Balzac's War

by Jeff VanderMeer

  He wrote in his diary:

  There’s nothing to stop me from taking my own life, or taking the lives of as many others as I like. There’s no one in my life that could tell me to do otherwise. I might as well still be in those caves by the sea. I am a god in this apartment; how the creatures I create try to please me, try to escape their own extinction. But it’s hardwired into them. Once born, their deaths are already set, while I have discovered how to slow my aging. How lonely can a man be before such an option no longer seems inviting?

  The unrest led to Bunadeo changing his name, to escape people who were now pursuing him. He remembered a character in an old holovid he’d watched once, based on an ancient book, and changed his name to “Quin.”

  By this time, he had begun to take liberal tissue samples from his own body and introduce them into his test subjects.

  This practice would continue when Quin, for a brief time, served as an anonymous assistant in the production of artificially-created children for the now-failing AIs. However, his main focus remained perfecting the experiments Madrid Sybel had first performed using meerkats…

  And that is the story of Quin, gleaned from a few fragments of short story I never finished (and which may or may not match the reality of the novel). In a sense, what makes it to the printed page is always a fragment of something larger, whether because you wrote character studies in aid of character development, or because inspiration left you at a critical time, or because a scene didn’t really belong in the novel after all—even though somewhere out there, in a universe where everything literary is real, that scene actually occurred, because life (unlike fiction) isn’t all about dramatic potential.

  I suppose I could have worked more about Quin into Veniss Underground, but I always felt that the narrative was more about Quin’s influence on the main characters than about Quin himself. Quin, I felt, should remain an enigma, mysterious yet purposeful, whose will was expressed through his agents in the world: the meerkats who did his bidding. In Veniss Underground, Quin becomes a three-faced avatar created by the perceptions of, in turn, Nicholas, Nicola, and Shadrach.

  Quin’s influence shows up indirectly in the short stories set in the same milieu, including “Balzac’s War,” “A Heart for Lucretia,” “Detectives and Cadavers,” “Flesh,” and “The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight.” These stories describe the gradual domination of the Earth by Quin’s creatures. But there are more fragments than completed stories, and I find it unlikely that I will complete most of them. It’s more likely that their still-births were necessary to bring the finished stories to life—much as Madrid’s failed experiments eventually brought a sentient meerkat to life, for a little while anyway.

  Veniss Underground almost became one of those still-births, those fragments. I started with the short outline of a man going to buy a meerkat, sort of a futuristic magic shop story, and then conceived of the overall narrative arc. However, at the time I didn’t really have the skills to implement such a complex narrative. I was still learning my craft and acquiring technique, not to mention life experience. It took me over a year to find the right voice for Nicola, and to discover the pleasures (and dangers) of second person. It was easier to figure out how to portray Shadrach because he had such a direct and straightforward mission during the time when the reader would know him. (Nicholas’ vain, whining arrogance was easiest—I just channeled and intensified the worst aspects of my own personality.)

  But when Shadrach reached the organ bank, I found myself stuck for a different reason: I couldn’t visualize the place. For some reason, without visualizing the organ bank, I couldn’t visualize the rest of the novel.

