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

  Jamie knelt beside the forepaws. She took one paw in her hands.

  “It’s raw.”

  Five pads formed the underside of the paw. The pads had been worn to redness and the sides of the paw were as smooth as wind-washed stone.

  “This beast traveled a long way just to die here. I wonder where it came from – another city or maybe even from beyond the desert. How could anything with such thick fur come from the desert?”

  “It looks dangerous to me.”

  “It’s dead, Balzac.”

  “Even so.”

  Balzac’s gaze traveled the length of the creature and beyond until, lightheaded with dread, he realized the beast’s destination: the hole. The hole that must spiral down into level beneath level, threading its way through catacombs without number, musty and old, where lived the creatures from nightmare.

  “Jamie. Jamie, we should go. We should find Jeffer.”

  “Too late now. He’ll find us.” She did not bother to look up, but held the paw gently in her hand. “Such a distance to travel.”

  The sun beat down, hot and withering. It stung Balzac’s eyes and brought beads of sweat dripping onto the bridge of his nose. But, despite the sun, the creature had no smell, no stench of decay. This creature had padded across the desert, the mountains, perhaps, and seen things Balzac could only imagine, and it had had the singleness of purpose to head for the darkest hole it could find when its legs had begun to give out . . . and it had no smell.

  He wanted to run, to finally leave Jamie behind if she insisted on being so foolish. But, foolish or not, she was right: it was too late, for at that moment Jeffer appeared above them, staring down from the lip of the amphitheater.

  II

  “It seems to him there are a thousand bars,

  and behind the bars, no world.”

  —Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Panther”

  Ten years after the amphitheater, on the forty-eighth night of the war for Balthakazar, Jeffer saw Jamie for the last time and his mind wobbled strangely. He stood on the third-story balcony of the crumbling, baroque building he had chosen as a resting place for his men, but seeing her he was suddenly adrift, the stone beneath his feet shockingly porous, apt to fall apart and spill him onto the street below. Seeing her, he could not help but curl inward, downward, into a spiral of memories, surfacing only much later to the implications of her existence below him. Almost in self-defense, his thoughts circled back to the one ritual that had proven impervious to change: When he slept in those years before and after the amphitheater, he would dream of the oasis lakes reflecting the stars. In his dreams, the lakes transformed themselves to light-choking, frictionless surfaces, as motionless as, as smooth as, lacquered black obsidian, the stars that fell upon the lakes screaming down like shards of broken, blue-tinted glass. Other times, the lakes became the land and the surrounding desert metamorphosed into thick, churning oceans through which swam fish flipped inside out so that their organs slithered and jiggled beside them.

  Once, he had found Balzac at the oasis lakes, alone, his bony, frail body naked from a midnight swim, skin flushed blue with cold. Balzac’s smile of greeting had suddenly shifted to doubt when Jeffer told him the news; and then Jeffer could see the darkness invading his brother, that luminous, expressive face blank with self-annihilation.

  The images, the content, of the memory maintained a blurry constancy, across a dozen years, so that Jeffer could always conjure up the pale blue gloss of Balzac’s face, lit from within, and the awful curling of his lips, through which he sucked air as if he were a deep lake fish, slow and lethargic in the cold, dying out of water.

  What had he told Balzac at the time? The exact words had been erased from his memory; they lingered only as ghosts and he knew them only by their absence, the holes they left behind. The event itself he remembered with perfect clarity. He had been in a service tunnel with his parents, all three struggling to fix a clogged wastewater conduit sensitively located next to a main support beam. Polluted water streamed onto the tunnel floor. They all knew the dangers of compression, how that stream could become a flood. Their portable light flickered an intense green, staining the white tunnel walls as they toiled silently. The air, recycled too many times, tasted stale. Above them groaned the weight of five underground levels, enough rock, sand, and metal to bury them forever.

  When it began to look as if the patch on the conduit would hold, Jeffer took a break, turning away to sip from a water canteen. He was sweaty and covered with grit. He faced the blinking red light that beckoned from the exit and wondered idly whether there would still be time to get in a quick drink or a game of cards before the night shift.

  Behind him, like a door slamming shut, the supporting wall collapsed. Deafened, he heard nothing, felt the weight of sand and rock suddenly smother the tunnel.

  He knew.

  Before he spun around.

  His parents were dead.

  The foreknowledge strangled the scream rising in his throat, sent it imploding into his capillaries.

  Kill the messenger, Jeffer thought. Then maybe the message will die too.

  Seeing Jamie on the street below, Jeffer knew of no way to protect his brother from the image of her.

