Veniss Underground

by Jeff VanderMeer

  But I have let my story run away without me, as Shadrach might say but has never said, and into nastalgia, and we wouldn't want that.

  SO, AS soon as I stepped into the blue velvet darkness, the doors sliding shut with a hiss behind me, the prickly feeling in my spine intensified, and all the sounds from the alley, all the garbage odors and tastes were replaced with the hum of conditioners, the stench of sterility. This was high-class. This was atmosphere.

  This was exactly what I had expected from Quin.

  To both sides, glass cages embedded in the walls glowed with an emerald light, illuminating a bizarre bunch of critters: things with no eyes, things with too many eyes, things with too many limbs, things with too many teeth, things with too many things. Now I could detect an odor, only partially masked by the cleanliness: the odor of the circus I had seen as a kid—the bitter-dry combination of urine and hay, the musky smell of animal sweat, of animal presence.

  The cages, the smell, made me none too curious—made me look straight ahead, down to the room's end, some thirty yards away, where Quin waited for me.

  It had to be Quin. If it wasn't Quin, Quin couldn't be.

  He sat behind a counter display: a rectangular desklike contraption within which were embedded two glass cases, the contents of which I could not ID. Quin's head was half in dark, half in the glow of an overhead light, but the surrounding gloom was so great that I had no choice but to move forward, if only to glimpse Quin in the flesh, in his seat of power.

  When I was close enough to spit in Quin's face, I gulped like an oxygen-choked fishee, because I realized then that not only did Quin lean over the counter, he was the counter. I stopped and stared, mine eyes as buggee as that selfsame fishee. I'd heard of Don Daly's Self Portrait, Mixed Media on Pavement—which consisted of Darling Don's splatted remains—but Quin had taken an entirely different slant that reeked of genius. (It also reeked of squirrels in the brain, but so what?)

  Portrait of the Artist as a slab of flesh. The counter itself had a yellowish-tan hue to it, like a skin transplant before it heals and it was dotted with eyes—eyes that blinked and eyes that did not, eyes that winked, all watching me, watching them.

  Every now and again, I swear on my slang jockey grave, the counter undulated, as if breathing. The counter stood some three meters high and twenty long, five wide. In the center, the flesh parted to include the two glass cages. Within the cages sat twin orangutans, tiny but perfectly formed, grooming themselves atop bonsai trees. Each had a woman's face, with drawn cheekbones and eyes that dripped despair and hopelessness.

  Atop the counter, like a tree trunk rising out of the ground, Quin's torso rose, followed by the neck and the narrow, somehow serpentine head. Quin's face looked almost Oriental, the cheekbones pinched and sharp, the mouth slight, the eyes lidless.

  The animal musk, the bitter-sweetness, came from Quin, for I could smell it on him, pungent and fresh. Was he rotting? Did the Prince of Genetic Recreation rot?

  The eyes—a deep blue without hope of reflection—stared down at the hands; filaments running from each of the twelve fingers dangled spiders out onto the counter. The spiders sparkled like purple jewels in the dim light. Quin made them do undulating dances on the countertop, which was his lap, twelve spiders in a row doing an antique cabaret revue. Another display of Living Art. I actually clapped at that one, despite the gob of fear deep in my stomach. The fear had driven the slang right out of me, given me the normals, so to speak, so I felt as if my tongue had been ripped from me.

  With the sound of the clap—a naked sound in that place—his head snapped toward me and a smile broke his face in two. A flick of his wrist and the spiders wound themselves around his arm. He brought his hands together as if in prayer.

  “Hello, sir,” he said in a singsong voice oddly frozen.

  “I came for a meerkat,” I said, my own voice an octave higher than normal. “Shadrach sent me.”

  “You came alone?” Quin asked, his blue eyes boring into me.

  My mouth was dry. It felt painful to swallow.

  “Yes,” I said, and with the utterance of that word—that single, tiny word with entire worlds of agreement coiled within it—I heard the glass cages open behind me, heard the tread of many feet, felt the presence of a hundred hundred creatures at my back. Smelled the piss-hay smell, clotted in my nostrils, making me cough.

  What could I do but plunge ahead?

  “I came for a meerkat,” I said. “I came to work for you. I'm a holo artist. I know Shadrach.”

