Deadstock: A Punktown Novel

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “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-machines. 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.

  She cooed to him, his child mother. She cooed a name to him. And then he came awake, fully awake, with that name still resonating in his mind.

  Now he knew what he was called.

  Dai-oo-ika.

  ELEVEN: ORGAN GRINDER

  Adrian Tableau was short in stature but powerfully muscled, his graying hair neatly cut but undyed, his face as creased but hard as a clenched fist. Even with his custom-made five-piece suit and the marble-topped desk he sat behind, he still spoke with the tough accent of the streets that had shaped him. A former business partner named Grant Leery had said of Adrian Tableau that he hadn’t worked his way up from the streets to his penthouse apartment from the inside, but rather had climbed up the outside like a giant ape scaling a skyscraper.

  The face that presently filled Tableau’s comp screen was softer, more intellectual in aspect. The man introduced himself to Tableau as Simon McMartinez of the Paxton Center for Missing and Exploited Children. While McMartinez talked, Tableau dropped his gaze to the tool bar at the lower edge of the screen. The Caller ID feature there told him that the call did indeed originate from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, though the information also indicated that the particular device being used was a pay phone. That was a bit odd, but he supposed the man wasn’t in his office at the moment.

  After his introduction, McMartinez w
ent on to say, “I understand, sir, that you filed a missing person report with the city police, regarding your daughter Krimson.”

  “Why, have you heard something?” Tableau said, impatient to get to the point.

  “No, sir, I’m sorry, but I was hoping that we could lend you and the police some support with this case. We try to give them field investigative assistance in as many cases as our work load can handle.”

  “Well, I’d appreciate all the help I can get.”

  “Very good, sir. Might I come to your place of business right now and discuss this with you in person?”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. You know where I am? I can send my driver for you if it’s easier.”

  “Ah, yes, actually – that would save me from using public transportation. Very good, sir. I’ll wait in the lobby, then.”

  “Someone will be on their way.” Tableau tapped a key, broke the connection, then tapped another key to contact his chief of security.

  In moments, another face filled the screen. This face was covered in a camouflage of blue patches, ranging from pastel to indigo. But the camouflage was not makeup, nor was it even tattooing. It was the man’s natural coloration, if natural were the right word. “Sir?” the man said.

  “Jones, get down to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.” He recited the street address information that had been saved by his tool bar, as well. He then showed the man called Jones a picture of Simon McMartinez, a paused image from the call that his system had recorded automatically as it was programmed to do with all calls, until such time as he cleaned up its memory files of unnecessary data. “I want you to get this man and bring him here,” he told Jones, as if his voice came from the frozen image of McMartinez. “He’ll be waiting for you in the lobby.”

  “Very good, Mr. Tableau.” Jones signed off, and his blue-camouflaged face vanished.

  ***

  What a great idea to have Tableau’s man come and pick him up, thought Jeremy Stake. He wished he had thought of it first.

  Stake had anticipated that Tableau might check his Caller ID feature or trace the call. If Tableau doubted he was who he said he was, the meat magnate could later call the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and verify that a Simon McMartinez did indeed work there (though hopefully, he wouldn’t be put through to the man himself). Or if Tableau cared to check any number of net sources, such as a phone directory, he might find an image of McMartinez’s face, again to confirm his identity. It was for this sort of reason that Stake had decided to impersonate an actual person at an actual organization, rather than merely invent an undercover personality. But having Tableau’s driver fetch him from the Center itself was just too perfect.

  The only problem was that as Stake sat in the lobby waiting, a few people coming and going said hello to him, greeting him by name. One woman even looked at him quizzically and said, “Did you get a new hairstyle, Simon?” He smiled and pretended to be too busy talking on his wrist comp to answer her, and so she drifted along. But it made him anxious. What if McMartinez came down here right now from the building’s third floor, on which the Center rented its offices?

  Less than an hour ago, Stake had entered the Center and introduced himself as a private investigator hired by Adrian Tableau to find his missing daughter, Krimson. He had been introduced to Simon McMartinez, and had surreptitiously photo-captured the man on his wrist comp – several times, to be sure he got a clear, direct image. If he’d had more time, he might even have created a phony ID badge using one of these images, as he did when he impersonated forcers.

  McMartinez said he hadn’t seen Krimson’s missing person file yet, but he called it up on his comp. He seemed genuinely concerned and apologized to Stake for not having been introduced to this case earlier; there were just too many kids going missing in a city of these proportions. But he promised to let Stake know right away if he came upon any information about the teenager.

  Stake had then gone down to the lobby, locked himself in a stall in the men’s room, and stared at the various images he had stolen of McMartinez’s face, slowly transforming his features into those of the other man. As always when he needed to borrow an identity, Stake had been glad the man didn’t have facial fair, wasn’t obese or an octogenarian. Not that, in the latter two cases at least, his cells wouldn’t have given their best effort. The planes of his face shifted, realigned themselves, as if the very bone of his skull were being molded, but as extreme as the process was it was without physical pain. When the metamorphosis was complete, he’d returned to the lobby to make his call.

