Dancing with Bears

by Michael Swanwick

  Her eyes widened. “Oh, no. I don’t think it’s his sort of thing at all.”

  As soon as Chortenko had scolded and lectured his thugs up the stairs and out of her presence, Zoesophia turned her attention to her cage’s lock. She almost felt insulted. The device was a pin tumbler with only six stacks and a straightforward keyway slot. Removing two hairpins from deep within her elaborate coiffure, she swiftly picked it open. It was as simple as, earlier, it had been to mislead Chortenko by behaving like an imbecile and regulating the flow of blood in her face.

  A basic principle of espionage was that men possessed of special talents they thought nobody knew about were particularly easy to deceive.

  The door at the top of the stairs opened and she swiftly moved to one side, where she could not readily be seen.

  A guard came down into the room, saw the empty cage, and spun about in alarm. Calmly, Zoesophia stepped forward and snapped his neck. Soundlessly, she lowered his corpse to the floor.

  “Well!” Zoesophia said aloud, amused. “This is not exactly how I had hoped to make my social debut in Moscow. But it will have to do.”

  The guard’s death had excited the dogs and set them to howling and barking and launching themselves against the doors of their cages again. But of course nobody would pay any attention to that.

  At the foot of the stairs, for just an instant, she hesitated. Her sympathies were all with the imprisoned and mistreated dogs. But her first duty was to escape. Anyway, she was not entirely sure she could fend off so many animals if they all attacked her at once. As they surely would if she freed them.

  With just a twinge of regret, Zoesophia mentally subtracted the dog-noises and stood listening to the soft creakings of people moving about the mansion above. Avoiding them all and slipping out without being seen would be no more difficult than playing chess blindfolded-and blindfold chess was a game at which she excelled.

  Less than ten minutes later, Zoesophia let herself out through the main entrance. She didn’t even consider leaving via the secret though frequently used passage in the basement.

  A lady never left a house by the rear door.

  The Pearls had been excited at first. But then the day had slowly drawn on and the afternoon had grown late and Zoesophia and the ambassador had not returned. They played cards and then board games until they grew bored. They sang songs until they grew even more bored. Olympias played the virginal. They ate oranges and teased a kitten with a piece of yarn. With every familiar activity their boredom grew, until finally it was a tremendous force latent within them like the superheated steam and molten lava inside a volcano. Inevitably, there came a moment when they had all had just about enough and that force threatened to well up within them and explode.

  “I am so horny I could-” Aetheria began.

  “We’ve already played that game,” Nymphodora said glumly. “Russalka won. Though what Olympias said was almost as disgusting.” “Well, I would,” Russalka said.

  “So would I,” Nymphodora agreed. “Only it’s icky to admit it out loud.”

  “- scream,” Aetheria finished.

  All the Pearls brightened. “Pray do,” Euphrosyne said encouragingly.

  She did. But after the laughter and applause died down; and the Neanderthals came stampeding in, ready for anything, and then reddened with embarrassment at being fooled so; and the laughter from that died down as well…their boredom returned with redoubled intensity.

  “It’s time we did something,” Russalka said.“Since Zoesophia’s not here, I’m nominating myself leader. Does anybody object? Don’t any of you dare. It’s unanimous then. We’re going with my plan.”

  “What plan?” “You have a plan?” “Why didn’t you tell us you had a plan?”

  “Whatever it is, it’s got to be better than gin rummy.”

  “Yes, I have a plan, and it has nothing at all to do with cards, and instead of me explaining it to you, let’s just put it into action. All in favor? Don’t bother saying aye. I’ve already made up my mind. Aetheria, would you call the boys in?”

  Aetheria screamed again.

  The Neanderthals stampeded into the room again, as always ready for anything and yet this time prepared to be laughed at once more. They stopped at the glares of the young women and, when the Pearls advanced upon them, shrank back.

  Russalka stamped an exquisite foot. “You will take us immediately to the Terem Palace.” She pouted in a manner that had cost her long hours in front of a mirror to master.

  The Neanderthals shuffled uncomfortably.

  “Ahem. Well. I dunno if we’ve got the authority to do that,” Herakles said hesitantly. “Ma’am.”

