Balzac's War: A Tale of Veniss Underground
Date: 2000-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fantasy; Fiction; Horror; New Weird; Short Stories; Post Apocalyptic; Weird Fiction
Description: A deadly invasion of a far-future ecologically ravaged earth. A terrible secret discovered in a ruined city. Earth is no longer ruled by humans, but by the species they uplifted. Creatures called fleshdogs are their emissaries, and humanity must fight this implacable enemy or face extinction. Balzac must confront monsters and more trying to find his lover. And when he does find her, will the price be too great? This novella is part of Jeff VanderMeer’s cycle of far-future stories, which culminated with the critically acclaimed novel Veniss Underground. As an added bonus, this e-book also inclu

BALZAC’S WAR

Jeff VanderMeer

Cheeky Frawg Books

Tallahassee, Florida

This edition copyright © 2011, Jeff VanderMeer and Cheeky Frawg Books.

“Balzac’s War” was first published in somewhat altered form in The Third Alternative, 1997.
“Veniss Exposed” was first published in the Night Shade limited edition of Veniss Underground in 2003.
“Jessible and the Metal Dragon” previously appeared in the remixed edition of the story collection Secret Lives in 2006.

Cover and Cheeky Frawg logo copyright 2011 by Jeremy Zerfoss.

Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

Check out the full line of Cheeky Frawg Books at:

www.cheekyfrawg.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Balzac’s War

Veniss Exposed (an afterword)

Jessible and the Metal Dragon

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

This ebook contains the novella from Jeff VanderMeer’s cycle of far-future stories set on an ever-more ecologically ravaged Earth, which culminated with the short novel critically acclaimed Veniss Underground (Bantam/Pan Macmillan). The story first appeared in The Third Alternative (UK) and this version has been revised for ebook publication. As an added bonus, this ebook also includes two extras: an incomplete story set during the same time period as “Balzac’s War” and VanderMeer’s original afterword to the UK edition of Veniss Underground, a blend of fiction and nonfiction shedding light on the original creator of the creatures that take center stage in “Balzac’s War.”

BALZAC’S WAR

I

“Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

—Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

Balzac and Jamie stumbled upon the flesh dog on a day when the sky, seared white as bleached bone, split open the world and allowed any possibility. Sixteen and free of the crèche, two as one, they ran across the desert floor to the ruined city of Balthakazar. Balzac sucked air as he tried to match her long strides, his tunic and trousers billowing in the wind as if he were a human sail. Just ahead of him he could see Jamie’s tangles of black hair snarling out behind her, her burnished mahogany thighs pumping beneath the flurry of white dress plaited at the knee and drawn up between her legs. Within hours his older brother and self-proclaimed guardian, Jeffer, would track them down and, returning them to the crèche, force them to complete their lesson with the boring old water dowser, Con Fegman. No doubt Con Fegman was, at that very moment, recounting for the thousandth time how he had discovered the oasis lakes with a mere twitch-twitch of his fingers.

Ahead, the ruins shimmered in the heat, the dark metallic glints of edges and curves beginning to resolve into cracked causeways, broken-down battlements, and crooked buildings fifty stories high. The city had in its demeanor, the sand ever in motion across its metal and concrete carapace, a sense of watchfulness, a restlessness.

At the fringe, where buildings slept like bald and eyeless old men, they found an ancient highway; it shook itself free from the sand as if from a dream of drowning. Once, it might have been eighteen lanes wide, but now, choking on sand, it could fit only four abreast.

Breathing hard, Balzac slowed to a walk. Sweat dripped down his face. A delicious nervousness pierced his stomach.

Jamie, hardly winded, turned her face out of the sun.

“Why did you stop?”

“Because,” Balzac wheezed, “this is the city . . . ”

Husks and shells, as dead as the hollowed-out, mummified corpses of tortoises and jackals after a drought: the idea of “city” stripped down to its most fundamental elements, the superfluous flourishes of paint, writing, road signs, windows, scoured away in an effort to reveal the unadorned and beautifully harsh truth. Gutted weapons embankments pointed toward the sky, but could not defend the city from the true enemy.

Jamie interrupted his reverie. “Don’t just stand there – we’ve got to hurry. Your brother will find us soon.”

He held out his hand.

She stared at it for a moment, then took it. Her palm felt flushed and warm.

“I’ll deal with Jeffer,” he said with newfound confidence, although as he led her forward he didn’t dare to see if she was impressed or just amused.

Straight to the city’s heart they went, the buildings encroaching on the highway, while beneath their feet four-o’clocks, cactus blossoms, and sedge weeds thrust up through cracks in the highway pavement. Scuttling through these miniature oases, anonymous gray lizards waged a war with coppery metal scorpions that pursued with mechanical implacability, their electric stingers singing static to the wind. Con Fegman had shown them one cracked open: beneath the metal exterior lay the red meat of flesh and blood.

Balzac loved even this most deadly part of the mystery that was Balthakazar. All the crèche machines – heirlooms from centuries past – broke down regularly and had to be cannibalized to repair other machines, and yet the Con members did nothing. Even practical Jeffer must realize that some day there would be no machines at all. Some day only the dormant technologies of the city would save them.

“Look at the bones,” Jamie said, and pointed at the ground. Scattered across the highway were whitish-gray shards. It made Balzac shiver to think about it. Bones did not fit his pristine, cold-metal vision of Balthakazar in its prime.

“How do you know it’s bone? It could be plastic or mortar, or almost anything.”

“It’s bone. Why else do you think the Con members don’t move us back into the city. Why they don’t even want us to visit?”

“Because at night, creatures come out of the underground levels, things with sharp teeth, and they eat you.”

Jamie threw her head back and laughed; Balzac could see the smooth skin of her neck and marveled at its perfection even as he blushed and said, “It’s not funny.” Yet even her laughter pleased him.

“You,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “I stopped believing in that old tale a long time ago.”

