Veniss Underground

  And yet you know that only the man you first saw emerging from the darkness of Veniss Underground ten years ago can help you. He was hesitant. He squinted fiercely, his hand held across his face as though to ward off a blow, and the light streaming through his fingers nonetheless, like a live thing, and his joy in it, in this simple thing, this redemption. The light streaming through his fingers.

  You remember the way his eyes widened when he saw you, the way his mouth, unaccustomed to laughter, had formed a lopsided grin; the way he held himself—shoulders stooped, head tilted upward in rapture. (Flash forward to the firmly aristocratic Shadrach: stance upright, bold, quick to laugh politely, a decent conversationalist at parties. And yet, at first, this rough man emerging from darkness.) He smelled of earth and minerals. His touch on your wrist was gentle, respectful.

  He was no different than any of the others who, by chance or connections, had been allowed to come out of the tunnel into the light, except that somehow he made you smile. His eyes held you, and you found yourself thinking how odd it was that to find the light you must descend into darkness. He eclipsed your senses, and you still do not know whether you fell in love with him in that instant, at first sight, or whether it was his love for you, as radiant as the sun, that you came to love so fiercely.

  He kissed you first on the rose birthmark on your left hand, then the neck, then the mouth, all in plain view, moments after you spoke to him. Later that day, after he had gone through the last checkpoints, you attacked each other in a rented room with the rumble of the cool-down jets of out-system shuttles making the room vibrate with sound and motion, and the two of you oblivious to anything but the sweet tactile mystery of each other's bodies, neither as yet knowing anything else about the other except the flesh, and not caring (not thinking, but just being for hours). In the dark. In the light. A confluence of arms and legs, a symphony of sex broken by laughter and wordplay.

  It was never the same as that night, when your passion fogged the windows and your mouths could not get enough of the other, twins separated for too long. It was never quite like that again—the rough beauty of him in the dim light; the tousle of black hair; the scent of him, rich and indescribable; the long, delicious scar on the inside of his right thigh; the mysterious softness of his worker's hands, the palms of which were so pale they seemed to shine even with the curtains drawn; the way, afterward, he held you so delicately to him, engulfed you in him, as if he were a comfortable blanket and you a sun-sleepy girl again.

  In the beginning you loved him unconditionally, madly, unreasonably—and he loved you back as if you were not just the only woman in the world, but the only person in the world. At the beginning, you were equals. You knew the city and he did not; he came from an underground land darkly exotic. Your knowledge and sophistication. His strangeness, his stories about a place that seemed fantastical, impossible, unreal. All through the dark months when the central government imploded and chaos sought to break through, you guided him through the warrens of rival parties, kept both of you alive and prosperous.

  Eventually, he became familiar to you, which you didn't mind, for no one can long sustain passion without the relief, the release, of domestic tranquillity. What you could not tolerate was the inequality that crept up on you. It was the inequality of worship, for Shadrach mastered the city, became a part of it, and in this mastery he gained a distinct advantage over you, the resident, who had never needed mastery to make the city work for you.

  He became familiar to you. He mastered the city. More and more, his caresses, the white of his smile, the explosions of his cock inside you, became the actions, the mannerisms of a worshipper. Somehow, you realized one day, as he surprised you with flowers and dinner at a fancy restaurant; somehow, instead of becoming more real to him, you had become less real, until you existed so far above him and yet so far below that to become real again, you had to escape—his body, his scent, his words.

  Too fast, too fast—does time really pass that quickly? Can you wake up as if from a daydream and find that years have gone by, and you untouched by it?

  You remember the ending more clearly than the middle . . . His face, turned away, toward the window of your apartment, his stance stooped once more, his eyes on the glimmering of lights outside. “But I still love you, Nicola,” each syllable of your name a tense and teasing love on his lips. A promise that he would kiss you there and there, all the while whispering your name.

  “I don't love you anymore. I can't . . . anymore.” The argument you'd had with him in many guises over several months, stripped down to its essentials.

