Read Ghosts of Punktown Online
Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
When my vision cleared, the hovering doorway had disappeared.
* * *
I’m forty-four now, and plenty of people speculate that Neptune Teeb will pass his crown to his right-hand man, Wild Bill, should he retire before some enemy guns him down.
I still live alone, in my luxury Beaumonde Street apartment, except for the soldiers and servants who live in the two adjacent apartments. I still sit up watching VT at night. Or else I listen to music, usually from the extensive works of Del Kahn and Frankie Dystopia. When they sing of love found and lost, of devotion and desperation, it’s the closest I have to Candy whispering to me as we lay together on her fold-out sofa.
Ten years earlier I’d put out my ears, expecting to hear that a woman’s skeleton – missing one hand – had been discovered on the floor of apartment 30 in the Colonial Estates. But it never happened.
I know it’s a slim hope to hang onto...that she’d made some adjustments to her computers, and opened up another path for herself. That she was lost for a time in that twisty maze, but would eventually make her way out the other end of it. It was a slim hope, that a young girl like her would appear before this aging hood someday, with the same avowals of everlasting love on her tongue.
But maybe not so slim. “Don’t ever leave me,” Candy had said.
So I never have. And never will.
1
The Scowling Buddha, on Golgotha Street, had been their watering hole come the weekend. Now, without her, it was Swift’s watering hole come almost every night. To reach it, Swift had to take a shunt line – spitting sparks in its wake over the clotted streets of Punktown – from the biotech company for which he worked. That was the point of it; the bar was distant from the clubs and pubs that most of the other employees tended to favor. The two of them had not wanted their coworkers seeing them together, because she had been married to another man.
The harsh violet light in the Scowling Buddha was like the glow used to entice and fry summer insects. They had always sat at the same little table, unless it was already taken, in which case they would sit at a second favorite little table, but now Swift hung over the bar as if it were a beer-sticky bit of shipwreck flotsam. He had a mug of Knickerson beer (“knickers off,” he would toast her) in front of him, and he alternated between glowering fuzzily at the VT and the laughing couple who sat at their primary favorite table. The couple were too loud, too cozy, as if they had been hired to sit there and mock him. They even had a bottle of Merlot between them, and Merlot had always been Talane’s drink.
The bartender had begun an automatic advance through the VT’s endless channels, but had been called away and forgotten, or else he simply liked the effect of the channels changing, the flash and flutter of light, the succession of faces like people remembered in one’s dying moments, the snatches of music and chopped off splinters of dialogue. Swift heard a mere second’s worth of the theme song from a children’s show called
Wunderdumpling
, but he knew the song well enough to recognize it, and it was like a cattle prod to his sternum.
They had watched
Wunderdumpling
in bed on a couple of occasions – his bed, in his flat, never her place because she didn’t live alone as he did – and with her long bareness pressed down the length of his side, Talane would jauntily sing the theme song, but change the words to say,
“My name is Wunderdumpling, I love to go a-humping...”
That one-
second blip felt like a signal to him, a single word spoken at a séance, cryptic but in a familiar voice. It made him feel that he was immersed in memory, as if he were a tiny bug drowned at the bottom of his own glass.
A tiny mechanical bug, he mused. Like the bugs they manufactured at their workplace.
An eruption of laughter made him crank his eyes, hard as billiard balls with the pain of his headache, toward the corner. Two large young men – like Swift, ancestors of the Earth colonists who had established Punktown here on the world Oasis – were having a boozily good time pitching darts. They were regulars like himself, though he had never interacted with them, but he had never seen the alien in the Scowling Buddha before. The alien sat in a high bar chair that had been positioned in front of the dartboard. Swift didn’t know whether it was the men or the alien who had placed the chair there.
The alien had a dart projecting from its flesh, just below its face.
