Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer
—Giant Sand
CHAPTER 1
If Shadrach loved her alive, he loved her better, longer, farther, when he thought she was dead . . .
“The roses are doing so well because of the bumblebees Quin made for me. He is, you know, so considerate to indulge me . . .”
Another perfect day on Lady Ellington's perfect estate, a district unto itself: two hundred acres of woodlands and gardens, with its own police force to drive off the hungry free market mobs gathered outside the ornate gates.
The walls of Lady Ellington's pseudochateau were made from white pseudomarble, the vase upon the mantel above the window seat made of the finest clear plastic polymer, while the lady herself was somewhat . . . faux. She had taken “Lady” or “the Lady” as her first name, in tribute to—or, Shadrach thought, to give her some credit, in mockery of—some extinct aristocracy. She wore a left ear of perfect white that contrasted sharply with the dried prune of her right ear. A wrinkle-free left hand—lithe and lively until it reached its turgid, discolored wrist—found its malformed mate in the birdlike claw that dangled from her right wrist.
Between the thumb and forefinger of her marvelous new left hand, Shadrach had noticed a familiar blemish: a reddish birthmark in the shape of a rose. He stared at it without blinking.
“. . . thank you so much for stopping by to check,” Lady Ellington was saying. “I so rarely have guests over during . . .” And blah, blah, blah.
Shadrach continued to stare at the birthmark while he considered, briefly, that Quin had sent him to her estate so he would recognize this mark, this beautiful, familiar mark. As he nodded to the Lady and answered questions about Quin, about meerkats, a cold and bitter despair rose in his throat. He stared into the left eye of the Lady Ellington, a replacement that was blue as the blue of her eyes. As blue as he wanted the sea to be, pressed up against the canal walls.
He wondered if that eye held any memory of its former owner, if he was indeed still looking through the window into her soul. Lover, lover gone to pieces.
Tears came and he made no effort to stop them when they began to trickle down his face, his mouth set quite as firm and solicitous toward the Lady as before. He nodded, smiled politely.
Until even the Lady Ellington could not ignore the evidence of her own blue eye and trailed off into silence, possibly for the first time, there in her white, porous, artificial mansion.
The only sound in that place was the tink of Shadrach's tears as they hit the edge of the pewter cup he held in his hands. She would never understand the look on his face—the commingling of love and hate that warred within him as he stared at her and, through her, at Nicola.
But he supposed she knew enough to be quiet—understood that the man before her had undergone a fundamental change. And yet could she really ever comprehend the restraint it took for Shadrach not to crush her skull with his bare hands, then pluck his lover's eye gently from the fractured orbit?
ON HIS way to hell, Shadrach stopped at his apartment—an old split-level not far from the canals, with automated doors that seemed ever more reluctant to open for him. Inside, he found his official insignia: a badge in silver depicting a silhouette of an animal merging with a man. It allowed him safe passage through all of Quin's various business concerns.
Badge in hand, he found his gun after a moment of groping under the tightly made bed. He was not a violent man, but he loved his gun for the same reason he hated the mining machinery of his youth. The weapon had a graceful functionality built into its sleek, aerodynamic design. It was neither ungainly nor awkward; it fit perfectly in his hand. He had bought it used—an older model of the current laser gun lines—and the shining metal surface, once a sunny gold, had become a brazen copper. It glowed in a certain light, and it had known years of service before he had ever touched it, which made him love it all the more, that it had a history, a past, which it could communicate only in the precision of its fire, in the slight nicks along the muzzle, in its faded color. He had never fired it at anyone. He stuck it through his belt.
He walked into the tiny bathroom and thrust his head under freezing tap water until his face burned. Then he punched the bathroom wall as hard as he could, only stopping when the satisfying sting of pain had dulled the guilt and the other, deeper, pain.
Outside once again, in the ash-filled air, hidden in his black trench coat, he attacked the streets without regard for other traffic, pushing aside pedestrians, stepping in front of hovercraft. Anyone who sought to block him received the full and terrible force of his gaze.
