Michael Swanwick - Dancing With Bears

Night Shade Books

San Francisco

Also by Michael Swanwick

Novels:

In the Drift

Vacuum

Flowers Stations of the Tide

The Iron Dragons Daughter

Jack Faust

Bones of the Earth

The Dragons of Babel

Collections:

Gravitys Angels

A Geography of Unknown Lands

Moon Dogs

Puck Aleshires Abecedary

Tales of Old Earth

Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures

Michael Swanwicks Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna

The Periodic Table of Science Fiction

The Dog Said Bow-Wow

The Best of Michael Swanwick

Dancing with Bears 2011 by Michael Swanwick

This edition of Dancing with Bears

2011 by Night Shade Books

Cover art by Bruno Werneck

Cover design by Amy Popovich

Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart

Edited by Paul Witcover

All rights reserved

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-59780-235-2

E-ISBN: 978-1-59780-310-6

Night Shade Books

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To Marianne

who is as beautiful as Russia to me

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted first and foremost to Alexei Bezougly, Andrew Matveev, Boris Dolingo, and all my other Russian friends for their kindness, warmth, and hospitality, and for their help researching this novel as well. Tremendous thanks are also due to Eileen Gunn, Greg Frost, and Tom Purdom for sharing specialized knowledge with me, to Gerry Webb for his description of Baikonur, and to Vanessa White for naming the serviles. Assistance navigating the streets of Moscow was provided by the M. C. Porter Endowment for the Arts.

D ISCLAIMER

I write of a Russia I have neither seen nor suffered nor learned of from another, a Russia which is not and could not have been nor will ever be, and therefore my readers should by no means mistake it for the real one. No slanders or insults of any kind are intended toward a land and a people which I admire greatly and who deserve much better than they have ever received from history.

S OMETIME EARLIER

T he last man was led stumbling to the edge of the city. Long ago, Baikonur had been a bright jewel of human aspiration, a place from which ancient heroes rode tremendous machines beyon d the sky. Now it was a colony of Hell. The sun had set and the city was shrouded in smoke. But the red glow of furnaces and sudden gouts of gas flares lit up disconnected fragments of the incomprehensible structures that wound themselves about the ruins from the Age of Space. They revealed an ugliness that only a fiend could love.

The man was naked. To either side of him, all but invisible in the starless night, walked or loped metal demons, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. If he lagged, they drove him along with shoves on his shoulders and sharp nips at his heels. Through a forest of metal they traveled, under tangles of pipes, and past autonomous machines that were angrily hammering, ripping, welding, digging. The noise was painful to the man, but by this point, pain hardly mattered anymore.

At the edge of the city, they stopped. Look up, human, said one of the demons.

Reluctantly, he obeyed.

The division between the city and the wild was absolute. In the length of a single step, soaring grotesqueries of iron and cement gave way to scrub vegetation. The air was still foul with smoke. But beneath the stench of coal fires and chemicals was a hint of the spicy smell of the desert. Far ahead, an intensification of the darkness marked the low hills beyond Baikonur.

The man took a deep breath and coughed, almost choking. Then he said, I am glad to see this before I die. Perhaps you wont die.

To either side of him, the man saw shadows slipping out of the city and coming to a crouch at its fringe. He recognized them as the same kind of machines as those which had captured him, imprisoned him, tortured him, and just now brought him here. Whatever your game is, I wont play it.

We have perfected the drug distilled from your misery and a reliable courier carries it to Moscow to be replicated, the demon said. Your usefulness has therefore come to an end. So we will give you a head startall the way to the hillsbefore we come after you.

This is what happened to my comrades, isnt it? You brought them here, one by one, released them, and hunted them down.

Yes.

Well, I have suffered too much already. I wont let you play with me any moreand nothing you can say will make me change my mind.

The demons neither moved nor spoke for a long time. Irrational though the thought was, the man wondered if they were communicating with one another silently. At last, a second demon spoke from the darkness. One of your kind escaped us once, years ago. Perhaps you will be the second.

Uncertainly, the last man in Baikonur turned his face to the north. He began to walk. And then to run.

D eep in the heart of the Kremlin, the Duke of Muscovy dreamt of empire. Advisors and spies from every quarter of the shattered remnants of Old Russia came to whisper in his ear. Most he listened to impassively. But sometimes he would nod and mumble a few soft words. Then messengers would be sent flying to provision his navy, redeploy his armies, comfort his allies, humor those who thought they could deceive and mislead him. Other times he sent for the head of his secret police and with a few oblique but impossible to misunderstand sentences, launched a saboteur at an enemys industries or an assassin at an insufficiently stalwart friend.

The great mans mind never rested. In the liberal state of Greater St. Petersburg, he considered student radicals who dabbled in forbidden electronic wizardry, and in the Siberian polity of Yekaterinburg, he brooded over the forges where mighty cannons were being cast and fools blinded by greed strove to recover lost industrial processes. In Kiev and Novo Ruthenia and the principality of Suzdal, which were vassal states in all but name, he looked for ambitious men to encourage and suborn. In the low dives of Moscow itself, he tracked the shifting movements of monks, gangsters, dissidents, and prostitutes, and pondered the fluctuations in the prices of hashish and opium. Patient as a spider, he spun his webs. Passionless as a gargoyle, he did what needed to be done. His thoughts ranged from the merchant ports of the Baltic Sea to the pirate shipyards of the Pacific coast, from the shaman-haunted fringes of the Arctic to the radioactive wastes of the Mongolian Desert. Always he watched.

But nobodys thoughts can be everywhere. And so the mighty duke missed the single greatest threat to his ambitions as it slipped quietly across the border into his someday empire from the desolate territory which had once been known as Kazakhstan

The wagon train moved slowly across the bleak and empty land, three brightly painted and heavily laden caravans pulled by teams of six Neanderthals apiece. The beast-men plodded stoically onward, glancing neither right nor left. They were brutish creatures whose shaggy fleece coats and heavy boots only made them look all the more like animals. Bringing up the rear was a proud giant of a man on a great white stallion. In the lead were two lesser figures on nondescript horses. The first was himself nondescript to the point of being instantly forgettable. The second, though possessed of the stance and posture of a man, had the fur, head, ears, tail, and other features of a dog.