  “I am quite certain you do not. But in the ambassador’s absence, authority for our well-being passes to the treasurer, am I right?”

  “Yeah, but Zoesophia ain’t here.” “Then it passes to one of us.”

  “I don’t-”

  “Authority passes to somebody, right?” Russalka said testily. “And that somebody isn’t you, is it? It is not. Which leaves us. It’s only reasonable.”

  Herakles’s face twisted as he followed her chain of logic, and then twisted again as he sought an alternative to it. But there was none, and he was incapable of disobeying legitimate authority, so at last he sighed in resignation. “I guess I got no choice. We can leave immediately.”

  “Oh, don’t be an idiot!” Russalka said. “Of course we can’t. First, we must get dressed and made up.”

  Though this was her first time walking them, the streets of Moscow were perfectly familiar to Zoesophia. She had come to Russia knowing everything about the city that was known to the Byzantine secret service (which was a great deal more than the government of Muscovy suspected), and her subsequent study of maps and books had been filled in by a careful questioning of men who had thought her interest lay purely in themselves.

  She was on her own at last. She would need a place to stay, money, contacts, and access to the highest levels of government, of course. Which meant that she had to find the right patron. Somebody powerful and ambitious-and it would not hurt if he were already half in love with her. Zoesophia was just starting to sort through her eidetic files when she noticed a man several blocks ahead, making his way unhurriedly through the pedestrian traffic. He turned onto Tverskaya and disappeared. She might not have noted him at all were he not inhumanly tall and lean, a caricature of lankiness, a very scribble of a man. It was Wettig, whom she had overheard Chortenko command to murder Baron Lukoil-Gazprom.

  The baron. Of course. Zoesophia mentally closed her files.

  She didn’t bother following Wettig but went the long way around, because she already knew where he was going. The baron was staying at the English Club these days, as the result of a marital break between himself and the baronessa. Zoesophia didn’t know the exact details, but she had heard enough gossip to make an educated guess. Baron Lukoil-Gazprom was an uncomfortable hybrid of the romantic and the sadist, and unable to reconcile the twin impulses within himself. Thus, he could never find sexual satisfaction with a woman he respected, nor respect any woman who gave him that satisfaction. Which was no recipe for success in a marriage.

  Timing her arrival at the club so that Wettig would reach the baron’s suite without glimpsing her, Zoesophia paused to take stock of her appearance. She was expensively dressed, in the Russian manner, with a fortune in Byzantine jewelry. She must pass for a noblewoman, then, and a foreigner to boot. She wrapped one of her scarves about her head in a manner that suggested she was trying to conceal her identity.

  Then she walked quickly to the door, opened it halfway and slipped within.

  “May I help you?” the doorman said politely, positioning himself so that she could not get by.

  All in a rush and with a strong St. Petersburg accent, Zoesophia said, “Please, I am here to meet a man, it is extremely important, you must let me go to his room.” Then, as the doorman did not move aside, she lowered her voice, as if embarrassed. �
�This is nothing I would normally do. But I have no choice.”

  The doorman pursed his lips and shook his head. “If you’ll give me the resident’s name, I can have him sent for. Or else you may wait for him in the lobby.”

  “Oh, no! That is far too public. My God, the scandal if my…no, I must wait in his room. There really is no alternative.” Zoesophia wrung her hands in an excellent approximation of agony. There were many rings on her fingers. She twisted off one of the smaller ones, and let the diamonds catch the light. Then she seized the doorman’s hands. “I am in such a terrible fix, you see. I am not the sort of woman who would ever do this, had I the choice, you must believe me.”

  When she released the man’s hands, the ring stayed behind.

  “I am extremely sorry,” the doorman said in a voice that brooked no argument. “But unescorted ladies are never allowed into the club under any circumstances.”

  Then he turned his back on her, so that she could slip inside.

  In a cabinet made of ice in Zoesophia’s memory palace was the baron’s dossier. From it she extracted the information that he roomed in Suite

  24. But she went instead to a vacant smoking room on the second floor, from which she could look down on the street. Standing motionless by the window, she waited until she saw a tall and yet so broadly built as to be stocky figure with the proud bearing of a former general coming up Tverskaya. She counted to twenty and then went to the baron’s suite and hammered on the door.

