Veniss Underground

  “Come on,” Balzac said. “Let's go.” This time he did not hold her hand.

  The pavement became hot, cool, then hot again as the sun sliced through the spaces between structures. The landscape had changed, become both rougher and smoother until buildings were all edges or had no edges at all. Others gleamed with an odd hint of self-repair, their skins smooth and shiny.

  They encountered the hull of a rusted hovercraft over which, looking like a weathered lizard, lay the leathery, discarded skin of a dirigible. Balzac did not recognize the faded crèche insignia on the wrinkled cloth. Near the hovercraft lay a misshapen rock, as tall as two or three autodocs. The top of the rock was black and shiny.

  “Let's sit down for a moment,” Balzac said.

  “If you must.”

  “I must. And besides, it's not just to rest. I've got leechee fruit.”

  They climbed up onto the rock and lay down on its smooth surface. He handed her a leechee and bit into his own, the juice dribbling down his chin. The fruit helped to rejuvenate him and he soon became acutely aware of her rising and falling chest, the sharp lines of her legs, the faint musk of sweat. She ate the leechee in huge bites, ignoring the juice as it trickled down her neck and stained her dress.

  The rock was warm and it relaxed him to lie there with her, so close together. Confidence rising, he tried to explain why the city intrigued him so. He spoke of its rich history, how it must be considered the home of their ancestors, how it used structural designs and technologies unknown to the crèche.

  Propped up on one shoulder, Jamie gave him no encouragement. He stuttered, groping for the words that might unlock a true sense of mystery, of scale.

  Stymied, he started all over again, afraid that when he opened his mouth, the words would come out jumbled and senseless.

  “The city is alive.”

  “But it isn't,” she said. “It's dead.”

  “But you're so wrong. I mean, you are wrong.” He squinted at the city's outline until his eyes burned. “I see these buildings and they're like dozens of individual keys, and if I can turn enough of the keys, the city resurrects itself. Take that thing there.” He pointed to a rectangular patch of sand dotted with eroded stone basins and bounded by the nubs of walls. “That's not just a box of sand. That used to be a garden or a park. And take that strip.” He pointed to a slab of concrete running down the middle of the highway. “That wasn't just a divider for traffic lanes—that was a plot of plants and grass.”

  “You mean that you see the city as if it were organic.”

  “Yes! Exactly! And if I can rebuild the city, you could bring back the plants and the trees, flesh out the skeleton. There's a water source here—there must be—how else could the land support a city? In the old books, if you look, you'll see they used plants for decoration.”

  “Plants for decoration,” she said slowly. Then she lay back down against the rock.

  His heart pounded against his rib cage. He had made her see it, if only for a moment.

  A silence settled over them, the sun making Balzac lazy, the leechee fruit a coolness in his stomach.

  After a time, Jamie said, “No rain for at least a month.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The water dowser's last lesson—don't you remember, stupid?” She punched his shoulder. “Look at the clouds. They're all thin and stretched out, and no two are grouped together.”

  Balzac shielded his eyes against the sun and examined the clouds. At the edge of his vision, he thought he saw a series of black slashes.

  “What are those?”

  Jamie sat up. “I see them. They look like zynagill.”

  The scavenger birds circled an area east of the highway. Balzac shivered and stood quickly.

  “Maybe we should go back now. Maybe if we find Jeffer before he finds us, he won't be as angry.”

  But a sudden intensity and narrowness had crept over Jamie's features—a stubborn look Balzac had seen many times before. It was the look she wore in class when she disagreed with her teacher. It was the look she wore with her friends when they wanted to do something she didn't want to do.

  “No,” she said. “No. We should go see what they've found.” She shinnied down the side of the rock, folded her arms, and stared up at him. “Well?”

  Balzac stood atop the rock for several seconds, his pulse rapid, the weal of sky and sun burning above while all around lay the highway, littered with bones. Only when he looked into Jamie's eyes and realized she doubted him did he move; even then he hesitated, until she said, “If you don't go, I'm going alone.”

