Veniss Underground (9 page)

Gently, he set her down on the couch. Even the carpet by the couch was the same—the dead shag beneath his knees abrasive. He looked up to see Candle staring at her with concern. Something in the eyes gave Candle away.

“You're not human, are you?”

“No.”

Candle's hands were long, like thick roots, and they ended in retractable claws. The palms were yellow in the light. Where the cuff of his sleeves ended, Shadrach could see thick brown fur tufting out. Shadrach suddenly felt more threatened than he had with a gun aimed at him. Would Candle feel an affinity for the meerkat head in his pocket?

“Do you know Quin?” Shadrach asked.

“Yes.” Candle's gaze scorched through Shadrach.

“I know him too.” He searched in his pocket, pulled out the badge as if it were a lucky amulet. “I work for Quin.”

Candle turned away, walked to the other side of the room, stood facing the kitchen. “You don't need to show me that. I won't hurt you.”

“Yes, but will you help me otherwise? She needs help.”

Candle shrugged.

Shadrach turned back to Nicola. She had a gray pallor to her, as if she hadn't seen the sun for years. Her eye was sunk back in her head. Her breathing came slow and regular, but almost imperceptible. Her dirty hair had stuck to her scalp. He brushed bits of dirt from her cheek. What was the point of rescuing her if he couldn't save her life?

“Please,” he said to Candle. “Please. You must know someone—or know someone who might?”

Candle said, “I'm just an animal. What could I possibly know?”

“So you'll let her die?”

“No,” Candle said. “You'll let her die. You let her come to this. When you love someone, do you let them come to such a state? The guilt is written all over your face. I can smell it on you.”

Each word cut into Shadrach as if Dr. Ferguson were operating on him. He could not stand it. He spun to his feet, hand diving into his pocket.

But Candle's gun was already aimed at him again.

Candle said, “Don't.”

“You know where my parents are, don't you?”

“No. They moved your parents out—they moved all the humans out. I don't know what they did with the mining families. They just carted them off one day and carted us in. We work for Quin now.”

“What is Quin like?”

“Like?” Candle shook his head in amusement. “Like? He's like nothing that's ever been seen on this Earth. He's a part of me. He might even be a part of you. You've asked a question I've no answer to.”

“Do you respect Quin? Do you worship him?”

Candle gave him a long, suspicious stare. “No,” he said finally.

“Neither do I. Can't you just help me find a doctor?”

“Wasn't there a doctor where you found her?”

“Not anyone I'd trust. Besides, she doesn't just need a doctor—I need to know what she knows. I need a—”

“A psychewitch.”

“Yes.”

Candle scowled. “If I find you a psychewitch, will that be the end of it? Will you promise never to come back here?”

Shadrach nodded.

Candle regarded him for a moment. “I don't trust you.”

“But I trust you,” Shadrach said, even though it wasn't true.

CHAPTER 4

The psychewitch Candle called Rafter peered through her strangely bejeweled sight like an exotic canal fish: slow-moving, graceful, and utterly dangerous. She had given over one eye so that she could bond with the subatomic, the subchromosomatic. She lived a level above Candle, in a neighborhood of boarded-up businesses and closed-down industries. Candle had led Shadrach through a maze of narrow corridors to get there, Shadrach doing his best to mentally catalog each twist and turn for future reference. The whole way he had been lost in the double sadness of Nicola's condition and the loss of his family—and the guilt that he felt so little for his family. They had been wrapped in a gray fog of lack of detail for almost ten years. Surely he should feel something, but he found that his heart only had room for Nicola, that his concern for her had pushed out all other considerations. Did that make him insane?

When they arrived, Candle had had a long, whispered conversation with her while Shadrach stood in a corner with Nicola still in his arms. He did not want to subject her to the added trauma of setting her down if they were not welcome. Rafter had finally walked over to Shadrach, but said nothing, gazing at him until he looked away. Rafter's narrow features, perfectly preserved, gave no hint of information—about her age, her life. Her movements, concise and controlled, let slip no clue to weaknesses. Only the silver, close-cropped hair, flicked up in front and hugging her scalp in back, revealed anything about her personality.

The waiting room gave Shadrach more clues, for it had the carefully planned flamboyance of a magician's stage. Curtains full of moving holographic images of faces—past clients?—framed holographic windows on all four walls, each looking out on a scene of clichéd tranquillity: the sea, the desert, mountains, jungles (this last taken from ancient film reels). The chairs not only morphed to the curvature of a visitor's spine but also spoke in purring, sibilant voices. The carpet remained mute, but its thick grass did pull away to reveal a springy gray path at the first touch of a visitor's shoes.

Finally, Rafter said, “Come with me,” and, turning, led Shadrach and Candle into another, smaller room with an operating table. A rectangular black box stood on a pedestal in the corner. The room was devoid of any hint of personality.

“Set her down—gently,” Rafter said.

Shadrach laid her on the table. “Can you save her?”

