Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [89]
“It’s not actually a game, you fucking idiot. Sir.”
“Viewed properly, all of life is a game. Look at yourself! Do you walk with the plodding mindlessness of the Pale Folk? Oh, dear me, no. You stride along purposefully, and as to your motions…well, they are far too quick and alert. Even the Pale Folk, incurious dotards though they are, would be able to see through your subterfuge, were they not distracted by their chore. Now suppose I were to don this jolly old mask, what then? The two of us would be doubly obvious. Whoops go our chances of evasion and escape! You see?”
Reluctantly, Kyril had to admit that Darger’s words made a kind of sense. He flung down the mask in disgust. “Then what can we do?”
Joyous voices and the scuffing of feet announced that the next wave of captives was almost upon them. Soon they would be dimly visible. Darger laid a finger alongside his nose and winked. “Walk behind me, as if you were driving me toward this oh-so-very mysterious destination of theirs. Try to plod. I in my turn shall hide you behind gales of laughter and avalanches of girlish giggles! You must move in the same direction as the others, mind you. Oh, my, yes. If we go against the flow the Pale Folk will notice we are but imperfectly of their sort. When we see a line of escape divergent from our destination, why, then we shall take it and so sail off into a phosphorescent sea of free will wherein to find a destiny of our own.”
“Yeah, okay, I guess that makes sense.”
Darger waggled a finger at Kyril. “It is far better than your own foolish plan. Minion helmets indeed! Were I to follow your lead, it would inevitably end up with us breaking into some super-criminal’s lair to steal secret information, seduce a convenient voluptuary, kill the villain, and leave the entire place ablaze behind us!”
There was a glimmer of torchlight in the distance. “When we get to the surface,” Kyril said solemnly, “I’m going to kick your butt so hard you’ll never sit down again.”
Darger laughed and laughed.
The hunt wasn’t going well. Pepsicolova was down to her last two cigarettes, and the craving was almost unbearably strong. And getting stronger. She pulled the nearly depleted pack from her jacket pocket and gently teased out one tobacco-filled cylinder. It was soft from repeated fondling already, but she ran her fingers down its length, not so much straightening it as deriving what satisfaction she could from the feel of the paper. Slowly, she ran it under her nose, savoring the ghost of comfort the aroma provided. At last she was unable to put off the deed any longer and convulsively lit up.
Leaving her with a cushion of exactly one smoke.
She’d been hunting for a fresh pack for hours, with no success. Several times she’d run across a fellow addict also desperately looking to score. After determining for certain that they were entirely out, she’d released them. The first, a woman, she had then stealthily trailed after. But when she’d witnessed what became of the poor bitch when she finally found the Pale Folk, Pepsicolova had concluded there was nothing to be gained by following her example.
Now she was crouched in a concrete air vent high above the motorway, staring down at the throngs being driven toward the underlords’ redoubt. The flood of people looked more impressive than it actually was. There were hundreds of captives, she reckoned, but not many hundreds. Life was hard in the City Below and correspondingly short. Also, they were scattered over an area equal to that of the City Above, which meant that, inevitably, a goodly fraction of them would evade capture simply through blind luck. By Pepsicolova’s best estimate, the underlords wouldn’t be able to assemble an army of more than two or three thousand. Tops. Hardly enough to accomplish anything