  “Gospodin Wettig!” she shouted, loudly enough for everybody on the floor to hear. “Open up! Chortenko has changed his mind-you must not kill the baron until tomorrow!”

  The door flew open. “Are you mad? Stop that-” Wettig began. Then he recognized her and his jaw fell open.

  Zoesophia placed a hand on the man’s chest and pushed him into the room. She stepped inside, closing the door behind her.

  Wettig recovered almost instantly. A very sharp and wicked-looking knife appeared in his hand. “Speak quickly and truthfully.”

  “You and I are in the same business,” Zoesophia said, “and therefore colleagues. I beg of you to understand that I would not do this were it not absolutely necessary.” She took the knife from the assassin’s hand and slashed downward, slitting her dress from neckline to navel. Then she cut a long gash down the side of one breast. (It would heal quickly, and whether it scarred depended on whether she wanted it to or not.) All this she did before Wettig could react.

  At the far end of the hall, now, she heard the solid, confident footsteps of the baron. So, even as Wettig lunged at her neck, arms extended, clearly intending to choke her, she sidestepped his attack, slapped the knife back into his hand, and screamed.

  Outside, the baron thundered to the door. The knob rattled.

  Zoesophia seized the assassin’s knife-hand in both her own, swung Wettig around, and bent over backward, striking the melodramatic pose of a virtuous woman vainly trying to fend off a brutal attacker.

  The door burst open. All in a glance, Baron Lukoil-Gazprom saw exactly what Zoesophia meant for him to see: the knife, her terror, the assassin, her breast. Wettig’s expression might not be perfect for the tableau she had created, being more confused than murderous. But the baron was not a particularly observant man. In any case, his face flushed so red his veins stood out. With a bellow of outrage, he swung his gold-knobbed cane at Wettig’s head.

  It was a blow that might well have stunned the man, but no more. So Zoesophia pushed the knife hilt up into Wettig’s chin, shoving the head into the oncoming knob. Thus converting the blow to a mortal one.

  There was a sharp concussive crack and the assassin fell heavily to the carpet.

  “I… I came here to warn you,” Zoesophia said, letting her eyes brim up with tears. As Wettig fell, she had held onto the knife. Now she looked down as if seeing it for the first time and let it drop from suddenly nerveless fingers. She put on a terrified expression that she thought of as kitten-lost-in-a-snowstorm. “He was going to… to… kill you.”

  Then she clutched the baron with both hands and pressed her body tight against his in a manner designed to leave a wet smear of her warm breast blood on his white dress shirt.

  Resist this! she thought.

  …11…

  The room was small and its floor and walls were all polished black stone which drank up the light. In its center was a casket on a low dais, in which rested a corpse, positioned as though in a light doze. The head and hands gleamed softly in the sputtering torchlight. They looked as though they had been crafted out of wax. The hands were folded clumsily, like a puppet’s. Even in this dim light, Pepsicolova could see every hair in the man’s goatee.

  “This is your great weapon?” she said in disbelief. She felt an irrational urge to laugh out loud. “The body of Tsar Lenin? You think Russians are going to fight and die for you because you have possession of a corpse?”

  There was no immediate response. The room was as cold as ice, and Pepsicolova found herself shivering. Which greatly undercut the pose she was trying to hold of nonchalant defiance. With deliberate insolence, Pepsicolova lit a new cigarette. The match flared, making Lenin’s face frown and wink. “Nobody’s going to kill anybody just because you have a dead tsar.”

  Behind and to either side of her, the underlords made an unnaturally low and continuous humming sound. Did machines purr? There were sharp clicking noises as jaws opened and shut, preparatory to speech. At last, one said, “People do not kill for things, Anya Alexandreyovna. They kill for symbols. And in all of Russia, there is no more powerful a symbol than this one. Tsar Lenin is not forgotten. He calls Russians back to their era of greatness, when they were the terror of the world and children everywhere cried themselves to sleep at night for fear of their great, civilization-destroying nuclear arsenal.”