Something in his expression must have given him away, because she shocked him by saying, gently, “I’m sorry about your parents – really, I am – but the only truth is this,” and she bent to pick up a shard that might have been bone. “My father says no one knows what did this. If these are just old graves opened by the sands or if something killed them all off.” She paused, looked at him oddly, as if weighing her options, then said, “My father brought me here when I was much younger, and I just liked the texture of the bones. I didn’t know what they were. All I knew was that they felt good to touch – lightweight and with those porous grooves – and that my father was there with me after so many nights away from the crèche, showing me something that filled him with awe.” She tossed the shard aside. “It’s only bits of bone, anyhow. Whatever happened, happened a long time ago. There’s nothing to be done for them.”

True enough, and it was reassuring to know that the years had created a barrier between him and the bones, so he could look at them as curious reminders of another age. How many times had Con Fegman, or even Jeffer, retold the old legends from before the collapse of the cities, as if the mere repetition would fend off the spirits of the dead?

“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 dower’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 shimmied 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 calloused 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 that 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 circle 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 and 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, lightheaded 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.

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, amid 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.

Jeffer stared, his body stiff. His breath caught in his throat. Centuries slow, he picked up his rifle from the balcony railing.

“Who is it?” Balzac’s tired voice, muffled, came from the room at Jeffer’s back. They had barricaded themselves in and had booby-trapped the stairwells. Inside the room, the autodoc produced a thin, blue-tinted light that couldn’t be seen from the street.

The pale, moon-faced boy Mindle, a refugee from a northern crèche already destroyed by the invaders, sidled along the wall until he was close enough to whisper, “Is it her again?” Mindle’s voice held no fear, no surprise. Only Mindle’s body registered such nerve-end pricklings; at his spiritual core he had been frozen solid for a hundred years. Jeffer had seen too many like him in recent months as the crèche sent younger and younger men into battle.

“Keep Balzac quiet,” Jeffer whispered back. “If she hears him . . . get Con Fegman, if he’s able, to watch the door.”

Mindle nodded and, wraithlike, disappeared into the darkness.

Below, Jamie began to cry out Balzac’s name in the plaintive timbre of one who is lost and alone and afraid.

Balzac muttered a few words and Jeffer heard Mindle’s soft voice, calm and reasonable, coo a soothing reply.

The shape on the street below stiffened, sneezed, and said, “Balzac, my love?”

Balzac’s voice in reply: “Is it – could it?”

Mindle cursed. Jeffer heard a scuffle, a strangled cry, and silence, his gaze never straying from her. Lost and afraid. How could he ever consider her someone he had known? The sounds of her aloneness, her confusion, struck him as faintly pitiable, that she should, in any manner, try to re-create her former life. Such a curious double image: to see her on the street below and yet to remember all the times when Balzac had invited him over for dinner, Balzac and Jamie both exhausted from twelve hours of overseeing their reclamation projects in Balthakazar. She had never seemed vulnerable while arguing with him over the Con’s latest decisions or about how to adapt the hydroponics hangars to open-air conditions. The lack of hardness in her now, the weaning away of any but the most dependent attributes, made him wary.

The stone wall behind him bruised his back. He didn’t play the statue very well; he was sweating despite the cold and he imagined his breath as a vast, unmoving field of ice particles.

Perhaps, as on the two previous nights, she would miss them, would pass by, rasping out her song.

Jeffer raised his rifle to his shoulder. Pass by, he wished desperately. Pass by and be gone. He did not want to risk the sound of a shot. Come dawn, they would move elsewhere, maybe come across another unit and cobble up enough numbers to mount a counter offensive.

Pass by. Even better, remake history. Let Balzac come to me swimming at night at the oasis. Let Balzac tell me of our parents’ death. Let him be the eldest and follow me to Balthakazar.

She stopped directly beneath his balcony, at an extreme line of fire. She sniffed the air. She growled deep in her throat.

“Balzac, are you there?” Such a reedy, ghostly voice.

She paced in a circle, still sniffing.

Jeffer allowed himself to be seduced by the fluid grace, the single-minded purpose behind the strides, the preternatural balance, for she was still beautiful.

She stopped pacing. She stared right up at him with her dead violet eyes, the snarl of fangs below the mouth.

“Jeffer,” she said.

His finger closed on the trigger. The red tracer light lit up the pavement. The bullet hit the pavement, sent up a rain of debris.

But she was not there.

He could already hear her – inside the building. Battling through their booby traps. Barricades ripped apart, flung to the side.

“She’s coming up!” Jeffer shouted, running back into the room. “She’s coming up!”

Mindle and Con Fegman stood against the wall farthest from the door. Balzac sobbed, curled in a corner, guarded by the autodoc. It was clear Mindle had propped Con Fegman up and that the old man would fall down given the opportunity. Which left Mindle and him to stop her. Mindle had their last two laser weapons, a rifle and a hand-held beam. He aimed the rifle at the door. They both knew it had only two or three more charges left.

“Give me the rifle,” Jeffer said. “Keep the other one – a crossfire.”

Mindle nodded, threw the weapon to him. Jeffer caught it. His heart pounded. His hands shook. He flicked the safety.

Mindle said, “Soon now. Soon now.” He rocked back and forth on his heels. His eyes were dilated. He licked his lips.

They heard the scrabble of claws upon the stairs. Heard the rasping of her breath.

The terror left Jeffer in that instant, as if he had become as cold as Mindle. He wanted her to come through that door. He wanted to kill her.

The sound of claws faded. Silence settled over the room.

Jeffer looked at Mindle in puzzlement.

Mindle smiled and winked. “Just wait. Just wait.”

Then she hit the door with such force that the metal shrieked with fatigue.

“Balzac! Open the door!”

Another blow to the door. An indentation the size of her paw. A growl that would have ripped up Jeffer’s insides a minute before.

“Go away,” yelled Con Fegman, who fell, thrashing, in the fever haze of his infection.

“Balzac! Open the door!”

Balzac looked up from his corner. Jeffer could see the anguish in his eyes.

“Don’t,” Jeffer said.