  She held out her hand. Her palm was callused from hard work. He grasped it awkwardly, leaning against her compact weight as he jumped down off the rock. As they came together, her lips brushed his cheek; where she had kissed him the skin tingled and flushed bright red. He could smell her hair, was caught between its coolness and the heat of her lips.

  But she was already moving away from him and before he could react, she shouted, “Catch me if you can!” and sprinted down the highway, smiling as she looked back over her shoulder.

  He stood there for a moment, drunk with the smell and feel of her. When he did begin to run, she had a lead of more than a city block. Even worse, she didn't so much thread her way through the fields of broken stone as charge through them, leaping curved girders as blithely as if playing coddleskatch back at the crèche. To see her run for the joy of it, careless of danger, made him reckless too, and as much as his nature would allow he copied her movements, forgetting the zynagill and their destination, watching only her.

  Balzac had gained so much ground that he bumped into her when she finally stopped running.

  A mountain of sand rose above them. Vaguely pyramid-shaped, it buttressed the sides of a massive amphitheater. Balzac could just see, at the top of the sand pile, winged phalanges curling out from the circular lip. Above, the zynagill wheeled, eyeing them suspiciously.

  Jamie moved away from Balzac. She pointed at the sand and bent to one knee. Balzac knelt beside her, saw what she saw: an outline in the sand, seven times larger than his own palm, so large that at first he didn't realize it was a paw print. A greenish purple fluid had congealed inside the paw print. Several more indentations followed the first, leading up the side of the amphitheater, gradually obscured by a huge swath of sand where a heavy body had dragged itself forward.

  Jamie traced the paw's outline and sand fell inward.

  “Whatever it is, it's hurt,” Balzac said. “Probably dangerous. We should wait for Jeffer.”

  “No. Let's at least walk up to the top and see if we can find it.” Jamie softened the rebuke with another dazzling smile, which made his ears buzz.

  Helpless, Balzac took her hand when she offered it. He let her lead him as they trudged up the slanted wall of sand, parallel to the purple trail until, his sense of balance nearly betraying him, his muscles aching, they stood at the lip, blasted by the sudden wind.

  He looked out across the city. Now, finally, it revealed the mystery of its structure: a broken pattern of radial spikes piercing toward a center to the southeast, obscured by the sun and the distance. The sight confounded him, and he almost lost his balance for a second time. No longer did he have to fill in the gaps with his imagination. The buildings at the center of the spokes, those would have to be governmental or administrative in purpose; this would explain their archaic shapes, the arches and the domes. The remains of one- to three-story buildings immediately north of the center had to be the former homes of the city's leaders. Each revelation led to another until he forgot his chapped lips, the grumblings of his stomach, and the beast. He could have stood there forever, linking the city's streets in his mind, but Jamie tugged on his arm and pointed down, into the amphitheater.

  “Look,” she said.

  The amphitheater had concentric circles of seats, most nubs of plastic and metal. Railings trailed off into open space while a series of gap-toothed entranceways spiraled down into the circ
le of what had at one time been a stage but now could only be called a hundred-meter-wide depression. At its center a large, black hole spiraled farther downward. Halfway between the edge of the stage and the hole lay a dark shape, onto which the zynagill, leathery wings aflap, would land, then relaunch themselves. Not a single zynagill used its double-edged beak to saw at the flesh.

  “It's some kind of animal,” Balzac said. “And it's dead. Satisfied?”

  Jamie stared at him, then peered into the amphitheater again, as if weighing his unease against the mystery of the beast.

  “Jeffer needs to see this,” she said. “It might be important to the crèche.”

  “He'll just get mad at us.”

  “You worry too much,” Jamie said. “Stay here—I'm going down.”

  “Wait,” he said, but he was already climbing down into the amphitheater because he knew he couldn't stop her.

  By the time they reached the stage, Balzac noted with satisfaction that Jamie was breathing hard. A thin layer of sand covered the stage, broken only by the animal's purple-tinged drag marks. Jamie ran forward. Balzac followed cautiously behind. The zynagill loitered, their leathery hooded heads bobbing nervously, then rose as one, the rasp of their wings, the sudden cry of alarm, making Balzac think he saw movement from the body itself.

