Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [0]
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Also by Michael Swanwick
Novels:
In the Drift
Vacuum
Flowers Stations of the Tide
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter
Jack Faust
Bones of the Earth
The Dragons of Babel
Collections:
Gravity’s Angels
A Geography of Unknown Lands
Moon Dogs
Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary
Tales of Old Earth
Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures
Michael Swanwick’s 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
Please visit us on the web at
http://www.nightshadebooks.com
To Marianne
who is as beautiful as Russia to me
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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.
DISCLAIMER
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.
SOMETIME EARLIER…
The 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 won’t 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 won’t 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