The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus

by Michael Swanwick

  “Aye.” Papatragos grinned. “I gather that makes me practically your father-in-law.”

  By now all the satyrs who had been near enough to see the flames and had come with buckets to fight them—some twenty in all—were clustered about the two men. Hurriedly, Surplus told all that they knew of Pan, Eris and the troubles in town.

  “Nor is this matter finished,” Darger said. “The Chief Researcher said something about using Dionysus to stop riots. Since he has not appeared to do so tonight, that means they will have to create another set of riots to test that ability as well. More trouble is imminent.”

  “That is no concern of mine,” said one stodgy-looking crofter.

  “It will be ours,” Darger declared, with his usual highhanded employment of the first person plural pronoun. “As soon as the agent of the riots has left town, she will surely show up here next. Did not Dionysus dance in the fields after he danced in the streets? Then Eris is on her way here to set brother against brother, and father against son.”

  Angry mutters passed among the satyrs. Papatragos held up his hands for silence. “Tragopropos!” he said to the pimply-faced satyr. “Run and gather together every adult satyr you can. Tell them to seize whatever weapons they can and advance upon the monastery.”

  “What of the townsfolk?”

  “Somebody else will be sent for them. Why are you still standing here?”

  “I’m gone!”

  “The fire in town has gone out,” Papatragos continued. “Which means that Eris is done her work and has left. She will be coming up this very road in not too long.”

  “Fortunately,” Darger said, “I have a plan.”

  Darger and Surplus stood exposed in the moonlight at the very center of the road, while the satyrs hid in the bushes at its verge. They did not have long to wait.

  A shadow moved toward them, grew, solidified, and became a goddess.

  Eris stalked up the road, eyes wild and hair in disarray. Her clothes had been ripped to shreds; only a few rags hung from waist and ankles, and they hid nothing of her body at all. She made odd chirping and shrieking noises as she came, with sudden small hops to the side and leaps into the air. Darger had known all manner of madmen in his time. This went far beyond anything he had ever seen for sheer chaotic irrationality.

  Spying them, Eris threw back her head and trilled like a bird. Then she came running and dancing toward the two friends, spinning about and beating her arms against her sides. Had she lacked the strength of the frenzied, she would still have been terrifying, for it was clear that she was capable of absolutely anything. As it was, she was enough to make a brave man cringe.

  “Now!”

  At Darger’s command, every satyr stepped forward onto the road and threw his bucket of water at the goddess. Briefly, she was inundated. All her sweat—and, hopefully, her pheromones as well—was washed clear of her body.

  As one, the satyrs dropped their buckets. Ten of them rushed forward with drug patches and slapped them onto her body. Put off her balance by the sudden onslaught, Eris fell to the ground.

  “Now stand clear!” Darger cried.

  The satyrs danced back. One who had hesitated just a bit in finding a space for his patch stayed just a little too long and was caught by her lingering pheromones. He drew back his foot to kick the prone goddess. But Papatragos darted forward to drag him out of her aura before he could do so.

  “Behave yourself,” he said.

  Eris convulsed in the dirt, flipped over on her stomach, and vomited. Slowly, then, she stood. She looked around her dimly, wonderingly. Her eyes cleared, and an expression of horror and remorse came over her face.

  “Oh, sweet science, what have I done?” she said. Then she wailed, “What has happened to my clothes?”

  She tried to cover herself with her hands.

  One of the young satyrs snickered, but Papatragos quelled him with a look. Surplus, meanwhile, handed the goddess his jacket. “Pray, madam, don this,” he said courteously and, to the others, “Didn’t one of you bring a blanket for the victims of the fire? Toss that to the lady—it’ll make a fine skirt.”

  Somebody started forward with a blanket, then hesitated. “Is it safe?”

  “The patches we gave you will protect against her influence,” Darger assured him.

  “Unfortunately, those were the last,” Surplus said sadly. He turned the box upside down and shook it.

