Veniss Underground

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Mendeho had a foot in the water when a warning sounded from the link lodged in his ear. He stopped, hands at his sides.

  Citizen, it whispered, turn back. Turn back. You have broken curfew to swim. You cannot swim. The waves are too dangerous and you have no triplehand badge to keep you safe . . . You are old . . . The whisper took on a placatory tone. Turn back, citizen, and all will be forgiven.

  “You are the Devil! The physician was mistaken—I am fit. And I am going into the sea!” His second foot hit the water with a satisfying splash. “I am going to swim!” He smiled, saw his crankiness as a gift, a weapon.

  Your wife worries. The voice in his ear oozed sympathy.

  Mendeho stopped short. “Julia's been dead for a year,” he said. “A year ago today, and I am going to swim.”

  Your wife's name is Carlina, not Julia, chided the voice. She is alive and so are your four lovely children, and all five are worried.

  “They are your children. Shut off!”

  The line of his mouth quivered before blossoming into a grin. A certain exultation rose within him. They could not stop him, no matter what the danger. He walked farther into the water. Back onshore, the fiddlers had disappeared, alarmed by the spectacle of an old man talking to ghosts. Out in the ocean's deepest waves, a pseudowhale breached, humming songs for its forgotten dead. The songs reminded Mendeho of the doomed starship Tai-keegi's high-speed transmissions—sonorous and tragic—for even he had never seen a whale.

  You will see sense, said the solimind, and left him.

  Was that it? A warning and they would leave him alone?

  He plunged forward, the water splashing up to his knees, and yelled for joy. Now, indeed, the fiddlers knew him to be insane . . . But then, just as he prepared to jump into the water and really swim, the waves swirled in on themselves. While he watched with disbelief, sinking to his knees, one hand to his mouth, the sea pulled back from him, washed itself away. It slid back and back until the shoreline lay new and shimmering some forty meters ahead, held in check by an invisible dam or blockade. Mendeho cursed and wept, fish flopping and dying in the dryness before him. Under the moon, the expanse of sand was filled with the living debris left by too swift an ebb tide.

  You cannot come to harm, old man, said the calm, patient solimind. All citizens must obey the rules. You cannot swim, old man—come back . . .

  An anger as surging and powerful as the sea built inside Mendeho until his hands clenched and unclenched fitfully. Ignoring the solimind, he wiped his brow, hoisted himself to his feet with a grunt, and said, “If the sea will not come to me, I shall come to it.”

  He took a slow breath, exhaled, and began a stumbling run, feet slapping against the wet sand. A graveyard surrounded him, many of the creatures out-system forms restructured by the bioneers. He passed dying catechetans, their oar-shaped tusks hopelessly siphoning the air for moisture. Octopoids, too, wriggled and squirmed in the briny mire, tentacles clutching at him. Fish gasped for breath like living slates of ore, glimmering in the moonlight, some striped and smaller than Mendeho's finger, others solid purple and almost as large as a pleasure yacht.

  Mendeho ignored everything but the line of waves and water ahead. He could not say he did this for Julia, but he was stubborn even with himself and could not have told a psychewitch his motivation.

  The thing in his ear came alive. It is no use, Mendeho. Come back. The sea is beyond your grasp. We will always control the tides. Turn back.

  Mendeho tried to tear the metal from his ear, gasping at the ragged pain. Blood trickled from the wound, but it would not come free.

  Still he ran and still the waves retreated as if alive and wary. Sweat stung his eyes and his heart sent flames shooting through his body until he moved with both hands clutched to his chest. His legs were giving out; his left leg felt wooden. Perhaps the physician had been correct. He shook his head, though his entire being felt slump-heavy. He stumbled over the carcass of a saylber, a rancid stench already issuing from its blowholes. A dozen phosphorescent creatures ate at the slippery flesh.

  He crawled now, body threatening to quit completely, mind near blackout. The waves, he craned to see, were still distant. The bitter taste of failure coated his tongue like tyrol. Arm shaking, he fingered the wound where the link still clung.

