A Heart for Lucretia
      a short story by Jeff VanderMeer 

        This is the story of a brother, a sister, and a Flesh Dog, and how two 
        found a heart for the third. The story has both oral and written 
        traditions, with no two versions the same. It begins, for our purposes, 
        with the city...

      "The city, she has parts. The city, she is dead, but people live there, 
      underground. They have parts..." 
      Gerard Mkumbi cared little for what Con Newman said, despite the man's 
      seniority and standing in the creche. But, finally, the moans as the 
      wheezing autodoc worked on his sister persuaded him. The autodoc said 
      Lucretia needed a new heart. A strong heart, one which would allow her to 
      spring up from their sandy burrows hale and willowy, to dance again under 
      the harvest moon. Gerard had hoped to trade places so that the tubes would 
      stick out from his chest, his nose, his arms, the bellows compression 
      pumping in out, in out. But no. He had the same defect, though latent, the 
      autodoc told him. A successful transplant would only begin the cycle anew. 


      In Lucretia's room, at twilight, he read to her from old books: 
      Bellafonte's Quadraphelix, The Metal Dragon and Jessible, others of their 
      kind. A dread would possess him as he watched his sister, the words dry 
      and uncomforting on his lips. Lucretia had high cheekbones, smoky-green 
      eyes, and mocha skin which had made all the young men of the creche flock 
      to her dance. 
      But wrinkles crowded the corners of those eyes and Gerard could detect a 
      slackness to the skin, the flesh beneath, which hinted at decay. The 
      resolve for health had faltered, the usually clenched chin now sliding 
      into the neck; surely a trick of shadow. Anyone but Gerard would have 
      thought her forty-five. He knew she was twenty-seven. They had been born 
      minutes apart, had shared the same womb. Watching her deterioration was to 
      watch his own. Would he look this way at forty-five? 
      "Gerard," she would call out, her hand curling into his... 
      It had become a plea. He forced himself to hold her hand for hours, though 
      the thought of such decay made him ill. The autodoc insisted on keeping 
      her drugged so she could not feel the pain. Could she even recognize him 
      anymore, caught as she was between wakefulness and sleep, sleep and death? 

      Flesh Dog, eyes hidden beneath the rolls of raw tissue which were its 
      namesake, stayed always by his side. Flesh Dog shared few words with 
      Gerard, but every twitch of its muzzle toward Lucretia or the squat metal 
      autodoc reminded Gerard she would die soon--too soon, like their mother 
      before her. Unless a miracle arose from the desert. 
      "The city, she has parts..." 
      And, finally, he had gone, taking Flesh Dog with him. 

        Thus it begins. The ending is another matter, a creature of fragments 
        and glimpses which pieced together only tease...

      That summer, as the stars watched overhead, an angel descended to the 
      desert floor. And, when it departed, Lucretia arose from the dead and 
      danced like a will o' whisp over the shifting sands; a fitful dance, for 
      she often dreamed of Gerard at night, and they were unpleasant dreams. 
      That winter, Flesh Dog and Gerard limped back to the creche. He did not 
      speak now. Always, he looked toward the south, toward the great sea and 
      the city with no name, as though expecting strangers. 

        And the middle, finally, in which meat is placed upon the bone.

      For twenty days and twenty nights, Gerard trudged the sands, subsisting on 
      the dry toads which Flesh Dog dug up for them. They encountered no one on 
      their journey, listened only to the dry winds of the desert. 

      Finally, at dusk of the twenty-first day, they climbed a dune and stared 
      down upon the city. The sun lent the city with a crimson glare, 
      silhouettes burnt into the sand. Gerard saw that the walls had crumbled in 
      places and the buildings within, what could be glimpsed of them, had 
      fallen into disrepair. Although Gerard looked for many minutes, he could 
      discover no sign of life. The only movement came from the west, where a 
      vast ocean glittered and rippled, red as the dunes which abutted it. 
      Though tired and disappointed at the city's abandoned appearance, Gerard 
      would have plunged forward under cover of darkness. But Flesh Dog sniffed 
      the air, sneezed, and counciled against it. 
      "Strange smells," it ruminated, "strange smells indeed..." 
      Gerard, fatigue creeping into his bones, could not find the strength to 
      argue. He fell asleep against Flesh Dog's side, sand on his lips and the 
      wind in his hair. 