“I can save anyone,” Rafter said. “I can bring back the dead.” She ripped off the mask that covered Nicola's face. She opened Nicola's left eye and stared intently, clicking on a circle of lamps so that the light gathered like pearls across Nicola's face. Rafter's mechanical eye captured the light, interrogated it, then released it.

“Only dreaming,” Rafter muttered. She took surgical scissors from a pocket and cut away enough of the gauze that Nicola's arms came free. She held Nicola's right arm up—it looked unbearably pale to Shadrach—and focused her gaze on the nub of a wrist. Nodded once, replaced the arm carefully in the cast. Then she flicked out the lights pearling from her eyes. She smiled thinly at Shadrach, as if out of ritual, and from a distant place.

“She's salvageable,” Rafter said.

“Salvageable? What do you mean by salvageable?”

“I mean, I can bring her back.”

She held up a hand to forestall further questions and walked over to the box, pulled it over to Nicola.

“What's that?”

“Part of the procedure. Relax, it isn't happening to you.”

Rafter pushed a button on the side of the box and, with a whirring sound, four triangular flaps sprang open. The box proceeded to undergo an amazing transformation, turning itself inside out until its innards showed, full of conduits and microchips and gimcrack circuitry, in the middle of which hung vials of cloudy liquids hardwired into the interior. The machine cooed and burbled in a way that reminded Shadrach of a senile grandparent or a newborn baby. The sound did nothing to reassure Shadrach.

He must have grimaced, because Rafter said, “Oh, that. The machine still believes it's alive. Of course, it isn't anymore. Poor thing.”

She pushed a button and a thin, mechanical voice said, “Equilibrium . . . check . . . integrity . . . check.” Rafter might as well have been practicing witchcraft. She attached wires to Nicola's head, nodded, cursed, frowned, and finally smiled—the first time Shadrach had seen her smile, and it was a marvelous smile that lit up her entire face—as she read the results displayed on various monitors.

“You mean you can do all your work with just this box?” he asked.

“Your name is Shadrach and you work for Quin, correct?”

“Is that what Candle told you?”

Rafter smiled again. “I'm a psychewitch. I know everything there is to know. But if you work for Quin, then you do know that not everything of importance is very large.”

“I don't follow you.”

“You will, one day. Now listen very carefully, and don't interrupt: She's not in a coma. She's not brain-dead. She's stuck in the step before death. Sometimes, after they use a person for parts, they don't kill them, they just leave them in a state of stasis and give them to the boneyard, which is where I assume you found her, yes? After all, it's easier to leave them this way than to cut them up and cap all the parts. But the tricky thing is bringing a person out of stasis. The body revolts, the subconscious mind, having resigned itself to endless dream, protests. So I can do it, but it will take three or four days. It's like bringing someone out of deep sleep. If you rouse them quickly, it's a shock, but in this situation a shock that can kill. Her system has already suffered too much trauma. So you bring them up slowly. Like in the old days, with deep-sea divers, so they wouldn't get the bends.”

“The bends?”

“Never mind. So I coax her up, out of her sleep. It's easier because someone has accessed her memories recently, so she's that much closer to the surface.”

“What?”

“Her memories,” Rafter said. “Her memories. Someone has dredged them up. It's clear from these readings—and see the jack in the side of her head?”

A small metal implant did indeed protrude from his beloved's right ear.

“Why?” He was almost speechless. It horrified him that someone had rifled through her mind as if through a holographic file. Searching for . . . what?

“Someone probably wanted to view her death. That's not outlawed down here because . . . well, because nothing's outlawed down here.”

Nausea crept up Shadrach's throat. To be violated in that way . . . and yet, a thought came to him that shamed him. What if it were a loved one? What if it were necessary?

“Will . . . will it hurt her to access her memories?”

Rafter shook her head. “No. The path has already been established. Running a link through you might even bring her to the surface more gently. What I have to do is run that loop of her last memories over and over. It's like a siren song calling to her consciousness. Eventually, she will stop drowning and rise to the surface. We can do it right now. But I would advise against it.”

“I want—I need—to find out what happened to her. If it won't hurt her . . .”

“It won't. But it might hurt you.”

“Why?”

Rafter's mechanical eye dilated, and a grim smile transformed her face into a surface bleaker than the wastelands between the cities. “Because you never know what you'll find there.” Shadrach could fight off parachuting assailants. He could make his way through an army of cripples, search for his beloved in a mountain of legs, but when the time came to accept the temporary jack, the wires, and the entire apparatus of another's consciousness, he found himself as afraid as he had been since entering below level. Did he know enough about this world to bear what he found in her world? He would lie down in the darkness with her and when he rose from that darkness, he would leave her mired in it.

What does it mean to enter the mind of the beloved?
The I lost in the you without hesitation: the ultimate goal of every kindred soul to transcend the aching, the screaming, loneliness of the Divide, so that the atoms of one dissolve into the atoms of the other (two as one . . .), making such intimate love that orgasm is the sharing of electrons in flight.
And what does it mean to enter the mind of the beloved when you believe the beloved no longer loves you?

