Blue War: A Punktown Novel

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Oh!” she said. She looked confused.

  “She overheard your call. She knows that you were coming to meet me. I wasn’t very careful about what I said to her. I’m afraid it might make things more difficult for you.”

  “Nhot very no good.”

  “Well if I looked like that scabby-headed little monster, I suppose I’d be nasty, too. Remind me never to look at her too long, unless it’s close to October thirty-first.” He was exaggerating, but it felt good anyway. “I’m just afraid she might tell your husband we’re meeting.”

  “No worry, please. Husband afraid police now. And uncle very angry at Nhot, say to Nhot no more talk to husband. Uncle angry at me, but not want husband hurt me again.”

  “But will your husband know where you were going? When you get back, will he –”

  “Ga Noh.” Before they could step out of the craft, she put a hand on his arm. “Please. Today, no talk husband, okay? No talk anything husband.”

  Her beseeching face was like a child’s. He smiled, reassuring her. “Okay.”

  They disembarked, Thi bringing along a canvas bag with a shoulder strap. Seeing Stake notice it, she explained, “I brought food for Ga Noh.”

  “Ahh, a picnic, huh? Very nice.”

  The breeze had changed a little – though the air was so hot, Stake couldn’t tell there even was a breeze except by the movement of the steam – and a mist surrounded them as if they had stepped into his memories, distorted and decayed. They walked together until the Harbinger vanished behind them. Stake directed her attention to an apartment building lurking in the fog and said, “That’s the last place I knew my father to be living before I lost track of him. Or before he lost track of himself.”

  Thi apparently couldn’t think of anything to say, but sensing his emotion, she took his hand and squeezed it while they continued on.

  There was a continuous background noise of crunching static. Stake envisioned a wave of army ants feasting on the jungle. He pictured them more as the nanomites used in surgery and industry, though; implacable machine-animals with exoskeletons of chemically inert diamond, that couldn’t be reasoned with or deterred now that they were one with their programming. But this crackling was the sound of the coralline cells, kamikazes sacrificing their seconds-long lives to add their minute skeletons to the greater cause – living just long enough to split into clones of themselves, each one bequeathing memory-encoded molecules filled with this great city in its entirety. And why shouldn’t that be? Didn’t Stake’s parents exist in every one of his cells, figuratively and literally?

  He took Thi around a corner, down a narrower street. “There,” he said, indicating another tenement house ahead. “That’s the last place we lived while my mother was alive.” They drew closer until they stood on the opposite curb, and he pointed. “We were there on the third floor. By then she was very sick, and would sit at that window every day watching the people and vehicles go by.” Now, that and every window in the modest, unremarkable building were sightless slabs of coral.

  They crossed the street and Stake mounted the front steps, laid both hands on the sealed front doors. Behind him, down the steps, Thi said, “What kind gun you have? Maybe we cut inside?”

  “I don’t have a beam gun or any other kind of gun. They won’t let me, here.”

  “No?”

  Stake turned away from the double doors, came down the steps to take Thi’s hand and tug her along. “Come on. If we can’t go inside, we can at least go up top.”

  Behind the building, in an alley, a fire escape zigzagged its way to the flat roof. Stake mounted it ahead of her. The steps did not clang metallically as he remembered, but they supported their weight. “I used to go up here with a friend sometimes, and we’d throw stuff at other friends in the street. Or hide with a Zub we stole from my dad. A couple times I even sat up here with my dad. He’d sit up here for hours, the days after my mom died, but I left him alone. I thought he needed that.”

  Together they moved to the waist-high safety wall that surrounded the roof like a battlement, passing a mock utility shed, a row of three mock exhaust fans under vented domes, and the sealed staircase to the top floor. At the low barrier, Stake gestured toward a structure in the distance. “Jesus, look. I went to school in that building, there.”

  The building in question was still forming, so that it presented a cross section, as if exposed through partial demolition. Waste fluid ran down from floor to floor like champagne poured over a tower of wedding glasses.