Soon, he entered the dead-end alley, walked resolutely past the hologram, past the suddenly revealed sign, QUIN'S SHANGHAI CIRCUS, and placed a hand on the doors, which swung open in response to his badge.
Inside, the auxiliary lights glowed a dull blue, the animals curled up inside their glass cages, the funk of their hundred intertwined scents muted by their slumber. The Quin remote lay slumped across the counter of its lap, as if to peer over the edge at the slow sad faces of the miniature orangutan people. Dust motes sparkled, floated slowly to the floor. Asleep. Dead. Resting. No potential clients that day, brought round to see the show. The purple spiders dangled from the remote's outstretched hands, slaves to their spinnerets.
Shadrach tore the Quin remote into bloody strips of flesh. He smashed the glass cages. He broke the limbs of the animals, tore into their flanks until his teeth were bloody.
He wanted to do these things. For a long moment in the long silence, he stared at the slowly swaying spiders, hands clenched into fists at his sides.
Then he padded past the remote and into the brackish nonlight of the back rooms. The holographic screen of the computer reflected red light at him, already on and waiting for him. He quickly checked the two rooms beyond. He was alone. He sat down at the terminal and, after a few tense moments, found the records. The operation on Lady Ellington had been performed at her estate forty-three hours previously. The donor parts came from a “client” identified only as BDXFM 1000-231, currently held in “live storage” at the fifth-level repository known as the Slade Organ Bank. Quin had an arrangement with Slade's that made it easy for him to dispose of spare parts. Coldly, calmly, Shadrach analyzed the situation. If the records were accurate, then Nicola was still alive, but since the operation had occurred two days ago, she might since have sustained other losses not yet charged to the organ bank.
A grim smile creased his lips. It was obvious what he must do. Nothing could be simpler or more insane. He must steal her. He must plunge into the underground and bring her back to the surface himself . . .
Shadrach printed out the client number, shoved it into a pocket of his trench coat, and walked back into the main chamber.
The Quin remote waited for him. Its head was twisted to one side, the better to regard him. Its cold blue eyes, its cruel grimace of a smile, mocked Shadrach. Its eyelashes fluttered delicately. Shadrach had a sudden vision of the thousands of feet of rock that separated him from the real Quin, and the sense of vertigo, the terror over the extent of Quin's control, froze him.
“Have you been to see,” Quin said, “the sight of the Lady Ellington?” Singsong voice. Muttering of awakened beasts behind glass. Purple puppet spiders dancing on the ends of their marionette strings.
“Yes. I've been to see her.”
“Was it all you expected?”
“I expected nothing.”
“Did you love her?”
“The Lady Ellington? No.”
The remote grinned monstrously, said, “Good, good,” and fell silent.
Shadrach waited until the head once again rested upon the counter. Then he walked past the creatures in their cages, aware that the eyes, the eyes of each mutation, each wrecked husk of chromosomes, were following him.
Nicola's apartment door was half-open. It took a damaging act of will to clamp down on the despair riddling through his thoughts like wormholes and ask himself the relevant questions. Had Quin had her killed for some reason? Had someone s
natched her for parts, which Quin just happened to buy? The darkness of below level had already begun to infiltrate his mind. Now he was a detective. Now he shut the door behind him.
Inside, he found that the aquarium had been smashed, all of Nicola's fish long since dead in pretty patterns of inert flesh. They stank terribly. Off to the side, he discovered a dark stain on the carpet, but when he squatted and touched it, his finger came away dry. Blood? Wine? Spaghetti sauce?
He examined the fish next. Some were half-eaten, gnawed at by sharp teeth. Tufts of fur mixed in with the stinking fish made him think of meerkats. Had they been here? He sniffed the air. If so, the dead fish disguised their odor.
The couch had been moved recently, the marks where the legs had pushed down on the carpet still fresh. On the couch he found a laser gun—a sleek new model—tucked neatly into the left corner cushion. He left it there, but pulled out his own gun. The quiet had begun to get to him. Under the couch, another enigmatic red stain. He didn't bother to check it.