One of the young men had a shaved head and a tattoo in luminous purple ink of a cross on the rear of his knobby skull. Swift snorted. Was this stigmata a proclamation of belief, or just more empty color like the strobing of the VT? Despite his inebriation the man stood just about the standard distance of seven feet, nine-and-a-quarter inches from the board – or in this case, the alien – as he launched a fresh dart. It thunked into the being’s rubbery flesh, further down its torso, if it could be called a torso, eliciting a fresh roar of laughter from the dart players and squirming smiles of mixed revulsion and amusement from other patrons.
Swift sneered with disdain, more so for the alien than even for his two fellow creatures. This type of otherworlder had been dubbed the Bliss. It looked to Swift like a stingray bleached of all color, grafted onto the hind legs of a shaved goat. White to the point of translucence; the glow of a holograph advertising Zub beer showed through one of the flaps of flesh it had where an arm should have been. It had no upper limbs, and its face was just a suggestion of features, as if they’d been punched into that pallid skin with a screwdriver.
They’d been called the Bliss because little was known about them other than the hedonistic impulses that had apparently been the inspiration for their recent influx into Punktown. They were fast generating a reputation for decadent behavior, seeking out brothels, S&M dens, and more dubious institutions of pleasure, such as necrophilia clubs and snuff theaters. They liked their drugs, the stronger the better, purple vortex being a favorite. A week ago, Swift had stepped over one of them passed out or maybe dead in a subway station. Supercharged with arousal, ravenous for sensation, supremely masochistic, they seemed to live only for a heightened state of ecstasy. But should he begrudge them that?
Swift felt he had the right to begrudge anybody any kind of happiness, however heightened or slight. He felt only a heightening of his disgust when the Bliss substituting for a dartboard seemed to sense his gaze upon it, and turned its pancake of an upper body slightly so that its expressionless eyes studied him, in turn.
Talane had believed in God. She’d believed in angels. A woman working for a biotech company, highly proficient at nanotech research, helping to design and program microscopic biomechanical organisms like some kind of deity herself, cleaving to such superstitions. It had been the source of many a debate between them, soon soured into argument. How intolerant, how stubborn he could be when stirred to debate. “You have to win,” she had shouted at him, more than once. “You always have to
win!
”
But Talane, he thought – contrite though he might be – you aren’t with the angels now, are you? Did she really think she was trading his arms for theirs? She couldn’t have truly believed. She had lived in Punktown; if science couldn’t convince her of her delusions, surely this city should have. It had to have been a denial of reality...an escape. He was only trying to help her lose her dependence on the drug of mindless faith, that did not alleviate the suffering of life but only flew in the face of it.
The Bliss was still gaping at him with its empty little face. There, Swift thought, there’s the closest you’ll find to an angel in this city. This thing with its glowing skin, this thing in its state of continual pleasure, craving its debauchery, its fix of overstimulation, its heaven in the flesh.
An angel? He was reminded more of something he’d seen on the net, a thing called a Jenny Haniver. On Earth, in centuries long past, sailors would cut and carve the bodies of rays and let them dry, until they resembled the mummified remains of devil-faced little imps with pointed limbs, pointed wings, selling these prodigies as souvenirs. A poor man’s devil. A poor woman’s angel.
Why was it staring at him? Did his observation of its pleasure only make the experience more exciting? Add exhibitionism to its mix, then, but Swift was in no mood to be a party to it. He gave the thing a rude gesture as he slipped off the stool indented by his bony rump these past hours. As he turned toward the door, he heard another dart thump home, another round of guffaws.
What do you think you are, he asked the Bliss in his mind, bloody St. Sebastian?
2
Walking to work from his subway stop, Swift was a tall, thin figure with a slouched drooping head: a shepherd’s crook of a body. He lifted his eyes as if he’d been subconsciously counting his steps, to see Camus Organics rising before him. It was a block-like building, unremarkable except for one unaccountable decorative touch: five looming, curved projections like the ribs of some rotted leviathan – or the fingers of an immense reaching hand – that arose from its flat roof. Especially vivid at night, they glowed with purple light.
