Veniss Underground (5 page)

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

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

“My secret,” he says.

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

You decide on a line of questioning.

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

“Of course, Nicola.”

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

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

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

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

“Tell me, then,” you say.

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

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

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

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

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

“No. Do you know Shadrach Begolem?”

“No, Nicola.”

“Do you know Nicholas Germane?”

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

“No!”

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

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

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

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

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

         

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 6

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

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

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

         

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

Then you wait.

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

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

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

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

—and the meerkat you hope is Salvador jumps off the escalator, and you frantically elbow pedestrians aside, manage to disembark at just the right spot and enter the press of the cracked concrete walkway. Ahead, the familiar shape of Salvador turns a corner.

When you turn that same corner, you find yourself in an empty dead-end alley.

You let out a little laugh, a snort, a chuckle. You just stand there, staring at the far end of the alley, unable to think yourself past this point. A quiet grows inside you unlike anything you have ever known. The crowd noises, the soft hiss of hovercraft, the crackle of meat in a sidewalk grill—they all fade away, and all that is left is the pounding in your ears, the glistening drops of water on a culvert, the flash of lights behind your eyes.

Where did he go? The question creeps into the silence. You walk to the end of the alley. Garbage. Garbage cans to house the garbage. Rotten food, sweet and sour stench. Bottles, broken. A blank wall, rust red, that mocks your efforts.

You lean against the wall, look back out toward the chaos of the main street, and, as the wall dissolves, as you fall
through
it, a curious double image forms—that you've been here before, night after night, following Salvador, each time ending up in this alley and, until now, not solving the mystery . . . but then you have no time for anything but the fact that you are falling through the wall, through a blur of color, a grayness eclipsing the street vision, and then, as you land on a hard platform, you see above you the stars—the stars!—and a faint hint of green to the sides.

You hit, and the impact drives the breath from your lungs, even as you begin to understand that the wall was a hologram, even as you begin to realize that Salvador may be launching himself at you as you gasp for air. You whirl to your feet, despite the shock, a gray wall behind you, and ahead . . . a forest.

How can you articulate a dream that is not a dream? You feel as if you have found a secret room in a house long familiar. Did you ever truly know this city?

You stand atop a raised steel platform and before you a path of white pebbles, gleaming in the moonlight, descends into a valley of dark fir trees. You hear the sound of running water and see, at the limit of your vision, a small bridge of red and white, half-hidden by the trees. It slopes gently over what must be a fast-moving creek. Crickets and a few cicadas mumble their songs. The sounds of night birds flying, the chittering flit of bats above, against the blue-black sky. The white underbellies of the straggling clouds against the stars, against the darkness.

This sanctuary, this fifty-meter-wide strip of wilderness is hemmed in by skyscrapers to the right and left, but bound by the horizon straight ahead, and therefore must let out onto the seashore.

The thick smell of the fir trees is a revelation to you, as is the air itself: clean, fresh. And the moon—the moon isn't obscured by the yellow scourge of pollution, but brilliant as it highlights the fir trees, tints the entire forest silver.

But there is, for all the peace, an urgency to the cicadas' cry, and you feel exposed, vulnerable. Salvador is not in sight, but he could be watching—and what if someone or something comes through the alley and onto the platform?

You begin to walk down the path, your purchase on the shining white pebbles at first unsure. Very quickly, you are amongst the trees, which are so dense that you can see only branch-obscured patches of sky. This, you think, must be the illusion—it's the alley and its dead-end wall that must be real, and you are now dreaming, dreaming, dreaming.

“How could anyone have hidden this? How?” You're so shocked, you say it aloud. Under the most skilled of holographic shields, and at the greatest of expense—not just the manipulation, the illusion, but also the perception that no one ever lived in this space, that this space never existed within the city. (And, the second question, the one you don't want answered: Why was it so easy to enter?)

You have, for your various programming projects, examined a thousand plans of the city—maps, blueprints, grids—and yet never missed anything, never thought,
Here
is a gap.
Something
has been deleted here. Never felt a corresponding emptiness in your heart.

Worst of all, this place is beautiful, so beautiful that you cannot help but melt into the rightness of it. The wind, gentle through the trees, carries the scent of the sea, mixed with the mint of crushed fir. Here is a place for the stealthy animals of the Tolstoi District to live, having abandoned their hundred hiding places to walk under the light of the moon, along the white path, down to the sea.

Dislodged pebbles on the path behind you. You start, abandon the path, duck behind a fir tree, pull out your gun.

