Punktown: Shades Of Grey Part 7

"What are you?"

"Up until a few weeks ago I was a.s.sistant manager of a book store. My coworkers all seemed to know me, but I'm not sure I trust them any more."

"How long were you watching that prosty...Evan?"

"Several weeks. I wanted to do what you did, when I first spotted her, but I contained myself. We're different in some respects, you and I."

"Not many." Jed wagged his head, taking in his host once more. Though their haircuts varied somewhat, they both had the same scar on their chins. "You don't seem as surprised as I am about this."

"Three weeks ago, I had closed up the shop and was getting into my car when I was attacked from behind. A man stabbed me twice in the back with a knife." Lloyd pointed to the spot. "I struggled with him and managed to pull out the gun I carry. It's a rough town, you know. Well, I popped off a few rounds but he got away. I nearly bled to death. After that night, I moved to this apartment and quit my job."

"Did you see who it was who tried to kill you?"

"Yes-it was me. Or you, perhaps."

"Me? It wasn't, man, I swear it! I'll go to the forcers with you and take a truth scan to prove it!"

"I believe you, Jed. You were too surprised to see that prosty to be faking it."

"So...one of us is a clone, then?"

"Two of us are clones, Jed. And I don't think it's the guy who stabbed me."

"But I know who I am! I've been a garbage man for ten years now! I..."

"Jed." Lloyd smiled sadly, bitterly. "I've worked in that book store for ten years."

Jed looked again toward that lovely holo portrait. "We have to question that prosty. And our lying little coworkers."

"Someone has money, to pull this off. To pay to shut people up..."

Money. Yes! Jed whipped his head around. "Of course!" he hissed. "The building..."

Six months after killing his first clone, only two of them remained. Art had surprised himself as a hunter.

Of course, there had been some complications. One clone was even murdered by someone else during a mugging; this was, after all, Punktown. And Art had needed to kill a woman who was a witness to one of his murders, but it had come easier than he would have believed. Now that his inhibitions had worn down, he wondered what game he might play next, when this one had been finished.

He had shot the first clone, but that had been too impersonal. He had poisoned one, bludgeoned one, garroted one, stabbed another. He liked stabbing best, he found. He still used plasma to eliminate the bodies afterwards, but following one murder a photo of the victim, taken from a driver's license, had been shown on VT. That had given Art a scare, but no problems had seemed to come of it. Unless that was why the last two had eluded him.

One of them, though, he believed he had scared into hiding himself. That one had seen his face clearly, and apparently survived his knife wounds. What if he had fled to another city, or even another colony? That would be a bit more of a challenge than Art liked to contemplate. He wanted to wrap this challenge up totally before starting a new one.

He had found he enjoyed killing even more than he'd ever dreamed. He had even taken a very dark delight in raping one of his victims, raping himself, before strangling him to death.

In Punktown, the murders went mostly unnoticed. Maybe it was the wrong city in which to make a name for one's self as a serial killer, but that lent him all the more anonymity, and privacy for his entertainment.

It had been a productive day in the search for the remaining prey. Balser's contact with the Teeb Family had called; the wh.o.r.e who'd been used to make holo portraits for several of the clones had been approached by one of the clones in the street. The Teeb contact had been concerned that this might spoil Art's game, but he was appreciative for the lead, and had been allowed to question the woman. She said the man had driven a garbage truck, and had left it in the street, but by the time Art interviewed her it had been removed.

Tomorrow he would follow the garbage collection lead; for tonight, he would return to his apartment and relax in a nice tub while his holo harem performed for him.

He let himself into his apartment, only to find he was already there.

Jed held a large knife from the kitchen. Lloyd had the gun with which he had chased his attacker off. They had been waiting nearly an hour. Lloyd grinned at the startled expression on Art's face.

"How did you get in?" Art stammered.

"I pa.s.sed the three security checks, Mr. Lerna. The camera scan, the voice scan, and the hand-print scan. Of course."

"How did you find me?"

"We'll ask the questions," Jed cut in. "Why did you clone us? How many more of us did you make?"

"And why did you try to kill me?" Lloyd demanded.

"I...I..."

"We saw the little museum of yours," Jed told him, in disgust. "Your shrine to murder. You're just plain old insane, aren't you? A psychopath. Right?"

"This is some kind of sport to you, isn't it?" Lloyd said. "Don't lie to us, Mr. Lerna. We can figure out how you think easily enough."

"You have it wrong," Art stuttered, sliding along the wall. "I wouldn't hurt you two...I only made you so that I could go on living if anything ever happened to me..."

"Why the fake memories, then? Why the knife in my back? Don't lie to yourself." Lloyd smiled.

"You're sick!" Jed snarled. "You came hunting us down like animals! You're less worthy of life than we are!"

"Who are you to judge me?" Art sneered at his accusing reflection. "You're nothing but a potato with my face grown in a tank, a garbage man from the smell of you, and you judge me?"

Jed almost sprang at Artemis Lerna then, almost buried the knife in his chest. But he didn't. He couldn't kill. Alike as they were, he was that much different.

