Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [6]
Darger stared down at the flask.
Impatiently, the Russian snatched it back, unscrewed the top, and took a long pull. Then, with genuine force, he thrust the flask forward again.
To have done anything but to drink would have been rude. So Darger drank.
The taste was familiar, dark and nutty with bitter, yeasty undertones. It was some variety of tutorial ale, such as was commonly used in all sufficiently advanced nations to convey epic poetry and various manual skills from generation to generation.
For a long moment, Darger felt nothing. He was about to say as much when he experienced a sharp twinge and an inward shudder, such as invariably accompanied a host of nanoprogrammers slipping through the blood-brain barrier. In less time than it took to register the fact, he felt the Russian language assemble itself within his mind. He swayed and almost fell.
Darger moved his jaw and lips, letting the language slush around in his mouth, as if he were tasting a new and surprising food. Russian felt different from any other language he’d ever ingested, slippery with sha’s and shcha’s and guttural kha’s, and liquid with palatalized consonants of all sorts. It affected the way he thought as well. Its grammatical structure was very much concerned with how one went somewhere, exactly where one was going when one went, and whether or not one expected to come back. It specified whether one was going by foot or by conveyance, and there were verb prefixes to stipulate whether one was going up to something or through it or by it or around it. It distinguished between acts done habitually (going to the pub of an evening, say) or just the once (going to that same pub for a particular purpose). Which clarity might well prove useful to a man in Darger’s line of business, when making plans. At the same time, the language viewed many situations impersonally—it is necessary, it is possible, it is impossible, it is forbidden. Which might also prove useful to a man in his line of business, particularly when dealing with matters of conscience.
Still feeling a trifle giddy, Darger exhaled a short, explosive gasp of breath. “Thank you,” he said in Russian, as he passed the flask to Surplus. “This is an extraordinary gift you have given us.” Stylistically, the language had an elegance that appealed to him. He resolved to buy a flask of Gogol’s works as soon as he reached Moscow.
“You are welcome a hundred times over,” the Russian replied. “Ivan Arkadyevich Gulagsky, at your service.”
“Aubrey Darger. My friend is Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux. Surplus, for short. An American, it goes without saying. You must tell us how in the world you came to be in such a dire fix as we found you.”
“Five of us were hunting demons. It turned out that the demons were simultaneously hunting us. Three of them ambushed us. My comrades all died and I was captured, though I managed to kill one of the monsters before the last two got me. The survivor set me out as bait, as you saw, and released my poor horse in hopes it would draw in would-be rescuers.” Gulagsky grinned, revealing several missing teeth. “As it did, though not as the fiend had planned.”
“Two survived, you say.” Having drunk and absorbed the language, Surplus now joined in the conversation. “So there is another of these…” He paused, looking for the right word. “…cyberwolves out there somewhere?”
“Yes. This is no place for good Christian folk to camp out in the open. Do you have a place to stay the night?”
“We were looking for a town named Gorodishko, which…” Darger stopped in mid-sentence and blushed. For now that he understood Russian, he knew that a gorodishko was simply a small and insignificant town, and that the label had been a dismissive cartographer’s kiss-off for a place whose name he hadn’t even bothered to learn.
Gulagsky laughed. “My home town is not very large, true. But it is big enough to give you a good