Veniss Underground Read online

  When they stopped singing my shoulders sagged, as if their voices had supported my weight, and they saw me. All three with their large, luminous eyes. Fearful. They must have thought I would arrest them, for they quickly gathered up their game and, hobbling along, disappeared into the gloom.

  While I watched. The music gone. The corridor thick with dust and overlooked imperiously by the gargoyle likenesses of leaders long dead. Devon had lived in their world for six years—undercover, alone. I envied him.

  The memory of the voices did not fade. Late at night as I lay beside Arcadia, the faces came to me in dream, the mouths like open wounds whispering, “Daddy . . .” Sometimes I recoiled in disgust and sometimes I embraced them. Embraced them all, despite my revulsion.

  I think it was then, in the aftermath of these nightmares, that I truly understood the difference between Funny and muttie. The muttie had been fashioned to serve, to obey, and the master fears the servant. But the Funny was born of us and we tried to love it, no matter how staunchly we also hated it for reminding us of our own failures.

  Arcadia had never once spoken of leaving me because of my deficiency. The question hung between us, never spoken, until finally it evaporated, had no power over us other than that a ghost wields, a memory that has never come to pass.

  I would go to her at her ad job in the Canal District and we would walk home along the enclosed piers, amid the diaphanous glow of chemicals in the water, her hand in mine. Her grasp firm, without doubt, even when I looked into her eyes and almost pleaded to be reminded, to be accused.

  “My lover,” she would say, and ruffle my hair because she knew I hated that. “My lover,” she would say, and I would feel proud to be with her, in the Canal District, hand in hand, just walking.

  Devon had spoken.

  “What?”

  He pointed to the beast. “Beautiful, isn't it?”

  I stared at it. From outward appearances, it had fully regenerated: fur covered it, the claws were wicked and long, and one fang peeked innocently from the mouth.

  “Oh, yes, smashing,” I said. “If you're a Funny Person.”

  Devon scowled. “This is clever bioneering. A muttie that dies before it lives. A creature born dead which then revives.”

  “A muttie?” My fingers tightened on the .38. My heart hammered in my chest. “I thought you said it probably was not a muttie?”

  The creature's death rattle interrupted us: a groan of anguish that roared out, then diminished. The claws flexed. The eyes blinked. The head moved, the eyes tracking us as we backed away. I raised the Diamond .38 until the laser trace pulsed green on its forehead.

  Devon knocked the .38 from my hand. I grunted in surprise. As it hit the sand, out of reach, I realized every word of his had been an attempt to stall until the beast could awaken. As I spun to face him, he kicked me in the stomach, then brought both hands down on the back of my head. There was a soft crack and pain seared my skull. I fell. I tried to get up, but slumped in the sand.

  “You bastard!” I hissed, gulping for air. “You flesh-poor bastard!”

  Now Devon was tearing the trench coat from his body, buttons popping loose in his eagerness to be free. When he had finished disrobing, I cursed myself for a fool.

  Beneath the coat, a metal frame of gears and levers and wheels: living bone, tendon, sinew holding it together. A bioneer's wet dream. Within the organic wiring, the gimshaw circuitry, not Devon, not the seven-foot Devon I knew. No. Two Devons, each identical, each the same three-odd feet tall. Each with extra limbs, external lungs, sprouting from the chests. The top one sat on the lower one's massive shoulders. The lower dwarf operated the legs. Funny People. Hysterical. A carnie show. I would have laughed if my head hadn't hurt so much. A marvel of coordination. How many bribes to keep their secret? How many corrupt bioneers? And, more important, how many Funny People had they saved from the Conserge? I heard the nonsense rhyme then, the children's voices. Mocking me.

  Lithely, Top jumped from the frame, followed by Bottom. I don't know which disgusted me more. As I staggered to my feet, the empty frame tottered, fell to the sand. The dirigibles hovered over the city, unaware of the danger beyond the walls.

  The Devons hesitated and I saw the indecision on their faces. For a moment, I thought they might attack me, but then a grin cracked their mouths wide open, a grin that, perversely, made me grin back, it was so pure and spontaneous a reaction. Then, without a word, they began to run down the beach, away from the city, toward the wastelands.

