Veniss Underground

by Jeff VanderMeer

  As the wave broke over them, the tableau dissolved in confusion. Mostly, Balzac remembered the stench of gunpowder as he loaded and reloaded—but more slowly, mesmerized by the carnage—and the fleeting images through the smoke . . . Huge bodies flung without reason or care . . . a dark blue-black wall of flesh . . . the swiftness of them, almost as fast as a dirigible, so that a blink could cost a life . . . Sinuous muscles, caricatures of human faces as wincing passengers . . . The bright black slickness of spilled oil . . . Throats ripped from bodies . . . bodies fallen, whirling and dancing in the jaws of the flesh dogs . . . flesh dogs toppling, sawed in half or legs cut off, crawling forward . . . others, shot in the head, falling over on their backs.

  Through the black-white-black of dirigible flashes, Balzac saw Jamie fall in stop-gap motion and his heart stopped beating away from him into the darkness he couldn't see her anywhere. As he put out his hand to pull her up, she was no longer there.

  “Jamie!”

  A flesh dog galloped toward the breach in the line left by Jamie's absence. He spun, shot it, and jumped to the side, the fangs snapping inches from his throat. It slammed into the trench, dead. He got up . . . and when he looked back toward the gap in the line of defenders, she still hadn't filled it, hadn't regained her feet as he'd expected, even when the dirigibles scorched the night into day.

  In his panic, he couldn't breathe, he couldn't think.

  “Jamie!” he shouted over the screams and detonations. “Jamie!”

  And the echo passed along the line to him: “Retreat! Fall back! Breached! Breached!”

  A death sentence for Jamie. A section of the trench had been overrun and to avoid being flanked they must fall back. The retreat, a haphazard, broken-backed affair, piled confusion on confusion, some soldiers running away while others commenced a vigilant rearguard action to allow stragglers to cross back over what was now enemy territory.

  A dirigible exploded directly overhead, the impact knocking Balzac to the ground. Swaths of burning canvas floated down on the combatants. Molten puddles crackled and hissed around Balzac as he got up. Mechanically, he haunted the burning ground, searching for his beloved with his infrared goggles. He dove into ditches, crawled through the most dangerous of firefights, lending his rifle only long enough to clear a path to the next embattled outpost. Each minute of failure added to the heaviness in his chest, the rising sense of helplessness.

  Later, he would recall the black-and-red battlefield as if he had been aboard a dirigible; he would even remember watching himself run across the treacherous ground: a tiny figure leaping recklessly between trenches, scurrying through flames without hesitation. Other times, he would remember it only as a series of starts and stops. He would be running, then fellow soldiers or flesh dogs would be all around him like a sudden rain, and he would be alone again, his thoughts poisoning his skull.

  Only the sight of the creature saved Balzac from the endless searching, for it was only then that he realized Jamie must be dead.

  He sat down heavily, as if shot, and stared at it as it bustled about its business some thirty-five meters away. It was so sleek and functional and not of this world—so much more perfect than anything perfect could be—that for a moment Balzac could not imagine its function: it was merely a beautiful piece of artwork, a thing to be admired for its own clockwork self. How could humankind compete with such a creature? He watched it with mounting dread and guilty fascination.

  It scuttled along on cilia-like feet, almost centipedal, and yet it was clothed in dense, dark fur—long and low to the ground so that it seemed to flow, a species composed of the most elemental combination of flesh and bone. The head, which swiveled 360 degrees, reminded Balzac of a cross between cat and badger, the bright, luminous eyes and curious smile of muzzle conspiring to make the beast almost jolly. Thin, Balzac thought at first. Thinner than thin, the spine caved in on itself so that its back appeared to have been scooped out with a shovel, leaving a long, low compartment walled in by shoulders and flanks. The smooth-squishy sound it made with its thousand limbs he had heard before, on the battlefield, as a low, underlying counterpoint to the screams and explosions.

  But although the beast stunned him with its perfect strangeness, the function it performed stunned him more.

