“We want to live as you do,” Jones went on, improvising now as the rest of the words slipped through the fingers of his mind. He thought of his own hellish nest, and of Edgar’s tiny black shed of a home. “We want...”
“Hey! Freeze!” he heard Parr yell.
Jones snapped his head around. What was happening? Had another bodyguard emerged from one of the other rooms? They should have checked all of the rooms first, they should have...
Parr was pointing the police issue pistol at him, not at some new player, and before Jones could bring his own gun around Parr snapped off five shots in rapid succession. Gas clouds flashed from the muzzle, heat lightning with no thunder, but the lightning struck Jones down. He felt a fireball streak across the side of his throat, deadened somewhat by the scarf wound there. He was kicked by a horse in the collarbone, and three projectiles in a cluster entered the upper left side of his chest. He spun down onto his belly on the white carpet, and saw his blood flecked there like beads of dew, in striking close up. Beautiful red beads like tiny rubies clinging to the white fibers of the carpet. Even violence was glamorous in this place.
Mayda scampered closer, kicked his small silvery gun out of his hand. Jones’s guts spasmed, but his outer body didn’t so much as flinch. He cracked his lids a fraction, through crossed lashes saw Parr moving closer as well. For a moment, he had thought it was another man. Since firing the shots from behind the camera, out of its view, Parr had shed the bogus forcer uniform and changed into street clothes.
“I thought I heard a strange voice in here, Mr. Mayda!” Parr gushed, out of breath. “I dozed off in the other room...I’m so sorry! Are you all right?”
“Yes, thank God. He killed Brett!”
“How’d he get in here?”
“I don’t know...Brett went to answer the door, and the next thing I knew...”
Parr didn’t work for the Plant, Jones realized now, poor dumb culture that he was. He cursed himself. He wasn’t street smart. He was a child. He was five years old...
Parr worked for Ephraim Mayda, captain of a union, friend of the syndicate. Mayda, whose trusting followers killed others and themselves to fight for a job, to fight for their bread and shelter, while his job was to exploit their hunger, their anger and fear.
And the vid. The vid of a murderous clone attacking a hero of the people, stopped just in time by a loyal bodyguard (while another loyal bodyguard, poor Brett, had been sacrificed). One murderous forerunner of a much larger threat, as he had proclaimed. The vid that would unite the public against the cultures, lead to an outcry for the abolition of cloned workers...to their mass incineration...
He had almost seen this before. He’d let the money dazzle him. The bullets had slapped him fully awake.
“Call the forcers!” Mayda said for the benefit of the camera, sounding shaken, though he had known all along he was safe.
Through his lashes, Jones saw Parr stoop to retrieve his silvery handgun.
Jones’s left arm was folded under him. He reached into his coat, and rolling onto his side, tore free a second gun, this one glossy black, a gun Parr hadn’t known about, and as Parr lifted his startled head, Jones let loose a volley of shots as fast as he could depress the trigger. Parr sat down hard on his rump comically, and as each shot struck him he bounced like a child on his father’s knee. When at last Jones stopped shooting him, his face almost black with blood and holes, Parr slumped forward into his own lap.
Jones sat up with a nova of agony in his chest, and a nova of hot gas exploded before his eyes as he saw Mayda bolting for the door. The shot hit the birther in the right buttock, and he sprawled onto his face shrieking like a hysterical child frightened by a nightmare.
As Jones struggled to his feet, staggered and regained his footing, Mayda pulled himself toward the door on his belly. Almost casually, Jones walked to him, stood over him, and pointed the small black gun. Mayda rolled over to scream up at him and bullets drove the scream back into his throat. Jones shot out both eyes, and bullets punched in his nose and smashed his teeth, so that the face remaining looked to Jones like Edgar’s with its simple black holes for features.
The gun had clicked empty. He let it drop, stepped over Mayda’s body, over Brett’s body further on, and then stopped before the door, snuffing his ski hat over the flames of his skull. But before he opened the door, he changed his mind and returned to the plush, vast parlor just for a moment...