  Me, I wanted to find my Diamond .38, but something growled and swiped out at my legs. The muttie had slipped my mind in the wake of the twins' striptease. Claws locked around my left ankle. Again I fell. I scrabbled at the sand and kicked out, hoping to break a tooth or two before it swallowed me whole. My hand met something solid: the .38. I raised it. I fired. The muttie screamed as I severed its arm at the elbow. I kicked once more and was free. The severed claw-hand still clutched my ankle. I tore it loose, threw it away from me. I looked to see how far the Devon marvels had gotten.

  Too far to kill, or even maim.

  “You flesh-poor bastards!” I screamed, nothing if not original.

  No answer, of course. No answer at all, just Devon times two bobbing up and down, dancing along a shore under siege of rain.

  Behind me, the muttie hunched closer. I turned, fired. Blood spattered everywhere. Fired. Fired again.

  The golden eyes looked up at me, still bright. “Mann . . .”

  Speech? Stunned, I fired a fourth time. More blood. I had opened a major artery. I was crying now. It/he was talking.

  “Mannn . . .” Plaintive. “Mann?”

  I drilled it between the eyes. It groaned. It struggled to its feet, fell sideways, fur matted with blood. “Mann . . .” And the death rattle again.

  The storm was coming in quick, the wind rising, lightning in sheets of silver. The Devons were shadows in the spreading darkness. Soon they would be beyond even the range of the dirigibles. How the lower one must have sneered, held back giggles at my stupidity.

  “Mann . . .” The reverse death rattle. I turned in surprise. How to kill that which lives and lives again?

  “Why?” I screamed. I kicked it. “Why?”

  I will never know what the creature really said. Its mouth was full of blood, its words already garbled. I suppose I heard what I expected to hear.

  “I-wire, I-wire, adders and ladders . . .”

  Like a message in code, and me without the skills to solve it.

  Blood sang in my arteries, the storm's electricity lifting the hairs on my arms. My job—my life—was to uphold the law of Conserge, but the Conserge had never told me that mutties could speak, could think.

  The beast raised its head, eyes fixed on me.

  “You killl,” it stated or asked. “You killl Funnnyyy.”

  I thought of the three children playing coddleskatch. I thought of Arcadia's hair tangled in one upturned palm. “Afterward, we could go out to Hospital Central for another checkup . . .” My hands were cold on the trigger. “. . . you could . . . I mean we could . . .”

  “Weee makkk,” it said. “Wee makkk you . . .” Struggling to speak, perhaps to explain.

  This time I kept on firing, cutting the legs out from under it, quartering its head, knowing as I did so I could not kill it. As the beam sawed splinters out of the bone, its voice rose in an agonized scream to match the hysterics of the storm, a deafening wall of sound that left me trembling and weeping. I crouched to one knee, breathing hard.

  A wail of sirens from Veniss warned of rough weather as the dirigibles wallowed in troughs of calm air and indifference. If the Conserge fell, the children I had seen, who came to me in sleep, would not be Funny. I would be Funny. Arcadia would be Funny. In my mind, the children sought the embrace of my arms, as if I could save them. But I could not move.

  It was then, with the rain moving in, the thunder and lightning, that I realized how much I loved Arcadia. I loved her with
a resolve that surprised me. I could not sacrifice her safety, not for the children singing in the alley, not for the beast on the shore. Flesh preserve me, I would have betrayed the city and its tick-silly Conserge in that moment—but only for love of her. Funny People be damned. Devons be damned. Damn the lot of them. I would return to Veniss and report this new muttie to them. And the Devons. I would not allow them to slouch closer to the city, to harm its citizens, no matter how undeserving those citizens might be.

  But when I took one last look out to sea, I realized the choice was not mine to make. And I knew why the Devons had abandoned their disguise with such defiance.

  There, in the surf, not waves, but corpses. Thousands of skeletons churning water to foam as they made landfall. As if every muttie we had ever mistreated, tortured, murdered, had come back from the grave. Some were huge, larger than a dirigible, others like small fish. All with one eye intact to guide them, vertical pupils amid the gold. It seemed the water had evaporated—just skeletons clattering against one another, chattering in wind spray. Piling up.