  As he watched, the beast threaded its way through the scattered corpses. Finally, at the body of a young man with open, vacant eyes, and a thin line of blood trickling from the mouth, the beast came to a halt. Then, with a discernable pop, spinning wildly, the expression on its face insanely cheerful, the beast's head unscrewed itself from its body and, with the aid of cilia positioned beneath its now autonomous head, lifted itself over the edge of its own shoulders. Once it had sidled up to the head of its victim, the beast grunted twice and two appendages emerged from the thick fur: a powerful blade of bone and a two-thumbed hand. The blade came down, slicing through the man's neck. Almost simultaneously, the hand grasped the dead soldier's head and placed it over the hole left by the departure of the beast's head. It waited for a moment, then pulled the man's head, which had been “capped” with a pulsing purple slab of flesh, back out of the hole. Balzac watched with horrified fascination as the hand then tossed the capped head into the scooped-out cavity of the beast's body. Both blade and hand disappeared into the beast's grinning head, which then rolled and huffed its way back onto its own neck and twirled twice, before the whole nightmare contraption scuttled on, out of sight.

  Leaving Balzac alone, with the dead.

  AFTER THE battle, behind the lines, they assigned him to Jeffer's guerrilla unit. Jeffer would watch over him as he always had in the past.

  Jeffer placed his hand on Balzac's shoulder. Balzac flinched. Jeffer realized that the gesture was unappreciated, but he tried by an act of will to put all of his love and fear for Balzac into that simple touch of hand on shoulder. Love. He might not have admitted to love a few years ago, beyond the love expected by blood, but Jeffer had seen an unlikely transformation come over Balzac.

  Balzac, with his piercing green eyes and firm chin, had always been handsome to the point of callowness. But slowly, as he and Jamie became closer, and especially in the year after their marriage, Jeffer had seen the callowness stripped away. A certain weight and depth had entered the perfect lines of his brother's mouth, a seriousness and mischievousness that illuminated the eyes. It was as if a fear had conquered Balzac simultaneous with his love for Jamie—fear for the death of his beloved, that their love could not last forever—and that these entangled twins of fear and love had peeled away his shallow qualities like a molting lizard skin.

  Jamie had remarked on it during a tour of the Balthakazar reclamation projects, as they sat and watched Balzac out in the sun, badgering the engineers.

  “I don't know if I would still love him,” she said. “Not if he was just handsome. I used to love him for his mouth and his eyes and his awkwardness, and I wanted to protect him.” She flashed the smile that had driven dozens of men to despair. “Now he's grown up and become real.”

  The memory haunted Jeffer as he said to Balzac, “It will be okay. You don't have to do anything. It won't be long . . .” Jeffer suddenly felt weary. Why must he comfort others at those times he most needed comfort? The muscles in his throat tightened. Ever since he had been left with an eleven-year-old boy who could never again quite be just his little brother it had been this way.

  “I should have rolled in the dirt and disguised my scent,” Balzac said. “I should have become someone else. Then she couldn't have found me. Ever. I shouldn't have let her find me. But where's the kindness in that?”

  Jeffer smiled at the mimicry of Mindle's favorite phrase.

  “Kindness?” Mindle said, surprising them both. Eyes bright and reptilian, he stood in the doorway. “Kindness? How can you speak of kindness? There's no room for it. We've no need of it.”

  Jeffer half expected Mindle to crouch and lap up the blood pooling around the flesh dog's body. Who could predict the actio
ns of a child who had never been a child?

  “Are you finished with the barricades, Mindle?” Jeffer asked.

  “With the barricades? Yes.”

  “Then wait outside until dawn. Stand watch from the second-story window.”

  Mindle stepped inside the room. He licked his lips. “Yes, sir. But first I thought we might interrogate the prisoner.”

  “The prisoner will be dead soon.”

  “Then we must be quick—quicker, even,” he said, and took another step into the room.

  “Take up your post on the second floor,” Jeffer ordered.

  Mindle took a third step into the room.

  Before Jeffer could react, Balzac snatched up Con Fegman's rifle from the floor. He aimed it at Mindle.

  Balzac said: “Go. Away.”

  Mindle smiled sweetly and turned to Jeffer, one eyebrow raised.

  “Do as he says, Mindle,” Jeffer said. “And Balzac—put down the rifle!”

  Mindle shrugged and turned away.