  The body lay on its side, heavy flanks rising to the height of Balzac's chest. A dog. Coarse, black fur covered the body and the legs, sparser only at the paws, which ended in dulled double-edged hooks. The jowly, horrific head ran into a muscular, thick neck that disappeared into the torso without delineation between the two. The head lay against the ground and from the open mouth the purple tongue lolled, running over fangs longer and more numerous than Balzac's fingers. A pool of green-and-purple liquid had congealed near the mouth. The dog's eyes, staring blankly into the far wall of the amphitheater, shared the purple tint of the tongue, although they were partially hidden by loose flaps of skin; these same flaps camouflaged a bulbous knot of tissue, twice as large as a clenched fist, which jutted from the forehead. The beast could not have died more than an hour previous and yet it had an unnatural, almost mechanical, stiffness. The curled, taut quality of the limbs made him wonder how it could have walked or run. He had a sudden, chilling image of the creature dragging itself across the desert floor. The thought of the creature crippled disturbed him more than the thought of it whole.

  Jamie knelt beside the forepaws. She took one paw in her hands.

  “It's raw.”

  Five pads formed the underside of the paw. The pads had been worn to redness and the sides of the paw were as smooth as wind-washed stone.

  “This beast traveled a long way just to die here. I wonder where it came from—another city or maybe even from beyond the desert. How could anything with such thick fur come from the desert?”

  “It looks dangerous to me.”

  “It's dead, Balzac.”

  “Even so.”

  Balzac's gaze traveled the length of the creature and beyond until, light-headed with dread, he realized the beast's destination: the hole. The hole that must spiral down into level beneath level, threading its way through catacombs without number, musty and old, where lived the creatures from nightmare.

  “Jamie. Jamie, we should go. We should find Jeffer.”

  “Too late now. He'll find us.” She did not bother to look up, but held the paw gently in her hand. “Such a distance to travel.”

  The sun beat down, hot and withering. It stung Balzac's eyes and brought beads of sweat dripping onto the bridge of his nose. But, despite the sun, the creature had no smell, no stench of decay. This creature had padded across the desert, the mountains, perhaps, and seen things Balzac could only imagine, and it had had the singleness of purpose to head for the darkest hole it could find when its legs had begun to give out . . . and it had no smell.

  He wanted to run, to finally leave Jamie behind if she insisted on being so foolish. But, foolish or not, she was right: It was too late, for at that moment Jeffer appeared above them, staring down from the lip of the amphitheater.

  II

  “It seems to him there are a thousand bars,

  and behind the bars, no world.”

  —Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Panther”

  Ten years after the amphitheater, on the forty-eighth night of the war for Balthakazar, Jeffer saw Jamie for the last time and his mind wobbled strangely. He stood on the third-story balcony of the crumbling, baroque building he had chosen as a resting place for his men; but seeing her he was suddenly adrift, the stone beneath his feet shockingly porous, apt to fall apart and spill him onto the street below. Seeing her, he could not help but curl inward, downward, into a spiral of memories, surfacing only much later to the implications of her existence below him. Almost in self-defense, his thoughts circled back to the one ritual that had proven impervious to change: When he slept in those years before and after the amphitheater, he would dream of the oasis lakes reflecting the stars. In his dreams, the lakes transformed themselves to light-choking, frictionless surfaces, as motionless as, as smooth as, lacquered black obsidian, the stars that fell upon the lakes screaming down like shards of broken, blue-tinted glass. Other times, the lakes became the land and the surrounding desert metamorphosed into thick, churning oceans through which swam fish flipped inside out so that their organs slithered and jiggled beside them.

  Once, he had found Balzac at the oasis lakes, alone, his bony, frail body naked from a midnight swim, skin flushed blue with cold. Balzac's smile of greeting had suddenly shifted to doubt when Jeffer told him the news; and then Jeffer could see the darkness invading his brother, that luminous, expressive face blank with self-annihilation.

