Veniss Underground Read online

  Good programmers are in short supply as the city slouches and slips ever more into the dream of its extinction. The machinery of government would grind to a halt without you and your kind—a thousand trains would slip their tracks, a hundred thousand air conditioners spring to life at midnight instead of noon, hovercraft crash and burn like short-lived metallic moths.

  It is an expression of raw power to be a programmer these days—you are a brutal surgeon, a delicate butcher—and the building you work from, which you and your fellows call “the Bastion,” reflects your power. It is immense—white, rising cylindrical into the sky some two hundred stories up, you embedded in its metal flesh on the 120th floor.

  You are passionate about the Bastion and your work because it is no game, no simple task. This is deadly serious. This is the staff and the sword. This is life to you as you wind your way through old code and new, looking for where to splice, to reroute, to rewrite . . . You love this abstract world that impinges so heavily upon the concrete world. Everywhere around you the city falls apart—the belowground levels lost to civil government, the off-world colonies so concentrated on their own survival that within a generation the cool-down canals for outsystem spacecraft will be put to entirely more prosaic uses, the aboveground levels so divided into different governments that a trip from one end of the city to the other requires eighteen security stops.

  In the midst of this chaos, the clarity, the darting precision of your job comforts you—and it seems important, to maintain, to renovate, to hold back the encroachment of barbarism for one more day, one more week, one more month, one more year.

  Back to work, your boss on your shoulder, supervising your department by remote, sending his miniature holoself to peer at hard screen and soft like some tiny devil with a pitchfork. You never know when he might pop up—or even if there would be a penalty for being found slacking off—but still, halfway through the day, you decide to hunt for Nick through the computer systems, through the code.

  You check his identification number and find he has paid no rent for two months. He is behind on all of his bills. He has several loans out from disreputable pawnshops and so-called financial services. You check his credit. He's all maxed out, the last purchases made at least five months ago. Then you try one last, time-consuming idea—you access his bank (illegally) and check for bank cards. You find one, issued not three weeks ago . . . and finally find a current purchase which makes your heart leap . . . until you read more closely and see that the purchase—of a prawns-and-avocado pita from an independent vendor—was made on the tenth level below ground. You hardly knew there was a tenth level below ground, and you worry in earnest. Nick could have been robbed and killed, his credit now used by his attackers. Or perhaps he is hiding—made one too many shady deals, or gave the district police trouble. You decided not to give him money the last time he asked you for it. He was already into you for so much . . . but the deepest fear is of the underground, not for Nick. Just thinking of so much lawlessness makes you weak . . . and where would Nick have gone after coming to you?

  The answer comes to you immediately: Shadrach. You remember when Shadrach told you he was going to work for Quin. Shadrach had been in the city for a year, and you had lived with him for six months in your apartment. He'd been supporting himself by running supplies via autotrain to Balthakazar and other cities. This meant plowing through miles and miles of chemical wastes and rogue bioneer entrapments, and sometimes he didn't come back uninjured. Through the burnished glass, listening to Mozart, he would watch the automatic bombs go off, would watch the funny people and mutties as they tore at the train—this sudden confluence of color and violence and music—and he would wonder if he was not in fact trapped in a dream. Those were the days, he would tell you, when he realized beauty and horror could be synonymous, when he wept upon his return, the thought that he might not have survived to see you too much for him. You would take him in your arms and he would tell you his fears—that he might not ever be truly assimilated into the city, that the very language might fragment into shards of nothing.

  He understood and he didn't understand anything above ground. He wanted to be something other than he was. He wanted to be free. On the face of it, you should have been glad he was changing employment, but he couldn't even tell you what he would be doing for Quin.

  You sat with him in a tiny cafe called the Toussaint that looked in on the vast aquarium of blue-green water where you could catch your own meal: redgills, sailbellies, trenchfish. On the other side was the restaurant that owned the aquarium, and through the glass you could see, as if drowned amongst the kelp, the pale, wavery faces of its clientele.

  Shadrach didn't care much for the aquarium—he always set his chair facing outward, to the familiar open expanse of the meltdown canals.

  He talked to you about Quin—or, rather, talked around Quin—his dark eyebrows lively, his hand gestures many and quick, his body contorted so he could turn his head to glance at you, then look back at the canals. He was so beautiful, his face caught by the sun, his eyes so alive with excitement. He was going to make lots of money working for Quin. He'd be able to support you soon. (You feebly protested that you didn't want to be supported.) Someday, you might even be able to afford to move to a house or even to one of the off-world colonies that were doing so well. (So well, you pointed out, that many of them had not been heard from in decades.) True, sure, yes, but it was a dream still, wasn't it? Wasn't it? Smiling at you so openly, so brazenly, that you blushed and smiled back, but had to look away.

  The afternoon sun heightened the colors of the aquarium and you both grew sleepy and lazy in each other's company, your conversation at first loud and spirited, then soft and secret and conspiratorial. Until, finally, you asked him what he would be doing for Quin.