  “Solimind,” he rasped. “You bring me to death this way. The waves are out of reach and there are bodies of creatures greater than I already stiffening.” A flash of intuition struck him, a loophole of logic he could exploit only once. “It is killing me not to swim. My health is threatened. My wife will be worried. Help me . . .”

  Hesitation, then the whisper, accompanied by what he thought was a sigh: Swim, Mendeho . . .

  Even exhausted, lying with his face against the sand, Mendeho felt elation.

  SOON WATER licked at his feet, an insistent touch that strengthened under the solimind's ministrations and then buoyed him up. The body of the saylber drifted past him and he was floating, grasping seaweed, gulping air. Too tired to swim, to do anything except lie there in the water, Mendeho looked up at the moon and stars and clusters of light that were spacecraft. The waves rolled over and through him, enveloped him in their cool richness. Creatures nudged him but did not bite, tentacles wet and smooth. Bathed in the sea, he turned his head to catch a glimpse of the city. It still sparkled, but not, Mendeho decided, with the overwhelming light of the moon. His ear throbbed, his leg ached, and the pains in his chest intensified, but he floated in a weightless world, sensation deadened. And everywhere: the sibilant sound of moving water.

  Slowly, the solimind's treacherous current carried Mendeho Caranza Obregon away from land, until he was far from the minds of men, the city a dot, and only the moon looked large enough to touch with an outstretched hand.

  IN VENISS, there is told a tale called “The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight.” The sailors of space hear it in the telemar saloons and soon it is “The Vacuum, Mendeho, and Starlight.” In the free-triad markets, farmers hear it and soon it is “The Land, Mendeho, and Sunlight.” The story has become a legend of Dayton Central.

  And the solimind approves, within limits. According to the legions of psychewitches, nominal dissent can be healthy for a frustrated I-wire tech. Yes, the solimind has decided, myths can be useful things. For in all the tales the old man Mendeho drifts out to sea, space, or pasture on a destiny of the solimind's making and is never seen again.

  DETECTIVES AND CADAVERS

  The creature's ribs, half-buried by the tides, stuck out from the sand at odd angles, leg bones trapped beneath the torso. The head—four times the size of my own and, I'd dare say, more handsome—remained connected to the neck. Flesh covered the face, but could not hide the snarl of teeth, the cold stare of the vacant eye socket. Quite a specimen from where I was standing, half up to my mug in sand and water on the East Shore. Soggy weather, with an early-morning fog.

  “Unique. Ugly. Dead,” said my partner Devon, a tight-lipped man whose broad features suggested caricature. He stood seven feet tall. I had only worked with him a few times before, but he seemed dependable.

  “All true,” I said, “but none of it helpful.”

  We were there on the whim of a sharp-eyed wall patrolwoman. She'd spotted a “suspicious shape, a possible muttie.” Never ones to skimp, the Conserge had sent us.

  Getting out of Veniss had been problematic, demonstrators surrounding the front portal as ever: doomsayers convinced that the city's growing isolation from other Earth enclaves and off-world colonies was directly related to the muttie expulsion and supposed “persecution” of the Funny People. Never mind that the Conserge continually changed the definition of “muttie” and “Funny” to fit their own political agenda.

  “If ever there were a full-scale muttie invasion, why there we'd be, you and I, to shake their little paws and offer 'em tea,” I'd said to Devon as we were finally flushed out of Veniss. I would have preferred a small army to deal with a possible muttie, but the Conserge
had other priorities.

  Devon wrapped his trench coat tighter around his frame.

  “How should we go about reporting this?” he asked.

  I took a quick glance back at Veniss before answering. Emulsifiers spewed green filth—the cost of our bioculture—across the walls, the fortifications, coated our poor defenseless defenders of city and Conserge. The flesh had awakened in Veniss. I could smell it even from here, the peculiar mélange of heat and frustration that said, Too many people, too little room.

  “The Conserge is a strange lot,” I said, from the strength of twenty years' experience. “Sometimes they can tell you what you're going to find before you find it, so be thorough. And start simple—what is it?”

