what you projected upon them. You have never known reality. You have never known love.”
This last statement filled Arkady with indignation, for he knew it was not true. “I love Aetheria!”
“You are in love with your idea of her, and that is a very different thing from loving the woman herself. There is a real person there, assuredly, but you do not know her. Tell me her likes and dislikes. Relate an incident from her girlhood. Reveal to me her soul. You cannot! The songs you sing to her praise superficialities-her eyes, her hair, her voice-beyond which you have not sought. Your love has been a delusion, a mirage existing only within your mind. It is the work of the Devil. It must be rejected and put behind you.”
“I, however, am real.” The doxy cupped a breast and lifted it slightly. “Touch me, if you doubt it. Place your hand or any other part of your body wherever you like. I will not stop you.”
There was no comparing this strumpet’s merely carnal beauty with Aetheria’s unearthly perfection. Still, she was a woman. And naked. And present. She moved so close to Arkady that he could smell the musky scent of her sex. “I-”
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 man’s shoulders in the friendliest possible manner and said,“If anyone asks for tea, please direct the caterers to make it for them.”
Then he went inside the mansion.
If the gardens outside held the best of Moscow society, the rooms within held the worst. These were the people who really mattered-the plutocrats and ministers and financiers who, subordinate only to the mighty duke himself, actually ran Muscovy. They were not crowded together as were those without. They gathered in the ballroom in threes and fours, chatting amiably with colleagues they saw every day, while waiters drifted by with drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Nor did Surplus’s entry make much of a stir. The grandees looked up or did not, nodded or failed to do so, and occasionally smiled in the serene knowledge that they were so powerful and the event so inconsequential that not even the most judgmental would think they were trying to ingratiate themselves to a mere foreigner.
A waiter held out a tray holding triangles of toast and an enormous bowl of caviar. “Beluga, sir?”
Surplus leaned forward and sniffed. “Why does this smell fishy? It’s clearly gone bad. Throw it in the alley.”
“But Excellency…!”
“Just do it,” Surplus said, pretending not to notice the shocked and amused reactions of those near enough to overhear.
At the far end of the ballroom, a newly built partition stretched from wall to wall. It was solid from the floor to waist-height and scrollwork filigree above, with a mesh screen behind it to ensure that nothing but air, sight, and sound could pass from one side to the other. Through it could be dimly glimpsed the alluring figures of the Pearls as they entered the space behind and peered about eagerly. There Surplus went.
“So these are the famous Russian women,” Olympias said. “They look like cows.”
“Compared to you and your sisters, O Daughter of Perfection, all women do. Though to be fair, those present are ministers and gene-barons and the like, along with their wives and husbands. No doubt many of them have daughters or lovers who are more fetching. In an uncultured and rough-hewn sort of way, of course.”
“Don’t,” Olympias said, “condescend.”
“Will the duke be here?” Russalka interjected.
“He has been invited, of course. Whether he will attend in person or not…” Surplus shrugged.
“I am avid to see him.”
“I am avid to do a great deal more than that with him,” Nymphodora added.
“We are all avid to begin our new lives,” Zoesophia said.“In fact, if we are not presented to the duke soon, I promise you that things will get ugly.”
“I shall of course make it my first priority to…”
“More ugly than you can imagine,” Zoesophia emphasized.
Surplus returned to his guests. It suited his purposes to meet the Duke of Muscovy, and the sooner the better. The ultimatum the Pearls had just issued did not bother him in the least.
Until, that is, he mentioned his errand to the Mistress of Protocol, and she burst into a short, sharp bark of laughter. “The Duke of Mus-covy-here? Whyever in the world would he come here?”
“He was expressly invited.”
The State Mistress frowned like a bulldog. “The duke never responds to invitations. It would be absurd. They are all discarded, unread. That is, in fact, a significant part of my job.”
“Then allow me to seize the opportunity, since you are here, of arranging a private audience. I am most eager to meet him.”
“Meet the Duke of Muscovy! My dear Ambassador, nobody can meet that perfect man! Oh, such underlings as are ordered to his chambers to receive orders or offer accountings. And Chortenko, of course. But the duke does not socialize. Nor does he see foreigners of any ilk.”
