Veniss Underground Read Free

of government, but no one knew anything concrete about Quin's past.
    So I daydreamed about meerkats after Shadrach left me. I imagined wonderful, four-foot-tall meerkats with shiny button eyes and carrot noses and cool bipedal movement and can-I-help-you smiles. Meerkats that could do kitchen work or mow the atrophiturf in your favorite downtown garden plot. Even wash clothes. Or, most importantly, coldcock a pick dick and bite his silly weiner off.
    This is the principal image of revenge I had branded into my mind quite as violently as those awful nuevo Westerns which, as you have no doubt already guessed, are my one weakness. “Ah, yessirree, Bob, gonna rope me a meerkat, right after I defend my lady's honor and wrassle with this here polar bear.” I mean, come on! No wonder it was so hard to sell my holoart before the pick dicks stole it.
    But as I headed down the alley, which looked quite dead-endish later that night—having just had a bout of almost-fisticuffs (more cuffs than fisties) with a Canal District barkeep—I admit to nervousness. I admit to sweat and trembling palms. The night was darker than dark—wait, listen:
the end of the world is night
; that's mine, a single-cell haiku—and the sounds from the distant bright streets only faintly echoed down from the loom 'n' doom buildings. (Stink of garbage, too, much like this place.)
    As I stepped through the holograph—a perfect rendition that spooked me good—and came under the watchful
I
's in the purple-lit sign, QUIN ' S SHANGHAI CIRCUS , I did the thrill-in-the-spine bit. It reminded me of when I was a kid (again) and I saw an honest-to-greatness
circus
, with a
real
sparrow doing tricks on a high wire, even a regular dog all done up in bows. I remember embarrassing my dad by pointing when the dog shat on the circus ring floor and saying, “Look, Dad, look! Something's coming out the back end!” Like a prize, maybe? I didn't know better. (Hell, I didn't even know my own dad wasn't real.) Even then the genetic toys I played with—Ruff the Rooster with the cold eyes I thought stared maliciously at me during the night; Goof the Gopher, who told the dumbest stories about his good friends the echinoderms—all produced waste in a nice solid block through the navel.
    But I have let my story run away without me, as Shadrach might say but has never said, and into
nast
algia, and we wouldn't want that.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    SO, AS soon as I stepped into the blue velvet darkness, the doors sliding shut with a hiss behind me, the prickly feeling in my spine intensified, and all the sounds from the alley, all the garbage odors and tastes were replaced with the hum of conditioners, the stench of sterility. This was high-class. This was
atmosphere.
    This was exactly what I had expected from Quin.
    To both sides, glass cages embedded in the walls glowed with an emerald light, illuminating a bizarre bunch of critters: things with no eyes, things with too many eyes, things with too many limbs, things with too many teeth, things with too many
things
. Now I could detect an odor, only partially masked by the cleanliness: the odor of the circus I had seen as a kid—the bitter-dry combination of urine and hay, the musky smell of animal sweat, of animal presence.
    The cages, the smell, made me none too curious—made me look straight ahead, down to the room's end, some thirty yards away, where Quin waited for me.
    It had to be Quin. If it wasn't Quin, Quin couldn't be.
    He sat behind a counter display: a rectangular desklike contraption within which were embedded two glass cases, the contents of which I could not ID. Quin's head was half in dark, half in the glow of an overhead light, but the surrounding gloom was so great that I had no choice but to move forward, if only to glimpse Quin in the flesh, in his seat of power.
    When I was close enough to spit in Quin's face, I gulped like an oxygen-choked fishee,