But Art reached inside his jacket in a desperate lunge. It was a wasted effort. Lloyd lifted his pistol a little higher and shot Art twice in the upper chest. They were plasma capsules, released a spreading blanket of glowing green. Not the best stuff; he had to shoot the convulsing, withering thing on the floor several more times in order to dissolve it entirely.

Jed had backed up against the wall in horror, dropping the knife. He was shaking his head in disbelief and disorientation. "He was insane," he repeated. "Insane."

"Just too rich," Lloyd murmured, glancing around him. "He lost his perspective a bit. But who can blame him? Look at this place. Can you imagine living here?"

"What do we do now?" Jed asked, still wagging his head. "We're just clones. What do we do now?"

"There can't be 'we,' friend," Lloyd sighed in an almost sorrowful tone, returning his gaze to his twin. "There can be only 'I.'"

"What?" Jed said, and then he was gaping at the muzzle of Lloyd's pistol as it swiveled his way.

"Sorry, friend," Lloyd apologized, and shot himself in the head.

WILLOW*TREE "Let my sh.e.l.l, the fresh young tree, wither, or be hewn down, and burnt to ashes, and scattered to all the winds!"

-The Dryad, Hans Christian Andersen 1: The Tree They called this part, this particle, of the city Willow Tree. It was not the actual name of the street; there were several streets that intersected through the area. Willow Tree was not an official name on any map of the city of Paxton (also known as Punktown). Apparently, no one alive even knew who had originally planted the nominal willow tree on its triangular traffic island, or how old it might be, but they knew the tree was not indigenous to this planet named Oasis. It had to have been brought by someone from Earth, the Earth people being those who had initially colonized Oasis and who still const.i.tuted the majority of Punktown's citizens. Had the willow tree been a sapling when planted, or an adult already at that time? Had it been planted in a park, a courtyard, which had gradually been pared down to this little traffic island, stranding the tree as wheeled and hovering craft whooshed by it on all sides like ravenous sharks? In the summer, fast and often dangerous neighborhood children braved that traffic to dash out to the island and climb on the tree (it had briefly harbored, nest-like, several generations of forts within its lower boughs), finding that the dangling whip-like arms were host to hundreds, thousands of little beetles with glistening orange sh.e.l.ls. Against a crisp autumn sky, its branches looked like carefully dissected veins or nerves separated from a human body for display. In the winter, through sifting snow, the drooping tentacles became misted, ethereal. The sagging and swaying branches, like braids hung from a great s.h.a.ggy head, were tossed in stormy waves when a gust of wind was channeled roaring through the city canyons, or rustled sedately in the breeze of rus.h.i.+ng vehicles. For some part of the afternoon, bright sunlight might work its way to the willow tree's flesh to sustain it, though generally it seemed to patiently wait for long hours drowned in the deeps of dark blue shadow. Around its scarred, initialed and graffiti-painted trunk lay cinder blocks and discarded soda cans, whiskey bottles snagged in a bed of overgrown gra.s.s, a traffic sign like a crushed metal flower bent right down to the ground, broken gla.s.s and sc.r.a.ps of vehicles that had collided at this intersection. The tree was both pa.s.sive and tenacious, both venerable and pitiful, both a symbol of peace and something vaguely sinister. At night, one might look down upon the great tree from a window in the apartment complex Sundered Gardens or from a flat above the Vietnamese restaurant Pho Paxton, and imagine that the plant was instead a rooted animal like a t.i.tanic anemone, its tendrils rippling at the bottom of the ocean, waiting to reach out and snare some metallic fish that flashed by too close.

2: The Dead Not all deaths, not even violent ones, made it into the newspapers and VT programs; there simply wasn't the s.p.a.ce, the time. And not all the dwellers in the neighborhood of Willow Tree, particularly the children, consulted these sources of information. But there was conversation, word of mouth, whispered gossip, grave admonishment. Husbands cautioned wives and parents warned children about the killings that began to occur in Willow Tree toward the start of that winter. The first of these was a man, a neighbor they knew, an old Choom of the native race, who was found in the bas.e.m.e.nt parking bay of Sundered Gardens, his body slumped against the outside of his vehicle, terribly hacked and torn. The second was a woman pulled into an alley between Pho Paxton and a brick tenement building with a ground floor s.e.x vids shop (cavorting holographic women in its windows, their luminous bodies casting phantasmal blue light onto the sidewalk). This woman, again a neighbor, was also badly mutilated. The third was a young man they didn't know, with no ID found on him, whose body was discovered by children on the triangular traffic island, slung in the crotch of the willow tree as though a leopard had left him there, his blood drying in the creases of the trunk's bark. Speculation was that the old Choom man had been murdered by child muggers, bashed to death with e-ikkos-the colorful, traditional Tikkihotto ax that was the in-vogue hand-to-hand combat weapon for gangs right now. But his wallet, still with a few small bills in it, had not been taken. Speculation was that the woman in the alley had been slaughtered by some disturbed pervert who had been t.i.tillated to a feverish state in the s.e.x vids shop. But the woman had not been raped. And speculation was that the young man on the traffic island had been struck by a speeding hovercar when trying to cross the street, the impact flinging him into the tree. But how could a hit-and-run driver have scooped the man's eyes out of their sockets, and slashed off both his ears but left the skull between them intact?

