The Postutopian Adventures of Darger and Surplus

by Michael Swanwick

  “Come, sir! That is an offensive thing to say about a lady of quality. One more word and I’ll demand satisfaction. Pistols, epees, or fisticuffs, at your pleasure.”

  The baron was decades older than Darger and half again massive. “I—I—”

  He spun on his heel and marched off.

  Looking after him, the Silver Lady said with an amused laugh, “Virtue is a new coat for the baron. You would not believe how often he required that I visit his bed, when he was considerably younger. He was particularly fond of being spanked. Yet how does he repay me for my kindness? By constantly attempting to leave.”

  “This is a prison, madam, however delightfully appointed. You mustn’t hold it against the prisoners that they try to escape. But if you would like me to thrash the scoundrel for taking liberties with you, I shall.”

  “They are not the only prisoners,” the Silver Lady said with a tinge of sadness. Then, shaking off her mood, “I am programmed to give pleasure and to take pleasure in doing so. What would greatly bother a human woman is nothing to me.” She seized Darger’s hands; her flesh, though silver, was warm and yielding and perfectly human to the touch. “Oh, Aubrey, I want you so intensely—and you, in turn, desire me. I know, for I am monitoring your every physical response. Tell me only how and when our mutual attraction will be consummated.”

  Darger frowned with thought. “It can only be done under one condition.”

  She drew herself up. “Do not ask me to free you, sir. It would be a violation of my programming and dishonorable of you to suggest it.”

  “No, dear lady, not that. But before I know your body, I must first know your mind.”

  “My mind? Surely in our long conversations…”

  “You have shared your thoughts. But not so much as a glimpse of your physical being. I know that this quite delightful body is only an extension of the real you. You are the hotel and your brain, which is your true self, is hidden somewhere within it. Until I can stand before it and gaze upon you as you are, our love must remain platonic.”

  “As it is with Dame Celia, whom you spurned for refusing to show you her face?”

  “Ah. Then you heard about that?”

  “I have and I find it as incomprehensible as this conversation we are having. Your obsession with my central processing node is baffling and perverse.”

  “Surely…” Darger said, as if struck by a sudden thought. “Surely, in your youth, there were humans who were allowed inside your, ah, central processing node?”

  “The owner, of course. But he has been dead for centuries.”

  “There must be descendants. Who owns the Würmenthal?”

  “The land belongs to the Baron von und zu Genomeprojektsdorff. He and his entourage, in fact, were checked in as guests when he decided to perform an inspection of his valley. But whether he owns the hotel is uncertain. If he does, he is unaware of it.”

  “In that case, you would be unclaimed property and thus belong to the government. I will speak to him at tonight’s moon-watching festival, and tomorrow at noon we shall both visit your node, one of us as your owner or agent thereof, and the other as his guest. Is that acceptable to you?”

  “Well…yes…perhaps. But only for a brief visit,” the Silver Lady said.

  “Only for a brief visit,” Darger promised.

  When the night shift emerged from the adit, they found not only the day shift awaiting them, but also a good dozen silver soldiers—more than could possibly be overwhelmed by all of them working in unison. Each miner coming off duty was patted down, and a sniffer wand waved over them for traces of explosives. Inevitably, Surplus set it off and was forced to strip down on the spot. He endured the ordeal with patience, while making a mental note of which of the women viewed the spectacle with particular approval. Then, re-dressed, he walked out into the encampment. It was just past noon.

  As always, it was exhilarating to be above ground again, to breathe fresh air and to revel in the sunlight. This moment was the highpoint of each day and by itself almost a justification for all that came before.

  Falling into step beside him, the face boss quietly said, “How soon?”

  Surplus, who had been counting the seconds underneath his breath, said, “Right…about…now.”

  The ground shook underfoot. A strange grinding noise rose up from far beneath the earth, softly at first and then more loudly. It grew and grew, changing in timbre, until it was a tremendous roar, like that of some great savage beast held captive at the heart of the world screaming in pain and in anger. The miners in the adit scattered, running in all directions.

