Blue War: A Punktown Novel Page 5

  It had made Stake wonder what “me” was, if every teleportation was a death and a rebirth. There had even been criminals who, having attempted to flee via teleportation, tried to argue in court that they could not be found guilty for the misdeeds their previous incarnations had committed.

  This line of defense had never proved successful. Just as Stake doubted that the families of the Ha Jiin he had killed, were they to capture him upon his return to Sinan, would ever find him unaccountable for his own killings.

  A display at the front of the chamber indicated the pod’s progress, a horizontal meter going from black to green. One might think they were in a bathysphere and the meter measured the depths to which they were submerging. The pod had no windows. If it did, Stake wondered what he would see outside them. Maybe only blackness. Or maybe the guts of space, time and dimension, a vision so incalculably immense and complex that it would shatter his mind to take it in.

  Only a few minutes had passed, but the display showed they were halfway there. Stake understood the here and there of it. It was what lay between that was so slippery, and frightening, to grasp.

  The meter seemed to be reading the queasiness swelling inside him. He found himself trembling. Was the vibration he felt running through the pod, or himself?

  Three-quarters of the progress meter had turned green now.

  This was not so much a transdimensional pod, for him, as a time machine. Bringing him back to a place where people had tried to kill him, many more than just a couple of vengeful Stems. And where he had killed people. And fallen in love with a woman who to this day was still a stranger to him – but a stranger who moved on the periphery of his dreams, a stealthy sniper camouflaged in mottled patterns of memory and desire.

  The meter was nearly full now.

  “Prepare for arrival,” said that same intercom voice, as bland and undistinguished as his own face.

  Once more he thought, prepare...how?

  The penetrating vibration simply stopped. Through the pod’s body, at least.

  Henderson patted himself jokingly and said, “Looks like we made it in one piece.”

  Every soldier knew of pods that had somehow been misaligned with their destination, ending up buried a hundred feet underground like a coffin, or merged with the side of a mountain like a fossil, with the crew all dead or – more horribly – still alive. And of course there were those pods that had just vanished, never to arrive anywhere, maybe hurtling through the infinite continua for all eternity.

  But for these passengers, the voice came over the speaker one last time and said cheerlessly, “Welcome to Sinan.”

  ***

  Since Di Noon’s teleportation center was so much smaller than Punktown’s, the terminal for the transdimensional pods was situated within the same complex. Stake and Henderson emerged into the main concourse, bags in hand, to be confronted with the most Sinanese people Stake had seen in one place in over a decade. There were enough Earther faces – and even some nonhuman ones – amongst the swarming crowd that he and the Colonial Forces officer did not draw all eyes, but they were definitely noticed.

  They had first passed through a customs checkpoint where their bodies were scanned for weapons and their visas scanned for authenticity. The stern-faced young Jin Haa woman, grimly attractive in her military-style uniform, had looked up from Stake’s face on her monitor to his face in the flesh. Stake had been nervous; had he begun taking on another person’s appearance unconsciously? Could she detect some discrepancy between his visa image and himself? But a green light flashed to signify that he had been cleared, and he was admitted through to join Henderson. He had thanked the woman in her own language, one of the few words he remembered. She did not respond.

  The two men had then been met by a pair of young CF military guards with blue camouflage uniforms, camouflage helmets, and cumbersome-looking but actually lightweight assault engines cradled in their arms. Henderson had explained, “There have been some violent protests, and even some terrorist-type activities, because of what’s happening. When you see the scope of the problem, you may wonder why there hasn’t been more violence.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “They trust us that if we have the power to wreak such havoc, we have the power to make things right. A lot of them – the Jin Haa, if not the Ha Jiin – like what we do for them. And also, they’re afraid of us. But fear and hate walk hand-in-hand. Things will get worse, believe me, unless Bluetown is stopped in its tracks real quick.”

  They waded through a sea of bobbing blue faces. Most of these were of a robin’s egg hue, though others were an intense sky blue and some an even darker shade. Glossy obsidian hair that, when the light struck it just right, shimmered with a metallic red undertone. Eyes shaped by what was called, on Earthers of Asian lineage, the epicanthic fold. When these often beautiful, mask-like faces turned to regard Stake – with what? curiosity? distrust? resentment? – their black eyes also caught the light just so and flashed an eerie red, glowing like the eyes of animals filmed at night in an infrared light, staring back at the camera. Perhaps dangerously.

  Men and women both tended to be slight in stature and build, but tight-muscled and tough. Despite the mix of otherworldly visitors, the crowd was so much more homogeneous than any gathering of people Stake might encounter back home. All around him were the distinctive high cheekbones, the more or less slanted eyes, and that ebony hair with its hidden undercurrent of blood – worn short on the men, but usually long, so long, on the women. Everywhere, he saw what could have been sisters to Thi Gonh. He even swore he saw her, here and there, multiply cloned and blended into the congregation of travelers.

  As the Jin Haa briefly returned his gaze, Stake believed what he was seeing in some of their faces was not just loathing, but self loathing for their marriage of convenience with the colonists, self disgust for their natural tendency to keep every unseemly emotion in restraint.

