Punktown: Shades Of Grey Part 10

Don't stare. Look disinterested.

Amino acids...polypeptide chains...

Nothing hasty; be patient.

Polypeptide chains...alpha helices...protofibril...

It's beautiful. Perfect. It's worth a wait.

Alpha helices, protofibril, hydrogen bond... Hair.

The woman was young, Kalian, smart in her (untraditional) office attire. Short, crisp leather jacket, milk-colored scarf, long, straight black hair falling down across her shoulders. Her hair was blacker than the jacket, s.h.i.+mmering vividly, as if from within, as if her neck were a light source. Black hair...protofibril, hydrogen bond, melanocytes, eumelanin.

Griffin circled the phone booth-the Kalian inside like a specimen behind gla.s.s. She seemed oblivious, her mouth moving, her black eyes settled on the street.

She's waiting for "The Worm." She's watching for it. Excellent.

Confident in his a.s.sessment, Griffin floated further from the booth, hands in his pockets, objects in his hands. A soft buzzing sound came from behind-a metallic green dragonfly was blurring its wings, its long body stuck to the tar-like wall of a Grind House. The outer walls were pebbled with flies and grit spat up from the tracks. While the day was grey, there was enough light for shadow and the shadow of the building, its roof a tangle of dark pipes, leaned into the street. The pipes were like two black octopi wrestling.

Griffin watched for the shuttle, glanced at the woman, watched for the shuttle. He stole a look at her hair. Metal in one hand in his pocket. An old toothless Choom woman sat on what was left of a bench, mumbling. A silver plastic bag in her lap s.h.i.+fted as if full of lobsters.

It did not matter if the Kalian was beautiful (she was). He did not imagine what her clothing concealed. She was only long black hair, only molecules, eumelanin. She was leaning her back against the gla.s.s, her hair flattened, glossy.

The pipes up on the building gurgled and rumbled. A thick periscope whined up, higher than the pipes, rust flakes spilling down like cinnamon snow. Steam disgorged thickly and a bird thrust out of the pipe-too slow-it was swallowed by the cloud, shrieking.

The Worm shrieked as it pulled up to the broken bench. Griffin shot a look at the phone booth; as expected, the woman rushed out and trotted over in her heels. He let the old Choom get between him and his prey as they mounted the steps and ducked into the ribbed, black tube of the shuttle.

Sit behind her.

Griffin bit his lower lip. There were not many seats to choose from. A man squeezed over so that the Choom could sit and the Kalian proceeded further down the aisle. A handsome young man in a suit, scrunched into the back, scrunched further, smiled and patted his seat.

s.h.i.+t!

The Kalian, her black hair waving tauntingly behind her, accepted the offer. Frowning, Griffin sank down next to a dozing woman and her obese toddler. The boy wore a helmet like a copper trilobite, its wires running down into his temples. Gazing blankly, he laughed and coughed for the next two miles.

The Worm rumbled into a tunnel, slanted down, descended under the city for a windowless carnival ride of b.u.mps and turns. The tot's mother was jarred out of her sleep and, noticing that she and her son had company, smiled. She had teeth the color of hydraulic oil. Griffin returned a polite smile, his eyes-even on this grey day, even in the subterranean dimness of The Worm's belly-safe behind thin wrap-around sungla.s.ses.

When the shuttle made its third stop, deep in the humming and clanging of the Bridgeport Forge, the black-haired woman came down the aisle from behind. Griffin smelled her perfume as she pa.s.sed, something exotic-or was it the Kalian spices embedded in her skin?

Ahhh, she's a secretary for Bridgeport. Mr. Business isn't with her. Perhaps I'm not so unlucky after all.

Griffin was quick on the clacking heels of the Kalian as she made for the front of the shuttle, his face close to her s.h.i.+mmering black waterfall. Swiftly, he pulled the small scissors from his pocket, and-snip!

