Blue War: A Punktown Novel Read online

Two of the men helped the old woman to her feet. A young soldier Stake heard addressed as Nha seemed to be wiping her mouth with a napkin, but then he realized the cloth was stained with blood from her nostrils. He was shocked at the purple veins that stood out along her temples, fat and thick as worms. He did not know that they were more pronounced than they had been the last time she had accompanied these men to Bluetown.

  Hin Yengun approached the elderly villager slowly, with Stake trailing a step behind. Yengun spoke to her in their own language. The Earther didn’t catch much more than the respectful title of “aunt” that preceded the captain’s words. The woman’s eyes, dull and glassy, moved back and forth between the faces of the two men. At last, Yengun turned to Stake and nodded. “She is ready to go inside,” he said. “And she took your offer quite literally. She says that after today, the dreams will belong to you.”

  “That’s what I’m getting paid for,” Stake said.

  The rest of the men stood, wiping their hands on their trousers, fruit rinds scattered around their boots. Nha and another soldier would accompany them inside. The other four soldiers would stand watch in the street, forsaken as it was.

  They entered through one of the gaping windows, Nha and the other soldier pretty much passing the old witch through the opening into the hands of Yengun and Stake. As the two soldiers followed, Stake turned to Yengun and asked, “Did you know Thi Gonh’s family has pressured her into dropping charges against her husband? Can’t he be detained and charged despite what she wants?”

  “I suggest you let her handle it the way she wishes, Mr. Stake. Maybe it is better for you this way. It is less likely now that you will have problems about the incident yourself.”

  “It’s not me I’m worried about.”

  Yengun looked at him closely. “I admire your concern for her.”

  “Is that why you’re helping me? Because I protected her when she was a war criminal?”

  Yengun grimaced, as if the idea were absurd. “I simply want to know whose remains those are, and how the Blue City could clone them. If we know that, we may understand the Blue City itself better – and then, maybe find a way to stop it.”

  Again Stake noticed the raised scar on Yengun’s cheek. These scars were meant to represent family members lost during the Blue War, but why should Yengun’s scar be only half the normal length? He was about to bring it up when the Ha Jiin faced him directly once more.

  “You still love her,” Yengun stated.

  “Yes.”

  The officer’s hard mouth suggested the faintest of smiles. “I told you my people are romantic, poetic, and that is why some still love the Earth Killer turned Earth Lover. I think you are that way, too.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  “The war burned our love, you and I,” Yengun said. “But it could not destroy it.” Before Stake could ask him what that bit of poetry was all about, the captain started off down the murky blue hallway. “Come.”

  They proceeded into the cavernous room, the two soldiers using the lights on their guns to illuminate it. They all watched as the tiny woman moved ahead of them to stand at the very edge of one of the three openings in the floor. She muttered something, and appeared to be trembling. They waited. Stake was ready to lunge forward and catch her arms if she started to topple forward. Her nearness to the pit and her shaking were making him nervous. And then, she started to speak.

  “What’s she saying?” Stake whispered.

  “She says she remembers her dreams. She sees three of the devils with white faces.”

  “Huh,” Stake said.

  “But they are not warriors.”

  Stake frowned. “What? Is she sure? Ask her if they wear camouflaged uniforms, carry guns.”

  “If she will hear me,” Yengun said, but he addressed the witch in their tongue. She answered him back in a cracked, distant voice. “No,” Yengun reported. “They do not wear jungle patterns. Yes, they carry guns – small guns in pouches, she says.”

  “No heavy arms?”

  “Apparently not.” The woman said more. Yengun translated, “She says the devils did not come from an egg.”

  “An egg?” Had she not been the one to lead Yengun to the clones in the first place, Stake might have dismissed her impressions as delirium.

  “She sees them standing in a ray of light.”

  Stake pondered a moment. He was distracted, and so when the old woman started moving he jolted, afraid he’d be too late to catch her, but she was turning away from the pit and shuffling toward one of the large room’s barren walls, mumbling to herself as she went.