  “Ga Noh learn things with medicine?” Thi motioned with her hand as if injecting an invisible syringe into her temple. “I hear about.”

  Memory-encoded molecules, like the virus-tainted education each generation of smart matter cells passed on to the next. “No,” Stake told her, “I never had that. It’s mostly banned in Punktown, to preserve the jobs of educators and make sure that kids have social interaction with real teachers and other children, in a classroom setting. Sometimes wealthy people will have their kids learn that way, or by computer interface, to keep them away from all the school violence, but by law even they can only do that for a few years, spaced throughout their kids’ total education.” He shielded his eyes from the paired suns as they peeked through a tear in the drifting canopy of mist. Still staring at the bisected school, he went on, “I wish I could have learned that way, because someone once said, ‘Hell is other people,’ and it’s true. That’s why I feel like this gift of mine is hell, sometimes. It’s like I’m possessed by every face I’ve ever assumed, crowded inside me. You would think that in a school of almost entirely mutants, kids would be less mocking and cruel to each other, but that wasn’t the case. They were cruel, maybe out of self-loathing. There was another student with a condition like mine, but much worse. It got to the point where his face was changing features constantly – even when he was asleep – in this boiling blur of flesh, so that you couldn’t ever see just one face, though you’d think you might recognize one of them for a second. You might think you saw yourself in there. But he couldn’t see himself in there anymore, I guess, because one day he just put a bullet into his skull to kill all those faces at once.” He nodded, as if he were watching a number of scenes played out all at once in the school’s dissected rooms. “Yeah – Tin Town. This is why I escaped to the military, when I was old enough. To get away from all this self-loathing. But I didn’t get far, huh? I escaped to Sinan. And now, here on Sinan, I find my home again.”

  Thi was leaning against the barrier, looking up at his face. She took his chin and turned it toward her. She saw his tears streaming. Stake met her gaze, and within moments he saw fat tears pop from her own eyes and roll down her cheeks. It was, essentially, the first time he had ever seen anyone imitate his face. He was sure she understood only a portion of his words, but she understood his feelings precisely. He didn’t think he’d ever known such a moment of pure empathy with another being.

  He took her face in turn, in both hands, and then they were kissing. Passion came quickly; the slippery dance of tongues, the holding of each other’s heads. He squeezed one of her small breasts, feeling its engorged nipple in his palm through the material of her blouse, while she ran her hands under his shirt to slide up the skin of his back.

  Thi pulled away from him, looking to left and right. At first he thought she was alarmed at some arrival, but she was surveying their prospects with blatant anxiousness. The floor of coral was too rough, so she simply leaned over the railing and looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes shining with fever. Stake pulled down her pants, and fitted himself behind her. She was small, and winced once, but he drew out her moisture and went in again more smoothly. Then, holding her waist, he began thrusting long and deep, mounting in rhythm quickly until his front slapped against the small hard balls of her buttocks. She grunted, looked out over the new city and then back at him again.

  “Ga Noh is beautiful now,” she panted. “Beautiful.”

  He knew why. He had been
taking on her appearance unconsciously. Consciously, he had only been thinking: eleven years. Eleven years...

  “You have magic on me. Magic, I can not keep away.” She reached back awkwardly, took one of his hands off her narrow waist and placed it at the back of her head. At her prompting, he took a handful of her hair, heavy black silk, but he only held it taut without pulling on it. “Oh,” she panted, “fuck me.” Her eyes shone back at him like red glass lit from within. “Ban ta likes Ga Noh strong...strong.”

  Ban ta: your lover. And he understood the rest, too, slapping his pale olive skin harder and harder against her blue skin, as if he might achieve the ultimate mimicry and meld with her body in a reverse mitosis.

