Ghosts of Punktown

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Thank you -- that’s very sweet of you. You know, two young men passed me on the way up and neither of them so much as looked at me.”

  Hanako was not surprised. Very little surprised her about Punktown anymore, and she had only moved here from the larger but less infamous colony-city of Miniosis three months ago. Even in Miniosis, she had been well accustomed to the vileness of the human race. And nonhuman races, too.

  “What floor are you on?” she asked the woman, having taken hold of the cart’s handle along with her. Together, they dragged it up step after step behind them.

  “Four, just up here,” the woman said, tilting her head. “Which floor do you live on, dear? I’ve never seen you before.”

  “Five,” Hanako replied. “I’ve only been here a few months. Plus, I travel a lot.”

  “Do you live with your parents?” The old woman looked her up and down dubiously.

  Hanako smiled. “I live alone. I’m an adult – I have a condition that has fixed my physical age at fourteen.”

  “Oh, my! Well, you’re very beautiful, no matter what age you are. You’re as adorable as a little doll. But you weren’t lying – you are stronger than you look, aren’t you?”

  A more uncomfortable smile flitted on Hanako’s face, and she changed the subject. “Can’t you have your groceries delivered to you?”

  “I like to shop in person, not order on the computer. Choose my own tomatoes, you know? I don’t want to stay cooped up inside all the time.”

  “Of course not. You must be careful outside, though, please.”

  “Oh, you need to be more careful than I do, my dear…look at you.”

  Hanako considered complimenting the woman on the beauty she retained but thought it might sound insincere, obligatory, so she didn’t. As they dragged the cart up the last step to the fourth floor landing, and passed into the narrow, stuffy corridor that led off from it, Hanako asked, “Which door?”

  “Apartment 12, at the far end.”

  The old woman punched in her password on the keypad beside the door. Hanako couldn’t help herself from noticing that the password spelled out NURSERY. Unlike the malfunctioning elevator, the door promptly slid back into the wall. On the threshold, the woman turned to invite Hanako inside for a cup of tea. Hanako was anxious to return to her own apartment, having just arrived back in Punktown by shuttle flight from a business trip to the southwestern Outback Colony, but she didn’t want to hurt the woman’s feelings by declining her kind gesture. She supposed she could spare a half hour more before showering and then winding down in front of the VT, on the sofa -- where she would probably spend the night. And that was okay. There was no one to share her bedroom with.

  “Wonderful!” the old woman said, and before she led the way inside she told Hanako her name was Sabina.

  The moment she stepped into Sabina’s apartment, Hanako was suffused with awe. The air was dense, humid. Either the air circulation was malfunctioning, or else the apartment’s atmosphere was thick with the emanations of the plant life that exploded all around her, from every available space and surface.

  “You have a green thumb,” Hanako said in wonder, turning slowly to take it all in.

  “I have a green everything,” Sabina joked, already filling an old-fashioned tea kettle with water.

  They stole sips of their tea as Hanako helped Sabina put away her groceries, starting with those that required refrigeration. Also, in the midst of this activity Sabina would point out a plant on this shelf, atop that appliance, basking on a windowsill to drink in the faux sunlight of Subtown. Addressing this very issue, Sabina said, “I’ve been lucky with a lot of plants that normally wouldn’t do well with only artificial light. It’s trial and error with plants -- I’ve had many failures. But some of my babies I’ve had for fifteen years or more.”

  “Oh my, that’s wonderful,” Hanako said. “I’m very impressed. I really wish I had time for a hobby like this.”

  “Hm…I don’t like to think of it as a hobby,” Sabina said, refilling their cups. “I worked in the nursing field all my life, and I made a good living at it. I was the head of the nursing department at Central Hospital for eleven years. Caring for the sick, nurturing so many different types of sentient beings for all that time. Well, when I retired I couldn’t just stop caring for others, could I? Only, these days, these are my ‘others.’” She gestured around the kitchen. “These are my patients, my children, my everything.”

  “You don’t have children?”

  “No. My husband and I didn’t. Too busy working, both of us. Nicolas passed away eight years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You?” Sabina asked.

  “Me? You mean husband, or children?”

  “Either.”

  “Neither. Never,” Hanako stammered. “Too busy…like you were.” She gave a jerky shrug.

  “Oh dear! A lovely girl like you? Do you think men are shy of you because you look so young?”

  Hanako wanted to laugh at the woman; how could she be so naïve? It was because of her youthful appearance that men had given her no rest. Instead, she said, “Maybe I’m the one who’s too shy. But I have devoted myself very much to my career, so...”

