Jeff VanderMeer - Balzac's War

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Balzac's War

a novelette by Jeff VanderMeer

For Wade Tarzia - thanks

"Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea."

-- Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill"

Balzac and Jamie stumbled upon the flesh dog on a day when the sky, seared white as bleached bone,

split open the world and allowed any possibility. Sixteen and free of the crèche, two as one, they ran

across the desert floor to the ruined city of Balthakazar.

Balzac sucked air as he tried to match her long strides, his tunic and trousers billowing in the wind as if he

were a human sail. Just ahead of him he could see Jamie's tangles of black hair snarling out behind her,

her burnished mahogany thighs pumping beneath the flurry of white dress plaited at the knee and drawn

up between her legs. Within hours his older brother and self-proclaimed guardian, Jeffer, would track

them down and, returning them to the crèche, force them to complete their lesson with the boring old

water dowser, Con Fegman. No doubt Con Fegman was, at that very moment, recounting for the

thousandth time how he had discovered the oasis lakes with a mere twitch-twitch of his fingers.

Ahead, the ruins shimmered in the heat, the dark metallic glints of edges and curves beginning to resolve

into cracked causeways, broken down battlements, and crooked buildings fifty stories high. The city had

in its demeanor, the sand ever in motion across its metal and concrete carapace, a sense of watchfulness,

a restlessness.

At the fringe, where buildings slept like bald and eyeless old men, they found an ancient highway; it shook

itself free from the sand as if from a dream of drowning. Once, it might have been eighteen lanes wide,

but now, choking on sand, it could fit only four abreast.

Breathing hard, Balzac slowed to a walk. Sweat dripped down his face. A delicious nervousness pierced

his stomach.

Jamie, hardly winded, turned her face out of the sun.

"Why did you stop?"

"Because," Balzac wheezed, "this is the city..."

Husks and shells, as dead as the hollowed-out, mummified corpses of tortoises and jackals after a

drought: the idea of "city" stripped down to its most fundamental elements, the superfluous flourishes of

paint, writing, road signs, windows, scoured away in an effort to reveal the unadorned and beautifully

harsh truth. Gutted weapons embankments pointed toward the sky, but could not defend the city from

the true enemy.

Jamie interrupted his reverie. "Don't just stand there-we've got to hurry. Your brother will find us soon."

He held out his hand.

She stared at it for a moment, then took it. Her palm felt flushed and warm.

"I'll deal with Jeffer," he said with new-found confidence, although as he led her forward he didn't dare to

see if she was impressed or just amused.

Straight to the city's heart they went, the buildings encroaching on the highway, while beneath their feet,

four o'clocks, cactus blossoms, and sedgeweeds thrust up through cracks in the highway pavement.

Scuttling through these miniature oases, anonymous gray lizards waged a war with coppery metal

scorpions that pursued with mechanical implacability, their electric stingers singing static to the wind. Con

Fegman had shown them one cracked open: beneath the metal exterior lay the red meat of flesh and

blood.

Balzac loved even this most deadly part of the mystery that was Balthakazar. All the crèche

machines-heirlooms from centuries past--broke down regularly and had to be cannibalized to repair

other machines, and yet the Con members did nothing. Even practical Jeffer must realized that some day

there would be no machines at all. Some day only the dormant technologies of the city would save them.

"Look at the bones," Jamie said, and pointed at the ground. Scattered across the highway were

whitish-gray shards. It made Balzac shiver to think about it. Bones did not fit his pristine, cold-metal

vision of Balthakazar in its prime.

"How do you know it's bone? It could be plastic or mortar, or almost anything."

"It's bone. Why else do you think the Con members don't move us back into the city. Why they don't

even want us to visit?"

"Because, at night creatures come out of the underground levels, things with sharp teeth, and they eat

you."

Jamie threw her head back and laughed; Balzac could see the smooth skin of her neck and marveled at

its perfection even as he blushed and said, "It's not funny." Yet even her laughter pleased him.

