantin Evangelos in an age when she was weak and Greece powerful, and upon the shoddiest of excuses—something about some ancient marbles that had supposedly…well, that hardly matters.”

  “Our mission is to find and recover them,” Surplus elucidated.

  “They must be valuable.”

  “Were you to discover them, they would be worth a king’s ransom, and it would be my proud privilege to write you a promissory note for the full amount. However—” Darger coughed into his hand. “We, of course, are civil servants. The thanks of a grateful nation will be our reward.”