Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [86]
He grabbed the shoes and, not bothering to put them on, ran like hell.
As Kyril ran, he found himself growing happier and happier until, against all his better judgment, he slowed to a trot and then a walk and finally a dawdle. “Definitely something in the air,” he chuckled. “Pretty funny stuff, whatever it is.”
One of the Pale Folk plodded lifelessly by. But this one had a bird-head! Kyril couldn’t help laughing. On an impulse, he raced after the sad parody of a human being and positioned himself directly in front of it. It stopped and stared at him until, still laughing, he stepped out of its way with a little bow. Then, when it tried to walk by, he stuck out his foot and tripped it.
Down it went, in the drollest possible manner.
Kneeling on the sad being’s back, Kyril merrily undid the leather mask. The beak was filled with herbs and had two meshed slots or nostrils. Laughing dementedly, he strapped it on.
When Kyril had the mask secured on his own face, he leaped back to see how his pallid victim would respond. The creature stood slowly. An odd, puzzled look entered its eyes. Its face relaxed into the faintest shadow of a smile. Then it leaned back against the marble wall. Its eyes slowly crossed. After a bit, its jaw went slack and it began to drool.
That was pretty funny. But what was even funnier was that by slow degrees Kyril’s mood was darkening. Experimentally, he tried punching the wall. “Fuck! Piss! Cunt! Shit! Prick!” he said. It hurt like a motherfucker.
He dared not take off the mask to suck on the skinned knuckles. But he felt a lot better for being able to feel a lot worse.
Now that he could think clearly again, Kyril was sure that he’d been breathing in spores from the funguses that the Pale Folk grew. You didn’t have to be much of a geneticist to grow happy dust—though giving it away free was a new wrinkle. And if the mushrooms were just beginning to broadcast that shit, that meant that the City Below would be a madhouse for at least a day. During which time, the Pale Folk would be free to do who-knew-what.
However, all he had to do was get to the surface, where the spores would be harmlessly dispersed by the winds, and he’d be fine.
Only…
Only, nobody drugged strangers out of the goodness of their heart. Happy dust was valuable. Whoever was pumping it out would want a return on their investment. Which, for the moneyless tribes living underneath the streets of Moscow meant enslavement, death, or—presuming that such a thing were possible—worse. Well, fuck them. Kyril didn’t owe anybody anything. Especially his so-called friends. The sonsabitches had stabbed him in the goddamned back, pissing themselves with laughter as the cocksucking goats hauled him off screaming to jail, just to keep their fucking mitts on a few shitty rubles that he’d earned for them in the first place. The cunts.
There was, however, one man who had played it straight with him. Who could have simply ripped him off, but had not. Who had taught him useful skills and shown him a possible path out of squalor. Who, devious and unreliable though he might well be, had very carefully shown Kyril the line up to which he could be trusted, and beyond which all bets were off.
Who right now doubtless was sitting like a lump in Ivan the Terrible’s library with his nose buried in a book, oblivious to the world around him and all its strange and gathering dangers.
Well, Kyril didn’t owe him anything either. He had told Darger so to his face. To his goddamned face!
Still…
Feeling like an absolute turnip, Kyril turned away from the long stairway that led up to the surface and headed back toward the lost library.
The orange glow of the reading lantern showed Darger chortling, snorting, and snickering like a fool. He had a scroll unrolled across his lap and was shaking his head in merriment over what was written thereon. Occasionally, he paused to wipe the tears of laughter from his eyes.
“You simply must read this,” he said when Kyril crawled into the library. “What Aristotle