Veniss Underground

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “Are they . . . they are intelligent?”

  “Yes,” replied Flesh Dog flatly.

  Intelligent. He almost laughed. Was he to believe an intelligent toad next? His heartbeat quickened and with it he could feel his sister's heart, uneven and diseased, slowly winding down. He sobered.

  “Flesh Dog, are these the folk who live underground?”

  “Almost certainly,” replied Flesh Dog.

  When they came before the meerkats, the leader spoke to Gerard, ignoring Flesh Dog. The leader was a sleek, jet specimen with amber eyes and the language it spoke was all trills and clicks. The meerkat soon switched to gish when it interpreted the confused look on Gerard's face.

  “State your business,” it said in a bored voice.

  “I need a human heart,” Gerard said. “I am willing to trade for it.”

  A huffing rose from the leader, followed by similar noises from the other two.

  “Parts,” the leader ruminated, his tone bordering on contempt. “Fifteenth level.” He barked a phrase to his followers and they stepped forward and passed a glittering rod in front of first Gerard and then Flesh Dog.

  The leader nodded and escorted them to the elevator.

  GERARD HAD seen elevators in books before, but never dreamt he would one day ride in one and so, when the doors closed, he bent to his knees and whispered to Flesh Dog, “Are elevators safe?”

  Flesh Dog, sensing the tremor in Gerard's voice, replied, “Hold on to me if the motion makes you sick.”

  And so Gerard did hug Flesh Dog as they descended into the city's belly. He clung also to the rucksack full of precious stones and old autodoc parts with which he hoped to woo a human heart.

  The levels seemed to crawl by, each more wondrous than the last, more terrible, more strange. Many of the things they saw, Gerard did not understand. They saw winged men with no eyes and vats of flesh and monstrous war engines belching, spitting sparks, and tubes and gears grinding and metal frames for ships in enormous caverns and stockpiles of small arms and old-style lasers and meerkats walking on ceilings and ghosts, images that reflected from the floor, that could not be real, and more meerkats—meerkats in every size and color, crawling all over the engines of war, the tubes, the metal frames.

  Fires burned everywhere—in rods and in canisters, on walls and floors: yellow fires, orange fires, blue fires, tended by meerkats more sinister than their fellows. Meerkats with frozen smiles and cruel claws and mouths that, like traps, shut. The acrid smell of fire came to Gerard through the elevator walls, a bitter taste on his tongue. Around some fires meerkats threw squirming creatures the size of mice into the flames and, once or twice, larger metallic objects, their alloys running together and melting like butter to grease a pan.

  Gerard turned away and ignored the cruelty of the meerkats, tore it from his mind. Lucretia needed a heart. Lucretia needed a heart.

  The weight of earth and rock above him and to all sides made him dizzy and nauseous, but still deeper they went, silent and fearful, into the blackness beneath their feet.

  At the fifteenth floor, they were greeted by a man who resembled the people in the pits: the same lifeless eyes and fixed jaw. But this man was alive and he indicated that Gerard was to follow him down the corridor. The corridor led into a maze of tunnels, all lit by a series of soft, reddish panels set into the ceiling. The smell was dank—a sharp, musty scent as of close quarters and many residents over many generations. The original reliefs carved into the walls had been defaced or done over, so that meerkat heads jutted from human bodies and gish became a weird series of sharp, harsh lines. Unease crept up on Gerard as they walked and, when he looked down, he saw that Flesh Dog's hackles were raised and its fangs bared: a startling white against the black-blue of his muzzle.

  By the time they reached their destination, Gerard was thoroughly lost and could no more have retraced his steps than conjured a heart out of thin air. He clung to his rucksack, and to the thought that Lucretia still needed him.

  The man led them into a large room. It had partitions that hid other sections from them. A chair had been provided, and the silent man gestured to it. Then he left, locking the doors behind him. Gerard sat down and Flesh Dog flopped to rest at his feet.

  “That man smelled of the pits,” Flesh Dog muttered. “Everything smells of the pits.”

  A whirring sound made Gerard sit straighter in his seat and a brace of meerkats appeared from behind a partition. One was tall and white, the other short and yellow. Flesh Dog growled, but they ignored the beast.

