Veniss Underground

by Jeff VanderMeer

  —and the meerkat you hope is Salvador jumps off the escalator, and you frantically elbow pedestrians aside, manage to disembark at just the right spot and enter the press of the cracked concrete walkway. Ahead, the familiar shape of Salvador turns a corner.

  When you turn that same corner, you find yourself in an empty dead-end alley.

  You let out a little laugh, a snort, a chuckle. You just stand there, staring at the far end of the alley, unable to think yourself past this point. A quiet grows inside you unlike anything you have ever known. The crowd noises, the soft hiss of hovercraft, the crackle of meat in a sidewalk grill—they all fade away, and all that is left is the pounding in your ears, the glistening drops of water on a culvert, the flash of lights behind your eyes.

  Where did he go? The question creeps into the silence. You walk to the end of the alley. Garbage. Garbage cans to house the garbage. Rotten food, sweet and sour stench. Bottles, broken. A blank wall, rust red, that mocks your efforts.

  You lean against the wall, look back out toward the chaos of the main street, and, as the wall dissolves, as you fall through it, a curious double image forms—that you've been here before, night after night, following Salvador, each time ending up in this alley and, until now, not solving the mystery . . . but then you have no time for anything but the fact that you are falling through the wall, through a blur of color, a grayness eclipsing the street vision, and then, as you land on a hard platform, you see above you the stars—the stars!—and a faint hint of green to the sides.

  You hit, and the impact drives the breath from your lungs, even as you begin to understand that the wall was a hologram, even as you begin to realize that Salvador may be launching himself at you as you gasp for air. You whirl to your feet, despite the shock, a gray wall behind you, and ahead . . . a forest.

  How can you articulate a dream that is not a dream? You feel as if you have found a secret room in a house long familiar. Did you ever truly know this city?

  You stand atop a raised steel platform and before you a path of white pebbles, gleaming in the moonlight, descends into a valley of dark fir trees. You hear the sound of running water and see, at the limit of your vision, a small bridge of red and white, half-hidden by the trees. It slopes gently over what must be a fast-moving creek. Crickets and a few cicadas mumble their songs. The sounds of night birds flying, the chittering flit of bats above, against the blue-black sky. The white underbellies of the straggling clouds against the stars, against the darkness.

  This sanctuary, this fifty-meter-wide strip of wilderness is hemmed in by skyscrapers to the right and left, but bound by the horizon straight ahead, and therefore must let out onto the seashore.

  The thick smell of the fir trees is a revelation to you, as is the air itself: clean, fresh. And the moon—the moon isn't obscured by the yellow scourge of pollution, but brilliant as it highlights the fir trees, tints the entire forest silver.

  But there is, for all the peace, an urgency to the cicadas' cry, and you feel exposed, vulnerable. Salvador is not in sight, but he could be watching—and what if someone or something comes through the alley and onto the platform?

  You begin to walk down the path, your purchase on the shining white pebbles at first unsure. Very quickly, you are amongst the trees, which are so dense that you can see only branch-obscured patches of sky. This, you think, must be the illusion—it's the alley and its dead-end wall that must be real, and you are now dreaming, dreaming, dreaming.

  “How could anyone have hidden this? How?” You're so shocked, you say it aloud. Under the most skilled of holographic shields, and at the greatest of expense—not just the manipulation, the illusion, but also the perception that no one ever lived in this space, that this space never existed within the city. (And, the second question, the one you don't want answered: Why was it so easy to enter?)

  You have, for your various programming projects, examined a thousand plans of the city—maps, blueprints, grids—and yet never missed anything, never thought, Here is a gap. Something has been deleted here. Never felt a corresponding emptiness in your heart.

  Worst of all, this place is beautiful, so beautiful that you cannot help but melt into the rightness of it. The wind, gentle through the trees, carries the scent of the sea, mixed with the mint of crushed fir. Here is a place for the stealthy animals of the Tolstoi District to live, having abandoned their hundred hiding places to walk under the light of the moon, along the white path, down to the sea.

