Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer
“Only if the saylber decides to submerge itself.”
Shadrach decided the Gollux was laughing at him.
AFTER A while, Shadrach heard drums beating over the water ahead of them.
“Gollux? What's that sound?”
“The Gollux is pained to say he does not know. But the Gollux thinks we will find out soon enough . . .”
“How profound, Gollux.”
“The Gollux is not profound. The Gollux is a Gollux. Nothing more. Nothing less . . .”
Eventually, the open sea before them became cluttered with vast floating rafts, from which rose structures Shadrach could think of only as cathedrals. The drums had become so loud they hurt his ears. As the first spires loomed over them, he could see that the rafts were manned entirely by meerkats. He pulled out his badge, sat down on the saylber as the wake of the rafts began to rock the creature.
“Where did they come from? And are they dangerous?” he asked the Gollux.
“The Gollux says that usually they let the winds take them wherever they lead. But now they are speeding for shore. Are they dangerous? the Gollux asks himself. The Gollux does not feel any threat toward itself, but the Gollux cannot speak for what you feel . . .”
“Thank you, Gollux. Once again, you have managed to put all my fears to rest.”
Despite himself, Shadrach felt a sense of awe, of appreciation, as the black obsidian temples and their scaffolding floated past. Thousands of meerkats in every shape and size, and every color from rust red to white, some with dense, thick fur, others with bristly hair, some with upturned ears and others with floppy ears—yet not a one turned to look down at him from their lofty perches. They all stared toward the shore with an intensity of purpose that confused Shadrach. It was almost as if they meant to make their rafts reach shore sooner simply by wishing it so. The musk of them made him sneeze, and though now his heart was weak, and he almost wavered and wanted to turn back, the image of Nicola's face came to him, and he continued to hold up his badge like a shield.
The meerkats said nothing—to him, or to each other—and nowhere that he looked, at the spires, at the planks between rafts, at the scaffolding, did he see a single meerkat in motion. No, they all stood and watched the shore. The fires that dominated the burning hearts of their gently rocking cities guttered or spun out of control, unattended. The smell of white-hot metal, the sound of the great engines that helped keep them afloat . . .
As they glided through the channels formed between the rafts, Shadrach noticed something that the meerkats' stillness had at first disguised: From the spires and the scaffolding, which combined looked like blackened skeletons of some enormous beast, makeshift gallows had been set up—and from the nooses swung ropes, wires, and elastic cords, from which hung hundreds of Ganeshas and other nonmeerkat Quin creations. The bodies hung straight down, limp and lifeless, the heads resting upon the stretched necks as if in sleep.
The meerkats' silence had nothing to do with him. Suddenly he understood that the silence represented an intense and watchful fear.
“They are fleeing the center,” the Gollux said, without its customary pomposity. “They are fleeing Quin.”
“What is the difference,” Shadrach whispered to the Gollux, “between the creatures of the shore and the creatures of the sea?”
“The Gollux knows of only one difference: The creatures of the shore know they are flawed, but the creatures of the sea do not know they are flawed.”
After a time, they left the silent floating cities of the meerkats behind. The open sea once more lay ahead of them. The saylber picked up speed. The water was flecked with specks of green phosphorescence that swirled in tiny whirlpools. The water smelled, incredibly enough, of mint. Shadrach stood up again. He restrapped John the Baptist to his arm.
“How are you?” he asked the head.
“I can't feel my legs,” the meerkat said. “I can't feel my feet. I must be dying.”
“We have almost reached Quin.”
“So? I'm dying. Shutting down. Turning off. I'm half-convinced I should leave you prematurely so I don't have to see your ugly face.”
“We just passed through a floating meerkat city. Did you grow up on a floating city?”
“What does it matter to you?”
“It doesn't. But I would rather talk to you than not—no matter how difficult you are.”
“Let me tell you what happens when you burn a person's body, pull out all of his teeth, glue his head to a plate, and shove a bomb in his ear. You become that person's object of undying hatred.”