  And now, this simulacrum of Simon McMartinez looked up to see a man with a blue camouflaged face enter the office tower’s lobby.

  “Dung,” Stake breathed.

  It was not, of course, the first time he had seen a Blue War clone in the city of Punktown. But most of the clones who had survived the Blue War had been given jobs as miners on distant moon colonies, or made construction workers on orbital space stations, or made laborers in some other location that didn’t intermix them greatly with a public too busy resenting clones as job competition to be grateful for their war service.

  The clone veteran met Stake’s eyes, as well, and immediately came walking toward him. But Stake had already guessed that this was Tableau’s man. What else would a homunculus bred as a warrior be doing here in this silvery tower? And wearing an expensive black suit and a fashionable bowler hat, to boot?

  “Mr. McMartinez?”

  Stake pretended to end his imaginary wrist comp call, and stood up. “Yes? Are you Mr. Tableau’s driver?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m Mr. Jones, the security chief for Tableau Meats.” He waved them back toward the lobby’s revolving doors. “Will you come with me, please?”

  They rode in Tableau’s luxury helicar, which lifted above the congested street traffic and glided along invisible navigation tracks beamed through the canyons of steel and concrete. Its interior was heavy with Mr. Jones’s high-priced cologne, which he seemed to overindulge in just to show that he could afford to do so on his salary. Or maybe the cologne and his fancy suit and bowler hat were his way of self-consciously compensating for his appearance – and origins. Stake couldn’t help but lean toward the front seat and ask him, “So you were in the Blue War, huh?”

  “Yes, sir. I was there for four years.”

  Me too, Stake wanted to tell him. “That must have been a rough ride.”

  “Yes it was. I lost my left foot in an engagement in the Kae Ta Valley.”

  “Really? Did you have it regenerated?”

  “I don’t believe that a cloned soldier would be deemed worthy of that level of attention, sir. No, I was given a prosthesis.”

  Ahh. Did Stake detect the slightest hint of resentment at the clone’s station in life?

  Then he frowned. The Kae Ta Valley? The cloned soldiers of the 5th Advance Rangers, led by Sergeant Adams, had been pinned down by heavy action in that location before rendezvousing with Sake’s unit, holed up in the captured monastery. But he told himself not to become paranoid. The Fifth couldn’t possibly have been the only cloned unit to fight their way through the Kae Ta Valley. Anyway, even in the unlikely case that this man had been one of the Rangers (Stake didn’t remember him, as they all looked alike anyway), his guise as McMartinez would prevent him from being recognized. Still, unsettled, Stake activated his wrist comp, called up McMartinez’s image, and stared hard at it, lest his face begin to dissolve back to its default setting prematurely.

  He needed to maintain his disguise. He had felt this was the best way to approach Tableau, and poke about the issue of his missing daughter. And maybe in poking at that, he might turn up Yuki Fukuda’s stolen doll. He knew it was unlikely that Tableau would have answered questions put to him by a private dick hired by his business rival.

  “I hope you can help Mr. Tableau find his daughter,” Jones spoke up from the front seat. “He’s very distraught over it.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Stake said
. Without lying in that regard, at least.

  ***

  It was difficult for Stake to take in Tableau closely, at first, or even to hear his words. He was too stunned by the menagerie that formed the man’s office, here at Tableau Meats.

  The walls of the office were transparent, and behind this barrier were a dozen cells containing a variety of animals. These were natural specimens of the creatures his company produced in the form of headless/limbless battery animals. In one cell, a cow rested on its side in a bed of straw, its long-lashed eyes gazing back at Stake placidly. Two pigs in another cell. A cluster of chickens pecking at feed. A Kalian glebbi, a long-legged and long-necked reptile resembling a llama. Stake knew that the battery versions of these creatures, as produced in the manufacturing departments of this complex, would be bigger, plumper, without fur and scales and feathers to be removed. But what of that ape in one of the cells?

  Stake had never heard about any race in Punktown that included such an advanced primate in their diet. This creature even looked bipedal, more of a hominid than an ape. But then he thought of the extradimensional race called the L’lewed, who bred a species of primate they had encountered on another world for sacrifice in a religious ritual. The L’lewed would have preferred to use more fully human beings for this purpose, but naturally that was frowned upon by the Earth Colonies. Could Tableau be producing the hominids here for the L’lewed’s needs? Stake gestured at the creature, which was moving about its cell in an agitated way, back and forth, throwing them hostile looks and once baring its fangs in a cry they couldn’t hear.

  “Is this also a comestible animal, Mr. Tableau?”

  Tableau turned to regard the creature, and laughed. “Oh, this guy is a one-of-a-kind, Mr. McMartinez. I once had a business partner named Grant Leery. We parted ways on, ah, bad terms. He liked to call me an ape in a suit, behind my back. So I had my lab people make this hairy fella from some of Grant’s DNA that I got a hold of. But they tweaked it here and there, and we sort of regressed him a bit. I’m told my Grant is a fine specimen of Australopithecus africanus.” He laughed again. “I had a hat made for him like an organ grinder’s monkey, but he wouldn’t keep it on.”