Balzac's War

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Mindle had brought them a present, unwrapping the corpse of one of the enemy at a Con meeting. It was the only body yet recovered, badly burned and curled up into a fetal position like a dead black cricket, but still recognizably mammalian. Weasel-like. Two meters tall. Fangs snarled out from the fire-peeled muzzle.

  “At first they walked around in plain view, directing their troops,” Mindle had told the Con members. “Darting here and there, sometimes on four legs, sometimes on two legs. A meerkat hybrid, no doubt a leftover from biotech experiments before the Collapse, with a much bigger skull and an opposable thumb. Made creatures. When we captured this one, they went into hiding, and now they only send their servants, the flesh dogs . . . ”

  Watching the grimace of Mindle’s features, the hatred embedded there, Balzac had felt a prickle of unease, as if Mindle were not the messenger, but the presence of death itself.

  With Mindle gone, Balzac turned to Jamie, her face set like a jewel in a ring, nearly buried by the folds of tissue on the flesh dog’s head. Clinically, he forced himself to recall the little he knew about such symbiosis: Jamie’s head had been cut from her body and placed in the cavity usually reserved for the flesh dog’s nutrient sac; the nutrient sac allowed the beast to run for days without food or water. Her brain stem had been hardwired into the flesh dog’s nervous system and bloodstream, but motor functions remained under the flesh dog’s control. She could not shut her eyes without the flesh dog’s approval, and although she kept her own eyes, they had been surgically enhanced for night vision, so that now her pupils resembled tiny dead violets. Sometimes the wiring went wrong and the symbiote would fight for muscle control with the flesh dog – a condition that ended with uncontrollable thrashing and a slow death by self-disembowelment.

  Jeffer stumbled over a chair and Balzac became aware that his brother still shared the room with him.

  “Why don’t you leave, too,” Balzac said, anger rising inside him.

  “You shouldn’t be alone. And what if there were others? I need to watch from the balcony.”

  “There’s no one with her.”

  “I’m staying. You’ll hardly know I’m here.”

  Balzac waited until Jeffer had stepped out to the balcony. Then, thoughts a jumble of love and loathing, he forced himself to stare at his lover’s face. The face registered shock in the dim light, stunned as it began to recover itself. As he watched, the eyes, pupils stained purple, blinked rapidly, the full mouth forming a puzzled smile. Balzac shuddered. She looked enough like the Jamie he remembered for love to win out over loathing. He had known it would; deep down, in places he would never reveal to anyone, he had hoped Jamie would track him here. He had assumed that once she had found him again he could bring her back from the dead.

  Looking at her now, he had no idea what to do.

  “Balzac? Balzac?” That voice, no longer demanding and sexy.

  He was so used to her being the stronger one, the one who had an answer for everything, that he couldn’t reply. He couldn’t even look at her. Throat tight and dry, legs wobbly, he took a step toward Jeffer. Jeffer was only a silhouette, behind which rose the night: a ridge of black broken by faint streaks of laser fire.

  “Help me, Jeffer.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “What should I do?”

  “I would have shot her in the street.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I missed.”

  “Balzac,” Jamie said. The disorientation in her voice frightened Balzac. He ground his teeth together to stop his tears.

  “She can still hurt you,” Jeffer said.

  “I know,” Balzac said. He slumped down against the wall, his shoes almost touching Jamie’s head. The floor was strewn with dirt, pieces of stone, and empty autodoc syringes. Beside Balzac, the flesh dog’s entrails congealed in a sloppy pile.

  “Balzac?” Jamie said a third time.

  Her eyes blinked once, twice, a miracle for one who had been dead. She focused on him, the flesh dog’s head moving with a crackly sound.

  “I can see you,” she said. “I can really see you.”

  You’re dead, he wanted to say, as if it were her fault. Why aren’t you dead?

  “Do you know where you are?” Balzac asked. “Do you know who you are?”

  “I’m with you,” she said. “I’m here, and it’s cold here.”

  The effort too much, too soon, with the flesh dying all around her, Jamie’s eyes closed to slits.

