Ghosts of Punktown (22 page)

     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.

     The haze was so thick that it seemed the ocean began only fifty yards out from the shore, the waves appearing to form from the substance of an opaque white wall. It was an unsettling effect for Huck, who had never stood before an actual ocean, who had never in fact left the borders of the city of Punktown in his life.

     It was high tide, and people had waded out far into the waves, which buoyed them briefly. But it was the people on the shore who commanded Huck’s interest. Actually, his focus had narrowed to one person in particular.

     This great room of the Paxton Center Casino was circular, enclosing a dense collection of vid poker tables and other card games (physical or virtual). The circular wall was an unbroken vidscreen, showing a live feed of a tourist spot on the shore of the Duplam Ocean, elsewhere here on Oasis. As one looked fully around the room, there was no inland to be found – no view of what lay behind the camera’s perspective, the tourist shops that surely must line the street opposite the beach. What he was seeing was a wraparound view, as if the ends of a long strip of paper had been joined together. Though this was meant to be clever, exciting, to Huck it was another unsettling effect. There was no way to escape this ocean; it surrounded you. You were on an island in its center. Its waves buffeted and pushed the puny swimmers back to shore. Even the sea birds swooped round and round the perimeter of the room, as if unable to break free of an invisible cage. Huck followed a few of them by swiveling in his chair, and the movement made him queasy as if he were seasick. What made him even more nauseous was looking at the place where the two ends of the long stretch of seascape were joined, because of course they did not match up. Waves there were misaligned. On the beach, people walked toward the seam and vanished, seeming to change into different people on the other side. Huck found he had to look away from it, his stomach churning as if it too were buoyed on the waves. But when he spotted a waitress threading her way through the tables, he still motioned her over to order a ninth beer.                                 

     His waitress, a statuesque black woman with a gleaming bald head, wore a skimpy bikini with a shimmering blue-green fish scales pattern. He thought this whole ocean motif was simply an excuse for these roving bar girls -- and the female dealers (physical or virtual) at the tables -- to wear such revealing attire. He was cynical about it, but he didn’t object.

     Yet these women were sexy for business, undressed for success, not like the girl he had focused on in the surrounding vidscreen. Her sexuality was a kind of purity.

     He watched her as he took the first swig of his fresh Zub. Watched her as the sea birds wheeled and cried out, as the children frolicking in the sand or surf cried out, as the waves roared and broke, as even a fabricated smell of the ocean came to him. “Like a million dead women rotting on the ocean floor,” he described this unfamiliar scent aloud to himself, as if this one girl he admired furthered by contrast his contempt for so many others. For all others, at that moment.

     The funny thing was, this magic mirror into that distant scene worked both ways. He had no idea what the exact arrangement was on the other side, but there must be some sizable vidscreen on the beach advertising the new Paxton Center Casino. This was apparent from the way a small group of people, always changing, was always gathered in one spot of the circular vidscreen, gazing with curiosity in at the gamblers. Some of these spectators were parents who looked like they’d rather be sitting at one of those card tables, themselves, than sweating on a beach for the benefit of their kids. Often they craned their necks to get a look at the players’ hands of cards, but the tables were positioned in such a way that this was not possible.

     So who were the zoo goers, he wondered, and who were the animals on display?

     If any of these distant gawkers should single him out in the crowd, Huck would appear to them as a human of Earth ancestry in his late thirties, a bit out of shape, with an unruly burst of black hair and a full beard that could use a trimming. With his pasty skin, it would be obvious he seldom saw the sun, for all the shadows that flooded the streets of Punktown, and because his activities often called for him to work by night, or in the extensive subterranean sector of the city nicknamed Subtown – a neighborhood he also happened to live in. This part troglodyte, part nocturnal creature wore a cloned leather jacket over a rumpled white dress shirt, and the same pair of jeans for the second day in a row. His nondescript, unremarkable appearance was not a ruse; he’d never been one for gangster chic, despite his being one of the top triggermen for the Neptune Teeb syndy.