Veniss Underground (6 page)

You pause to catch your breath. Now you realize that even in your panic, a part of your brain has been talking to you. It has been saying, in a shock as profound as that of the flayed dog,
You are not superior. You are not superior
. Because what Quin's Shanghai Circus means is this: your extinction.

The people that you pass on your way home, these governed and governing—do they realize yet that their place has been usurped?
Driven out
. How long before they guess?

CHAPTER 7

Later, in your apartment
. You love the lights at night, the silence of street corners, the pixilation of dewdrops on the window glass. You love the feel of warm sheets against your skin in the cold. You love the way your fingers seem to know the next step faster than your brain when you are immersed in programming. You love the sensation of sex, even with a holograph. You love, you love, you love . . . and yet such a ghost are you, haunting your apartment, waiting for the return of Salvador. You have a gun in your hand. You sit on the living room couch. A coffee mug rests on the table nearby.

The coffee mug, the couch—these are very normal, ordinary things, and yet you are waiting in a dream that is not your apartment. You are dreaming in a world that is not your world, and you feel as if you have seen it all before—this strangeness, this sense of oblivion.

The utter clarity of your surroundings despite the revelations of the night convinces you that you are in a shadowland. The absence of light.
He came out of the darkness, a revelation
. . . You have turned the lights off. What choice do you have? You prefer the reality of the vast forest, the delicate bridge, the white pebble path. You prefer the moonlight. You prefer all that will be denied you.
The animals are waiting in the Tolstoi District, under leaves and branches and bricks . . .

A sliding of an ID card in the door lock. A familiar scent.
Two as one—Nicholas's presence a shadow, an absence—defined by the space around him, defined by that which is not him
. A card slides in the lock. A card slides in the lock. The door opens slowly.

Salvador turns on the lights. He has a sad look on his face, sadder still when he sees you on the couch. He carries a bag of fiddler crabs.

“Hello, Nicola,” he says.

“Salvador. I couldn't sleep.”

He does not reply, but walks over to the kitchen, places the bag of crabs on the counter.

“More crabs?” you say. You've hidden your laser gun at your side, under a cushion.

Salvador's eyes are red, not amber, under the panel illumination of the kitchen. He walks back into the living room, stands in front of you, the window, the night sky, at his back. You no longer know what you see when you stare at him.

“Nicola,” he says. “Nicola. How stupid do you think I am? I
know
where you've been. I can smell it on you. I can taste it on you.”

A distance, some vast space, lies between you and the fear.

“You fell through the alleyway. You walked down the white pebble path to the bridge, and you saw our lights and you found us.”

He smiles—or is this a snarl? If he moves one step closer, you will shoot him whether he smiles or snarls.

“I was there,” you confess. Does it matter what you tell him now? “It was beautiful. It was
wonderful
.” And it was, oh it was! Beautiful and wonderful and terrible.

“My dear,” Salvador says gently, almost with love, “you should not have seen that. You should not have followed me.”

“I'd never tell. If I told, they'd come and destroy it, Salvador.”

“You're a programmer from the Bastion, Nicola. No matter what you say, you'll destroy it.”

He snarls, and his forepaws clench and unclench. His eyes are red. He laughs—a wheezing laugh full of savagery.

How can he be so split? So gentle and sad, and yet so full of anger? It surprises you, the answer:
because he's fully human
.

He circles you now as you half rise from the couch, your gun aimed at him.

“If you put down the weapon,” he says, growling the words, “I will kill you quickly.”

“I know Shadrach,” you say. “I know Nicholas. Both of them work for Quin. Quin is your master. If you leave now, I won't report you.”

“You know no one. I'm Quin's ambassador, come for you.”

“Do you want to be as cruel as those
humans
in your holograph show? To be no better than the worst of what we are?” and in your words a peculiar echo, a sense that everything has already been said.

Again the sadness in his movements, his voice: “To protect ourselves, we must be cruel. I'm sorry, Nicola, but you drive me to it.”

You fire your laser, miss, and set the carpet on fire. The force of the blast knocks him off his feet. You run behind the couch. You aim again as he recovers and launches himself at you. Your beam catches him in midleap, and he falls onto the couch. His fur is blackened, his left forepaw a stump—but he launches himself again, at your throat. His teeth click an inch away, his hot breath on your neck. The meerkat's teeth close around your wrist. You do not feel the bite, only the moment when the grip falters, the limbs convulse, and Salvador falls back onto the couch, his eyes closed, the whole left side of his body blackened, his fur stained red. Is he dead? Close enough.

You drop the laser. You wander around the living room. The image of the flayed dog comes to you again. You cannot pull it out of your head.