Griffin's neighbors were factories and warehouses. He crossed a skeletal footbridge over in-ground vats of molten purple where men in bulky toad-like suits prodded with staffs and stirred up violet mist like the ghosts of bruises.

Grim grey-tiled buildings huddled along streets that were rusted grates bejeweled with condensation. Griffin lived in one of these, above a metal casket company on the sixth floor with a view of a watery green chemical pond and a colossal black sculpture of a mastodon.

Locked in his flat, the man set hastily to work. The bedroom, kitchen and bath were all necessarily small to accommodate his work area, which bordered on an empty chamber he called The Womb. There was never much light in the lab and the baroque configuration of pipes and panels was the black of the Kalian's hair, black as the carved mastodon. Here and there indicator bulbs winked like shy stars in a cluttered metal sky.

Griffin snapped on latex gloves and removed the stolen snippet of hair from a small airtight vial. His reflection, pale and distorted, showed in the dark of a sleeping view screen. His skin being what it was, it would have proved difficult to guess his age, though one might speculate that he was within the thirties range. Oh, didn't I tell you? As a teenager working at Chemical Land, he had had an unfortunate encounter with an undesirable substance and suffered something known as The Puzzle.

Thyroid dysfunction, hair loss, liver damage, epidermal crystallization. Layer upon layer of Griffin's skin had hardened into a glistening exoskeleton. The doctors had drilled through it to insert a breathing tube and run another to administer fluids. Over a matter of weeks the petrified skin had cracked into jigsaw-piece shapes and flaked off, exposing the muscle beneath.

The skin replacement had taken well, though; Griffin's new facade was a sheeny pink, overly soft and without hair. In an almost studied attempt at vanity, he had seeded his head, but the hair came in spotty and hard, like thorns from barbed wire.

In the suffocating c.o.c.kpit-like lab, Griffin placed his silky black prize in a scanning box. The machine purred, the readout flashed a series of pale blue numbers. Next he fed the lock of hair into a glossy humming tube that broke it down into molecular bits and disseminated it into The Womb. That room, or chamber, was sealed behind a submarine's door. There were no windows. A variety of spigots and vents fed into it from the ceiling and a number of cameras gazed from hidden panels in the walls.

Smoking, Griffin leaned forward and tapped on a keyboard. His reflection fractured into static as the vid-screen hissed to life. He leaned back, creaking in his chair and waited.

With his lab pulsing and humming, it was a wonder that he heard the door buzzer.

What? What?

In seconds he was out of his chair, out of the lab and checking the security-cam screen in the coffin-sized foyer. Little good it did him, though, for his entire vid-system had been malfunctioning as of late and whoever was standing outside his door seemed little more than a pillar of grey. Even so, he thought he recognized the pillar and buzzed the door open.

Mrs. Derringer, a tall, thin woman surgically made to look younger, stood scowling down, strangling in her own face.

Griffin smiled anxiously. "What a lovely suit-dress! Is it new?" (All suit-dresses looked the same to Griffin.) Derringer was the owner of the metal coffin business downstairs and also Griffin's landlady.

"I don't know what you're running in there, Griffin, but you just sucked the juice out of half my building. Melda Orange is having a fit because she lost power in the middle of her favorite game show."

Griffin withered. "Ahh, I'm sorry, yes, sorry. I'll be more careful from now on. Perhaps I need to do a bit of updating, yes?"

The woman seemed to scold him "You spend all your time in there-why don't you go out and make some friends or something?"

That, but for the woman's disgusted sigh as she whirled away, was the end of the conversation.

Griffin buzzed the door shut and invented a new stream of curses as he raced back to his creation. Safe in the burbling dark of his lab, he gazed expectantly into the screen. He chuckled, fumbling blindly on the counter for his smokes, unable to take his eyes away.

The screen flickered, the color coming and going as static danced. Somehow, squinting, Griffin could make out the room, the air thick with mucoid mist-something huddled on the floor. Still in the early stages, now integrated with the latest ingredient, it was a jumble of fidgeting organs in a tangled nest of great black hairs.