The rustle becomes louder, and soon, moonlit, scoured of the veil of pollution, of sickness, two dark figures come into view. One, with its sinuous, curling nose, must be a Ganesha. The other, taller and weasel-sharp, must be another meerkat. The two pass by your hiding place, huffing with laughter, in a jolly mood, conversing in a language of clicks and whistles and yelps. They don't speak in human languages when they are alone. Why would they? The light creates a blue-green sheen across their bodies. The meerkat musk is strong.

Once they are past, you creep from hiding and follow, feeling suddenly exposed . . . Soon the fir trees become less dense, replaced by strange, thick bushes, then by sinewy roots clinging to brackish land almost the consistency of mud. The white pebble path brings you to genuine mudflats—a narrow strip that buttresses the creek flowing beneath the bridge. From the mudflats, a million eyestalks stare up at you: fiddlers by the thousands, clacking their claws and tracking your movements. Their carapaces shine ghostly.

You cross the bridge. The water is dark blue—no trace of chemicals, so there must be a strong filter—and through it you catch the silver gleam of strange fish: three-eyed and so scaly as to be coated in armor. They mutter and pout like old men and in their listless motions you discern an icy intelligence.

Beyond the bridge, the firs close up around you again. The musk of meerkat rises so strong that you fight the urge to sneeze. A light not from the moon glimmers through the trees. You follow it. With each step you recede a little more into the background of some odd fairy tale. The light, diffuse and yet focused, is a fey light. It casts the fir branches in sharp relief. It coats the ground in an ever-nearer sheen of gold. Soon you must shadow it, circle it, not drawing closer until you can be sure of cover—a large bush, an unusually thick tree trunk. From the light comes laughter, chirping speech, and, periodically, the scream of an animal in agony. Moths and beetles cloud the air, burn through it in an insectile fog.

Finally, you spy movement through the branches, hear individual voices, although the language remains a mystery to you. Then, hidden by a branch you are afraid must be ridiculously small for the purpose, you
crawl
toward the light, stopping just short of the clearing that would reveal all mysteries.

Your chin scratches the ground and your arms are weary. Through the branches, the wind blowing into your face, you see a congregation of meerkats and Ganeshas in the foreground—lit by a series of lanterns—very animated; all gesturing paws and trunks a-sway like snakes, accompanied by a torrent of clicks and whistles and chirps that must, by the intensity of the interaction, carry equally intense meaning. A number of younger meerkats contentedly groom each other and, spiky-furred and frisky, chase each other around the clearing. In the back, the wavery light of a hologram plays, while a group of meerkats and Ganeshas sit in front of it and watch. Slowly, your gaze is drawn from the foreground, from the middle ground, where you are trying to find Salvador, to the background hologram. The hologram at first is just a flux of images—some even in black-and-white, from archaic flat media, such as photographs or film. But the images are the same, and the sounds are the same: horrible agony, horrible pain . . . against the backdrop of a marketplace a man takes a long, curving blade, and proceeds to flay a dog alive, skillfully cutting off the coat in a few quick strokes while the dog screams, then, furless, looking like a newborn thing, its eyes tightly closed, trembles and pants—pink and vulnerable and in shock while the man goes on to the next dog, and the first one—in extreme close-up—goes into the waiting bag of a customer as casually as a pound of rice . . . puppies hanging from telephone poles . . . gerbils burned alive in skillets . . . mice poured into burning wax for a Living Art exhibit . . . scenes from the wastes outside the city walls, where the animals gasp and cough and live out their lives against a backdrop of chemicals and toxic gases . . . meerkats pierced through the skull with a control bar and guided by their human tormentors to tear each other apart . . .

You cannot watch for long. You must not. It is too terrible . . . When you can bear to look again, you see that now it is not animals but human beings—tortured, mutilated, burned, cut up, gassed . . . and, strangely, the seated meerkats and Ganeshas react most visibly to these displays, such physical revulsion that some look away as you look away, in shock and disgust. They hide their children's eyes as any responsible parent would . . .

A chill runs through you. What could they think of a species that had brought the world to such an impasse? As you watch them, as you watch their interactions, their conversations, you are overcome by a panic that has nothing to do with fear of discovery. You manage to control it—even though it bubbles up beneath the skin, steals your breath, slicks your palms. You creep backward through the underbrush, until the light is once again just a glimmer through dark green and the white pebble path once more ribbons out behind you.

Then fear seizes you for real, cups your throat, lets your legs hang free—and you run, biting your tongue not to scream, sometimes on the path, sometimes off it, unaware when you almost turn an ankle or when a branch strikes your face. You have forgotten Salvador, Shadrach, Nicholas, and Quin. Soon you see the platform glinting and you run faster, jump up onto it, and plunge back through the hologram into the dead-end alley. Back amongst the stench, the stink, the pollution of the city. Your lungs burn. Your legs ache.