  I went a speck mad then. I laughed a dry, hacking laugh. Turning, I ran, but at my back was the terrible vision that told me the Conserge had failed, that I had failed: the corpses piling up, returning to life. The sound they made took the form of bone-thin voices in the waves, voices in my mind, “detectives cadavers, detectives cadavers.”

  How now to save this city for us funny people?

  A HEART FOR LUCRETIA

  This is the story of a brother, a sister, and a flesh dog, and how two found a heart for the third. The story has both oral and written traditions, with no two versions the same. It begins, for our purposes, with the city . . .

  “THE CITY, she has parts. The city, she is dead, but people live there, underground. They have parts . . .”

  Gerard Mkumbi cared little for what Con Newman said, despite the man's seniority and standing in the crèche. But, finally, the moans as the wheezing autodoc worked on his sister persuaded him. The autodoc said Lucretia needed a new heart. A strong heart, one that would allow her to spring up from their sandy burrows hale and willowy, to dance again under the harvest moon. Gerard had hoped to trade places so that the tubes would stick out from his chest, his nose, his arms, the bellows compression pumping in out, in out. But no. He had the same defect, though latent, the autodoc told him. A successful transplant would only begin the cycle anew.

  In Lucretia's room, at twilight, he read to her from old books: Bellafonte's Quadraphelix, The Metal Dragon and Jessible, others of their kind. A dread would possess him as he watched his sister, the words dry and uncomforting on his lips. Lucretia had high cheekbones, smoky-green eyes, and mocha skin, which had made all the young men of the crèche flock to her dance.

  But wrinkles crowded the corners of those eyes and Gerard could detect a slackness to the skin, the flesh beneath, which hinted at decay. The resolve for health had faltered, the usually clenched chin now sliding into the neck; surely a trick of shadow. Anyone but Gerard would have thought her forty-five. He knew she was twenty-seven. They had been born minutes apart, had shared the same womb. Watching her deterioration was to watch his own. Would he look this way at forty-five?

  “Gerard,” she would call out, her hand curling into his . . .

  It had become a plea. He forced himself to hold her hand for hours, though the thought of such decay made him ill. The autodoc insisted on keeping her drugged so she could not feel the pain. Could she even recognize him anymore, caught as she was between wakefulness and sleep, sleep and death?

  Flesh Dog, eyes hidden beneath the rolls of raw tissue that were its namesake, stayed always by his side. Flesh Dog shared few words with Gerard, but every twitch of its muzzle toward Lucretia or the squat metal autodoc reminded Gerard she would die soon—too soon, like their mother before her. Unless a miracle arose from the desert.

  “The city, she has parts . . .”

  And, finally, he had gone, taking Flesh Dog with him.

  Thus it begins. The ending is another matter, a creature of fragments and glimpses that pieced together only tease . . .

  THAT SUMMER, as the stars watched overhead, an angel descended to the desert floor. And, when it departed, Lucretia arose from the dead and danced like a will-o'-the-wisp over the shifting sands; a fitful dance, for she often dreamed of Gerard at night, and they were unpleasant dreams.

  That winter, Flesh Dog and Gerard limped back to the crèche. He did not speak. Always, he looked toward the south, toward the great sea and the city with no name, as though expecting strangers.

  And the middle, finally, in which meat is placed upon the bone.

  FOR TWENTY days and twenty nights, Gerard trudged the sands, subsisting on the dry toads that Flesh Dog dug up for them. They encountered no one on their journey, listened only to the dry winds of the desert.

  Finally, at dusk of the twenty-first day, they climbed a dune and stared down upon the city. The sun lent the city a crimson glare, silhouettes burned into the sand. Gerard saw that the walls had crumbled in places and the buildings within, what could be glimpsed of them, had fallen into disrepair. Although Gerard looked for many minutes, he could discover no sign of life. The only movement came from the west, where a vast ocean glittered and rippled, red as the dunes that abutted it.

  Though tired and disappointed at the city's abandoned appearance, Gerard would have plunged forward under cover of darkness. But Flesh Dog sniffed the air, sneezed, and counseled against it.

  “Strange smells,” it ruminated, “strange smells indeed . . .”