  ***

  Her arms had become abraded against the blue coral, so they had both removed their clothing and laid it down on the roof and made do with that. Sitting on the puddled clothing now, Stake tolerated the wall as he leaned against it with Thi leaning in turn against him. Through her back, could she feel his heartbeat easing from a gallop to a trot? When atop her, he had felt her chest pounding against his own, the two organs seeming desperate to escape their rib cages to reach each other. Her mysterious Ha Jiin heart, which if it were to be cut open would give up a black fog like sinon gas. For eleven years, it had seemed to him that a black cloud had hidden her heart from him on the outside, as well. When he had lain upon her, his face inches from hers, he had asked, “Are you doing this because you feel sorry for me?”

  “No,” she said huskily. “Because I feel sorry me.”

  Now, with their bodies still damp with sweat, Thi reached for his porkpie hat and placed it atop his head. “There. Ga Noh is ready go home.”

  “I don’t think they’d let me on the base wearing only this. What about when you go home, Thi? What’s going to be waiting for you?”

  “I said, please, no talk husband today. Please. I be okay, I swear.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Hungry now? I have food I make.”

  “Oh yeah, great, I forgot about that. Something to drink would be nice, before I die of heat prostration.”

  Thi went onto hands and knees to retrieve her canvas bag. Enjoying the view, Stake reached between her legs from behind to tug gently on a tuft of her unruly hair. She looked back at him with a crooked smile, and a shadow slid across her flesh. Stake looked up, expecting to see a fresh cloud of steam blocking the intense glare of the binary stars.

  Above them floated something of the size and general form of a parachute, and it eclipsed the sky so that the double suns glowed grayish through a black membrane with an oily iridescence, their light making it more translucent. From this bell hung a ring of long, ropy arms, bluish and also translucent, with a nest of shorter pitch black tentacles squirming at the center.

  Bender, Stake thought, even as one of the longer tendrils – their insubstantial-looking flesh full of paralyzing venom – lashed out at his naked body like a whip. He shot to his feet and threw himself to one side, evading the first tentacle but not a second, which encircled his leg like a lasso. Stake was jerked aloft and upside-down, his hat falling away and arms thrashing. But they didn’t thrash for long, as the stunning toxins entered his bloodstream.

  Thi had also thrown herself forward, gone into a shoulder roll toward the pouch she had been reaching for. She came up in a squat beside it, in the same motion having removed two items. In her left hand, a long knife she had brought to cut fruit and bread. In her right, a dull gray handgun.

  Stiffening, Stake still managed to look up toward the bender’s underside. Another blue limb had coiled around one of his arms, and a third slithered around his neck but he could no longer feel their touch. They were lifting him toward the black tendrils, which seemed to writhe more excitedly in anticipation. It was the black tendrils that delivered enzymes to begin the breakdown of tissues for digestion.

  Through the bender’s dark membrane, three darker floating shapes were silhouetted. Stake knew what they were: a smaller, spherical life-form called a blastula. Symbiotically, these orange-sized creatures fed off the emanations of larger extradimensionals – their life force, some would say. In return, through a primitive telepathic connection, the little vampires served as sensory organs and guides to the benders in dimensions where they might otherwise be blind and disoriented. Always three blastulas, and Stake could see them more plainly hovering like satellites above a second bender that was drifting toward the tenement building as if it were a silent ghost galleon.

  Stake’s eyelids could not close, but he could still see. He could still hear, too. He heard a loud, sharp crack. Above him, as he was drawn upward, he saw one of the silhouetted blastulas burst and vanish. Then another. A third cracking sound – a third bullet zipping straight through the diaphanous canopy overhead – and the last guide creature was gone.

  He could no longer turn his eyeballs, but peripherally he saw a figure spring into the air like a big cat taking down a gazelle. A blur of naked blue skin, and a silvery flash of metal in an arc. Silvery flash. Silver...glowing through the sudden darkness.

  ***

  Gleaming metallic eyes spaced wider than they should be in a human – maybe the eyes of some predatory cat, stealing toward him in the dark as he lay under the covers of his bed, the blanket tucked in so tight across him that he could not move his arms, his whole body. Even his head on his pillow was immobile as he watched the disembodied eyes float nearer.