  Balzac wondered if what he saw was not just a carnie trick, if beneath the flesh lived nothing more than an endless spliced loop, a circuit that said his name and tried to seduce him with the lie that Jamie lived, long enough for it to drive him mad. Jamie had died. He knew that; if he saw her now, she was ghost cloaked in flesh, as dead as the city of powdering bones. The same war that had given the city a false heart – a burning, soul-consuming furnace of a heart – had resurrected Jamie. Yet he must assume that she was more than a shadowy wisp of memory, because he could not prove her ghostliness, her otherness. What cruelty for him to abandon her should she be aware. And trapped.

  Jamie had died on the front lines a week before, then and now separated by a second and a century. His recollections were filtered through a veil of smoke and screams, the dark pulsating with frantic commands. Particular moments stood out: the irritation of sand grit in his shoes; a lone blade of grass caught just so between yellow and green; an ant crawling across an empty boot, its red body translucent in the laser glow; the reflection of an explosion, the burnt umber flames melting across the muzzle of his rifle; the slick feel of Jamie’s grime-smeared hand in his, her pulse beating against him through the tips of her fingers.

  Crowded together in long trenches, they had been only two among several thousand, waiting. They did not talk, but only touched.

  The flesh dogs appeared promptly at twilight, bringing silence with them in a black wave. They wore the masks of friends, the guise of family. They jogged and cantered across the fires: fueled by a singleness of purpose, pounding on shadow muscles, ripping swathes of darkness from the night so as to reimagine themselves in night’s image. Eyes like tiny dead violets. An almost-silent ballet of death.

  Then, on cue, they halted, forming a solid, uniform line. They stood so still it would have been easy to think they were a row of ancient statues built on the order of a brilliantly deranged despot.

  In the lull, Balzac hugged Jamie, taking comfort in the feel and scent of her body.

  Above, dirigibles coughed and grunted with the effort of discharging missiles, flashes of light catching ground combatants in freeze frame.

  As the flesh dogs came into range, in such numbers that the ground reverberated with the thunder of their passage, the defenders of the trench opened fire: the spitting sparks of lasers and the rhythmic phutt-phutt of rifles entwined in an orgasm of recoil and recharge. It took immense discipline to stand in the teeth of such a charge. The rifle in Balzac’s hands seemed heavy, difficult – it wanted its head, and in the heat of battle it was all he could do to keep it aimed and firing, his finger awkward on the trigger.

  In reply to the defenders’ barrage: a chorus of bone-thin voices attached to alien bodies, a thousand ghosts wailing across the ruins in the timbre of old friends pleading for their lives, calling out to the living by name.

  It brought madness bubbling to the surface, so that the defenders shot and recharged with incredible speed, shouting back their own hatred to block out the voices, obliterating the present that it might not obliterate the past.

  As the wave broke over them, the tableau dissolved in confusion. Mostly, Balzac remembered the stench of gunpowder as he loaded and reloaded – but more slowly now, mesmerized by the carnage – and the fleeting images through the smoke . . . Huge bodies flung without reason or care . . . a dark blue-black wall of flesh . . . the swiftness of them, almost as fast as a dirigible, so that a blink could cost a life . . . Sinuous muscles, caricatures of human faces
as wincing passengers . . . The bright black slickness of spilled oil . . . Throats ripped from bodies . . . bodies fallen, whirling and dancing in the jaws of the flesh dogs . . . flesh dogs toppling, sawed in half or legs cut off, crawling forward . . . others, shot in the head, falling over on their backs.

  Through the black-white-black of dirigible flashes, Balzac saw Jamie fall in stop-gap motion and his heart stopped beating away from him into the darkness he couldn’t see her anywhere. As he put out his hand to pull her up, she was no longer there.

  “Jamie!”

  A flesh dog galloped toward the breach in the line left by Jamie’s absence. He spun, shot it, and jumped to the side, the fangs snapping inches from his throat. It slammed into the trench, dead. He got up . . . and when he looked back toward the gap in the line of defenders, she still hadn’t filled it, hadn’t regained her feet as he’d expected, even when the dirigibles scorched the night into day.