  Devon bent mechanically to his knees, to better examine the beast. His creakiness was, so he told me, the result of an accident. Funny People had assaulted him while he worked for the bioneers below level.

  He looked up, smiled through crooked teeth. “It's mostly bone. I know a bioneer who could run tests for us.”

  I grunted, dug my hands into my pockets. “Could we call it ‘Funny' and leave it at that?”

  Devon's face tightened. Now there was a bad move—mentioning Funny People—but how else could I phrase it? No matter what the scars, the poor bastard would have to grin and bear it.

  “No,” he said. “Not a Funny Person.”

  I had been pulled from my wife, Arcadia, and a warm bed for this assignment; I had a mind to rub it in, but time pressed. Behind me, the dirigibles had sounded their horns, cast moorings, and hovered whalelike over the city as they policed it. Some carried floating gardens to an altitude above the miasma of pollution that choked the life out of Veniss.

  Besides, after a moment's reflection, Funny People hardly seemed amusing. Arcadia and I wanted a child, but the bioneers had told us there was a good chance it would turn out Funny. A chief detective with a Funny Person for a child? No future for the child, possible confinement. No promotion and “voluntary” sterilization for me.

  “A muttie, then,” I said. That word didn't raise his gander.

  Devon got up. “I'll take the pictures. You decide what it is. It'll keep my mug out of the heat. Look to the horizon. My knees can't take bad weather.”

  Devon was right. The wind blew in bursts. Strange, crested waves of sargasso rolled in under a watery sun. If a bit of weed were the end of it, fine, but the sea had given us nasty surprises more than once. And, of course, the rain would soon be here, hindering communications and contaminated with flesh knew what. Arcadia would already be sealing the apartment, listening to the weather report on the split screen.

  I had left her lying on the bed, her hair tangled in one upturned palm, her face turned away from me as she said, “How long?”

  “I don't know. Muttie. East Shore.”

  There was a curious lilt to her voice as she said, “Afterward, we could go out to Hospital Central for another checkup. You could . . . I mean we could . . .”

  She trailed off, perhaps sensing the hurt in my rigid stance, belt taut in my hands.

  “I'll be back as soon as I can,” I had told her, sealing the promise with a kiss, taking the salty taste of her with me.

  Devon took out the trusty v-c and started clicking stills. He carefully avoided touching the carcass. More tissue had survived on the beast than I'd thought: Hair or fur clung to the ear holes, the jawline. The underbelly appeared intact, though naturally I wasn't going to turn the stinking thing over to confirm—I'd get Devon to do it. Only, there was a problem with that description. The thing wasn't stinking. Which seemed strange. The water was full of chemicals that ordinarily broke down flesh within hours.

  “Could this be another experiment gone bad?” I asked. “Some clever bioneer thought he'd violate the Prohibition and hide it in the sea.”

  Cases of unauthorized genetic experiments still made it into the books, even with both the bioneers and the Conserge determined to enforce regulation.

  Devon shook his head. “No. Too sophisticated. They'd need at least six months in one place. Someone would have caught them at it.”

  “Yes, well,” I said, “we'll have to call it—”

  That's when my day was spoiled for good. A moan cut the air, froze the freckles on my ears, dried the spit right out of my throat.

  Devon chuckled in a way I found unnerving.

  “Just the wind. Through its mouth.”

  The wind was brisk and, yes, it whistled through the beast's mouth.

  “Oh,” I said.

  I covered my embarrassment by pretending a profound interest in the beast's nose. Nose? I stared into the eyes—the vertical pupils, the gold irises—and found myself lost, at sea. Was I an old fug or had only one eye been intact minutes before? Now I truly felt the wind lash my neck, recognized that the dawn was darkening, and the salt spray stinging.

  “How clever,” said Devon. “Very clever.”

  “What do you mean?” I knew what he meant.

  “The flesh is re-forming. Coming back to life.”

