Ghosts of Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  She helped Mendeni get over the fact that Chard Colores had successfully outbid him at the auction, and walked away with the caryatid representing Lupool, wife of the deity his grandfather had once worshiped. Cynth told him he had actually been the luckier of the two, in that it was he who had won her, and at a fraction of the price.

  Mendeni had moved with her into the building that once upon a time she had called the Mansions of Despair.

  And two years after the statue of Lupool had been auctioned, shortly after which Cynth had left Jango to work for a larger auction house, she heard that the Triplex was to be completely razed so that a new, more up-to-date office complex could be built on that site.

  A Semblance of Life

  It didn’t really matter to him whether people addressed him as LeBlanc, which was the first name he’d been given, or Jones, which was the last name he’d been given. His last name couldn’t be considered a surname, however, as LeBlanc was a clone. Because the ID pin he wore on the jacket of his neat gray suit read L. JONES, his partner – who was not a clone – called him El Jones. This moniker he didn’t care for, but then he didn’t care for his partner.

  LeBlanc hadn’t liked Miter since the first time they’d met, two years earlier, when the seasoned guard had laughed, “Hey, don’t go in the museum’s courtyard garden or I’ll never find you.” He was referring to LeBlanc’s appearance. The clone was from a particular sub-series of soldiers, who for a bit of variety from other lots had been given identical African features. But

  Miter’s comment had to do with the fact that these military clones had been designed for combat in the blue-leaved jungles of the planet Sinan. As such, LeBlanc’s entire body – from his hairless head to his feet – was patterned with blue-toned camouflage pigmentation.

  “The usual drill, El Jones,” Miter instructed tonight, at the start of their after-hours shift. “You take floors two and three, and I’ll take the first floor, lobby, gift shop and café.” He listed all these areas as if they were located separately, instead of all being on the first floor. Of course the senior guard would take this territory for his rounds; not only was it half that of LeBlanc’s allotment, but Miter could sit for an hour or more at a time in the café, drinking coffee and munching snacks from the dispensers, or even with his head down on his folded arms at one of the tables, snoring.

  LeBlanc had complained to his supervisor about Miter’s naps, after one night during which the older security guard had slept in the café for three hours straight. The supervisor had said he would talk to Miter about it, resulting in Miter angrily confronting the newer guard. LeBlanc had held his own temper, and had never reported the other man’s activities or lack thereof again. He didn’t want any trouble. He craved only serenity, for his nights to float by in a placid walking dream. This, if anything, was his stipend for whatever service he had performed in years past. After steaming jungles of blue foliage, insidious booby traps, ripping fusillades of solid projectiles and flashing beams from ray weapons, the silent after-hours halls and rooms of the Hill Way Galleries were the very mansions of Heaven.

  “Okay, chief?” Miter said, starting away from the lobby’s security desk in the direction of the café, and the first of tonight’s succession of coffees. He gave LeBlanc a salute, no doubt a sarcastic nod to his service in what had been called the Blue War. But that war had ended a dozen years ago.

  LeBlanc didn’t return the salute, only nodded, gave an affirmative grunt, and turned to leave the lobby. On his way he glanced at the windows that fronted the reception area. Beyond them lay the enormous city of Paxton, best known by its own moniker of Punktown, built here on the planet Oasis by Earth colonists but peopled by an extensive variety of sentient beings. The art and culture of many of those races were reflected here, in one way or another, in the exhibit halls of the Hill Way Galleries.

  Through the glass, the city, massive as it was, looked as distant, cold and unapproachable as the stars that its constellations of windows and advertising lights resembled in night’s blackness. LeBlanc had lived here ever since he had finished a decade-long stint extracting ore on an asteroid mine, following the end of the Blue War, but Punktown didn’t feel much more like home than the asteroid had. To LeBlanc, home was an alien concept.

  * * *

  Satisfied that no one was lurking in the second floor ladies’ rest room, LeBlanc withdrew, but not before a glance at his reflection in the large view screen (which did not reverse his reflection as a mirror would; not that it mattered to him). His face, swarming with patches of blue in every shade, glared back at him like another clone from his lot, as displaced as himself.

  LeBlanc always checked the rest rooms warily. There had been occasions when museum visitors had hidden until after closing time, with the intention of theft, vandalism (some people were roused to destroy pieces they found offensive on political, religious, or moral grounds), or, if they were homeless, just for a warm place to spend the night. LeBlanc himself had ejected a number of homeless people since he had started here, and held more questionable types for the forcers to come and claim.

  But it was Miter who had had the distinction of finding three dead people over the course of his career. One of them, in the first floor men’s room, had died of an overdose on the toilet. Another had perished in an attempt to have sexual congress with an abstract mechanical sculpture by a local artist named Teal, whose lover Nimbus had posed for the sensually contorting (and lethally crushing) automaton. And only one week ago, Miter had found what had obviously been a victim of murder.