3: The Children Kiwi wore her hair in a s.h.i.+ny blue-black helmet, straight bangs over her eyebrows, neat as plastic. She was thirteen but looked ten, like a sickly ten-year-old, like a lollipop with a black head. Her father was Anglo and her mother Vietnamese. Sometimes she bolted out to the traffic island and played there with her friends. She had never been a.s.saulted or robbed on the island by tougher kids because her brother was seventeen and had already killed two other boys with his blue and orange e-ikko. She wore earrings he had given her, which she supposed were stolen, that played tinkling ancient-sounding music box music like a baby might listen to when you activated them. Sometimes she left them in when she went to bed and played the music to soothe herself and distract her from her parents' shouting...but she was always quick to silence them when she heard her father plodding into her room. She would want to pretend that she was asleep. But even if she rolled onto her belly and feigned slumber, he might still sit down heavily on the edge of her mattress. He would begin stroking her s.h.i.+ny blue-black helmet of hair, his voice slurred with alcohol or maybe even anodyne gas, his whispered words tripping over each other's feet, his hand caressing her head on and on as if it kept slipping off. When she was younger he might have read a story to her, or simply recited one that he could remember. But lately his bedside litany was more in the way of reminiscence than fairy tale, though they both shared a similar quality coming from him. Sometimes his reminiscences varied, but usually and basically they were the same. By the time he finished his bedside monologue, he might be softly sobbing. He would mutter an apology and pull her blanket up to her jaw and wish her candy-coated dreams. Sometimes Kiwi played the music box ear rings again when he'd left, to drown out the echo of his drunken litany. Though ultimately she felt too sorry for her father to do so, sometimes Kiwi thought she should ask her mother to make him stop. His sobbing made her want to sob, as well.

4: The Litany "You look just like your mother...your mother more than me. And Tri looks more like me. That's fair, huh? Son like father, daughter like mother? You're so beautiful. So, so beautiful. You remind me of your mother when I first met her. We were both seventeen years old. She looked fourteen. She had a fourteen-year-old sister. She would have been your aunt. She would have been your Aunt Lan, but you never met her. Can I tell you a secret? I loved your mother the minute I saw her, but I loved your Aunt Lan, too. She was just a kid, but she was so beautiful, and so sweet, just like you. She and your mother used to live around the corner from here, on Meter Street, and they used to play on that willow tree like you do now. When I moved here with my mother it was summer and I met these two beautiful, beautiful girls in their little summer outfits and their yellow-brown skin. Your mother had long, long hair, down to her cute tiny b.u.m. But Aunt Lan had short hair, just like you. Short hair even blacker than your mother's black hair. One day we sat in their apartment watching VT and Aunt Lan lay down on the sofa and put her head in my lap. Your mother didn't seem to mind too much; she just clicked her tongue and ignored her. But I stroked her hair. Just stroked and stroked for a whole hour. Like a dog with its head on your knee. At the time I didn't know if she was asleep or awake. But the way she looked up at me after, and smiled at me, I knew she'd been awake all the time. For that hour she and I were in love and it was like we were totally alone. It was the greatest hour of love I ever knew. I don't know why. I'm sorry to tell you that. I love your mother. But maybe it was the greatest hour of love in my life only later on, when I thought about it afterwards, after what happened. There was a serial killer in the neighborhood that winter. He cut the head off a homeless man and left him on a tenement roof top. They only found him in the spring, though. And there was a policeman, of all people, a forcer, and they found him in his car with the motor still running, and he looked okay from the waist up but he was cut to ribbons below the belt. Then there was a woman they found in her own apartment, all sliced and slashed, sitting in a rocking chair in front of her VT. And your poor Aunt Lan. Poor, poor, beautiful little Aunt Lan. They found her up in that willow tree she loved to climb on like a monkey. She climbed up so fast one time when I was chasing her; I couldn't catch her. I was big and couldn't get up very far but she was so light she could climb way up into those yellow branches. They hung all around her like...like a beaded curtain, and she smiled down at me so cute, so adorable. Out of my reach. She wasn't that high up when they found her, but she was there in the tree, with snow on her face...on her open eyes. They told me. I was glad I didn't see her. But I can picture the snow on her black hair, making it look old and gray. If I'd seen her I would've wiped it off. Wiped it off. Wiped the blood off her face. Oh G.o.d. Oh dear G.o.d. She was so beautiful, your Aunt Lan. So sweet...like you...she looked just like you...oh G.o.d. Ohhh G.o.d. I'm sorry, honey. Never mind. You're my good little girl. My sweet little girl. You have candy-coated dreams, now."

