“What does it mean?” Balzac asked Jeffer, whose face was still clouded with thought.
“I don’t know. We will have to tell the Con members.”
“Where do you think it went?” Jamie asked.
“I think . . . I think it was a messenger. A beacon. I don’t know.”
“It was incredible,” Jamie said.
The afternoon shadows so emphasized the brazen lines of her eyes, nose, cheekbones, that her image burned its way into Balzac’s heart. He would have willingly lost himself in her, if only for the mystery he could not unravel – that her beauty was as luminous and sharp-edged as that of the winged creature. He experienced a rush of vertigo, fought for his balance on the edge of a darkly glittering future that would bind her to him beyond any hope of untangling.
Then he was falling again, willingly, gripped by sudden happiness, laughing as he saw the adventure of their lives together spreading out before him.
Jeffer and Mindle stood side by side at the top of the stairs, looking down through the early morning gloom of dust motes. Mindle shook with spasms of tears, undoing all the savagery of his face. Below, on the landing, Balzac’s body lay sprawled, a wide, black hole burned through his back. His hands were tightly clasped around the flame-distorted head of Jamie, whose lidless eyes stared sightless at them. Even in the shadows, Jeffer could see the thin, pale line of his brother’s mouth fixed in a smile.
An emptiness Jeffer could not quantify or describe opened up inside of him. For a moment, he could not contain it, and he looked over at Mindle, intending to kill the boy should he discern even a trace of mockery upon that ancient face. But the tears had washed away the predatory sarcasm, the bloodlust, and he was almost vulnerable again, almost boyish again.
Jeffer slung the laser rifle over his shoulder and motioned to Mindle.
“Come on – if it’s safe, we can bury them in the amphitheater,” he said.
Horror, yes, and pain, and sadness – and yet, this relief: It was over. It was finished. And this final thought, which overcame the guilt: I’m alive. I survived it.
Mindle looked disoriented for a moment, as if he had been dreaming or listening to a distant and terrible music. Then the mask slid back over his face and he sneered, muttered a hollow “Yes,” and followed as Jeffer walked down the steps to the body of his brother, the sun warm on his back.
VENISS EXPOSED:
PRECURSORS AND EPIPHANIES
Note: This afterword contains spoilers. It details the genesis of the original creator of the uplifted meerkats, providing backstory not found in the novel or in “Balzac’s War”.
The first thing Bunadeo saw was the ceiling of the laboratory: the grain of rough, dark stone smoothed by human technologies. The first thing he heard was the rushing surge of the sea, which he mistook for the sound of his own pumping blood. The first face he saw was that of Madrid Sybel, smiling. No memories haunted Bunadeo’s head. Although an adult, he did not even know his name until Madrid told him.
“Who am I?” he asked, his throat dry.
“Bunadeo,” the smiling face told him.
“Where am I?”
“In a kingdom by the sea,” the smiling face said.
The room smelled of plastic and of brine.
He fell into darkness for awhile. When he woke, he knew little more, but he had held onto his name: Bunadeo. He was Bunadeo…
Madrid Sybel, the first bioneer to create a semi-sentient species, lived in a labyrinth of caves that opened out onto a beach of black rocks. The caves lay at the bottom of barren cliffs. Dayton Central, a city that would someday be known as Veniss, sat atop the cliffs. The AIs that ran Dayton Central bankrolled Madrid. He spent all day creating and extinguishing life in his cave laboratories, accompanied only by his assistant Bunadeo and a little girl named Nicola. Madrid had a long white beard that framed a long face from which peered startling blue eyes. Those eyes made his face look like a disguise to Bunadeo, because they belonged to someone much younger. Nicola had blonde hair she tied up in braids and eyes that stared into the middle distance. She rarely said anything.
Bunadeo did not know that Nicola was actually his mother, in a sense. Madrid had told him that his parents were dead, that his lack of memories meant he had suffered a terrible trauma before the AIs had given him over into Madrid’s hands. This was not true. Madrid had created both Bunadeo and Nicola. Madrid had created Nicola from the DNA of Bunadeo’s birth mother. Bunadeo had been created, nurtured, and birthed in a vat, using ovum from the original Nicola. Madrid had no idea how they had died; he knew only that the AIs had provided him with a fresh source of DNA. As he had stared down at his creation as it woke for the first time, Madrid hadn’t known whether he would keep it or discard it and start afresh. Something about the look of innocence on Bunadeo’s face, the way he asked his questions, made Madrid keep him.
