Veniss Underground (15 page)

He felt the wind on his face and heard Nicola say, “It's the stars . . .” and realized that she too had not known until that moment that they were looking out at the night sky, slowly working its way toward dawn. He had not seen the sky for so long that the stars were each and every one a revelation to him, a new way of seeing the world, like the first time.

They stood at the top of the ramp, which overlooked the city. It glistened with lights.

“It's beautiful,” she said.

And deadly,
he thought. The city was a strange, hidden place with a white bridge and a gravel path. The city was a place of intermingled species, of minds. Was this evolution? He recalled the intricate beauty of the caterpillar map. He recalled John the Baptist's stoicism.

Down below, he could see the thick, cool aqueducts of the Canal District, the sides of the canals lined with lights. The world was silent. It seemed to him that the silence hid, and would forever hide, a living, breathing mystery. No matter that the city would eventually build a protective skin over this riddle, so that it would be but the dim red of a beating heart seen through milky tissue. No matter that, if Nicholas was right, the city was filled with a thousand unturned keys, ready in the lock, always just a gesture, a color, a sound away from clicking into place. The particular hue of a chemical sunset. The guttural command of a private policeman. The farewell kiss of lovers on a canalside beach. Of all the signs and symbols in such a chaotic city, which would be the one to unleash Quin's circus upon the world? Or would they stand forever at the ready, awaiting a command from a ghostly hand?

Ahead of them, stairs led down into the Veniss. Behind them, Shadrach heard the footsteps, the rustling, getting louder. What had come up with them from below level?

He pulled Nicola behind him, whirled around, hand on his gun, and saw . . . nothing. No one was standing in the mouth of the ramp. Just shadows.
A kiss in the dark
. He had imagined it.
The man living in the belly of a giant fish
. The real and the unreal had finally traded places.

Then and only then did he allow himself to cry: silent tears that ran down his face, dripped off his chin, fell to the pavement. He wept for the pain of his ordeal and for what he had had to do to rescue Nicola. He wept for his parents, who surely must be dead, and for Nicholas, stupid, a fool, led astray and discarded. He wept for his former self now that he had changed in so many ways and could not yet comprehend the half of them. But most of all, he wept with relief—that Nicola was alive and that he was alive with her.

But even though he hurt, and even though it was such sorrow to look upon Nicola's bruised face, and even though most things would not, as Nicola had said, ever again be the same, it was joy, not pain, that finally buckled his knees and brought him to the end of his endurance. He lay down against the rough stone of the ramp, staring up at the stars, wordless. Nicola sat beside him, together but alone, her hand in his as she looked out over Veniss.

At dawn, he knew that they would walk down into the city, not sure what they would find there, but knowing it must be better than what they had left behind. He knew that memory would make the past easy, by blurring the details and distorting time. He would grow old to this. He would become sentimental. He would forget he had become a murderer. He would forget many things. But he would never forget that he loved her, despite that niggling thought, which he would never be free of: Had he done enough? Could he have done better?

Still fighting it, still not sure, Shadrach closed his eyes and slept for the first time in seven days.

VENISS STORIES

THE SEA, MENDEHO, AND
MOONLIGHT

Above Mendeho Obregon an incandescent moon shone, eclipsed from time to time by the lumbering shadows of interstellar freighters as they took the I-wire up and down from Veniss. Always, they headed for the city, whose lights curved away from him down the almost silent beach.

Mendeho listened only to the call of gull and lurcher, the strangled choke of meerkat at its kill. Saw only the vermilion sea, studded with tiny glints, glares, ripples, and the strobes of squid. He blinked away a tear as he watched, the moisture collecting in the wrinkles of his face. It was forty years since he had last seen the ocean at night.

Mendeho had his eccentricities—the cane he used to conquer his rheumatism, for example, when a simple y-scan could have nipped it without so much as an operation. When pressed, he told his cousin, “I want to remember pain, to know I am alive.” His cousin, an I-wire tech named Onry, had stared blankly at him, keeping his own opinions to himself and his link.

A rustle caught Mendeho's ear: the sound of tiny scuttling feet. He squinted against the moonlight, finally saw that thousands of fiddlers were scouring the beach in a living wave of carapace and claw. Whatever dead tissue had washed up during the day would be devoured.

Mendeho smiled. The bioneers had not yet reconstructed the fiddlers. He was glad. Once, long ago, his great-great ancestors had stood offshore and cast nets to catch such creatures. For the raw protein. At least, the family records told him so.

A rare in-system shuttle rumbled into view, a clot of lights soon swallowed by the city's intense glow. It would land in one of the cool-down canals that had given Dayton Central the nickname “Veniss.”