  Dislodged pebbles on the path behind you. You start, abandon the path, duck behind a fir tree, pull out your gun.

  The rustle becomes louder, and soon, moonlit, scoured of the veil of pollution, of sickness, two dark figures come into view. One, with its sinuous, curling nose, must be a Ganesha. The other, taller and weasel-sharp, must be another meerkat. The two pass by your hiding place, huffing with laughter, in a jolly mood, conversing in a language of clicks and whistles and yelps. They don't speak in human languages when they are alone. Why would they? The light creates a blue-green sheen across their bodies. The meerkat musk is strong.

  Once they are past, you creep from hiding and follow, feeling suddenly exposed . . . Soon the fir trees become less dense, replaced by strange, thick bushes, then by sinewy roots clinging to brackish land almost the consistency of mud. The white pebble path brings you to genuine mudflats—a narrow strip that buttresses the creek flowing beneath the bridge. From the mudflats, a million eyestalks stare up at you: fiddlers by the thousands, clacking their claws and tracking your movements. Their carapaces shine ghostly.

  You cross the bridge. The water is dark blue—no trace of chemicals, so there must be a strong filter—and through it you catch the silver gleam of strange fish: three-eyed and so scaly as to be coated in armor. They mutter and pout like old men and in their listless motions you discern an icy intelligence.

  Beyond the bridge, the firs close up around you again. The musk of meerkat rises so strong that you fight the urge to sneeze. A light not from the moon glimmers through the trees. You follow it. With each step you recede a little more into the background of some odd fairy tale. The light, diffuse and yet focused, is a fey light. It casts the fir branches in sharp relief. It coats the ground in an ever-nearer sheen of gold. Soon you must shadow it, circle it, not drawing closer until you can be sure of cover—a large bush, an unusually thick tree trunk. From the light comes laughter, chirping speech, and, periodically, the scream of an animal in agony. Moths and beetles cloud the air, burn through it in an insectile fog.

  Finally, you spy movement through the branches, hear individual voices, although the language remains a mystery to you. Then, hidden by a branch you are afraid must be ridiculously small for the purpose, you crawl toward the light, stopping just short of the clearing that would reveal all mysteries.

  Your chin scratches the ground and your arms are weary. Through the branches, the wind blowing into your face, you see a congregation of meerkats and Ganeshas in the foreground—lit by a series of lanterns—very animated; all gesturing paws and trunks a-sway like snakes, accompanied by a torrent of clicks and whistles and chirps that must, by the intensity of the interaction, carry equally intense meaning. A number of younger meerkats contentedly groom each other and, spiky-furred and frisky, chase each other around the clearing. In the back, the wavery light of a hologram plays, while a group of meerkats and Ganeshas sit in front of it and watch. Slowly, your gaze is drawn from the foreground, from the middle ground, where you are trying to find Salvador, to the background hologram. The hologram at first is just a flux of images—some even in black-and-white, from archaic flat media, such as photographs or film. But the images are the same, and the sounds are the same: horrible agony, horrible pain . . . against the backdrop of a marketplace a man takes a long, curving blade, and proceeds to flay a dog alive, skillfully cutting off the coat in a few quick strokes while the dog screams, then, furless, looking like a newborn thing, its eyes tightly closed, trembles and pants—pink and vulnerabl
e and in shock while the man goes on to the next dog, and the first one—in extreme close-up—goes into the waiting bag of a customer as casually as a pound of rice . . . puppies hanging from telephone poles . . . gerbils burned alive in skillets . . . mice poured into burning wax for a Living Art exhibit . . . scenes from the wastes outside the city walls, where the animals gasp and cough and live out their lives against a backdrop of chemicals and toxic gases . . . meerkats pierced through the skull with a control bar and guided by their human tormentors to tear each other apart . . .

  You cannot watch for long. You must not. It is too terrible . . . When you can bear to look again, you see that now it is not animals but human beings—tortured, mutilated, burned, cut up, gassed . . . and, strangely, the seated meerkats and Ganeshas react most visibly to these displays, such physical revulsion that some look away as you look away, in shock and disgust. They hide their children's eyes as any responsible parent would . . .