Circling back to the door, Shadrach noticed signs of struggle. His circumspect entrance could not account for the rough indentations in the carpet, the traces of imprinted mud.
He entered the kitchen, found five rotting fiddler crabs on the counter, their eyestalks flaccid, claws red and cracked.
Which left the bedroom. The door was shut. Memories lay beyond that door—of late nights spent talking and making love, making love and talking, until the two actions were as intertwined and inseparable as their bodies. Was her body in there, on the bed?
Reluctantly, he punched the door button. It slid open. The bedroom was empty. He sat down on the bed. No evidence of any disturbance or struggle. He checked under the bed. Nothing.
He was about to walk back into the living room when he heard a sudden rustle, a spasm, from the closet. Quietly, he approached the closet. He listened at the door. Nothing . . . and yet . . . Shadrach opened the door, his gun aimed dead center . . . to reveal a very normal clothes closet, with shoes and old stuffed animals strewn at the bottom. The animals were antique investments. Nicola had had them for years. Slowly, Shadrach parted the clothes, gun aimed into the back of the closet. Nothing came hurtling out of the darkness. A body did not come falling down out of the darkness.
Shadrach looked at the stuffed animals. She had a bear, a rabbit, a meerkat.
With great care, Shadrach placed the muzzle of his gun against the top of the meerkat's head.
“Move and I'll kill you,” he said.
“Feesssshhh,” came the muted reply as the meerkat trembled uncontrollably.
Shadrach stepped back, the gun held at arm's length, the muzzle still against the side of the meerkat's head. The meerkat's face scrunched up in a permanent flinch against the expected blast.
“Feesshhhh good,” the meerkat said distantly, its stare glassy. And why shouldn't its stare be glassy? The whole left side of its body had been torn away, then cauterized by a laser weapon. The creature was in shock.
“Nicola. Do you know Nicola?”
The meerkat leered through the blood bubbles in its mouth. It stared up at Shadrach. “Nicola doesn't need fish anymore.”
It had taken a few moments, but now Shadrach recognized the meerkat's subtype: an urban assassin model. Quin planned to sell versions of the subtype to the spy services of half a dozen city governments. But what was one doing in Nicola's apartment?
“You're not so bad off after all,” Shadrach said, “except that now I've found you.”
“Sirrrs?” the meerkat said, almost toppling over onto its side.
Shadrach stepped back, gun still aimed unwaveringly at the meerkat's head.
“I mean that you've got a lot of hardware up there,” he said as he used a wide dispersion wave to incinerate the meerkat's body, leaving only the neck and head, which fell atop the heap of ashes with an expression akin to astonishment forever etched into its features.
“Feesssshhhhh!” came the anguished, bewildered cry.
Shadrach carefully picked up the disembodied head by one svelte ear and took it into the kitchen. The heads of the assassin models had been created to be self-supporting in an emergency, and could live on for several days after decapitation. Although in shock, although suffering from disorientation and possible brain damage, the meerkat might still have its uses. It might serve as a suitable vehicle for revenge.
In the kitchen Shadrach found a common permanent adhesive and applied it to the cauterized stump of the meerkat's neck as the beast moaned and spat at him. He searched the cabinets, found a small plate, and put the meerkat head on it. He held the head in place as the adhesive did its work.
He stared into the meerkat's eyes, which were sharp and bright with pain, and said, “I don't give a fuck what your name was before. From now on, your name is John the Baptist, you son of a bitch.” He snickered for no reason at all, then stopped abruptly, because he could feel an anger, a rage, behind the snicker that must, at any cost, be denied until later. Everything in its place.
The meerkat said, “I will kill you. I will hear your eyes pop against my teeth.”
With a kitchen tool cleverly called an All-in-One, Shadrach used the pliers function to pull out all of the meerkat's teeth. It squealed once or twice over this latest indignity. Shadrach clotted the blood with a washcloth until the meerkat gagged, after which he let up.