  “Doing?” he said with surprise, and gave a little laugh of disbelief, shaking his head and looking out at the canals. “Doing? He never said and I never thought to ask.”

  CHAPTER 3

  There is a shadow life here—you see it in mirrors, where your image does not quite match your form, your motions not quite synchronized with this other, this other. You see it in window glass, where your reflection does not catch—instead, you sense, at the corner of your eye, another life. And in the shadows you sense Nick. There is someone looking over your shoulder. There is someone who stares through your eyes. You feel as if you have done all of this before. And so you must do something, take some action . . .

  YOU VISIT Nick's apartment in the Tolstoi District. To travel from your apartment in the Leevee District to his in Tolstoi means crossing six other districts, each pretending to autonomy, each with its own lexicon of security. At the multiple checkpoints that mark the end of one district, the beginning of another, each police force feels the instinctual need to flex its muscles—in boringly similar ways. You gain intimate knowledge of how the identification badge on your wrist works because ten different security stations pass their scanners across it. You can, by the fifth checkpoint, answer their interminable questions before they ask them; you are overturning your purse in anticipation of the latest absurd search before you leave the shelter of the gray, frictionless shuttle tube. Cretins. Absurd creations of multiple fractured bureaucracies, most of which you help to keep running. They lack the imagination necessary to remain fully human; their shiny, unsmiling faces take on the same aloof, distant expressions, while their uniforms are always a variation on the nihilistic theme of black. They even smell the same: a vague, shoe-shine tint to the air, a pressed uniform cleanliness.

  The only relief for the senses is the latest innovation to reduce costs: several checkpoints now use Quin's Ganeshas—little blue men with elephant heads, four delicate arms, and obsequious smiles hidden behind their palpating trunks. You suppose you must give some credit to the bureaucrats for this welcome change. They provide color and distraction from the welter of advertising holos that parade alongside the tube tunnel in transit, and from the dull gray of th
e tube checkpoints. You hand out appreciative chuckles like candy every time you see one.

  Tolstoi itself, when you are finally herded onto the street with the rest of the passengers, holds no surprises—it is, as always, grubby, diseased, malfunctioning. The narrow alleyways wind between squat brick buildings almost apologetically. Some streets, major thoroughfares, cannot accommodate hovercraft, being made of asphalt, or even more absurdly, cobblestone! Built when a fascination with the past prompted the restoration of many a dangerous anachronism, Tolstoi retains the less pleasant aspects of past centuries: newspaper blows across street corners; garbage litters the pavement; the black patina left by particle weapons bleeds across masonry; and, worst of all, stray animals of every size and description hide in the shadows, scurrying to deeper safe places, huddling in alcoves and cubbyholes where they are only staring eyes or a swatch of dirty fur. No one knows their species, their intellect, their means of survival, but even the police leave them alone, and sometimes it is only by the feral shrieks, the crescendo of bloodshed late at night, that anyone knows of their existence.

  Laundry lines sail between rooftops, clothes dried and punished by the winter wind. The smells of rot and wastes are sharper, more disturbing, in the winter. Only the ever-present but dust-dulled holosigns break the monotony of dark colors. The few people on the streets walk quickly, with glances neither right nor left, and use the escalator sidewalks, many of which have broken down or make an annoying whining sound. Rising over the “slums”—the old-fashioned word comes to mind—are the glass-and-plastic skyscrapers of the ruling classes, sparkling even against the dull gray horizon.

  Nick loves it. He loves it for its broken-down individuality, its crass, old-fashioned qualities. He loves it because it is cheap.

  And, luckily, he chose an apartment close to the checkpoint station—ten minutes after disembarkation you find his apartment building. It seems to suddenly rush at you as you emerge from a long, dim alley, so that the second-floor holosign, faded and crackly, leaps into focus: a half-transparent image of a woman sadly singing the praises of the accommodations while she holds a sign that reads TOLSTOI HOSTEL in frenetic shades of red and pink. Words and motion and song hit you all at once, and, although you have been here before, you stop and stare, annoyed, at the colors and textures, the way, against the gray of the district, the sunlight hits the sides of buildings and illumines them in gold.

  Inside, you find the landlord behind a once-opulent polished oak check-in counter. He hasn't seen Nicholas in over three weeks he says, after you bribe him with the rent money. The fist-faced old codger rewards you with a key, a broken-toothed leer, and desperate conversation: “I was a boxer once. Max Windberg once rode my muscles to victory at eighteen to one!” Has anyone visited him since the robbery, you ask. “No, no one's visited,” he says, and you don't know if he means Nick specifically or the Tolstoi Hostel in general.

  You can feel the landlord's gaze on your back—not lascivious, you feel, merely lonely—as you walk across the lobby, past an old man and woman sitting on a sofa staring toward the open door. Who are they waiting for?

  The pilgrimage to Nick's apartment is a difficult trudge up old-fashioned nonmoving stairs to a second-floor landing right out of one of those ancient revivalist cops-and-robbery movies Nick likes so much: paint peeled, no ventilation, a door scrawled over with so much graffiti that none of it is readable. Nick added the graffiti himself—the accumulation of all the sayings and phrases he created while playing the slang jockey game.

