Ghosts of Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  And there you have it, just the briefest of introductions to the countless eateries the megalopolis of Punktown has to offer. But tonight rather than venture out into the city (after all, it can be rather hazardous after hours), I suggest you call for a delivery or room service, then sit back in the relative safety of your hotel room and enjoy the buffet that follows. Some of the dishes may be exotic and warming, while others you may find a bit distasteful or hard to swallow. But you did come to experience Punktown in all its diverse flavors, didn’t you?

  In His Sights

  1

  The other young returnees kept looking at him, wondering what horrors were concealed by his mask. The mask looked like several layers of black plastic vacuum-formed to his face, with openings for his eyes, nostrils and mouth. From his eyes, with their epicanthic folds, they could at least tell that he was of Asian ancestry. But what wounding had he suffered? Had he been spattered with hot, corrosive plasma from a mortar round? Sprayed with acid or minced with shrapnel in some Ha Jiin booby trap? The other men – and there were some female soldiers, too – felt pity for him. And also shame, at being relieved that it wasn’t them forced to wear the healing black mask.

  But he wasn’t healing. Because he wasn’t wounded, at least not in the ways they speculated on.

  He was simply hiding his face.

  Though he knew it would, his face shouldn’t have shocked the others in a purely physical sense. After all, this was Punktown. The city had been called Paxton, of course, when Earth colonists had first founded it, but it hadn’t taken long for its nickname to come about, for its predestined character to make itself manifest. Races other than human had come to colonize the city as well, over the decades. Included among the few truly humanoid races that dwelt within the megalopolis were the Choom – indigenous to this world, which the Earth colonists had renamed Oasis. They had frog-like mouths that sliced their faces back to their ears. Then there were the Tikkihotto, who in place of eyes had bundles of clear tendrils that squirmed in the air as if to assemble vision with their sensitive touch. But there were far stranger beings in Punktown. Beautiful, by the Earthly conception of such things, or hideous. In addition, there were mutants of every deformity, corresponding to every cruel whim of nature (nature as distorted through pollution and radiation). So, it would seem illogical that anyone in Punktown would feel self-conscious enough to hide their features by pretending to have been disfigured. But it wasn’t simply self-consciousness that had caused the young man to don his mask.

  It possibly went so far as self-preservation.

  “Santos, Edgar,” a voice said from a speaker. The name was spelt out on a screen as well, and showed Santos’ military ID number. The man in the black mask looked up and watched as Edgar Santos pushed away the little VT he had been watching, affixed to the arm of his chair. He headed off to one of the offices, its number also displayed on the information screen. Santos. There were a few more names to be called, alphabetically, before they got to the masked man. Stake, Jeremy.

  Stake sat in a long row of plastic chairs of a terrible orange color. His row faced a row opposite. Trying not to look at the people seated across from him, despite how they stole glances at him, Stake couldn’t help but be reminded of the first time he had been sent to the planet of the Ha Jiin. The dimension of the Ha Jiin.

  It had been over four years ago. The then nineteen-year-old Jeremy Stake had sat with a group of young men and women, humans and humanoids, with no Ha Jiin blood yet on their hands. None of their own blood yet spilled. They had sat just like this, in two rows inside a metal Theta pod, waiting to have their material beings shifted. Smuggled inside a bullet fired through page after page in the closed book of realities, taking a shortcut through infinity. The transdimensional pod had hummed with an almost subliminal vibration under their boots and asses. They had looked at each other’s faces in nervousness. A few of these troop pods had gone missing, taking a wrong turn somehow, perhaps ending up in some alternate plane from which there was no return or maybe just ceasing to be.

  Sometimes Stake wondered if he truly had returned to his own plane. Might this be a subtle variation on the world he had left? If so, might some subtly different Jeremy Stake have taken his place in his reality? And if so, had he come back without the need for disguise?

  Well, such alternate versions of oneself had not in fact been discovered in any of the realms that Theta research/technology had given the Earth Colonies access to. But extradimensional races had certainly been encountered. There were the beetle-like Coleopteroids, derisively called Bedbugs. The putty-like L’lewed. The more humanoid Antse people, who covered their bland gray bodies entirely in the gorgeous flayed skins of great creatures called flukes. And then, there were the blue-skinned Ha Jiin. One of the most human of races. One of the most beautiful. And deadly.

  “Severance, Amy Jo,” called the speaker’s voice. Stake watched a young woman rise to attend her appointment. She was one of those who had come today in uniform rather than street clothes. It was really a personal decision. Maybe she was proud of it. Maybe she was simply still in the military mind-set. Under her arm she carried a black beret, her uniform itself patterned in shades of blue, from dark navy to bright azure to pastel. Stake was in his street clothes, but he had an identical set of camouflaged fatigues among his belongings.

  The Blue War, they had called it.

  It was over now. Everybody coming home. Everybody being sifted back into a world that would be different for them, whether it was a secretly distorted variation or not.

  “Buddy? Hey...brother?”