Rafter said from somewhere above him, “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” he said, and Rafter's eye novaed, and he was no longer himself.

         

YOU. WERE.
Always. Two. As one: Nicola and Nicholas, merging into the collective memory together, so that in the beginning of a sentence spoken by your brother you knew the shadow of its end and mouthed the words before he said them. In each moment you spent with him, you lived again that mist-shrouded beginning when the doctor rescued you from the artificial mother's womb—to bawl and cough and look incredulous at the sheer imperfection of the outer world. The world of plastic, the world of sky, the world of detritus and decay . . .

You entered her, then there was nothing except for her thoughts, the images coming from her eyes, and you/he disembodied/reincarnated as your love, feeling every pain, every happiness, every disappointment. It was exhausting. It was frustrating. It was cruel. It made you realize that if there were a God, It had placed humanity in so many different closed receptacles through a wisdom that only revealed itself now: that you could be too close to someone . . . and yet, he found himself still an object in the current of her thoughts, able to discern that he was separate from her . . . even as he wanted to scream “Don't seek him out! Leave him be!” when Nicholas didn't make his lunch appointment with her. When she went to the Tolstoi District, he saw as she did not the menace in the animals that peered out at her from the shadows. When he came face-to-face with himself on the docks—that sour, that pathetic countenance, so absorbed in its own self-pity—he wanted to die, to kill himself; he could see the resentment on his features, the childish holding back of himself out of pride when he should have comforted her and given her the information that might have saved her. When John the Baptist came to her door, he thought to himself, “But he's just a head in my pocket.” He could not take it. He could not survive as a separate mind, knowing what he knew. He could not be as a god, removed from it all. And so, eventually, he did slip fully into her skin, by giving up the opinions that comprised his identity. There was a vast relief, an unlimited freedom, in this giving up of his self. He was a leaf floating to the street surface, a fleck of ash spiraling through the air. He was ears and eyes and tongue and nose and hands and mind. He was nothing. He was everything. And his love for her burned ever brighter the closer she came to her destruction . . . until her brother's hands were around their throat and he thought he would die too. He could see the same darkness ahead, the single candle flickering out. And he had no ideas about revenge at that moment, no thoughts at all, but only feelings as he tried to sculpt the very pathways of her memory, to comfort her and remember her simultaneously. To reach out to her, no longer her watcher, her shadow, but somehow to communicate with her, to let her know that she survived this, that she survived this, that he was with her, and she would not die. But he couldn't. He couldn't, whether it was some fault in him or a limitation of their contact. He couldn't reach beyond himself into her. Not really. And it was this horror, not her death, not rage toward Nicholas or Quin, that finally brought him out of her—screaming like a lost soul.

         

HE WOKE
in Rafter's arms. She was slapping his face and staring down at him with her mechanical eye. As soon as he came to, she pulled away, released him to the ministrations of one of her chairs. He was in the lobby.

“It's okay,” Rafter said, as if Shadrach had just had a bad dream.

His body did not feel right—it was too large, awkward and gangly. He felt something trickling down the side of his face, wiped at it, saw that it was blood.

“You ripped the jack out of your head,” Rafter said. “Not really a very good idea. But you're awake now. You're awake. You're alive. She's alive too. I even gave you some vitamins and protein intravenously—you must not have eaten for a couple of days before you came here. So everything's fine—you can stop shaking now.”

She produced a self-lighting cigar, took a puff, and sat down in the chair next to him.

“Candle left,” she said. “He said to say he hopes he doesn't see you again.”

Shadrach choked on a great, collapsing breath, his arms trembling. He wanted to hit Rafter, but simply lay back exhausted in the chair. How could he remember? How could he forget? He had been inside her mind. He had been her. Inside of him, in the corners of his consciousness, the animals of the Tolstoi District now prowled in all their strangeness. And the sensation of being made love to by the hologram of a man. And the full, terrible weight of her love for him, and her falling out of love, her judgment. Which he accepted. He accepted it all. It was as she said.

Rafter said quietly, as if holding back some savage emotion, “I shouldn't have let you do that.”

“No, no,” Shadrach said, rising, face pale. “It was better to know.”

Rafter looked away.

Shadrach's face hardened. He wiped the tears from his face. “Tell me—what's on the tenth level?”

“It's just a garbage zone. There's nothing much there.”

“Except for Nicholas.”

“Who?”

“The man who killed Nicola. Her brother.” He choked on the words.

Rafter snorted. “You're telling me you're off to get revenge instead of staying here with her?”

“I'm going to kill Nicholas. And then I'm going to kill Quin, because he put Nick up to it.”

Rafter took a puff from her cigar. “You're going to get yourself killed. For revenge. And where will that leave your lover? In the boneyard again, no doubt.”