Veniss Underground (16 page)

DETECTIVES AND CADAVERS

The creature's ribs, half-buried by the tides, stuck out from the sand at odd angles, leg bones trapped beneath the torso. The head—four times the size of my own and, I'd dare say, more handsome—remained connected to the neck. Flesh covered the face, but could not hide the snarl of teeth, the cold stare of the vacant eye socket. Quite a specimen from where I was standing, half up to my mug in sand and water on the East Shore. Soggy weather, with an early-morning fog.

“Unique. Ugly. Dead,” said my partner Devon, a tight-lipped man whose broad features suggested caricature. He stood seven feet tall. I had only worked with him a few times before, but he seemed dependable.

“All true,” I said, “but none of it helpful.”

We were there on the whim of a sharp-eyed wall patrolwoman. She'd spotted a “suspicious shape, a possible muttie.” Never ones to skimp, the Conserge had sent us.

Getting out of Veniss had been problematic, demonstrators surrounding the front portal as ever: doomsayers convinced that the city's growing isolation from other Earth enclaves and off-world colonies was directly related to the muttie expulsion and supposed “persecution” of the Funny People. Never mind that the Conserge continually changed the definition of “muttie” and “Funny” to fit their own political agenda.

“If ever there
were
a full-scale muttie invasion, why there we'd be, you and I, to shake their little paws and offer 'em tea,” I'd said to Devon as we were finally flushed out of Veniss. I would have preferred a small army to deal with a possible muttie, but the Conserge had other priorities.

Devon wrapped his trench coat tighter around his frame.

“How should we go about reporting this?” he asked.

I took a quick glance back at Veniss before answering. Emulsifiers spewed green filth—the cost of our bioculture—across the walls, the fortifications, coated our poor defenseless defenders of city and Conserge. The flesh had awakened in Veniss. I could smell it even from here, the peculiar mélange of heat and frustration that said,
Too many people, too little room.

“The Conserge is a strange lot,” I said, from the strength of twenty years' experience. “Sometimes they can tell you what you're going to find before you find it, so be thorough. And start simple—
what
is it?”

Devon bent mechanically to his knees, to better examine the beast. His creakiness was, so he told me, the result of an accident. Funny People had assaulted him while he worked for the bioneers below level.

He looked up, smiled through crooked teeth. “It's mostly bone. I know a bioneer who could run tests for us.”

I grunted, dug my hands into my pockets. “Could we call it ‘Funny' and leave it at that?”

Devon's face tightened. Now there was a bad move—mentioning Funny People—but how else could I phrase it? No matter what the scars, the poor bastard would have to grin and bear it.

“No,” he said. “Not a Funny Person.”

I had been pulled from my wife, Arcadia, and a warm bed for this assignment; I had a mind to rub it in, but time pressed. Behind me, the dirigibles had sounded their horns, cast moorings, and hovered whalelike over the city as they policed it. Some carried floating gardens to an altitude above the miasma of pollution that choked the life out of Veniss.

Besides, after a moment's reflection, Funny People hardly seemed amusing. Arcadia and I wanted a child, but the bioneers had told us there was a good chance it would turn out Funny. A chief detective with a Funny Person for a child? No future for the child, possible confinement. No promotion and “voluntary” sterilization for me.

“A muttie, then,” I said.
That
word didn't raise his gander.

Devon got up. “I'll take the pictures. You decide what it is. It'll keep my mug out of the heat. Look to the horizon. My knees can't take bad weather.”

Devon was right. The wind blew in bursts. Strange, crested waves of sargasso rolled in under a watery sun. If a bit of weed were the end of it, fine, but the sea had given us nasty surprises more than once. And, of course, the rain would soon be here, hindering communications and contaminated with flesh knew what. Arcadia would already be sealing the apartment, listening to the weather report on the split screen.

I had left her lying on the bed, her hair tangled in one upturned palm, her face turned away from me as she said, “How long?”

“I don't know. Muttie. East Shore.”

There was a curious lilt to her voice as she said, “Afterward, we could go out to Hospital Central for another checkup. You could . . . I mean we could . . .”

