Deadstock (punktown) Read online

  Her eyes still probed him. Sniper's keen eyes. "Thi worry you. Very worry."

  "No. No, really. Look, I have to go. Maybe I'll call again sometime."

  "Call from where? Where you now?"

  "Punktown, on Oasis. I was born here."

  She glanced behind her before she continued. "I am afraid husa-bund angry Thi, talk to Ga Noh."

  "Yes, yes, I understand."

  "But you need Thi, you call. Okay?"

  "Sure. Same here. You need anything, call me. Just store my number, all right?"

  "Mm."

  "Okay, then. Well. nice to see you. Goodbye, Thi, okay? Goodbye."

  Sadness in her face. It truly looked like sadness. Ask her! part of him shouted. But what did it matter now what, if anything, she had felt back then? What that had been all about. A husband now. Another life entirely, as if a different woman had been reincarnated inside the same body.

  "Goodbye, Ga Noh," she said.

  He pressed a key, banished her face. Then let his head droop. And laughed. Wagged his head, and laughed.

  "Fool," he muttered. "Stupid, stupid fool." Ten years, for these five minutes. And now it was all over, wasn't it? This was his closure. Finally over, with a whimper. With a chuckle.

  Stake lifted his head to make another call. To let John Fukuda know about the visit from Tableau's cloned thugs. And to let Fukuda know that his own life might be in danger.

  Back to the case, to take his mind off the call he had just made. The emptiness that it had filled only with pointed, painful heaviness, like the obsolete detritus of their war. Razor wire and spent cartridges, blood-crusted knives and mud-caked guns. Back to the case, because it was all he had.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  conjoined

  As he passed through a wide section of tunnel, Dai-oo-ika noticed that two youths in shabby clothing were watching him, crouched as they were on a catwalk above him, but when he turned his head their way they ducked back into a narrow opening. He was tempted to go up the ladder there after them, in order to take more nourishment, but he did not want to be distracted from the unseen beacon-the silent vibration, almost like a voice- that drew him on and on through the entrails of Punktown. It promised him understanding of his condition, of himself, at its source. Or at least, it was his desire that it would be so.

  Some stretches of tunnel were utterly without light. It didn't inconvenience him one bit. His senses had become heightened; the thick tendrils of his face touched-like Braille-the particles of light from which images were constructed. They caressed the currents of sound like a hand dipped in a flowing stream, and the airborne spores of scent adhered to them and dissolved into their silver/black-banded flesh.

  On he burrowed. On. Like an archeologist in subterranean ruins, hoping to excavate and piece together the fragments of his memory. There had to be more than just his name, the face of his child mother, snatches of dream. There had to be.

  He reached the limits of underground Subtown, but came to a ladder, which he climbed up, up, to a higher level of the netherworld. At one point he crawled on all fours on a web-like metal grille and watched a subway train speed by below him, washing him in a flow of warm and stinking air. Now, just below the crust of the city, he continued following the beckoning call. A voice almost as familiar as his mother's.

  He came to a sealed circular grate, but it was not the first that had blocked his path and he pushed it out of its frame with a tortured screech of metal. Dai-oo-ika entered a polished white tunnel, glossy as the inside of a leviathan's intestine. He crawled along this for a short distance, warm air like the wake of that subway train blowing hard against him. But he was a fish diligently swimming upstream against the current. At the end of this air vent he encountered a fan spinning inside a cage. He bent his thick fingers between the bars and tore the cage out of the mouth of the tunnel. The fan came with it in a burst of sparks, the blades whirring to a gradual stop. He bent this obstacle to one side, the fan blades merely the petals of a giant flower for the crushing.

  Dai-oo-ika found himself in a long passage that vanished into darkness in either direction, despite the maintenance lighting. The tunnel was crammed with pipes that sheathed power cables and plumbing that conveyed water both fresh and fouled-many of these conduits labeled with tags or even by color. Spaced along the tunnel were rungs set into the tiled walls, these leading up to hatches stenciled with words he could not fathom. But he did not need to read them. He went unerringly to one set of rungs, and hoisted his bulk up them. The metal hatch was locked, but he yanked it clear of its socket with one hand and let it crash below him.