  “So did I,” Sabina sighed, “so did I.” With all the groceries now settled in place, she gestured for Hanako to follow her into the next room – which, from the orientation of her own apartment, Hanako knew would be the living room. “Come on…you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  Now Hanako did laugh out loud, but it was a sound of delight rather than mockery. This living room was nothing like her own, which was almost as neat and nondescript as the hotel rooms she had occupied in the course of her business travels. She exclaimed, “It’s like a greenhouse in here!” There were pathways through the verdant foliage that spilled out from every direction, but there were areas of the room she thought one might need a machete to get to. How did Sabina ever water all the plants in the far corners…and did she ever forget to water some of them, in all this chaos? Big pots stood on the floor, smaller pots crowded shelves and little tables and windowsills, or hung by chains from the ceiling. The slowly declining, false light of dusk that slanted through the windows was spattered upon countless leaves, and the room had an overall subdued greenish glow, like the floor of some deep enchanted forest. Just as Punktown’s many races coexisted shoulder-to-shoulder in the chaos outside these walls, and above their heads, so did the flora of numerous worlds thrive here in a kind of botanical microcosm.

  Sabina noticed Hanako admiring a large plant close by the doorway, sprouting from a beautiful glazed pot standing on the floor. “Both this plant and the pot are from Sinan,” she explained, but Hanako might have guessed that from the brilliant blue of the plant’s large rubbery leaves. All the plant life on the extradimensional world of Sinan was one or other shade of blue. “It’s a cousin of this plant, but with even longer leaves, that the Sinanese use to wrap up their dead before they bring them to the underground tunnels where they lay them to rest.”

  “Such a collection,” Hanako remarked. “You put so much love into this…it must be so rewarding for you.”

  “It keeps me out of trouble,” Sabina said, leaning in to blow a little dust off the leaves of another plant beside her. The apartment was less than tidy in other ways – books overflowed from shelves, and were stacked on tables amongst the plants, with more potted plants perched upon some of these book stacks – but compared to the sterility of her own apartment on the floor above, Hanako found it all quite charming. Was it that she was not home often enough, worked and traveled too many hours, or was she herself simply too lacking in this ambiguous “soul” people spoke of to have created an environment of such rich character to dwell in?

  “Like I say, this is my life’s work now,” Sabina continued, “but of course I began it before I retired from my ‘real’ job.” She made hooked quotation marks with her fingers at the word “real.” “You must be familiar with the Japanese exp
ression ‘rice work.’”

  “Uh…hm?” Hanako said.

  “Oh, so you’re not? Well, then, in the culture of your ancestors, the work that puts food on the table is your ‘rice work.’ As opposed to your ‘life work,’ which is the work you truly love. The work that really enriches you.”

  “Ah, I see,” Hanako said. She lied, “Forgive me…I’ve never studied my own heritage as much as I should.”

  “That’s all right, dear! Anyway, as much as I loved my nursing work, and so many of the patients I came to know over the years, growing plants was always my personal passion. I even had a rooftop garden where my husband and I grew vegetables, right in the middle of this terrible city, before he died and I had to move down here to this smaller place.” Sabina wandered further into the room, and Hanako followed her, fronds and branches and flowers brushing against them both in whispery caresses. “So what’s your rice work, honey, and what is your life work?”

  “Well,” Hanako said, and found herself stammering again, “I guess I only have my rice work. I don’t even know what my life work would be.”

  Sabina stopped to face the younger woman again, the two of them standing in a clearing at the center of the enchanted woods. “Oh, my cutie,” she said. “Tell me you know yourself better than that.”

  Hanako gave another uneasy smile. She felt a twitch in her neck, and hoped it didn’t show – or look too unnatural if it did. She was feeling trapped in her blandly fashionable businesswoman’s jacket and skirt – too tight, too constricting after all these hours. She had not been designed to wear an abundance of clothing.

  Hanako hated lying to her kindly neighbor by omission, yet how could she tell Sabina that she wasn’t an adult woman consigned by some medical condition or mutation to forever look fourteen years old…but rather, that she was actually younger than fourteen years old? That she had started her life, such as it was, as fourteen years old?

  How to explain that she was not Japanese? Nor even a human?

  Sabina put a hand on her arm, seemed to sense the uneasiness in her. “I’m sorry, darling, I shouldn’t lecture you. Come on, come over here and I’ll show you my pride and joy. A mother isn’t supposed to have favorites among her children, but…”

  Hanako hadn’t clearly seen the far side of the room before, for all the indoors forest that obscured it, but as Sabina led her through her secret garden Hanako realized that the entire back wall was covered in a dense mat of vines, like ivy but of a deep purple color, with a metallic sheen. It looked synthetic.

  “This is a vine native to Ram,” Sabina explained. Hanako had seen vids of Ram, with its feline-faced humanoids. Their ancient warrior caste was often compared to the samurai. “I never know if my plants feel my love for them, and feel anything for me in return. Not that I ask them to demonstrate it to me. But this one is very special, very unique.”

  A rocking chair was positioned here beside a little table. Above them, affixed to the back wall, was a shelf. Not only were the wall’s pair of windows covered by the purple leaves (Hanako could only tell there were windows here by slight depressions in their outline, and because they corresponded with windows in her own flat) but the vines had also swallowed up the shelf. And in addition, had apparently smothered a cat, as well. A cat-shape made of leaves rested at the end of the leaf-coated shelf.

