Veniss Underground

  Ultimately, you decide that Salvador is too natural for art, too natural even to be thought of as a crude manipulation of genes and chromosomes. No aesthetic seems at work here save for the aesthetic of evolution. You are looking at the future. The future after the cities are gone, winking out like the lights of the dirigibles as they settle down for the night.

  “You will replace us,” you say, and it is not even a sad thought, but more a release of responsibility, a relief.

  “Ma'am?” The meerkat looks puzzled, holds its head to one side.

  “You are short-furred,” you say teasingly. “Shaded light brown, tan with streaks of black. Your teeth are sharp and ridged. You're probably about four feet tall, ninety-five kilos of pure muscle. Quick on your feet. How do you do that?”

  “What, ma'am?” Somehow, Salvador manages to look nervous, even through all the fur.

  “Stand upright. Walk upright. And don't call me ma'am. Call me Nicola.”

  “Very well. Nicola. Hybridization. Kangaroo and gorilla genes.”

  “Gorilla genes!” Remarkably close to heresy here, but now that the central government is gone, eighteen different interpretations of the law.

  Could you build a human from a gorilla? You cannot shake the sensation that this is not a mobile computer, programmed to serve you. This is an autonomous creation.

  Encouraged by your reaction (this creature already “reads” you), Salvador launches into a textbook description of its species that you listen to with half an ear.

  “Meerkats, Nicola, were originally found in Sur Africa and we are closely related to lemurs and the mongoose family.”

  “I'm not familiar with either family,” you say, but then quickly add “Continue,” when you see the confusion and distress on Salvador's face.

  “Yes, Nicola. We are, in fact, distant cousins, you and I, and it would be good for our relationship if you would think of me as a distant ancestor—”

  Ah, the ancestor/descendant question resolved!

  “—traditionally, we had a close social structure and we were highly organized, living in what used to be the Kalahari Desert. We were gentle with our pups and affectionate in play, and fiercely protective of our own. We have quick and clever minds, and made ideal subjects for genetic enhancement. The first prototypes were developed by Madrid Sybel but Quin was the one who made us fully intelligent, stable, and long-lived. Madrid Sybel's work with—”

  “Never mind,” you say, rubbing your eyes. “It's too early in the morning. Explore. Walk around. Tell me more later.” Besides, you already know about Sybel. You want to know about Quin.

  With a low bow, Salvador stops talking and silently surveys the living room while you pour yourself some coffee and sit down on the couch.

  It is the aquarium that fascinates Salvador the most. He waddles over to it after only the most cursory of glances at the other furnishings. On his way to the aquarium, he runs his paws over your collection of rare business disks. Then watches the miniature blue-finned sailbellies swimming languid in their prison.

  “Feessshhh,” he says with genuine pleasure, and then louder, a delighted grin parting his jaws, so that his pink tongue presses forward. “Fiiisssshhh!”

  “Yes, fish,” you say.

  You catch yourself smiling and frown instead. Salvador is too charming. You must be more careful. You remind yourself of the shy animals in the Tolstoi District, the musky odor in Nicholas's apartment. And what do you know of Quin? An idea comes to you.

  “Salvador,” you say from the couch.

  The meerkat sidles over, his obsidian gaze still intently focused on the aquarium.

  “Yes, Nicola.”

  “Tell me everything you know about Quin.”

  Salvador inclines his head slightly, says, “Why do you wish to know?”

  Ah, a deviation. A stumble. A revelation. It has a sense of curiosity, or it is trying to protect its creator. How does it view its creator?

  “Is it improper for me to ask about Quin?” you say, wondering how far Salvador will take this evasion. Your blood pulses quick and hard. Your heartbeat is suddenly fast.

  Salvador looks straight at, straight into you: an unblinking stare.

  “No, Nicola. It is not. You may ask me any question you wish. I am your servant in all things.”

  Now you are afraid—and yet nothing has changed. The meerkat is no different, your apartment is no different. Your resolve stiffens as you remember Nicholas, somewhere in the city, lost, alone, possibly hurt.