  The access chute was narrow, and he had to squeeze his heavy body through it like the boneless mass it truly was, just as an octopus can ooze its body through the barest crack. But he was able to stand erect again once he had entered the basement of the apartment complex called Steward Gardens.

  There were a number of interconnected rooms. Dai-oo-ika could stand in them with only a little stooping. Here were the support systems of the structure above him. Its softly humming generator. Cabinets sparkling with indicator lights. Monitor stations with screens that showed colorful scrolling data, or fizzing static, or were black and dead. Dominating one room was a huge tank containing the generic soup of fermented bacteria that the apartments' food fabricators could mold like clay into a variety of programmed meals-could have, had the soup not gone bad. Dai-oo-ika sensed the seething microscopic life within, but it did not interest him. It was not a sustenance that would have nourished him, even if it were still viable.

  But he took all this in only briefly. The source of the voice in his head was here, so loud now. As he moved toward it, however, several stealthy figures crept out of the gloom.

  Dai-oo-ika felt the vaguest sense of kinship with these four figures. Their origins were at least in part the same as his own. Like him, they had no eyes but still appeared to see him as they approached in a widening semicircle. Their skin was gray, as his was predominately. All that distinguished one from the other of them was the number marked on their foreheads.

  But they apparently felt no kinship with him. They clearly saw him only as another intruder.

  The first of the creatures to bolt and leap upon him tried to dig its fingers into his flesh. This angered Dai-oo-ika, and he plucked the clinging creature off him with one hand, flung it across the room. Another rushed him, but he batted it away and it thudded hard against a wall. He caught the third and fourth in his arms-and pulled them tight in a squeezing embrace. Pressed them against his swollen white belly. Until, much as they squirmed in his arms, they began to sink into his flesh as if it were a pool of milk.

  One of the two he had repelled tried to rise, but he moved toward it with one of its brothers' legs still protruding from his belly for a moment before it slipped out of sight. He picked up this stunned creature and embraced it, too. As soon as it had submerged, he turned his attention to the last of the four. It was flopping in a seizure on the floor.

  It didn't put up a fight, only convulsed in his hands as he fed it headfirst into his mid-section.

  Nourishment. He savored it. He felt stronger still. And now he focused his attention on the voice again. Followed it to the very core of this building which, in a sense, the owner of the voice made a sentient thing-though sentient in a damaged way. Steward Gardens was like one immense living entity that didn't quite know what it was, either.

  The encephalon was a mass of grayish, convo-luting tissue thatflattened into a vertical transparent frame, about four feet tall by two feet wide by six inches thick. Wires snaked out of the massive brain, floating subtly in the greenish amni-otic solution that kept it alive. There were more computer stations in this room, but the brainframe itself was the very soul of the building.

  Dai-oo-ika approached the glass cabinet slowly, its fungal green glow upon him. What was its relation to him? Brother? It felt more like… father. Creator. A god's god. He reached out his right hand and placed it fl
at against the surface. The brain's thoughts poured into his palm, flowed up his arm and into his flesh toward his own nexus of thought. He jolted a little at the strength of their connection, and the glass around his hand shattered. The nourishing solution began to leak out and patter on his feet. But Dai-oo-ika did not pay heed. He pressed his hand inside the cabinet, and now laid it upon the knotted brain tissue itself. The voice running into his arm turned to a bellow.

  A stigmata-like hole opened in his palm of its own volition. The coiled brain matter started to unravel, to be sucked into the hungry mouth in his hand. It diminished in its frame as more and more fluid splashed free.

  Like a dead parent's belongings packed away in an attic steamer trunk, Dai-oo-ika had compacted the inorganic material he could squeeze no sustenance from, but which he had not yet bothered himself with ejecting as waste product, into a cavity inside himself. This tight bundle included Dolly's clothing and crushed shoes. But he had not quite figured out what to do with her nanomites, being in that gray area between organic and inorganic, so as much as they had made his mind itch with their busy work he had tolerated them, accepted them as part of his evolving condition.