  “Is that,” Hanako stuttered, pointing, “was that…”

  Sabina laughed, and put a hand on Hanako’s arm. “I know what you’re thinking. It was only a ceramic kitty, don’t worry. On Ram, these vines are used to make hedge animals and other decorative forms on the grounds of palaces and temples. But they aren’t trimmed into those forms; these plants are trained to grow that way, by special artisans using ancient techniques I don’t even understand. But my baby here demonstrated a little something of that ability for me, on its own. You see, one day when I woke up I found my ceramic kitty smashed on the floor. The vines had spread during the night and accidentally nudged it off the shelf. I was very upset – the kitty had belonged to my mother. Well how could this plant have known that? Yes, I made some sounds of unhappiness, but I didn’t scold the plant. And yet…the next day when I woke up, this cat was here instead.”

  “You mean…you mean, there’s nothing inside this shape?”

  “There is something, but more about that in a moment. The ceramic kitty is no more. But that shape you see is the exact same size and shape of the kitty my plant accidentally smashed. It remade it for me. Because somehow, my dear…it was sorry.”

  “Oh my,” Hanako said, turning to view the wall of metallic purple leaves with fresh eyes.

  “Like I say, there is something inside my replica cat, though. I’ll show you.” Sabina moved closer to the shelf, reached up toward the cat figure and gently parted the leaves with her hands. She reached inside, and delicately coaxed out something like a hidden egg the size of a baseball. The glossy, plum-colored orb was tethered to the interior of the cat as if by an umbilicus, but it was of course the end of a vine. Or perhaps, Hanako considered, the very beginning of all these vines – the first shoot of a bulb.

  But this bulb also had a ring of soft spines around its base, and when Sabina set the orb down on the shelf beside the kitty, the spines started moving like the cilia of a microscopic animal. The round, insect-like form slowly crawled back to the cat, and began nudging its way inside. It took several minutes for the egg to be fully concealed once more.

  “It’s shy,” Sabina said simply, with a fond smile.

  Hanako felt a pleasing sensation of experiencing something new and remarkable. She supposed this was the equivalent of a human’s sense of wonder.

  Sabina’s affectionate smile was closely followed by a scowl of discomfort, and she felt behind her for the wooden rocking chair, which she lowered herself into carefully. “I’m sorry, dear.” Suddenly she sounded short of breath. “Please, take the books off that chair over there and sit with me.”

  “Are you okay?” Hanako had taken an impulsive step toward the aged woman.

  “I think the same company that made our elevator made this poor clunky ticker of mine.” Sabina pressed her palm between her breasts.

  “Your heart is artificial?”

  “Yes, dear. You’re too young to remember, but my poor husband and I lived in this town back when the pollution made the whole sky rusty red some days. Back when those old pollution suckers used to float over the city. It’s much better now, but the damage is done for so many of us. Maybe it’s best my hubby and I never had children – there are enough mutants already in this city, and with our health problems that’s what we might have faced.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about your heart,” Hanako said. She was intrigued that they both possessed an artificial heart, but that they should still be such different kinds of entities.

  She also felt true concern for the woman, however. This fact in itself intrigued her. Was this a result of the most recent upgrades she had arranged for herself, or was it a natural if rather unexpected development of her original programming – which had called for her to be sweet, courteous, attentive to the pleasure of others?

  Whatever the cause of her feelings, from that day on she not only helped Sabina bring her groceries up to her apartment (which proved easy when the elevator was functioning properly), but she would also accompany her to the market. She bought little for herself on these excursions, of course. Though she could drink and even eat, she did not need to nor have the means of enjoying it, and later would only drain out the tea and pastries Sabina served her after their shopping trips, through a port hidden in her navel.

  Did part of her feel obligated, still, to be solicitous toward a human being? Was her caring reaction beyond her control? No…she felt she was more in command of herself than that. After all, on one of her visits to add an illegal enhancement to her system, she had also had the tech heat-seal the openings to her vagina and rectum.

  “Here, I want to give you something,” Sabina said
in sudden inspiration, when Hanako was about to leave after that first visit. The old woman had regained some strength, but Hanako had suggested she should go so Sabina could lie down and get some proper rest. Sabina moved to a metal floor rack with several shelves, and came back to Hanako clutching a tiny, oddly-shaped orange plant bristling with spines. “This is a Kalian cactus, love.”

  “Thank you,” Hanako said, accepting the offering awkwardly. Cupping the little potted cactus made her philosophical; even this primitive organism was technically more alive than she. “But I’m not sure how well I would do caring for a plant. And with my traveling…”

  “Relax, dear. It gets moisture from the air. For this baby to die you’d have to kill it on purpose.”

  HUCK

  1

  The sea was hazy with summer heat and humidity. These stimuli were the only aspects of the scene that Huck was not given to experience – after all, some of the poker players around him were already sweating enough without that discomfort, and they couldn’t cool off in the waves like the people Huck sat watching as he sucked at his eighth bottle of Zub.