  It had been one of those infrequent nights when Miter had offered to switch places with LeBlanc, taking floors two and three. Had it not been so, LeBlanc himself would have discovered the body, though he had viewed it after receiving Miter’s near hysterical call over their wrist comps. After the rigorous interrogation the forcers had subjected Miter to, LeBlanc was grateful he hadn’t been the one to discover the corpse, knowing that as a clone, a former soldier, and a fairly new employee, he would have less credibility. As it was, Miter had a hard time explaining how he had missed discovering the corpse earlier, when it lay there in the middle of the floor in the large antechamber to the third level’s Hall of Antiquities, which Miter claimed he had passed through several times previously during his shift.

  LeBlanc recalled the victim now, as he strolled toward the same antechamber. The memory did not frighten him – he had seen far more violated bodies during his three intense years of military service – but it did make him vigilant. The victim had been another homeless person, a young male junkie, though they didn’t know where he might have been hiding. The theory was that a homeless companion had killed him in a quarrel, and fled. But fled where? Cameras were trained on every entrance to the museum, and while they and all the other cameras in the building (any one of which could be accessed on security’s wrist comps at any time) only viewed and did not record, the entrance/exit cameras were programmed to sound an alert at the sight of any unfamiliar body that appeared in their range out of visiting hours – aside from the guards, whom the cameras would recognize. All the forcers could conclude was that the killer had again hidden away somewhere, then reemerged during regular hours and exited the Hill Way Galleries along with its more innocent patrons.

  Miter had found the young junkie sprawled there with his neck and both arms broken. The flesh of his face had been roughly torn, rather than slashed, and both his eyes had been gouged out. They had not been recovered.

  * * *

  In the antechamber to the Hall of Antiquities, LeBlanc was greeted by a huge iron bust of the deity Raloom, worshiped by the ancestors of this planet’s indigenous people, the Choom. The eyes of the great metal head were hollow, fragrant oil lamps intended to be burned in them. Their gaping emptiness again called to LeBlanc’s mind the image of that junkie with his eyes torn out.

  Religion. It was perhaps the last thing he could relate to. There were those who claimed this was because clones had no souls,
and LeBlanc could not really protest. He just didn’t know how it felt not to be a clone. He knew he had no sexual desire, had been designed as such, to keep him from being distracted from his duties and perhaps chasing after beguiling, blue-skinned Sinanese women. One thing he could relate to with birthers, as clones called nonclones, was the sensual enjoyment of food. He was currently taking gourmet cooking classes, with half a thought to becoming a chef. Recently his instructor, a man, had kissed him on the mouth when they were alone. LeBlanc had not been aroused in any way, but he had withdrawn from the man calmly, without feeling any hostility either.

  LeBlanc moved on, into the Hall of Antiquities, which was actually an extensive series of interconnected rooms. Here, on the walls and on pedestals, on shelves or in showcases, were ancient sculptures, blank-faced mannequins attired in archaic clothing, pottery beautifully intact or in shards, mean-looking weapons and prehistoric tools – spotlighted objects representing a diversity of races, from human to nonhuman.

  Every night, LeBlanc was surrounded by other people’s cultures. He, who had no heritage or history, no culture or kin – only related product with the same lot number, the same face. Sometimes he felt as he had when aiding the Jin Haa people in their struggle to win autonomy from the ruling Ha Jiin people, on Sinan. He, who had no politics, fighting alongside those who would die for their beliefs...people passionate for their sense of individualism, of ethnic identity, when he had none. Now, likewise, here he was protecting these venerated cultural icons, that meant nothing more to him than items in store windows that might mildly catch his interest at the Canberra Mall.

  Was it just that he had no cultural connection, LeBlanc would wonder, or that it was against his bio-programming to care about such things? Well, he tried to take an interest. He had read the information accompanying every single exhibit in the museum, he wouldn’t doubt. At least, everything on the second and third floors (while Miter had no doubt sampled every item in the food dispensers by now). He had no desire to switch to first shift, when these rooms would be flooded with visitors, swarms of children on field trips, so he did not have to be conversant on the displays as the day shift guards were, but he found reading the exhibit plaques interesting for his own benefit. Having noticed this habit, Miter had commented that if LeBlanc should ever want to become a day guard, “All they’d have to do is feed you some art history in a brain drip, the way they trained you to be a soldier back at the factory, right?”

  Ignorant birther, LeBlanc had thought.

  Tonight, his attention was attracted once more to the latest additions to the museum’s collection, a good number of items from the private collection of a wealthy business owner, donated by his wife following his recent death. She had then hastily left Oasis for Earth, which lent extra suspicion as to whether her husband had acquired all these treasures in a legitimate, ethical, and culturally sensitive fashion. While the proper authorities were looking into all that, the museum continued to display the items, as they had since acquiring them just a month earlier.

  It was LeBlanc’s understanding that the businessman had been found murdered in his home in a ghastly but undisclosed fashion, and that the wife’s swift departure to Earth was still being considered in regard to this, as well.

