Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [127]
There was a ripple in the crowd which the baronessa noticed only in passing, as four more gigantic bear-men of the Royal Guard muscled their way through, escorting a slightly podgy little man wearing glasses whose lenses, seen by torchlight, were two cobalt disks.
Chortenko.
The head of the secret police came up on the platform and walked straight toward the baronessa. Leaning down, he said in her ear, “You have taken my seat, Baronessa. But no, no, no, you must keep it. I will stand here behind you.” He placed a hand on her shoulder.
Even in her elated state, Baronessa Lukoil-Gazproma could not help but shudder.
“When leadership is weak and ineffective. When it is invisible and unheard, why then a time must come for it to be replaced. That time has finally arrived. That time is now.” Tsar Lenin paused to let the applause roll over him. Then, gesturing for silence, he said, “A new compact must be made with the Russian people. You will give me your loyalty, your labor, your dignity, your bodies, your blood, your lives, your sons and daughters…”
His silence, though brief, seemed to stretch on forever.
“In exchange, I will take you in my hand, mold you together into one indistinguishable mass, and of this new matter create a single tool, a single weapon, a hammer greater and more powerful than anything the world has ever seen. This hammer I will bring down upon our enemies. Upon those who stand in our way. Upon those who are weak and traitorous. Upon all who oppose our greatness. Our armies will sweep across the continent and nations will fall before us. This will be only the beginning…”
The speech was quite literally hypnotic. Lenin’s actual words hardly mattered; the experience of solidarity they created was all. So intent was the baronessa on Lenin’s radiant vision of the future that she did not realize at first that the buzzing in her ear was Chortenko talking to her. With an effort, she managed to focus on his words. “. . . and in the morning, a private get-together at my mansion.”
She turned, astonished. “What did you just say?”
Chortenko stroked her hair. “The two of us, Baronessa, alone. I’ll show you my kennels.”
Darger and Kyril made a wide circumnavigation of the Kremlin, searching for an approach that was not blocked by prodigious crowds. But though they circled almost two-thirds of the way around the fortress, always there were impenetrable thickets of humanity in their way.
In Kitai-Gorod, they had just taken a shortcut through a narrow and lightless alleyway when someone—or something—came running up behind them.
Darger whirled about and then flinched back from an astonishing apparition: two people, one riding on the other’s back and clutching him so tightly that they seemed a single, if misshapen, two-headed creature. “Whoa!” cried a woman’s voice, and the chimera came to a halt. Its two faces were filthy with mud or worse.
“Don’t be afraid, sweeties,” the woman crooned. “Old Baba Yaga means you no harm. She won’t rip off your tongues and gouge out your eyes. She wouldn’t eat a fly.”
“Don’t believe her!” a man said in a terror-choked voice. “She’s killed two—”
But the warning was cut short. The man made a strangled noise. Then the grotesque figure collapsed into its component parts, the man tumbling down to the ground unconscious and the woman leaping free. “So much for him,” she said. “They have no stamina, these modern youngsters. It was the invention of fire that did it. Fire and edged tools have made them all as weak as porridge.”
Darger opened his mouth and shut it again.
“Alcohol?” Kyril said brightly, extending the bottle.
“Yes!” The alarming woman snatched it out of his hand. “And that rag you’re wearing as well.”
The kerchief whisked itself from Kyril’s neck. There was a long silence.
At last Darger said, “Are you in need of assistance, madam? Perhaps we can…” His voice trailed off. Waving his hands through the murk before him to make