The thunder scattered fiddlers, sent night waders up in a flurry of leathery wings. Waves died at the shoreline and a weak bluster of wind whipped Mendeho's unfashionably high collar against his neck. Already, he had defied the curfew for service citizens; the double placed in his bed would not fool the solimind forever.

And for what? He laughed, kicked at the sand with his good leg, leaning on his cane. A midnight skinny-dip? He squared his shoulders, assumed the straight-backed posture that had aided his swimming stroke and, later, helped him survive two sections at the academy years and years ago.

Mendeho's grip on his cane tightened, fingers clenched. The sea—the color of the sea—was so dark tonight, despite the occasional flash and sparkle. The fiddlers had returned and, beyond them, bathed in moonglow and wave, dolsynths slid through the water as smoothly as a solimind shuttle. The wind felt good, having picked up (probably at the solimind's request), and he took halting steps down from the dunes, silhouetted against the city's continual splendor. The fiddlers froze, not knowing what to make of him.

Perhaps poor Julia had been right, he thought, breathing faster than he would have liked. Perhaps defying the solimind would have been too dangerous, but he had been willing to try . . . Later, he saw Julia for what she was—a component in the system, chip-simple. Meanwhile, his approved wife bore and bored him with four children, as requisitioned. All four were linked before their first birthdays. What use for a father then? Onry told him he was lucky. Since the Diaspora Plague, some had had to bear the burden of five or six children.

And all the while Mendeho diligently oversaw the production of shuttle emulsifiers and clogshop units, choking on the taste of dust-dull work.

The fiddlers compromised, clearing a space around him, perhaps hoping he would die and leave plenty of protein for their eager mouths. He shooed them back. Then, staring at the sea, Mendeho let his cane fall to the sand with a soft
scrunch
. The buttons of his gray shirt and pants popped free as he undressed himself. His shoes with their sticky adhesive had already been discarded and soon he wore only a pair of jet-black briefs. He took a deep breath through his nose, swiveling his shoulders. For a man of sixty-seven, he had a firm body, with white hair that crawled across his chest like stringy seaweed. Mendeho smelled the salt spray and smiled, content with his decision.

Often he had swum when he was younger, in the old days when the restriction of a triplehand badge was unnecessary. The rule took all the fun out of it—exactly the solimind's intent. “Safety first,” it proclaimed on vidolos where it paraded and pouted, taking on the disguise of mother, father. The worst irony? Life
was
ordered, everyone richer, more comfortable than before. The freighters docked graceful as ballerinas under I-wire control and the clockwork universe humankind had created for itself out of chaos ticked on oblivious to strife.

But Mendeho Caranza Obregon, son of Juan Carlos VII, son of Juan Carlos VI, could not marry whom he wanted, could not set his own job requirements, and—most important at that moment—could not even swim in the ocean. And this thing he was determined to do before his death. If they would not let him swim at Dayton Central, then he would swim here, where Earth regained some guise of the natural, where the meerkat could play amongst the dunes, and out at sea dolsynths romped through deep water.

Mendeho Obregon told himself he was stubborn, and found that he was stubborn. A light shone from his eyes, in the set of his mouth, the outward thrust of his chin. He limped toward the surf, fiddlers skittering from his path. The city lights shrank and the sound of airborne traffic became muffled. There was only the sea in front of him, the living carpet of arthropods, and the rising wind. And, above all, the gutted and pockmarked moon, still transcendent on a night like this one.

Mendeho had a foot in the water when a warning sounded from the link lodged in his ear. He stopped, hands at his sides.

Citizen,
it whispered,
turn back. Turn back. You have broken curfew to swim. You cannot swim. The waves are too dangerous and you have no triplehand badge to keep you safe . . . You are old
. . . The whisper took on a placatory tone.
Turn back, citizen, and all will be forgiven.

“You are the Devil! The physician was mistaken—I am fit. And I am going into the sea!” His second foot hit the water with a satisfying splash. “I am going to swim!” He smiled, saw his crankiness as a gift, a weapon.

Your wife worries.
The voice in his ear oozed sympathy.

Mendeho stopped short. “Julia's been dead for a year,” he said. “A year ago today, and I am going to swim.”

Your wife's name is Carlina, not Julia,
chided the voice.
She is alive and so are your four lovely children, and all five are worried
.

“They are
your
children. Shut off!”

The line of his mouth quivered before blossoming into a grin. A certain exultation rose within him. They could not stop him, no matter what the danger. He walked farther into the water. Back onshore, the fiddlers had disappeared, alarmed by the spectacle of an old man talking to ghosts. Out in the ocean's deepest waves, a pseudowhale breached, humming songs for its forgotten dead. The songs reminded Mendeho of the doomed starship
Tai-keegi
's high-speed transmissions—sonorous and tragic—for even he had never seen a whale.