  His heart beat faster, but a soft voice came out of the gloom to reassure him. “Don’t worry, honey,” it said, “I’m watching over you. I’m protecting you.” Just above him now, the glow of her eyes illuminated enough of her face for Stake to recognize his mother. He felt her hand, with its fingers lacking nails, alight cool upon his feverish forehead. “You’ll be fine soon, my love.”

  But then Stake realized he was standing outside his body, as if astral projecting, and he saw his mother bent over his younger self. The child’s face was illuminated by the gentle radiance from her eyes, as well, and so Stake could see it wasn’t a younger version of himself after all. The boy turned his head on the pillow to smile at him. It was Brian, the clone found in the cloned city, and the boy said, “Don’t be afraid to die. He wears the singing bracelet. Necromancy lullaby...I can’t go back to sleep now.”

  A sudden burst of light into the room. Squinting, Stake turned toward a door held open by a small, silhouetted female figure. A new voice intruding into the darkness.

  “Ga Noh – awake now.”

  ***

  It was her tugging on his arms to get his shirt on that brought him back to her. His trousers were already on, as were her own clothes. Stake could move his head a little, and he saw that Thi was wearing his wrist comp.

  His skull was filled with pain so intense that his vision was black and rippling around the edges, and he was shivering with fever. Through the ripples, he noticed several lengths of severed blue tentacles strewn across the roof; snakes hacked from the medusa.

  He turned his head a little more, saw black smoke rising from a gelatinous mound on the roof of a neighboring building. The mound flickered with green fire. A second column of smoke rose from the street below, from where the other of the two giant jellyfish had sunk from view. Thi saw him looking that way, and scooped something up to show him.

  “I have two kind,” she explained, holding the clip of solid projectiles with which she had killed the blastulas. She had switched it, obviously, with a magazine of plasma rounds, the only real way to bring down a bender. “I give gun to Ga Noh.” She patted his deep trouser pocket, a heaviness inside tugging at the material. She pushed the spare magazine into his other pocket. “You say to me have no gun. You need gun on Sinan.”

  “You need the gun,” he croaked.

  “I have bigger gun,” she assured him. “They come my farm to hunt animals, I always shoot them.” She pantomimed firing a rifle toward the bender’s smoldering carcass.

  “You need it,” he insisted. “What
if your husband tries to hurt you again?”

  Thi held up her empty hands, fingers bent a little like iron claws. “Need no gun.”

  Stake tried on a half-paralyzed smile. “I remember you now,” he rasped. “You’re the Earth Killer.”

  “You talk crazy,” she scolded like a fussing mother, fastening his shirt. “Poison inside. Sometime animal poison inside head for year and year. Sometime monks like poison – drink wine with animal poison inside so monks can talk to ghosts and look to future.”

  “I know,” he rasped. In the monastery his soldiers had captured, he had seen bottles of sacred wine – forbidden to the general public – in which bender larvae had been pickled like anatomical specimens. None of his men had dared try it.

  “You not fly car now.” She tapped his wrist comp. “I see name your friend on computer: Henderson. I call him already. Soon he come here, take you home, okay?”

  “Okay. Thanks, Thi.”

  “Before, in war, Ga Noh protect me from soldiers. Now, I protect you. Always.”

  He let her prop him up in a sitting position against the roof’s barrier. Moving made the pain in his head worse, and he winced. “Just protect yourself in the future,” he managed, “and I’ll be happy.”

  “Who that face Ga Noh have now?” She touched his cheek.

  “What?” He reached up to feel his own features, was surprised to find that he had transformed while he’d been delirious. Some mutants with his affliction could take on the faces of others simply by thinking about them – whether purposely or spontaneously – but he had always needed to be looking at a person or picture to accomplish his own shape-shifting.

  His eyes were not as far apart as they should have been to really do the trick, and he knew their pupils would not be reflective as chrome, but he understood whose face he was imitating at that moment.