  Yengun said, “They did not come here in an egg. They rode a ray of light. They were here, and then gone, and then here again.”

  The woman had reached the wall and ran her hands over the coral-like material, as far above her head as she could reach. She slapped it with both palms. Stake moved closer to watch her face in the beams of the flashlights. She was babbling with more animation, slapping the wall again. Then she whirled around and said something to Yengun. He responded by digging a pad and a pen from a pocket in the leg of his uniform. He handed them over to her, and she scribbled in an unsteady hand. When she was finished, she shoved the pad back into the captain’s hands.

  “What is it?” Stake moved beside him, and saw what appeared to be characters that were not from the Ha Jiin alphabet. An S and an M. Yengun handed him the pad for Stake to pore over. As he was doing so, the old woman stepped toward him with an irritable grunt and roughly turned the pad around in his hands. Not SM. It was a W and an S instead.

  “She must have seen that symbol on the wall,” Yengun observed.

  “Yes. I think you’re right. I think she’s seeing the room that corresponds with this one – in Punktown.” Stake looked up at the Ha Jiin officer. “The three people didn’t come to Sinan in an egg. A pod – a transdimensional pod, like I came here in. Like the soldiers used to come here in. They came in a ray of light instead.”

  “But what would that be? The only way your people can come to Sinan is in the pods.”

  Stake returned his gaze to the witch, trying to fathom what these dreams might be saying to her. He saw that she was staring at his alien face in apprehension again, quaking. Was he reminding her of the soldiers who had come to her village in their powerful machine, killed her neighbors and nephews? Or was he reminding her more of the people she had seen in her latest visions?

  She let out an abrupt cry and backed away. “Ga Noh!” she screeched, pointing at his face. “Ga Noh!”

  Nha rushed forward, put an arm around her to steady and comfort her. Turned her to face away from the shapeshifter.

  “Please don’t do that,” Yengun told Stake.

  “Sorry.” He touched his own face, if it could be called his own face, and felt the disturbing contours of wrinkles and distended veins.

  Outside the building they heard a terrific boom, like an explosion. The sound was still rumbling, a deep thunder, as Stake and Yengun rushed from the room and to the nearest of the hallway’s windows. The other two men supported the witch on either side, following more slowly.

  “Christ,” Stake said.

  Above and between the buildings on the opposite side of the street, he could see that a distant skyscraper had toppled. Its vast weight had crushed the fronts of surrounding buildings, but they managed to uphold it at an angle. A great blue cloud of pulverized coral began to billow upwards, and within moments they could no longer see the fallen building. The last of the thunder reverberated off down the branching streets.

  “Are they starting to demolish some of these buildings?” Stake asked Yengun, hoping he hadn’t just witnessed an act of terrorism.

  “The buildings here have foundations appropriate for your Punktown, not necessarily for this terrain. Our own science teams have concern over this, and it is one of the reasons we try to discourage refugees. What are called friction piles are to be anchored in soil, and bearing piles are to rest on rock, but if
the conditions here are not duplicated along with the buildings, some of them collapse from the strain of the ground beneath them.”

  “If only they’d all fall down on their own, huh?” Stake murmured.

  “At least my world is rejecting some of them,” Yengun said.

  ***

  Stake had offered to take Yengun and the elderly seer to her village, but she would have none of the flying machine and none of the Ga Noh. Stake had watched the party move off down the street and disappear around a corner. Then he was alone, and waiting for Thi. Before leaving him, though, Yengun had advised him to wait inside his helicar, lest some dangerous animal or squatters come along. Stake had told him he would, but he did not, stood leaning against the vehicle with his mind picking among the detritus of the old woman’s visions.

  His wrist comp blipped. He saw it was Thi. She told him she was in Bluetown now, and he told her to watch for his vehicle. He entered the Harbinger, lifted it high enough above the surrounding buildings for her to see as she approached. Within fifteen minutes he saw a hoverbike nearing below. When it came to a halt in the street beneath him, he lowered the craft again to come to a rest beside her. She swung herself off the bike, he stepped out of the helicar, and they met each other between.