5: The Monster Bobo's uncle swore he'd seen a monster exactly a week ago. Bobo told the other children about it, and even Tri and the older boys of the gang stood listening and didn't scoff too much. The uncle was unloading a company hovervan, backed up to the dock behind a brick building with a cafe on its ground floor. It was snowing hard that day, did they remember?, and the uncle heard a sound behind him. There was a little courtyard with a big dumpster that zapped the cafe's trash, and a lot of heaped and rusting junk no one had ever bothered slinging into the dumpster to get zapped, too. Bobo's uncle saw something stand up, all covered in snow that began to trickle off its body. It was such a cold day, did they remember?, that nothing should be living after lying on the ground long enough to be covered all in snow like that. And it was big, big, and dark, but he couldn't make it out, and he only looked for a second because he ran out of the alley, around to the front where the coffee house was, and when he came back with another man, who carried a gun, there was no sign of the monster the uncle had seen except for these dragging, messy tracks that were impossible to make out. Tri listened all the way through this tale but then he reminded the younger children, his sister among them, that there was an old robot in that courtyard that had been used for s.h.i.+pping/receiving work when the cafe had once been a small factory. The robot hadn't budged in a decade or more, but maybe something had set it off, a transmission from a hand phone or palmcomp or even the radio of a pa.s.sing hovercar, and it had finally risen. Together they went to that courtyard, and there they found the derelict automaton sprawled where it had always lain, parts of it torn off, other parts caked in graffiti. It was covered in a deep, smooth drift of snow, Bobo pointed out. The snow hadn't fallen off it. What his uncle had seen had to be something else. Furthermore, his uncle had said it had long arms like tentacles. A lot of long arms like tentacles. That much he saw before he fled. Tri smacked Bobo lightly across the back of his skull and told him it must have been a coat with long rawhide fringe. Or, what if they were arms? So what? Then it was either an alien or a mutant. There were plenty of aliens and mutants. Any one of them could be called a monster. People called human murderers, and these children themselves, monsters. There were lots of monsters about. It could have been any one of them. That didn't mean it was the one that had killed that Choom in the bas.e.m.e.nt parking bay...that woman in the alley...that man they found in the willow tree. Anyway, Tri said, it could very well be three different monsters who killed those people. But Kiwi listened to this, and not for the first time since these killings had begun she thought of her father's oft-heard bedtime story. She wondered if Tri had ever heard it, too, either from their father or from their mother, but she'd never dared bring it up to Tri. Now that Tri was almost a man, he and his father were perpetually at near-violent odds. Tri despised his father's heavy drinking and use of anodyne gas (though Kiwi had known her brother to drink and gas up with his friends). As much as she dreaded listening to her father's slurred and painful recollections, she was afraid that if she complained about him or even brought up his bedside visits, it would set off her hot-tempered brother and cause him to confront her father. Her father-who was himself often hot-tempered, always sad, usually unemployed, gray before he should be gray, his very skin gray as if some monster sat down on the edge of his own mattress at night while her mother lay sleeping unaware right beside him, and rested its head on her father's lap while it inhaled the life from his pores.

6: The Window Four of the boys in the gang Tri belonged to took turns standing at the very edge of the sidewalk, the traffic whipping by so close that it made their long trendy winter coats flap, and hurling their tomahawk-like e-ikkos through the flas.h.i.+ng gaps between the vehicles, the e-ikkos twirling end over end until their blades thunked into the bark of the willow tree, where they had sprayed a target in red paint on top of layers of earlier graffiti. Kiwi hoped they hadn't sprayed on top of the angel someone had intricately painted there many years ago (primarily in shades of a luminescent blue paint that had faded over the years but which once must have caused the angel to glow in the night like a phantom). It was bad enough that someone had gouged out its eyes with a knife, and someone else had painted a huge phallus on it, but it still managed to be beautiful, more like a serene and tolerant spirit standing in front of the tree than a flat image upon its grooved bark. She thought of the j.a.panese G.o.ddess O-Ryu. She had encountered her name on the net when researching a report for school. O-Ryu was the G.o.ddess of willow trees. Kiwi couldn't tell from here if the angel painting had been damaged; she stood behind the tall boys of the gang, watching their e-ikko contest. One boy said to Tri that if he won, for his prize he would demand to spend the night with Tri's mother. Tri raised his weapon as if to cleave the boy's head down the center-he was not entirely joking in the gesture-but the gang's leader barked at them both to cease. The boy who'd teased Tri hurled his weapon and it clanged hard against the fender of a pa.s.sing hoverbus. He was almost hit, himself, darting into the street to retrieve it, and he cursed when he saw that the blade had been dinged. While the others laughed, Tri taunting him the loudest, Kiwi raised her eyes to the face of the brick building directly opposite her, across this intersection at the center of which-like an oasis, or a mirage-stood the triangular traffic island. She had heard her father's bedtime story in many variations. Sometimes he talked more about the aunt she had never known. Told her more about the adventures he and the two sisters had shared that summer, and that autumn, before the mythologized and martyred Aunt Lan died that winter. Other times he spoke-a little more, at least-about the killings that had taken place that winter. There had been four. There had been three, this winter. Three, so far. She had heard the details often enough to know that the elderly woman who had been found in her rocker in front of her VT, mauled as if by a madman, or a lion, had lived right there, right up there in the apartment behind that window, that window with a view right down on the traffic island-like an oasis in the middle of the intersection-a view right down directly on the willow tree.