  The items from his private collection were from a variety of planets, so they were not all housed in the same room, but in this room were a number of objects that the businessman had collected from a race called the Antse. Their world existed in an alternate dimension, as did Sinan in fact, and the man had traveled there repeatedly in his business dealings. One of these items was a suit of flesh made from a giant animal called a fluke, which the Antse flayed in a sacred ritual so that they could harvest their skin – a gorgeous mix of green and black like malachite. The Antse made these skins into form-fitting suits that they wore over their own bland, smooth gray bodies and hairless heads. It was the only time they ever wore clothing.

  Another item, preserved inside a tall glass showcase lest it decay, was one of the effigies the Antse people hung out in the street during their so-called flaying season, carved from the white inner meat of a fluke in a generally anthropomorphic shape, and then stuck with nails and spikes like some half-formed martyr. Staring at the totem, LeBlanc could only wag his head, mystified. Was he missing out on something vital in not feeling any religious impulses of his own? All he knew for sure was that he would never want to wish damnation on, or wage a crusade or jihad against, anyone who did not harbor the same religious impulses as his own.

  Yet another display from the businessman’s collection drew LeBlanc’s attention, and according to the plaque this too had religious significance. On a raised platform crouched three identical figures, each tucked into a ball, tucked so tightly in fact that one might not at first realize these uneven spheres were meant to be people. Apparently they represented a clerical order associated with an Antse religion that had died out centuries ago. The clerics were said to contort their bodies into balls such as this trio of sculptures portrayed, and remain that way through long periods of meditation. They did not wear the flayed fluke skins, but they did paint their naked gray bodies with a bright yellow mineral. These sculptures were so painted, too, and either this pigment or the stone they were carved from gave them a porous texture like pumice.

  LeBlanc stooped down, trying to look at the face of one of the figures, but its head was so tucked in, besides being covered over with its arms, that he couldn’t see it. The fingers laced between its shoulders had dark stains on them, no doubt from age.

  Straightening, LeBlanc read the rest of the plaque. The rites of these clerics were so secret that anyone not invited to view them would suffer grave consequences. The usual threats to infidels, LeBlanc thought.

  His wrist comp beeped, and he lifted his arm to gaze down at its little screen. Miter was there, and he talked while chewing. “Hey, El Jones, I thought I’d give you a head’s up, even though I might just be going crazy in my old age. A little while ago when I was sitting here in the café, I swore I heard a sound like a bare foot slapping on the floor. So I turned around and out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw someone run past the café doorway, but when I went to look I couldn’t find anybody. I’m going to check out the rest of the floor now, so you keep your eyes peeled too, okay?”

  “What did they look like?”

  “It was just a flash, you know, like you get sometimes looking too quick from a light area into a dark area? So it could just be my imagination, man; too much coffee or not enough. But it sort of looked like someone small, with no clothes. I don’t know, maybe just wishful thinking.” The man snorted. “Just have a look around, will ya?”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Miter signed off.

  * * *

  LeBlanc checked the rest of the third floor thoroughly, then descended to the second floor. He beeped Miter in the process. “I haven’t seen anything. You?”

  “No. Maybe I need a nap, man; I barely slept today, you know? I’m not a young guy like you. How old are you, now...like fourteen?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Wow. Be patient, El Jones, and you’ll be able to legally drink in a few years.”

  LeBlanc said nothing, but cut their connection.

  When LeBlanc had finished his rounds of the second level and returned to the third, he was surprised but not startled to find Miter in the Hall of Antiquities, reading the plaque on the wall beside the flesh scarecrow in its glass case. “Hey,” said LeBlanc, and Miter whirled around fast, a hand going to the pistol holstered under his gray suit jacket.

  “For Chrissakes, dung-hole, are you trying to burst my beater? Jesus.” He straightened up. “That’s what I get for coming in here and reading about all this creepy Antse stuff.”

  “Did you see someone come up here?”

  “No, but I thought I’d have a look around where I found that body last week, you know?”

  Miter blew out his cheeks, still shaken, and LeBlanc smirke
d internally. The older guard had been on the day shift twenty years ago, when the psychotic artist Toll Loveland had terrorized Punktown with his bio-art. Two Health Agents on the artist’s trail had come to the Hill Way Galleries to have a look at Loveland’s art therein, in the hopes of discovering clues. The way Miter told it, he had assisted the Health Agents in their case; one might think that when these men finally defeated Loveland, Miter was right there beside them. The museum had acquired more of Loveland’s art after his death – including a bio-engineered golem of roughly human form, its flesh programmed to once an hour sprout clusters of what looked like little wavering branches or an unraveling circulatory system, before returning always to its original shape. Now that LeBlanc thought of it, this effigy reminded him of the Antse flesh scarecrow. It also had sort of reminded him of himself, sometimes. Was he only a tricky moving sculpture imitating a man? Might he himself be housed in a place like this one day, a mere artifact of the culture that had fashioned him?

  “Well I swept this floor and two pretty thoroughly, and didn’t see anything,” LeBlanc reported. “If you’re really worried, we could get the forcers down here to do a scan.”