  Some months into this writer’s block, Ann and I visited England, where I discovered York Cathedral (with help from friends Chris Reed and Manda Thompson). York Cathedral became my grand epiphany, perhaps the most visionary experience I have ever had while writing a story or novel. As soon as we entered the cathedral—a place older than Westminster— and I traced the path of the columns up to the stunningly high ceiling, the little hairs on my arms lifted, and I shivered. The columns, looking like multiple tubes tied together, were utterly alien to me. I’d seen nothing like them. My scalp was tingling. I could feel something rising up inside of me. The organ bank was becoming a reality right in front of my eyes. But it wasn’t until I walked around a corner and saw steps leading down to a door and a window set into the wall, wooden bars across it, that the back of my head exploded and I found myself hardly able to breathe. I could clearly see Shadrach walking around the corner as I had…and being confronted by a scene out of Dante’s Inferno in that room with the little steps leading down to it. In my vision, that room stretched out and opened up into a much larger space filled with body parts in various stages of decay. As I saw this spreading out before me, so too the rest of the cathedral changed, until the columns became conduits for blood and the sculptures of saints on the columns were bodies set into the columns and the design on the ceiling of the cathedral was instead a series of floating cameras and there, coming down the walkway, were two old women with purses; no, two old people carrying the body of a young girl between them, and behind them, Dr. Ferguson in his bloody smock, and although I’m not religious, this was a religious experience, the world transformed, the world’s surface peeled back to reveal the flesh beneath the skin. I stood there scribbling away like a slack-jawed idiot for long minutes, writing down what was being written into me. I couldn’t keep up with the images and ideas cutting into my head. I had to find more paper. I had to keep writing. It was all spilling out. It was all becoming real. I couldn’t stop writing. In every possible way, I experienced exactly what Shadrach experienced up to that moment when he saw his love buried beneath the mound of legs. Then it was past and gone and I was in the world again, and it was just a cathedral, and I was exhausted and speechless—spent.

  If you’re lucky, you have three or four experiences like this in a lifetime. I can’t describe it as anything other than a vision, a transformation. Such a happening does not mean that the writing that occurs because of it will be any better or any worse than writing achieved through discipline and a slow grind forward. Anything I put down on paper could only be a shadow, an echo, a ghost of what I had experienced in the flesh.

  But, on a grand scale, it does remind you why you write: for those everyday epiphanies, the little moments of sudden knowledge that occur when you are written. In my case, that half hour in the York cathedral saved Veniss Underground. It got me past the point of most resistance. A lot of hard work remained ahead of me, but I could see my way to the end.

  Whenever I think of the novel, I think of that moment in the cathedral. But I also think of the relationship between Veniss Underground and my Ambergris stories, with their own, much more enigmatic, underground. While I was writing Veniss Underground, Ambergris began to colonize my imagination. In a way, this happened at just the right time. For very sound reasons—frustrating to the more direct part of my nature—I could not describe the subterranean passageways of Ambergris in anything other than fragments and conflicting glimpses. The integrity of the stories I was writing at the time would have been threatened by a clear view. But for the third part of Veniss Underground, I needed to strip away the darkness of a subterranean land and show, unflinchingly, what hid in that darkness. In a strange way, Veniss Underground allowed me to show readers—metaphorically, at the level at which images resonate—the nether parts of Ambergris. At the same time, the milieu of Veniss, in the novel and the other stories, showed me a way to write future Ambergris stories. (What I mean by this will become clear in my new Ambergris fiction.)

  Veniss Underground is an unabashedly decadent, phantasmagorical novel. Like the Gollux, it may be a flawed location, not a flawed creature, if read as science fiction. Fed by fragments the reader cannot see but can sense, by visions and transformations, by cross-pollination with other story cycles, it is a mutt, a mongrel, but oddly beautiful nonetheless. When I re-read it now, it
reminds me of Bunadeo/Quin, working toward his master’s ends: creating an entire world out of a tiny fish, revealing a man’s pale face in the grip of some other beast’s flesh. I like that sense of it. I think it’s fitting.

  —March 9, 2003, Tallahassee

  JESSIBLE AND THE METAL DRAGON

  Because she was stupid and young and desperate, Jessible one day stole a boat from her crèche and sailed out into the deep waters of the world, far from everything that she had ever known.

  The blood in Jessible’s veins sang like the waters of the sea, with undercurrents and swells and calms. Sometimes when she walked along the shore, she would become possessed of an urge to rush head-long into the waves, to embrace the water until her lungs hurt, and then beyond, until they burned, and then beyond that, until the pressure of water against her body was so great that she must learn to breathe water or drown. The members of her crèche did not understand her, did not understand what she wanted to become. Nights spent huddled in the great enclosure underground, whispering by candlelight as they waited for the creatures above to go away, she wondered why it was they tried to live at all. What was the point of such an existence? Her parents had no answers for her—their voices had become like the whine of the little metallic insects that now converged on the crèche during the day.