      During the night, he woke in a cold sweat, convinced his sister had been 
      leaning over him the moment before, her hair back in the pony-tail she had 
      lovingly braided at age nine: giggling and warning him to stay away from 
      the city, the city which lay at the edge of his vision: a dark and ominous 
      block of shadow. 
      As he drifted back to sleep, Gerard imagined he felt his sister's pulse 
      weaken, back in her creche bed. 

      In the morning, Gerard and Flesh Dog found that the city was nearly 
      eclipsed by the cusp of the ocean, its waves a blinding green. Flesh Dog 
      wished to bathe, but Gerard said no. The waves echoed his sister's voice 
      in their constant rush and withdrawal: hurry, hurry... 

      Flesh Dog scouted ahead as Gerard entered the city. The walls had been 
      breached in a dozen places and overhead zynagill hovered, waiting for 
      carrion. The smell as Gerard passed under the shadow of walls made him 
      bite back nausea. A subtle smell of plastic and leather and unwashed 
      drains. 
      The interior was littered with corpses: a valley of corpses. Flesh Dog, 
      whimpering, retreated to stand by Gerard. Gerard stared at the spectacle 
      before him. 
      Dead people had been stacked in rectangular pits until they spilled over 
      the edges. Nothing stirred. No flies tended the dead. No zynagill touched 
      them. Plague, Gerard thought, putting a hand over his mouth and nose. 
      But the bright, festival clothes, the perfection of flesh without hint of 
      boil or scab, mocked his intuition. 
      Gerard stepped forward, Flesh Dog shadowing him. The clothing upon the 
      dead remained limp, lacking even the secret life of the wind. Eyes stared 
      glassily and the jaws beneath were stiff, locked against giving up their 
      mystery. Gerard would rather they sprang up in parody of human form than 
      lie there, staring...A chill entered Gerard's bones. Watching. Bloodless. 
      Cold. A vast tableau of the unburied and unburnt. 
      "So many dead," Gerard muttered. Once, he had been told of the legend of 
      the Oliphaunt's graveyard. Was this the human equivalent? Would his 
      Lucretia soon find her way to this city, against her will, because he had 
      failed? 
      Flesh Dog sniffed the air as they skirted the nearest pit. 
      "Dead?" it said. "They smell as if they never lived..." 
      "Hush," replied Gerard, respectful of the silence. 
      And so they shuffled forward through the army of bodies, some appealing 
      with outstretched arms, but all quiet as run-down clockwork mice. The eyes 
      seemed to have lost the hope of blinking away deep sleep, the skin of 
      feeling dappled sunlight upon it. 

