Punktown: Shades of Grey (12 page)

“I don’t see nothing and I don’t know nothing. But get that bastard and his stinking noisy menagerie out of here!”

“I need to know what he looks like!”

“Don’t talk to me. He’s got friends, they always do. Leave me alone! I haven’t seen a thing!”

To hell with him.
Peck might still be alive and in need of help. Yu turned from the door, instead regarded doors B-9 through B-12. Did all of them still open into the linked apartments, or only one?

He touched the key for B-9. A red light came on and there was the beeping complaint of a lock. B-12, he guessed, but tried B-10 anyway.

The door hissed fully open.

It was a zoo in there.

Close to his face, something like a pumpkin with a large starfish grafted to its base was inching up the wall. Half covering the ceiling of the linked rooms was something like an immense walking stick insect.
This, at least, Yu recognized from a VT wildlife program; a Tikkihotto animal.
It could fold its legs up so that the whole thing was little larger than a man’s hand, if it wanted.

A fat lizard basked on a windowsill. Birds took up a chattering chorus of alarm, some in cages and some free. Most of the creatures in here were contained, fortunately
;
in mesh cages, in aquariums, in transparent terrariums and pens. In the corners there were a few larger pens made from repulsor beams. In one, monkey-like animals with faces like garish totem pole images were bounding against the repulsor walls in excitement. The other large repulsor pens had been deactivated.

There was no furniture, no bed in sight that might give Yu some sense of the occupant’s physiology. Maybe there was a bed in one of the off-branching rooms, from which came more strange chattering, weird gibbering, and the burbling of support tanks of one kind or another.

The sounds were chaotic, the smells a nearly visible miasma despite the air system, and the sights made Yu’s mind reel.

But all of this—the starfish, the walking stick, the lack of furniture—was a secondary, peripheral matter. What seized his attention primarily was the body of Peck, sprawled on the floor across the room, his gun lying a few inches from his gnarled hand.

There was no blood, but his eyes stared glassily. The cause of this was no mystery; a great black limb like a tentacle was squeezed around his neck. The thing that had killed him was also clearly dead. It was a black, almost amorphous blob of rubbery flesh, ringed with more of those long tentacles, its head ringed in smaller
tentacles which
gave it some slight resemblance to the toad-beast. If it too had once glowed, the glow had since dispersed. Peck had ripped its barrel of a body open with several
shots which
Yu had not heard over his headset. Peck must have had his gun set to silence mode. Yu had his silencer to OFF, so that the tenants would keep behind doors if they heard him fire.

Over the two dissimilar corpses linked in an embrace of death stood another creature. When Yu had burst in, the thing had swivelled its head to regard him.

“Freeze!” Yu yelled at it, taking a firing stance.

It was bipedal, its legs skinny and jointed, as were its arms. Crab-like three-toed pincers snicked at the ends of its arms. The body was shaggy with fur, and the black dome of a head was ringed with tiny black eyes that glittered at him.

The thing had been leaning over Peck as if about to touch him.
To retrieve his gun, perhaps?
Was this the thing Yu had heard making odd sounds over Peck’s headset? Yes
;
those dry autumn leaf sounds had been the delicate clicking of its claws.

“Get back from him!” Yu shouted. He had decided that this being was the best candidate for the Ophluu, unless the black market trader was hiding in one of the other rooms.

The being didn’t budge. Even if it were the Ophluu, could it understand his words without a translator unit in hand?

Yu stepped nearer, gesturing with the gun. “I said get back from him, damn you!”

The being
obeyed,
but looked poised for action, its claws snapping more aggressively. Unless that was an agitated language it was babbling.

From a kitchen doorway, another creature began to emerge. It was terrible; a raw red blob like some organ torn from a giant’s chest.
A spaghetti
of red limbs whipped at the air crazily and a head of red tendrils writhed. Yu guessed that these similar creatures were all from the Ophluu’s world. But was this one worth considering as that being? Yu decided to stick with the shaggy, upright being…but he still didn’t like the way the scarlet monstrosity was advancing toward him out of the kitchen.

“Get back!” he now yelled at this thing, while keeping his gun on the shaggy creature.

Again Yu asked himself if the Ophluu had opened up the pens to create a diversion, or had he let these things have free reign of his apartment normally? Maybe some of the pens had been opened accidentally in the black monster’s struggle with Peck. Yu could still no more figure out what had happened than he could put labels to the exotic fauna he was seeing.

He decided that with Peck dead, it might not be a bad idea after all to back off and seal the apartment up until the others got here. Maybe Russet wasn’t as much a prissy little puke as he’d thought. Yu had to admit that he had jumped into the deep water a little too quickly more than once before. On occasion, he had been lucky to
have swum
out of it alive. He realized that it might be prudent to start for shore right now—

He touched his headset. “Russet! Can you hear me?”

“Where are you?”

“In the room. Peck’s dead. Call base; where the hell are the uniforms?”

“I’ll buzz them. Where’s the Ophluu?”

“In my sights. I think.”