  It was two hours before dawn, and as Jeffer stood on the third-story balcony the wind blew out of the southwest, cold and oddly comforting against his face. He hadn’t showered or shaved for three weeks and there were holes in both his shoes. Sleep had become a memory, no more or less diaphanous than all the other memories, which crept in when he wasn’t on his guard, because there was too much time to think.

  Also from the southwest came the smell of gunpowder and the acidic stench of flesh burned by laser. Gouts of flame revealed dirigibles on fire, their barrel bodies cracking like rotten orange melons. There, amid the fiercest fighting, the crèche leaders had decided to use most of their remaining laser weapons. Spikes of light cut through the jumbled horizon of rooftops. The enemy hated light. It could not use light. Every spike of light extinguished was a human life snuffed out.

  Jeffer’s men, sequestered inside the building, numbered four. He could no longer lie to himself and call them a unit, or pretend they had any mission other than survival. Sixteen men had been killed in less than three nights. Of the rest, Con Fegman, wounded, had become delirious; Mindle counted as no more than a dangerous child; and Balzac . . . Balzac he could no longer read, for his brother hid beneath his handsome features and revealed himself to no one. Even their sole remaining autodoc – a portable, two-meter-high model with wheels and treads – had become increasingly eccentric, as if, deep in its circuitry, it had succumbed to battle fatigue.

  Their predicament had become so dire that Jeffer found himself giggling at the most unexpected times. For over two hundred hours they had been cut off from communications with their superiors. The four of them had fought and fled from the enemy through tunnels, aqueducts, the ruins of old homes, and across the cracked asphalt of a thirty-six-lane highway.

  Through it all – the deadly lulls and the frenzies of violence – Jeffer had survived by fashioning a new identity for himself and his brother; they were refugees fleeing the past, and their best strategy had proved to be the simplest: in the unraveling of their lives to forget, to disremember, to exist purely in the now. They had successfully eluded the past for two nights running and yet, somehow, she had found them again.

  The war had extended into the heart of the desert winter, the buildings that crowded the street etched in sharp, defining lines by the cold. But how to define her? She walked in the shadow of her own skin, lit by the intermittent flash of laser fire. Was she human? She loped along the chill pavement of the street below, nimble and dainty and muscular as she navigated the long-abandoned barricades.

  Jeffer stared, his body stiff. His breath caught in his throat. Centuries slow, he picked up his rifle from the balcony railing.

  “Who is it?” Balzac’s tired voice, muffled, came from the room at Jeffer’s ba
ck. They had barricaded themselves in and had booby-trapped the stairwells. Inside the room, the autodoc produced a thin, blue-tinted light that couldn’t be seen from the street.

  The pale, moon-faced boy Mindle, a refugee from a northern crèche already destroyed by the invaders, sidled along the wall until he was close enough to whisper, “Is it her again?” Mindle’s voice held no fear, no surprise. Only Mindle’s body registered such nerve-end pricklings; at his spiritual core he had been frozen solid for a hundred years. Jeffer had seen too many like him in recent months as the crèche sent younger and younger men into battle.

  “Keep Balzac quiet,” Jeffer whispered back. “If she hears him . . . get Con Fegman, if he’s able, to watch the door.”

  Mindle nodded and, wraithlike, disappeared into the darkness.

  Below, Jamie began to cry out Balzac’s name in the plaintive timbre of one who is lost and alone and afraid.

  Balzac muttered a few words and Jeffer heard Mindle’s soft voice, calm and reasonable, coo a soothing reply.

  The shape on the street below stiffened, sneezed, and said, “Balzac, my love?”

  Balzac’s voice in reply: “Is it – could it?”

  Mindle cursed. Jeffer heard a scuffle, a strangled cry, and silence, his gaze never straying from her. Lost and afraid. How could he ever consider her someone he had known? The sounds of her aloneness, her confusion, struck him as faintly pitiable, that she should, in any manner, try to re-create her former life. Such a curious double image: to see her on the street below and yet to remember all the times when Balzac had invited him over for dinner, Balzac and Jamie both exhausted from twelve hours of overseeing their reclamation projects in Balthakazar. She had never seemed vulnerable while arguing with him over the Con’s latest decisions or about how to adapt the hydroponics hangars to open-air conditions. The lack of hardness in her now, the weaning away of any but the most dependent attributes, made him wary.

  The stone wall behind him bruised his back. He didn’t play the statue very well; he was sweating despite the cold and he imagined his breath as a vast, unmoving field of ice particles.

  Perhaps, as on the two previous nights, she would miss them, would pass by, rasping out her song.

  Jeffer raised his rifle to his shoulder. Pass by, he wished desperately. Pass by and be gone. He did not want to risk the sound of a shot. Come dawn, they would move elsewhere, maybe come across another unit and cobble up enough numbers to mount a counter offensive.