* * *
It was an hour to dawn when Magnesium Jones reached the house of Edgar Allan Jones on the Obsidian Street Overpass.
Edgar croaked in delight to see him, until the withered being saw the look on the taller culture’s face. It took Jones’s arm, and helped him as he stooped to enter the tiny black-painted shack.
“You’re hurt!” Edgar cried, supporting Jones as he lowered himself into a small rickety chair at a table in the center of the room. Aside from shelves, there was little else. No bed. A radio played music like the cries of whales in reverse, and a kettle was steaming on a battery-pack hot plate.
“I have something for you,” Jones said, his voice a wheeze, one of his lungs deflated in the cradle of his ribs. “A Christmas present...”
“I have to get help. I’ll go out...stop a car in the street,” Edgar went on.
Jones caught its arm before Edgar could reach the door. He smiled at the creature. “I’d like a cup of tea,” he said.
For several moments Edgar stared at the man, gouged features unreadable. Then, in slow motion, head blurring, it turned and went to the hot plate and steaming kettle.
While Edgar’s back was turned, Jones reached into his long black coat, now soaked heavy with his blood, and from a pouch in its lining withdrew a sculpture carved from opalescent crystal. It was a fierce Ramon warrior, bringing his lance to bear. He placed it on the table quietly, so that the stunted clone would be surprised when it turned back around.
And while he waited for Edgar to turn around with his tea, Jones stripped off his ski hat and lowered his fiery brow onto one arm on the table. Closed his eyes to rest.
Yes, he would just rest a little while...until his friend finally turned around.
UNLIMITED DAYLIGHT
“The eye altering, alters all.”
—William Blake
Anoushka didn’t care for virtual bookstores. Well, she spent time in them if she couldn’t locate a particular book elsewhere, and admitted that they had their value...but because so many favored them, rhapsodized over their convenience, she felt inclined to disparage them in her defense of Paxton’s innumerable tangible bookstores. A frequent argument in favor of the virtual shop was that one didn’t have to leave the comfort (and safety; this was Paxton, better known as Punktown, after all) of one’s home. But that was just it. Anoushka wanted to venture out into the city...to occupy a physical space other than that of her apartment. To sip a coffee in those shops that incorporated a café, to listen to living breathing musicians rather than the recorded jazz, folk and ethnic musicians inserted into many of the VR shops. Some VR stores even had cafés, and if you had the right interface equipment you could smell the aroma of brewing coffee, and imagine you were tasting it. Anoushka found this offensive. One might as well pickle one’s brain in a jar, wire it up to a state-of-the-art computer, and draw in all of one’s life experiences that way. Pseudo life. Bogus life. A why-be-alive life.
For the same reason, she favored the solid article, the artifact, of a physical book over a net book, a disk book. Something she could hold in her hands, that she could smell (she loved to press her nose into the open cleft of a book, and inhale its bright new ink or its musty age). Anoushka would no sooner favor a virtual book over a tangible book than she would choose a robot child over a flesh and blood infant. A VR lover over a man formed from living cells.
On the net it was even possible to tour most of this vast, Earth-established colony city on the planet Oasis without having to brave its much-publicized and well-founded dangers. (Ther
e were some sections that were so unsafe as to be, in a sense, uncharted, unmapped; terror incognita.) Anoushka was willing to take those chances, so as to shop in a Vietnamese market. To buy some fried dilkies, a root favored by the native Choom people, from a street vendor. To feel the sun on her face in those streets that weren’t lost in the shadows of skyscrapers (some of which might more readily be called skypiercers). And it was one of her greatest pleasures to explore a bookstore for the first time. At least the net came in handy in listing Punktown’s many bookstores, large and small. But sometimes she stumbled upon an unlisted one, quite by accident. That was an especial delight.