Absentmindedly, you put out the fire, and even when its last flames lash out at your legs, you feel nothing. You try not to look at the still, burnt shape on the couch. This cannot be real. Your life cannot be real. The moonlight is not moonlight. The aquarium is blue-green illusion. Only the forest leading to the sea is real. Only the nervous fiddlers on their mudflats are real. Nicholas—even Shadrach—might understand you now. They would understand your isolation. How you miss them both. How you need them both.

The doorbell rings harshly in the silence. You opaque the door from your side only—and burst into tears. Nicholas stands outside.

You open the door, and there is your brother. Dressed in a ragged raincoat, he looks so incredibly gaunt, so incredibly
old
and used up, that you say, “Oh, Nicholas, what have they done to you?”

You want to hold him, but he stands so stiffly, with his hands at his sides, and his hair, unwashed for days, hangs limply from his scalp, so you can't, somehow, hold him after all.

Instead you say, “I was
so
worried,” through your tears and then wait as he seems about to say something. He cannot spit it out. The words trip and tremble on his tongue, his face contorted as he tries to form them.

“What is it?” you say. “What's wrong, Nicholas?” you say, putting out a hand to steady him. You cannot finish sentences that remain unspoken.

The touch makes him convulse, and his hands contort in unnatural shapes. He manages to steady himself and, although he stutters, you understand what he says, “L-l-let m-m-me t-t-tell you about the c-c-city.”

“It's okay,” you say, and you hug him even as his hands (you have done this before), shaking, almost out of control (you relax, knowing this is the end), find your throat.

Memory so ephemeral, that it should fade so quickly, so without a struggle. The apartment dissolves against the pressure on your throat and you are light remembering itself, the light lingering upon shadow, the light wistful for itself. In that place all memories are one, and although you are not at peace, although you ache for the smell of chemicals in the Canal District, for the feel of a lover's touch, for the sound of your own heartbeat, you cannot say you have time for regrets, for pleas, for absolution, but only this final thought: that there was so much more you wished to do. The ache of atoms, the yawn of the abyss, then you are ascending, carried in another's arms, the light flooding into you and through . . . light.

You so desperately want to remember the color of roses in the spring.

III

SHADRACH

“Between her compassion and her prowess, her heart was the compass that knew when and where I'd wreck.”

—Giant Sand

CHAPTER 1

If Shadrach loved her alive, he loved her better, longer, farther, when he thought she was
dead . . .

“The roses are doing so well because of the bumblebees Quin made for me. He is, you know,
so considerate
to indulge me . . .”

Another perfect day on Lady Ellington's perfect estate, a district unto itself: two hundred acres of woodlands and gardens, with its own police force to drive off the hungry free market mobs gathered outside the ornate gates.

The walls of Lady Ellington's pseudochateau were made from white pseudomarble, the vase upon the mantel above the window seat made of the finest clear plastic polymer, while the lady herself was somewhat . . .
faux
. She had taken “Lady” or “the Lady” as her first name, in tribute to—or, Shadrach thought, to give her some credit, in mockery of—some extinct aristocracy. She wore a left ear of perfect white that contrasted sharply with the dried prune of her right ear. A wrinkle-free left hand—lithe and lively until it reached its turgid, discolored wrist—found its malformed mate in the birdlike claw that dangled from her right wrist.

Between the thumb and forefinger of her marvelous new left hand, Shadrach had noticed a familiar blemish: a reddish birthmark in the shape of a rose. He stared at it without blinking.

“. . . thank you so much for stopping by to check,” Lady Ellington was saying. “I so rarely have guests over during . . .” And blah, blah, blah.

Shadrach continued to stare at the birthmark while he considered, briefly, that Quin had sent him to her estate so he would recognize this mark, this beautiful, familiar mark. As he nodded to the Lady and answered questions about Quin, about meerkats, a cold and bitter despair rose in his throat. He stared into the left eye of the Lady Ellington, a replacement that was blue as the blue of
her
eyes. As blue as he wanted the sea to be, pressed up against the canal walls.

He wondered if that eye held any memory of its former owner, if he was indeed still looking through the window into
her
soul. Lover, lover gone to pieces.

Tears came and he made no effort to stop them when they began to trickle down his face, his mouth set quite as firm and solicitous toward the Lady as before. He nodded, smiled politely.

Until even the Lady Ellington could not ignore the evidence of her own blue eye and trailed off into silence, possibly for the first time, there in her white, porous, artificial mansion.

The only sound in that place was the
tink
of Shadrach's tears as they hit the edge of the pewter cup he held in his hands. She would never understand the look on his face—the commingling of love and hate that warred within him as he stared at her and, through her, at Nicola.

But he supposed she knew enough to be quiet—understood that the man before her had undergone a fundamental change. And yet could she really ever comprehend the restraint it took for Shadrach not to crush her skull with his bare hands, then pluck his lover's eye gently from the fractured orbit?