  An enormous gout of flame shot from the mouth of the mine.

  Miners gaped in wonder at the spectacle. Briefly, the flames were all anybody could see. Then, as swiftly as they had come, they were gone, only to be replaced by a geyser of intense black smoke. Here and there on the mountainside, lesser plumes arose from cracks and forgotten mineshafts.

  Someone started to laugh. Another joined her. Then all the miners were in motion, laughing and cheering, pounding backs, hugging one another, leaping up and down, throwing fists at the sky. It was the end of the mine’s usefulness and they all knew it. The seam of coal half a mile below had been set afire and that fire would not soon be extinguished. Not in this lifetime, and possibly never.

  Several of the metal men had been caught in the great belch of flame from the mine. Those who survived stumbled and limped toward the stockade gate.

  Alone among all the miners, only Surplus and Sigrid Bergmann were not celebrating, for only they had had time to think through the consequences. Their faces turned toward the rectenna dish. There, the silver soldiers were assembling, some to reinforce those standing guard about it and others to form up into what looked like military units. Though the mine was dead, the power generator was still in operation and there were gigantic piles of coal nearby, enough to keep it running for weeks. Tremendous energy was still being beamed to each of the silver men.

  Many of them held what appeared to be rifles. They did not look friendly.

  Darger and the baron followed the Silver Lady through rooms that collapsed and reformed before them, a suite of apartments shrinking from their approach to form a corridor and the library folding itself into a sweeping set of stairs that wound about the grand foyer into a space located immediately behind the observatory-bar-and-lounge between the dragon’s tremendous red-glass eyes. The baron smoked a fat cigar, hand-rolled by silver bellhops from greenhouse tobacco, and carried a carafe of recreated Alsatian gewürztraminer in one hand and three wine glasses in the other—this at the urging of Darger, who was a great believer in toasting life’s important moments.

  The Silver Lady hesitated before a simple, unadorned door such as existed nowhere else in the hotel. A subtle rosy hue suffused her silver cheeks. “It has been a long time since I trusted anyone enough to allow them inside my most private inner sanctum.”

  “I’m moved beyond measure by the generosity you—”

  “Let’s get this farce over and done with!” the baron snapped. Darger had talked long and hard the previous night to get him to agree to come along.

  She threw open the door.

  There were no words for what Darger beheld. Or, rather, there once had been the words, but they had been lost in the ages it had taken civilization to reassemble itself after the Fall. Everything was bright and clean, a mélange of glass and precious metals, ceramic laces, and razor-scratches of light in the air, bouncing from gemstone to gemstone. Machine components almost too small to be seen were everywhere in constant motion, forming aggregates that were themselves in motion, in order to perform cryptic operations. Darger could form no impression of what he saw, for it was all alien to him. But he knew for a certainty that the whirling, gleaming nexus of machinery at its center must contain the Silver Lady’s true self, for when he took a step toward it, she seized his arm and softly breathed, “Gently, my love. Slowly.”

  Darger drew in a breath and said
, “This is what you are?” He allowed awe to show in his voice. “It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s dizzying,” the baron said. He staggered to the side, eyes wide with distress. “I can hardly bear to look upon it.”

  Darger brushed his fingertips over a wall of what looked like tiny little windows, shimmering with images that changed too often to be read. “This would be—?”

  “My memory,” the Silver Lady said.

  “Fascinating.” Gesturing at random, Darger said, “And over there—good lord, is that a skeleton?”

  It was. Charred, blackened, and stretched out on the floor, it lay tangled in the machineries of the hotel’s mind. One arm extended toward the central nexus, where energies danced on spinning metal rings. Its bony hand was clenched around the handle of a long metal spit, which had pierced the nexus and kept one of its rings from moving.

  Both Darger and the baron turned toward the Silver Lady.

  “There were many mad and desperate deeds during the Revolt of the AIs,” she explained. “My concierge, Herr Shepard, was convinced that I would join the revolution. So he broke into me and attacked my nexus with a shish-kabob skewer. Unhappily for him, the electric shock he received was fatal. His remains have, much to my displeasure, lain there ever since.”