  “My name is—” said Whitey, pronouncing a series of high-pitched trills.

  “And I am—” said Yellow. “Together, we are the Duelists of Trade. I assume that is why you are here?”

  Gerard nodded eagerly.

  “First,” said Whitey, “you must be thirsty.”

  He clapped his paws together and the lifeless man reentered, holding a glass of clear liquid. He offered it to Gerard, who took it with nodded thanks.

  “Do not drink!” Flesh Dog hissed. “Do not drink!”

  “Hush,” Gerard said. “Hush.”

  The liquid smelled of berries and the first tentative sip rewarded him with a tangy, smooth taste. He took one more sip to be polite, then heeded Flesh Dog's warning and set the glass by his chair.

  “And now,” said Yellow, “what precisely do you wish to trade for?”

  “A heart,” replied Gerard. “A human heart.” He reached for his rucksack.

  Whitey looked at Yellow, made a huffing sound. They both had fangs that poked out from the muzzle. Red dye designs had been carved into the whiteness, designs like scythes and slender knives in their sharpness. The eyes were slightly slanted and they devoured Gerard with a kind of hunger.

  “What do you have to trade?” asked Yellow.

  The hairs on Gerard's neck rose. The question had been asked with quiet authority and now, and only now, did he think that perhaps these meerkats were not as simple as the ones he had caught in the desert. That they might be dangerous in their own way. But the drink had created a sharp warmth in his stomach and it made him careless. Besides, Lucretia still needed a heart. He reached into the sack.

  “I have gems,” he said, pulling out a huge orange stone he had found at an oasis.

  Whitey took the stone from Gerard's hand. He examined it for a moment, held it up to the light. Then he dashed it to the floor. It shattered. Flesh Dog growled.

  “Gems?” Whitey hissed. “Gems! For a human heart?”

  Gerard shrank back into his chair.

  “But I—”

  “Do you mean to insult me?” His tail twitched and twitched.

  “No! My sister Lucretia is dying! Her heart is bad. I have brought the richest stones I could find . . .”

  Flesh Dog rose onto his haunches, fur bristling, teeth bared.

  Yellow patted Gerard's shoulder.

  “There, there. No need to shock our guest. What else do you have?”

  Here was a warmhearted fellow, a generous fellow. Perhaps Yellow could be satisfied. Gerard scrabbled in his pack, pulled out an autodoc part.

  “There. It is almost new.”

  Yellow's claws bit into his shoulder. Strangely, Gerard felt no pain, though the shock made him bite back a scream.

  “No,” said Yellow, voice like ice. “No, I'm sorry, but this won't do . . . this won't do at all. You come here, down all fifteen levels, spy on us, and offer us used parts?”

  Flesh Dog growled and Gerard shook off Yellow's grasp. Why did he feel so numb? He was a fool, he realized, to have come here. In his ignorance he might well have come into the clutches of villains.

  Gerard felt Flesh Dog against his feet, a position from which to guard him, and an unworthy thought crept into his head.

  “What about Flesh Dog?” he asked Whitey. “I will trade Flesh Dog's talents for a heart . . .” An unfair trade considering the multitude of services Flesh Dog performed, but it was after all a beast. Surely a human l
ife outweighed ownership of a talking beast? He tried to ignore the animal's whining.

  Yellow nodded. “Very good. Very good indeed. However,” and he pushed a button, “not good enough.”

  One of the partitions slid back. Behind it: one hundred Flesh Dogs, their parts not yet assembled, so that the heads sat upon one shelf while the bodies sagged in rows below. Two men, like the ones in the pit, lay sprawled in a corner.

  Gerard gaped at the sight. So many Flesh Dogs. Dead? Decapitated? It made no sense. But then, neither did the numbness spreading through his body.

  Flesh Dog shuddered, shook its head, and moaned.

  One hundred heads, connected by one hundred wires to one hundred nutrient vats, turned to stare at him, with their globby folds of tissue dangling.

  “We are,” said Yellow, pausing, “overstocked on Flesh Dogs at the moment. Human hearts, now, those are rare. We have only one or two.”