         

ON HIS
way to hell, Shadrach stopped at his apartment—an old split-level not far from the canals, with automated doors that seemed ever more reluctant to open for him. Inside, he found his official insignia: a badge in silver depicting a silhouette of an animal merging with a man. It allowed him safe passage through all of Quin's various business concerns.

Badge in hand, he found his gun after a moment of groping under the tightly made bed. He was not a violent man, but he loved his gun for the same reason he hated the mining machinery of his youth. The weapon had a graceful functionality built into its sleek, aerodynamic design. It was neither ungainly nor awkward; it fit perfectly in his hand. He had bought it used—an older model of the current laser gun lines—and the shining metal surface, once a sunny gold, had become a brazen copper. It glowed in a certain light, and it had known years of service before he had ever touched it, which made him love it all the more, that it had a history, a past, which it could communicate only in the precision of its fire, in the slight nicks along the muzzle, in its faded color. He had never fired it at anyone. He stuck it through his belt.

He walked into the tiny bathroom and thrust his head under freezing tap water until his face burned. Then he punched the bathroom wall as hard as he could, only stopping when the satisfying sting of pain had dulled the guilt and the other, deeper, pain.

Outside once again, in the ash-filled air, hidden in his black trench coat, he attacked the streets without regard for other traffic, pushing aside pedestrians, stepping in front of hovercraft. Anyone who sought to block him received the full and terrible force of his gaze.

Soon, he entered the dead-end alley, walked resolutely past the hologram, past the suddenly revealed sign,
QUIN
'
S SHANGHAI CIRCUS
, and placed a hand on the doors, which swung open in response to his badge.

Inside, the auxiliary lights glowed a dull blue, the animals curled up inside their glass cages, the funk of their hundred intertwined scents muted by their slumber. The Quin remote lay slumped across the counter of its lap, as if to peer over the edge at the slow sad faces of the miniature orangutan people. Dust motes sparkled, floated slowly to the floor. Asleep. Dead. Resting. No potential clients that day, brought round to see the show. The purple spiders dangled from the remote's outstretched hands, slaves to their spinnerets.

Shadrach tore the Quin remote into bloody strips of flesh. He smashed the glass cages. He broke the limbs of the animals, tore into their flanks until his teeth were bloody.

He wanted to do these things. For a long moment in the long silence, he stared at the slowly swaying spiders, hands clenched into fists at his sides.

Then he padded past the remote and into the brackish nonlight of the back rooms. The holographic screen of the computer reflected red light at him, already on and waiting for him. He quickly checked the two rooms beyond. He was alone. He sat down at the terminal and, after a few tense moments, found the records. The operation on Lady Ellington had been performed at her estate forty-three hours previously. The donor parts came from a “client” identified only as BDXFM 1000-231, currently held in “live storage” at the fifth-level repository known as the Slade Organ Bank. Quin had an arrangement with Slade's that made it easy for him to dispose of spare parts. Coldly, calmly, Shadrach analyzed the situation. If the records were accurate, then Nicola was still alive, but since the operation had occurred two days ago, she might since have sustained other losses not yet charged to the organ bank.

A grim smile creased his lips. It was obvious what he must do. Nothing could be simpler or more insane. He must steal her. He must plunge into the underground and bring her back to the surface himself . . .

Shadrach printed out the client number, shoved it into a pocket of his trench coat, and walked back into the main chamber.

The Quin remote waited for him. Its head was twisted to one side, the better to regard him. Its cold blue eyes, its cruel grimace of a smile, mocked Shadrach. Its eyelashes fluttered delicately. Shadrach had a sudden vision of the thousands of feet of rock that separated him from the real Quin, and the sense of vertigo, the terror over the extent of Quin's control, froze him.

“Have you been to see,” Quin said, “the sight of the Lady Ellington?” Singsong voice. Muttering of awakened beasts behind glass. Purple puppet spiders dancing on the ends of their marionette strings.

“Yes. I've been to see her.”

“Was it all you expected?”

“I expected nothing.”

“Did you love her?”

“The Lady Ellington? No.”

The remote grinned monstrously, said, “Good, good,” and fell silent.

Shadrach waited until the head once again rested upon the counter. Then he walked past the creatures in their cages, aware that the eyes, the eyes of each mutation, each wrecked husk of chromosomes, were following him.

Nicola's apartment door was half-open. It took a damaging act of will to clamp down on the despair riddling through his thoughts like wormholes and ask himself the relevant questions. Had Quin had her killed for some reason? Had someone snatched her for parts, which Quin just happened to buy? The darkness of below level had already begun to infiltrate his mind. Now he was a detective. Now he shut the door behind him.

Inside, he found that the aquarium had been smashed, all of Nicola's fish long since dead in pretty patterns of inert flesh. They stank terribly. Off to the side, he discovered a dark stain on the carpet, but when he squatted and touched it, his finger came away dry. Blood? Wine? Spaghetti sauce?