The door tore open as if it were paper.

Metal and stone exploded into the room. Jeffer was yelling but Balzac couldn’t hear the words. She stood there – huge, black, half-seen in the autodoc’s blue glare. She shook herself, debris fluming out from her body. Mindle dove into Balzac’s corner and caught him in the ribs with an elbow. It drove the air out of Balzac’s lungs. Before he could get to his feet – to warn her? to protect Jeffer? – she leapt at Jeffer. Jeffer’s laser rifle flashed and burned her hindquarters off. Jamie screamed and, trajectory altered, landed in a bloody, crumpled heap beside him, brought to a stop by the wall.

The body thrashed, the claws whipping out from the pistoning legs. Balzac ducked, covering his head with his hands. Con Fegman, struggling to his feet, was ripped by a claw and sent reeling by the impact. The front legs sought traction, flailed, and the great jaws beneath Jamie’s head gnashed together, opening reflexively only inches from Balzac’s throat. Fangs the size of fingers. Breath like an antiseptic wind. Blood spattered over the blunt muzzle. He could see the tiny pink tongue muscles tensing and relaxing spasmodically.

Jeffer shouted an order to the autodoc. The autodoc lurched over on its treads, extended a tube, and stuck a needle into what remained of the flesh dog’s left flank. The flailing died away. The great jaws lost their rigidity and rested against the floor. Blood seeped out from beneath the body, licking at Balzac’s drawn up feet. Con Fegman moaned.

Balzac sat up against the wall, unable to look at his beloved. An endless singsong ran through his head: if only, if only. If only Jeffer had let him talk to her while she was still on the street, perhaps he could have persuaded her to go away – and perhaps he didn’t want her to go away. He let out a deep, shuddering sigh and stood on trembling legs.

Mindle blocked his path, so close he could smell the boy’s rotten breath.

“Kill it,” Mindle hissed, his face white with hatred. “Kill it now!”

Mindle’s eyes had narrowed to knifepoints. Balzac looked away – toward Jeffer, toward Con Fegman.

Con Fegman, in a misty, faraway voice, said, “I can’t see anymore. I can’t bear to see anymore,” and covered his eyes and began to weep.

Balzac pushed past Mindle, turning his shoulder into the boy so he stumbled backward. He went over to Con Fegman and knelt beside him, looked into his ancient face. Such sadness, such shame, that one of the crèche’s elders should be dying here, like this.

Balzac took one of Con Fegman’s hands, held it tightly in his own.

Con Fegman grinned with broken teeth and said, “I need water. I’m so thirsty.”

“I’ll get you water. Autodoc – Con Fegman. Full medical.”

Balzac stood and allowed the autodoc to do its job. It injected tranquilizers, enveloped Con Fegman in a sterile white shield and, away from meddling eyes, went to work on him.

“Don’t waste ammunition,” Jeffer said. “It’s dying anyhow. It can’t hurt us.”

“No, she can’t hurt us,” Balzac said.

Mindle’s hand wavered on his laser. Balzac stared at him until he lowered it.

“Jeffer,” Balzac said. “Please, get him out of here. The traps. Have him redo the traps.”

“I’m here,” Mindle said. “I’m in the room.”

Mindle’s hot gaze bore down on him, and he tensed, prepared to defend himself.

Jeffer nodded to Mindle. “Go downstairs and fix the barricades. Put up more traps. I’ll keep watch on the balcony. At dawn, we move out.”

“And will we take that thing with us?” Mindle asked, in a voice sweet as poison.

“No,” Jeffer said, and stared pointedly at Balzac. “I promise you we won’t take her with us.”

“Compassion!” Mindle spat, but he headed for the door.

Balzac watched him – a man-child, both ancient and newly born, gaunt but innocent of hunger. Balzac couldn’t blame him for his rage, or for the madness that came with it. He could only fear the boy. He had always feared the boy, ever since he had come to the crèche: an albino with frazzled, burnt white hair sticking up at odd angles, and eyes that made Balzac want to recoil from and embrace Mindle all at once. The eyes hardly ever blinked, and even when he talked to you, he was staring through you, to a place far away. Mindle had laughed at their reclamation project, had not seen the point in the face of war. Why did they persist when they knew what they knew? Perhaps, Balzac thought, they had simply refused to believe in the proof Mindle brought with him.

It had been Mindle, a refugee from the north, who had first given a name and a face to the enemy, fed the growing unease of the Con members. Before him, there had only been disturbing phenomena: strange, ungainly creatures lurking at the edge of campfire and oasis; dismembered human corpses not of the crèche; then little gobbets of divorced flesh with cyclopean eyes that twitched like epileptic rats as they walked and, when dissected, proved to be organic cameras, click-click-clicking pictures with each blink of the single liquid-blue eye.

Mindle had brought them a present, unwrapping the corpse of one of the enemy at a Con meeting. It was the only body yet recovered, badly burned and curled up into a fetal position like a dead black cricket, but still recognizably mammalian. Weasel-like. Two meters tall. Fangs snarled out from the fire-peeled muzzle.

“At first they walked around in plain view, directing their troops,” Mindle had told the Con members. “Darting here and there, sometimes on four legs, sometimes on two legs. A meerkat hybrid, no doubt a leftover from biotech experiments before the Collapse, with a much bigger skull and an opposable thumb. Made creatures. When we captured this one, they went into hiding, and now they only send their servants, the flesh dogs . . . ”

Watching the grimace of Mindle’s features, the hatred embedded there, Balzac had felt a prickle of unease, as if Mindle were not the messenger, but the presence of death itself.

With Mindle gone, Balzac turned to Jamie, her face set like a jewel in a ring, nearly buried by the folds of tissue on the flesh dog’s head. Clinically, he forced himself to recall the little he knew about such symbiosis: Jamie’s head had been cut from her body and placed in the cavity usually reserved for the flesh dog’s nutrient sac; the nutrient sac allowed the beast to run for days without food or water. Her brain stem had been hardwired into the flesh dog’s nervous system and bloodstream, but motor functions remained under the flesh dog’s control. She could not shut her eyes without the flesh dog’s approval, and although she kept her own eyes, they had been surgically enhanced for night vision, so that now her pupils resembled tiny dead violets. Sometimes the wiring went wrong and the symbiote would fight for muscle control with the flesh dog – a condition that ended with uncontrollable thrashing and a slow death by self-disembowelment.