  Jessible would help repair nets on the beach while others went out to fish, including her parents, setting off in lithe, long boats with silent motors, so as not to disturb the pseudowhales and their kin. The world was changing, and people had to be careful. Any creature might turn out to be intelligent. Any creature might turn out to be dangerous.

  On the day her parents told her they had arranged her marriage to a mere boy from a neighboring crèche, the service to be performed by the local Conregiman, Jessible did throw herself into the sea, into the luscious moistness of its embrace, albeit in a small boat, fitted with an outrigger, sails, and a silent motor that drew its energy from the sun. She had hidden the boat under the creche’s single pier, disguised by sand and tree branches, since the age of fourteen. She had started stocking it with provisions at the age of fifteen. With it hidden beneath the pier, she had always felt a certain amount of freedom. At any time, she could have slipped down to the boat during the night and set off for parts unknown, and no one would have known. They would have said she had perished in the ruined city of Veniss, whose underground levels still held danger. They would have said she had drowned in the sea.

  But that day, the sea singing in her veins, she cast off in broad daylight, while the fisherfolk fleet cast its nets farther east, out of sight. The sky was a hazy blue-orange arch above her, and every color, every salt smell was enhanced by the finality of her rebellion. She loved the tension of the rope against her skin, the way she could reel in and let out sail without more than a twinge in her stomach muscles.

  Too late, her crèche mother saw her heading out to open sea and ran to the shore’s edge, where she flitted back and forth like a sandpiper, shouting at Jessible: “Come back! Come back!”

  But Jessible ignored her crèche mother. She just waved, smiled, and let the waves slap against the boat’s prow. The sea pulsed weakly now that she was within its grasp, and she let her hand dangle off the side, content with the feel of the water against her palm.

  Perhaps, she thought, the singing in her veins, the way the blood in her seemed to hum, to bring her skin taut, to bring her to the height of tears, was also the height of madness, but if so, she wanted to remain mad.

  It wasn’t long, the boat passing out of sight of land that Jessible fell asleep to the slow rocking of the waves, the Northerly breeze speeding her vessel along while it cooled her under the heat of the sun…

  When she awoke, it was to a sea aglow with the fire of saylbers, their great sails iridescent in the darkness that had fallen across the world. They surrounded her, moving with slow assurance: a land of blue, orange, yellow, red, green triangles of light, around which gathered the tiny sea creatures on which the saylbers made their meals.

  She sat up, rubbing her eyes. Saylbers! She had only seen them in an old ragged book of her mother’s called Bellefonte’s Quadrahelix. None of the fisherfolk had ever seen them either, for salybers inhabited the deep ocean, so far from land that when they died, their bodies did not even wash up on shore like the great husks of pseudowhales. She glanced up at the sky. No moon, but the stars seemed brighter and more numerous, so that she could hardly pick out constellations: St. Gerard, the Meerkat, the Great Whale, the Rock Toad. They lay hidden by the twinkling designs of yet other stars, interwoven skillfully so that they enhanced the light of the saylbers on the water. A sweet smell came to her, like jasmine or desert saline. She knew at once, from her reading, that she was in the middle of mating pod; this was their mating scent. Near the center of the saylbers, where they were most densely clustered, the triangular sales pushed and nudged in a slow, sensuous way.

  A saylber surfaced near her hand, which dangled over the boat’s edge, the fleshy sail brushing against skin; it felt smooth and tingling. The creature could easily have capsized her boat, but instead just lifted up the edge of the prow.

  Another rhythm enveloped her with the touch.

  [W/ho/at are you?]

  She gasped.

  The saylber rose against the boat, the triangle still blazing green, the same rhythm in her bloodstream, but very faint, rippling through her system. The book had never said anything about voices in her head. Had not done much more than allow her to recognize saylbers and not be frightened by them. But this. For a moment she had a vision: that the ocean was not filled with saylbers, but with couples making love across the water’s surface. People? Could they possibly be like…people?