It was summer; the air so thick that one might think the sewers had overflowed and their rancid waters risen to drown the city. Or Anoushka imagined this sea upon whose bottom she walked to be the juices wrung from millions of sweating bodies. Her round shoulders, bared by her sleeveless white blouse, were filmed in a sticky membrane of her own perspiration. Her skirt, clinging to full hips, was a silvery satin. Her garments made her pale, brown-yellow skin appear darker. She wore sandals. Men looked at her as she passed them. With her thick black hair, falling in lush snarls to the small of her back, huge dark eyes and full lips, she was very attractive. At the pharmacy where she worked, however, men were usually too irritable or old or both to flirt with her as she filled their prescriptions. Sometimes she wore a bindi, but not today, though there was a tiny gem in her left nostril.
At the end of her block, Anoushka descended into the subway to catch a tube to Ratchet Ave. Station. The neighborhood where she emerged was much like her own; not the best nor the worst Punktown had to offer. She had discovered a nice Indian restaurant here the last time she’d been through, on an errand...and it being the weekend, she had decided to have a bit of an excursion, a bite of lunch.
This street was lined in buildings left over from the Choom town that predated colonization, most of them of red or brown brick. A number of modern buildings had been made to resemble them, to preserve some sense of tradition, but elsewhere Anoushka saw newer buildings that had been built directly above the ancient structures on thick legs containing elevators, dwarfing the brick buildings in their less weathered shadows, and looking nothing like the native edifices whatsoever. Several of the old buildings had sealed windows and doors, were abandoned, crumbling, covered in graffiti, with ivy-like tendrils covering the sides that might catch a measure of sustaining sunlight during the day between the tides of city shadow.
She found her restaurant, read a book from her shoulder bag while she ate. She had been lucky to be seated by the front window, and would glance up from her food and book to watch pedestrians and vehicles, equally diverse in character, pass by outside. A man who darted across the street in the direction of the restaurant caught her attention...at first only because she was afraid he’d be struck by a hovercar, then because of his appearance.
Trying not to be blatant about it, she watched as he entered the restaurant and approached the reception counter. He seemed to be picking up an order he’d called in. He was not an Indian himself, though of course only half the patrons were, this afternoon. Tall, dressed in a black T-shirt several sizes too large for his slender frame, hanging loose over tight black jeans. Bulky black boots. His hair was shoulder length, parted in the center, black and more snarled than her own. Against all this black, his skin looked like blank paper. His nose was long, his lips very full and almost feminine. Anoushka found him terribly attractive.
Also black were the goggles he wore, their thick cup-like eyepieces snug to his face so as to let no light around them, so as to reveal not even a glimpse of the eyes beneath them. He looked like he’d taken a break from welding to grab a bite to eat. Maybe they were just his way of dealing with the summer sun and looking enigmatic besides.
Bagged food and some bills were exchanged, and the man left. Anoushka watched him dodge back across the street, and when he was out of sight returned to her reading. A brief distraction, a bit of candy for the eyes.
* * *
As Anoushka exited the Indian restaurant a small misshapen being, no doubt a mutant, walked directly across her path, its oversized head shaking from side to side uncontrollably. Given a start, she veered to avoid it, and another man hurrying along the sidewalk bumped her left shoulder. For a moment she felt a jolt of alarm; two years ago, a Coleopteroid had stolen her pocketbook and when she’d tried to hold onto it had slashed her across the wrist with one of its chitinous forelimbs, cutting her to the bone. The man who’d jostled her stopped to apologize, and looking up into his face she saw he was a Tikkihotto. Sometimes Anoushka thought that the human-like races such as the Tikkihotto and Choom were more unnerving than the beetle-like Coleopteroids and other nonhuman beings. They were almost entirely human in appearance, so the features that distinguished them (such as the Chooms’ ear-to-ear grin) seemed incongruous, more like deformities. Another human-like race, the gray-skinned Kalians, said that their god Ugghiutu had seeded the universe with humans, who had then adapted to their various worlds.
“Sorry,” the tall man said. Even his voice was entirely human.
“No problem,” Anoushka said, her teeth bright against her dusky skin. For a moment she stared up at the alien’s face. From the deep sockets of his skull, translucent filaments writhed in the air, like delicate sea plants stirring underwater. Like the rippling cilia on a microscopic organism. These tendrils were what the Tikkihotto had for eyes.