  “I see. I understand.” In a voice as if the world had cracked open and left him in midair. Diminished in his long coat and boots, making his way to the door, and when you put your hand on his shoulder, he shuddered and pulled away and said, in a muttering hush, “If I am to survive this. If I am to survive, you understand, I must go now, immediately.”

  Then he was gone, through the open door, and you closed the door behind him, and cried. Love was never really the issue.

  It took time, but eventually you found that life without Shadrach was . . . wonderful. Free. Quiet. You grew more confident with the knowledge that you were someone—autonomous, separate, a world that had no need of another world. Your programming job satisfied, your few close friends satisfied, as did your hobbies. Only the initial shock of love became a missing element in your life.

  FIVE YEARS later and you have seen him only twice—once on the holovision, in the background, during a report on Quin, and once in passing at a city luncheon.

  When you reach the Canal District, you stand at the entry point, trembling. The shop windows glint and glitter with the force of the fiercely subdued sun as it fights through the gray sky. This light, a fading gold, lends to the holoads, the canalside merchants, the hustlers, an angelic quality. But still there is the wind and the cold, and the tar smell of drugs and chemicals. You are, finally, without a choice, and the decision that you have been slowly circling toward now seems inevitable. The police are permanently on pay-for-hire and service is terrible. You can't expect more from them than a filed and quickly forgotten report, accompanied by the cliché: “Veniss has walls to keep the pollution out. Where can he go? Underground?” (Derisive laugh.) “He'll turn up soon.”

  So you seek out Shadrach Begolem among the crowds already hungry for entertainment, although it is not yet night. Ganeshas and meerkats move through the human rivers like strange and exotic toys, unreal somehow, both threatening and harmless.

  You don't really want to find him, but he is a creature of habit and you still know those habits. He sits not twenty meters from his favorite cafe, legs dangled over the edge of the protective railing as he watches the red water below gush through cracks in the seawall. Your body becomes rigid, each step forward a trial. You are poised on the brink of something new, something that might destroy you. Underlying this, an even stranger sensation: even just looking at his back—straight, unyielding, clothed in the muted purples and grays that are his trademark—you have a sense of doubling—that, as once you could look at Nicholas and see yourself, now you see yourself in Shadrach.

  You slide in beside Shadrach and say, simply, “Hello.”

  Startled, he looks over at you, then the familiar mask slips over his features. The quickness of his recognition astonishes you, makes you think he expected your arrival, if not today then tomorrow.

  He says nothing. You smile and look out across the water. What does he see in it that he should come here day after day, year after year? It is oily, the residue of freighters from five years past still polluting it, but every year the waters are cleaner—ribbons of blue seep in between the overwhelming red. You suspect Shadrach watches more to see the change from red to blue than because the water holds beauty now.

  “Hello, Nicola,” he says finally, and you smile again—at his casual delivery, and at his familiar habit of looking out to sea, at the shops behind him, his feet—anywhere but at
you. How does it feel to be worshipped? Uncomfortable. You are aware of the heat of his body next to yours, somehow intensified by the wall in front of you, which rises to block out the world beyond the cool-down canals.

  “I'm not here on a whim,” you say as you draw your legs up and wrap your arms around them. Except that now it does seem like a whim. Your crazy brother is in trouble again.

  An uncomfortable silence, which you break with, “I didn't come here to upset you.”

  “You're not,” he says. Looking into his face, trying to gauge the truth of him, you find an unfamiliar gauntness. The eyes are deep in the orbits, as if trying to escape their own testimony, and devoid of spark. Sad eyes. Were they sad before you sat down beside him? You smell an odor on him like drugs or aftershave.

  “How is your work?” you ask.

  The torpid canal waters reflect your faces in shades of green and orange. Shadrach looks at you, and you hold your breath. His eyes are so old, his movements slow, careful, watchful. But anger smolders behind those eyes.

  “What do you want?” he asks. “I haven't spoken to you in what, five years? And, then, I'm sitting here and without warning, like a mistimed miracle, suddenly you appear. There must be something you want from me. Not that I am ungrateful for the surprise.”