  “God.” Stake touched her face lightly, wagging his head. Even though she looked better than she had at the clinic, the bruises made him cringe inside with empathetic pain. “How did he do this to you? He punched you?”

  “No. I was shower my body, and husband came to me with knife. He pull me out of shower, pull me to sit at table, not let me wear clothes. Yell, yell to me, point knife to my face, and then hold my hair, here.” She reached behind her head and gathered her long hair in her fist. “Make my head hit table again, again. Walk around and around table, yell to me more, then hold my hair again and hit head to table very much. Here.” She felt at the bruises on her forehead. So it was the force of these blows, as he slammed her head against the table edge, that had caused the swelling of her eyes. Stake wondered if she’d suffered a concussion that the doctor’s no doubt limited equipment hadn’t been able to scan. She touched herself under her jaw; he could tell from her expression that the bruise there was tender. “I hit my chin on table one time.”

  “I didn’t hit him enough with the stick,” Stake muttered. “Not nearly enough.” He managed to get past the replay of the fight in his mind to ask, “What was he doing driving those animals into town when I came? Helping some neighbors?”

  “They my yubo, from my farm. Move them to Vein Rhi. Every day let yubo outside to eat, then bring inside again.”

  “So he beats you, leaves you there at the table bruised and naked, and goes to do some chores like it’s just another day for...what’s his name?”

  “Hin, same-same Yengun, soldier you talk to.”

  “No, he isn’t same-same as Yengun. Not at all.”

  “I meaning name only.”

  “I know what you mean. So who was the girl who sat beside you in the doctor’s office?”

  “Name is Twi. Niece of mine, very good girl, only fifteen year. Twi love me so much. I teach Twi shoot, shoot gun like aunt.”

  “Thank God at least one of your family had compassion for you.” Stake touched the side of her face again, this time let his hand linger there. She reached up, placed her hand over his. They shifted their bodies closer, eyes locked together. And then, their mouths came together, too.

  Their tongues slid over and around each other. Moist sounds, and a tiny moan from her. Stake sucked at her plump lower lip and reluctantly let it go as she pulled away slowly to look up at his eyes again. She was smiling softly. “Ga Noh,” she said. “Long time ago kiss me, same as now.”

  His heart was rumbling in echoes like those of the fallen building. “Thi, I’ve never stopped thinking about you all these years. I used to be so afraid that you didn’t really feel anything for me, that you were only using me back then so I’d keep the other soldiers away from you. Then when you came to Punktown to fight those men for me, I knew that you did care for me somehow. Maybe not the same way I care for you, but – ”

  “Same as Ga Noh,” she cut him off, eyes dark with the intensity of her earnestness. “I care you same-same you care to me.” Her smile widened. “I think you put magic inside me. Magic make me crazy.” She touched his face this time. “Ga Noh is gentle. Feel pain of me. Here.” She touched her fingertip to his forehead. He understood, then, that the semblance of bruises were manifesting on his skin there, like a saint’s stigmata.

  Arms still around her back, Stake pressed her small body closer to his and kissed the bruises on her own forehead. “What happened to you, Thi? What happened to the Earth Killer?”

  “No Earth Killer, remember? Earth Lover now.”

  “No, I mean, how can a soldier who earned that name sit there and let her husband bang her skull into the table and not lift a finger to defend herself?”

  “You said word – husband. I obey husband. Respect to husband. Have to, Ga Noh. Have to.”

  He let her go and took a step back, the fury spreading through him like heat from a furnace again. “You don’t have to. You choose to.” Just because he was attracted to the woman for being of another culture didn’t mean that he had to love everything about that culture. He found Ha Jiin women’s devotion and loyalty to their men was, at the same time, one of their best and worst qualities. Depending on the man in question, he supposed. “I don’t understand why a strong and intelligent woman like you would marry a man like this in the first place.”