  You put the key in the door, turn it, but do not open it when you hear the resounding click. Suddenly your hands tremble. What lies beyond the door is also beyond your control. You enter into a stark white silence, poorly lit and overlaid with a musky smell. The apartment has three rooms—a living room that merges with the kitchen, and a tiny bathroom toward the back, barely large enough for a shower. The living room and kitchen are empty. Huge blank spots in the living room show where his holoart once stood, while rude scuff marks against the left wall reveal where the ugly, old-fashioned blue couch—metal-springed and without programmable attributes—used to hunker, ready to convert into Nick's bed. Gone too the few scattered chairs that used to litter the floor like lost and confused pets.

  Gone, all gone. How can this be? Has the landlord stolen what the thieves left behind? A terrible sadness beats at the windows to your heart, and the world opens up and closes and opens up, and you are trapped between, of the world, not of the world.

  You take four hesitant steps into the room, as if you do not truly believe that so little of Nicholas remains in this place. The sensi-carpet has been turned off, the bristles hard, inert—dying. The too-sweet smell of the carpet's putrefaction overwhelms the lingering scent of wet animal fur. The combination makes you sneeze.

  The apartment has no windows, no way to look outside, to escape the emptiness. Every blank and empty centimeter screams out to you of silence, of being silenced. You search the bathroom, find stray hairs from shaving in the sink, dust in the corners, the ever-present dying carpet. On the kitchen floor you find more hairs, although these are long and black and coarse: animal hairs. The kitchen cabinets are bare of glasses, cooking utensils, plates. The sheer spotless, dustless perfection contrasts starkly with the living room, the bathroom. The thought comes to you unbidden: It happened here. This is where it happened.

  Your gaze glides across the living room, the marks where the couch used to be, the bare spots of the missing holographs—only to discover something white and small in the space behind the door. You walk over to it. A piece of paper, crumpled into a ball, almost hidden by the curling edge of dead carpet.

  You pick it up, slowly uncrumple it. The handwriting is Nicholas's and, in the lower left corner, the white paper is stained rust red, as if with old blood. The scrawled letters form words, the words form lines, the lines form a poem. Your eyes scanning across the page give the poem life.

  QUIN'S SHANGHAI CIRCUS

  Quin is:

  quintessentially—himself:

  a child in the dark

  who teased

  the weave and warp

  of flesh into the medium

  of our desires.

  Quin is:

  the kiss in the dark

  from the creature you cannot quite

  glimpse from the corner of the eye—

  a cyberquick message

  sent from the light to the dark.

  Quin is:

  the sigh of anticipation

  on a lover's lips,

  foretaste of pleasure

  surcease of pain

  the end of the matter.

  Quin is:

  the man living

  in the belly of a giant fish

  who remakes the world

  in his own image but is

  trapped in its jaws.

  Quin is:

  quintessentially . . .

  unlike me.

  The slang jockey thing. Quin is a child in the dark. This fascination, this worship of Quin leaves you cold. Yet Shadrach had it too, and surely you can understand Quin: that-which-is-idolized, much as Shadrach had idolized you. Quin and Nicola: marble statues in a park, only Quin has more freedom than you.

  You carefully fold the poem and put it in your purse. The apartment has nothing more to give you. Nicholas is not there. The poem contains only traces of him.

  You close the door behind you, step out onto the second-floor landing.

  In the far corner stands one of Nicholas's holograms, in orange and blue and black, an abstract landscape from which faces fade and reemerge: meerkat faces, human faces, the features blurred and melting, then separate again. You stand very still in the quiet of the stairwell. It wasn't there before. Or was it? The hairs on your neck rise and the pulse of a new thing beats inside you: fear. Not for your brother but for yourself.

  You see no one on the stairs, but beyond Nicholas's apartment a row of doors leads down the corridor. Does some
thing wait for you behind a door? When you turn to descend the stairs, will the doors open and the animals rush out of hiding, chasing after you? The musk of fur is very loud in your nostrils. Very bright. Suddenly, you want even the gray autumnal light of the dingy street, not this artificial solace. Somehow, you compose yourself and walk past the holograph (which you cannot, will not, touch, for fear of . . . what?) and down the stairs, alert to every stray sound. In the lobby, you try to seek out the landlord, but he has left. Even the two old people are gone. The lobby is silent, bare, the marble columns dull and crumbling. Just the light from the front door. Just the floating dust motes. Just the dull cry of the hologram outside, muffled, barely audible. And suddenly you know where you must go, whom you must see.

  The wind is blowing harder when you leave the Tolstoi District, and the animals stare at you with wide, mournful eyes from their sanctuaries.

  CHAPTER 4

  What does the statue say to him who made her? Thank you? Thank you for making me in one image, in one position. Never having to move. Never having to be other than what you see reflected in his eyes. To lose a certain essential fluidity.