“Bastard,” Shadrach said. “What makes you think you're any different than the funny people out in the wastelands? What makes you think you're anything more than an extremely complex machine?”
He found the largest plastic bag in the kitchen cabinets, poked airholes into it, put the meerkat inside, and stuffed the bag into the huge right side pocket of his trench coat.
“You, John the Baptist, are going below level,” Shadrach said. “I don't think there's much else I can do in the light.”
SHADRACH ATE at a cafe in the Canal District, oblivious to the strangled whimpers coming from his pocket and the strange looks the waiter gave him. His mind had become extraordinarily clear, as if he had managed to discard all the detritus of his past.
The great wall that surrounded the city impressed itself upon him with a precision that verged on the microscopic: He understood that with only the slightest squint he would be able to make out every blemish, every pockmark, on its blind, timeworn face. The colors running beneath the deck of the restaurant shone with a vibrance he could not recall having seen before—the orange hues livid as flames, the blues reflecting a sky that in its immensity could crush him in an instant.
The wind from the sea brought to him such a variety of scents that simply by breathing he became more alive: the sting of salt, certainly, and the subdued brine, but also an underlying sweetness that reminded him of Nicola's favorite perfume. Had he truly never smelled that sweetness before, or had it always been there?
Now Shadrach knew he was fated to go below level again. This was not fickle chance, not coy coincidence—this was fate, and he would run toward it as fast as he could, mouth curled back in a snarl. To think that he could grow so complacent that he could take anything for granted, even a smell, an aftertaste, an echo.
He ate his sea bass and potatoes with a peculiar combination of intensity and sloth, each bite savored, before, finished, he slapped down payment and left that place, as far as he knew, forever.
CHAPTER 2
Down below. Ten years since he had been there, and who knew how it might have changed, have warped in his absence? Somehow, he had thought, as a child might, that it had not existed at all after he had left, but had been a nightmare from which he had finally woken up. Why such a place should exist was a question hopelessly tangled in other questions, lost in the below-level passageways, long ago. At times, its distant, fading shrieks could be heard, only to be once again drowned out by the chaos of a million other voices whispering about survival. What lay below level? Surely not his past.
A NARROW alley. A slit of sky caught between tall buildings. A weal
th of garbage—cans, rotted food, plastic boxes, dead animals—that some eccentric hadn't simply heaved over the side of the city wall. Under the garbage, the keys to the old kingdom: an ancient maintenance entrance—just a manhole cover anyone could lift, after a moment's strain, by hand. He knew of more normal entrances, but from this one a careful person could bypass two belowground levels without detection. An element of surprise might be vital.
As Shadrach stood at the threshold, the wind died away, the rumble and hiss of hovercraft faded into the air, and even John the Baptist stopped his futile squirming. No sound but for his own shallow breathing. The round gray manhole cover grew and grew until it became the world. From beneath it, he imagined he could hear the sounds of below level rising to poison the sunlight. It came softly, softly, but building, like gossamer dream transforming itself to heavy nightmare.
On the other side of the manhole a wet glob of slugs and grubs waited for him; it was their faint mewling cries he heard, the whole of their pulsing, gray bulk waiting for him to come home. The image of a maggoty, sudden dark. The drip-drip of water. The suggestion of massive machinery grinding. The dark. The harsh, spitting sound of holovids flicking green light from behind closed doors in closed-off corridors. The dark. No matter how he might rationalize it, he knew that his own personal Hell waited for him down below level. He had driven autotrains through the desert and seen what no one in the city could imagine, but he would rather do anything than return below level. He did not want to go. He would not go.
In a single motion, Shadrach pried open the portal, jumped into the greasy hole, clamped on to the ladder that ran down the inside of it, and shut the lid above him. The clang resounded in the darkness as he clung to the metal ladder. He clawed at the unpleasantly moist lid, which he could never again open, locked as it was from the outside.