  “I'm just curious, Salvador. Who is Quin?”

  “Quin is my creator,” Salvador says, hesitantly. Suspicion? Awe? Some other quality has entered his voice. “Quin is a child in the dark, a boy alone in the park, a man who teased the weave and warp of flesh into the medium of his desire. He is the kiss from the dark.”

  That you should hear, halfway across the city, the words you found written in Nicholas's hand in the Tolstoi District where the animals hide and will not show their faces to the light . . . What does it mean? This is your tortured cry. What does it mean? You are tired of questions.

  The meerkat stares at you with an expectant quality. You can see the small, sharp fangs in its open mouth.

  “Is there more?” you say.

  “I don't know anything else, ma'am.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yesss . . .”

  A kiss in the dark. You don't believe in coincidences. Every sprinkler in the city runs on a fixed schedule. Every train is programmed to return at a certain time. If these words come from the meerkat, then it is no coincidence. Someone programmed them to fall from his mouth into your ears.

  Someone knows that you went to Nicholas's apartment. Someone knows a lot more than you do. And you wonder: Is this the moment to disengage, to allow your brother to drift off into his fate? More and more you are convinced there can be no half measures.

  As you leave to run errands, Salvador stands in front of the sail-bellies, an absurd look of wonderment spread across his features. Upon your return in the late afternoon, you find that Salvador has cleaned the entire apartment. It is spotless; he has dusted behind the holovision, the chairs, the table, the couch. The smell of lilac and vanilla permeates the apartment. He has even seeded the grass carpet and watered it early enough that it is springy, not moist, under your feet as you walk toward your bedroom.

  In your bedroom, you open your purse, pull out the laser gun you bought on your way home. It is dark gray and blunt. It can take someone's head off at 150 meters. It will not answer any of your questions, but its immutability pleases you. It is not composed of shadows and half-teasing clues. More important, you feel safe with it around. You start to put it under your pillow, but that's no good—Salvador will find it while making the bed. So you leave it in your purse. Just aim and fire, the seller told you.

  When you return to the living room, Salvador awaits you, a comical chef's hat perched atop his head, a spoon held precariously in one paw. You smell heat, seafood, melting cheese.

  “Dinner is ready,” he says, and motions for you to sit down at the dinner table.

  “I'm not sure I like you taking over the dinner duties.” You remove your red jacket and set it over the back of your chair. “I know I don't like it.”

  “But Nicola,” Salvador says, obviously hurt, “this is my function: to serve you.”

  “I won't argue about it right now. I'm hungry.”

  Salvador has made a seaweed casserole garnished with fiddler crab and a few sprigs of dandelion. Where he found the dandelion, you have no idea. It's been years since you saw a dandelion. The smell makes your mouth water as you sit down.

  As Salvador brings out the plates, he asks, “Shall I eat with you, or in the kitchen, Nicola?”

  “Here,” you say. “I want to ask you more about Quin.”

  He sits down and begins to eat—a very dainty eater, using his paw-hands to manipulate fork and knife, taking tiny bites, more interested in the garnish of fiddler cr
ab claws (which he expertly cracks open) than with the seaweed casserole.

  “Where did you get the fiddler crab?” you ask. “And how did you pay for it?”

  Salvador grins, revealing sharp canines. The full revelation of his teeth is anticlimactic, now that you have the gun.

  “My secret,” he says.

  A secret indeed. You take a few bites of the casserole. It melts in your mouth, the vegetable and the cheese wonderful in combination. Where could you find fiddler these days?

  You decide on a line of questioning.

  “Now, Salvador, surely you can tell me more about Quin than those delightful lines you gave me this morning.”

  “Of course, Nicola.”

  You had expected another mysterious answer, a question thrown back at you, more evasive maneuvers.

  “I thought you said this morning that you had told me all you know?”