  In his panic, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t think.

  “Jamie!” he shouted over the screams and detonations. “Jamie!”

  And the echo passed along the line to him: “Retreat! Fall back! Breached! Breached!”

  A death sentence for Jamie. A section of the trench had been overrun and to avoid being flanked they must fall back. The retreat, a haphazard, broken-backed affair, piled confusion on confusion, some soldiers running away while others commenced a vigilant rearguard action to allow stragglers to cross back over what was now enemy territory.

  A dirigible exploded directly overhead, the impact knocking Balzac to the ground. Swathes of burning canvas floated down on the combatants. Molten puddles crackled and hissed around Balzac as he got up. Mechanically, he haunted the burning ground, searching for his beloved with his infrared goggles. He dove into ditches, crawled through the most dangerous of firefights, lending his rifle only long enough to clear a path to the next embattled outpost. Each minute of failure added to the heaviness in his chest, the rising sense of helplessness.

  Later, he would recall the black-and-red battlefield as if he had been aboard a dirigible; he would even remember watching himself run across the treacherous ground: a tiny figure leaping recklessly between trenches, scurrying through flames without hesitation. Other times, he would remember it only as a series of starts and stops. He would be running and then fellow soldiers or flesh dogs would be all around him like a sudden rain, and then he would be alone again, his thoughts poisoning his skull.

  Only the sight of the creature saved Balzac from the endless searching, for it was only then that he realized Jamie must be dead.

  He sat down heavily, as if shot, and stared at it as it bustled about its business some thirty-five meters away. It was so sleek and functional and not of this world – so much more perfect than anything perfect could be – that for a moment Balzac could not imagine its function: it was merely a beautiful piece of artwork, a thing to be admired for its own clockwork self. How could humankind compete with such a creature? He watched it with mounting dread and guilty fascination.

  It scuttled along on cilia-like feet, almost centipedal, and yet it was clothed in dense, dark fur – long and low to the ground so that it seemed to flow, a species composed of the most elemental combination of flesh and bone. The head, which swiveled three hundred sixty degrees, reminded Balzac of a cross between cat and badger, the bright, luminous eyes and curious smile of muzzle conspiring to make the beast almost jolly. Thin, Balzac thought at first. Thinner than thin, the spine caved in on itself so that its back appeared to have been scooped out with a shovel, leaving a long, low compartment walled in by shoulders and flanks. The smooth-squishy sound it made with its thousand limbs he had heard before, on the battlefield, as a low, underlying counterpoint to the screams and explosions.

  But although the beast stunned him with its perfect strangeness, the function it performed stunned him more.

  As he watched, the beast threaded its way through the scattered corpses. Finally, at the body of a young man with open, vacant eyes, and a thin line of blood trickling from the mouth, the beast came to a halt. Then, with a discernable pop, spinning wildly, the expression on its face insanely cheerful, the beast’s head unscrewed itself from its body and, with the aid of cilia positioned beneath its now autonomous head, lifted itself over the edge of its own shoulders. Once it had sidled up to the head of its victim, the beast grunted twice and two appendages emerged from the thick fur: a powerful blade of bone and a two-thumbed hand. The blade came down, slicing through the man’s neck. Almost simultaneously, the hand grasped the dead soldier’s head and placed it over the hole left by the departure of the beast’s head. It waited for a moment, then pulled the man’s head, which had been “capped” with a pulsing purple slab of flesh, back out of the hole. Balzac watched with horrified fascination as the hand then tossed the capped head into the scooped out cavity of the beast’s body. Both blade and hand disappeared into the beast’s grinning head, which then rolled and huffed its way back onto its own neck and twirled twice, before the whole nightmare contraption scuttled on, out of sight.

  Leaving Balzac alone, with the dead.

  After the battle, behind the lines, they assigned him to Jeffer’s guerilla unit. Jeffer would watch over him as he always had in the past.