The security guard didn’t look up at him, or even at his monitors, as Swift scanned himself through the turnstile. He might even have been asleep in his chair behind the counter. One of Camus’s mottos was “Celebrate Diversity,” which had resulted in almost 70% of its work force being of the Dacvibese race, who resembled bipedal albino greyhounds with pink, goat-like eyes. The head of Personnel Resources was a Dacvibese, which accounted for the company’s admirable diversity, and for this security guard being a Dacvibese, too. At least this one wore a uniform; usually they went naked, and peripherally it would appear to Swift that the labs and offices swarmed with bony walking cadavers.
Swift reported to his own work area first, just for the sake of appearances, keeping an eye open for his supervisor. He glanced around at the sprawl of cubicles; inside a half dozen of them, Dacvibese already had their heads down on their folded arms, napping. The personnel chief had explained that they napped frequently on her world. They also expressed displeasure by jetting a foul-smelling mucus from glands in their muzzles, and this was just a cultural behavior that nonDacvibese had to understand and be tolerant of. When one of the emaciated beings lifted its head to blink at Swift pinkly, and caught him staring, it curled its lip to squirt a warning sample of mucus into the air. Then it lowered its head again. Swift had sucked in his breath, and his irritation.
When he felt a prudent enough amount of time had passed, he wandered off toward Talane’s work area. He would have felt more comfortable had he known where his boss was but he still hadn’t spotted him this morning.
Talane had called this her flea circus. Here, her labors had been of the utmost seriousness but also, in stolen hours which she still justified as research, she had developed such nanospecies as the “crab louse,” which she had once managed to introduce into the trousers of a male coworker whose amorous attentions she had been less receptive to than Swift’s.
Swift felt his anxiousness increase as he noted that more of Talane’s materials had disappeared, appropriated by other workers. Not her personal belongings – someone had gathered those up for a sister off in the colony city Miniosis – but the implements of her research. Much of her particular corner of research had been in programming nanomites to deliver information to the human brain. Specifically, memory-encoded long-chain molecules. Normally, these programmed molecules were conveyed via a brain drip. This was the manner in which clones utilized for labor and the military had their training delivered to them whole, but it was also the manner in which the memories of a deceased wealthy person could be transferred into a clone of their body – which was illegal, but might still be arranged with the right contacts.
In the course of her experiments Talane had had her own memories recorded, just as these wealthy people would do at an illicit cloning facility, usually run by the Neptune Teeb crime syndicate. It was okay for her to do this, though. It was all in the name of research.
One month had already passed with Talane gone from the world. It already seemed to have been many more months than that. In the first week, Swift had not touched anything, had not even ventured into her area. Partly, it was because of the wary, knowing way his coworkers watched him. In the second week, he had entered in the hopes of stealing a photo from a partition wall, a forgotten package of mints or a stained coffee mug, but by then all that was already gone. All he found, on the carpet under her desk, was one of her long black hairs. This single, brittle strand released a powerful flood of sensations: the silk of her hair under his palm, the spill of it across his belly, the smell of it against his nuzzling nose. He had twined the strand around and around his finger until it cut off his circulation, unreleased tears capping his eyes like distorting lenses. In this hair was enough of her essence to clone her, he thought, if only he could afford such a thing. And he had the memories with which to imbue that clone. It was so possible. So impossible. He had kept the hair, taped it to a slip of paper and folded it away in his wallet. After that, however, his mind had remained fixed on those recorded memories of hers.
In the third week, on a day when his boss was out, he had got much done. He had accessed the memory file, because Talane had given him nearly all her work-based passwords so that he might avail himself of her data in his own researches. Then, he had transmitted the data to an unprogrammed batch of her nanomites, encoding the long-chain molecules they already carried inside them like waiting wombs. The nanomites had been like blank, undifferentiated cells, now given a very specific purpose.