  A chill runs through you. What could they think of a species that had brought the world to such an impasse? As you watch them, as you watch their interactions, their conversations, you are overcome by a panic that has nothing to do with fear of discovery. You manage to control it—even though it bubbles up beneath the skin, steals your breath, slicks your palms. You creep backward through the underbrush, until the light is once again just a glimmer through dark green and the white pebble path once more ribbons out behind you.

  Then fear seizes you for real, cups your throat, lets your legs hang free—and you run, biting your tongue not to scream, sometimes on the path, sometimes off it, unaware when you almost turn an ankle or when a branch strikes your face. You have forgotten Salvador, Shadrach, Nicholas, and Quin. Soon you see the platform glinting and you run faster, jump up onto it, and plunge back through the hologram into the dead-end alley. Back amongst the stench, the stink, the pollution of the city. Your lungs burn. Your legs ache.

  You pause to catch your breath. Now you realize that even in your panic, a part of your brain has been talking to you. It has been saying, in a shock as profound as that of the flayed dog, You are not superior. You are not superior. Because what Quin's Shanghai Circus means is this: your extinction.

  The people that you pass on your way home, these governed and governing—do they realize yet that their place has been usurped? Driven out. How long before they guess?

  CHAPTER 7

  Later, in your apartment. You love the lights at night, the silence of street corners, the pixilation of dewdrops on the window glass. You love the feel of warm sheets against your skin in the cold. You love the way your fingers seem to know the next step faster than your brain when you are immersed in programming. You love the sensation of sex, even with a holograph. You love, you love, you love . . . and yet such a ghost are you, haunting your apartment, waiting for the return of Salvador. You have a gun in your hand. You sit on the living room couch. A coffee mug rests on the table nearby.

  The coffee mug, the couch—these are very normal, ordinary things, and yet you are waiting in a dream that is not your apartment. You are dreaming in a world that is not your world, and you feel as if you have seen it all before—this strangeness, this sense of oblivion.

  The utter clarity of your surroundings despite the revelations of the night convinces you that you are in a shadowland. The absence of light. He came out of the darkness, a revelation . . . You have turned the lights off. What choice do you have? You prefer the reality of the vast forest, the delicate bridge, the white pebble path. You prefer the moonlight. You prefer all that will be denied you. The animals are waiting in the Tolstoi District, under leaves and branches and bricks . . .

  A sliding of an ID card in the door lock. A familiar scent. Two as one—Nicholas's presence a shadow, an absence—defined by the space around him, defined by that which is not him. A card slides in the lock. A card slides in the lock. The door opens slowly.

  Salvador turns on the lights. He has a sad look on his face, sadder still when he sees you on the couch. He carries a bag of fiddler crabs.

  “Hello, Nicola,” he says.

  “Salvador. I couldn't sleep.”

  He does not reply, but walks over to the kitchen, places the bag of crabs on the counter.

  “More crabs?” you say. You've hidden your laser gun at your side, under a cushion.

  Salvador's eyes are red, not amber, under the panel illumination of the kitchen. He walks back into the living room, stands in front of you, the window, the night sky, at his back. You no longer know what you see when you stare at him.

  “Nicola,” he says. “Nicola. How stupid do you think I am? I know where you've been. I can smell it on you. I can taste it on you.”

  A distance, some vast space, lies between you and the fear.

  “You fell through the alleyway. You walked down the white pebble path to the bridge, and you saw our lights and you found us.”

  He smiles—or is this a snarl? If he moves one step closer, you will shoot him whether he smiles or snarls.

  “I was there,” you confess. Does it matter what you tell him now? “It was beautiful. It was wonderful.” And it was, oh it was! Beautiful and wonderful and terrible.

  “My dear,” Salvador says gently, almost with love, “you should not have seen that. You should not have followed me.”

  “I'd never tell. If I told, they'd come and destroy it, Salvador.”