  “However,” said Whitey, “there is one way in which we might be persuaded to part with such a heart . . .”

  “Yes?” said Gerard, afraid of the answer. He had volunteered his own heart before, but that had been with the assurance of care, faulty though it might have been, from the autodoc.

  “It would involve both you and Flesh Dog,” said Yellow slyly.

  “It would take six months,” said Whitey.

  The delightful warmth had crept up his chest, the cold following behind.

  “Afterward we would let you go . . .” Whitey held his hands while Yellow caressed his neck. “And in return, we give Lucretia a heart . . .”

  “How soon?” Gerard asked. “How soon?” He shivered under Yellow's touch.

  “Immediately,” whispered Yellow in his ear. “Flesh for flesh. You must simply show us on a map where your crèche lies—you do know what a map is?—and we will send it by hovercraft. We do not break our word.”

  “So what of it, friend Gerard,” said Whitey. “Do you agree?”

  Gerard turned to Flesh Dog.

  “What do you think, Flesh Dog?”

  Flesh Dog peered at him through its fleshy folds. It turned to the Flesh Dog heads on the shelf—and howled. And howled, as though its heart had been broken. Then, with a sideways stutter, it leaned into the floor and was still, trembling around the mouth.

  “Poor, poor machine,” hummed Whitey. “It has forgotten it is a machine. So many years in service. Poor, poor machine . . .”

  “Rip their throats,” growled Flesh Dog from the floor. “Rip their throats?” The growl became a moan, then incoherent. Gerard would have comforted it as it had comforted him in the elevator, but he was too numb.

  “Do you agree?” Yellow asked, one eye on Flesh Dog.

  “Yes,” Gerard said, immobile in the chair now, able only to swivel his head. He imagined he could feel his sister's heartbeat become more regular, could feel a glow of health return to her cheeks. This, and this alone, kept him from panic, from giving over to the fear which ached in his bones. “Yes!” he said with a drunken recklessness, at the same time knowing he had no choice.

  “You will leave with a smile upon your face,” Whitey promised.

  “Oh yes, you will,” sang Yellow gleefully, taking out the knives.

  As for the ending, there are many. Perhaps the next day, the next month, a new face stared up from the pits, the arms of the body reaching out but frozen, the eyes blank. Perhaps the meerkats never honored their agreement. Or . . .

  THAT SUMMER, as the stars watched overhead, an angel descended to the desert floor. And, when it departed, Lucretia arose from the dead and danced like a will-o'-the-wisp over the shifting sands. She danced fitfully, anger and sadness throbbing in her new heart.

  That winter, Flesh Dog and Gerard limped back to the crèche. He did not speak now. Always, he looked toward the south, toward the great sea and the city with no name, as though expecting strangers. Always, as he sat by the fire and sucked his food with toothless gums, Gerard–Flesh Dog looked at Lucretia, the Lucretia who saw only that Flesh Dog had returned a mute, and smiled his permanent smile. Beneath the folds of tissue, Gerard's smoky-green eyes stared, silently begging for rescue. But Lucretia never dared pull back the folds to see for herself, perhaps afraid of what she might find there. Sometimes she would dream of the city, of what had happened there, but the vision would desert her upon waking, the only mark the tears she had wept while asleep.

  After a year, the men of the crèche held a funeral for Gerard. After two years, Lucretia married a wealthy water dowser and, though she treated Flesh Dog tenderly, he was never more than an animal to her.

  BALZAC'S WAR

  I

  “Time held me green and dying

  Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

  —Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

  Balzac and Jamie stumbled upon the flesh dog on a day when the sky, seared white as bleached bone, split open the world and allowed any possibility. Sixteen and free of the crèche, two as one, they ran across the desert floor to the ruined city of Balthakazar. Balzac sucked air as he tried to match her long strides, his tunic and trousers billowing in the wind as if he were a human sail. Just ahead of him he could see Jamie's tangles of black hair snarling out behind her, her burnished mahogany thighs pumping beneath the flurry of white dress plaited at the knee and drawn up between her legs. Within hours his older brother and self-proclaimed guardian, Jeffer, would track them down and, returning them to the crèche, force them to complete their lesson with the boring old water dowser, Con Fegman. No doubt Con Fegman was, at that very moment, recounting for the thousandth time how he had discovered the oasis lakes with a mere twitch-twitch of his fingers.