  Stake turned his head, which glistened black like obsidian. He met the eyes of a Choom with a severe crew cut.

  “What happened to you?”

  There. Someone had overtly invaded his privacy. Someone either too unthinking – or too compassionate – to just leave him be.

  Stake had an answer prepared, though. “I was in some caverns, and there were major gas concentrations. A plasma grenade caused it to ignite.” That was what they had been doing there. Traveled so far for, bled so long for. Officially, it was to lend support to the emerging Jin Haa nation. But everyone knew it was really all about those rich subterranean gases.

  The Choom made an exaggerated wincing expression. “Ouch. I heard of that happening. You gonna be all right?” He gestured at his own face. “Will it get back to normal?”

  “I don’t know,” Stake said. He wasn’t lying about that part. “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  The Veterans Administration worker whose office Stake was directed to was a stern-faced black woman who introduced herself as Miriam Khaled. She was studying her screens when Stake let himself in. She looked up at him in a bit of a double-take, a little surprised by his appearance, but she dropped her eyes to his file again as he took a seat in front of her desk.

  “Will you be my caseworker?” he asked her.

  “No...you won’t be given a particular caseworker; you can meet with anyone here at the VA about your concerns,” she said as she read from his records. “Corporal Stake. I see you have a very distinguished four years of service. Hm. Assigned to several deep penetration units. You captured an enemy sniper who was quite a local legend to her people.”

  Stake’s guts knotted tighter at the mention of her. “Yes.” He saw the Ha Jiin woman’s face on his own internal screen. Her blue-skinned, beautiful face. She had been his prisoner for a while. Sometimes he felt he was her prisoner, now.

  “And you have no desire to further your career in the military?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Um...” She frowned. “I don’t see anything here about your injury.”

  “This isn’t from an injury, ma’am.”

  “No?” She looked up, scowling.

  “Excuse me,” Stake said, and then he reached behind his head to unseal the shiny black mask. He peeled it from his head like a cocoon. Under it, his short dark hair was sweaty and disheveled. His skin was normally
almost olive, but had become so pale it was almost of a bluish, corpse-like cast, as if he had been hidden from the sun for months. He watched Khaled’s face. He saw comprehension dawn there; not of the particulars, but at least an understanding as to why he would wear the mask.

  She quickly consulted the files again. “You underwent surgery to perform your penetration missions?”

  “No, ma’am. This isn’t from surgery. I’m a mutant.”

  Miriam Khaled took him in more closely. The young man seated opposite her was almost entirely a Ha Jiin, just as the Ha Jiin were almost entirely human – indistinguishable except for matters of pigment that Stake’s malleable cells could not duplicate, however crafty they were in their mimicry. Despite its best efforts, his skin was not that lovely, ghostly shade of blue. And the Ha Jiin’s eyes, though black, gleamed a laser red when the light struck them a certain way. Even their black hair took on a metallic red quality where the light made it shine. But there were other effects that Stake’s face had been very successful at reproducing. The Ha Jiin’s eyelids possessed the epicanthus of human Asians. Also, it was not uncommon for Ha Jiin men to mark their faces with scars. Stake had two horizontal raised bars on his right cheek, and three on his left cheek, almost as if to indicate that his age was twenty-three. In fact, the scarification was meant to represent the number of family members a man had lost in war. Maybe when they touched their own faces, or saw their reflections, it helped arouse them afresh in their desire to conquer their enemy and avenge their dead. Were it not for his imitation scars, Stake might have passed for an Earth Asian. But those markings were so distinctive.

  Khaled found it in his information at last. “I see. It’s a mutation called...Caro turbida. ‘Disordered flesh.’ Huh. It’s impressive how it works.” She appeared to regret phrasing it that way. “I mean...”

  “It came in handy when I was doing my penetration work,” he confirmed. “But I had to have my skin dyed blue for those missions.”

  “This happens spontaneously?”

  “Yes. If I look at a person or a picture of a person for too long...or too intensely. It can happen in a matter of minutes. Faster, if I’m trying to get it to happen.”

  “But why do you look like a Ha Jiin now?”

  “The effect can last until I look long enough at another person’s face to trade for theirs. Or, for lack of another subject, sooner or later I’ll revert back to...me. Under normal circumstances, I try not to stare at people too much. I’ve been watching your face more than I normally would. I should have begun looking like you by now.”

  “So why isn’t that happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Stake admitted. “This has never happened to me before. I’m...stuck.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Three weeks now. Three weeks since I took on the appearance of a man I killed in my last field mission.”

  “But you really don’t know why that is?”

  Stake swallowed. “I, ah, I can’t say for sure.”

  She nodded, and gazed at her computer system. Stake guessed that she was studying a picture of his own, natural face. He knew it would appear subtly unnatural to her. In his default mode, as he called it, the mutant had an oddly unfinished-looking appearance. Too bland, too nondescript, like an oil portrait that had been roughed in but never completed. She had probably seen androids that were more life-like.

  “I can schedule an appointment with one of our doctors at the VA Hospital,” she said. “Or maybe it would be more helpful if you spoke to one of our counselors...”