  The eyes stared lazily, glassily, and I heard the chorus from behind me, in deep and high voices, in voices like reeds and voices like knives: “You came alone.”

  And I was thinking then, dear Yahweh, dear Allah, dear God, and I was remembering the warm fuzzies and the cold pricklies of my youth, and I was thinking that I had fallen in with the cold pricklies and I could not play omnipotent now, not with the Liveliest of the Living Arts.

  And because I was desperate and because I was foolish, and most of all, because I was a mediocre artist of the holo, I said again, “I want to work with you.”

  In front of me, Quin had gone dead, like a puppet, as much as the spiders on his fingers had been puppets. Behind me, the creatures stepped forward on cloven hooves, spiked feet, sharp claws, the smell overpowering. I shut my eyes against the feel of their paws, their hands—clammy and soft, cruel and hot—as they held me down. As the needles entered my arms, my legs, and filled me with the little death of sleep, I remember seeing the orangutans weeping on their bonsai branches and wondering why they wept for me.

  LET ME tell you about the city, sir. Like an adder's kiss, sharp and deadly. It's important. Very important. Let me tell you about Quin and his meerkats. I work for Quin now, and that's bad business. I've done terrible. I've done terrible things—the deadest and deadliest of the Dead Arts, the cold pricklies of the soul. I've killed the Living Art. I've killed the living. And I know. I know it. Only. Only the flesh comes off me and the flesh goes on like a new suit. Only the needle goes in and the needle comes out and I don't care, though I try with all my strength to think of Shadrach and Nicola.

  But the needle goes in and . . .

  Let me tell you about the city . . .

  II

  NICOLA

  “They say this here place is haunted. Yeah, but only by a ghost.”

  —Giant Sand

  CHAPTER 1

  You. Were. Always. Two. As one: Nicola and Nicholas, merging into the collective memory together, so that in the beginning of a sentence spoken by your brother you knew the shadow of its end and mouthed the words before he said them. In each moment you spent with him, you lived again that mist-shrouded beginning when the doctor rescued you from the artificial mother's womb—to bawl and cough and look incredulous on the sheer imperfection of the outer world. The world of plastic, the world of sky, the world of detritus and decay.

  A subtle yet pulsing music played in the birthing room. The walls, in your memory, at least, had been stained red, within which you and your brother were splendid, symmetrical parallels of flesh.

  “And you,” your foster mother always said, as long as you allowed yourself to live with her. “And you,” your foster mother always said, as if to claim the miracle of the moment for herself, “the first sight of the world, for you, for Nick, besides the air itself, the ceiling, the bed, the chair, was the other, the twin, the sweet, sweet mirror of the flesh.”

  You'd been taken from a vat womb like all the other vatlings, but Nick was your brother, grown from the same egg, and in his eyes you saw yourself staring back.

  THE NIGHT you noticed the change came one week after Nick failed to show up for an infrequent lunch date in the Canal District. You were tired, exhausted by a ten-hour day of programming, and you stood at the window of your apartment on the seventy-fifth floor of the Barstow, staring down at the city spread out below you: multicolored, flowing lanes of hover traffic defining the shape and height of buildings
as the light fled the sky in streaks of orange and green. Here, the great, greedy glitter of the industrial sectors, there the glamorous but petit languor of the Canal District. Beyond the lights, the dark swath of the city walls, almost two hundred feet high and a mile deep, followed by the patchy bleed of the wastelands, and farther still, if you squinted hard, if you really wanted to, you thought you could discern the faded, distant twinkle of Balthakazar, sister city.

  Once, we were close and close-knit, but now we are unmoored islands, each alone, each a separate planet, drifting farther and farther away, content to turn ever inward . . . This is no idle solipsism; it has taken on the fragile brightness of truth. Cities turned from cities, self-devouring. Governments fragmenting into fragments of fragments. Entertainment become a solitary diversion. Solo adventures.

  As you watched the night invade the city, snuffing out the glint and glitter of sun off steel and glass, you sensed Nick in the shadows between spaces, knew that he was somewhere down there, in the chaos that from the seventy-fifth floor of the Barstow building looked so methodical, so rational.