  Pass by. Even better, remake history. Let Balzac come to me swimming at night at the oasis. Let Balzac tell me of our parents’ death. Let him be the eldest and follow me to Balthakazar.

  She stopped directly beneath his balcony, at an extreme line of fire. She sniffed the air. She growled deep in her throat.

  “Balzac, are you there?” Such a reedy, ghostly voice.

  She paced in a circle, still sniffing.

  Jeffer allowed himself to be seduced by the fluid grace, the single-minded purpose behind the strides, the preternatural balance, for she was still beautiful.

  She stopped pacing. She stared right up at him with her dead violet eyes, the snarl of fangs below the mouth.

  “Jeffer,” she said.

  His finger closed on the trigger. The red tracer light lit up the pavement. The bullet hit the pavement, sent up a rain of debris.

  But she was not there.

  He could already hear her – inside the building. Battling through their booby traps. Barricades ripped apart, flung to the side.

  “She’s coming up!” Jeffer shouted, running back into the room. “She’s coming up!”

  Mindle and Con Fegman stood against the wall farthest from the door. Balzac sobbed, curled in a corner, guarded by the autodoc. It was clear Mindle had propped Con Fegman up and that the old man would fall down given the opportunity. Which left Mindle and him to stop her. Mindle had their last two laser weapons, a rifle and a hand-held beam. He aimed the rifle at the door. They both knew it had only two or three more charges left.

  “Give me the rifle,” Jeffer said. “Keep the other one – a crossfire.”

  Mindle nodded, threw the weapon to him. Jeffer caught it. His heart pounded. His hands shook. He flicked the safety.

  Mindle said, “Soon now. Soon now.” He rocked back and forth on his heels. His eyes were dilated. He licked his lips.

  They heard the scrabble of claws upon the stairs. Heard the rasping of her breath.

  The terror left Jeffer in that instant, as if he had become as cold as Mindle. He wanted her to come through that door. He wanted to kill her.

  The sound of claws faded. Silence settled over the room.

  Jeffer looked at Mindle in puzzlement.

  Mindle smiled and winked. “Just wait. Just wait.”

  Then she hit the door with such force that the metal shrieked with fatigue.

  “Balzac! Open the door!”

  Another blow to the door. An indentation the size of her paw. A growl that would have ripped up Jeffer’s insides a minute before.

  “Go away,” yelled Con Fegman, who fell, thrashing, in the fever haze of his infection.

  “Balzac! Open the door!”

  Balzac looked up from his corner. Jeffer could see the anguish in his eyes.

  “Don’t,” Jeffer said.

  The door tore open as if it were paper.

  Metal and stone exploded into the room. Jeffer was yelling but Balzac couldn’t hear the words. She stood there – huge, black, half-seen in the autodoc’s blue glare. She shook herself, debris fluming out from her body. Mindle dove into Balzac’s corner and caught him in the ribs with an elbow. It drove the air out of Balzac’s lungs. Before he could get to his feet – to warn her? to protect Jeffer? – she leapt at Jeffer. Jeffer’s laser rifle flashed and burned her hindquarters off. Jamie screamed and, trajectory altered, landed in a bloody, crumpled heap beside him, brought to a stop by the wall.

  The body thrashed, the claws whipping out from the pistoning legs. Balzac ducked, covering his head with his hands. Con Fegman, struggling to his feet, was ripped by a claw and sent reeling by the impact. The front legs sought traction, flailed, and the great jaws beneath Jamie’s head gnashed together, opening reflexively only inches from Balzac’s throat. Fangs the size of fingers. Breath like an antiseptic wind. Blood spattered over the blunt muzzle. He could see the tiny pink tongue muscles tensing and relaxing spasmodically.

  Jeffer shouted an order to the autodoc. The autodoc lurched over on its treads, extended a tube, and stuck a needle into what remained of the flesh dog’s left flank. The flailing died away. The great jaws lost their rigidity and rested against the floor. Blood seeped out from beneath the body, licking at Balzac’s drawn up feet. Con Fegman moaned.

  Balzac sat up against the wall, unable to look at his beloved. An endless singsong ran through his head: if only, if only. If only Jeffer had let him talk to her while she was still on the street, perhaps he could have persuaded her to go away – and perhaps he didn’t want her to go away. He let out a deep, shuddering sigh and stood on trembling legs.

  Mindle blocked his path, so close he could smell the boy’s rotten breath.

  “Kill it,” Mindle hissed, his face white with hatred. “Kill it now!”

  Mindle’s eyes had narrowed to knifepoints. Balzac looked away – toward Jeffer, toward Con Fegman.

  Con Fegman, in a misty, faraway voice, said, “I can’t see anymore. I can’t bear to see anymore,” and covered his eyes and began to weep.

  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.