Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [28]
The strannik had turned away and was rummaging in his leather medicine pouch. “Your education to date has been all words. It is time they were put into action.” He emerged with a vial and shook from it two black specks. “But before you do anything else, you must each take one of these pills.”
The whore stuck out a small pink tongue to receive hers.
“What is it?” Arkady asked.
“You have seen it in action before. This was the drug that brought Prince Achmed back to life, though only briefly. It is called rasputin, after a holy man of the Preutopian era. It will give you tremendous strength and stamina. But more importantly, it will break down the barriers that divide the physical realm from the spiritual, your thoughts from the pneuma, your mind from the divine.” The strannik brushed it onto Arkady’s tongue with his thumb. “Everything I have told you to date is mere theory. This will show you the reality.”
A strange metallic taste flooded Arkady’s mouth, and he felt a few brief twinges of pain in his abdomen. Then nothing. He waited for what seemed an eternity. Still nothing. “I don’t think this is—”
working, he was going to say. Then he felt all the air going out of his lungs in a great whoosh. Out and out it gushed, a river of breath, showing no sign it was ever going to stop. Then it did. He inhaled, and suddenly he was filled with energy. He felt strong enough to wrestle a Neanderthal and win. Wonderingly, he took the dinner table by one of its legs—it was carved of ebony or some similarly dense wood—and lifted it above his head. So it was true! The strength he felt was not an illusion.
Gently, even delicately, he returned the table to the floor.
Then a pinpoint of light came calmly into existence at the center of his brain. Unhurriedly, it expanded, filling him from the inside with an all-encompassing warmth. He felt a deep and profound love for everyone and everything in the universe, combined with a sense of wholeness and oneness with life itself. It was as if the sun had risen in the middle of the night to kindle his soul.
The whore favored Arkady with a knowing look. But her eyes shone with a spiritual light that was the twin of his own. “Take off your clothes and come to me,” she said, “and I will teach you what it feels like to fuck God.”
The parade ended up at the new Byzantine embassy, an ivory-and-yellow Preutopian mansion on Spasopeskovskaya ploschad’. There, Surplus grandly descended from his carriage and, after the Neanderthals had safely escorted the Pearls within, went to inspect the embassy grounds. Tents of shimmering spider silk sheltered tables heaped high with refreshments. String quartets played soothing music. By the gates, hired thugs squeezed into traditional Russian costumes checked the identity of the guests against long lists of invitees.
Surplus had been very careful to invite all the best people in Moscow to a space that would comfortably handle three-quarters of them. So he was not surprised to find the grounds overflowing with women in empathic gowns shifting toward the darker shades of the emotive spectrum and men whose suits reflexively bristled with short, sharp spines when others got too close. All of them complaining bitterly about how they were being treated. He strolled by the fenced yard, carefully just out of reach of their outstretched hands and voices, and did not glance their way.
“Sir! Sir!” The majordomo came running up, quite beside himself.“The caterers are serving vodka from samovars and say it is at your direction. Sir, you cannot serve vodka in samovars. It’s simply not possible!”
“It is eminently possible. A samovar holds liquid. Vodka is liquid. I fail to see the problem.”
“People will think you are completely ignorant of Russian culture!”
“So I am. I hope to learn much during my stay in your delightful country.”
“But a samovar is for tea!”
“Ah. I understand.” Surplus put an arm over the