At six o'clock the black metal box on Griffin's bedside table popped open and a skull flew out, bouncing on its spring as sardonic laughter filled the room.

Rise and s.h.i.+ne.

The jack-in-the-box alarm clock was one of his more whimsical, if not existential, creations.

Griffin showered, toweled off his pink flesh and took breakfast (coffee and a cigarette) in the lab. The vid-screen was fuzzy, but he could distinguish his creation. It had wormed up one of the walls and hung there pulsing, the frenzy of hair having grown some overnight. He flicked a switch and spoke into a microphone, "Good morning."

It was a slow day at the plant so Griffin and some of his coworkers were sent down to the cellar where a blown containment-mount in the south wall had invited a flood of amber jelly. They spent the afternoon in protective suits shoveling the slime into empty fifty gallon barrels which were sent upstairs on a freight lift to be dumped in the waste truck.

The antic.i.p.ation Griffin felt was a secret not to be shared with the louts he worked with-all through the long hours he dreamed and planned. There was so much to do, more components to gather. Bones would not be a major problem, but a brain...that would prove a challenge. Then there was the question of how much intellect to instill. There was also the problem of feeding. So many things to do!

One step at a time.

Cigar Store Indian was a shop of curious collectibles just over the Vandermoor Bridge. Not much from the outside, the place was a virtual museum of oddities, including its namesake, who greeted all that entered. Ploom, the old Tikkihotto owner, had hung a bra on the thing.

Griffin was purposeful, wading through the treasures, the stuffed wildlife, the antique furniture, the primitive masks and exotic jewelry. There really was an intriguing array of goodies-primitive robotic limbs, swords, a plastic-sealed copy of the Koran floating in a big jar of blood, dolls, canes, synthetic jack-o'-lanterns, scary Tikkihotto marionettes, even gore-stained tiles from the Hobblehouse Ma.s.sacre. The owner, bored it seemed, approached Griffin at one point, smiling.

"You've been in here before. I remember-those fascinating spikes on your head..."

Griffin grunted.

"Are you looking for something in particular? A gift, perhaps? Something for a lady...?"

"No lady," Griffin said, not really looking at the Tikkihotto.

"I have some toys in the back room, if you're interested..."

Griffin faced the man (he always stared at a Tikkihotto's nose when conversing-better than trying to look those wavering tendrils in the eye).

"I'm looking for bones. Bones, yes. Humanoid, preferably."

Ploom grinned. "I'm afraid I don't have much to choose from, though a lovely snake skeleton came in last week... Wait! There is the orangutan..."

"Orangu-what?"

"An extinct species of earth primate. It's in good condition considering they died out, oh, hundreds of years ago, I'd say."

The skeleton stood in a corner, dusty webs strewn between the ribs and long arms. The skull made Griffin think of a dog.

"Impressive fangs," he noted. "Was it a carnivore?"

"I don't believe so. It is a beauty, though, isn't it?"

Griffin nodded slowly. "Yes. I think I like it."

Back in his lab, Griffin sawed the tip off one of the orangutan fingers. While he only needed a small piece, he had decided against asking the shopkeeper to compromise the integrity of the rare specimen. He felt guilty for doing so himself, but the skeleton had appealed to him-something seemed right about the idea of fixing that long black hair to an ape's frame.

The fingertip was placed in a small groaning container where it was pulverized before being immersed in a tube of foamy green gel which then was converted into a molecular mist and funneled into The Womb. Griffin pecked hastily at his keyboard.

The cameras refused to cooperate, the image on the screen crumbling into static, winking like a strobe. Whatever was in the adjacent chamber, it was larger and darker than before.

The room smelled like old apples, its low ceiling stained brown from water leaks; a vent in one wall was rattling, the sound of a fan distant in an air duct, squeaking. A fly as big as a watermelon lay dead on its back on the battered kitchen table-the centerpiece in a room which was otherwise unadorned. Griffin paced, smoking, and started when the door opened. A gaunt Hispanic man in a long snake skin coat whisked in.