  “The lady Eris will be enormously tired for at least a day. Have you a guest room?” Darger asked Papatragos. “Can she use it?”

  “I suppose so. The place already looks like an infirmary.”

  At which reminder, Darger hurried inside to see how Theodosia was doing.

  But when he got there, Theodosia was gone, and Anya and her mother as well. At first, Darger suspected foul play. But a quick search of the premises showed no signs of disorder. Indeed, the mattress had been removed (presumably to the wagon, which was also gone) and all the dislocations attendant upon it having been brought into the farmhouse had been tidied away. Clearly, the women had gone off somewhere, for purposes of their own. Which thought made Darger very uneasy indeed.

  Meanwhile, the voices of gathering men and satyrs could be heard outside. Surplus stuck his head through the door and cleared his throat. “Your mob awaits.”

  The stream of satyrs and men, armed with flails, pruning-hooks, pitchforks and torches, flowed up the mountain roads toward the Monastery of St. Vasilios. Where roads met, more crofters and townsfolk poured out of the darkness, streams merging and the whole surging onward with renewed force.

  Darger began to worry about what would happen when the vigilantes reached their destination. Tugging at Surplus’s sleeve, he drew his friend aside. “The scientists can escape easily enough,” he said. “All they need do is flee into the woods. But I worry about Dionysus, locked in his crypt. This expedition is quite capable of torching the building.”

  “If I cut across the fields, I could arrive at the monastery before the vigilantes do, though not long before. It would be no great feat to slip over a back wall, force a door, and free the man.”

  Darger felt himself moved. “That is inutterably good of you, my friend.”

  “Poof!” Surplus said haughtily. “It is a nothing.”

  And he was gone.

  By Darger’s estimate, the vigilantes were a hundred strong by the time they reached the Monastery of St. Vasilios. The moon rode high among scattered shreds of cloud, and shone so bright that they did not need torches to see by, but only for their psychological effect. They raised a cry when they saw the ruins, and began running toward them.

  Then they stopped.

  The field before the monastery was alive with squids.

  The creatures had been loathsome enough in the context of the laboratory. Here, under a cloud-torn sky, arrayed in regular ranks like an army, they were grotesque and terrifying. Tentacles lashing, the cephalopods advanced, and as they did so it could be seen that they held swords and pikes and other weapons, hastily forged but obviously suitable for murderous work.

  Remembering, however, how they feared fire, Darger snatched up a torch and thrust it at the nearest rank of attackers. Chittering and clacking, they drew away from him. “Torches to the fore!” he cried. “All others follow in their wake!”

  So they advanced, the squid-army retreating, until they were almost to St. Vasilios itself.

  But an imp-like creature waited for them atop the monastery wall. It was a small black lump of a being, yet its brisk movements and rapid walk conveyed an enormous sense of vitality. There was a presence to this thing. It could not be ignored.

  It was, Darger saw, the Chief Researcher.

  One by one, the satyrs and men stumbled to a halt. They milled about, uneasy and uncertain, under the force of her scornful glare.

  “You’ve come at least, have you?” The Chief Researcher strutted back and forth on the wall, as active and intimidating as a basilisk. A dark miasma seemed to radiat
e from her, settling upon the crowd and sapping its will. Filling them all with doubts and dark imaginings. “Doubtless you think you came of your own free will, driven by anger and self-righteousness. But you’re here by my invitation. I sent you first Dionysus and then Eris to lure you to my doorstep, so that I might test the third deity of my great trilogy.”

  Standing at the front of the mob, Darger cried, “You cannot bluff us!”

  “You think I’m bluffing?” The Chief Researcher flung out an arm toward the looming ruins behind her. “Behold my masterpiece—a god who is neither anthropomorphic nor limited to a single species, a god for humans and squids alike, a chimera stitched together from the genes of a hundred sires…” Her laughter was not in the least bit sane. “I give you Thanatos—the god of death!”

