Veniss Underground (20 page)

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 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 swaths 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, 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. Swaths 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, then fellow soldiers or flesh dogs would be all around him like a sudden rain, and 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.