Jeffer stumbled over a chair and Balzac became aware that his brother still shared the room with him.

“Why don’t you leave, too,” Balzac said, anger rising inside him.

“You shouldn’t be alone. And what if there were others? I need to watch from the balcony.”

“There’s no one with her.”

“I’m staying. You’ll hardly know I’m here.”

Balzac waited until Jeffer had stepped out to the balcony. Then, thoughts a jumble of love and loathing, he forced himself to stare at his lover’s face. The face registered shock in the dim light, stunned as it began to recover itself. As he watched, the eyes, pupils stained purple, blinked rapidly, the full mouth forming a puzzled smile. Balzac shuddered. She looked enough like the Jamie he remembered for love to win out over loathing. He had known it would; deep down, in places he would never reveal to anyone, he had hoped Jamie would track him here. He had assumed that once she had found him again he could bring her back from the dead.

Looking at her now, he had no idea what to do.

“Balzac? Balzac?” That voice, no longer demanding and sexy.

He was so used to her being the stronger one, the one who had an answer for everything, that he couldn’t reply. He couldn’t even look at her. Throat tight and dry, legs wobbly, he took a step toward Jeffer. Jeffer was only a silhouette, behind which rose the night: a ridge of black broken by faint streaks of laser fire.

“Help me, Jeffer.”

“I can’t help you.”

“What should I do?”

“I would have shot her in the street.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I missed.”

“Balzac,” Jamie said. The disorientation in her voice frightened Balzac. He ground his teeth together to stop his tears.

“She can still hurt you,” Jeffer said.

“I know,” Balzac said. He slumped down against the wall, his shoes almost touching Jamie’s head. The floor was strewn with dirt, pieces of stone, and empty autodoc syringes. Beside Balzac, the flesh dog’s entrails congealed in a sloppy pile.

“Balzac?” Jamie said a third time.

Her eyes blinked once, twice, a miracle for one who had been dead. She focused on him, the flesh dog’s head moving with a crackly sound.

“I can see you,” she said. “I can really see you.”

You’re dead, he wanted to say, as if it were her fault. Why aren’t you dead?

“Do you know where you are?” Balzac asked. “Do you know who you are?”

“I’m with you,” she said. “I’m here, and it’s cold here.”

The effort too much, too soon, with the flesh dying all around her, Jamie’s eyes closed to slits.

Balzac wondered if what he saw was not just a carnie trick, if beneath the flesh lived nothing more than an endless spliced loop, a circuit that said his name and tried to seduce him with the lie that Jamie lived, long enough for it to drive him mad. Jamie had died. He knew that; if he saw her now, she was ghost cloaked in flesh, as dead as the city of powdering bones. The same war that had given the city a false heart – a burning, soul-consuming furnace of a heart – had resurrected Jamie. Yet he must assume that she was more than a shadowy wisp of memory, because he could not prove her ghostliness, her otherness. What cruelty for him to abandon her should she be aware. And trapped.

Jamie had died on the front lines a week before, then and now separated by a second and a century. His recollections were filtered through a veil of smoke and screams, the dark pulsating with frantic commands. Particular moments stood out: the irritation of sand grit in his shoes; a lone blade of grass caught just so between yellow and green; an ant crawling across an empty boot, its red body translucent in the laser glow; the reflection of an explosion, the burnt umber flames melting across the muzzle of his rifle; the slick feel of Jamie’s grime-smeared hand in his, her pulse beating against him through the tips of her fingers.

Crowded together in long trenches, they had been only two among several thousand, waiting. They did not talk, but only touched.

The flesh dogs appeared promptly at twilight, bringing silence with them in a black wave. They wore the masks of friends, the guise of family. They jogged and cantered across the fires: fueled by a singleness of purpose, pounding on shadow muscles, ripping swathes of darkness from the night so as to reimagine themselves in night’s image. Eyes like tiny dead violets. An almost-silent ballet of death.

Then, on cue, they halted, forming a solid, uniform line. They stood so still it would have been easy to think they were a row of ancient statues built on the order of a brilliantly deranged despot.

In the lull, Balzac hugged Jamie, taking comfort in the feel and scent of her body.

Above, dirigibles coughed and grunted with the effort of discharging missiles, flashes of light catching ground combatants in freeze frame.

As the flesh dogs came into range, in such numbers that the ground reverberated with the thunder of their passage, the defenders of the trench opened fire: the spitting sparks of lasers and the rhythmic phutt-phutt of rifles entwined in an orgasm of recoil and recharge. It took immense discipline to stand in the teeth of such a charge. The rifle in Balzac’s hands seemed heavy, difficult – it wanted its head, and in the heat of battle it was all he could do to keep it aimed and firing, his finger awkward on the trigger.

In reply to the defenders’ barrage: a chorus of bone-thin voices attached to alien bodies, a thousand ghosts wailing across the ruins in the timbre of old friends pleading for their lives, calling out to the living by name.

It brought madness bubbling to the surface, so that the defenders shot and recharged with incredible speed, shouting back their own hatred to block out the voices, obliterating the present that it might not obliterate the past.

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 now, 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. Swathes 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 and then fellow soldiers or flesh dogs would be all around him like a sudden rain, and then 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 three hundred sixty 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 guerilla 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 down and lap up the blood pooling around the flesh dog’s body. Who could predict the actions 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 dived 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 onto 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 which 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.

He owed it to her. If he loved her.

In agony, he ran to the balcony, pushing Jeffer aside, and beat his fists against the stone railing.

