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

unable to look at his beloved. An endless singsong ran through his head: if only, if only. If only Jeffer had let him talk to her while she was still on the street, perhaps he could have persuaded her to go away – and perhaps he didn’t want her to go away. He let out a deep, shuddering sigh and stood on trembling legs.
    Mindle blocked his path, so close he could smell the boy’s rotten breath.
    “Kill it,” Mindle hissed, his face white with hatred. “Kill it now!”
    Mindle’s eyes had narrowed to knifepoints. Balzac looked away – toward Jeffer, toward Con Fegman.
    Con Fegman, in a misty, faraway voice, said, “I can’t see anymore. I can’t bear to see anymore,” and covered his eyes and began to weep.
    Balzac pushed past Mindle, turning his shoulder into the boy so he stumbled backward. He went over to Con Fegman and knelt beside him, looked into his ancient face. Such sadness, such shame, that one of the crèche’s elders should be dying here, like this.
    Balzac took one of Con Fegman’s hands, held it tightly in his own.
    Con Fegman grinned with broken teeth and said, “I need water. I’m so thirsty.”
    “I’ll get you water. Autodoc – Con Fegman. Full medical.”
    Balzac stood and allowed the autodoc to do its job. It injected tranquilizers, enveloped Con Fegman in a sterile white shield and, away from meddling eyes, went to work on him.
    “Don’t waste ammunition,” Jeffer said. “It’s dying anyhow. It can’t hurt us.”
    “No, she can’t hurt us,” Balzac said.
    Mindle’s hand wavered on his laser. Balzac stared at him until he lowered it.
    “Jeffer,” Balzac said. “Please, get him out of here. The traps. Have him redo the traps.”
    “I’m here,” Mindle said. “I’m in the room.”
    Mindle’s hot gaze bore down on him, and he tensed, prepared to defend himself.
    Jeffer nodded to Mindle. “Go downstairs and fix the barricades. Put up more traps. I’ll keep watch on the balcony. At dawn, we move out.”
    “And will we take that thing with us?” Mindle asked, in a voice sweet as poison.
    “No,” Jeffer said, and stared pointedly at Balzac. “I promise you we won’t take her with us.”
    “Compassion!” Mindle spat, but he headed for the door.
    Balzac watched him – a man-child, both ancient and newly born, gaunt but innocent of hunger. Balzac couldn’t blame him for his rage, or for the madness that came with it. He could only fear the boy. He had always feared the boy, ever since he had come to the crèche: an albino with frazzled, burnt white hair sticking up at odd angles, and eyes that made Balzac want to recoil from and embrace Mindle all at once. The eyes hardly ever blinked, and even when he talked to you, he was staring through you, to a place far away. Mindle had laughed at their reclamation project, had not seen the point in the face of war. Why did they persist when they knew what they knew? Perhaps, Balzac thought, they had simply refused to believe in the proof Mindle brought with him.
    It had been Mindle, a refugee from the north, who had first given a name and a face to the enemy, fed the growing unease of the Con members. Before him, there had only been disturbing phenomena: strange, ungainly creatures lurking at the edge of campfire and oasis; dismembered human corpses not of the crèche; then little gobbets of divorced flesh with cyclopean eyes that twitched like epileptic rats as they walked and, when dissected, proved to be organic cameras, click-click-clicking pictures with each blink of the single liquid-blue eye.
    Mindle had brought them a present, unwrapping the corpse of one of the enemy at a Con meeting. It was the only body yet recovered, badly burned and curled up into a fetal position like a dead black cricket, but still recognizably mammalian. Weasel-like. Two meters tall. Fangs snarled out from the fire-peeled muzzle.
    “At first they walked around in plain view, directing their troops,” Mindle had told the Con members. “Darting