  “I was Earth Lover. People point to me, laugh to me, some hating me. Men too shy marry me. Who else have me?” And she added, with a bitter curling of her lips, “And who else have Hin?”

  “I would have you,” Stake said simply. It made her eyes snap back to his. “Come to Punktown with me. Right now. I’ll leave this place and its problems for better minds to solve.”

  “Ga Noh.” She shook her head slowly. “I can not.”

  “Why? You said you cared about me, the same way I care about you.”

  “True – I swear. Never forget you before. Never forget you tomorrow. But your ban ta is marry.”

  Ban ta – your lover. Why was she still calling herself that, then? “So get a divorce.”

  “No divorce. I understand, my uncle say no. Only uncle of mine give to me divorce. Boss of family.”

  “That’s your choice, Thi, only your choice. Let me talk to this uncle of yours. Is he more concerned with the family honor and saving face than he is about whether or not his brother’s daughter gets beaten to death, or stabbed in the shower?”

  “It is my people. I am Ha Jiin. Always Ha Jiin.”

  “Yeah, your people. During the war both sides puts guns in the hands of women, young girls like you just out of their teens, and so this is the reward you got afterwards? They take the gun out of your hands again, give you back a broom, and tell you to mind your place?”

  Thi only blinked at him, as if in her agitation she was failing to comprehend his tirade. She looked on the verge of tears.

  Stake filled her silence with more of his own words. “I don’t know, maybe you still love this guy, huh? You let him go free. You won’t divorce him. Won’t come away with the man who offers you a new life. Maybe you love that he doesn’t smile at you, like you told me before. Chats with male friends but never with you. Blows his load sometimes before he’s barely inside you. Wow, what a prize. You love your husband, huh?” Snarling now. “And look how jealous he got. He loves you, too, right? What a fool I was, getting between the two of you.”

  The tears didn’t come. Her eyes hardened. She shifted back just enough of a half-step that the light reaching her eyes changed and their blackness glinted red in metallic sparks and splinters. “Ga Noh talk no good. Very no good.” She turned back toward her hoverbike, and slung one leg over the seat.

  Stake walked toward her, still bitter but with a desperation as he saw her ready to leave. He
knew right now he was just another angry guy telling her what to do, trying to control her. “Thi, it’s only because – ”

  Straddling the bike, she started the engine and it rose off the ground a little, bobbing slightly. She looked up at him, glaring, features pinched. “Ga Noh not believe my love.”

  Love. Neither of them had used the word before. Stake felt the desperation more keenly, and put a hand out to stay her wrist but she swerved the bike around in a circle to distance herself and face him again. When she did, her eyes were harder still, the eyes of the soldier she had once been. But how could she give him that look, and not the man who had beaten her?

  “Hin never love me. If Ga Noh steal yubo of husband, husband angry same. I belong husband same like animal.”

  “Listen – ”

  She cut him off, voice strained. “And I never love husband, too. Marry him to be marry. He need marry, I need marry, husband talk good then so I marry. But never love before Ga Noh. Never love again. Ga Noh believe or no believe, I not care.”

  “But Thi, if you won’t come be with me, then why did you want to see me today?”

  “I want say goodbye today.”

  And with that, she put the bike in motion again – off down the empty street, her long hair flashing behind her like black flames streaked with red. Small with distance now, the bike turned a corner and she was gone.

  ***

  Waiting for Captain Rick Henderson to pick up his call, Stake sat in the Harbinger and gazed off toward the building that had collapsed and was propped against its smaller neighbors, pointing at the sky like a cannon. A blue mist still hung in the air over that part of the city. On the vehicle’s music system he was tuned in to a station that played classic hits. There was an old song he liked by Del Kahn, called Paxton, and though it was not playing at that moment it ran in his mind louder than the music inside the car, Kahn’s voice raw and resigned.

  “Yeah, I’m goin’ back to Paxton,

  But why I can not tell...”

  Finally, Henderson connected and Stake lowered dead eyes to the wrist comp’s screen.