  Jeffer placed his hand on Balzac’s shoulder. Balzac flinched. Jeffer realized that the gesture was unappreciated, but he tried by an act of will to put all of his love and fear for Balzac into that simple touch of hand on shoulder. Love. He might not have admitted to love a few years ago, beyond the love expected by blood, but Jeffer had seen an unlikely transformation come over Balzac.

  Balzac, with his piercing green eyes and firm chin, had always been handsome to the point of callowness. But slowly, as he and Jamie became closer, and especially in the year after their marriage, Jeffer had seen the callowness stripped away. A certain weight and depth had entered the perfect lines of his brother’s mouth, a seriousness and mischievousness that illuminated the eyes. It was as if a fear had conquered Balzac simultaneous with his love for Jamie – fear for the death of his beloved, that their love could not last forever – and that these entangled twins of fear and love had peeled away his shallow qualities like a molting lizard skin.

  Jamie had remarked on it during a tour of the Balthakazar reclamation projects, as they sat and watched Balzac out in the sun, badgering the engineers.

  “I don’t know if I would still love him,” she said. “Not if he was just handsome. I used to love him for his mouth and his eyes and his awkwardness, and I wanted to protect him.” She flashed the smile that had driven dozens of men to despair. “Now he’s grown up and become real.”

  The memory haunted Jeffer as he said to Balzac, “It will be okay. You don’t have to do anything. It won’t be long . . . ” Jeffer suddenly felt weary. Why must he comfort others at those times he most needed comfort? The muscles in his throat tightened. Ever since he had been left with an eleven-year-old boy who could never again quite be just his little brother it had been this way.

  “I should have rolled in the dirt and disguised my scent,” Balzac said. “I should have become someone else. Then she couldn’t have found me. Ever. I shouldn’t have let her find me. But where’s the kindness in that?”

  Jeffer smiled at the mimicry of Mindle’s favorite phrase.

  “Kindness?” Mindle said, surprising them both. Eyes bright and reptilian, he stood in the doorway. “Kindness? How can you speak of kindness? There’s no room for it. We’ve no need of it.”

  Jeffer half-expected Mindle to crouch down and lap up the blood pooling around the flesh dog’s body. Who could predict the actions of a child who had never been a child?

  “Are you finished with the barricades, Mindle?” Jeffer asked.

  “With the barricades? Yes.”

  “Then wait outside until dawn. Stand watch from the second-story window.”

  Mindle stepped inside the room. He licked his lips. “Yes, sir. But first I thought we m
ight interrogate the prisoner.”

  “The prisoner will be dead soon.”

  “Then we must be quick – quicker, even,” he said, and took another step into the room.

  “Take up your post on the second floor,” Jeffer ordered.

  Mindle took a third step into the room.

  Before Jeffer could react, Balzac snatched up Con Fegman’s rifle from the floor. He aimed it at Mindle.

  Balzac said: “Go. Away.”

  Mindle smiled sweetly and turned to Jeffer, one eyebrow raised.

  “Do as he says, Mindle,” Jeffer said. “And Balzac – put down the rifle!”

  Mindle shrugged and turned away.

  Balzac tossed the weapon aside and hunkered over the flesh dog’s body. His brother’s gauntness, the way the autodoc’s light seemed to shine through him, unnerved Jeffer. Such an odd tableau: his brother crouched with such love and such gentleness over the massive body of the flesh dog, as if it were his own creation.

  Jeffer tottered forward under the spell of that image, his intentions masked even from himself, but Balzac waved him away.

  “Please, let me be,” Balzac said. “Watch the window. Watch Mindle.”

  Even as he nodded yes, Jeffer hesitated, wondering for the first time if he could aim a rifle at his own brother. He walked over to the balcony and watched Balzac and Jamie from the darkness. Jamie’s face was pale, her lips gray. The beast’s flesh surrounded her like a rubbery cowl.

  He marveled at the affection in Balzac’s voice as his brother touched the creature’s face and asked, “How do you feel?”

  “Cold. Very cold. I can’t feel my legs. I think I’m dying. I think I’m already dead, Balzac. Why else should I feel so cold?”