The red creature lunged, then; it was uncanny how that awkward blob could suddenly hurl itself forward, lashing out with its many slender arms. It was not Yu it seized, however, but the shaggy being instead. The shaggy thing reached up and clipped some of the arms that engulfed it, but there were too many—so many that Yu nearly lost sight of the smaller being.

“Hey! Hey!” Yu cried. He aimed his Osprey, hunting for a clear shot, but in the frenzy of struggling bodies and whipping limbs he couldn’t sight on the thing’s tentacled head.

He
side-stepped
rapidly, danced in closer a few steps, but several of the red creepers now came shooting out for him. One wrapped around his left wrist. Yu placed his gun’s muzzle against it and pulled the trigger. A blast, and the severed end came free, dropping to squirm at his feet.

It was too late for the shaggy being, in any case. It had gone limp in its cocoon of red feelers, like a moth mummified by a spider. The red blob began to withdraw to the kitchen, dragging its prey behind it.

Well,
a fitting end
to the bastard, Yu thought. He knelt to take Peck’s gun. He’d retreat, seal the door, guard it until the
back-up
arrived.

As he was about to touch the gun, he noticed an odd thing about the black monster that lay dead alongside his partner.
Two odd things, in fact.

For one, the creature was missing one of the black tentacles that ringed its belly. It had not been blown off by Peck’s gun; the place where it had detached was too neat, a kind of socket. The other odd thing was that several of the tentacles had weird silver markings on them. At first, he took them to be a natural spotting. Then, he realized they were tattoos.

An animal might be tattooed for identification. But however alien written language could be, this did not appear to be even hieroglyphics. The markings seemed purely decorative.

Yu suddenly changed his mind about the Ophluu.

So, Peck and the criminal had killed each other, then…right?

But his eyes shifted again to that empty socket. There should be a limb there.
A tentacle, long and black, like
some giant snake. Or an eel…

Abruptly, he straightened.

Maybe that tentacled dome for a head wasn’t so much a head, after all. Maybe the brain of an Ophluu was situated in a less obvious place.
A place that, like the tail of some lizards, could be detached in an emergency.

Or, more precisely, like the arm of a starfish. Which, later, would grow into an entirely new creature of
its own
.

Yu dashed out the door, turned, tapped the button to close it. He then bolted to the elevator, closed himself inside, and hit the button marked BASEMENT.

The Ophluu would be down there, no doubt searching for a window or air vent by which to reach outside. Yu decided to let Russet stay where he was for now, and didn’t alert him to his revelation. There was no time; the elevator was descending faster than it had ascended.

When it reached bottom, Yu heard a wet splash, as if from a fruit being stomped on.

“Damn,” he breathed.

Detective Yu emerged from the lift, stepped around behind it into the wire mesh
cage which
enclosed its cables and machinery. He knelt, gun in hand, and peered under the carriage.

Sure enough, a black rubbery tip showed from beneath the lift, a small pool of clear liquid spreading around it. As Yu watched, the tip quivered, though whether this was voluntary or a nervous spasm he had no way of knowing.

“Sorry,” he told it, but not with any great sincerity.

He didn’t feel guilty. The thing had already been dazed by its fall, he reckoned, and his crushing of it had been purely accidental. And with Peck dead, well, that cinched his dispassion.

He watched until it stopped moving altogether, and then he rose, slipping the Osprey back into its holster. He let out a sigh. What a nightmare, he thought.

But this was Punktown, and its diversity of life, however hostile it might often be, still held him fascinated…as when he’d been a boy and loved to visit the zoo.

Now he’d return upstairs, and with the others see to it that the Ophluu’s own zoo was safely relocated. Selfish bastard. How could the alien have bartered in rare life that way? And he had killed an innocent policeman, as well.

Yu sneered down at the crushed eel thing.

“Animal,” he told it.

— | — | —

ADRIFT ON THE SEA OF MILK

There was a small carnival in Oval Square, several blocks from Paxton University, and at night Loring could see its lights from the single window of his room in an old tenement house that had been converted to dorm housing. Over the past four years he had seen the lights glowing variously through rain and fog and falling snow, but tonight it was summer and hot and he had recently graduated, but he stayed on, and the lights drew him out onto the narrow back streets of Punktown, toward the carnival, though his friends who had accompanied him in the past had all gone away like migrating birds.

A spindly runaway with some netlink images scorched into her face, either from accident or addiction (part of a graph and a backwards 4), dislodged herself from shadow to ask him for money, but he murmured an apology, avoiding her eyes. Derelicts and other lost souls grew thick toward the carnival—drawn like moths to the colored lights—where they slept on the old cobbled floor of Oval Square (which dated back to the native Choom town which predated Punktown), keeping considerately out of the way of traffic like trash shunted aside by a push broom, feeding on scraps of burger roll and greasy fried dilky root salvaged from those trash zappers that weren’t functioning.

The Temple of the Sea of Milk was here. At the far end of the square from the point Loring entered; he penetrated straight to it without conscious direction, but unerringly, ignoring the friendly summons and the arrogant demands of the game keepers and freak barkers. The Temple was half shrine and half ghost train ride, half fading and blistered and half garish and slick, rusted but glittering, grindingly noisy but strangely serene in its constant, confident motion.