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

than a twinge in her stomach muscles.
    Too late, her crèche mother saw her heading out to open sea and ran to the shore’s edge, where she flitted back and forth like a sandpiper, shouting at Jessible: “Come back! Come back!”
    But Jessible ignored her crèche mother. She just waved, smiled, and let the waves slap against the boat’s prow. The sea pulsed weakly now that she was within its grasp, and she let her hand dangle off the side, content with the feel of the water against her palm.
    Perhaps, she thought, the singing in her veins, the way the blood in her seemed to hum, to bring her skin taut, to bring her to the height of tears, was also the height of madness, but if so, she wanted to remain mad.
    It wasn’t long, the boat passing out of sight of land that Jessible fell asleep to the slow rocking of the waves, the Northerly breeze speeding her vessel along while it cooled her under the heat of the sun…
    When she awoke, it was to a sea aglow with the fire of saylbers, their great sails iridescent in the darkness that had fallen across the world. They surrounded her, moving with slow assurance: a land of blue, orange, yellow, red, green triangles of light, around which gathered the tiny sea creatures on which the saylbers made their meals.
    She sat up, rubbing her eyes. Saylbers! She had only seen them in an old ragged book of her mother’s called Bellefonte’s Quadrahelix. None of the fisherfolk had ever seen them either, for salybers inhabited the deep ocean, so far from land that when they died, their bodies did not even wash up on shore like the great husks of pseudowhales. She glanced up at the sky. No moon, but the stars seemed brighter and more numerous, so that she could hardly pick out constellations: St. Gerard, the Meerkat, the Great Whale, the Rock Toad. They lay hidden by the twinkling designs of yet other stars, interwoven skillfully so that they enhanced the light of the saylbers on the water. A sweet smell came to her, like jasmine or desert saline. She knew at once, from her reading, that she was in the middle of mating pod; this was their mating scent. Near the center of the saylbers, where they were most densely clustered, the triangular sales pushed and nudged in a slow, sensuous way.
    A saylber surfaced near her hand, which dangled over the boat’s edge, the fleshy sail brushing against skin; it felt smooth and tingling. The creature could easily have capsized her boat, but instead just lifted up the edge of the prow.
    Another rhythm enveloped her with the touch.
    [W/ho/at are you?]
    She gasped.
    The saylber rose against the boat, the triangle still blazing green, the same rhythm in her bloodstream, but very faint, rippling through her system. The book had never said anything about voices in her head. Had not done much more than allow her to recognize saylbers and not be frightened by them. But this. For a moment she had a vision: that the ocean was not filled with saylbers, but with couples making love across the water’s surface. People? Could they possibly be like…people?
    The saylber made a third pass and this time she choked down her fear, reached over the side of the boat, and grabbled onto the sail.
    [Who/at are you? Where do you come from? Are you from the metal dragon? *Lust*Sea* against *skin* made for the deep cold water *sucking in* of creatures against teeth. Who/at are you? Where do you come from? Metal dragon?]
    Metal dragon imploded inside her head not as words, but as an image: the battered hulk of a monster, gleaming in the sunlight, huge beyond measure, trailing red-hot fragments of stars behind it.
    The saylber patiently allowed her a better grasp on its sail, rocked gently against her boat.
    “No,” she said, thinking it hard, “I’m not from the metal dragon. I’m from the crèche.”
    Her she thought, hard, of the desert, and the underground caverns in which her people had lived for hundreds of years, since the beginning of the Dying Out, through the