  “Mm,” he grunted.

  “In any case...do you have a family, Corporal? Anyplace to go?”

  “My mother is dead,” he told her. She had been a mutant, too. They had lived in the Punktown slum called Tin Town; it held the highest concentration of mutants in the city. As far as he knew his father was still alive, if his drug-addicted state could be called that. “No family,” was all the further elaboration he would give.

  “All right, then I’ll extend your temporary shelter in the VA Hospice until you can find an apartment. And of course you have a ten year pension, but frankly it’s limited in nature and you’re encouraged to make use of our resources here in searching for employment.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The mask, Corporal Stake. It’s because you’re afraid to upset the other returnees?”

  His stolen face – the face of a dead man, as if grafted on to replace his own obliterated countenance – gave her a sickly smile. “It’s to prevent the other returnees from wanting to lynch me.”

  2

  “What are the goggles for?” She had smiled nervously when she asked it.

  “I damaged my eyes in the war,” he’d lied.

  The Blue War. The light of twin blue-white suns beating down through the jungle canopy, a jungle where every plant from tree to flower to the grass itself was a shade of blue. Blue like the flesh of the Ha Jiin themselves.

  The military surplus goggles were like those Cal Williams and many other soldiers had worn for night vision, or to see distantly, or to gaze through the walls of Ha Jinn structures. But when it had come time to shoot, it was through the lens of his sniper rifle’s scope that he had peered.

  Right now, he had adjusted the spectrum filter on his goggles. Right now, everything he saw was tinted blue.

  Cal paced the tiny apartment where he had been staying since his discharge from the VA Hospital. He had been returned to his own dimension a few months before all these others who were flooding back now, but it was being badly wounded that had won him that head start. The last treatment had erased the scars on his chest. They had assured him that everything without and within had been fully restored, but the skin of his chest still seemed too tightly drawn to him. As he paced he would occasionally rotate his arms in their sockets, or stretch them high above or far behind him, as if to loosen his confining, claustrophobic flesh.

  He hadn’t been looking for a job; not yet. He had his pension. He would live frugally, draw it out. It paid his rent. And it had paid for the young woman who lay on the bed he kept trying not to look at as he paced.

  He wore nothing but the goggles. His bare feet were stealthy as he padded, back and forth, like a tiger in its cage. There was one little window and he paused at it, nudged aside the shade to peek out at the city of Punktown. In the evening light, the hovercars swarming at ground level and helicars that drifted along the invisible web of navigation beams sparkled like scarabs. The lasers and holographs of advertisements strobed and flashed as if the city were full of bombings and firefights. And through his goggles, the entire city was blue, and even darker and more ominous than it would have been, like a metropolis built on the bottom of a deep arctic sea.

  Leaning against the window’s frame was the rifle he had bought last week from a black market source, along with the pistol he carried with him when he ventured onto the streets. He lifted the rifle now and couched it in his arms, a familiar and strangely soothing sensation. It was inferior to the one he had used over there, which had been able to fire both solid projectiles and beams. This rifle fired beams alone. And yet, in that area this weapon was a bit more advanced. He stepped away from the window and let the rifle’s barrel hold back the lip of the shade. He could fire a bolt of dark purple light right now, and it would pass through the windowpane without shattering or even scorching it. It was only one of the gun’s tricks.

  Through his goggles and through the rifle’s scope, he tracked one helicar for a moment before shifting to another. He increased the magnification, traced his gaze from window to window on the building directly across the broad street. At last, he lowered his view further and zoomed in on a man walking along the sidewalk. He zoomed until the man’s unaware face filled his vision. He was a wide-mouthed native Choom, even if the goggles made his face appear as if his skin were blue.

  Lowering his rifle a little, Cal twisted around and glanced over at the bed at last.

  The woma
n was of Asian lineage, with beautiful almond eyes and black hair down to her waist, tiny like the female Ha Jiin, but he had learned quickly not to be deceived by that. They were deadlier than the men.

  “What are the goggles for?” she had asked him.

  Lying there, staring at the ceiling and smiling a little as if to mock him, she was as blue-skinned as a Ha Jiin woman. Even though she wasn’t one.

  Cal dropped his gaze to the blood spattered and drying on his belly and legs. It looked black through the goggles. But then, he became conscious of something for the first time. The realization horrified him, and he almost dropped the rifle in setting it aside. He clawed the goggles off his head.

  Through their lenses, his own flesh had appeared blue to him, too.

  3

  The giant’s head thrust up out of the earth, but Corporal Jeremy Stake knew there would also be an entire body below the surface, its form just as intricately covered in a mosaic of colorful tiles even if no one would ever see them. The giant’s mouth was open wide, and gave access to a metal spiral staircase that wound like a corkscrew down through the titanic body, down into the caverns below the jungle. There, in galleries of stone, writhed the bluish gases that the Ha Jiin worshipped as their ancestral spirits – but which the Earth Colonies had more practical uses for.