  “Are you up for a flight over Bluetown, for a look?” Henderson asked him as they made their way toward the exits and the parking lots beyond, “or do you want to head straight to your quarters at the barracks?”

  “I’d like to see it,” Stake told him.

  “Okay. You hear that, Aldo?” he said to one of the two security men. “We’re heading out to Bluetown.”

  “Yessir.”

  They had just left Punktown, Stake thought. Now, in a way, they would be returning to it.

  ***

  The helicar that lifted high above the teleportation center was a military model known as a Harbinger, equipped with a variety of mounted guns and rocket launchers, such a craft tolerated because of the presence of the Colonial Forces base here in Di Noon, though Henderson had explained that as a civilian visitor, Stake himself would not be permitted to carry a weapon.

  Outside the teleportation center, the air had closed around him steaming and hot, pressing the air from his lungs with its humid weight, but the interior of the Harbinger was cool. He leaned close to one window and peered down at the city below him as they rose yet higher.

  The Jin Haa capital of Di Noon sprawled to every horizon, as if it might carpet the whole of the planet. Just as the crowd at the airport had lacked the wild diversity of Punktown’s citizens, so did Di Noon’s homogeneity contrast with the diverse architectural styles and influences Punktown had to offer. The majority of buildings, packed tightly flank-to-flank, were flat-roofed boxes with plaster walls, often painted white or in soft pastel shades. Most, however, were painted in shades of orange, from very pale to pumpkin to fluorescent. Orange was the color of the Jin Haa flag, the color of their independence from the Ha Jiin nation. Orange was the opposite of blue. A kind of defiance by pigment – though with their blue skins, Stake thought that their rejection of the Ha Jiin’s blue flag and generally blue-painted buildings seemed almost like a rejection of themselves, in part. Another reason they were distressed at the nearing Punktown clone? Maybe Bright Horizons should have chosen orange for t
he project that had inadvertently spawned Bluetown, too.

  Except for hotels, which were a few stories taller, not too many structures rose higher than three or four floors. The majority of streets were narrow, lined with shops at ground level, countless signs above countless little awnings. These streets and the broader avenues that cut through the city were absolutely thronged with bikes. There were wheeled bicycles and wheeled motorbikes, but most were hoverbikes that rode just above the pavement. The best hoverbikes were of Earth origin, a status symbol but increasingly accessible to Di Nooners. Like pretty beads offered to primitives, Stake thought. Like chewing gum for children.

  Punktown’s wider streets would have been packed mostly with hovercars, instead, and its sky would have been swarming with helicars. But here, Stake saw no other flying vehicles at all in the empty expanse of sky, made a pearly white by smog and humidity, through which blazed the blue-white glow of twin suns. Sky and city met in a kind of balanced flatness, broken only by a few scattered skyscrapers at Di Noon’s center that crossed the border between earth and heaven.

  But there was an intrusion into this yin-yang balance, now. It didn’t take long for Stake to spot it.

  Smog, humidity and distance made the city beyond the city appear misted and ghost-like, an unfinished painting sketched in on the white glass of the sky. Here were the tall buildings that Di Noon lacked. The horizon was jagged with a profusion of soaring towers, like the lances of an advancing spectral army of giants.

  “Simulacra,” Henderson announced needlessly.

  “Bluetown,” Stake muttered against the glass.

  The Harbinger hurtled toward it – despite its bristling weapons, quite unequipped to do battle with the phantom city’s glacier-like approach.

  ***

  Stake thought of the city of Pompeii, buried under volcanic ash. The hollows in the solidified ash that, when filled with plaster centuries later, proved to be molds in the shape of the citizens who had been smothered there. Bluetown reminded him of that. As if a city had been buried and then decayed, leaving a tremendous void in its place. The mold had been poured full of some blue substance like concrete, and this was what it looked like after it had been arduously excavated. A silent, unseeing facsimile, like those human figures in the poses they had lain in when they died.

  “It’s hard to take in, isn’t it?” said Henderson.

  Gliding above its doppelganger, Stake realized just how much he took Punktown’s myriad architectural features for granted, overwhelmed as they were by the dazzle of neon and laser and holograph, billboards and graffiti, the wide-ranging colors that differentiated their surfaces, the teeming people and the vehicles that transported those people. Now, as they floated lower (dipping between two edifices so colossal they surged up past the helicar on either side), Stake could appreciate just how intricate was the detail Bluetown had reproduced.

  Minarets, cupolas, porticos. Arched gothic windows. Art Nouveau facades with their organic, unpredictable curves. Art Deco. Neoclassical and Baroque towers. Columns with intricate plumed rattlesnakes inspired by Pre-Columbian stone pillars; pillars with leafy Corinthian capitals. Punktown’s architects had copied these details from far earlier architects, and Bluetown had copied the copies. A skyscraper with its top three levels bearing mock pagoda roofs with upturned corners. Occurrences of the external wall decoration called an oculus, because it resembled an eye. Corrugated towers pattered after those at the ancient temple of Lingaraja, themselves mimicking phalluses, stabbing arrogantly at the sky – Punktown’s skyscrapers built ever higher in their designers’ penis envy. But it wasn’t just Earth’s history of architecture that was represented. Kalian onion domes. Huge, scalloped Tikkihotto temples. Smallish brick buildings that were remnants of the native Choom city which had preceded Punktown.