      Beyond the pits lay the city proper: a maze of half-buried fortifications 
      and jumbled buildings. In places, it appeared wars had been fought among 
      the ruins, for the ground was burnt and some walls had melted into slag. 
      All Gerard could do was remind himself that Con Newman had said, "people 
      live there, underground." It was obvious none lived above. Not even grass 
      grew in the pavement cracks. They trudged on to the sound of their own 
      belabored breathing. 
      Finally, they came upon a strange sight amongst the wreckage: the top of 
      an exposed elevator shaft some fifty meters ahead; the tower which had 
      once housed the device had fallen away entirely, leaving only a rough 
      rectangle of regular stone embedded in the ground. The shaft, which had 
      all the looks of a bony arm, vein-like girders naked to the sky, the 
      mortar peeled away, revealed a compact glass box, intact, which was the 
      elevator. Gerard recognized it from The Metal Dragon. Jessible had escaped 
      using an elevator. That something so fragile could have survived for so 
      long amazed him. 
      Standing by the shaft were three creatures, each larger than Gerard by a 
      third. They resembled giant weasels but no fur grew upon their clawed 
      hands and they stood upright as though it was their birthright rather than 
      some carnie show trick. 
      "What are they?" he hissed to Flesh Dog. "I have never seen them before." 
      "Meerkats," it replied. "Distilled somewhat with other species, but still 
      meerkats. Your father used to read you tales of the meerkats and the 
      dances they did for the men who created them." 
      Meerkats! This was indeed magical, and it created out of the torn and 
      wasted landscape some small scrap of hope. Meerkats! He had killed 
      meerkats for the meat before, but they rarely reached two feet in height. 
      For a moment, he considered the possibility that Flesh Dog lied, but 
      dismissed it: Flesh Dog had taught his father how to read and write. Flesh 
      Dog never lied. 
      "Are they...they are intelligent?" 
      "Yes," replied Flesh Dog flatly. 
      Intelligent. He almost laughed. Was he to believe an intelligent toad 
      next? His heartbeat quickened and with it he could feel his sister's 
      heart, uneven and diseased, slowly winding down. He sobered. 
      "Flesh Dog, are these the folk who live underground?" 
      "Almost certainly," replied Flesh Dog. 

      When they came before the meerkats, the leader spoke to Gerard, ignoring 
      Flesh Dog. The leader was a sleek, jet specimen with amber eyes and the 
      language it spoke was all trills and clicks. The meerkat soon switched to 
      gish when it interpreted the confused look on Gerard's face. 
      "State your business," it said in a bored voice. 
      "I need a human heart," Gerard said. "I am willing to trade for it." 
      A huffing rose from the leader, followed by similar noises from the other 
      two. 
      "Parts," the leader ruminated, his tone bordering on contempt. "Fifteenth 
      level." He barked a phrase to his followers and they stepped forward and 
      passed a glittering rod in front of first Gerard and then Flesh Dog. 
      The leader nodded and escorted them to the elevator. 

      Gerard had seen elevators in books before, but never dreamed he would one 
      day ride in one and so, when the doors closed, he bent to his knees and 
      whispered to Flesh Dog, "Are elevators safe?" 
      Flesh Dog, sensing the tremor in Gerard's voice, replied, "Hold on to me 
      if the motion makes you sick." 
      And so Gerard did hug Flesh Dog as they descended into the city's belly. 
      He clung also to the ruck-sack full of precious stones and old autodoc 
      parts with which he hoped to woo a human heart. 
      The levels seemed to crawl by, each more wondrous than the last, more 
      terrible, more strange. Many of the things they saw, Gerard did not 
      understand. They saw winged men with no eyes and vats of flesh and 
      monstrous war engines belching, spitting sparks, and tubes and gears 
      grinding and metal frames for ships in enormous caverns and stockpiles of 
      small arms and old-style lasers and meerkats walking on ceilings and 
      ghosts, images which reflected from the floor, that could not be real and 
      more meerkats--meerkats in every size and color, crawling all over the 
      engines of war, the tubes, the metal frames. 
      Fires burned everywhere--in rods and in canisters, on walls and floors; 
      yellow fires, orange fires, blue fires, tended by meerkats more sinister 
      than their fellows. Meerkats with frozen smiles and cruel claws and mouths 
      which like traps, shut. The acrid smell of fire came to Gerard through the 
      elevator walls, a bitter taste on his tongue. Around some fires meerkats 
      threw squirming creatures the size of mice into the flames and, once or 
      twice, larger, metallic objects, their alloys running together and melting 
      like butter to grease a pan. 
      Gerard turned away and ignored the cruelty of the meerkats, tore it from 
      his mind. Lucretia needed a heart. Lucretia needed a heart. 
      The weight of earth and rock above him and to all sides made him dizzy and 
      nauseous, but still deeper they went, silent and fearful, into the 
      blackness beneath their feet. 