“You're not a person,” Shadrach said, but then trailed off.
Ahead of them, something huge blotted out the lesser darkness of sea and sky. At first glance, Shadrach could tell only that it resembled a vast set of jaws, with jagged shards of light placed up and down its surface to illuminate it. It floated in the water, rising and falling with the waves.
“What is that, Gollux?”
“That is our objective—that is where Quin lives . . .”
Soon, Shadrach could see that it didn't just look like a huge pair of spread jaws, it was a huge pair of spread jaws. Dripping seaweed and teeth, they rose some six hundred feet above the surface. The flesh of those jaws was pitted and gnarled with age or ill use, either contrived by Quin or the result of the natural accumulation of years.
“Did Quin make this, Gollux?”
“He raised It from a Minnow.”
The eye—the eye was most disquieting. It shone out at them like a searchlight, and as its attention drifted from there to there, over the wine-dark sea, so too did the light move across the depths. The deep green-blue of the pupil, and the golden veins that slithered across the cornea . . . why, the eye itself was larger than a small spacecraft! And mad, mad, mad in its roving: nervous and without purpose, the light so thick it pierced many hundreds of feet into the water, grazing the edges of other sea creatures: fins and tentacles and the impression of sinuous bodies swimming from the path of its assault.
As they approached the beast, the reason for the increasing waves, which actually splashed over the top of the saylber, became clear. Somewhere far, far below, the fish's tail swished back and forth to maintain this one position, as if ever hungry, ever in wait for the world so as to devour it whole. And somewhere halfway up the leviathan: the side fins, frilled and delicate despite weighing twenty or thirty tons, also working hard to maintain this one position. While Quin, within, worked his magic from the fish's belly.
The fish wasn't just old. It was scarred. Fires, like tiny blossoms, dotted its skin, some extinguished when the leviathan rose or fell a few dozen meters. Creatures patrolled the leviathan's skin—they were like tiny parasites, except that they were larger than Shadrach. They scuttled and clung to the vertical surface, performing alien functions. Maintenance of the beast. That it should not fall apart. That it should not die. These creatures—scaly, insectile, arthropodic—all lacked heads, consisting only of mouths and arms and legs without end. Chitonous. Viscous. Blind. Stupid. Birthed to perform one task, one function. Confronted by such creatures, it was hard for Shadrach not to think of Quin as a god.
Among them, meerkats could be seen to move, and other animals, of all types, locked in combat. The combatants centered around the fires, some of them falling off from the extreme angle of the leviathan's upper half and into the water, where without a scream or shriek, they were devoured by unseen animals in the sea. While the survivors labored on at the killing game, which seemed to consist solely of extinguishing other subspecies.
The smell of putrescent fish flesh came from the leviathan itself. It was rotting. It was alive, and it was rotting.
“Gollux, what is happening here?” Shadrach asked.
“All systems atrophy. All systems die. The fish is a system. Quin is a system. The meerkats are a system. There are too many systems. Too much confusion. Something has gone wrong. The systems are at war.”
At the point where the jaws curve
“Why,” he asked as he removed the safety, “is the fish so calm? Why isn't it thrashing about?”
The Gollux turned toward Shadrach, eyeless as it appeared to be, and gave the unmistakable impression that it thought this was a stupid question. “Quin made the fish without nerve endings, so it could not feel the daily pains that might make it flinch or dive or splash. It is the calmest fish in all the world because of Quin's genius.”
Would that Quin had had the genius—or was it compassion?—to pull the nerve ends out of Nicholas before altering him. This fish could be ripped to shreds, could be torn apart by connoisseurs of seafood back in the Canal District and would not raise the slightest complaint. What an advancement! A creature that could not feel its own pain. A creature lacking survival instincts of any kind.
The metal of the ever-approaching docks burned red with the reflection of the fires. The fires spilled over the corners of the leviathan's mouth. The inside of its mouth was aflame, and still it patiently treaded water. Only the lunatic movements of its eye revealed its numbed panic.