Bunadeo never found out about this hesitation, but many years later, he did suffer a hint of his connection to Nicola. As he stared down at a woman preserved beneath a protective sheath, buried beneath a mound of severed legs, he had a flicker of awareness that had no scientific basis. This sudden piercing pain in his head, his heart, almost led to a reversal of his fate. For a moment, he was back by the sea, by the rocks, and he could see the little girl Nicola standing beside him. But the image disintegrated, the thought fled, the erosion continued…
Madrid taught Bunadeo his Living Art, but did not let him into his life. It took many years before he could think of his creation as more than an assistant. The role he played, that of an inattentive father, hurt Bunadeo, for too often he thought of Madrid as more than his mentor. His relationship with Nicola was more mysterious. Sometimes she would behave toward him in a motherly fashion; at other times, she lived so completely inside her own head that no one could reach her. But he was grateful to both of them; he had no other family.
It took Bunadeo as long to understand the secrecy of their mission as to understand his family. Madrid had told Bunadeo from the very beginning that neither he nor Nicola could ever leave the caves or the seashore. Although he became used to this fact, he never liked it; sometimes watching holovids of the city above them helped assuage his curiosity, sometimes it just made him angry.
The work itself he found fascinating. They captured pseudowhales and married their genes to those of apes and kangaroos. They unfroze DNA from the extinct elephant and wedded it to that of mice, rats, birds, and frogs. Sometimes, it seemed as if they were very close to making a sentient life form. Sometimes, the excesses of their failures would send a tide of blood washing down one edge of the lab floor to the other, mimicking the wildness of the sea at their backs. The smell at such times made Bunadeo tremble, but it also excited him. It was the smell of life, tangy and rich. The screams, the shrieks, however, terrified him, as some malformed creature became a second-hand memory.
Most days, the lab work fell between the two extremes. Bunadeo wrote about it in his holographic diary. He kept the diary because he had the constant fear that he would one day wake up and his mind would be as blank of experience as the first time he had seen Madrid’s smiling face. Sometimes, he would wake up in the middle of the night, screaming, and would find himself compelled to record even his nightmares. Better nightmares than nothing. Once, Bunadeo wrote this in his diary:
Today we tried lizards. When I came into the laboratory, Madrid was staring at a lizard on a tray. It had two tails and three heads. It was golden brown, scaly, and almost dead. The eyes stared up at me, the glassiness telling me it had had enough, that it was weary, that this would never work. It smelled like burnt grass. I think it was trying to talk. I don’t know what it wanted to tell us. To stop? To give up? I’m still not sure.
But Madrid never gave up. Every day, year after year, he worked at the task the AIs had assigned to him, Bunadeo helping him. Every few months, the AIs would visit to discuss Madrid’s progress. They ignored Bunadeo and Nicola. They used holographic manifestations to show themselves
: giant manta rays, winged rhinos, minotaurs, chimeras. Their presence scared Bunadeo, who felt more like a ghost with their ghost-like presence all around him. The electric discharge of their avatars tasted like lime on his tongue. Madrid talked to the hulking shapes as if they were old friends who had stopped by to chat. Bunadeo never understood why the AIs wanted Madrid to create a new intelligent biological life form.
“Why do they let us do this?” he asked his mentor once as they sat looking out at the sea.
Madrid winked and replied, “Because they’re curious.”
“Just because they’re curious?”
“Maybe they want to see what happens to humans because of it. Maybe they even think…”
But Madrid never completed the sentence. Instead, a distant look on his face, he got up and walked back into the caves. Bunadeo didn’t see him for three days, and Madrid never said where he’d gone.
Over time, Bunadeo realized that Madrid hid things from him. For awhile, he thought Madrid was trying to protect him, that Madrid’s distance came from a love so strong that it had the discipline to remain removed from that which it loved. Much later, when he turned this thought over and over in his mind like a coin between his fingers, he wasn’t so sure.