  The meerkat bows its head and crunches down on a fiddler claw. “I didn't know, Nicola. But when I went down to the Canal District to haggle for the fiddler crab, I stopped at the public archives and I did some . . . research. Have I done something wrong?”

  A mournful face, only it doesn't work on you because you are still trying to decide what is more incredible—that the public archives provide access to made creatures, or that Salvador knew how to access the data.

  “Tell me, then,” you say.

  Salvador nods. “As you wish. My creator came to Veniss from Balthakazar in the middle of the breakup, during the period of lawlessness when above level and below level were at war. It would have been the year—”

  “Yes. I know all of this. What about Quin?”

  “Quin makes biological creations. He has contracts with all eighteen above-level districts to produce Ganesha messengers and guards. He has contracts below level as well, although I do not know the details of such contracts.”

  “That's it? You could have accessed all this information yourself.”

  “Yes, Nicola. Would you like more seaweed casserole?”

  “No. Do you know Shadrach Begolem?”

  “No, Nicola.”

  “Do you know Nicholas Germane?”

  “Shall I research both names at the archives tomorrow?”

  “No!”

  You get up so fast the chair has no time to react and screeches against the floor. You walk into the living room and sit down on the couch. Salvador follows you.

  “Leave me alone, Salvador,” you say. At eye level, the meerkat appears more muscular, more dangerous. It could have you by the throat before your first scream.

  You opaque the window, which shows the dull, doomed lights of the city, and punch up a scene of pseudowhales breaching. Pseudowhale song—deep and sonorous—drowns out Salvador's response.

  He regards you for a moment, and waddles back into the kitchen to start clearing the dishes.

  Where is your brother in all of this? Why have you let this creature into your apartment?

  THE WORLD moves more swiftly, more deadly, and yet its center, Nicholas, moves not at all. Your face takes on a terrible implacability. You will see this through to the end. This is your brother, after all. And now you are curious beyond all reason. True, you still get that feeling of dread deep in your belly. You still feel fear. But that's better than feeling nothing at all . . .

  Your normal life goes on regardless, as if without respect for your brother's absence. You ignore Salvador for the rest of the night. In the morning, you refuse his offer of breakfast. You work frantically to meet deadlines, push Nicholas to the back of your mind. You call Shadrach twice during the day, but his personal holoscreen remains off. You keep seeing his face as the meerkat fell into step beside him.

  At lunch, you use the time to try to find out more about Quin, but nothing exists on Quin. Quin's presence surrounds the city, engulfs it, and yet there is nothing inside the city about him. It is almost as if his creations define him so utterly that no one has bothered to set down, for the record, who he is, preferring to rely on rumor, on innuendo, on falsehoods. He's as insidious as the chemical-loaded air come off the sea—invisible and yet everywhere. How do you fight someone like that? How do you get inside his guard?

  You wonder and worry until the evening, when you return home to another delicious dinner. Salvador, with his annoying subservience. You are a fairy-tale princess in a fairy-tale tower served by a beast that is, under the fur, a man.

  That night, you cannot sleep. You fall into a half doze, only to be brought out of it by the echo of your brother's voice, trying to tell you something. At three, you give up on sleep and sit at the edge of the bed, sweat beading your forehead despite temperature control. You hate Salvador in that moment. You hate Shadrach, too, for his unwillingness to tell you the truth. Shadrach said, “I've made a mistake . . .” Is it a mistake to let Salvador into the apartment?

  The click of the front door opening brings you fully awake. Your first thought is that you really did hear your brother's voice and he has snuck in past the security systems. But more than likely a genuine intruder has entered the apartment.

  Stealthily, you rise, wrap your nightgown around you, and take the laser gun from your purse. You tiptoe to the bedroom door and open it a crack. A half-moon shines into the apartment and gives you enough light to see a dark shape walking across the living room carpet.

  You step out from the bedroom, hit the light switch, say, “Don't move or you're dead,” and aim your weapon at . . . Salvador.

  You keep the gun aimed at the meerkat, whose eyes blink against the sudden light.