  The images, the content, of the memory maintained a blurry constancy, across a dozen years, so that Jeffer could always conjure up the pale blue gloss of Balzac's face, lit from within, and the awful curling of his lips, through which he sucked air as if he were a deep-lake fish, slow and lethargic in the cold, dying out of water.

  What had he told Balzac at the time? The exact words had been erased from his memory; they lingered only as ghosts and he knew them only by their absence, the holes they left behind. The event itself he remembered with perfect clarity. He had been in a service tunnel with his parents, all three struggling to fix a clogged wastewater conduit sensitively located next to a main support beam. Polluted water streamed onto the tunnel floor. They all knew the dangers of compression, how that stream could become a flood. Their portable light flickered an intense green, staining the white tunnel walls as they toiled silently. The air, recycled too many times, tasted stale. Above them groaned the weight of five underground levels, enough rock, sand, and metal to bury them forever.

  When it began to look as if the patch on the conduit would hold, Jeffer took a break, turning away to sip from a water canteen. He was sweaty and covered with grit. He faced the blinking red light that beckoned from the exit and wondered idly whether there would still be time to get in a quick drink or a game of cards before the night shift.

  Behind him, like a door slamming shut, the supporting wall collapsed. Deafened, he heard nothing, felt the weight of sand and rock suddenly smother the tunnel.

  He knew.

  Before he spun around.

  His parents were dead.

  The foreknowledge strangled the scream rising in his throat, sent it imploding into his capillaries.

  KILL THE messenger, Jeffer thought. Then maybe the message will die, too.

  Seeing Jamie on the street below, Jeffer knew of no way to protect his brother from the image of her.

  It was two hours before dawn, and as Jeffer stood on the third-story balcony the wind blew out of the southwest, cold and oddly comforting against his face. He hadn't showered or shaved for three weeks and there were holes in both his shoes. Sleep had become a memory, no more or less diaphanous than all the other memories, which crept in when he wasn't on his guard because there was too much time to think.

&n
bsp; Also from the southwest came the smell of gunpowder and the acidic stench of flesh burned by laser. Gouts of flame revealed dirigibles on fire, their barrel bodies cracking like rotten orange melons. There, amidst the fiercest fighting, the crèche leaders had decided to use most of their remaining laser weapons. Spikes of light cut through the jumbled horizon of rooftops. The enemy hated light. It could not use light. Every spike of light extinguished was a human life snuffed out.

  Jeffer's men, sequestered inside the building, numbered four. He could no longer lie to himself and call them a unit or pretend they had any mission other than survival. Sixteen men had been killed in less than three nights. Of the rest, Con Fegman, wounded, had become delirious; Mindle counted as no more than a dangerous child; and Balzac . . . Balzac he could no longer read, for his brother hid beneath his handsome features and revealed himself to no one. Even their sole remaining autodoc—a portable, two-meter-high model with wheels and treads—had become increasingly eccentric, as if, deep in its circuitry, it had succumbed to battle fatigue.

  Their predicament had become so dire that Jeffer found himself giggling at the most unexpected times. For over two hundred hours they had been cut off from communications with their superiors. The four of them had fought and fled from the enemy through tunnels, aqueducts, the ruins of old homes, and across the cracked asphalt of a thirty-six-lane highway.

  Through it all—the deadly lulls and the frenzies of violence—Jeffer had survived by fashioning a new identity for himself and his brother; they were refugees fleeing the past, and their best strategy had proved to be the simplest: in the unraveling of their lives to forget, to disremember, to exist purely in the now. They had successfully eluded the past for two nights running and yet, somehow, she had found them again.

  The war had extended into the heart of the desert winter, the buildings that crowded the street etched in sharp, defining lines by the cold. But how to define her? She walked in the shadow of her own skin, lit by the intermittent flash of laser fire. Was she human? She loped along the chill pavement of the street below, nimble and dainty and muscular as she navigated the long-abandoned barricades.