“Listen to me: it’s better this way,” Jeffer whispered. “Come morning, there’s a good chance we can come under the protection of a larger unit. If we can only survive – ”

“Shut up!” Balzac hissed. “Shut up or I’ll yell and they’ll all hear us.”

“Should I leave?”

“Leave? No . . . but I don’t want to talk. I just want to stand here for a moment.”

“That’s fine. That’s fine. I’m your brother, Balzac, your brother. I don’t want to hurt you.”

Balzac tried to slow his breathing. He leaned on the railing and looked out across the city. Dawn soon, and still the dirigibles burned and still the darkness closed in around them. A hundred shades of darkness for a hundred different tasks – darkness to cover buildings; darkness to cover pain; darkness to cover thoughts; darkness to cover the light, and the light, when it came, only emphasized the darkness all the more. He could no longer hear the faint, ghostly shouts from the front lines; the darkness had swallowed the voices, too.

For the first time, looking out over not only the ruined city but also the ruins of his own ambition, Balzac felt the pull of that darkness, felt overpowered by it. He was tired. He was so tired. He began to weep. He could not bear it. He must bear it. He could not. He must.

Where into that darkness had she been taken? Where had the scuttling creature dragged her? Had it dragged her into the hole at the center of the amphitheater? Some place underground where the darkness grew thick and unfettered – in the tunnels under the city, wherever they had their headquarters, where the creatures from nightmare used to live before the enemy displaced them. It hurt to think of such places. They scared him more than anything. All he could imagine was suffocating dirt, the tunnel imploding and burying him alive.

What sort of immortality had she found there? When they’d reawakened her, had she pleaded with them? Did she know, even now, exactly what had been done to her?

And if he took her back there, could they live together, in the darkness, all alone with only one another for company amongst the ghouls and ghosts . . .

“Help me to imagine it, Jeffer.”

“Imagine what?”

“Never mind.”

A red wound bled across the horizon. Balzac stared at Jeffer. Jeffer looked away.

“I know I have to do it,” Balzac said.

“You don’t. I’ll do it for you.”

“No. I have to do it.”

“Then do it.”

Balzac nodded and walked back to Jamie. He leaned over her, touched her face once again, smoothed back a strand of hair. Strange, the calm that settled over him.

“Balzac?” she said in such a questioning tone that he almost laughed with grief.

“Jamie. Jamie, I have to ask you something. Do you hurt, Jamie? Jamie, do you hurt a lot?”

“I’m so cold,” she said. Then something clicked behind her eyes and he thought he saw the old confidence.

“Close your eyes then, Jamie. I swear, Jamie. This won’t hurt. Jamie, it won’t hurt. I wouldn’t lie. Not to you, Jamie.”

“I know, my love.”

He exchanged weapons with Jeffer: his rifle for Jeffer’s laser. Then, hugging the flesh dog’s head to him, he adjusted the setting on the laser for a needle-thin, ten-centimeter-long blade. If he cut the throat, she might last for a few minutes, in pain. But if he could spear her through the head . . . his hand wavered and for a moment every atom, every particle, that made him Balzac streaked in opposite, splintered directions. If only she wouldn’t stare at him . . .

His hand steadied, and with it his resolve. Two smooth strokes and he had separated the node of tissue that contained Jamie. There was no blood; the laser cauterized the wound instantly. Her eyes still stared up at him though her lips did not move. He held her against him, closed her eyes, kept the rifle in his right hand, reactivated the normal settings.

He looked up at Jeffer, who was staring at him in horror.

Balzac’s shoulders sagged, the weight of darkness too great, and then he righted himself, found his legs.

Jeffer took a step forward, as if to block the door.

“Don’t. Don’t do that,” Balzac said.

“Balzac! Leave her be.”

Tears blurred Balzac’s vision; he wiped them away viciously with his forearm. Seconds were as precious as water now; he could not waste them.

“I can’t do it, Jeffer. I. Just. Can’t.”

“You can! You know you can. You remember how I was after . . . after our parents died? You remember how I was? You brought me back. You did that. I can do that for you. I know I can.”

“And if you do? I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear it. I can’t lose her too.”

“It’s too late. You’ll lose her anyway.”

“Not if I find them in time. I’ve got an hour. Two, maybe.”

Silent as an executioner, Mindle appeared at the door, his hand-held laser aimed at Balzac.

“Mindle, get out of here!” Jeffer screamed, raising his own rifle. The barrel wavered between Balzac and Mindle.

Mindle’s eyes had the fatal density of dead stars.

“Shut up, Jeffer,” he said. “If he moves, I’ll shoot him.”

Into the deadly silence crept the first light of the sun. Grainy yellow rays revealed them all as tired, grime-smeared, gaunt figures frozen in time, while Con Fegman stared with sightless eyes directly into the sun. Balzac could hear his brother’s muttered prayers, could sense the tension in Mindle’s trigger finger. He looked first at one and then the other, their shadows flung against the far wall.

Looking down into her sleeping face, Balzac knew he was impervious to the other voices, the voices that were not hers. For her sake, he had to get past Mindle, make it to the doorway, and onto the street below. The odds were bad, and yet he felt at peace: the darkness was still with him, cloaking and protecting him.

Vaguely, he heard Jeffer tell him to put down his rifle and Mindle scream that if he took a single step he was a dead man, but their words came from very far away. They could not touch him – not Mindle, not his brother. No one but Jamie. The darkness covered his face like a veil. He caressed Jamie’s cold cheek with one trembling hand.

“Goodbye,” he said. He threw his rifle in Mindle’s face. He ran toward the door. Behind him he heard Jeffer’s slow, drawn-out shriek of loss, and then the ice-heat of Mindle’s star exploded against his back. The force drove him forward, knocked the breath from his body, and he was falling through the doorway, falling into the darkness of the stairwell – and kept falling, a numbness enveloping his body, until the darkness was complete and it was no longer the stairwell but the black oasis lakes, and he was diving into and through them, the wet wave and wash licking blackly at his limbs, and just when he thought he might fall forever, he caught himself.