  Sweat beaded my forehead. I wanted to run—run and not look back. Arcadia awaited my return. For a moment, I had an image of her pure white skin, the liquid amber of her eyes, the way she could say a word, a phrase, and give it a meaning I had never thought of, and I almost lost my balance. This thing was big enough to rip us both apart and clean its teeth with a thighbone.

  “Does . . . Does that mean it's muttie?” Devon seemed to enjoy the fear in my voice.

  He shrugged. “Not really. We should wait. See if it's a full regeneration or—”

  “Or what?”

  Devon smiled. “Or an involuntary reaction. The cells may grow back. The creature may then be intact but dead. We will need to observe . . . for our report.”

  That rattled me. Devon telling me the rules. Yes, he was right: We were expendable, but the city's security was not.

  “Okay,” I said, “but if it starts to revive . . .” I pulled out my laser-sight Diamond .38.

  He nodded. “Fair enough.”

  WE KEPT a strange vigil—like the parents who used to wait at Hospital Central to see if their child was normal or Funny.

  I wondered if Devon had children. I had never asked, but I thought not; he was too impersonal, aloof. He click-clicked the v-c until I thought the lever would fall off.

  Me, I tried not to watch as layers of flesh sprouted from the bone, as tendons and muscles began to fill in the gaps. The leer of teeth was soon covered. Organs ballooned inside the rib cage. What Arcadia would have made of it, I don't know. She might have laughed.

  Devon had seen such things, of course, working as he had for the bioneers below level. He had even been to the fifteenth level.

  So, I thought about mutties, about Funny People. They were, as you might expect, much on my mind. Though I'd never told Devon, I had seen Funny People before—alive, not preserved in vat jars for school field trips.

  I had been on the fifth level (considered marginally safe because bioneer apprentices live there) and had just finished taking the statement of a Mrs. Jilla Collander about her missing husband. Missing! In a walled city. Surrounded by mutties and water. I wanted to say, Where the fug can he go, Mrs. Collander? Though there were at least two possibilities: that spies for the rogue bioneers in the wastes had taken him for the flesh—the city wasn't that secure—or he planned to create a new data file on himself and show up six months later, secure in a face-lift, with an obedient young blonde on his arm.

  A step from the elevator and the promise of an early dinner with Arcadia—I had gone out and bought lilies, mushroom wine, the works—I heard a sound: like distant bells or chimes. It made me trip, bend my head, concentrate on the source. I walked until I could hear it clearly: a chorus of reed-thin voices that reminded me of whale song, of wind through hollow glass. The holographic operas they put on to take your mind off the city's troubles couldn't compare. I had to find the source. I had to. There are so few things of beauty in Veniss.r />
  The voices led me through progressively worse sections until even the overhead lights sputtered and shadows cringed away from me. (Thank flesh for a glow-in-the-dark detective's badge.) Two green handheld find flares bobbed and weaved down the corridor, but it was so dark I could not even see the faces behind the lights. Rancid water lapped at my boots. The smells of overheated plastic, machine oil, excretion, spices, liquor, and sweat all inundated me; but I clung to the sound like a drowning man. And it was difficult at times to follow the sound, to unwind it from the chugging air filters, the hissing oxygen pumps, the maniacal canned laughter of split screens in the boxed-in tenements.

  Finally, trudging through refuse from higher levels, I came to a corridor between two ramshackle single roofs. A flickering light above revealed neobaroque representations of former Conserge members.

  On the dusty floor, three children played coddleskatch to a nonsense rhyme. No, not just children. Funny People. Unlike most, two were flesh-poor: just a head, neck, and an arm to pull them along. The third had two arms, but the welts and exposed tissue told me she (yes, she, with an angelic face) would be dead soon. All three must have required special gear. But still, there they were, playing coddleskatch after the fashion of children all over the city, moving from square to square with sidles and hops. The song? I remember only two verses. Nonsense, as I have said, but sung to perfection.

  I-wire, I-wire

  adders and ladders

  detectives cadavers

  it's really no fuss

  to simply forget us

  Psychewitch, psychewitch

  eat your flesh sandwich

  make us metal like you

  swallow what we chew

  flesh sandwich . . .