"Corporal Stake? I'm Sergeant Adams, of the 5th Advance Rangers. We're the men headed to rendezvous with you at the enemy temple."
"Yes, sir. Good to talk with you, sergeant," Stake said. In reality, though, he was always wary when dealing with clones. They tended to be grouped into their own units, and so there was often resentment or even hostility between them and the "birther" soldiers, as the clones had nicknamed men like Stake. The birther men felt superior for not being a mass-produced product. The clones felt superior knowing that they were, in general, the better warriors. Stake tried not to fall into childish tribalism and counterproductive rivalry, as so many others did, but it was easy to get swept up in it when the derision was directed one's own way.
"Stake, we're in the Kae Ta Valley and things are a bit intense down here." In fact, Stake could hear a distant crackling of gunfire in the background. "I estimate we're going to be a few days behind in merging our unit with yours."
"Understood, sir. We'll continue to hold this position until you arrive, or until we receive new orders."
"Good man. Hey-we heard you caught the Earth Killer. Nice work, corporal." "Yes, sir."
"Got to run. Places to go, people to kill. I'll get back to you ASAP."
"Thanks, sergeant." The man's patterned face vanished from his compack's screen, and he returned it to his belt.
A short while later, the soldiers ate some dinner and settled in, restlessly listening to the sounds of the darkening jungle as diurnal animals made way for nocturnal. Stake stole back toward the room in which Thi Gonh was kept. There, he found Devereux posted outside. The man looked agitated when he saw Stake coming toward him.
"Go get Martin to replace you," Stake told him harshly. "I don't want you guarding this woman anymore."
"Okay, sir," Devereux stammered, sounding strangely less cocky all of a sudden, "but why don't you go get Martin, and I'll wait here until…"
Beyond the thick door, Stake heard a muffled voice. A man's.
He pushed past Devereux, threw the glossy blue door open.
The Earth Killer lay on her belly on the mattress, her face squashed against it in profile. She was naked, and so was the man lying across her back. Private Cortez had his pistol in his fist, and he kept its muzzle pressed against the blue woman's skull. Hearing the door open, Cortez had raised his head. "Dung," he hissed. Thi Gonh opened her eyes.
The tip of Stake's boot caught the Earth soldier under the jaw. He then descended on Cortez with his fist. When he had rolled Cortez's moaning hulk off the small woman, Stake stomped him between the legs, and then on the face. He heard his nose break. Blood sparkled on his boot.
"Stop it!" Devereux shouted, trying to grab at Stake from behind.
Stake's pistol smashed across Devereux's jaw in an arc as he tore it out of its holster. He then aimed the weapon at the stunned soldier's face. Blood started to run into the palm Devereux clamped over his mouth. Cortez's faraway moans sounded like he was having some terrible nightmare.
"Anyone touches this woman again, I will kill them. I will. absolutely. kill them."
"She's using you!" Devereux sobbed. "She doesn't give a blast about you, or me, or any of us! She'd kill us all if she could!"
"Get out of here. And take your friend to the medic, before I decide to shoot his stinking jewels off."
Devereux dragged Cortez's nude body from the room, leaving a swath of blood. And Stake turned to look down at the prisoner. She had pulled her clothing to her, but held it balled up in front of her in clenched fists. For the first time, he saw her eyes were moist with tears that she was fighting to restrain. For the first time, she revealed to Stake that she knew some words of English, after all.
"T'ank you, Ga Noh," she said in her dark voice. "T'ank you, take care, take care of me."
Ga Noh. He remembered it now. Henderson had told Stake she'd referred to him this way, after seeing his face change the first time. Ga Noh was something like a chimera or a shapeshifter. A mystical kind of being; part human, part god. Maybe good, maybe evil.
"I'm sorry," he told her.
She held her hand out to him. He stared at it.
Using you, Devereux had said. Only using you.