Sand, bright sand, beneath his feet, the grains like glittering jewels. He looked up – into the glare of late afternoon – and saw Jeffer staring down at him from the lip of the amphitheater. Jamie saw Jeffer a moment later and gasped in surprise.

Jeffer stalked down to them, cold-shouldered and stiff, sand spraying out around his boots. Balzac had risen from his position near the beast, thinking Jeffer would give them both a thrashing.

But instead, Jeffer became very quiet and asked them if they were all right. Balzac said yes and Jamie asked how he had found them.

“The zynagill,” Jeffer said, still staring at the beast. “I thought you might be dead.”

Before Balzac could speak, Jamie laughed and said, “No. It is. What do you think of it?”

“I think you should get away from it.” Jeffer walked closer.

“It came from underground,” Balzac said.

“It came from far away,” Jamie said. “Look at its paws.”

“It’s like something from the old books,” Jeffer whispered, skirting the edge of the beast as if it were poison. “We should burn it.”

“Burn it?” Balzac said. “It’s dead.”

“Burn it,” Jeffer said.

But it was too late. They heard a leathery, cracking sound and the flesh dog’s bulbous forehead split open and out struggled a creature the size of a man’s heart. It glistened with moisture and, seeming to grow larger, spread its blue-black wings over the ruins of the flesh. It had all the delicate and alien allure of a damselfly.

“It’s beautiful,” Jamie said.

The creature gazed at them from one red-ringed eye (luminous amber, with a vertical black slit). The bone-thin legs ended in razor claws. The wings rose and fell with its breathing, which was steady and unruffled. The wings were those of a fallen angel, miraculous in that the black, shiny surface reflected greens and purples and blues. They were monstrously oversized for the body and the beast flapped them to keep its balance.

Jeffer moved first, fumbling for his gun. The creature, alarmed by the motion, moved its wings more vigorously.

Balzac put himself between Jamie and the creature, his swift embrace so tight she could not move, though she struggled against him.

Before Jeffer could aim, the creature launched itself into the air and spiraled up through the flock of hovering zynagill, scattering them in all directions. It made a swift pass over the amphitheater, still gaining altitude, then veered abruptly toward the west and began to pick up speed, soon out of sight.

Jamie wrenched herself from his grasp. “Why did you do that?”

“I didn’t want it to hurt you.”

“I don’t need your help,” she said, but when he looked into her eyes, he saw a sudden awareness of him that had not been there before. It sent a shiver through his body.

“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.

He wrote in his diary:

There’s nothing to stop me from taking my own life, or taking the lives of as many others as I like. There’s no one in my life that could tell me to do otherwise. I might as well still be in those caves by the sea. I am a god in this apartment; how the creatures I create try to please me, try to escape their own extinction. But it’s hardwired into them. Once born, their deaths are already set, while I have discovered how to slow my aging. How lonely can a man be before such an option no longer seems inviting?

The unrest led to Bunadeo changing his name, to escape people who were now pursuing him. He remembered a character in an old holovid he’d watched once, based on an ancient book, and changed his name to “Quin.”

By this time, he had begun to take liberal tissue samples from his own body and introduce them into his test subjects.

This practice would continue when Quin, for a brief time, served as an anonymous assistant in the production of artificially-created children for the now-failing AIs. However, his main focus remained perfecting the experiments Madrid Sybel had first performed using meerkats…

And that is the story of Quin, gleaned from a few fragments of short story I never finished (and which may or may not match the reality of the novel). In a sense, what makes it to the printed page is always a fragment of something larger, whether because you wrote character studies in aid of character development, or because inspiration left you at a critical time, or because a scene didn’t really belong in the novel after all—even though somewhere out there, in a universe where everything literary is real, that scene actually occurred, because life (unlike fiction) isn’t all about dramatic potential.

I suppose I could have worked more about Quin into Veniss Underground, but I always felt that the narrative was more about Quin’s influence on the main characters than about Quin himself. Quin, I felt, should remain an enigma, mysterious yet purposeful, whose will was expressed through his agents in the world: the meerkats who did his bidding. In Veniss Underground, Quin becomes a three-faced avatar created by the perceptions of, in turn, Nicholas, Nicola, and Shadrach.

Quin’s influence shows up indirectly in the short stories set in the same milieu, including “Balzac’s War,” “A Heart for Lucretia,” “Detectives and Cadavers,” “Flesh,” and “The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight.” These stories describe the gradual domination of the Earth by Quin’s creatures. But there are more fragments than completed stories, and I find it unlikely that I will complete most of them. It’s more likely that their still-births were necessary to bring the finished stories to life—much as Madrid’s failed experiments eventually brought a sentient meerkat to life, for a little while anyway.

Veniss Underground almost became one of those still-births, those fragments. I started with the short outline of a man going to buy a meerkat, sort of a futuristic magic shop story, and then conceived of the overall narrative arc. However, at the time I didn’t really have the skills to implement such a complex narrative. I was still learning my craft and acquiring technique, not to mention life experience. It took me over a year to find the right voice for Nicola, and to discover the pleasures (and dangers) of second person. It was easier to figure out how to portray Shadrach because he had such a direct and straightforward mission during the time when the reader would know him. (Nicholas’ vain, whining arrogance was easiest—I just channeled and intensified the worst aspects of my own personality.)

But when Shadrach reached the organ bank, I found myself stuck for a different reason: I couldn’t visualize the place. For some reason, without visualizing the organ bank, I couldn’t visualize the rest of the novel.

