“Huck, come on, friend…you shouldn’t talk like that. It’s disrespectful. And you know Wild Bill – he’s not the type to be afraid, or he wouldn’t be where he is today.”
“And I wouldn’t be sitting here with you today taking a severance package from Neptune Teeb if people weren’t afraid of me.”
Phlone’s wide Choom mouth, made wrinkly and sunken by his condition, grimaced unattractively. In a lower tone of voice he said, “Of course he’s afraid of you, Huck. Who isn’t?”
Huck leaned back in his chair again, as if satisfied by the meal that hadn’t arrived yet.
“Listen,” Phlone went on, “this is a juicy severance. Get yourself a nicer apartment, up here in the sunlight. Get yourself a couple new sexy girlfriends like this one.” He hooked a thumb toward Hien, who was taking an order at another table. “Enjoy the fruits of your labors. Travel, whatever. Just do what’s right, that’s all: don’t listen to the other families if they come knocking. Don’t draw any more attention to yourself -- keep a low profile. Keep your snout clean. Hang up the guns.”
“Hang up the guns,” Huck repeated to himself, watching a young couple who were seated nearby, swapping smiles and touching hands. They were as alien to him as those two Dacvibese sitting at another table. Hang up the guns…and yet, for the past twenty-something years, the only way he had been able to define his life was by stopping the lives of others.
“I’m impressed with you, how reasonable you’re being about this,” Phlone continued.
“How else could it be?” Huck muttered, averting his eyes as his cynical smile momentarily faltered. “Even I know I went too far this time.”
“Well you’re being a good boy now, and it’s appreciated. Keep it up, and enjoy your life. It’s a new life for you, man! Hey, I envy you. You’re getting out young. You’re getting out alive.”
“Right. And you be a good boy, too, Squash.”
“How’s that?”
“Don’t you come knocking later on, either, with second thoughts about that bonus I mentioned before.” Huck’s restored grin seemed almost as big as the Choom’s split-head mouth. “Or I’ll do you for nothing.” He held his right hand up in front of his eye, fingers curled in the shape of a zero – or a rifle scope.
HANAKO
3
Returning from her trip to Miniosis in the early evening, Hanako did not stop in to say hello to Sabina, but after she had showered and changed into more casual clothes she gave the old woman a call. Sabina did not answer, but Hanako thought that she might have retired early, and didn’t call again until the next morning. Again Sabina did not answer. Hanako had to go to work, but she tried phoning at her lunch break. Once more, no reply. This was the day of their weekly shopping excursions, once Hanako had come home from work -- but she didn’t want to wait for that.
She made some excuse to her manager about going home early. He didn’t protest; he’d been the perfect gentleman since the day she had thought she might have to kill him. (Whether or not he suspected she was not human she didn’t know.)
Hanako did not own a vehicle herself (again, afraid to have her background checked), so she rode public transit down into Subtown, and to her neighborhood…walked briskly the rest of the way, the high heels that added a little to her 4’9” frame clicking sharply against the pavement. As she neared her apartment building, passing a section of the park they called the Jungle, she heard the rustling of vegetation and wet smacking sounds, and looked to her right. Behind the fence, several faces peered out at her from parted foliage, between the bars like animals in a zoo. They were young men, making kissing sounds at her and lapping at the air. “Hey, little girl, come here a minute,” one of the Jungle savages called.
She faced forward again, picked up her pace a little and clicked up the front steps of her building, on into the lobby. She didn’t even waste time checking on the elevator (maybe that scruffy man in the leather jacket was in there yet, still propped up by the wall), and danced up the staircases to the fourth floor instead.
At the far end of the hallway, Hanako buzzed the door to Apartment 12. She waited a few moments, buzzed again. Finally, she pounded the heel of her fist on the door. Still, no one responded to her summons. She stood contemplating the door, then, her arms hanging at her sides, trying to compute the possibilities. Maybe Sabina had gone on her own little trip? Perhaps she had relatives or other friends she hadn’t told Hanako about?
Her eyes settled on the keypad, and she called to mind the password she couldn’t help noticing the first time Sabina had invited her in. She reached out her hand, and punched in N…U…R…S…E…R…Y.
The door slid open, and Hanako stepped inside. If she had possessed a sense of smell, she wouldn’t have bothered calling out, “Sabina?” as she ventured into the dark, secret garden within.
There was a creaking noise ahead. Hanako recognized it as the sound of Sabina’s wooden rocking chair in motion. Relieved, she felt an unwilled smile come to her face. “Sabina?” she said again, making her way to the back of the living room. “I’m sorry I let myself in…”
Hanako saw Sabina silhouetted in her rocking chair against an open window. From outside came the sounds of traffic; hovercars close to the street, lesser numbers of helicars coasting higher. But immediately this scene registered as wrong to Hanako. In all the times she had been in the apartment, this window had been completely covered by the dark purple vines of Sabina’s favorite plant.