  You look away—at the zynagill hovering like leathery seagulls, at the solar-sailed ships entering the canal.

  “I wondered,” you say. “I wondered if you had seen Nick recently. He was supposed to meet me for lunch two weeks ago. He didn't make it. No call, no message. His apartment is empty—except for this.”

  You hand him the poem; he takes it from you gingerly, tenderly. Your fingers touch, his skin abrasive.

  He looks at the paper for a moment, reads a line under his breath, thrusts it back at you, his mood unreadable.

  “So?”

  “So, where and when did you see him last? Did you speak to him recently? Did he say anything to you—about Quin, about anything?”

  “No.”

  “No to which question?”

  “No, he said nothing about Quin. I saw him three weeks ago.”

  “Was he in good health? What did he say to you?”

  “A new job. He'd gotten a new job.”

  “On the tenth level below ground?”

  Startled, Shadrach turns to you. “What?”

  “He bought some food with the last credits on a bank card on the tenth level a week ago. What would he be doing there? I didn't even know there was a tenth level.”

  Shadrach looks out at the waves once more.

  You take his left hand in yours. It is a rough, callused hand that will never forget twenty-four years of hard life below level. It is more knotted than you recall, and the odd swirling scar on the back of his hand, near the thumb—the place he picked at when he was nervous—is scarlet, almost to the point of infection.

  “Am I upsetting you, Shadrach—or is there something else?”

  He wrenches his hand away.

  “I have made a mistake, Nicola.” A great, coiled sadness has entered him, and his hands are clenched fists.

  “What does that mean, Shadrach? You must tell me what that means!”

  He seems on the verge of speaking, but looks past you in the same moment that you smell something musky, thick, not entirely agreeable. The same scent you found in Nick's apartment. You turn away from the canal and there stands a meerkat, staring down at you. From this vantage, its four-foot height is absurdly menacing. It has ginger fur flecked with white. Its claws, half-transformed by the bioneer's art into hands, hang ridiculously at its sides. Its eyes are liquid black. You avert your gaze, embarrassed to be outstared by an animal.

  Shadrach smiles at you, but it is a thin smile of pain, the smile of someone torn between two extremes.

  “I mean, of course,” he says with great difficulty, “that it was a mistake to talk to you. I'm sure your brother will turn up if that is any comfort.”

  He rises, leans over to take the meerkat's paw, and walks off, soon disguised, hidden by the crowds. Watching them, you cannot tell who is leading whom. He does not look back—there is a frightening finality to his departure.

  The sun fades over the great walls and the dirigibles dock for the night: great floating whales breaching with a snort of hydrogen. The sun—mauve and electric red and metallic green—cuts into the heart of you.

  CHAPTER 5

  Morning brings with it a too-bright sunrise through half-shaded windows, the welcome realization that it is the weekend, and a knock upon your door.

  The knock repeats itself, despite the early hour. You throw on a bathrobe, brush your hair in two quick strokes, start coffee with a mumbled command. The knock comes again—a child's knock, not loud, but confident. Who else but a child would fail to use the doorbell?

  Enough suspense. You clap your hands and the door opaques itself, starting at the top and slowly teasing downward. At eye level there is still nothing. Then: Is that something moving? Something blue? The tips of blue ears appear. Is that a blue bit of hose or flexible pipe now curling its way upward?

  “Who is it?” you call out, although you'll know in a few seconds.

  “Delivery,” comes the muffled reply.

  “Of what?”

  As the answer is spoken to you, the answer is also revealed in the flesh, for the door fully opens and there, oblivious to your scrutiny through the one-way glass, stand a Ganesha and a meerkat.

  The Ganesha, a dark blue, is dressed in a top hat and hopelessly outdated tuxedo. The poor meerkat is clothed in nothing but its own fur. The Ganesha doffs his hat and, with a single fluid motion, transfers it from top right hand to bottom right hand, to bottom left to top left. The blue trunk, meanwhile, is an inquisitive snake. The eyes are bright gold, the mouth toothy with two tiny tusks. The blue belly paunches out below and the stubbly legs end in flat feet.