  The dome of the monastery rippled and stirred. Enormous flaps of translucent flesh, like great wings, unfolded to either side, and the forward edge heaved up to reveal a lightless space from which slowly unreeled long, barb-covered tentacles.

  Worse than any merely visual horror, however, was the overwhelming sense of futility and despair that now filled the world. All felt its immensely dispiriting effect. Darger, whose inclination was naturally toward the melancholic, found himself thinking of annihilation. Nor was this entirely unattractive. His thoughts turned to the Isle of the Dead, outside Venice, where the graves were twined with nightshade and wolfsbane, and yew-trees dropped their berries on the silent earth. He yearned to drink of Lethe’s ruby cup, while beetles crawled about his feet, and death-moths fluttered about his head. To slip into the voluptuously accommodating bed of the soil, and there consort with the myriad who had gone before.

  All around him, people were putting down their makeshift agricultural weapons. One let fall a torch. Even the squids dropped their swords and huddled in despair.

  Something deep within Darger struggled to awaken. This was not, he knew, natural. The Chief Researcher’s god was imposing despair upon them all against their better judgments. But, like rain from a weeping cloud, sorrow poured down over him, and he was helpless before it. All beauty must someday die, after all, and should he who was a lover of beauty survive? Perish the thought!

  Beside him, a satyr slid to the ground and wept.

  Alas, he simply did not care.

  Surplus, meanwhile, was in his element. Running headlong through the night, with the moon bouncing in the sky above, he felt his every sense to be fully engaged, fully alive. Through spinneys and over fields he ran, savoring every smell, alert to the slightest sound.

  By roundabout ways he came at last to the monastery. The ground at its rear was untended and covered with scrub forest. All to the good. Nobody would see him here. He could find a back entrance or a window that might be forced and…

  At that very instant, he felt a warm puff of breath on the back of his neck. His hackles rose. Only one creature could have come up behind him so silently as to avoid detection.

  “Nobody’s here,” Bast said.

  Surplus spun about, prepared to defend himself to the death. But the great cat merely sat down and began tending to the claws of one enormous paw, biting and tugging at them with fastidious care.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Our work now being effectively over, we shall soon return to Greater Zimbabwe. So, in the spirit of tying up all loose ends, the monks have been sent to seize the Evangelos bronzes as a gift for the Scientifically Chosen Council of Rational Governance back home. The Chief Researcher, meanwhile, is out front, preparing to deal with insurgent local rabble.”

  Surplus rubbed his chin thoughtfully with the knob of his cane. “Hum. Well…in any case, that is not why I am here. I have come for Dionysus.”

  “The crypt is empty,” Bast said. “Shortly after the monks and the Chief Researcher left, an army of nymphs came and wrested the god from his tomb. If you look, you can see where they broke a door in.”

  “Do you know where they have taken him?” Surplus asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then, will you lead me there?”

  “Why should I?”

  Surplus started to reply, then bit his words short. Argument would not suffice with this creature—he was a cat, and cats did not respond to reason. Best, then, to appeal to his innate nature. “Because it would be a pointless and spiteful act of mischief.”

  Bast grinned. “They have taken him to their temple. It isn’t far—a mile, perhaps less.”

  He turned away. Darger followed.

  The temple was little more than a glen surrounded by evenly spaced slim white trees, like so many marble pillars. A small and simple altar stood to one end. But the entrance was flanked by two enormous pairs of metal lions, and off to one side stood the heroic bronze of a lordly man, three times the height of a mere mortal.

  They arrived at the tail end of a small war.

  The monks had arrived first and begun to set up blocks and tackle, in order to lower the bronze man to the ground. Barely had they begun their enterprise, however, when an army of nymphs arrived, with Dionysus cradled in a wagonload of feather mattresses. Their initial outrage at what they saw could only be imagined by its aftermath: Orange-robed monks fled wildly through the woods, pursued by packs of raging nymphs. Here and there, one had fallen, and the women performed abominable deeds upon their bodies.