  “You're a programmer from the Bastion, Nicola. No matter what you say, you'll destroy it.”

  He snarls, and his forepaws clench and unclench. His eyes are red. He laughs—a wheezing laugh full of savagery.

  How can he be so split? So gentle and sad, and yet so full of anger? It surprises you, the answer: because he's fully human.

  He circles you now as you half rise from the couch, your gun aimed at him.

  “If you put down the weapon,” he says, growling the words, “I will kill you quickly.”

  “I know Shadrach,” you say. “I know Nicholas. Both of them work for Quin. Quin is your master. If you leave now, I won't report you.”

  “You know no one. I'm Quin's ambassador, come for you.”

  “Do you want to be as cruel as those humans in your holograph show? To be no better than the worst of what we are?” and in your words a peculiar echo, a sense that everything has already been said.

  Again the sadness in his movements, his voice: “To protect ourselves, we must be cruel. I'm sorry, Nicola, but you drive me to it.”

  You fire your laser, miss, and set the carpet on fire. The force of the blast knocks him off his feet. You run behind the couch. You aim again as he recovers and launches himself at you. Your beam catches him in midleap, and he falls onto the couch. His fur is blackened, his left forepaw a stump—but he launches himself again, at your throat. His teeth click an inch away, his hot breath on your neck. The meerkat's teeth close around your wrist. You do not feel the bite, only the moment when the grip falters, the limbs convulse, and Salvador falls back onto the couch, his eyes closed, the whole left side of his body blackened, his fur stained red. Is he dead? Close enough.

  You drop the laser. You wander around the living room. The image of the flayed dog comes to you again. You cannot pull it out of your head.

  Absentmindedly, you put out the fire, and even when its last flames lash out at your legs, you feel nothing. You try not to look at the still, burnt shape on the couch. This cannot be real. Your life cannot be real. The moonlight is not moonlight. The aquarium is blue-green illusion. Only the forest leading to the sea is real. Only the nervous fiddlers on their mudflats are real. Nicholas—even Shadrach—might understand you now. They would understand your isolation. How you miss them both. How you need them both.

  The doorbell rings harshly in the silence. You opaque the door from your side only—and burst into tears. Nicholas stands outside.

  You open the door, and there is your brother. Dressed in a ragged raincoat, he looks so incredibly gaunt, so incredibly old and used up, that you s
ay, “Oh, Nicholas, what have they done to you?”

  You want to hold him, but he stands so stiffly, with his hands at his sides, and his hair, unwashed for days, hangs limply from his scalp, so you can't, somehow, hold him after all.

  Instead you say, “I was so worried,” through your tears and then wait as he seems about to say something. He cannot spit it out. The words trip and tremble on his tongue, his face contorted as he tries to form them.

  “What is it?” you say. “What's wrong, Nicholas?” you say, putting out a hand to steady him. You cannot finish sentences that remain unspoken.

  The touch makes him convulse, and his hands contort in unnatural shapes. He manages to steady himself and, although he stutters, you understand what he says, “L-l-let m-m-me t-t-tell you about the c-c-city.”

  “It's okay,” you say, and you hug him even as his hands (you have done this before), shaking, almost out of control (you relax, knowing this is the end), find your throat.

  Memory so ephemeral, that it should fade so quickly, so without a struggle. The apartment dissolves against the pressure on your throat and you are light remembering itself, the light lingering upon shadow, the light wistful for itself. In that place all memories are one, and although you are not at peace, although you ache for the smell of chemicals in the Canal District, for the feel of a lover's touch, for the sound of your own heartbeat, you cannot say you have time for regrets, for pleas, for absolution, but only this final thought: that there was so much more you wished to do. The ache of atoms, the yawn of the abyss, then you are ascending, carried in another's arms, the light flooding into you and through . . . light.

  You so desperately want to remember the color of roses in the spring.

  III

  SHADRACH

  “Between her compassion and her prowess, her heart was the compass that knew when and where I'd wreck.”