“Sabina?” Hanako said, and when she advanced a bit closer two things were revealed. These incongruous revelations made her stop in her tracks so that she might clearly observe them, try somehow to assimilate them.
Sabina lay on the floor near the rocker, her body having been obscured before by the fronds of a large potted plant. Hanako did not know how to judge such things, but she might have guessed that Sabina had been dead for several days – might even have expired the same day she had left on her trip. Her eyes and mouth were open, and she looked older than she had in life – as if some vital component had been extracted, leaving just a husk like a chrysalis. A flesh mannequin.
The Sabina that rocked in the chair was formed of tightly woven vines and leaves of a dark purple color. It was a perfect sculpture; Hanako could even recognize the subtle shapes of the old woman’s face, with the pronounced cheekbones that spoke of her youthful beauty. If she looked closely enough she could see that the feet of wound vines were flexing ever so slightly, enough to keep the rocker in motion.
“Did you do this to her?” Hanako asked the golem. She looked around her, and noticed that a few small plants had been knocked from their shelves, one large potted plant now tipped over and its soil spilled across the floor. The shards of a decorative plate lay scattered amongst the patches of spilled dirt. A splayed magazine, a shattered tea cup – maybe one that Hanako herself had lifted to her lips after one of their expeditions to the market.
She drew closer to the open window, carefully stepping around the old woman’s corpse. Now she noted how the window had been wrenched open, tearing the vines that had cloaked it before. Clumps of the vine lay about the floor here, where they had been torn free – apparently by human hands. She even spotted some gashes in the window frame, as if some heavy bladed instrument had been used to hack at the thick web of vines.
Hanako leaned out the window, and for the first time took in how the vines had actually grown out the window and down the back wall of the apartment building, reaching to the ground. Sabina must have left the window open just a crack to allow the vines to spread – that, or they had nudged the window open themselves. Either way, the window had obviously not been locked. And Hanako could see how the vines growing on the outside wall were damaged, as well. Damaged, she deduced, by whoever it was who had climbed up the vines like a rope ladder, all the way up here to the fourth floor of the apartment building…then forced open the window, hacked and torn at the vines…and entered into Sabina’s apartment.
A distant who
op, like the call of a wild animal, caused Hanako to lift her eyes and stare into the depths of the overgrown park. She scanned the clumps of trees, then shifted her gaze when she detected movement in a field of grass grown taller than a man. Vague figures moved through the elephant grass. She followed their progress until the figures emerged at the edge of the pond, covered by its thick green membrane of algae. They were a half dozen youths without shirts, wearing blue camouflage fatigue pants. Two of them carried machetes.
Slowly Hanako withdrew, back into the apartment, and regarded Sabina again. Then turning, regarded the rocking doppelganger. Softly, she said to it, “You didn’t kill her. You only miss her.”
She considered reaching her hand into the figure, taking hold of the insect-like bulb she knew would be hiding within – as if it were the sculpture’s heart – but decided to leave the little entity here with its dead master.
“You loved her,” Hanako stated. “You wanted to make her again. But we can’t, can we?”
The rocking figure did not reply. The two effigies merely shared each other’s company for a short while.
* * *
Several forcers came first, in their black uniforms and intimidating full-head helmets, but then a pair of plainclothes detectives arrived. One of them was a human, very tall and thin, lost in his rumpled suit, his gaunt face very pale and with black hair falling almost to his waist. He stood gazing moodily out the open window as if contemplating a lost love, or suicide, rather than the cause of Sabina’s death. His partner was a Fekah, wearing a badly fitted suit and a red-tinted fishbowl helmet. The tinting was to protect the Fekah’s sensitive eyes, but the helmet was mostly to protect other races from the strangely loud and disturbing sound of his respiration. The Fekah had something of the appearance of a bipedal giant frog, all white, with the feathery gills of an immature salamander. Maybe that was why some referred to the Fekahs as “Hellbenders.” This one was the senior of the two detectives, so it was with him that Hanako talked. Besides, the other one seemed too lost in his own tragic thoughts.
His translated voice coming to Hanako via a microphone, the Fekah asked her, “What was your relationship with the deceased?”
Hanako said four words, then, that she had never thought she would utter. “She was my friend.”
“You told the officers that you let yourself in with the deceased’s password. Why did you know it?”
They weren’t suspecting her, were they? Hanako lied, “She gave it to me in case something ever happened to her, and she couldn’t come to the door. She was in poor health.”
“Do you know if she has family…next of kin?”
“I don’t really know.”
“All right – that’s something we’ll be looking into.”
Hanako glanced behind her, at the spot on the floor where Sabina had lain. Her body had been removed a few minutes earlier. “Do you think she was murdered?”
“Every possibility will be considered.”
“I’m sure one or more people climbed up the vines outside, and came in through the window here. The window was completely covered by vines the last time I was here. They had to have come over the fence, from the park.”