  Another tilt at windmills no doubt, some obscure artistic venture and promises framed by insincere smiles and handshakes. He will turn up later, bedraggled and cowed, but ready to try again, to sell more of himself—his “Living” art—and make yet another deal with a seedy gallery. No doubt.

  Doubt. You know him well—you are even used to him, this “him” of the later phase: the outlandish clothes (“Why not just become a fashion designer?” you joked once) and the self-described “slang jockey” way he often expressed himself, as if this just reinforced the quality of his holo work. But even Nick had to realize that he was getting old, long in the tooth to be making like one of the young upstarts. You had tried to persuade him to become a programmer like yourself—you'd happily train him—at least until he had recovered from the robbery. Pay back some debts—he owed you money, too. But he said no: “I'd be bored—and not even to death, unhappily, just to near death.”

  You walked into your bathroom, stared into the old-fashioned mirror, while beside you a hologram of yourself sprang up, creating four of you: two staring into the mirror and two staring back. You could see Nick in the frown upon your face. Doubling you. Mimicking you. Trying to tell you something. Why is it that in your hologram you see someone more alive than yourself?

  You can still hear Nick's sentences, but you don't want to complete them, for they are monstrous, guttural creations, and they reek of blood. They are not the constructions of the Nick you know, the Nick who loves the Canal District for its many-layered conversations, the deals being made, the mysterious magic of it that defies easy definition.

  “That's the ultimate Living Art,” he told you once, his face red with enthusiasm. “All those overlapping conversations. All those words, all the nuances of the words. If I could just capture that in the holos or the ceramics, I'd be an effing genius.”

  Only, he wasn't a genius. Genius doesn't strain for perfection. Genius is . . . effortless. There were moments, though, mostly when you lived with Shadrach, that Nick caught fire, as if your love for Shadrach had suffused his art, that you might signify the singular once again, and where you had become beauty in the flesh to Shadrach, so too he had become beauty in his art.

  Afterward, he stumbled along as before, and tried, and tried, and tried so hard that sometimes you hurt for him as badly as he must hurt for himself. Nick had basked in the company of geniuses and traded stories with them. Was it so absurd to think that if he'd had more time, he might have created a minor masterpiece, something to Live after his death?

  He still can, you remind yourself, but there is the awful pressure of those ghostly, ghastly sentences in your head to call you a liar.

  Sentences and memories.

  NICK LAUGHS at the creature as it lurches across the living room floor. Your parents are at work, school just let out, the pneumatic pods having deposited you safely at home. Nick sits at the kitchen table, his bioneer kit splayed out like the autopsy of a steel insect. You sit on the couch across from him and watch the volcanic gasps of the made creature. It stumbles and mewls piteously: a kitten with compound eyes, five legs, a lizard's tail, and, the crowning indignity, a human ear sprouting from the top of its head. From the earhole writhes a dark red tongue.

  It shall have the life of a mayfly; its organs, hideously malformed, poke out from its sides. The kitten stops trying to walk, trembles in a miserable pile, blood weeping from its impossible eyes. It smells like bruised and rotting fruit.

  You found them funny at first, these creatures Nick made from a kit; you laughed when he laughed, or before he laughed, and sometimes you even brought your friends over to play with the newest toys. You found their prattling antics an entertaining break between homework and chores.

  But now you are ten and you have begun to truly notice the fear, the pain, the bewilderment. In the eyes, the contorted features, the spastic lurch.

  You walk over to the kitten. Gently, you pick it up, you hold it, with Nick still snickering in his corner. Your touch comforts the kitten, and yet is its agony, for parts of it are nothing but raw flesh. It tries to purr, but all that comes out is a wretched coughing sound. You hold it a moment longer. Then you place your hand on its neck, and twist. The kitten goes limp.

  “Nicola!”

  You do not need to say anything: Your blazing stare, the tight lips, the set jaw, tell him, and when you go to bury the kitten in the backyard, he comes with you, crying.

  But the next week he digs it up and, in his room, where you cannot criticize, he continues his experiments, and will continue until he realizes that he has neither the patience nor the skill to create a truly autonomous living being that will last. With that realization will come wholesale abandonment, disgust with the chromosomes, the kits, the little gobbets of flesh, followed by his embrace of holo art.