The flesh towered above them, the eye so close it was no longer an eye, or even a circle, but just a green-blue surface that encompassed the horizon. The reason for the eye's panic became apparent, for even the eye was not a neutral ground. Creatures fought and died there, leaving gaping wounds. The smell made Shadrach cough and cover his mouth. Canyons, cliffs, cathedrals of flesh. The sounds of skirmishes fought with teeth and claws: the yowl or yelp of meerkats, the galumphing death rattle of even stranger beasts. And the sound of efficiency: the scuttling of the creatures built to maintain the leviathan. They didn't care that the beast was dying. They didn't care that a war was being waged on the flesh of their fish. They simply kept on doing what they had done for years: cleaning the scales, tending to the wounds, dousing the fires with the voluminous sputum of their breath.
The saylber came to a precise halt at the edge of the docks. The docks—the giant cranes and hauling machines—had been abandoned; anyone who had wanted to flee had fled a long time ago. The metal posts of the docks were topped with heads: human heads, inhuman heads. Shadrach didn't spare them a second glance. He'd seen so much worse. Instead, he hopped up onto the pier, the Gollux beside him. The saylber, with a wet squelch, immediately submerged, and Shadrach had the impression of its vast wings pumping furiously as it tried to put depth and distance between it and its insensate cousin, the leviathan.
From the moment Shadrach set foot on the dock, he could feel the vibration of the leviathan's heartbeat: now tremulous, now strong. And the beating of its fins deep underwater, which made its body, and the dock, nudge ever so slightly upward, so that he felt as if he were in danger of being launched into the air. A weird music played all around them, like a dirge. Above, the fish's teeth, like inverted mountain peaks, glinted down at Shadrach from a great height.
“Which way, Gollux?” he asked.
“This way,” said the Gollux, and headed up the stairs toward the inside of the leviathan's mouth. The automatic mechanism on the stairs had failed because of the putrefied bodies that had jammed its lower levels, so they had to walk up them, stepping over the carnage.
Not more than ten steps up, a Ganesha hurdled the railing and ran toward Shadrach, followed closely by a meerkat with a club in its hands. The meerkat, before Shadrach could react, caught up with the Ganesha and hit it so hard the back of its skull crumpled inward. It fell with a wet thud at Shadrach's feet. He shot the meerkat before it had a chance to do anything, whether friendly or hostile. It too fell with a wet thud at Shadrach's feet.
“I don't like this place, Gollux,” Shadrach said. “Let's get where we need to go in a hurry.”
“The Gollux tells you this: It's just a rotting fish. Nothing to like or dislike.”
They managed to make good progress after that, despite the steepness of the incline and stacks of dead bodies slick with blood. The Gollux made great leaps to attain each next step. Shadrach marveled at the strangeness of a sudden vision: that huge as the leviathan appeared to him, to the Gollux it must be as big as the world.
When they reached the lip of the leviathan's mouth, they stopped and looked around them. To right and left, intolerably close, the jaws rose like twinned cliffs. The teeth, as large as ships, glinted in their own white light; giant silverfish threaded their way through the teeth, intent on cleaning the pitted surfaces. Were the leviathan to close its mouth, snap shut like a trap, Quin's whole world would be gone. What did it mean that Quin had chosen to live within the jaws of so large and dangerous a beast?
But the jaws held his attention for only a second—he had seen them from afar; up close, it was merely more of the same. The sights within the mouth of the beast interested him far more, for it was here that Quin had built his underground empire.
Never had any beast so wide, so varied, so interesting a throat. From where Shadrach stood, it was at least four thousand meters to the opposite jawline. Between, in the basin of the beast's gullet, a new world had been carved from nerveless flesh.