Why had he found himself attracted to her, even before he'd learned that she had spared three of his men? Was it indeed just her beauty blinding him? Was the shapeshifting mutant so desperate for the attentions of a woman? Any woman? He felt a moment of contempt for her. Contempt for himself.
And then he took her hand.
Private investigator Jeremy Stake awoke to find that Buddy Balloon had been replaced by a late night talk show. A naked starlet sat giggling in the interviewee chair, luminous green tattoos twined around her overly large breasts like the vines of pumpkins. He turned his head to see that Yuki Fukuda's biology teacher, Janice Poole, had dozed off in her purple silk robe beside him. He stared at her profile for a few moments. Private Devereux had been dead for ten years now-killed the first day that Stake's unit and the cloned Rangers ventured out from the monastery togeth-er-but his words still echoed in Stake's mind. Using you.
He stole out of bed, gathered up his clothing. He was afraid that the sound of showering would rouse Janice, but this was not so much out of consideration for her. He just slipped into his things, buckled on his gun's holster, and stepped out into the chill of Punktown's night.
CHAPTER TEN
the friend
"I saw an elephant, Mom!" the little Choom boy said to his mother as she pulled him along the sidewalk, away from the mouth of the alley he was pointing into. It wasn't good to linger too close to alleys in Punktown, whether above or down here in the sector called Subtown, lest one be pulled inside that alley by a mugger or rapist, drug addict or addled homeless person.
The homeless person leaned forward out of the shadows a bit, watching the child point back at him. The boy's words meant nothing to him. He did not know he was being confused with an animal that the boy had an inaccurate understanding of, but which the homeless person did resemble in the most superficial of ways. For one thing, he had grown larger. He was taller now than most of the people he saw on the streets. This made them look at him more. That was why he preferred to venture out of the maze of alleys only when the lights in the concrete sky dimmed and artificial night fell over the twinned, shadow city of Subtown.
He turned away from the mouth of the alley, which teased him with its view of the lively bustle of traffic and people. People who, unlike him, seemed to know exactly where they were going. No, he turned the other way, deeper into the network of passageways behind and between the squat buildings that rose from the cavern's floor like stalagmites.
Behind an atypically wider structure called Fallon Waste Management Systems, the homeless person ducked beneath some thick pipes that ran out of the building's flank and curved to disappear into the floor of the back lot like gigantic tree roots that had nourished the building's growth. He passed through a gust of warm air blowing out of a huge fan behind a protective grille. There was something of a grotto back here that he hadn't chanced upon before. It looked very promising as a shelter, though the fan made the climate-controlled air warmer than he liked.
There were more pipes of varying thickness; a nest of them. Red valves locked inside clear plastic security boxes. Nevertheless, steam hissed out of leaks here and there. The homeless person had to get down on hands and knees to proceed deeper, and at last he came upon a little bower made from these pipes and a projection of the building that formed a corner. He discerned two eyes, brightly reflecting the light back at him, watching him approach. At first, when he noticed these eyes, the homeless person paused. But then he understood that this was one of those metal people he saw on occasion. He did not know words like automaton or robot, but he could comprehend that it was a creature not quite alive like himself. Usually they were moving. This one didn't move at all, and looked to be missing some of its parts. Though he knew these metal people were not alive, he also suspected th
at this one had in its way crawled into this hidden nest to die.
As the homeless person drew nearer to the robot, it spoke to him in a wary, shaky voice. "Who is that? What do you want?" it demanded.
The homeless person froze, confused. When another being poked its head out from behind the dead robot he realized that he had been mistaken, but he still did not know whether to withdraw, or wait for the hidden person to say more. Before he could do anything else, the person spoke again. More of her came into view, also. She was a woman, with matted yellowish-white hair, a wool hat pulled down over it. In one blue-veined fist she gripped a piece of pipe. Or maybe it was a piece of the robot she hid behind.
"This is my place. Can't you see that?" she rasped at him. Then, her nervous face twisted in an exaggerated expression of befuddlement. "What the hell are you? A mutant?"
