Balzac's War: A Tale of Veniss Underground Read Free Page B

ruins of old homes, and across the cracked asphalt of a thirty-six-lane highway.
    Through it all – the deadly lulls and the frenzies of violence – Jeffer had survived by fashioning a new identity for himself and his brother; they were refugees fleeing the past, and their best strategy had proved to be the simplest: in the unraveling of their lives to forget, to disremember, to exist purely in the now. They had successfully eluded the past for two nights running and yet, somehow, she had found them again.
    The war had extended into the heart of the desert winter, the buildings that crowded the street etched in sharp, defining lines by the cold. But how to define her? She walked in the shadow of her own skin, lit by the intermittent flash of laser fire. Was she human? She loped along the chill pavement of the street below, nimble and dainty and muscular as she navigated the long-abandoned barricades.
    Jeffer stared, his body stiff. His breath caught in his throat. Centuries slow, he picked up his rifle from the balcony railing.
    “Who is it?” Balzac’s tired voice, muffled, came from the room at Jeffer’s back. They had barricaded themselves in and had booby-trapped the stairwells. Inside the room, the autodoc produced a thin, blue-tinted light that couldn’t be seen from the street.
    The pale, moon-faced boy Mindle, a refugee from a northern crèche already destroyed by the invaders, sidled along the wall until he was close enough to whisper, “Is it her again?” Mindle’s voice held no fear, no surprise. Only Mindle’s body registered such nerve-end pricklings; at his spiritual core he had been frozen solid for a hundred years. Jeffer had seen too many like him in recent months as the crèche sent younger and younger men into battle.
    “Keep Balzac quiet,” Jeffer whispered back. “If she hears him . . . get Con Fegman, if he’s able, to watch the door.”
    Mindle nodded and, wraithlike, disappeared into the darkness.
    Below, Jamie began to cry out Balzac’s name in the plaintive timbre of one who is lost and alone and afraid.
    Balzac muttered a few words and Jeffer heard Mindle’s soft voice, calm and reasonable, coo a soothing reply.
    The shape on the street below stiffened, sneezed, and said, “Balzac, my love?”
    Balzac’s voice in reply: “Is it – could it?”
    Mindle cursed. Jeffer heard a scuffle, a strangled cry, and silence, his gaze never straying from her. Lost and afraid. How could he ever consider her someone he had known? The sounds of her aloneness, her confusion, struck him as faintly pitiable, that she should, in any manner, try to re-create her former life. Such a curious double image: to see her on the street below and yet to remember all the times when Balzac had invited him over for dinner, Balzac and Jamie both exhausted from twelve hours of overseeing their reclamation projects in Balthakazar. She had never seemed vulnerable while arguing with him over the Con’s latest decisions or about how to adapt the hydroponics hangars to open-air conditions. The lack of hardness in her now, the weaning away of any but the most dependent attributes, made him wary.
    The stone wall behind him bruised his back. He didn’t play the statue very well; he was sweating despite the cold and he imagined his breath as a vast, unmoving field of ice particles.
    Perhaps, as on the two previous nights, she would miss them, would pass by, rasping out her song.
    Jeffer raised his rifle to his shoulder. Pass by , he wished desperately. Pass by and be gone. He did not want to risk the sound of a shot. Come dawn, they would move elsewhere, maybe come across another unit and cobble up enough numbers to mount a counter offensive.
    Pass by. Even better, remake history. Let Balzac come to me swimming at night at the oasis. Let Balzac tell me of our parents’ death. Let him be the eldest and follow me to Balthakazar.
    She stopped directly beneath his balcony, at an extreme line of fire. She sniffed the air. She