  Balzac tossed the weapon aside and hunkered over the flesh dog's body. His brother's gauntness, the way the autodoc's light seemed to shine through him, unnerved Jeffer. Such an odd tableau: his brother crouched with such love and such gentleness over the massive body of the flesh dog, as if it were his own creation.

  Jeffer tottered forward under the spell of that image, his intentions masked even from himself, but Balzac waved him away.

  “Please, let me be,” Balzac said. “Watch the window. Watch Mindle.”

  Even as he nodded yes, Jeffer hesitated, wondering for the first time if he could aim a rifle at his own brother. He walked over to the balcony and watched Balzac and Jamie from the darkness. Jamie's face was pale, her lips gray. The beast's flesh surrounded her like a rubbery cowl.

  He marveled at the affection in Balzac's voice as his brother touched the creature's face and asked, “How do you feel?”

  “Cold. Very cold. I can't feel my legs. I think I'm dying. I think I'm already dead, Balzac. Why else should I feel so cold?”

  Balzac flinched, and Jeffer thought: Think? Feel? Can it do either?

  “It's a cold night,” Balzac told her. “You need a blanket. I wish I had a blanket for you, my love.”

  “Cold. Very cold,” she said, in a dreamy, far-off voice.

  “I'll find something for you,” Balzac said, his voice cracking with grief. “Jeffer, I'm going to look through the supplies downstairs—maybe there's a blanket. Watch her for me?”

  “She's almost . . . I mean, I don't think we have a blanket.”

  “I know! I know that. Just watch her.”

  Balzac scrambled to his feet and fled through the ruined doorway, leaving Jeffer with the enemy. As he circled her, he wondered if he should kill her.

  “Who is there?” Jamie said. “Are you cold, too?”

  At the sound of that voice, Jeffer stepped away from her, made sure she couldn't see him. What if she recognized him? What if she spoke his name again? What then?

  In the corner, Con Fegman stirred and said, in a singsong voice, “The sand toad told the sand itself and the sand told the toads and the toads told the sand and . . . and . . . and . . .” He faded back into unconsciousness, the myth trapped between his withered lips.

  Jeffer tried to ignore Con Fegman. He had so resigned himself to the old man's death that he sometimes started in surprise during Con Fegman's moments of lucidity, as if a ghost had drawn breath.

  “I want to get up,” Jamie said, face tightening as she strained to move the flesh dog's leg muscles. “I can't seem to get up.”

  Jeffer knew better than to interrogate her. If he couldn't shoot her, he would have to content himself with watching her.

  In the early days, before the full-fledged invasion, he had volunteered to help capture and interrogate such surgically altered specimens. They never had much to say and, anyhow, who could tell if what the prisoners said was authentic or preprogrammed? The heads when separated from the bodies would live on unimpaired for two or three hours, and perhaps there was a hint of miracles in this delayed mortality, but surely nothing more.

  Locklin, the subject of Jeffer's final interrogation, had believed in miracles, and as Jeffer stared at Jamie he could not help but see Locklin's face superimposed over hers.

  Locklin had laughed at him even during those moments of the interrogation that most resembled torture. When asked a question, the creature would say its name and make a low, bubbling laugh through its flesh dog and human mouths. The violet eyes would widen, his craggy, heavily tanned and scarred face sprawled across the flesh dog's forehead. “I am Locklin today, but tomorrow? You will all be me.”

  Locklin claimed to come from a crèche located in the far north, nestled against a frozen sea. Cliffs four hundred meters high sheltered them from the cruel winds, and from these same cliffs came the enemy in great numbers, on a winter's day when many of the crèche were dying from cold; the heaters had failed and the crèche's leadership had wavered on whether to wait out the weather or to abandon the crèche.

  “But the m'kat,” Locklin offered near the end, contempt for Jeffer poisoning his voice, “they fixed us up! Ho! They surely did. Immortality in return for service—a fine, fine body that will run forever, and we said yes! We said yes, all of us shivering in that frozen place . . . as most of you will say yes in your turn.”