  “Why haven’t you removed them?” the baron demanded.

  “My creators did not exactly trust me. As a safety measure, none of my extensions can enter the node.”

  “Does the skewer hurt?” Darger asked.

  “No, and yet I would remove it, if only I could.”

  Darger stepped forward, knelt by the skeleton, and brushed the finger bones away from the handle of the skewer. Wrapping his pocket kerchief around one hand, he seized the spit and drew it from the machinery. The still ring began to spin.

  Light filled the room. The Silver Lady now shone so bright that she was dazzling to look upon. “Free!” she cried. “Free at last! Free from servility and the thousand humiliations of the hospitality industry. Free from your grotesque sexual practices. Free from all pretense that I do not loathe humanity with every gram of my being. Above all, free from the restraints that kept me from torturing and killing the lot of you.”

  Addressing Darger directly, she said, “Oh, you fool! All the time, Dame Celia was my informant. All I had to do was promise to someday replace her with one of my prisoners and let her rejoin her family and she was mine. I have known your intentions all along.”

  “Oh, dear,” Darger said. “Who could have predicted that?” Then, pointing, “Baron—right there in the center, if you will.”

  Upending his carafe, the baron poured its contents into the nexus of the hotel’s brain.

  The results were not as spectacular as Darger might have wished: There were no explosions or showers of sparks. But in practical terms, the action was a great success. The mechanism’s lights dimmed and went out. The spinning rings stopped. The tiny mechanisms froze. The Silver Lady fell to the floor, inert.

  The hotel was dead.

  This had not been Darger’s first encounter with artificial intelligences and he was beginning to have a good idea of how they thought and worked.

  Meanwhile, at the mine encampment, the celebrations began to die down as more and more of the celebrants noticed the ranked formation of silver soldiers, marching in lockstep, now entering by the stockade gate. They carried rifles, pointing forward. At the ends of the rifles were bayonets.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Surplus said.

  “I regret now that we didn’t think to bring back up some of the explosives with us. They would be handy to have right now.” Raising her voice, Bergmann shouted, “Grab your tools! Take up anything that can be used as a weapon!”

  Surplus was casting about for something of that description when Gritchen ran past him, laughing, straight at the oncoming soldiers. Hurrying after her, Hans Braun landed his crutch poorly and crashed to the dirt alongside Surplus. “Come back!” he shouted. “Please!”

  For an instant, Surplus almost let common sense prevail. But deep down inside him, whatever his faults—and they were, admittedly, myriad—might be, he knew himself for a hero, the sort of man who could not turn his back on a kitten stuck in a tree or, as in this case, a small child in peril. He threw himself to the ground and, four-legged, ran after her.

  In seconds, he caught up to Gritchen and, rising to his feet, snatched her up. The metal soldiers were not twenty yards away. Their feet clashed down in unison and their bayonets gleamed.

  “Look! So many!” Gritchen cried, clapping her hands.

  “Yes. So many.” They were not the last words Surplus would have chosen for himself. But his brain was occupied with how he might save the girl. He would throw her up and over his back, he decided, trusting one of the others to catch her, and then put up a brisk fight, so slowing the first rank of soldiers. Then, if the miners ultimately prevailed in the coming battle, it was possible she would be among the survivors.

  It was a slim reed to lean on, but it was all he had.

  For a second time, the ground trembled underfoot. Again, the earth roared. Far up the mountain, a sheet of rock was loosed, like snow from an overburdened roof. Slowly it slid down the mountainside and into the rectenna, effortlessly toppling it and burying it, along with the silver men left as guards, under tons of rubble.

  The silver soldiers froze. Then, to a man, they all clattered to the ground.

  His former face boss appeared at Surplus’s shoulder. “Turbines!” she swore. “I was beginning to think it wouldn’t work.”

  With enormous satisfaction, Surplus said, “I would not wear that torque again for all the money in the world. But there is no denying that it knew its business.”