      At the fifteenth floor, they were greeted by a man who resembled the 
      people in the pits: the same lifeless eyes and fixed jaw. But this man was 
      alive and he indicated that Gerard was to follow him down the corridor. 
      The corridor led into a maze of tunnels, all lit by a series of soft, 
      reddish panels set into the ceiling. The smell was dank--a sharp, musty 
      scent as of close quarters and many residents over many generations. The 
      original reliefs carved into the walls had been defaced or done over, so 
      that meerkat heads jutted from human bodies and gish became a weird series 
      of sharp, harsh lines. Unease crept up on Gerard as they walked and, when 
      he looked down, he saw that Flesh Dog's hackles were up and its fangs 
      bared: a startling white against the black-blue of his muzzle. 
      By the time they reached their destination, Gerard was thoroughly lost and 
      could no more have retraced his steps than conjured a heart out of thin 
      air. He clung to his rucksack, and to the thought that Lucretia still 
      needed him. 
      They were led into a large room which had partitions to hide other 
      sections from them. A chair had been provided and the silent man gestured 
      to it before locking the doors behind him. Gerard sat down and Flesh Dog 
      flopped to rest at his feet. 
      "That man smelled of the pits," Flesh Dog muttered. "Everything smells of 
      the pits." 
      A whirring sound made Gerard sit straighter in his seat and a brace of 
      meerkats appeared from behind a partition. One was tall and white, the 
      other short and yellow. Flesh Dog growled, but they ignored the beast. 
      "My name is --" said Whitey, pronouncing a series of high-pitched trills. 
      "And I am --" said Yellow. "Together, we are the Duelists of Trade. I 
      assume that is why you are here?" 
      Gerard nodded eagerly. 
      "First," said Whitey, "you must be thirsty." 
      He clapped his paws together and the lifeless man re-entered, holding a 
      glass of clear liquid. He offered it to Gerard, who took it with nodded 
      thanks. 
      "Do not drink!" Flesh Dog hissed. "Do not drink!" 
      "Hush," Gerard said. "Hush." 
      The liquid smelled of berries and the first tentative sip rewarded him 
      with a tangy, smooth taste. He took one more sip, for politeness' sake, 
      and then heeded Flesh Dog's warning and set the glass by his chair. 
      "And now," said Yellow, "what precisely do you wish to trade for?" 
      "A heart," replied Gerard. "A human heart." He reached for his ruck sack. 
      Whitey looked at Yellow, made a huffing sound. They both had fangs which 
      poked out from the muzzle. Red dye designs had been carved into the 
      whiteness, designs like scythes and slender knives in their sharpness. The 
      eyes were slightly slanted and they devoured Gerard with a kind of hunger. 