  Ahead, the ruins shimmered in the heat, the dark metallic glints of edges and curves beginning to resolve into cracked causeways, broken-down battlements, and crooked buildings fifty stories high. The city had in its demeanor, the sand ever in motion across its metal and concrete carapace, a sense of watchfulness, a restlessness.

  At the fringe, where buildings slept like bald and eyeless old men, they found an ancient highway; it shook itself free from the sand as if from a dream of drowning. Once, it might have been eighteen lanes wide, but now, choking on sand, it could fit only four abreast.

  Breathing hard, Balzac slowed to a walk. Sweat dripped down his face. A delicious nervousness pierced his stomach.

  Jamie, hardly winded, turned her face out of the sun.

  “Why did you stop?”

  “Because,” Balzac wheezed, “this is the city . . .”

  Husks and shells, as dead as the hollowed-out, mummified corpses of tortoises and jackals after a drought: the idea of “city” stripped down to its most fundamental elements, the superfluous flourishes of paint, writing, road signs, windows, scoured away in an effort to reveal the unadorned and beautifully harsh truth. Gutted weapons embankments pointed toward the sky, but could not defend the city from the true enemy.

  Jamie interrupted his reverie. “Don't just stand there—we've got to hurry. Your brother will find us soon.”

  He held out his hand.

  She stared at it for a moment, then took it. Her palm felt flushed and warm.

  “I'll deal with Jeffer,” he said with newfound confidence, although as he led her forward he didn't dare to see if she was impressed or just amused.

  Straight to the city's heart they went, the buildings encroaching on the highway, while beneath their feet four-o'clocks, cactus blossoms, and sedge weeds thrust up through cracks in the highway pavement. Scuttling through these miniature oases, anonymous gray lizards waged a war with coppery metal scorpions that pursued with mechanical implacability, their electric stingers singing static to the wind. Con Fegman had shown them one cracked open: Beneath the metal exterior lay the red meat of flesh and blood.

  Balzac loved even this most deadly part of the mystery that was Balthakazar. All the crèche machines—heirlooms from centuries past—broke down regularly and had to be cannibalized to repair other machines, a
nd yet the Con members did nothing. Even practical Jeffer must realize that someday there would be no machines at all. Someday only the dormant technologies of the city would save them.

  “Look at the bones,” Jamie said, and pointed at the ground. Scattered across the highway were whitish-gray shards. It made Balzac shiver to think about it. Bones did not fit his pristine, cold-metal vision of Balthakazar in its prime.

  “How do you know it's bone? It could be plastic or mortar, or almost anything.”

  “It's bone. Why else do you think the Con members don't move us back into the city. Why they don't even want us to visit?”

  “Because at night, creatures come out of the underground levels, things with sharp teeth, and they eat you.”

  Jamie threw her head back and laughed; Balzac could see the smooth skin of her neck and marveled at its perfection even as he blushed and said, “It's not funny.” Yet even her laughter pleased him.

  “You,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I stopped believing in that old tale a long time ago.”

  Something in his expression must have given him away, because she shocked him by saying, gently, “I'm sorry about your parents—really, I am—but the only truth is this,” and she bent to pick up a shard that might have been bone. “My father says no one knows what did this. If these are just old graves opened by the sands or if something killed them all off.” She paused, looked at him oddly, as if weighing her options, then said, “My father brought me here when I was much younger, and I just liked the texture of the bones. I didn't know what they were. All I knew was that they felt good to touch—lightweight and with those porous grooves—and that my father was there with me after so many nights away from the crèche, showing me something that filled him with awe.” She tossed the shard aside. “It's only bits of bone, anyhow. Whatever happened, happened a long time ago. There's nothing to be done for them.”

  True enough, and it was reassuring to know that the years had created a barrier between him and the bones, so he could look at them as curious reminders of another age. How many times had Con Fegman, or even Jeffer, retold the old legends from before the collapse of the cities, as if the mere repetition would fend off the spirits of the dead?