Did their work have a hidden purpose? Had Madrid hidden something from the AIs? Bunadeo already knew that Madrid kept a boat concealed by the rocks and would sometimes use it to visit an island just visible on the horizon.
He only knew about the boat because he had stumbled across it one day when his research took him to the tidal pools in the rocks. Thousands of creatures lived in these pools. Staring down into the miniature ecosystems—the sky a lathe of boiling blue above the waves that, foaming white, crushed themselves against the blackened rock—made Bunadeo feel less isolated, less removed. At times, the brine stench overwhelmed him, and he would crouch for an hour beside one pool, soaking up the smell and the rush-withdrawal of the water. He would watch a starfish move across a bed of seaweed, a tiny translucent shrimp pick crumbs of food from the tentacles of a sea anemone.
Usually Nicola came along with him, to help carry the specimen containers. She would stand at the edge of the tidal pools, weighed down with containers, while Bunadeo waded into the pools. If Nicola spoke to Bunadeo, it would usually be during these expeditions; the sea seemed to bring her out of her thoughts, into the world.
Other mysteries besides the boat became revealed to him through the tidal pools. Once, he caught a tiny fish and kept it in a tank in his room. Over time, he experimented with increasing its size and numbing its reactions to pain. Many decades later, he would live inside of this fish and be reminded of the place in which he had found it. Another time, Nicola gave a little gasp and pointed to a stinking bed of washed-up kelp. A man’s head had become enmeshed in the kelp, the body hidden by the deep green fronds. The surprise of it left Bunadeo dislocated for a moment, in search of context. A sudden thought came to him, later recorded in his diary: “The kelp looked like skin to me, like the dark, oily skin of some beast. And the man’s head, so pale, looked as if it had been set into the side of that beast.”
Bunadeo stood there for a long time, Nicola beside him, staring at the man. Later, the image would re-enter his memory like an air bubble struggling to rise to the surface, and he would use it to create the first flesh dog. In a sense, everything Bunadeo would later become he found first in the tidal pools beyond the caves.
For more than twenty years, Bunadeo, Madrid, and Nicola lived in the caves, always a few steps away from success. Every morning, Bunadeo would rise from the cot in his small room and join Madrid and Nicola in the laboratory, where a new subject might already be squirming on the examination tables. Every few months, the AIs would manifest themselves, talk to Madrid, and dematerialize again.
Every year, Nicola’s agelessness became more and more apparent. She never changed, and as the years passed, Bunadeo felt more and more estranged from her, imagining a closeness between them in previous years that had never existed in reality. He felt as if he was being flung along by the current of a powerful river, while she had found a rock to cling to; soon, he would be so far downriver that he would be unable to see her. This fact began to obsess him more than his fear of losing his memory. Even Madrid aged, if slowly. Madrid, meanwhile, laughed at Bunadeo’s hints that Madrid should also transform him into a creature that never aged.
“Everything in its time, Bunadeo,” Madrid would say. “You should be in less of a hurry to become young again and in more of a hurry to learn. I won’t always be here.”
Madrid knew that the AIs had become impatient with him. New research using modified meerkats had been promising, but success might still be many years off. He also knew that when Bunadeo could slow his own aging process, his apprenticeship would be over.
For Bunadeo’s part, he told himself he resented Nicola, when he actually already missed her.
The end came suddenly. One day Madrid took him aside and told him to visit the most remote area of the caves to capture a particular type of bat. When he returned two days later, the laboratory had been destroyed by men sent by the AIs. He had only to consult the surveillance holograms to find out who had been responsible. The equipment had been dismantled or crushed into little pieces. The test animals had been slaughtered or were missing. Madrid and Nicola had been butchered: they lay in a crumpled heap on the floor, surrounded by dried spatters of blood. Nicola had died in the middle of a scream. Madrid looked peaceful, a characteristic smile upon his lips. From the wounds, Bunadeo knew that they had died slowly. The loss overwhelmed him. He would have been moved to weep, if he hadn’t seen beside them a perfect replica of his own body, also dispatched in bloody fashion. Seeing this, his grief became transformed into a different kind of shock.