The man continued on his way. Anoushka wandered in the other direction. She wanted to explore this street a little farther before she turned back toward home. Prior to today, the Indian restaurant was as far as she’d ventured.
She saw a Tikkihotto woman with her infant child riding in a backpack. Its eye filaments squirmed as merrily as its stubby fingers. An older Tikkihotto man walked by her, his tendrils wavering more slowly, and looking whitish and opaque, less transparent with age. At the same time, Anoushka began to see shop signs that were written both in English and in the complex hieroglyphs of the Tikkihotto. So...this was a bit of a Tikkihotto neighborhood, then. She hadn’t known it existed here. But it didn’t surprise her, as she’d grown up in a largish Indian neighborhood on the suburban fringe, even gone to school with mostly her own kind. In that sense, she felt that her parents had sheltered her a bit. They had no doubt been as much concerned with protecting her sense of cultural identity as with protecting her from Punktown’s rampant crime. Still, Anoushka felt that up until her teens, she had been isolated from all but that little microcosmic community like an enclave within Punktown. She felt that if she hadn’t been so segregated, a race like the Tikkihotto or the native Chooms would not cause her the slightest unease.
Well, this area was by no means exclusively Tikkihotto, and Anoushka did not feel like an intruder—or in danger for being different, as she would in other, more homogeneous neighborhoods. She was even intrigued. Was that fast, twangy, bleating music she heard from an open window above her Tikkihotto in origin? What was advertised by the occasional sign that had no English translation whatsoever? Though the Tikkihotto written language might best be described as hieroglyphics, it also seemed to incorporate geometric designs, and the figures in the pictographs—while sometimes suggesting people, animals, physical articles—were more often than not unidentifiable. They either portrayed people and animals in a very abstract form, or they actually illustrated nothing except the abstraction of thought and concept. Whatever these symbols expressed, it was in a language suitably complex for the complex visual organs of these offworlders.
As she walked along the noisy street, Anoushka spied one sign that was written only in English. It was a vertical strip affixed to the brick face of an old Choom building, at the second floor level:
B
O
O
K
S
As simple, as generic, as that. But it was enough for Anoushka. Without hesitation, she headed directly for the structure’s recessed, paint-b
listered door.
* * *
The ground floor of the building was gutted, dark, though Anoushka thought she heard a rustle of movement from an open doorway in the hall. Ceiling plaster swollen and cracked, or broken to reveal bare slats. Graffiti on the water-stained walls. It was, in fact, Tikkihotto graffiti. Blurry, multicolored gibberish that almost made her eyes ache. Trying to interpret it was like looking for Whistler’s mother in a Pollock painting. She hastened to the stairs, not bothering to try the unreliable-looking lift at the gloomy hallway’s end.
On the second floor landing, she found herself before a closed door painted a bright glossy red that looked almost stickily fresh, a contrast to what she’d seen thus far. A sign fixed to the door read: RETKU’S BOOKS.
When she opened the door, a discreet beep alerted the counter man to her entrance. He sat at a low long table on which rested his register and the remnants of his lunch. He looked up at her over the rim of a mug of coffee. She couldn’t see his eyes, though, through the black lenses of the goggles he wore.
Anoushka almost froze on the threshold. One moment ticked by. “Hi,” she said.
The man she’d seen in the restaurant nodded, swallowed his mouthful of coffee. “Hi.”
The table was several paces from the door. She looked beyond it now, into the bookstore itself. It was smallish. Shelves lined the walls, formed a few aisles, and books were also heaped on more long tables and even overflowed boxes under these tables. Classical music played softly. She saw only two other people, both women, in the store, lost in their browsing...a young Earther and an elderly Tikkihotto.
“First time here?” asked the man behind the counter.
Anoushka took a couple of steps into the store at last, pulling the door shut behind her. She noted how nicely restored the hardwood floor was, glossy as amber. “Yeah. I was just out exploring. I’ve never heard of this shop before.”
Punktown Page 19