He had no choice but to grit his teeth and descend the ladder, never knowing if something below might be scuttling up the ladder, slinking through the darkness to surprise him. The sound of his boots on the rungs resonated through the brackish, close air. Sweat trickled into his eyes. The already enclosed space around the ladder seemed to collapse in on him. His movements became frantic. It took a conscious effort to slow his breathing, to not just let go of the rungs and slide down into . . . what?
CHAPTER 1
If Shadrach loved her alive, he loved her better, longer, farther, when he thought she was dead . . .
“The roses are doing so well because of the bumblebees Quin made for me. He is, you know, so considerate to indulge me . . .”
Another perfect day on Lady Ellington's perfect estate, a district unto itself: two hundred acres of woodlands and gardens, with its own police force to drive off the hungry free market mobs gathered outside the ornate gates.
The walls of Lady Ellington's pseudochateau were made from white pseudomarble, the vase upon the mantel above the window seat made of the finest clear plastic polymer, while the lady herself was somewhat . . . faux. She had taken “Lady” or “the Lady” as her first name, in tribute to—or, Shadrach thought, to give her some credit, in mockery of—some extinct aristocracy. She wore a left ear of perfect white that contrasted sharply with the dried prune of her right ear. A wrinkle-free left hand—lithe and lively until it reached its turgid, discolored wrist—found its malformed mate in the birdlike claw that dangled from her right wrist.
Between the thumb and forefinger of her marvelous new left hand, Shadrach had noticed a familiar blemish: a reddish birthmark in the shape of a rose. He stared at it without blinking.
“. . . thank you so much for stopping by to check,” Lady Ellington was saying. “I so rarely have guests over during . . .” And blah, blah, blah.
Shadrach continued to stare at the birthmark while he considered, briefly, that Quin had sent him to her estate so he would recognize this mark, this beautiful, familiar mark. As he nodded to the Lady and answered questions about Quin, about meerkats, a cold and bitter despair rose in his throat. He stared into the left eye of the Lady Ellington, a replacement that was blue as the blue of her eyes. As blue as he wanted the sea to be, pressed up against the canal walls.
He wondered if that eye held any memory of its former owner, if he was indeed still looking through the window into her soul. Lover, lover gone to pieces.
Tears came and he made no effort to stop them when they began to trickle down his face, his mouth set quite as firm and solicitous toward the Lady as before. He nodded, smiled politely.
Until even the Lady Ellington could not ignore the evidence of her own blue eye and trailed off into silence, possibly for the first time, there in her white, porous, artificial mansion.
The only sound in that place was the tink of Shadrach's tears as they hit the edge of the pewter cup he held in his hands. She would never understand the look on his face—the commingling of love and hate that warred within him as he stared at her and, through her, at Nicola.
But he supposed she knew enough to be quiet—understood that the man before her had undergone a fundamental change. And yet could she really ever comprehend the restraint it took for Shadrach not to crush her skull with his bare hands, then pluck his lover's eye gently from the fractured orbit?
ON HIS way to hell, Shadrach stopped at his apartment—an old split-level not far from the canals, with automated doors that seemed ever more reluctant to open for him. Inside, he found his official insignia: a badge in silver depicting a silhouette of an animal merging with a man. It allowed him safe passage through all of Quin's various business concerns.
Badge in hand, he found his gun after a moment of groping under the tightly made bed. He was not a violent man, but he loved his gun for the same reason he hated the mining machinery of his youth. The weapon had a graceful functionality built into its sleek, aerodynamic design. It was neither ungainly nor awkward; it fit perfectly in his hand. He had bought it used—an older model of the current laser gun lines—and the shining metal surface, once a sunny gold, had become a brazen copper. It glowed in a certain light, and it had known years of service before he had ever touched it, which made him love it all the more, that it had a history, a past, which it could communicate only in the precision of its fire, in the slight nicks along the muzzle, in its faded color. He had never fired it at anyone. He stuck it through his belt.
He walked into the tiny bathroom and thrust his head under freezing tap water until his face burned. Then he punched the bathroom wall as hard as he could, only stopping when the satisfying sting of pain had dulled the guilt and the other, deeper, pain.