  They are so like a cartoon that you half expect them to be badly dubbed, to move at one-and-one-half speed, to prance and prattle like poorly made toys. Entertainment. Servitude. Comedy. But they don't. They stand there, awaiting your attention. This suaveness, this smoothness frightens you. This is a dance you do not understand, a pattern that doesn't repeat itself enough times to instill its nautilus self in the grooves of your brain. Nicholas used to make creatures like these . . .

  When they speak, their voices lodge like little pins in your ears, and when you speak little pins pierce your tongue. “Come in.”

  You let them in because you do not believe in them. They are not real. This is a dream. You are the glass of the door, and you wonder for a moment if this is what it means to be a holograph, if this is what it means to be a story that has reached its end. One single shudder, one single tear, and you will shatter into a thousand memories.

  And then they are barreling in like thoughtless, rude clowns. Speaking to you while you listen with disbelief.

  “Nicola? Nicola Germane?” the Ganesha says. “Programmer Nicola Germane?”

  “Yes,” you say, somewhat overwhelmed.

  “May I present to you,” says the Ganesha, with a flourish of all four arms, choreographed perfectly, toward the meerkat. He begins again in a high, lilting speech akin to the music of List or Bardman. “May I present to you . . . a present, a gift, a friendly gesture, from Quin, the greatest of all Living Artists, for a friend of Shadrach's is a friend of Quin's.”

  You look at the meerkat. Eyes downcast, body language subservient, still it suffers your examination. You want to laugh. It is a droll, impossible creature, rather like an upright weasel. A stuffed toy. A trifle.

  “It has no name as yet,” says the Ganesha, “for it is your task, Ms. Germane, to name this pleasant creature. I need only confirm that you will accept this gift which, I might add, is an honor bestowed only upon a few.” The Ganesha's twinkly eyes seem to tell you there is no possibility open to you but acceptance. And, just for a second, its eyes chill you with their contrast—unlike the meerkat, you can find
no subservience in those eyes, no acceptance of your superiority. Isn't there, in fact, a trace of scorn, of disdain?

  “Yes,” you hear yourself say, “yes,” and wish you had a better reason than “because.”

  One thing is certain—you don't intend to let it leave the apartment. Nick decided to buy a meerkat and vanished. Shadrach worked for Quin, who makes meerkats, and Shadrach had a secret. Nick had had a personal invite to see Quin. Had Shadrach given him the invitation? Now you have a meerkat. Will you disappear?

  The morning sun is frozen outside your window. The silence snuffing out the world seems of your own making. He's funny, this creature. He's cute and cuddly. You think, in those first moments of contact, that he's the stuffed animal you never had growing up. He's huggable, and you feel an unprecedented sympathy toward him. He's so helpless, so out of his element (whatever his element might be). You briefly recall the image of a tormented kitten with compound eyes, but this meerkat is a healthy, sinuous creature, full of curiosity. Nicholas would have called the meerkat a work of art. Living Art. And, yes, the creature is quite mobile, but you don't call it Art. It's too silly for art as you circle it and it circles you in turn, each appraising the other. Adversary or ally?

  This silence as you observe the meerkat would be rude if it were human, but it isn't human. It isn't animal either, and you must remember that—neither human nor animal. What is it? What are you? Why do you feel a kinship with this creature?

  Perhaps you are not alone in this kinship; after all, despite the prohibition against the bioneers, meerkats are more common than ever before. Some people—you've seen on holovision—even let them roam by themselves. Each district has its own leash laws.

  “I think I will call you Salvador,” you say, “after that grandmaster of the Dead Arts and godfather of the Living Arts.”

  “And what may I call you?” it asks.

  But you are not ready. You put a finger to your lips, a signal copied by Salvador. You are not ready. You are still examining him.

  Salvador has a compact muscularity that, combined with the clever black eyes, the quick-darting, muscular head, makes you insecure. You cannot tell whether you stare into the eyes of the past, the present, or the future. Ancestor, equal, descendant?