Bunadeo circled the body several times, mouth agape. He prodded it with his finger. He lay down beside it. He rolled it over. It looked more like him than he did. It was perfect in every detail. Except that Bunadeo’s eyes were blue, and when he pulled back the eyelids on the body, he found that his doppelganger’s eyes were brown.
A thought occurred to him. In the grip of a secret emotion, Bunadeo crouched over Madrid’s body and opened its eyes. They, too, were brown, not blue. Only Nicola’s eyes were the same color as before.
He lay there beside the Nicola body, under the intermittent flickering of the ceiling lights, and wondered if he had gone insane. But in the morning, when he woke, the bodies still lay there, stiffening. Including his own. The discovery that Madrid’s hidden boat had disappeared from its mooring near the rocks prompted him to write in his diary:
I cannot be sure of anything, but I believe that Madrid is alive somewhere. That he knew this would happen. That he purposefully sent me away so I would not be killed. That he may or may not have fashioned a double for Nicola, too. That she may also be alive, somewhere. That I do not know why they would not take me with them, why he would send me away instead, why he would want me to find those bodies like that, and why he would want me to doubt not only him but my own thoughts, because how can I ever be sure? About any of this?
Although the AIs’ men and the AI avatars had left long before his arrival, Bunadeo did not feel safe in the caves, among the ruined equipment. He took the bodies out to the sea and let the current take them. The strangeness of watching his own likeness slide away into the waves would never leave him. It lent a chill to the air, a sharpness to the contours of the sky. He stood on the rocks until the bodies had disappeared and then stared out at the island. If Madrid had sought refuge there, it meant he did not want Bunadeo by his side. So be it.
Before leaving his home, he went into his room one last time. There, he found the fish he had taken from the tidal pool still alive. He also found one of his creatures, a large ball of pregnant flesh with no eyes, no brain, and no legs. He took both the fish and the creature with him. He also gathered together the few unbroken pieces of equipment. Finally, he took vials of both Madrid and Nicola’s
DNA from previously stored samples.
Then, numb, he found his way out of the caves and into Veniss Underground. There was nothing for him above ground. He could never live there as long as the AIs ruled; he could never be sure they wouldn’t want him killed, or worse.
Bunadeo never saw Madrid or Nicola again, or at least not in their original forms. He hid himself in Veniss Underground, going as deep as he could, taking any job to survive, often cold, often beaten, often hungry. Wherever he went, he could not drive the thoughts from his head: that, ultimately, Madrid hadn’t wanted him, or, worse, that it had been Madrid’s body on the floor of the laboratory and Bunadeo had betrayed his memory by not trusting him. This second possibility hurt more than the first. As time put more distance between him and the event, Bunadeo even had days when he imagined that the dead Madrid’s eyes had been blue, not brown. The brine of the sea was always in his mouth.
When he did begin to experiment again, a year later, within the confines of his tiny apartment, it was as much to distract himself as from any interest in the research. He was working for a psychewitch at that point, looking into people’s minds with crude equipment. It paid enough for him to begin to buy what he needed, and gave him experience he would later find useful.
The pregnant ball gave birth in that month. It gave birth and died, but what it gave birth to was a miracle: a modified meerkat that could reason, could talk after a fashion. Bunadeo had placed the embryo of a dog-lemur inside the creature, not a meerkat. Only Madrid could have performed the operation to switch them.
The meerkat did not last long—only two months—but that was enough for Bunadeo to begin to understand where Madrid had made a mistake. And to realize that by leaving the creature in his room, Madrid sent him a clear message. At least, this was Bunadeo’s reasoning. He could not tell for sure. But he preserved the meerkat’s DNA.
Over the next few years, he worked hard to duplicate Madrid’s success, and to improve upon it, despite several interruptions. The first period of civil unrest, during which the human population of Dayton Central tried to overthrow its AI overlords, led to horrible suffering for Bunadeo. His paranoia about his memory returned, he lost his position with the psychewitch, and he had to take a series of illegal, demeaning, and often morally repugnant jobs. He also fell into the habit of having surgeries performed that appended limbs or just sections of flesh from other creatures onto his own form. This intrusion of foreign flesh gave him great pleasure.
Balzac's War Page 5