  Now, they seemed to sniff the encephalon, and it aroused them in its abundance. The microscopic machine-animals raced through Dai-oo-ika's system, through his arm and into the brain tissues even as he drew them into himself. Then they began racing back and forth between the two entities, as if to help facilitate his absorption of the huge organ, a nest of eager worker ants. He had subconsciously altered their programming, or was it they who had gnawed away the membranes clouding his own programming? In any case, the nanomites worked at a frenzied pace to marry the two bodies together at the cellular level, a corps of wartime surgeons, incising and cauterizing, transplanting and mending with their tiny mandibles, tiny tool limbs.

  The wires plugged into the brain were sucked into Dai-oo-ika's hand, as well. As with the other inorganic material he had drawn in, these were not dissolved and digested. Even when the last of the encephalon was gone, and only a little fluid pooled at the bottom of the frame, the wires still streamed out of his palm.

  He slumped down heavily to the floor as if in a swoon, sitting in the puddle of amniotic solution like a drunken Buddha. His arm was still draped inside the frame but he was unmindful of the fangs of glass that pinned his wrist there. The other ends of the wires ran into relays that communicated with the little room's various computer stations. And now, all the monitors that had been showing colorful data or fizzing static or dead blackness flickered and revealed the same image. It was grainy, streaked with scratches and blips like damaged celluloid, but beneath this clutter Dai-oo-ika could see a burning and mostly flattened city, stretching out black and twisted to all horizons. Below were thousands of upturned faces and arms lifted in praise. The faces were a mix of human and nonhuman, but all were charred black, blistered by fire and deformed with radiation. Silvery pus ran out of heat-sealed eyes. Yet despite the pain these people must be feeling, they were singing to him, all in one voice of adoration. And he looked down upon them from a great height. For he was huge. He was their god.

  Dai-oo-ika understood the cosmic web of Fate then. He understood that he and this brother/father had needed to become united (was it reunited?) in order to both realize their potential. In order to fulfill their destinies.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  interviews

  On his vehicle's sound system Stake played a jazz piece called "Yesterdays" from Twentieth Century trumpet player Clifford Brown. It was melancholy, and melancholy music from any era or planet, for that matter, was all right by him. He was piloting the hovercar down a wide, multilane ramp into Punktown's subterranean sector.

  Caren Bistro had told him that Brat Gentile belonged to a gang down here in Subtown. The B Level of Folger Street. "The Folger Street Somethings," she had said.

  Above him now, a solid sky with clouds of steam hissing out of the crisscrossed network of pipes up there. Stake slowed the car as the ramp fed into a grid of streets and the early morning traffic along this one congealed to an ooze. Among the work-bound pedestrians walking along the sidewalk he spotted several that glowed a luminous blue. Each of them turned its head to smile directly at him. One of the translucent blue figures stood at the curb with her thumb sticking out as if to hitchhike, her long hair blowing dreamily. It was then that a whispery voice spoke to him inside his vehicle.

  "Open your world to Seance Friends-for the strongest, clearest Ouija channels in Paxton." He had left the holographic hitchhiker behind him a moment ago, but now she stepped up to the curb ahead of him again, her eyes seeming to look into his. The voice went on, "Make a special friend who can tell you about the long past, or even about your own future."

  "Bastards," Stake said. It was legal for such advertisements to intrude into one's sound system, justified as "ambient sound," like hearing someone else's radio blast from another car. The ad didn't replace his music, but overlapped it, and that was invasive enough. It continued with a testimonial: the voice of a young girl.

  "My spirit guide told me I'll die before I'm twenty, so your next ghost friend could be me!" She giggled.

  Stake shut his sound system off altogether.

  Further along, he made his way through a neighborhood of gray-skinned, blue-turbaned Kalians. Tenements and shops had hung black banners outside, and there was a group of protestors that shouted at the passing vehicles. Several helmeted and armored riot forcers made sure they didn't overflow into the street itself to block traffic. Stake glanced out at their furious, black-eyed faces. "What's their problem now?" he muttered.