“My partner is working on that possibility right now, miss.” The Fekah gestured one webbed hand toward his moody colleague. “He’s a mutant, with PSI ability. He’s trying to call up what transpired.”
“Oh my,” Hanako said, impressed. She added helpfully, “I think it was some young men I saw out the window, in the park. They had machetes…and I think you can see chop marks on the window frame. They must have wanted money for drugs or such. Can you check to see if they took money from her?”
“As I say, we’re looking into every possibility.” Though uninflected, somehow the Fekah’s synthetic voice still managed to sound annoyed. “Just let us do the detective work, okay?”
Hanako knew, from watching the news on VT, how overworked Punktown’s police force was – how impossible their task of investigating and solving all of its crimes. Still, she was about to persist when she heard a little sob from the man at the window, and turned to see him covering his eyes with one hand, his shoulders slumped disconsolately.
“Do you have something, Wilbur?” asked the Fekah.
“Not on the woman…but a little girl was killed in the park, just right down here, about ten years ago I’d say. I can see the case was already solved, though.”
The Fekah sighed – a sound that might have deafened a man had he not been wearing his helmet – and explained to Hanako, “It’s an inexact science.”
“Will you look into those young men?”
“Yeah yeah…I told you, miss, just let us do our jobs.”
“Will you call me when you have more information?”
“You can call us…but give us a chance, will you?”
Hanako nodded helplessly. She felt an impulse to sigh, herself. Not for the first time, she settled her gaze on Sabina’s wooden rocker. Upon its seat, and on the floor in front of it, was heaped a shapeless mass of vines. When she’d returned to the apartment with the first forcers, she had found the vines this way – the effigy of Sabina fallen away. There was no sign of the glossy purple bulb. Hiding…somewhere in this forest.
“Who will care for her plants now?” Hanako asked, looking all around her now as if the full impact of Sabina’s absence was finally coming home to her. “Many of them will die if they’re not watered soon.”
“I told you,” the Fekah said testily, “we’ll be looking for her next of kin. That isn’t your concern.”
HUCK
3
The girl in his apartment building’s elevator had put the brothel where he had once functioned as a bouncer into the forefront of Huck’s mind, and so after his lunch with Phlone he had decided to shoot his helicar over there. He didn’t know if he were acting upon Phlone’s insistence that he should pursue the recreations of a retired man…if he were acting on anything other than another of his body’s hungers that needed fulfilling. Or maybe what he needed was a better-looking conversationalist than Phlone. Who was he kidding – the staff of prosties at this whorehouse was entirely made up of pleasure machines. But sometimes he had liked them better than the real deal. No artificial woman had ever sneered at him, slapped him, spat on him.
The helicar was a big old Albatross model, pearly white and with flared fins and chrome trim. The brothel was up here, in the city proper, and Huck lifted the car high enough that he broke from the deep shadows that drowned the streets, up into the blaze of the sun he sometimes didn’t emerge to witness for weeks at a time. Squinting, he tapped a key to tint his windshield a darker shade. The establishment was not far from Pho Paxton, and he alighted on the rooftop parking lot. A smiling attendant in a trim, snug uniform stepped forward to greet him. Her blouse was cut especially low. She was of Asian design, as were all the models in this particular brothel. There were pleasure houses of every style, catering to every desire, in abundance throughout Punktown: offering humans, androids and cyborgs, aliens and mutants, males and females and combinations of the two. Many establishments were illegal – such as those that catered to pedophiles, necrophiliacs and animal lovers, of course -- though this one was licensed…actually, one of the legitimate business assets of syndy lord, and Huck’s former boss as of today, Neptune Teeb.
It had been some years since he’d been here, and he couldn’t tell if any of the girls he encountered in the front lounge -- whether cyborgs sheathed in human flesh or totally synthetic androids, like the girl in the elevator – were among the same prosties he would have been familiar with back then, but they all smiled at him brightly when they made eye contact with him. Some of the androids, even with their synthetic skin, were so convincing -- right down to occasional moles and the subtle textures of their faces -- that even on close inspection they could pass as human, while others were intentionally less realistic, smooth as children’s dolls, some even with slightly disproportionate heads and extra-large
eyes. Even the more realistic models, when they greeted him, held their eyes open wide and blinked with deliberate slowness, designed to imitate the cute kawaii look of girls in manga and anime. Many real human girls practiced the same mannerisms, after all. Robots imitating komikku girls that were an imitation of real girls, who in turn imitated the komikku girls.
Huck spotted one girl frolicking with some middle-aged businessmen in a pool in the center of the lounge, which dominated the building’s ground floor, who wore a skimpy white bikini. She looked so like the girl in the elevator that he might have believed it was the same person, had she been a person. He considered motioning for her to come out and meet him, but instead settled on an older-looking girl (she might even have passed for a woman of twenty-five) of the Hikaru model.
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