She trailed off, perhaps sensing the hurt in my rigid stance, belt taut in my hands.

“I'll be back as soon as I can,” I had told her, sealing the promise with a kiss, taking the salty taste of her with me.

Devon took out the trusty v-c and started clicking stills. He carefully avoided touching the carcass. More tissue had survived on the beast than I'd thought: Hair or fur clung to the ear holes, the jawline. The underbelly appeared intact, though naturally I wasn't going to turn the stinking thing over to confirm—I'd get Devon to do it. Only, there was a problem with that description. The thing wasn't stinking. Which seemed strange. The water was full of chemicals that ordinarily broke down flesh within hours.

“Could this be another experiment gone bad?” I asked. “Some clever bioneer thought he'd violate the Prohibition and hide it in the sea.”

Cases of unauthorized genetic experiments still made it into the books, even with both the bioneers and the Conserge determined to enforce regulation.

Devon shook his head. “No. Too sophisticated. They'd need at least six months in one place. Someone would have caught them at it.”

“Yes, well,” I said, “we'll have to call it—”

That's when my day was spoiled for good. A moan cut the air, froze the freckles on my ears, dried the spit right out of my throat.

Devon chuckled in a way I found unnerving.

“Just the wind. Through its mouth.”

The wind was brisk and, yes, it whistled through the beast's mouth.

“Oh,” I said.

I covered my embarrassment by pretending a profound interest in the beast's nose. Nose? I stared into the eyes—the vertical pupils, the gold irises—and found myself lost, at sea. Was I an old fug or had only
one
eye been intact minutes before? Now I truly felt the wind lash my neck, recognized that the dawn was darkening, and the salt spray stinging.

“How clever,” said Devon. “Very clever.”

“What do you mean?” I knew what he meant.

“The flesh is re-forming. Coming back to life.”

Sweat beaded my forehead. I wanted to run—run and not look back. Arcadia awaited my return. For a moment, I had an image of her pure white skin, the liquid amber of her eyes, the way she could say a word, a phrase, and give it a meaning I had never thought of, and I almost lost my balance. This
thing
was big enough to rip us both apart and clean its teeth with a thighbone.

“Does . . . Does that mean it's muttie?” Devon seemed to enjoy the fear in my voice.

He shrugged. “Not really. We should wait. See if it's a full regeneration or—”

“Or what?”

Devon smiled. “Or an involuntary reaction. The cells may grow back. The creature may then be intact but dead. We will need to observe . . . for our report.”

That rattled me. Devon telling
me
the rules. Yes, he was right: We were expendable, but the city's security was not.

“Okay,” I said, “but if it starts to revive . . .” I pulled out my laser-sight Diamond .38.

He nodded. “Fair enough.”

         

WE KEPT
a strange vigil—like the parents who
used to wait at Hospital Central to see if their child was normal or Funny.

I wondered if Devon had children. I had never asked, but I thought not; he was too impersonal, aloof. He
click-clicked
the v-c until I thought the lever would fall off.

Me, I tried not to watch as layers of flesh sprouted from the bone, as tendons and muscles began to fill in the gaps. The leer of teeth was soon covered. Organs ballooned inside the rib cage. What Arcadia would have made of it, I don't know. She might have laughed.

Devon had seen such things, of course, working as he had for the bioneers below level. He had even been to the fifteenth level.

So, I thought about mutties, about Funny People. They were, as you might expect, much on my mind. Though I'd never told Devon, I had seen Funny People before—alive, not preserved in vat jars for school field trips.

I had been on the fifth level (considered marginally safe because bioneer apprentices live there) and had just finished taking the statement of a Mrs. Jilla Collander about her missing husband. Missing! In a walled city. Surrounded by mutties and water. I wanted to say,
Where the fug can he go, Mrs. Collander?
Though there were at least two possibilities: that spies for the rogue bioneers in the wastes had taken him for the flesh—the city wasn't
that
secure—or he planned to create a new data file on himself and show up six months later, secure in a face-lift, with an obedient young blonde on his arm.