He had heard that word used about him before, when people saw him on the street. The word didn't have the excited wonderment of the word "elephant" that the little boy had uttered.
The woman took in the homeless person's frayed, dirty poncho fashioned from a blue plastic tarp. "You're like me, huh?" she grumbled. "No place else to go?"
He didn't move. He was timid, because her voice was harsh and she still held that pipe, although she probably weighed as much as one of his stout limbs.
"I used to have a place, a nice place!" she blurted, as if accusing him for changing that situation. "I was born on Earth, not here, not down in this hole! I had a husband, and a good job-can you believe that? But we never had kids. Pollution got in my system. Oh, we couldn't afford to fix that, and we couldn't afford to adopt. Things went downhill when he lost his job, and then I did, too. Can you believe the way people are forced to live in this city? While those rich scum sit in their fancy restaurants looking down on the rest of us?"
The homeless person felt his insides gurgle with that unending, nameless hunger. Could the old woman hear it? He felt vaguely embarrassed at his own abject state, as if he were inferior even to her.
She took him in again with that crumpled squint. And as if she had indeed heard his guts churn, she said, "You're a big boy, aren't you? But you can't be eating well. Our type don't eat well, do we?" She lowered her makeshift weapon at last. "A big boy like you might keep the punks away from me. Do you know they steal my medicine? It's hard to get my medicine! I don't have a job like I once did, see! I have to sell scrap." She motioned toward the partially dissected robot. "Good thing I used to assemble electronics. I know what I'm doing, damn it! But these punks steal my medicine." She eyed the homeless person craftily. "A big boy like you, they wouldn't come close. Maybe we can help each other, huh?"
He said nothing. He was unable. But he thought he could make sense of her words, or at least her intentions, in some intuitive way. Using some latent ability.
"You can't understand a damn thing I'm saying, can you?" she grumbled. "Or can you? Come here. Come over here. I won't hurt you if you don't hurt me."
She gestured. He hesitated, still meek, a cowering giant. But at last, he crawled closer to her.
"I'm Dolly," she told him, still crouching behind the robot's carcass, still a little leery at the size and shape of him. "You got a name?"
A name. A name. Did he have a name?
"You look like a big fat baby," she mumbled. "I'll call you Baby. Or maybe Junior. Oh fuck it." She waved him on impatiently. "Come on. Come back here. There's a better spot behind here, if you can fit through. It's better, as long as those thieving punks stay out of it."
"Bastards like him are what put me out of my job," she said in an echoing voice, as she ducked through a conduit in back of Fallon Waste Management Systems. She had pushed aside a circular grille, secured now by only one screw at the top, to facilitate their entrance. She was referring to the robot they had left behind in the arbor of pipes. "So I don't mind stripping him down to pay for my medicine. Poetic justice, I say."
The homeless person still had to crawl on hands and knees, through a thin trickle of foul-smelling sludge. She glanced back at his movements.
"Just like a big baby. You probably wouldn't be any good protecting me if some punks did try to rob me, but the looks of you might scare them off." Dolly faced forwards again. "We're almost there."
The conduit intersected with a larger, downwards-angled passage, also circular but this time with inset lights spaced along its curved ceiling. The homeless person could walk on two legs, though stooped over double. This angled tunnel deposited them at last into a dark, dripping catacomb, a rat's maze of off-branching corridors. Water sluiced through run-off channels recessed into their floors, bundles of cables and pipelines both stiff and flexible snaking along their walls. The circulatory system and digestive tract of a megalopolis. Dolly put it more simply.
"Now we're in the guts of Punktown," she said triumphantly, like an explorer who had discovered an ancient, buried city. "But here's my little corner of it."