      "What do you have to trade?" asked Yellow. 
      The hairs on Gerard's neck rose. The question had been asked with quiet 
      authority and now, and only now, did he think that perhaps these meerkat 
      were not as simple as the ones he had caught in the desert. That they 
      might be dangerous in their own way. But the drink had created a sharp 
      warmth in his stomach and it made him careless. Besides, Lucretia still 
      needed a heart. He reached into the sack. 
      "I have gems," he said, pulling out a huge orange stone he had found at an 
      oasis. 
      Whitey took the stone from Gerard's hand. He examined it for a moment, 
      held it up to the light. Then he dashed it to the floor. It shattered. 
      Flesh Dog growled. 
      "Gems?" Whitey hissed. "Gems! For a human heart?" 
      Gerard shrank back into his chair. 
      "But I--" 
      "Do you mean to insult me?" His tail twitched and twitched. 
      "No! My sister Lucretia is dying! Her heart is bad. I have brought the 
      richest stones I could find..." 
      Flesh Dog rose onto his haunches, fur bristling, teeth bared. 
      Yellow patted Gerard's shoulder. 
      "There, there. No need to shock our guest. What else do you have?" 
      Here was a warm-hearted fellow, a generous fellow. Perhaps Yellow could be 
      satisfied. Gerard scrabbled in his pack, pulled out an autodoc part. 
      "There. It is almost new." 
      Yellow's claws bit into his shoulder. Strangely, Gerard felt no pain, 
      though the shock made him bite back a scream. 
      "No," said Yellow, voice like ice. ""No, I'm sorry, but this won't 
      do...this won't do at all. You come here, down all fifteen levels, spy on 
      us, and offer us used parts?" 
      Flesh Dog growled and Gerard shook off Yellow's grasp. Why did he feel so 
      numb? He was a fool, he realized, to have come here. In his ignorance he 
      might well have come into the clutches of villains. 
      Gerard felt Flesh Dog against his feet, a position from which to guard 
      him, and an unworthy thought crept into his head. 
      "What about Flesh Dog?" he asked Whitey. "I will trade Flesh Dog's talents 
      for a heart..." An unfair trade considering the multitude of services 
      Flesh Dog performed, but it was after all a beast. Surely a human life 
      outweighed ownership of a talking beast? He tried to ignore the animal's 
      whining. 
      Yellow nodded. "Very good. Very good indeed. However," and he pushed a 
      button, "not good enough." 
      One of the partitions slid back. Behind it: one hundred Flesh Dogs, their 
      parts not yet assembled, so that the heads sat upon one shelf while the 
      bodies sagged in rows below. Two men, like the ones in the pit, lay 
      sprawled in a corner. 
      Gerard gaped at the sight. So many Flesh Dogs. Dead? Decapitated? It made 
      no sense. But then, neither did the numbness spreading through his body. 
      Flesh Dog shuddered, shook its head, and moaned. 
      One hundred heads, connected by one hundred wires to one hundred nutrient 
      vats, turned to stare at him, with their globby folds of tissue dangling. 
      "We are," said Yellow, pausing, "overstocked on Flesh Dogs at the moment. 
      Human hearts, now, those are rare. We have only one or two." 
      "However," said Whitey, "there is one way in which we might be persuaded 
      to part with such a heart..." 
      "Yes?" said Gerard, afraid of the answer. He had volunteered his own heart 
      before, but that had been with the assurance of care, faulty though it 
      might have been, from the autodoc. 
      "It would involve both you and Flesh Dog," said Yellow slyly. 
      "It would take six months," said Whitey. 
      The delightful warmth had crept up his chest, the cold following behind. 
      "Afterwards we would let you go..." Whitey held his hands while Yellow 
      caressed his neck. "And in return, we give Lucretia a heart..." 
      "How soon?" Gerard asked. "How soon?" He shivered under Yellow's touch. 
      "Immediately," whispered Yellow in his ear. "Flesh for flesh. You must 
      simply show us on a map where your creche lies--you do know what a map 
      is?--and we will send it by hovercraft. We do not break our word." 
      "So what of it, friend Gerard," said Whitey. "Do you agree?" 
      Gerard turned to Flesh Dog. 
      "What do you think, Flesh Dog?" 
      Flesh Dog peered at him through its fleshy folds. It turned to the Flesh 
      Dog heads on the shelf--and howled. And howled, as though its heart had 
      been broken. Then, with a sideways stutter, it leaned into the floor and 
      was still, trembling around the mouth. 
      "Poor, poor machine," hummed Whitey. "It has forgotten it is a machine. So 
      many years in service. Poor, poor machine..." 
      "Rip their throats," growled Flesh Dog from the floor. "Rip their 
      throats?" The growl became a moan, and then incoherent. Gerard would have 
      comforted it as it had comforted him in the elevator, but he was too numb. 

      "Do you agree?" Yellow asked, one eye on Flesh Dog. 
      "Yes," Gerard said, immobile in the chair now, able only to swivel his 
      head. He imagined he could feel his sister's heartbeat become more 
      regular, could feel a glow of health return to her cheeks. This, and this 
      alone, kept him from panic, from giving over to the fear which ached in 
      his bones. "Yes!" he said with a drunken recklessness, at the same time 
      knowing he had no choice. 
      "You will leave with a smile upon your face," Whitey promised. 
      "Oh yes, you will," sang Yellow gleefully, taking out the knives. 

        As for the ending, there are many. Perhaps the next day, the next month, 
        a new face stared up from the pits, the arms of the body reaching out 
        but frozen, the eyes blank. Perhaps the meerkats never honored their 
        agreement. Or... 