Outside once again, in the ash-filled air, hidden in his black trench coat, he attacked the streets without regard for other traffic, pushing aside pedestrians, stepping in front of hovercraft. Anyone who sought to block him received the full and terrible force of his gaze.
Soon, he entered the dead-end alley, walked resolutely past the hologram, past the suddenly revealed sign, QUIN'S SHANGHAI CIRCUS, and placed a hand on the doors, which swung open in response to his badge.
Inside, the auxiliary lights glowed a dull blue, the animals curled up inside their glass cages, the funk of their hundred intertwined scents muted by their slumber. The Quin remote lay slumped across the counter of its lap, as if to peer over the edge at the slow sad faces of the miniature orangutan people. Dust motes sparkled, floated slowly to the floor. Asleep. Dead. Resting. No potential clients that day, brought round to see the show. The purple spiders dangled from the remote's outstretched hands, slaves to their spinnerets.
Shadrach tore the Quin remote into bloody strips of flesh. He smashed the glass cages. He broke the limbs of the animals, tore into their flanks until his teeth were bloody.
He wanted to do these things. For a long moment in the long silence, he stared at the slowly swaying spiders, hands clenched into fists at his sides.
Then he padded past the remote and into the brackish nonlight of the back rooms. The holographic screen of the computer reflected red light at him, already on and waiting for him. He quickly checked the two rooms beyond. He was alone. He sat down at the terminal and, after a few tense moments, found the records. The operation on Lady Ellington had been performed at her estate forty-three hours previously. The donor parts came from a “client” identified only as BDXFM 1000-231, currently held in “live storage” at the fifth-level repository known as the Slade Organ Bank. Quin had an arrangement with Slade's that made it easy for him to dispose of spare parts. Coldly, calmly, Shadrach analyzed the situation. If the records were accurate, then Nicola was still alive, but since the operation had occurred two days ago, she might since have sustained other losses not yet charged to the organ bank.
A grim smile creased his lips. It was obvious what he must do. Nothing could be simpler or more insane. He must steal her. He must plunge into the underground and bring her back to the surface himself . . .
Shadrach printed out the client number, shoved it into a pocket of his trench coat, and walked back into the main chamber.
The Quin remote waited for him. Its head was twisted to one side, the better to regard him. Its cold blue eyes, its cruel grimace of a smile, mocked Shadrach. Its eyelashes fluttered delicately. Shadrach had a sudden vision of the thousands of feet of rock that separated him from the real Quin, and the sense of vertigo, the terror over the extent of Quin's control, froze him.
“Have you been to see,” Quin said, “the sight of the Lady Ellington?” Singsong voice. Muttering of awakened beasts behind glass. Purple puppet spiders dancing on the ends of their marionette strings.
“Yes. I've been to see her.”
“Was it all you expected?”
“I expected nothing.”
“Did you love her?”
“The Lady Ellington? No.”
The remote grinned monstrously, said, “Good, good,” and fell silent.
Shadrach waited until the head once again rested upon the counter. Then he walked past the creatures in their cages, aware that the eyes, the eyes of each mutation, each wrecked husk of chromosomes, were following him.
Nicola's apartment door was half-open. It took a damaging act of will to clamp down on the despair riddling through his thoughts like wormholes and ask himself the relevant questions. Had Quin had her killed for some reason? Had someone s
Inside, he found that the aquarium had been smashed, all of Nicola's fish long since dead in pretty patterns of inert flesh. They stank terribly. Off to the side, he discovered a dark stain on the carpet, but when he squatted and touched it, his finger came away dry. Blood? Wine? Spaghetti sauce?
He examined the fish next. Some were half-eaten, gnawed at by sharp teeth. Tufts of fur mixed in with the stinking fish made him think of meerkats. Had they been here? He sniffed the air. If so, the dead fish disguised their odor.