  “Please don't be frightened, Nicola,” Salvador says. He extends a hand. “See? I waited early for fresh fiddlers. You liked them so much.”

  The fiddlers' claws close impotently on the meerkat's slick fur.

  “Three in the morning?” you say. “Three in the morning, and you're out getting fiddlers for next night's dinner?”

  Salvador stares at the ground and when he looks up again his fangs show and his eyes flash with some inscrutable emotion.

  “Nicola,” he says softly, “if you think there has been a malfunction in me, then you must tell Quin. If you think I am lying, then you must do that. I may well have broken down in some way. I am not capable of monitoring my own state of mind.”

  You sigh and let the gun drop to your side. “Go to sleep, Salvador. Just . . . go to sleep.”

  “Thank you,” Salvador says, and slips past you to the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 6

  You were always two as one: Nicola and Nicholas merging into the collective memory together. You have been living someone else's life. You have been living someone else's life. There is a shadow existence here, a separate world—you see it in mirrors where your image does not match your living form, your movements not quite synchronized with this other, this creature, who is not you. The shadow of the waxwing slain. The moon crosses your heart. Out in the Tolstoi District the animals gather amidst the wrack and ruin, no longer shy.

  You see it in the glass, where your half reflection slides off to reveal, at the corner of your eye, another life, another even more ghostly Nicola living out another life. That is it: You are a ghost of a ghost, a memory fast fading. The smell of nothing on the breeze—the pale limbs of trees on the holoscreens, the memories of sounds upon the walkway, the clarity of the echo of your hand upon the railing. The emotion that comes to you is so clear, so simple, as if a painter has managed, using translucent paints, to penetrate to the core of a canvas, and you its reflection. No fear. No hatred. No frustration. No anxiety. No love. No envy.

  When you turn for protection from this insanity, from the mirrors, the glass, the only solace is found in the shadows—and it is in shadows that you once again sense Nicholas. Two as one.

  THE NEXT night, you go to bed early. You lock your bedroom door, change from work clothes to black pants, black blouse, and black boots, with a blue jacket thrown over the blouse. You place the gun in a pocket on the inside of the jacket. You put
a holographic mapfinder in an outside pocket.

  Then you wait.

  For a while, all you hear is the clack of dishes as Salvador puts them in the washer. This sound is followed by silence. You become tired. You feel a bit foolish—since when were you cut out for spying? But then you hear the familiar click of the door, and you check your watch: two in the morning. You wait a moment, quickly leave the bedroom, and are out the door—onto the seventy-fifth floor of your apartment building. The elevator is empty. You take it to ground level and walk onto the street, hoping you've not already lost him.

  Free market traders crowd the streets in their makeshift hovercraft shops. Neon flashes over everything in garish shades of pink and purple and green and blue. Almost blinded, you put on sunglasses. People press against you in all variety of clothes, from the opaque to black robes with headdress. The smell of a thousand drugs rises in your nostrils: a melange of addiction. A man spills his drink against you. A woman shouts out, “You Dead Art fucking bitch whores!” Above, the walls of the city, highlighted with green lights, rise two hundred feet, lit also by the warring fires of the wall guards, the tied-up dirigibles casting shadows down onto the crowds.

  For a moment, overwhelmed by the city in a way you had not thought possible, you stop walking and glance desperately from side to side. You curse your stupidity. Have you already lost him?

  Profound relief washes over you as you catch a glimpse of a familiar furry tail and hindquarters getting on an escalator walkway not twenty meters ahead. You press through the crowd, jostle the man who spilled his drink on you, and manage to get on the escalator, thirty meters behind Salvador, who is a tuft, a spray of fur, through the welter of legs. The laser gun suddenly is much too small a weight in your jacket pocket, not nearly enough to defend you from the city. You are alone. None of your friends know about Nicholas's disappearance. The police don't know either. If you disappear, Nicholas disappears with you: You are not one, after all, but two, and the city is the only infinite—a maze, a crystal mirror, a shattered toy, a palate of undigested time.