  Gerard, fatigue creeping into his bones, could not find the strength to argue. He fell asleep against Flesh Dog's side, sand on his lips and the wind in his hair.

  During the night, he woke in a cold sweat, convinced his sister had been leaning over him the moment before, her hair back in the ponytail she had lovingly braided at age nine, giggling and warning him to stay away from the city, the city that lay at the edge of his vision: a dark and ominous block of shadow.

  As he drifted back to sleep, Gerard imagined he felt his sister's pulse weaken, back in her crèche bed.

  In the morning, Gerard and Flesh Dog found that the city was nearly eclipsed by the cusp of the ocean, its waves a blinding green. Flesh Dog wished to bathe, but Gerard said no. The waves echoed his sister's voice in their constant rush and withdrawal: hurry, hurry . . .

  Flesh Dog scouted ahead as Gerard entered the city. The walls had been breached in a dozen places and overhead zynagill hovered, waiting for carrion. The smell as Gerard passed under the shadow of walls made him bite back nausea. A subtle smell of plastic and leather and unwashed drains.

  The interior was littered with corpses: a valley of corpses. Flesh Dog, whimpering, retreated to stand by Gerard. Gerard stared at the spectacle before him.

  Dead people had been stacked in rectangular pits until they spilled over the edges. Nothing stirred. No flies tended the dead. No zynagill touched them. Plague, Gerard thought, putting a hand over his mouth and nose.

  But the bright, festival clothes, the perfection of flesh without hint of boil or scab, mocked his intuition.

  Gerard stepped forward, Flesh Dog shadowing him. The clothing upon the dead remained limp, lacking even the secret life of the wind. Eyes stared glassily and the jaws beneath were stiff, locked against giving up their mystery. Gerard would rather they sprang up in parody of human form than lie there, staring . . . A chill entered Gerard's bones. Watching. Bloodless. Cold. A vast tableau of the unburied and unburnt.

  “So many dead,” Gerard muttered. Once, he had been told of the legend of the Oliphaunt's graveyard. Was this the human equivalent? Would his Lucretia soon find her way to this city, against her will, because he had failed?

  Flesh Dog sniffed the air as they skirted the nearest pit.

  “Dead?” it said. “They smell as if they never lived . . .”

  “Hush,” replied Gerard, respectful of the silence.

  And so they shuffl
ed forward through the army of bodies, some appealing with outstretched arms, but all quiet as run-down clockwork mice. The eyes seemed to have lost the hope of blinking away deep sleep, the skin of feeling dappled sunlight upon it.

  BEYOND THE pits lay the city proper: a maze of half-buried fortifications and jumbled buildings. In places, it appeared wars had been fought among the ruins, for the ground was burnt and some walls had melted into slag. All Gerard could do was remind himself of what Con Newman had said: “People live there, underground.” It was obvious none lived above. Not even grass grew in the pavement cracks. They trudged on, to the sound of their own belabored breathing.

  Finally, they came upon a strange sight amongst the wreckage: the top of an exposed elevator shaft some fifty meters ahead; the tower which had once housed the device had fallen away entirely, leaving only a rough rectangle of regular stone embedded in the ground. The shaft, which had all the looks of a bony arm, veinlike girders naked to the sky, the mortar peeled away, revealed a compact glass box, intact, which was the elevator. Gerard recognized it from The Metal Dragon. Jessible had escaped using an elevator. That something so fragile could have survived for so long amazed him.

  Standing by the shaft were three creatures, each larger than Gerard by a third. They resembled giant weasels but no fur grew upon their clawed hands and they stood upright as though it was their birthright rather than some carnie show trick.

  “What are they?” he hissed to Flesh Dog. “I have never seen them before.”

  “Meerkats,” it replied. “Distilled somewhat with other species, but still meerkats. Your father used to read you tales of the meerkats and the dances they did for the men who created them.”

  Meerkats! This was indeed magical, and it created out of the torn and wasted landscape some small scrap of hope. Meerkats! He had killed meerkats for the meat before, but they rarely reached two feet in height. For a moment, he considered the possibility that Flesh Dog lied, but dismissed it: Flesh Dog had taught his father how to read and write. Flesh Dog never lied.