Free Balzac's War: A Tale of Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer

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