  He remembered what Janice had told him about the Kalian deity called Ugghiutu. "Sort of the

  Kalian God and Satan in one body." One of the so-called "Outsiders," exiled from this dimension but waiting to return to power. He thought of the former owners of Alvine Products, their lunatic plan to design and grow a horde of giant monsters to reclaim the universe.

  Despite the strict religious beliefs of most Kalians, Stake had never encountered a neighborhood that didn't have its street gang, and he soon noted a cluster of Kalian boys who wore blue satin jackets to match their turbans, which they wore facing backwards. But these were not the gang kids he was searching for. He continued on, until he arrived at last on Folger Street.

  Stake cruised along the entire length of the extensive street. When he finally reached what appeared to be its end, he turned around and came back from the other direction.

  He didn't spot a single gang kid. That is to say, he saw no apparent gang outfits, and what was the point of being in a gang if you didn't flaunt it, announce it in some way, brazen and proud?

  Stake didn't know the full name of the gang Gentile belonged to, but he thought he knew gang graffiti when he saw it. On the face of one tenement building, in between two windows, someone had sprayed a very large, stylized dog's head baring its fangs, in red paint that glowed like neon. Though they didn't exhibit any obvious gang peacockery, there were three tough-looking kids sitting on the tenement's front steps, apparently in no hurry to be off to school.

  Stake found a parking spot along the curb a little ways up, and then backtracked to the tenement building on foot. With animal-keen instincts, the kids noticed his approach right away. He hadn't been able to think of any guise he might have called up, seated in his car and browsing through the faces on his wrist comp, in order to gain their confidence. Couldn't think of an actor's role he might adopt. And so he figured he'd just jump right into it without pretense.

  "Hey," he said in greeting as he came to the steps. The preteens looked a little too young to be in a full-blown street gang; maybe a tadpole gang. But you never knew. The adolescent gang called the Martians-after the god of war-was one of the deadliest in Punktown. "Do you guys know a kid named Brat Gentile? I'm a friend of a friend and nobody seems to know where's he got off to."

  "Oh, please, officer," said one of the three, a Choom girl with he
r spiky hair dyed a metallic silver, her long mouth in a smirk. As young as she was, she'd had her eyelids surgically altered so as to look exotically slanted.

  "No, no, I'm not a forcer. I'm a friend of Brat's girlfriend, Krimson. Krimson's gone missing, too."

  "I don't know who the hell you're yakking about."

  "Brat's in a gang from around here, the Folger Street Something-or-others."

  "Snarlers," said one of the two boys seated beside the girl. "The Folger Street Snarlers."

  "Snarlers. So do you know Brat?" he asked the boy.

  "I'm sure I'd know his face if I saw him. But I haven't seen him or any of the Snarlers in a while." "What do you mean?"

  The second boy spoke up. "It isn't just your friend of a friend that's missing, Mr. Forcer. Nobody's seen any of the Folger Street Snarlers for days."

  "Mr. Gentile?"

  Stake almost said Genitalia, because it had been running through his mind that Caren Bistro had said that was Krimson Tableau's playful nickname for Brat. Caren had also said, in Janice's classroom, that Brat had a brother whom she had contacted while trying to find out what had happened to her friend. Stake had been grateful to find his phone number listed on the net.

  "Who is this?" asked the face on the hovercar's console screen. Theo Gentile appeared to be in his mid-twenties, and wary didn't begin to address the look in his eyes.

  "My name is Jeremy Stake, sir. I'm a hired detective. I'm looking for a girl named Krimson Tableau, and I understand that your brother-"

  "I don't know anyone by that name!" Gentile snapped.

  "I'm told he calls her Smirk. She's your brother's girlfriend."

  "I don't know where she is. I don't even know where my brother is! Who hired you?" Stake began to stammer a reply, but Gentile cut him off. "I just got back from Miniosis. You go tell your boss-I don't know anything!"