"Okay, so you're the guy who wants a brain, right?" The man seemed impatient.

I don't like this neighborhood. I don't like this lout, but what else am I to do?

"Yes, a brain, yes-preferably an Earthling. As fresh as possible."

"Yeah, yeah. Sure you don't want a whole body? My hombre at the morgue, he gets some nice chicks in there. Real young ones too..."

Griffin shuddered. He was glad for the gun beneath his wind breaker.

"No, no thank you. A brain is all I need. Um, you're sure you're not going to kill someone for this...I wouldn't want any part of that."

"Kill somebody? Not for what you're paying me." The man snickered.

60% white matter...dendritic branchlet...glial cells...diencephalon...cerebral cortex...

The brain came from a four-year-old boy who had been strangled by his stepfather. Griffin verified this by buying a newspaper. The brain-stage of the operation proved so meticulous that he stayed up all night processing and infusing the matter. Too tired to work the next morning, he called in sick. Besides, he was too excited to leave the creature alone.

Over the weekend, he completed an air-based nutrition system along with the time-release administration of energy beams. That solved the sustenance matter. The thing in the sealed room was responding nicely, according to the functions readouts. If only he could get the cameras to work as well as the more complicated, more crucial apparatus, but replacing them would not be easy, due to their in-wall locations-it would call for workmen, renovators, and he couldn't allow his creation to be seen by them.

Griffin sat with his face close to the hissing screen. He saw the shadowy figure stand, saw it take its first steps, watched as its hands explored the empty walls. How much of it was shadow, and how much was hair, he could not tell.

"I'm afraid I have to get to bed now," Griffin spoke into his mic.

The thing looked up at the ceiling of The Womb, where the speaker was. The eyes were working fine, as far as it could be determined.

"Pleasant dreams," Griffin whispered.

Trembling weeds of light ran from the bottom of the screen to the top. The image was only black and white now as the vid-system continued on its course of betrayal. Griffin fretted, considered calling that fellow who had provided the brain; perhaps he could arrange for some zip-lipped workers to tear into the walls to replace the cameras, but Griffin really did not want to resort to dealing with him again.

One might wonder why Griffin did not simply open the heavy pressure-sealed door and go into The Womb to set up a new camera... Well, the creature, still in a developmental stage, required stringently controlled atmospheric conditions which would have been deleteriously compromised were such a course taken. It was unfortunate that the limited s.p.a.ce at Griffin's disposal did not allow for an airlock between the lab and the all-important chamber.

Griffin flopped onto the love seat in the inconsequential living room-sat next to the skeleton of the orangutan which was propped there.

It's not fair.

He picked up the newspaper and paged through it halfheartedly. There had been another riot in the Indonesian neighborhood-more effigy burning, more looting, more cars torched. Belly Girl, a corporation-manufactured teen singing starlet-thrust upon the ma.s.ses like soda bottles packed with flesh-had died in a sadom.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic mishap. The Paxton Antiquarian Museum was going to be displaying the brain of Reikon Yos.h.i.+zawa for the next three weeks.

Reikon Yos.h.i.+zawa!

The paper rattled in Griffin's hands. Yos.h.i.+zawa had been one of the great minds of the last century-a philosopher, an historian, an explorer, an inventor. He had risen to revered status as a diplomatic presence but was a.s.sa.s.sinated while attempting to mend a civil war on some far and ravaged world. Griffin tossed down the paper, turned and spoke to the ape skeleton, "Reikon Yos.h.i.+zawa..."

He went to the lab, gazed at the screen, at the blurry hair-draped figure. It was pacing, much as he was known to do.

"Hungry?" Griffin spoke into the mic.

The creature looked up as if to find the source of the invisible talker, while Griffin inserted a measure of green powdered nutrient mix into a dispensing chute which infused the substance into the filmy air of the chamber.

"I'm off to work," Griffin said.

Did the creature make a sound back or was it only the groaning of the steam ducts?