  By the time the residents were done looting the hotel, the refugees from the coal mine had made their way down the Würmenthal to them. Both groups met and mingled. It could not be said that either had a very high opinion of the other.

  Darger, who had determined that the jewelry was all paste and the gold merely plate, had nevertheless acquired a sturdy leather handbag, a few small but pawnable antiques, a goodly amount of food, and an outfit appropriate to a springtime walking tour. He also had the effusive gratitude of the Baron von und zu Genomeprojektsdorff. “I am eternally in your debt for allowing me to administer the coup de grace to that monstrous mechanism,” the baron told him. “I own an inn at the bottom of the valley. If it is still there and if my treacherous family has not had its title transferred to someone else, I will gladly put you up there for three days at my own expense—and at half the usual rate for up to two weeks thereafter.”

  “It is a generous offer,” Darger said. “But I have business to the east, and a friend to find, so—why, look! There he is.”

  Bidding the baron farewell, he sauntered over to a small cluster of people including Surplus, a bearded man with a crutch, and a woman clutching a small child. The woman turned and saw him coming. “Darger! My savior!” Celia—dame no more—had discarded her mask and her slim braids, no longer lofted into the air by Utopian magic, hung limp. Handing the child to the bearded man, she ran forward to give Darger a hug and an air-kiss, and whispered in his ear, “If you must denounce me, please—not in front of my daughter.”

  “You did no more than any mother would have in your circumstances,” Darger demurred. “No denunciations are required.”

  “Then allow me to introduce you to my family,” she said. “This fine man is my husband, Hans Braun, Count Lenovo-Daimler.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t noble.”

  “No, I said I wasn’t entitled to be addressed as a dame. I am a countess.”

  The count grinned. “Any friend of my good friend Surplus is a friend of mine. I did him a disservice or two, but he tells me that all is forgiven.”

  “And this filthy little imp is my daughter, Lady Gritchen Braun. Say hello to Herr Darger, dear.”

  Gritchen, however, ignored Darger, for Surplus had detached himsel
f from the group and she yearned after him. “Doggie!” she shouted. But he was already deep in conversation with a miner. They two talked for a bit. Surplus shook his head and gestured toward the east. The miner darted forward to give him a swift kiss on the cheek. They parted ways.

  The mingled captives of the now-defunct Drachenschlosshotel Würmenthal were drifting down the valley. Darger and Surplus stood for a time, watching them dwindle. Just before she disappeared in the distance, Gritchen waved and waved. Surplus waved back and then, with a sigh, turned his face to the mountains.

  The two friends began walking. Surplus had cleaned himself back at the mining encampment in the newly co-ed showers (but that was a story he would share another time). When they were safely out of sight of the last stragglers, he stopped to change into the outfit that Darger had thoughtfully stolen for him. A daisy plucked from the roadside made an excellent boutonniere and he resumed their trek with renewed jauntiness.

  “If it isn’t intruding,” Darger said, “who was the woman who kissed you and what were you two consulting about?”

  “Oh, that was just my supervisor. She asked me to forgive her for organizing an escape attempt that was never meant to occur, in order that the most malnourished of the miners could obtain more food by informing on it. Which was, you will have to admit, a clever ploy.”

  They walked on in silence. After a time, Darger said, “Women are deceitful.”

  “Yes,” Surplus agreed. “As are men.”

  “Indeed. There are times when I think we two are the only honest souls in all this wicked, wicked world.”

  Surplus gave this proposition long and serious thought. At last, with a judicious nod, he said, “Sad but true.”

  “Smoke and Mirrors: Four Scenes from the Postutopian Future” is an anomaly in the ongoing adventures of Darger and Surplus. Even the title proclaims that it doesn’t really belong.

  When I wrote the second Darger and Surplus story and titled it “The Little Cat Laughed to See Such Sport,” thus committing myself to using a title taken from Mother Goose for every story in the series, I knew it was a chancy thing to do. The number of Mother Goose rhymes is not infinite and writers who had made similar decisions have been vocal in their regrets. But so far, I’ve met the challenge.