Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [30]
“All the more reason for him to accept this gift! Too much work will dull even the sharpest of minds. An hour spent with only one of the Pearls of Byzantium would be as good as a month’s vacation. A weekend with all seven will make a new man of him.”
“Give up this mad ambition. Chortenko himself could not arrange it.”
So it went. General Magdalena Zvyozdny-Gorodoka shook her red curls with disdain. The Overseer of Military Orphan-Academies smiled pityingly and made little tsk-ing noises. “Ridiculous!” snapped the State Inspector of Genetic Anomalies. Nobody thought it even remotely possible to arrange a meeting with the duke.
Surplus was beginning to feel baffled and frustrated when a stocky man wearing dark blue-glass spectacles and trailed by two dwarf savants approached him and said, “You are a very clever fellow, Ambassador.”
“How do you mean?”
“The business with the samovars.”
“Eh?”
“For a feast celebrating the opening of an embassy, you knew that your guests would expect exotic foods and exotic drink. Obviously, you could not transport such quantities of provisions all the way across Asia Minor. So the food was prepared from local ingredients to Levantine recipes. That was simple enough. Even if the cooks got it wrong, who would know? But then there is the question of drink. You could not provide the fabulous story-wines of Byzantium, and the fantasies brought on by Georgian wines are so squalid they would make a cow weep. How then could you make mere vodka an experience worth telling one’s grandchildren about? Obviously, by being so extremely foreign as not to understand—or, rather, to seem not to understand—the nature of a samovar. So you are, at a minimum, clever. Later, you displayed a similar ignorance by sending away the only bowl of caviar I saw in evidence here. It is evident to me that these festivities have strained your budget. Therefore you economized, by means which lead me to suspect that you are downright devious.”
This struck too close to home for Surplus’s liking. But he hid that fact. “And who, sir, might you be?”
“Sergei Nemovich Chortenko. At your service.”
“I am Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux. An American originally, but now a proud citizen of Byzantium.” They shook. “I have heard much about you, Gospodin Chortenko.”
“I but serve a minor function at the Kremlin.”
“You are too modest. I am told that you are the head of the duke’s secret police, his chief wizard-catcher, and de facto inquisitor. Further, and not coincidentally, that you are one of the most powerful men in Muscovy and thus in all of Russia.”
“A glorified errand boy is all I am, really.” Chortenko shook open a handkerchief and took off his glasses, revealing the fact that he was bug-eyed. Surplus tried not to stare.
“I see you’re fascinated by my eyes.”
Indeed, Surplus was. The eyes were each hemispherical and, on examination, divided into thousands of glass-smooth facets. “Do they allow you a 360 degree field of vision? Or perhaps they help you make your way through the dark?”
“Perhaps. Chiefly, they ensure that I cannot be outstared,” Chortenko said. “I never blink, you see.” He wiped his eyes with the handkerchief and restored the glasses to his face. “Nor have I any need for tears. But you, obviously, have extra-species borrowings of your own.”
“Not at all. Though it was modified in various ways in order that I might move easily in human society, my genome is entirely that of the noble dog.”
“How curious. Why, exactly, was that done?”
“Such things are common in America.” Surplus coughed politely, to signal a change of subject. “On an unrelated matter, I wonder if—”
“I know