You will see sense
, said the solimind, and left him.

Was that it? A warning and they would leave him alone?

He plunged forward, the water splashing up to his knees, and yelled for joy. Now, indeed, the fiddlers knew him to be insane . . . But then, just as he prepared to jump into the water and really
swim
, the waves swirled in on themselves. While he watched with disbelief, sinking to his knees, one hand to his mouth, the sea pulled back from him, washed itself away. It slid back and back until the shoreline lay new and shimmering some forty meters ahead, held in check by an invisible dam or blockade. Mendeho cursed and wept, fish flopping and dying in the dryness before him. Under the moon, the expanse of sand was filled with the living debris left by too swift an ebb tide.

You cannot come to harm, old man,
said the calm, patient solimind.
All citizens must obey the rules. You cannot swim, old man—come back . . .

An anger as surging and powerful as the sea built inside Mendeho until his hands clenched and unclenched fitfully. Ignoring the solimind, he wiped his brow, hoisted himself to his feet with a grunt, and said, “If the sea will not come to me, I shall come to it.”

He took a slow breath, exhaled, and began a stumbling run, feet slapping against the wet sand. A graveyard surrounded him, many of the creatures out-system forms restructured by the bioneers. He passed dying catechetans, their oar-shaped tusks hopelessly siphoning the air for moisture. Octopoids, too, wriggled and squirmed in the briny mire, tentacles clutching at him. Fish gasped for breath like living slates of ore, glimmering in the moonlight, some striped and smaller than Mendeho's finger, others solid purple and almost as large as a pleasure yacht.

Mendeho ignored everything but the line of waves and water ahead. He could not say he did this for Julia, but he was stubborn even with himself and could not have told a psychewitch his motivation.

The thing in his ear came alive.
It is no use, Mendeho. Come back. The sea is beyond your grasp. We will always control the tides. Turn back.

Mendeho tried to tear the metal from his ear, gasping at the ragged pain. Blood trickled from the wound, but it would not come free.

Still he ran and still the waves retreated as if alive and wary. Sweat stung his eyes and his heart sent flames shooting through his body until he moved with both hands clutched to his chest. His legs were giving out; his left leg felt wooden. Perhaps the physician had been correct. He shook his head, though his entire being felt slump-heavy. He stumbled over the carcass of a saylber, a rancid stench already issuing from its blowholes. A dozen phosphorescent creatures ate at the slippery flesh.

He crawled now, body threatening to quit completely, mind near blackout. The waves, he craned to see, were still distant. The bitter taste of failure coated his tongue like tyrol. Arm shaking, he fingered the wound where the link still clung.

“Solimind,” he rasped. “You bring me to death this way. The waves are out of reach and there are bodies of creatures greater than I already stiffening.” A flash of intuition struck him, a loophole of logic he could exploit only once. “It is killing me not to swim. My health is threatened. My wife will be worried. Help me . . .”

Hesitation, then the whisper, accompanied by what he thought was a sigh:
Swim,
Mendeho
. . .

Even exhausted, lying with his face against the sand, Mendeho felt elation.

         

SOON WATER
licked at his feet, an insistent touch
that strengthened under the solimind's ministrations and then buoyed him up. The body of the saylber drifted past him and he was floating, grasping seaweed, gulping air. Too tired to swim, to do anything except lie there in the water, Mendeho looked up at the moon and stars and clusters of light that were spacecraft. The waves rolled over and through him, enveloped him in their cool richness. Creatures nudged him but did not bite, tentacles wet and smooth. Bathed in the sea, he turned his head to catch a glimpse of the city. It still sparkled, but not, Mendeho decided, with the overwhelming light of the moon. His ear throbbed, his leg ached, and the pains in his chest intensified, but he floated in a weightless world, sensation deadened. And everywhere: the sibilant sound of moving water.

Slowly, the solimind's treacherous current carried Mendeho Caranza Obregon away from land, until he was far from the minds of men, the city a dot, and only the moon looked large enough to touch with an outstretched hand.

         

IN VENISS,
there is told a tale called “The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight.” The sailors of space hear it in the telemar saloons and soon it is “The Vacuum, Mendeho, and Starlight.” In the free-triad markets, farmers hear it and soon it is “The Land, Mendeho, and Sunlight.” The story has become a legend of Dayton Central.

And the solimind approves, within limits. According to the legions of psychewitches, nominal dissent can be healthy for a frustrated I-wire tech. Yes, the solimind has decided, myths can be useful things. For in all the tales the old man Mendeho drifts out to sea, space, or pasture on a destiny of the solimind's making and is never seen again.