The couch had been moved recently, the marks where the legs had pushed down on the carpet still fresh. On the couch he found a laser gun—a sleek new model—tucked neatly into the left corner cushion. He left it there, but pulled out his own gun. The quiet had begun to get to him. Under the couch, another enigmatic red stain. He didn't bother to check it.
Circling back to the door, Shadrach noticed signs of struggle. His circumspect entrance could not account for the rough indentations in the carpet, the traces of imprinted mud.
He entered the kitchen, found five rotting fiddler crabs on the counter, their eyestalks flaccid, claws red and cracked.
Which left the bedroom. The door was shut. Memories lay beyond that door—of late nights spent talking and making love, making love and talking, until the two actions were as intertwined and inseparable as their bodies. Was her body in there, on the bed?
Reluctantly, he punched the door button. It slid open. The bedroom was empty. He sat down on the bed. No evidence of any disturbance or struggle. He checked under the bed. Nothing.
He was about to walk back into the living room when he heard a sudden rustle, a spasm, from the closet. Quietly, he approached the closet. He listened at the door. Nothing . . . and yet . . . Shadrach opened the door, his gun aimed dead center . . . to reveal a very normal clothes closet, with shoes and old stuffed animals strewn at the bottom. The animals were antique investments. Nicola had had them for years. Slowly, Shadrach parted the clothes, gun aimed into the back of the closet. Nothing came hurtling out of the darkness. A body did not come falling down out of the darkness.
Shadrach looked at the stuffed animals. She had a bear, a rabbit, a meerkat.
With great care, Shadrach placed the muzzle of his gun against the top of the meerkat's head.
“Move and I'll kill you,” he said.
“Feesssshhh,” came the muted reply as the meerkat trembled uncontrollably.
Shadrach stepped back, the gun held at arm's length, the muzzle still against the side of the meerkat's head. The meerkat's face scrunched up in a permanent flinch against the expected blast.
“Feesshhhh good,” the meerkat said distantly, its stare glassy. And why shouldn't its stare be glassy? The whole left side of its body had been torn away, then cauterized by a laser weapon. The creature was in shock.
“Nicola. Do you know Nicola?”
The meerkat leered through the blood bubbles in its mouth. It stared up at Shadrach. “Nicola doesn't need fish anymore.”
It had taken a few moments, but now Shadrach recognized the meerkat's subtype: an urban assassin model. Quin planned to sell versions of the subtype to the spy services of half a dozen city governments. But what was one doing in Nicola's apartment?
“You're not so bad off after all,” Shadrach said, “except that now I've found you.”
“Sirrrs?” the meerkat said, almost toppling over onto its side.
Shadrach stepped back, gun still aimed unwaveringly at the meerkat's head.
“I mean that you've got a lot of hardware up there,” he said as he used a wide dispersion wave to incinerate the meerkat's body, leaving only the neck and head, which fell atop the heap of ashes with an expression akin to astonishment forever etched into its features.
“Feesssshhhhh!” came the anguished, bewildered cry.
Shadrach carefully picked up the disembodied head by one svelte ear and took it into the kitchen. The heads of the assassin models had been created to be self-supporting in an emergency, and could live on for several days after decapitation. Although in shock, although suffering from disorientation and possible brain damage, the meerkat might still have its uses. It might serve as a suitable vehicle for revenge.
In the kitchen Shadrach found a common permanent adhesive and applied it to the cauterized stump of the meerkat's neck as the beast moaned and spat at him. He searched the cabinets, found a small plate, and put the meerkat head on it. He held the head in place as the adhesive did its work.
He stared into the meerkat's eyes, which were sharp and bright with pain, and said, “I don't give a fuck what your name was before. From now on, your name is John the Baptist, you son of a bitch.” He snickered for no reason at all, then stopped abruptly, because he could feel an anger, a rage, behind the snicker that must, at any cost, be denied until later. Everything in its place.
The meerkat said, “I will kill you. I will hear your eyes pop against my teeth.”
With a kitchen tool cleverly called an All-in-One, Shadrach used the pliers function to pull out all of the meerkat's teeth. It squealed once or twice over this latest indignity. Shadrach clotted the blood with a washcloth until the meerkat gagged, after which he let up.