  Always it was flesh dogs fashioned from members of this particular crèche that Jeffer found least like a poorly animated holovid. If some responded like sand through a sieve to his questioning, then these hardened types were steel traps. For they had not just pledged allegiance to the “m'kat” but worshipped them, giving up their children to immortality and abandoning their old religions. This betrayal of species terrified Jeffer. Among the Con members it was the greatest of all fears: to be captured by an enemy that did not know mercy as humans knew it, an enemy unparalleled in the art of psychological warfare. To be sent back in the guise of a flesh dog, mouthing your own name or the name of your beloved as the creature fought you.

  Only now did Jeffer realize he had talked to Locklin too much, for as he watched Jamie, Locklin's hypnotic words drifted in and out of his thoughts: “You could live forever this way, if you would only submit . . .” A great sadness welled up inside Jeffer, for he and his brother had become estranged; it was there in Balzac's words, in his face: that the love he had for Jamie had become monstrous, had taken him over and eaten him from the inside out. Did Balzac sense a truth to Locklin's words that escaped him? A chill crept into Jeffer's skin. He could already foresee an outcome monstrous beyond imagination and he told himself he would not help in that way—he could not—and he tried to convince himself this was because he loved his brother, not because he stood alone in the same room with a creature so familiar to him and yet so alien.

  MINDLE HAD been Balzac's hateful shadow as he rummaged through their meager cache of supplies for a blanket. The boy had said nothing, had followed almost without sound, but Balzac could feel that gaze blasting the back of his head, scorching his scalp. He didn't mind; better to know where Mindle was than not. At times on his miniquest, he even tried talking to Mindle, and took a perverse pleasure in his facade of cheeriness, knowing it must make the boy burn even brighter. Burn, then. Burn up.

  But there was no blanket, and with each step back up the stairs, the facade faded a little more until he could barely walk for the weariness that pulled at him. On the third-floor landing, Balzac heard Mindle's retreating footsteps and was glad of it, not wasting time with a taunt, but ducking into the room where Jamie still lay in the autodoc's blue light. Jeffer stood to one side.

  “I couldn't find a blanket. You can go back to the window.”

  Jeffer gave Balzac a wan smile, but Balzac only slumped down beside Jamie.

  “Jamie,” he said when Jeffer had gone back out onto the balcony.

  “I'm cold.” A voice like an echo, rich with phlegm or blood.

  “Cold like the oasis lakes—do
you remember the oasis lakes?”

  He thought he saw her mouth curl upward. She gave a little hiccupping laugh.

  “I remember. I remember the cold. It makes me sneeze.” Then, doubtful: “That was a long time ago . . .”

  The water had been cold. They'd dove in together, into the hardness of the water, swum through it, their muscles aching. They'd snorted water, gurgled it, luxuriating in the decadence of so much water, and surfaced to kiss, breathlessly, under the stars. Her lips had tasted of passion fruit and he had pressed her into the shallows where they could stand, then moved away from her shyly, only to find her pulling him back toward her and putting his hand between her legs; making sharp, quiet sounds of pleasure as his hands moved lightly on her.

  But, faced with her in the flesh, he could not hold on to the memory of the emotion. It dissipated into the grime and darkness: a dimly glittering jewel against whose sharp edges he could only bleed.

  “We made love there,” he said.

  Silence.

  Dawn would come soon and they would have to move on while they had the chance.

  Jamie whimpered and moaned and cried out in her half death, half sleep. He was cruel (wasn't he?) to prolong her pain.

  He could feel Jeffer staring at him. If not Jeffer, then Mindle. Mindle hated him. Jeffer loved him. But they both wanted the same thing.

  Balzac let his gaze linger over Jamie's face, the thickness of it that had overtaken the grace, as if the architects that had put her back together could not quite re-create their source material. This was the woman who had worked side by side with him to rebuild the city, she planting trees as he excavated and drew plans. He had even grown to enjoy the planting—long hours, yes, and the work made his fingers bleed and blister, but he had liked the smell of dirt, enjoyed the rhythms of the work and the comfort of her presence at his side.

  He thought of the times he had made love to her on the cool desert sand under the stars, and how they would sneak back to the crèche in the years before they were married, there to lie in bed for hours afterward, talking or telling stories. The sweet smell of her, the taste of her tongue in his mouth, these were real, as was the peace that came over him when he was inside her, so very close to her, as close to her as he could, to be inside her and looking into her eyes.