7: The Photos The first photo her father showed her, showed her proudly, proud that his young daughter would ask to see these old photographs, was of her father and mother at the time they had worked together in the little brick factory that had now closed down like so many factories had, and since become a coffee shop. They were standing on the street in front of it with their arms around each other's waists, barely out of their teens. The next photograph had been taken inside her mother's old apartment building, and it was a few years older, because it showed her Aunt Lan standing in front of a window. She was silhouetted, eclipsed, the light making a halo around her head, her face dark with shadow but smiling. She did indeed have short hair cut in neat bangs like her niece's. Kiwi hadn't seen this picture in years. Neither had her father. She thought he might begin to weep as he held it in his lap, but he had only downed two beers so far tonight and he moved on to more pictures. More of her mother. More of her Aunt Lan. More of their friends and neighbors here in Willow Tree. Toward the bottom of the stack there was a picture of Aunt Lan standing in front of the willow tree, both her arms tucked behind her as if she'd been lashed to the trunk though obviously she was merely leaning back against it. Sunlight had managed to pry its way through the shadows of the city towers, beaming directly down onto the island. Aunt Lan wore cheap sungla.s.ses with circular lenses. From a distance, they made her look as if she had skull sockets in place of eyes. Another of the photos showed a gang of boys much like the one Kiwi's brother belonged to; her father explained that he had worked with one of those tough youths in the factory. Kiwi stared at this photo a long time before she realized what was wrong with it. She stopped her father from moving on to the next picture. She didn't tell him, however, what she had figured out about it. She could ascertain from the buildings behind the youths that they were standing at the intersection. Directly behind them was the traffic island. But she did not see the willow tree. Could their bodies be obscuring it? She felt she should be able to see the tree, huge as it was, between and even above their heads. But it was as if the tree had been cut down. Could it have been? And then replaced with another specimen? Had the original become sick? Maybe the tree hadn't been planted yet at that time; but no, there was that photo of Aunt Lan from the same period (the photos even had superimposed dates in their corners), with her leaning against its body. Kiwi glanced at her father's face but he either didn't notice anything unusual in the shot, or was not seeing the photo in the same way she saw it. She didn't ask him about it, though. She let him shuffle through to the next memory.

8: The Dream That night, from out her bedroom window, and from the precarious perch of her dreams, Kiwi watched a man walk along the street below with a blizzard swirling around him. He was a big man, a huge block of a man, a fedora crunched down onto his head, his broad body hunched inside a heavy coat. From this coat hung a long rawhide fringe that whipped all about him in the air. She watched the man come to a stop on the sidewalk, and she was afraid, wanted to duck down out of sight, thinking he was gazing up at her. She could see his small eyes catch a glimmer of orange light, flash in his shadowy face like the eyes of a lion in the dark. But then she realized he was facing across the street, not at her window. (In her dream, her apartment building was not in its actual location.) He was gazing up at a window in a brick building of native Choom design and origin. Kiwi recognized that window. Though she could not see through its curtains, she knew an elderly woman sat behind that gla.s.s, rocking in a chair, watching some old movie on her VT. As she spied on the spying man in the fringed coat, she saw the fringe become even more animated in its movements, even though the storm had fallen into a lull. She saw one long strand of the man's fringe shoot out, lengthen like elastic, like a string of putty, across the empty street, and up to that curtained window with its blue VT glow. Kiwi watched the extended limb, for now she understood it to be such, pick and claw at the edge of the window, seeking a way inside. A solitary hovercar sped by in the street, churning up a little whirlwind of snow in its wake. Its lights briefly slashed across the bulky figure, though the vehicle's owner might not have noticed that he pa.s.sed directly below the extended limb. The headlights sent a myriad of reflected glimmers across the hulking figure. Sparkling orange gems. Gems that moved slowly, that swarmed, all over the black figure. They were hundreds, thousands of little beetles with glistening orange sh.e.l.ls. But they weren't just crawling on the figure, she realized. They seemed to entirely compose the figure, ma.s.ses of beetles in the millions, not thousands, filling that coat and the snowy fedora. Kiwi watched as the thing's yellow, tentacle-like arm managed to raise the edge of the window just a fraction, and apparently snake its way inside. Minutes pa.s.sed, filled only by mute snow. At last, the rope-like arm withdrew. Did she see dark droplets fall from its tip as it was retracted? Did a few drops mark the snow where the figure had stood, when it began walking along the sidewalk again? Kiwi repositioned herself so as to follow the progress of the man, the alien, the mutant, the monster as he continued on to the street corner. He was at the intersection. And now he began to cross-slowly, without fear of being hit, there being an uncanny lack of traffic, a disquieting quiet-to the little triangular traffic island. But now, at last, Kiwi saw that there was no willow tree upon the island. Not at first, anyway. A gust of wind caromed down into the street, raising a billowing cloud of snow. When it had cleared away enough for her to see the traffic island again, the bulky figure in its greatcoat and fedora was gone. But the willow tree was there on its island, after all. And that was when Kiwi opened her eyes in her dark bedroom and stared at her ceiling, across which blazed like meteors the headlights of vehicles which never, in real life, stopped zipping along the streets of Willow Tree. In her head, a buzzing sound like the cries of cicadas was fading off down a tunnel. Then gone. Though she had never heard them make a sound, she imagined it was a chorus those many orange beetles that appeared on the willow tree might sing, when their eggs were hatched, and they were born anew each summer.