      That summer, as the stars watched overhead, an angel descended to the 
      desert floor. And, when it departed, Lucretia arose from the dead and 
      danced like a will o' whisp over the shifting sands. She danced fitfully, 
      anger and sadness throbbing in her new heart. 
      That winter, Flesh Dog and Gerard limped back to the creche. He did not 
      speak now. Always, he looked toward the south, toward the great sea and 
      the city with no name, as though expecting strangers. Always, as he sat by 
      the fire and sucked his food with toothless gums, Gerard-Flesh Dog looked 
      at Lucretia, the Lucretia who saw only that Flesh Dog had returned a mute, 
      and smiled his permanent smile. Beneath the folds of tissue, Gerard's 
      smoky-green eyes stared, silently begging for rescue. But Lucretia never 
      dared pull back the folds to see for herself, perhaps afraid of what she 
      might find there. Sometimes she would dream of the city, of what had 
      happened there, but the vision would desert her upon waking, the only mark 
      the tears she had wept while asleep. 
      After a year, the men of the creche held a funeral for Gerard. After two 
      years, Lucretia married a wealthy water dower and, though she treated 
      Flesh Dog tenderly, he was never more than an animal to her. 

      Afterword 
      Cordwainer Smith has always been my primary SF influence. His ability to 
      create SF that truly feels alien still startles and enthralls me. 
      I wanted to bring a mythical element to this -- I wanted to write a story 
      set in the far future that is actually written about the distant past. If 
      that sounds contradictory, it really isn't. As I wrote the story, I 
      imagined myself as a storyteller in the year 12,000 AD writing a story 
      about the year 11,500 AD. Thus the mythic can mix with the science 
      fictional with no harm done to either. 
      Added to these elements were the real-life worries I had for my sister, 
      whose heart problems had become life-threatening. 
      Finally, any far future scenario that is "realistic" -- at least 
      psychologically realistic -- has to contain two elements: (1) the presence 
      of some other sentient species than humankind, probably created by 
      humankind and (2) consequences for our short-term environmental policies 
      of the present-day. I have long been fascinated by meerkats -- their 
      quick, agile movements, their complex social and family life, and ability 
      to survive human encroachment. So the idea of making the species created 
      by humankind be based on meerkat genetic stock appealed to me greatly. As 
      other stories in this cycle indicate, these are not just giant meerkats, 
      but enriched with genes from other groups, including human beings. 
      The Flesh Dog character is stolen, in a way, from the 1977 remake of 
      Invasion of the Body Snatchers. When I saw the movie, there was one scene 
      that stood out for me -- a brief glimpse of a dog with a human head. It 
      scared me to death -- the juxtaposition really seemed alien. So the idea 
      of Flesh Dog being remade to have a human face came from that movie. The 
      other general idea behind Flesh Dog is to have a character, alien in the 
      exterior, who is actually almost more human than the "hero" -- there is 
      something heroic and sympathetic about Flesh Dog. This also creates a nice 
      juxtaposition with the meerkats, whose intentions are sinister... 
      All of this may sound rather calculated, but in execution it wasn't. What 
      I do is find elements I would like to deal with in a story, and then when 
      the opportunity arises, because I've been thinking about them a great 
      deal, they tend to organically embed themselves in the story. 
      As for the ending, it is implied in the beginning. One thing I like to do 
      in stories is present the reader with a situation that seems clear and 
      self-evident, but by the end of the story invert the meaning of the scene 
      or situation that began the story. This process of transformation, if done 
      well -- not as a twist, but as part of the natural evolution of the story 
      -- doesn't just dislocate the reader. It, hopefully, makes the reader 
      question the assumptions he or she makes in processing what we call 
      "reality". It's like a reminder that the world is more complex than the 
      elements we break it down into. 

      © Jeff VanderMeer 1993, 1999
      "A Heart for Lucretia" first appeared in The Silver Web, Winter/Spring 
      1993.