A step from the elevator and the promise of an early dinner with Arcadia—I had gone out and bought lilies, mushroom wine, the works—I heard a sound: like distant bells or chimes. It made me trip, bend my head, concentrate on the source. I walked until I could hear it clearly: a chorus of reed-thin voices that reminded me of whale song, of wind through hollow glass. The holographic operas they put on to take your mind off the city's troubles couldn't compare. I had to find the source. I had to. There are so few things of beauty in Veniss.

The voices led me through progressively worse sections until even the overhead lights sputtered and shadows cringed away from me. (Thank flesh for a glow-in-the-dark detective's badge.) Two green handheld find flares bobbed and weaved down the corridor, but it was so dark I could not even see the faces behind the lights. Rancid water lapped at my boots. The smells of overheated plastic, machine oil, excretion, spices, liquor, and sweat all inundated me; but I clung to the sound like a drowning man. And it was difficult at times to follow the sound, to unwind it from the chugging air filters, the hissing oxygen pumps, the maniacal canned laughter of split screens in the boxed-in tenements.

Finally, trudging through refuse from higher levels, I came to a corridor between two ramshackle single roofs. A flickering light above revealed neobaroque representations of former Conserge members.

On the dusty floor, three children played coddleskatch to a nonsense rhyme. No, not just children. Funny People. Unlike most, two were flesh-poor: just a head, neck, and an arm to pull them along. The third had two arms, but the welts and exposed tissue told me she (yes, she, with an angelic face) would be dead soon. All three must have required special gear. But still, there they were, playing coddleskatch after the fashion of children all over the city, moving from square to square with sidles and hops. The song? I remember only two verses. Nonsense, as I have said, but sung to perfection.

I-wire, I-wire
adders and ladders
detectives cadavers
it's really no fuss
to simply forget us

Psychewitch, psychewitch
eat your flesh sandwich
make us metal like you
swallow what we chew
flesh sandwich . . .

When they stopped singing my shoulders sagged, as if their voices had supported my weight, and they saw me. All three with their large, luminous eyes. Fearful. They must have thought I would arrest them, for they quickly gathered up their game and, hobbling along, disappeared into the gloom.

While I watched. The music gone. The corridor thick with dust and overlooked imperiously by the gargoyle likenesses of leaders long dead. Devon had lived in their world for six years—undercover, alone. I envied him.

The memory of the voices did not fade. Late at night as I lay beside Arcadia, the faces came to me in dream, the mouths like open wounds whispering, “Daddy . . .” Sometimes I recoiled in disgust and sometimes I embraced them. Embraced them all, despite my revulsion.

I think it was then, in the aftermath of these nightmares, that I truly understood the difference between Funny and muttie. The muttie had been fashioned to serve, to obey, and the master fears the servant. But the Funny was born of us and we tried to love it, no matter how staunchly we also hated it for reminding us of our own failures.

Arcadia had never once spoken of leaving me because of my deficiency. The question hung between us, never spoken, until finally it evaporated, had no power over us other than that a ghost wields, a memory that has never come to pass.

I would go to her at her ad job in the Canal District and we would walk home along the enclosed piers, amid the diaphanous glow of chemicals in the water, her hand in mine. Her grasp firm, without doubt, even when I looked into her eyes and almost pleaded to be reminded, to be accused.

“My lover,” she would say, and ruffle my hair because she knew I hated that. “My lover,” she would say, and I would feel proud to be with her, in the Canal District, hand in hand, just walking.

Devon had spoken.

“What?”

He pointed to the beast. “Beautiful, isn't it?”

I stared at it. From outward appearances, it had fully regenerated: fur covered it, the claws were wicked and long, and one fang peeked innocently from the mouth.

“Oh, yes, smashing,” I said. “If you're a Funny Person.”

Devon scowled. “This is clever bioneering. A muttie that dies before it lives. A creature born dead which then revives.”

“A muttie?” My fingers tightened on the .38. My heart hammered in my chest. “I thought you said it probably was
not
a muttie?”