"You," she said, wiping tears from her eyes. "I stopped believing in that old tale a long time ago."

Something in his expression must have given him away, because she shocked him by saying, gently, "I'm

sorry about your parents - really, I am - but the only truth is this," and she bent to pick up a shard that

might have been bone. "My father says no one knows what did this. If these are just old graves opened

by the sands or if something killed them all off." She paused, looked at him oddly, as if weighing her

options, then said, "My father brought me here when I was much younger, and I just liked the texture of

the bones. I didn't know what they were. All I knew was that they felt good to touch - lightweight and

with those porous grooves - and that my father was there with me after so many nights away from the

crèche, showing me something that filled him with awe." She tossed the shard aside. "It's only bits of

bone, anyhow. Whatever happened happened a long time ago. There's nothing to be done for them."

True enough, and it was a reassurance to know that the years had created a barrier between him and the

bones, so he could look at them as curious reminders of another age. How many times had Con Fegman,

or even Jeffer, retold the old legends from before the collapse of the cities, as if the mere repetition would

fend off the spirits of the dead?

"Come on," Balzac said. "Let's go." This time he did not hold her hand.

The pavement became hot, cool, then hot again as the sun sliced through the spaces between structures.

The landscape had changed, become both rougher and smoother until buildings were all edges or had no

edges at all. Others gleamed with an odd hint of self-repair, their skins smooth and shiny.

They encountered the hull of a rusted hovercraft over which, looking like a weathered lizard, lay the

leathery, discarded skin of a dirigible. Balzac did not recognize the faded crèche insignia on the wrinkled

cloth. Near the hovercraft lay a misshapen rock, as tall as two or three autodocs. The top of the rock

was black and shiny.

"Let's sit down for a moment," Balzac said.

"If you must."

"I must. And besides, it's not just to rest. I've got leechee fruit."

They climbed up onto the rock and lay down on its smooth surface. He handed her a leechee and bit into

his own, the juice dribbling down his chin. The fruit helped to rejuvenate him and he soon became acutely

aware of her rising and falling chest, the sharp lines of her legs, the faint musk of sweat. She ate the

leechee in huge bites, ignoring the juice as it trickled down her neck and stained her dress.

The rock was warm and it relaxed him to lie there, so close together. Confidence rising, he tried to

explain why the city intrigued him so. He spoke of its rich history, how it must be considered the home of

their ancestors, how it used structural designs and technologies unknown to the crèche.

Propped up on one shoulder, Jamie gave him no encouragement. He stuttered, groping for the words that

might unlock a true sense of mystery, of scale.

Stymied, he started all over again, afraid that when he opened his mouth, the words would come out

jumbled and senseless.

"The city is alive."

"But it isn't," she said. "It's dead."

"But you're so wrong. I mean, you are wrong." He squinted at the city's outline until his eyes burned. "I

see these buildings and they're like dozens of individual keys, and if I can turn enough of the keys, the city

resurrects itself. Take that thing there." He pointed to a rectangular patch of sand dotted with eroded

stone basins and bounded by the nubs of walls. "That's not just a box of sand. That used to be a garden

or a park. And take that strip." He pointed to a slab of concrete running down the middle of the highway.

"That wasn't just a divider for traffic lanes - that was a plot of plants and grass."

"You mean that you see the city as if it were organic."

"Yes! Exactly! And if I can rebuild the city, you could bring back the plants and the trees, flesh out the

skeleton. There's a water source here - there must be - how else could the land support a city? In the old

books, if you look, you'll see they used plants for decoration."

"Plants for decoration," she said slowly, hesitantly. Then she lay back down against the rock.

His heart pounded against his rib cage. He had made her see it, if only for a moment.

A silence settled over them, the sun making Balzac lazy, the leechee fruit a coolness in his stomach.

After a time, Jamie said, "No rain for at least a month."

"How do you know?"

"The water dower's last lesson - don't you remember, stupid?" She punched his shoulder. "Look at the

clouds. They're all thin and stretched out, and no two are grouped together."

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