9: The Victim They considered it a gang-related death, and there were even murders in retribution. This did not satisfy Kiwi, however, or ease her grief in the slightest. She knew it was not a rival gang that had killed her brother Tri in such a grisly fas.h.i.+on, and left his seated body propped against the dumpster in that courtyard behind the coffee shop, where the dead robot still dreamed under its blanket of snow. Tri's blue and orange e-ikko was gripped in his fist when they found him, as if he had tried to defend himself, though no blood stained its blade. There were splinters of wood pulp wedged between the blade and its base, but that could have been from the throwing contest they had held. Kiwi's mother wailed. Her father drank, and looked at more photographs, these of his son when he was an infant and a toddler and just starting school. That night he came to sit on the edge of Kiwi's bed, but he only sobbed inarticulately, and he didn't stroke her head at all. Revenge, revenge, Tri's gang and even the younger children vowed, unsated. Kiwi wanted revenge, too. But she knew their enemy was masquerading. She knew it had had its four victims already, and might well hibernate for years to come until it again needed to feed, to be refreshed. But she didn't care. She would have her vengeance.

10: The Purging She sneaked out into the night, into the snow that never seemed to cease, as if time were turning in on itself over and over in a loop that needed breaking. She had a flammable fluid in a red plastic container. She had her father's cigarette lighter. Though it was late, she had to be quick when she darted out into the street...when she crossed to the triangular traffic island. She uncapped the container, splashed the trunk with its carved lovers' initials (were her father's and mother's there? had her father secretly carved her Aunt Lan's there?), splashed the beautiful painted angel with the luminous blue robes and the gouged eyes. Before she thumbed the lighter on, she tilted her head back and stared up into the waterfall of swaying vegetation, looming over her like a living cathedral. The wind hissed through the yellow tendrils like a warning. As if to answer that hiss, Kiwi produced a flame in her hand. Little at first, just like a seed that she planted at the base of the willow tree, but it soon bloomed and blossomed and she had to run across the street to escape its spreading autumnal leaves. A pa.s.sing car clipped her hip and she spun around fast and fell hard, but fortunately it was the sidewalk that she sprawled upon. The car did not stop. Nor did the flames.

11: The Hive.

A column of black smoke, underlit a vivid orange, climbed high into the night like a magical beanstalk. Fire-fighting robots came, attended by human crews, and by now Kiwi had been joined by her parents on the sidewalk; they apparently believed she had stepped outside only moments before themselves. Kiwi saw her father's face in profile as his eyes followed the billowing flames, saw the fire-glow ripple across his face like memories of sunlight. Branches once climbed upon, now sheathed in flame. Branches stained in blood, turned into tinder. Kiwi gazed across the street and saw a few stray members of Tri's gang, drawn like moths to the blaze. A ring of faces bordered the intersection by the time the hoses and chemical sprays arced toward the conflagration. When they struck the fires, an angry sizzling hiss rose up. The hiss became a buzz. The buzz was as much a vibration in Kiwi's head as it was a sound. A vast plume of sparks cascaded into the air, borne aloft in the twisted column of smoke (itself like a black specter of the trunk it rose from). These sparks drifted high, blazed, dispersed, faded. Like fireflies. Like a whole swarm of bright orange insects, briefly and dazzlingly alive, then dying in the winter's cold air. The fire was soon brought under control, now that the crews had arrived. Even the smoke was quick to dissipate. And when it did, only the lower trunk of the willow tree remained. It looked shorn off, a huge stump, and the inside of the charred stump was strangely hollow. There was something else strange, but only Kiwi seemed to attribute any significance to it. She saw a firefighter stoop and pick up a fedora, and shake the snow and ash from it.

12: The End.

Kiwi returned to her old neighborhood often to see her mother, though she lived in the neighboring city of Miniosis now. She was nineteen; her sad, leeched father had pa.s.sed away two years ago. He just let go, was the way people-her mother included-explained it. His bedside reminiscences about Aunt Lan had not been repeated after the night the willow tree was destroyed. Kiwi would occasionally recall a particular story he had read to her, back when his stories had still come from books: in Greek mythology, Myrrha was cursed by the petty G.o.ddess of love Aphrodite so that she fell in love with her own father, Cinyras. Revolted by Myrrha's seduction of him, Cinyras then attempted to murder her. To escape her fate, Myrrha asked the G.o.ds to turn her into a tree. Recollecting this story made Kiwi fantasize that the spirits of the willow tree's victims had been kept prisoner within it-and when the tree had burned, those spirits were freed from their cell. It was as though the still-living spirit of Kiwi's father had been trapped for many years in the willow tree's trunk, as well, and been released in some small way by the cleansing flames that night. When she came back home on her visits, however, Kiwi still occasionally heard strange stories told by her superst.i.tious mother and her own childhood friends, sometimes bordering on folk tales and urban legends. There were always going to be unsolved murders, though, weren't there? And mysterious strangers glimpsed on stormy nights? There would always be monsters. But all that remained of the willow tree that had given this section of the city its name had been removed years before, extracted like a rotted tooth. On the traffic island now, a local group had volunteered to plant a basin of flowers. Every summer, they bloomed in phosph.o.r.escent shades of blue-like the robes of a glowing angel.