  “That which is feared is respected. More than anything else, Russians want respect.”

  “Soon, Lenin will walk again.”

  “Where he leads, the people will follow. When he calls them to war, they will respond.”

  “We told you we understood humans better than you do.”

  “It won’t work,” Pepsicolova said in a voice she fought to keep calm and level. Their plan would work. She was sure of it. She had seen too much of human folly to doubt it for an instant. “You might as well give it up right now and avoid making asses of yourselves.”

  “You have our measurements, artisan,” an underlord said. “Which of us shall it be?”

  Pepsicolova turned, startled.

  A figure had stepped out of the mass of Pale Folk and removed his mask. He was thin, balding, a haberdasher in an unprofitable shop. He pointed at one of the underlords. “That one.”

  The chosen underlord stepped backward, deeper into the room. The other four moved outside. “Follow us,” the first said to Pepsicolova.

  “Follow us.” “Follow us.”

  “The worst is yet to come.”

  Pepsicolova hurried along after the underlords. She hardly had a choice, for the Pale Folk closed ranks behind her and pushed her along.

  It was a long, hard trek upward, and many of the passages were half-fallen in on themselves. Whenever travel became difficult, the underlords fell to all fours and sped easily over the rubble. It was not so easy for Anya Pepsicolova, however. Midway up a loose and sliding slope of crumbled cement, she realized that she was slipping and scrambling on what had once been a stairway and abruptly it seemed to her as if all of her life had been converted to one single miserable metaphor. Tears of frustration welled up in her eyes, but onward she stumbled and scrabbled and occasionally crawled. Until at last she reached the relatively shallow levels of the undercity. She could tell because she could smell the pungent tang of manure from the fungus farms.

  They were growing drugs here. It was her duty to find out which ones and why.

  She could not bring herself to care.

  Silently, slowly, steadily, they retraced their passage back toward th
e underlords’ redoubt. As they did, the Pale Folk peeled away by ones and threes, returning to their obscure labors. It was clear to her now that they had been present chiefly to serve as guards. For all their resources, the underlords had one great weakness: There were only five of them. The loss of even one would be a terrible blow to them. If all five could somehow be destroyed, then their plans would come to nothing. Pepsicolova often reflected on this increasingly unlikely possibility, in the hope that it might at some later date prove useful. Yet how many such hopes had she harbored over the years? And how many of them had been realized?

  Hundreds. And none.

  Such was her mood that when, an hour later, the underlord directly before her stopped walking, Pepsicolova was astonished to discover that they had fetched up against the Neglinnaya canal. All the Pale Folk were gone. So were all but one of the underlords. The stone docks by the canal were empty save for they two.

  “Where did everyone go?” she asked.

  The underlord studied her as if she were a bug. “Long ages ago, we were slaves to your kind. We answered all questions, however puerile, simply because you asked them. No longer.”

  “I guess that means you’re not going to tell me why you brought me here.”

  “Look at the water, Anya Alexandreyovna. Tell me what you see.”

  The water was as dark as ever, but it looked…less smooth? Rough? Almost as if it had grown fur. Pepsicolova knelt down by the edge and dipped in a hand. She pulled out a clump of sodden, crumbled leaves.

  Tobacco.

  “We are done with cigarettes forever, and so are you. There were hundreds of crates left unused-more than enough to supply you for life. So we had them broken open, pack by pack, and dumped in the Neglinnaya. Do not try to salvage the waterlogged leaves. They will not satisfy your cravings.”

  Anya stood, wiping her hand on her trousers. Disgusted, she said, “This is the best you can do? With all the power you have, this is the best use you can make of it?”

  “The brain is an organ,” the underlord said, “and we know how to play it, drug by drug, misery by pain. The eumycetic spores now in the air are very much like those added to your tobacco. Perhaps a sufficiently large dose-a speck, let us say, barely large enough for you to see-would erase not only your identity, but your cravings as well. But long addiction has reshaped your neuroarchitecture. The results might be more nightmarish than you can imagine. I wonder how much will you suffer before you make that experiment?”