Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer Page A

revenge. He was brittle with the weight of his humanity, and he had memories of this place. Every step became a step into the past—the fear of not having enough to eat, of being packed into a tiny room with five brothers and sisters, and of early shifts and late returns from the mining facilities. Each day they prayed that the lottery would save them by bringing them to the surface, the other country that lay like a miracle above the darkness.
    His first memories outside of the room that served as their house were of the clank-and-thrum musics of the mining machines. He soon saw them up close: monstrous black metal carapaces four, five stories high, the heat they gave off like sweat, so that they always seemed possessed of a righteous anger: to steam, to bubble, to boil. They generated a fierce light that annihilated his vision even as he adjusted to it; a corona of flame through which the machines burst in glimpses—their bodies a black darker than night (the blue-black skins like that of a metal god-temple), their spokes like iridescent midnight starfish; their rancid smell, which Shadrach came to realize was the stench of their own sweat as they toiled; the flecks of metal that floated off of them, infiltrating his clothes, his skin. The rust was on fire, the particles so small that when they came to rest on his clothes they burned through to his skin and embedded themselves like tiny coals, to flame white-hot before burning up, burning away. The rust spots didn't hurt, they only itched, but they lent his skin a mottled orange hue he only noticed on the rare occasions when the family visited the entertainment section with its bright lights and fun house mirrors.
    Eventually, he had adjusted—his night vision so improved he discarded his infrared goggles; his skin toughened, he developed sinewy muscles in his arms and thick muscles in his legs from pulling down huge levers, shoving mining carts into place, rolling exploratory shafts into position over holes. On days when the machines sang with the weight of the minerals caught in their great maws, he felt as if he were the fire itself, the site of a thousand pinprick conflagrations.
    His father had worked in the mines, too. His father: a silent giant of a man who caved in on himself over the years until it seemed the flames had devoured him, a sad husk who had done the best he could for his family.
    His mother skipped from job to job with a flexibility and ease that was frivolous next to his father's stoic centeredness. She had taught Shadrach to read and write using books plundered from an ancient library. The solimind civil war had effectively destroyed the school system.
    Why, he had often asked himself, after the lottery had brought him to the surface and condemned the rest of his family to the darkness, did they persist in their antiquated mining methods? Only after a long time had passed and he had been assimilated into the surface world did he realize that no one really controlled the machines, that the internal strife of the solimind war had severed the cause and effect between the companies above ground and their servants below ground. The food machines still worked and the lottery ran, and the mining machines were maintained, but to no purpose. Out of tradition, out of being stuck too far inside the beast to see it had ground to a halt, he and his family had enslaved themselves. But it was too late for Shadrach to tell them this.

CHAPTER 3
    Shadrach found what he was looking for soon after he entered the fifth level: a round tunnel clogged with cripples. The dull golden light that suffused the tunnel rendered their infirmities in glistening, glittering perfection. Here an arm missing, there a leg, a nose, an eye. Some had no limbs missing but soon would. Others came not to recover a leg but to lose a second. Many had brought tents or sleeping bags or chairs. They muttered as they stood in a rough line. They muttered and they fidgeted and they muttered