  The saylber made a third pass and this time she choked down her fear, reached over the side of the boat, and grabbled onto the sail.

  [Who/at are you? Where do you come from? Are you from the metal dragon? *Lust*Sea* against *skin* made for the deep cold water *sucking in* of creatures against teeth. Who/at are you? Where do you come from? Metal dragon?]

  Metal dragon imploded inside her head not as words, but as an image: the battered hulk of a monster, gleaming in the sunlight, huge beyond measure, trailing red-hot fragments of stars behind it.

  The saylber patiently allowed her a better grasp on its sail, rocked gently against her boat.

  “No,” she said, thinking it hard, “I’m not from the metal dragon. I’m from the crèche.”

  Her she thought, hard, of the desert, and the underground caverns in which her people had lived for hundreds of years, since the beginning of the Dying Out, through the murderous invasions of the muttie and the funny, incursions from flesh dogs and meerkats alike. She projected her mother and her father and her friends—willow-wisp Sandra and Bunadeo and Gilligny, the only one who might have sympathized with her decision to leave. The rhythm tightened, constricted her throat, and she realized, for the first time, that she had entered the unknown for good, that she could not go home, that she probably could not find her way home The salty taste of tears touched her tongue. Would they look for her? She didn’t know, but she didn’t know they wouldn’t find her. They didn’t dare lose a fisher craft looking for her.

  The rhythm rose in her ears, and she let her hand slide from the saylber’s fin, broke the contact, and broke, too, the feeling of loss.

  The saylber wiggled its fin.

  She resisted for several minutes, then, with a sigh, placed her hand once more on its sail. This time, the communication came in clearer, less choppy.

  [Glad not of metal dragon. We would have had to bring you into the sea and the sea into you. I am Emerald-Waters-Shift-with-Shadows.]

  “I am Jessible.”

  [Now that we are named, we may converse as true people. We may share.]

  Images splashed against her skull, seeking purchase—of deep space and the black between worlds and the darkness between minds and –

  “Stop!” She screamed, clamping her
hands to the sides of her head. “Stop!”

  The saylber trembled, drifted away from the boat, its fin flashing orange, red, blue, red, orange. Jessible tried to think of familiar things: the smells of her crèche mother’s toad pie, tangy and dry, the feel of sand against her calloused feet when she danced for the solstice festival, the taste of a boy’s tongue in her mouth after the festival, in a darkness that hid them both.

  The saylber wriggled its triangular sail.

  She put her hand on the smooth skin, reluctant.

  “You hurt me.”

  [Am sorry. We talk differently. I remember now. We have long memories, but we forget so much. We forget even our world before we were brought to this world. When we gather, we gather to remember. Let me tell you. Let me tell you of the metal dragons and why we fear them so. Shall I show you? Show you.]

  And the saylber did show her, so that she felt as if she were falling through a wormhole in her own mind. She saw the metal dragon spuming through space, sparking, imploding. Many of them. She saw whole ships filled with water and saylbers disintegrate. It was almost too much for her mind to hold…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer has had books published in over twenty languages and his short fiction has appeared in many year’s best anthologies. Novels include Finch, Shriek, and City of Saints & Madmen. Nonfiction includes Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer, Monstrous Creatures: Essays, Articles, and Reviews, and The Steampunk Bible. Solo and with his wife Ann VanderMeer, editor of Weird Tales, VanderMeer has edited several influential anthologies, including Leviathan vols. 1-3, The New Weird, Steampunk, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, and the forthcoming The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. He reviews books for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and others. A frequent guest at conferences and conventions, VanderMeer has lectured at MIT and the Library of Congress while also running writing workshops all over the world. He also serves as the assistant director to the Shared Worlds SF/Fantasy teen writing camp. Visit www.jeffvandermeer.com for more information.