He examined the fish next. Some were half-eaten, gnawed at by sharp teeth. Tufts of fur mixed in with the stinking fish made him think of meerkats. Had they been here? He sniffed the air. If so, the dead fish disguised their odor.

The couch had been moved recently, the marks where the legs had pushed down on the carpet still fresh. On the couch he found a laser gun—a sleek new model—tucked neatly into the left corner cushion. He left it there, but pulled out his own gun. The quiet had begun to get to him. Under the couch, another enigmatic red stain. He didn't bother to check it.

Circling back to the door, Shadrach noticed signs of struggle. His circumspect entrance could not account for the rough indentations in the carpet, the traces of imprinted mud.

He entered the kitchen, found five rotting fiddler crabs on the counter, their eyestalks flaccid, claws red and cracked.

Which left the bedroom. The door was shut. Memories lay beyond that door—of late nights spent talking and making love, making love and talking, until the two actions were as intertwined and inseparable as their bodies. Was her body in there, on the bed?

Reluctantly, he punched the door button. It slid open. The bedroom was empty. He sat down on the bed. No evidence of any disturbance or struggle. He checked under the bed. Nothing.

He was about to walk back into the living room when he heard a sudden rustle, a spasm, from the closet. Quietly, he approached the closet. He listened at the door. Nothing . . . and yet . . . Shadrach opened the door, his gun aimed dead center . . . to reveal a very normal clothes closet, with shoes and old stuffed animals strewn at the bottom. The animals were antique investments. Nicola had had them for years. Slowly, Shadrach parted the clothes, gun aimed into the back of the closet. Nothing came hurtling out of the darkness. A body did not come falling down out of the darkness.

Shadrach looked at the stuffed animals. She had a bear, a rabbit, a meerkat.

With great care, Shadrach placed the muzzle of his gun against the top of the meerkat's head.

“Move and I'll kill you,” he said.

“Feesssshhh,” came the muted reply as the meerkat trembled uncontrollably.

Shadrach stepped back, the gun held at arm's length, the muzzle still against the side of the meerkat's head. The meerkat's face scrunched up in a permanent flinch against the expected blast.

“Feesshhhh good,” the meerkat said distantly, its stare glassy. And why shouldn't its stare be glassy? The whole left side of its body had been torn away, then cauterized by a laser weapon. The creature was in shock.

“Nicola. Do you know Nicola?”

The meerkat leered through the blood bubbles in its mouth. It stared up at Shadrach. “Nicola doesn't need fish anymore.”

It had taken a few moments, but now Shadrach recognized the meerkat's subtype: an urban assassin model. Quin planned to sell versions of the subtype to the spy services of half a dozen city governments. But what was one doing in Nicola's apartment?

“You're not so bad off after all,” Shadrach said, “except that now I've found you.”

“Sirrrs?” the meerkat said, almost toppling over onto its side.

Shadrach stepped back, gun still aimed unwaveringly at the meerkat's head.

“I mean that you've got a lot of hardware up there,” he said as he used a wide dispersion wave to incinerate the meerkat's body, leaving only the neck and head, which fell atop the heap of ashes with an expression akin to astonishment forever etched into its features.

“Feesssshhhhh!” came the anguished, bewildered cry.

Shadrach carefully picked up the disembodied head by one svelte ear and took it into the kitchen. The heads of the assassin models had been created to be self-supporting in an emergency, and could live on for several days after decapitation. Although in shock, although suffering from disorientation and possible brain damage, the meerkat might still have its uses. It might serve as a suitable vehicle for revenge.

In the kitchen Shadrach found a common permanent adhesive and applied it to the cauterized stump of the meerkat's neck as the beast moaned and spat at him. He searched the cabinets, found a small plate, and put the meerkat head on it. He held the head in place as the adhesive did its work.

He stared into the meerkat's eyes, which were sharp and bright with pain, and said, “I don't give a fuck what your name was before. From now on, your name is John the Baptist, you son of a bitch.” He snickered for no reason at all, then stopped abruptly, because he could feel an anger, a rage, behind the snicker that must, at any cost, be denied until later. Everything in its place.

The meerkat said, “I will kill you. I will hear your eyes pop against my teeth.”

With a kitchen tool cleverly called an All-in-One, Shadrach used the pliers function to pull out all of the meerkat's teeth. It squealed once or twice over this latest indignity. Shadrach clotted the blood with a washcloth until the meerkat gagged, after which he let up.

“Bastard,” Shadrach said. “What makes you think you're any different than the funny people out in the wastelands? What makes you think you're anything more than an extremely complex machine?”

He found the largest plastic bag in the kitchen cabinets, poked airholes into it, put the meerkat inside, and stuffed the bag into the huge right side pocket of his trench coat.