They stepped up onto a tiled platform above the miasmic stream, where a filthy blanket hung down from an overhead pipe. Behind this curtain was Dolly's corner of Punktown. There were some cardboard boxes of salvaged and stolen junk that comprised her earthly possessions. Tools she used to dismantle some of the machinery down here for scrap. Bits of the machines she disassembled. Some cartons of food. A mattress she now sat down upon. She gestured for the homeless person to sit on the bare platform beside her, and lean his broad back against the wall's white ceramic tiles.
Dolly lifted a red metal valve from amongst her plunder, and grinned like a carved and shriveled apple head doll. "Sometimes I guess I cause little power outages and plumbing problems for the folks up there, taking my scrap. Too bad for them! It's their own fault for not having better security under the city; they're lucky no terrorists have blown it all up or poisoned the water! One time a rat got into the electrical ducts of the factory me and my husband worked at. It got itself fried, and they lost power and had to send everyone home. From one little rat! So it serves 'em right. Build and build, fast and reckless. Knotting up more and more of these pipes until they can't tell one from another. People only care about today's profit, see, not keeping things safe for tomorrow. You think the government would regulate everything? Not when they've got businesses tucking nice crisp munits in their G-strings. Greedy bastards, all of 'em." She tossed the valve back into its carton. "One time some repairmen came down here with a maintenance robot to fix some problem I caused, and they threatened me. I chased those idiots right out of here, and I even got a hunk of their damn robot, too!"
Throughout this tirade, the homeless person had sat there with a respectful and uncomprehending awe, as if in the presence of a wrathful deity that could shut this whole city down and bring it to its knees if she wished.
"Well, it's about time for my medicine. Sorry, I can't share this, so don't ask, but I'll let you have some of that there." She indicated a sizable bag of stale potato chips with a resealed top.
The homeless person turned his head toward it. The smell made his innards do a slow-motion somersault, but he knew by now that it was fruitless to try to get those enticing morsels inside him. He turned his attention back to Dolly, and watched her as she administered her medicine.
From inside her soiled clothing the old woman had produced a syringe-like device. She held it up to one of the maintenance lights, squinting one eye at the transparent cartridge. A silvery glitter writhed within. "These are nanomites," she explained. "They'll crawl all inside me and make my pain go away for a while. You get lots of pain when you're my age, you know, and living the way I do." She lowered the syringe and pressed its tip against a fat blue vein in a stick-thin wrist. "They weren't meant exactly for this, but the man I buy them from reprograms them, see? To help people like me who got no damn health insurance for regular doctors."
Dolly sent a measured portion of the contents into her bloodstream. She let out a wheezy little sigh, then hid away again her syringe filled with sparkling, microscopic bio-machin
es. She rested her back against the wall, now, too.
"They'll go to work inside me," she said. "Like I used to go to the factory to make machines. Now it's the other way around, see?" She snorted a laugh, sounding dreamy already. "They'll crawl straight to my brain. Tickle me… tickle me… make the pain go awaaaay…"
Dolly shut her eyes in their pouches of wrinkles. The homeless person simply observed her. A calm came over her; he felt it vicariously, and experienced a welcome serenity. He was transported, briefly, from his daily anxiety. The hiding, the aimless exploration. The confusion that gnawed him hollow inside.
Soon, linked as he was with Dolly, he lapsed into his own sort of dreaming.
First, he remembered the boy who had called him an elephant, because of his grayish bulk and because of the restlessly coiling trunk-like appendages where creatures like Dolly had a face. Then, however, the boy metamorphosed into an older child: a girl child. But although she was a child, she was also his mother. Wasn't she? Because she cradled him to her chest. Yet how could such a small, delicate entity carry him in her arms? Then he remembered that he had been getting larger. Larger, every day. She had nourished him with her love. With her very life essence. Maybe that was what he needed to fill the chasm inside him.
He dreamed of her beautiful face, her avid eyes, her tender kisses on his plump little belly, white as opposed to the grayer hue of the rest of him. The little wings on his back stirring contentedly, as they did now, rubbing up and down against the tiled wall, making the blue plastic tarp that covered him rustle with their movement.
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