  Overlapping elevated highways. Bridges for pedestrians or trams, linking one tower to another. Factories and adjacent dormitories for their laborers to live in (though with Punktown’s economy, many of the original plants were just as desolate at these duplicates). There should have been metal support rods like bones buried in the concrete. There should have been actual rivets socketed into girders, instead of just a surface mimicry. And these buildings should have been erected over a span of many years, individually, not in a tide of organic concrescence. They had grown without grout, without welding, without the use of derricks and cranes, without drilling and the boring of heated penetrators.

  Stake remembered reading of the so-called golden section, or golden ratio. An ancient geometric formula for designing and building, consisting of a circle divided into twenty-four parts of fifteen degrees each, a square inside the circle and four opposing triangles. Even the human body could be broken down into these mathematical golden proportions, with an inverted triangle and overlapping circles. But where Stake envisioned bearded mystical types with rulers and compasses bending for hours over reams of inked parchment, this city was generating itself with a dreaming effortlessness. The sleepwalking of a God.

  “Hey,” Stake said suddenly, leaning his forehead against his window. “Did you see that? That was the Chrislamic Cathedral down there.”

  “Yeah?” said Henderson.

  The jaggedly spired structure should have been made of black metal, with red stained glass windows. More than that, it shouldn’t have been there at all. “Red Jihad terrorists vaporized the Chrislamic Cathedral two years ago. It’s gone now.”

  “Huh,” said Henderson. “Well, I don’t get back to Punktown much; guess I missed that. Like I told you, Simulacra here is copying Punktown, but it appears to be a dated Punktown. I don’t know if they’ve pinned down the exact year yet.” Looking out another window, he wagged his head as if seeing this surreal cityscape for the first time. “With all its crime, Punktown is one scary place. So it surprises me that it seems even scarier without any people at all. Then again, people you can kill. But this place...”

  “But it’s beautiful, too,” Stake murmured close to the glass.

  Peripherally, he saw Henderson turn to look at him.

  Drifting above the city in the distance were a number of dark kites. No; parachutes, maybe, or large balloons, hanging in the air. But Stake had been to Sinan before, and he recognized them a moment later for what they were. “Benders,” he said.

  “Yeah,” one of their two CF guards confirmed. “They seem to be drawn to this place.”

  “Just hunting birds and such, out here in the open,” Henderson suggested. “Easy pickings.”

  Benders, as they had been nicknamed by the Blue War’s soldiers, were an extradimensional creature that was able to pass into and out of Sinan’s plane through some mysterious and apparently natural process. It was rare that they appeared in the plane Punktown existed in, though there had been occasional rumored sightings, including a few subway killings attributed to benders that were said to have taken to living down there. They closely resembled jellyfish – huge when adult – but jellyfish that floated in the air. As ethereal as they looked, Stake would always remember the kicking legs and screams of one of his comrades as he was lifted into the air by translucent blue tendrils, right beside him. The longer, blue tentacles paralyzed their prey, while shorter black tentacles administered flesh-dissolving enzymes. Stake remembered firing at the thing and it dropping the soldier, but too late. As he lay convulsing and liquefying, another soldier had had to shoot the young man to put him out of his agony. Before they had come to that wrenching decision, the man had stared past them and babbled about some strange place he was seeing. Maybe the poisons allowed him to look into the realm the benders came from. Maybe the sight of it had driven him mad.

  “I guess so, sir,” the guard responded to Henderson’s speculation. “But we think they gather more around the place where those three bodies were found than anyplace else.”

  “Huh,” said Stake, watching the distant hovering forms.

  “We’ll be over that soon,” Henderson said. And a moment later, “Yeah, f
unny, it does look like the benders are lingering above the building, doesn’t it?”

  But as if they could tell the Harbinger was coming their way (and it was undetermined just how sentient they were), the benders drifted away before the craft could reach them, so that it didn’t seem to get any closer to the creatures. Soon, however, the building in question was directly below the helicar. Their pilot swung them around for another pass.

  The building wasn’t all that large. Just five stories, but longish, with a flat roof. There was an antennae array atop the roof like a cluster of thin blue spires. “What are those?” Stake asked.

  “Not sure,” said Henderson.

  “The windows are all open.”

  “It must have had energy barriers for windows.” Henderson looked over at him. “You want to touch down for a peek inside?”

  “Ahh...”

  “No, no.” Henderson waved the idea away immediately. “You’ve been through a lot for one day, taking the shift and all. You know your own pace. Let’s get you to the base so you can get settled in for the night.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea; thanks.”

  Henderson ordered the pilot to take them to the Colonial Forces compound back in Di Noon, and the Harbinger gained a greater altitude so that Bluetown took on something of the appearance of a holographic map. They cut along close to the edge of the forest briefly, though it was obscured by billowing mist that rose into the air like clouds being mass produced. A byproduct of the city’s self-assembly, like the plume of a locomotive that was dragging its great mass inexorably across the land.