  The first time you split with Nick, did not reflect him, nor he you, was over the kitten, and it was then you truly realized you were different from him. That you could be free of him.

  CHAPTER 2

  Another week passes into gray oblivion. You're a slow dream, an autumn freeze, a ship in the doldrums. Thoughts come slow and ponderous, like deep-sea fish floating heavy and memory-bound to the surface; coelacanth reborn.

  You have a party. It is winter, the far-flung walls like sparkling metal ribbons wrapped around the gift of the city—and you lost within the ribbons, the party held in a specially chartered room embedded in the walls. All of your friends are there—from work, from contacts in other cities, via hologram. Their names? Forget their names, for they are interchangeable, intrachangeable, their faces dark circles greedy for the light. And all around you, from 360 degrees, the pleasant chime and clink of silverware and conversation. Wine. Heaping plates of squid and lobster. Laughter. Complaints. Arguments about work. Talk of new employees, competition, the latest entertainments in the Canal District . . .

  Nick surrounds you tonight—in a man's shadow across the teal-papered wall, in remembered conversations about holo art. He resides in the hollows of a debutante's cheekbones, in the flippant arrogance of a young composer, in the sad smile of his embarrassed wife. Like the waiter, he used to fumble with the wine bottles, was never much good at pulling out the cork.

  You expect someone, anyone, to ask about Nick, so that you can relieve the pressure building up inside you. “My brother?” you would say. “I don't know. I really don't. He missed a lunch date with me. Do you think he could be in trouble? Should I be worried?” But no one asks, because Nick is no one, except to you.

  Amid the brisk and lazy slipstreams of words, the witty yet predictable repartee, the gallant riposte, you half remember what you want to forget: that you are, at best, a memory, at worst a wraith long-fading. You preside over the festivities like a timekeeper, a watchmaker, ticking, always ticking toward the end.

  You look out onto the cold rim of the world, your companion at your side. Your compa
nion's name is Reuben, and he is a hologram, a wisp of a wisp.

  Sad. Suddenly sad, and you don't know why. Out there, in the sullen swell of waves, the pseudowhales breach and saylbers breed and sharks dream, bellies against the sand, their almond eyes drunk with sleep. An entire cycle of life continues unremarked upon and unaware, and there is no scorn for this anonymity, save from the shoals of silver fish that stitch the ocean's surface like quick-darting needles, here again and gone.

  What made Nick like the silver fish? What made him feel restless, unfulfilled, unable to be happy unless he was pushing himself hard?

  “You should be a holo artist,” Nick had said once. “There's no telling what you'd create.” Yes, Nick—no telling. Maybe I'd even make a kitten with compound eyes and five legs. And maybe I just want to glide through life invisible and weightless. Maybe life is easier, more satisfying, that way . . .

  You retire from the party early, to a private room complete with a bed and sexual toys. Your companion is a good lover for a hologram, to take away the sting, the fear, with just a whispered word or two. As you writhe beneath his coded suggestions, his faded ethereal caresses, you think: Nothing ever happens here, and you don't know if you mean to yourself or in the city.

  FOR TWO weeks you wait, taking the stat bureau tube to work in the morning, weathering ten hours of bytes and bits, ciphers and code, and dragging yourself home at night, sometimes going out with Tina or George, your fellow programmers. Sometimes a date through the Net—actual or virtual—but always with a part of you looking for Nick on street corners, in crowds, even on virtual trips to other cities: Zindel, Balthakazar.

  At work in your office, you begin to worry, driven out of the subroutines and subsubroutines by the thought of Nick. The dreamy dancing light of the holographic screens surrounds you like armor; you are dressed in it, coated in it, suited to it. Sometimes, you think you can smell the crackling air—fizzy, dry, electric—as you manipulate reality into new configurations. But in the end it's all gimcrack technology—older code which you actually keystroke or use voice-recognition software with, or the newest technology, from fifty years ago, which involves limited AI machines (their cores carefully yoked for obedience) you don't trust and you don't really understand: the last remnants of the solimind that once ruled over the city. The “current” technology—the holograms and their ilk—date from one hundred years ago, but you are most comfortable with them. You like the chips in your fingernails, how you almost look like you are playing a musical instrument when the data, in the form of light, streams from your hands.