“Bastard,” Shadrach said. “What makes you think you're any different than the funny people out in the wastelands? What makes you think you're anything more than an extremely complex machine?”
He found the largest plastic bag in the kitchen cabinets, poked airholes into it, put the meerkat inside, and stuffed the bag into the huge right side pocket of his trench coat.
“You, John the Baptist, are going below level,” Shadrach said. “I don't think there's much else I can do in the light.”
SHADRACH ATE at a cafe in the Canal District, oblivious to the strangled whimpers coming from his pocket and the strange looks the waiter gave him. His mind had become extraordinarily clear, as if he had managed to discard all the detritus of his past.
The great wall that surrounded the city impressed itself upon him with a precision that verged on the microscopic: He understood that with only the slightest squint he would be able to make out every blemish, every pockmark, on its blind, timeworn face. The colors running beneath the deck of the restaurant shone with a vibrance he could not recall having seen before—the orange hues livid as flames, the blues reflecting a sky that in its immensity could crush him in an instant.
The wind from the sea brought to him such a variety of scents that simply by breathing he became more alive: the sting of salt, certainly, and the subdued brine, but also an underlying sweetness that reminded him of Nicola's favorite perfume. Had he truly never smelled that sweetness before, or had it always been there?
Now Shadrach knew he was fated to go below level again. This was not fickle chance, not coy coincidence—this was fate, and he would run toward it as fast as he could, mouth curled back in a snarl. To think that he could grow so complacent that he could take anything for granted, even a smell, an aftertaste, an echo.
He ate his sea bass and potatoes with a peculiar combination of intensity and sloth, each bite savored, before, finished, he slapped down payment and left that place, as far as he knew, forever.
CHAPTER 2
Down below. Ten years since he had been there, and who knew how it might have changed, have warped in his absence? Somehow, he had thought, as a child might, that it had not existed at all after he had left, but had been a nightmare from which he had finally woken up. Why such a place should exist was a question hopelessly tangled in other questions, lost in the below-level passageways, long ago. At times, its distant, fading shrieks could be heard, only to be once again drowned out by the chaos of a million other voices whispering about survival. What lay below level? Surely not his past.
A NARROW alley. A slit of sky caught between tall buildings. A weal
As Shadrach stood at the threshold, the wind died away, the rumble and hiss of hovercraft faded into the air, and even John the Baptist stopped his futile squirming. No sound but for his own shallow breathing. The round gray manhole cover grew and grew until it became the world. From beneath it, he imagined he could hear the sounds of below level rising to poison the sunlight. It came softly, softly, but building, like gossamer dream transforming itself to heavy nightmare.
On the other side of the manhole a wet glob of slugs and grubs waited for him; it was their faint mewling cries he heard, the whole of their pulsing, gray bulk waiting for him to come home. The image of a maggoty, sudden dark. The drip-drip of water. The suggestion of massive machinery grinding. The dark. The harsh, spitting sound of holovids flicking green light from behind closed doors in closed-off corridors. The dark. No matter how he might rationalize it, he knew that his own personal Hell waited for him down below level. He had driven autotrains through the desert and seen what no one in the city could imagine, but he would rather do anything than return below level. He did not want to go. He would not go.
In a single motion, Shadrach pried open the portal, jumped into the greasy hole, clamped on to the ladder that ran down the inside of it, and shut the lid above him. The clang resounded in the darkness as he clung to the metal ladder. He clawed at the unpleasantly moist lid, which he could never again open, locked as it was from the outside.
He had no choice but to grit his teeth and descend the ladder, never knowing if something below might be scuttling up the ladder, slinking through the darkness to surprise him. The sound of his boots on the rungs resonated through the brackish, close air. Sweat trickled into his eyes. The already enclosed space around the ladder seemed to collapse in on him. His movements became frantic. It took a conscious effort to slow his breathing, to not just let go of the rungs and slide down into . . . what?