PART II.

SCOTT*THOMAS.

PULSE.

Stan Derma considered it a fall from grace, having to work for the privately owned Travis Transport Bus Company after having served with the city-run public system. The bus, for one, belonged in a sc.r.a.p yard and the routes and hours were undesirable, to say the least. He worked the dangerous sectors where the better-armored city buses were not obliged to go. Too many drivers for Travis Transport had found that it was a dead end job in more ways than one.

The city bus had been a thing of beauty, silver, sleek, comfortable, air-conditioned. It was divided into three segments, the first of which was the driver's cab, part.i.tioned off behind a cla.s.s-four plexi-door that could hold its own against every form of bullet and most ray and plasma weapons. His divider on the Travis "boat" would barely stop spit b.a.l.l.s.

Just behind the driver's cab was the pa.s.senger entry booth where folks climbed up into the vehicle and paid-the automatic machines accepted both cards and hard money. A weapon scan would commence; if weapons were detected, the driver would be alerted and the person carrying would need to run their firearms ID card through a scanner in the entry booth before being allowed into the pa.s.senger area.

While no bus drivers in Punktown were allowed to carry weapons themselves, the city buses were equipped with a handy feature, a full stun emergency blast. Say a brawl or gang rape broke out in the pa.s.senger compartment...the driver could hit a b.u.t.ton which would trigger a sudden clap of stunning energy that would incapacitate everyone in the bus. While only lethal to a minuscule number of species, and perhaps those with certain heart ailments, the blast would give the driver time to pull over and radio the police. Of course anyone boarding the bus would be warned by a recorded voice while still in the entry booth. Even so, there were a few deaths each year attributed to the stun blast, mostly old folks whose hearing was as bad as their hearts or brittle little insect-like Leelios, whose English was notoriously poor. Still, the recorded warning kept the city transit department safe from lawsuits.

Flipping back a few months, we find Stan Derma walking from his apartment to the small bakery on the corner of Forty-Fourth where he stopped every workday for breakfast. It was a hot day for spring and the gray filth that had erupted when a pollution-sucker exploded in the sky the week before was still caked on the sides of buildings and steaming in the gutters. City clean-up crews were raking in overtime tending to the mess, so they were in no hurry to remove it.

Quiet-looking, lean and dark-haired, thirty-two-year-old Stan ordered a croissant and coffee from the pleasant Tikkihotto woman behind the counter. She commented on what a lovely day it was. She always said it was a lovely day, regardless of the weather, and Stan smiled halfheartedly.

Stan ate quickly at a small table in the corner where someone had carved DIE HUMANS into the artificial wood. Probably a native Choom, Stan speculated. Some would never forgive the earth invaders who had colonized Oasis and claimed the cities now called Miniosis and Paxton (better known as Punktown).

A vidtank situated above the serving counter was tuned to an all-news channel. A smartly dressed human woman was reporting on a grim discovery made at the trade docks east of the city. Apparently a routine check of a cargo s.h.i.+p, that was supposed to be carrying a type of powdered coral used in the manufacture of high-speed wires, turned up a freight chamber full of dead Veers. Sixty-three of the unfortunate little humanoids had crammed into the s.h.i.+p in a smuggling attempt, each likely having paid a handsome sum to the pilot, merely to suffocate. Stan grinned when the ordinarily objective reporter Lisa Wren concluded her report by saying that she had to wonder if it would have been a greater tragedy if the stowaways had lived and gotten out into the streets of Paxton.

The Veers were outlawed from stepping foot on Oasis. Their eating habits and incorrigible savagery made a mockery of their visual charm. Full grown Veers resembled earth children, small and cute and smooth. On close inspection, one might be able to see that their teeth were one forged and sharp beak-like expanse of bone and that their skin was somewhat glossy and doll-like, but then close inspection could prove fatal.

Stan wondered if whatever G.o.d-force had a.s.sembled the universe had made the Veers the ironic answer to all the abuse suffered by innocent children. Maybe the G.o.d who saw fit to populate so many worlds with creatures that closely resembled humans (or did humans resemble the others?) had himself, or herself, a dark chuckle when making those adorable-looking demons.

At any rate, the dreadful cargo was dead and it was just as well. The pilot had slipped away when the port police went to check his load and he had not been located for questioning.

Stan finished his croissant and killed off his coffee while walking to the terminal. He punched in, checked the fuel in his bus and headed out on his route.

It was a Monday morning and the traffic was atrocious. Sneery business types pushed their way on at his first stop. Stan could monitor the pa.s.senger compartment from several strategically placed cameras and noticed that the trim, bespectacled corporate gent who had rushed to the back seat was jerking off to colored photographs of aborted babies secreted behind his Wall Street Journal.