The teeth themselves lit the entire tableau—a deep yellow, so that the light had an erratic quality: Some teeth had been pulled, others sunk into the gums, or teetered on the edge of falling, or had fallen down into the gullet. Parts of the gums had, like pieces of rotten fruit, sloughed off the mouth and lay in puddles and piles down below, littering the entrance to the gullet, or having smashed into buildings. The hot wind that rose from the firmament, smelling of blood and rot, came from the gullet, and in this way the beast regulated its temperature, casting aside the coldness of being buried under thirty levels of stone.
Each side of the gullet represented an entirely different world. To the left lay a variety of vats (green and monstrous and dull) interspersed with a low, flat line of buildings. They hunched against the jawline as if carved from the flesh, a second set of irregular teeth, pressed up against the jaw out of fear of falling into the gullet. The dwellings and laboratories (Shadrach could not guess their function) boiled over with activity, as the skirmishes carried out on the leviathan's scales had blossomed into battles. Meerkats shot at one another and other creatures indiscriminately. From this distance, the miniature struggles had a curious slow-motion quality, the tactics as obvious and inexorable as some ritualistic game. One particularly tall tower crackled with flames, and the flesh of the leviathan curled and blackened when the tower touched it, a matchstick to paper. Inside and out, the leviathan was slowly being cooked, roasted as it idly hovered in the water and its eye sought a means of escape. Like giant discarded wine bottles, the vats lay open or cracked, their skins occluded with a fine green smoke. As Shadrach watched, a vat came free of its moorings, the gobbly flesh within screaming as the vat fell into the gullet, bouncing off one side, then the other, before disappearing into a pink and hungry darkness.
If the left half of the leviathan's mouth suggested a world gone mad, the right side had a preternatural calm to it. There, Quin had fashioned a forest of fir trees amongst which nothing moved, not even the trees themselves, despite the wind. Shadrach thought he could see a glint, as of a distant brook. The suggestion of a white bridge. The forest seemed strangely familiar to him.
Shadrach asked the Gollux, “Which way?”
“Into the forest. The Gollux has been there before.”
“Why is the forest so calm?”
“Quin lives there. Not even now will they cross Quin, or tempt his anger. Quin is a Living Artist. Quin created the Gollux. He created all of us.”
The path that led to the forest was a path of agony. To either side, creatures writhed on dozens of crucifixes. Shadrach refused to look left or right, but merely took John the Baptist from his pocket and strapped him to his arm once again. It hardly mattered now what he did with John. The meerkat head looked around gla
“What did you say?”
“I smell crabs. I smell food.”
“We're almost there.”
“I know. We're both almost dead.”
“Will you be defiant to the end?”
“What did you expect me to say?”
“Nothing. Do you see what's around us?”
“Yes. Chaos. Traitors to order. Waking dreams. Nightmares.”
John's eyelids flickered and closed again. The meerkat had so little life in him that Shadrach almost laid him to rest by the side of the path, beneath the feet of the crucified, but he could not bring himself to do it. Somehow, John the Baptist had become more than his companion; he had become a talisman.
Besides, John still had a bomb in his ear.
BEFORE THEY could reach the floor of the mouth, and from there the forest, they chanced upon a hundred Candles. The path veered sharply down and to the right, sidestepping one of the leviathan's teeth, which had fallen from the gums, probably many years ago. When it leveled out again, the forest was directly ahead of them. To either side, more crucifixes, this time uniformly hammered to them, a hundred creatures that looked just like Candle: more than half wolf or coyote, the elongation of the face revealed as muzzle, the eyes yellow and ancient. The legs ended in half paws, half feet. The tails were crusted in blood and hung limply down. Like vultures in their stance, but unnaturally so, the long arms and legs a burden to them. Behind them, the corona of fires amongst the buildings.
There was none of the moaning that had marked the other crucifixions. They made no sound at all. Nuts and bolts held them to the posts; there was no way to bring any of them down.
“Candle?” Shadrach shouted as they walked down the path. “Candle? Is one of you Candle?”
The one nearest to him raised its head, blinked through the blood in its eyes but said nothing.