Some months into this writer’s block, Ann and I visited England, where I discovered York Cathedral (with help from friends Chris Reed and Manda Thompson). York Cathedral became my grand epiphany, perhaps the most visionary experience I have ever had while writing a story or novel. As soon as we entered the cathedral—a place older than Westminster— and I traced the path of the columns up to the stunningly high ceiling, the little hairs on my arms lifted, and I shivered. The columns, looking like multiple tubes tied together, were utterly alien to me. I’d seen nothing like them. My scalp was tingling. I could feel something rising up inside of me. The organ bank was becoming a reality right in front of my eyes. But it wasn’t until I walked around a corner and saw steps leading down to a door and a window set into the wall, wooden bars across it, that the back of my head exploded and I found myself hardly able to breathe. I could clearly see Shadrach walking around the corner as I had…and being confronted by a scene out of Dante’s Inferno in that room with the little steps leading down to it. In my vision, that room stretched out and opened up into a much larger space filled with body parts in various stages of decay. As I saw this spreading out before me, so too the rest of the cathedral changed, until the columns became conduits for blood and the sculptures of saints on the columns were bodies set into the columns and the design on the ceiling of the cathedral was instead a series of floating cameras and there, coming down the walkway, were two old women with purses; no, two old people carrying the body of a young girl between them, and behind them, Dr. Ferguson in his bloody smock, and although I’m not religious, this was a religious experience, the world transformed, the world’s surface peeled back to reveal the flesh beneath the skin. I stood there scribbling away like a slack-jawed idiot for long minutes, writing down what was being written into me. I couldn’t keep up with the images and ideas cutting into my head. I had to find more paper. I had to keep writing. It was all spilling out. It was all becoming real. I couldn’t stop writing. In every possible way, I experienced exactly what Shadrach experienced up to that moment when he saw his love buried beneath the mound of legs. Then it was past and gone and I was in the world again, and it was just a cathedral, and I was exhausted and speechless—spent.

If you’re lucky, you have three or four experiences like this in a lifetime. I can’t describe it as anything other than a vision, a transformation. Such a happening does not mean that the writing that occurs because of it will be any better or any worse than writing achieved through discipline and a slow grind forward. Anything I put down on paper could only be a shadow, an echo, a ghost of what I had experienced in the flesh.

But, on a grand scale, it does remind you why you write: for those everyday epiphanies, the little moments of sudden knowledge that occur when you are written. In my case, that half hour in the York cathedral saved Veniss Underground. It got me past the point of most resistance. A lot of hard work remained ahead of me, but I could see my way to the end.

Whenever I think of the novel, I think of that moment in the cathedral. But I also think of the relationship between Veniss Underground and my Ambergris stories, with their own, much more enigmatic, underground. While I was writing Veniss Underground, Ambergris began to colonize my imagination. In a way, this happened at just the right time. For very sound reasons—frustrating to the more direct part of my nature—I could not describe the subterranean passageways of Ambergris in anything other than fragments and conflicting glimpses. The integrity of the stories I was writing at the time would have been threatened by a clear view. But for the third part of Veniss Underground, I needed to strip away the darkness of a subterranean land and show, unflinchingly, what hid in that darkness. In a strange way, Veniss Underground allowed me to show readers—metaphorically, at the level at which images resonate—the nether parts of Ambergris. At the same time, the milieu of Veniss, in the novel and the other stories, showed me a way to write future Ambergris stories. (What I mean by this will become clear in my new Ambergris fiction.)

Veniss Underground is an unabashedly decadent, phantasmagorical novel. Like the Gollux, it may be a flawed location, not a flawed creature, if read as science fiction. Fed by fragments the reader cannot see but can sense, by visions and transformations, by cross-pollination with other story cycles, it is a mutt, a mongrel, but oddly beautiful nonetheless. When I re-read it now, it reminds me of Bunadeo/Quin, working toward his master’s ends: creating an entire world out of a tiny fish, revealing a man’s pale face in the grip of some other beast’s flesh. I like that sense of it. I think it’s fitting.

—March 9, 2003, Tallahassee

JESSIBLE AND THE METAL DRAGON

Because she was stupid and young and desperate, Jessible one day stole a boat from her crèche and sailed out into the deep waters of the world, far from everything that she had ever known.

The blood in Jessible’s veins sang like the waters of the sea, with undercurrents and swells and calms. Sometimes when she walked along the shore, she would become possessed of an urge to rush head-long into the waves, to embrace the water until her lungs hurt, and then beyond, until they burned, and then beyond that, until the pressure of water against her body was so great that she must learn to breathe water or drown. The members of her crèche did not understand her, did not understand what she wanted to become. Nights spent huddled in the great enclosure underground, whispering by candlelight as they waited for the creatures above to go away, she wondered why it was they tried to live at all. What was the point of such an existence? Her parents had no answers for her—their voices had become like the whine of the little metallic insects that now converged on the crèche during the day.

Jessible would help repair nets on the beach while others went out to fish, including her parents, setting off in lithe, long boats with silent motors, so as not to disturb the pseudowhales and their kin. The world was changing, and people had to be careful. Any creature might turn out to be intelligent. Any creature might turn out to be dangerous.

On the day her parents told her they had arranged her marriage to a mere boy from a neighboring crèche, the service to be performed by the local Conregiman, Jessible did throw herself into the sea, into the luscious moistness of its embrace, albeit in a small boat, fitted with an outrigger, sails, and a silent motor that drew its energy from the sun. She had hidden the boat under the creche’s single pier, disguised by sand and tree branches, since the age of fourteen. She had started stocking it with provisions at the age of fifteen. With it hidden beneath the pier, she had always felt a certain amount of freedom. At any time, she could have slipped down to the boat during the night and set off for parts unknown, and no one would have known. They would have said she had perished in the ruined city of Veniss, whose underground levels still held danger. They would have said she had drowned in the sea.

But that day, the sea singing in her veins, she cast off in broad daylight, while the fisherfolk fleet cast its nets farther east, out of sight. The sky was a hazy blue-orange arch above her, and every color, every salt smell was enhanced by the finality of her rebellion. She loved the tension of the rope against her skin, the way she could reel in and let out sail without more than a twinge in her stomach muscles.

Too late, her crèche mother saw her heading out to open sea and ran to the shore’s edge, where she flitted back and forth like a sandpiper, shouting at Jessible: “Come back! Come back!”