  Surplus looked resolutely away. He could feel the violent emotion possessing the women right through the soothing chemical voice of the patches he still wore, a passion that went far beyond sex into realms of fear and terror. He could not help remembering that the word “panic” was originally derived from the name Pan.

  He strolled up to the wagon, and said, “Good evening, sir. I came to make sure you are well.”

  Dionysus looked up and smiled wanly. “I am, and I thank you for your concern.” A monk’s scream split the night. “However, if my ladies catch sight of you, I fear you will suffer even as many of my former associates do now. I’ll do my best to calm them, but meanwhile, I suggest that you—” He looked suddenly alarmed. “Run!”

  Lethargy filled Darger. His arms were leaden and his feet were unable to move. It seemed too much effort even to breathe. A listless glance around him showed that all his brave mob were incapacitated, some crouched and others weeping, in various attitudes of despair. Event the chimeric squid had collapsed into moist and listless blobs on the grass. He saw one taken up by Thanatos’s tentacles, held high above the monastery, and then dropped into an unsuspected maw therein.

  It did not matter. Nothing did.

  Luckily, however, such sensations were nothing new to Darger. He was a depressive by humor, well familiar with the black weight of futility, like a hound sitting upon his heart. How many nights had he lain sleepless and waiting for a dawn he knew would never arrive? How many mornings had he forced himself out of bed, though he could see no point to the effort? More than he could count.

  There was still a torch in his hand. Slowly, Darger made his shuffling way through the unresisting forms of his supporters. He lacked the energy to climb the wall, so he walked around it until he came to the gate, reached in to unlatch it, and then walked through.

  He trudged up to the monastery.

  So far, he had gone unnoticed because the men and satyrs wandered aimlessly about in their despair, and his movement had been cloaked by theirs. Within the monastery grounds, however, he was alone. The bright line traced by his torch attracted the Chief Researcher’s eye.

  “You!” she cried. “British government man! Put that torch down.” She jumped down from the wall and trotted toward him. “It’s hopeless, you know. You’ve already lost. You’re as good as dead.”

  She was at his side now, and reaching for the torch. He raised it up, out of her reach.

  “You don’t think this is going to work, do you?” She punched and kicked him, but they were the blows of a child, and easy to ignore. “You don’t honestly think there’s any hope for you?”

  He sighed. “No.”
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br />   Then he threw the torch.

  Whomp! The dome went up in flames. Light and heat filled the courtyard. Shielding his eyes, Darger looked away, to see satyrs and men staggering to their feet, and squids fluidly slipping downslope toward the river. Into the water they went and downstream, swimming with the current toward the distant Aegean.

  Thanatos screamed. It was a horrid, indescribable sound, like fingernails on slate impossibly magnified, like agony made physical. Enormous tentacles slammed at the ground in agony, snatching up whatever they encountered and flinging it into the night sky.

  A little aghast at what he had unleashed, Darger saw one of the tentacles seize the Chief Researcher and haul her high into the air, before catching fire itself and raining down black soot, both chimeric and human, on the upturned faces below.

  Afterwards, staring at the burning monastery from a distance, Darger murmured, “I have the most horrid sensation of déjà vu. Must all our adventures end the same way?”

  “For the sake of those cities we have yet to visit, I sincerely hope not,” Surplus replied.

  There was a sudden surge of flesh and the great cat Bast took a seat alongside them. “She was the last of her kind,” he remarked.

  “Eh?” Darger said.

  “No living creature remembers her name, but the Chief Researcher was born—or perhaps created—in the waning days of Utopia. I always suspected that her ultimate end was to recreate that lost and bygone world.” Bast yawned vastly, his pink tongue curling into a question mark which then disappeared as his great black jaws snapped shut. “Well, no matter. With her gone, it’s back to Greater Zimbabwe for the rest of us. I’ll be glad to see the old place again. The food here is good, but the hunting is wretched.”

  With a leap, he disappeared into the night.

  But now Papatragos strode up and clapped them both on the shoulders. “That was well done, lads. Very well done, indeed.”