Balzac's War: A Tale of Veniss Underground Read online

  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 stru
ctures. 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 fart
her 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.