But Jessible ignored her crèche mother. She just waved, smiled, and let the waves slap against the boat’s prow. The sea pulsed weakly now that she was within its grasp, and she let her hand dangle off the side, content with the feel of the water against her palm.

Perhaps, she thought, the singing in her veins, the way the blood in her seemed to hum, to bring her skin taut, to bring her to the height of tears, was also the height of madness, but if so, she wanted to remain mad.

It wasn’t long, the boat passing out of sight of land that Jessible fell asleep to the slow rocking of the waves, the Northerly breeze speeding her vessel along while it cooled her under the heat of the sun…

When she awoke, it was to a sea aglow with the fire of saylbers, their great sails iridescent in the darkness that had fallen across the world. They surrounded her, moving with slow assurance: a land of blue, orange, yellow, red, green triangles of light, around which gathered the tiny sea creatures on which the saylbers made their meals.

She sat up, rubbing her eyes. Saylbers! She had only seen them in an old ragged book of her mother’s called Bellefonte’s Quadrahelix. None of the fisherfolk had ever seen them either, for salybers inhabited the deep ocean, so far from land that when they died, their bodies did not even wash up on shore like the great husks of pseudowhales. She glanced up at the sky. No moon, but the stars seemed brighter and more numerous, so that she could hardly pick out constellations: St. Gerard, the Meerkat, the Great Whale, the Rock Toad. They lay hidden by the twinkling designs of yet other stars, interwoven skillfully so that they enhanced the light of the saylbers on the water. A sweet smell came to her, like jasmine or desert saline. She knew at once, from her reading, that she was in the middle of mating pod; this was their mating scent. Near the center of the saylbers, where they were most densely clustered, the triangular sales pushed and nudged in a slow, sensuous way.

A saylber surfaced near her hand, which dangled over the boat’s edge, the fleshy sail brushing against skin; it felt smooth and tingling. The creature could easily have capsized her boat, but instead just lifted up the edge of the prow.

Another rhythm enveloped her with the touch.

[W/ho/at are you?]

She gasped.

The saylber rose against the boat, the triangle still blazing green, the same rhythm in her bloodstream, but very faint, rippling through her system. The book had never said anything about voices in her head. Had not done much more than allow her to recognize saylbers and not be frightened by them. But this. For a moment she had a vision: that the ocean was not filled with saylbers, but with couples making love across the water’s surface. People? Could they possibly be like…people?

The saylber made a third pass and this time she choked down her fear, reached over the side of the boat, and grabbled onto the sail.

[Who/at are you? Where do you come from? Are you from the metal dragon? *Lust*Sea* against *skin* made for the deep cold water *sucking in* of creatures against teeth. Who/at are you? Where do you come from? Metal dragon?]

Metal dragon imploded inside her head not as words, but as an image: the battered hulk of a monster, gleaming in the sunlight, huge beyond measure, trailing red-hot fragments of stars behind it.

The saylber patiently allowed her a better grasp on its sail, rocked gently against her boat.

“No,” she said, thinking it hard, “I’m not from the metal dragon. I’m from the crèche.”

Her she thought, hard, of the desert, and the underground caverns in which her people had lived for hundreds of years, since the beginning of the Dying Out, through the murderous invasions of the muttie and the funny, incursions from flesh dogs and meerkats alike. She projected her mother and her father and her friends—willow-wisp Sandra and Bunadeo and Gilligny, the only one who might have sympathized with her decision to leave. The rhythm tightened, constricted her throat, and she realized, for the first time, that she had entered the unknown for good, that she could not go home, that she probably could not find her way home The salty taste of tears touched her tongue. Would they look for her? She didn’t know, but she didn’t know they wouldn’t find her. They didn’t dare lose a fisher craft looking for her.

The rhythm rose in her ears, and she let her hand slide from the saylber’s fin, broke the contact, and broke, too, the feeling of loss.

The saylber wiggled its fin.

She resisted for several minutes, then, with a sigh, placed her hand once more on its sail. This time, the communication came in clearer, less choppy.

[Glad not of metal dragon. We would have had to bring you into the sea and the sea into you. I am Emerald-Waters-Shift-with-Shadows.]

“I am Jessible.”

[Now that we are named, we may converse as true people. We may share.]

Images splashed against her skull, seeking purchase—of deep space and the black between worlds and the darkness between minds and –

“Stop!” She screamed, clamping her hands to the sides of her head. “Stop!”

The saylber trembled, drifted away from the boat, its fin flashing orange, red, blue, red, orange. Jessible tried to think of familiar things: the smells of her crèche mother’s toad pie, tangy and dry, the feel of sand against her calloused feet when she danced for the solstice festival, the taste of a boy’s tongue in her mouth after the festival, in a darkness that hid them both.

The saylber wriggled its triangular sail.

She put her hand on the smooth skin, reluctant.

“You hurt me.”

[Am sorry. We talk differently. I remember now. We have long memories, but we forget so much. We forget even our world before we were brought to this world. When we gather, we gather to remember. Let me tell you. Let me tell you of the metal dragons and why we fear them so. Shall I show you? Show you.]

And the saylber did show her, so that she felt as if she were falling through a wormhole in her own mind. She saw the metal dragon spuming through space, sparking, imploding. Many of them. She saw whole ships filled with water and saylbers disintegrate. It was almost too much for her mind to hold…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer has had books published in over twenty languages and his short fiction has appeared in many year’s best anthologies. Novels include Finch, Shriek, and City of Saints & Madmen. Nonfiction includes Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer, Monstrous Creatures: Essays, Articles, and Reviews, and The Steampunk Bible. Solo and with his wife Ann VanderMeer, editor of Weird Tales, VanderMeer has edited several influential anthologies, including Leviathan vols. 1-3, The New Weird, Steampunk, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, and the forthcoming The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. He reviews books for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and others. A frequent guest at conferences and conventions, VanderMeer has lectured at MIT and the Library of Congress while also running writing workshops all over the world. He also serves as the assistant director to the Shared Worlds SF/Fantasy teen writing camp. Visit www.jeffvandermeer.com for more information.