One of Stan's regulars, a plump girl with Celtic hair, smiled at him as she climbed on at his second stop. Stan looked away shyly and saw his own sad smile reflected in the gla.s.s of the driver's window. She seemed like a student, always carrying books, reading on the days when the traffic made the ride long. She looked warm and soft in her appealingly unrevealing clothes. She looked a little embarra.s.sed when Stan did not beam back (though he'd have liked to) and moved quickly to the fourth row and opened a book.

Third stop. The man with the smeary fetus photos finished his business, crossed himself and got off at Hudson and Fifty-Third. A young blond girl, maybe nine or ten, climbed into the entry booth and fed some coins into the register machine. She smiled through the plexi-door and Stan was relieved to see that she had separately defined teeth, rather than a single fused bar. The secretly imported Veers had all died, hadn't they, and there was nothing to be worried about, though it always worried Stan to see children riding the bus alone; it was Punktown after all.

The small girl was admitted into the pa.s.senger section and skipped down the aisle in her little summer dress, then plopped on the seat next to the pretty red-head, who looked up and smiled politely. Her cheeks looked round and soft when she smiled and Stan longed to touch them, softly, with his fingers, or to place a quiet kiss...

The bus jerked back into traffic and the air conditioning hissed. There were sirens somewhere and the shadow of a pollution sucker pa.s.sed over the road as it floated overhead like a gray metal cloud.

Stan scrutinized some of the girls on the sidewalk as he sat at a light. An injectable fad known as...o...b..it was appearing with greater frequency these days. A luminous substance with a life of several days would be shot into the desired body part (usually the b.r.e.a.s.t.s) and radiate out with varying degrees of intensity. Two young females, perhaps fourteen, walked in front of the bus, crossing Hudson. Both wore black leather pants and white T-s.h.i.+rts. One's b.r.e.a.s.t.s glowed a soft mystical blue from under her top while the other's were announced in neon red. The girls sauntered over to an older-looking Hispanic boy clad only in baggy shorts who lounged outside a music store. Something purple glowed from within his trunks.

"That's all I need to get a girl," Stan muttered to the sun-bleached winds.h.i.+eld ghost that was his reflection, "a neon d.i.c.k."

He glanced at the rearview mirror, at the plump college student sitting there with a book in her lap, her neat perky hair cut with cute bangs. He liked to think that she too would frown upon such vulgar trends. He reached over to the dash and worked a small lever to guide one of the inconspicuous cameras mounted back in the pa.s.senger section. He zoomed in on the cover of the book she was reading: The Collected Poems of Emily d.i.c.kinson. Now Stan beamed. If only she had seen.

The light turned green and the bus moved forward. It sped up significantly as it headed over the Sumner Bridge toward downtown. Sporty little business b.a.s.t.a.r.ds wove in and out of traffic and-narrowly avoiding several collisions, as was par for the course-Stan moved over into the pa.s.sing lane to compensate for the fact that he was behind schedule. His time-recorder would register when he made his stops and drivers' paychecks were docked a munit for every time they made a stop later than scheduled. This, of course, made many of the pilots drive like madmen, risking their own lives as well as those of pa.s.sengers and fellow drivers, for the sake of a few munits. While no enemy of money, Stan only drove fast where it was safe to do so.

Stan heard the first scream when he was midway across the bridge, with its great walls of gray metal, pressed to resemble stone. Eyes flicking to the rearview, he saw that the little blond girl had clamped her mouth onto the soft round cheek of the college student and was shaking her head like a dog with a toy.

"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ!"

It was only later, following his dismissal, that Stan would learn that two of the Veers had survived the deadly smuggling episode and had made their way into the general population. As clever as they were hungry, the creatures used powder to make their skin appear less glossy and employed special marker pens to draw fake teeth divisions onto their biting beaks. Who'd have known?

The Veer had half the college girl's face off before Stan could even punch the stun b.u.t.ton. There was an electric cough sound and a blue flash and everyone except the Veer collapsed limp.

"s.h.i.+t!"

The Veer looked up at Stan and gave him a big, grateful, red smile and turned away from the unconscious college girl, who slumped over, her head banging against the window. Stan hit the stun b.u.t.ton again and the pa.s.senger chamber lit up like a teenage girl's breast, but still the Veer was unphased. It lunged at an old woman and latched onto her neck. Blood erupted onto the child-like face of the alien, beading its Goldilocks mane.

The bus was bearing down on a compact which was driving too slowly in the fast lane, the oblivious occupant busy on a portaphone. Stan tried to swerve into the slow lane, so as to pull over, but a business woman there held her ground, giving him the finger-no one was going to cut her off! Stan hit the police b.u.t.ton: this would alert local authorities of an emergency and even tell them his exact location. Then he hit it again to indicate that an ambulance was needed.

Stan looked back in the mirror as the old woman's detached head flew at him and thumped against the plexi-door, leaving a big red Rorschach. He remembered that one of the pa.s.sengers had been carrying a legal pistol, as revealed by the weapons scan system. If he could pull over, maybe he could get back there and take it off the unconscious man...