Punktown: Shades of Grey (16 page)

“We saw the little museum of yours,” Jed told him, in disgust. “Your shrine to murder. You’re just plain old insane, aren’t you? A psychopath. Right?”

“This is some kind of sport to you, isn’t it?” Lloyd said. “Don’t lie to us, Mr. Lerna. We can figure out how you think easily enough.”

“You have it wrong,” Art stuttered, sliding along the wall. “I wouldn’t hurt you two…I only made you so that I could go on living if anything ever happened to me…”

“Why the fake memories, then? Why the knife in my back? Don’t lie to yourself.” Lloyd smiled.

“You’re sick!” Jed snarled. “You came hunting us down like animals! You’re less worthy of life than we are!”

“Who are you to judge me?” Art sneered at his accusing reflection. “You’re nothing but a potato with my face grown in a tank, a garbage man from the smell of you, and you judge
me?”

Jed almost sprang at Artemis Lerna then, almost buried the knife in his chest. But he didn’t. He couldn’t kill. Alike as they were, he was that much different.

But Art reached inside his jacket in a desperate lunge. It was a wasted effort. Lloyd lifted his pistol a little higher and shot Art twice in the upper chest. They were plasma capsules, released a spreading blanket of glowing green. Not the best stuff; he had to shoot the convulsing, withering thing on the floor several more times in order to dissolve it entirely.

Jed had backed up against the wall in horror, dropping the knife. He was shaking his head in disbelief and disorientation. “He was insane,” he repeated. “Insane.”

“Just too rich,” Lloyd murmured, glancing around him. “He lost his perspective a bit. But who can blame him? Look at this place. Can you imagine living here?”

“What do we do now?” Jed asked, still wagging his head. “We’re just clones. What do we do now?”

“There can’t be ‘we,’ friend,” Lloyd sighed in an almost sorrowful tone, returning his gaze to his twin. “There can be only ‘I.’”

“What?” Jed said, and then he was gaping at the muzzle of Lloyd’s pistol as it swiveled his way.

“Sorry, friend,” Lloyd apologized, and shot himself in the head.

— | — | —

WILLOW TREE

“Let my shell, the fresh young tree, wither, or be hewn down, and burnt to ashes, and scattered to all the winds!”

—
The Dryad
, Hans Christian Andersen

1: The Tree

They called this part, this particle, of the city Willow Tree. It was not the actual name of the street; there were several streets that intersected through the area. Willow Tree was not an official name on any map of the city of Paxton (also known as Punktown). Apparently, no one alive even knew who had originally planted the nominal willow tree on its triangular traffic island, or how old it might be, but they knew the tree was not indigenous to this planet named Oasis. It had to have been brought by someone from Earth, the Earth people being those who had initially colonized Oasis and who still constituted the majority of Punktown’s citizens. Had the willow tree been a sapling when planted, or an adult already at that time? Had it been planted in a park, a courtyard, which had gradually been pared down to this little traffic island, stranding the tree as wheeled and hovering craft whooshed by it on all sides like ravenous sharks? In the summer, fast and often dangerous neighborhood children braved that traffic to dash out to the island and climb on the tree (it had briefly harbored, nest-like, several generations of forts within its lower boughs), finding that the dangling whip-like arms were host to hundreds, thousands of little beetles with glistening orange shells. Against a crisp autumn sky, its branches looked like carefully dissected veins or nerves separated from a human body for display. In the winter, through sifting snow, the drooping tentacles became misted, ethereal. The sagging and swaying branches, like braids hung from a great shaggy head, were tossed in stormy waves when a gust of wind was channeled roaring through the city canyons, or rustled sedately in the breeze of rushing vehicles. For some part of the afternoon, bright sunlight might work its way to the willow tree’s flesh to sustain it, though generally it seemed to patiently wait for long hours drowned in the deeps of dark blue shadow. Around its scarred, initialed and graffiti-painted trunk lay cinder blocks and discarded soda cans, whiskey bottles snagged in a bed of overgrown grass, a traffic sign like a crushed metal flower bent right down to the ground, broken glass and scraps of vehicles that had collided at this intersection. The tree was both passive and tenacious, both venerable and pitiful, both a symbol of peace and something vaguely sinister. At night, one might look down upon the great tree from a window in the apartment complex Sundered Gardens or from a flat above the Vietnamese restaurant
Pho Paxton
, and imagine that the plant was instead a rooted animal like a titanic anemone, its tendrils rippling at the bottom of the ocean, waiting to reach out and snare some metallic fish that flashed by too close.

2: The Dead

Not all deaths, not even violent ones, made it into the newspapers and VT programs; there simply wasn’t the space, the time. And not all the dwellers in the neighborhood of Willow Tree, particularly the children, consulted these sources of information. But there was conversation, word of mouth, whispered gossip,
grave
admonishment. Husbands cautioned wives and parents warned children about the killings that began to occur in Willow Tree toward the start of that winter. The first of these was a man, a neighbor they knew, an old Choom of the native race, who was found in the basement parking bay of Sundered Gardens, his body slumped against the outside of his vehicle, terribly hacked and torn. The second was a woman pulled into an alley between
Pho Paxton
and a brick tenement building with a ground floor sex vids shop (cavorting holographic women in its windows, their luminous bodies casting phantasmal blue light onto the sidewalk). This woman, again a neighbor, was also badly mutilated. The third was a young man they didn’t know, with no ID found on him, whose body was discovered by children on the triangular traffic island, slung in the crotch of the willow tree as though a leopard had left him there, his blood drying in the creases of the trunk’s bark. Speculation was that the old Choom man had been murdered by child muggers, bashed to death with e-ikkos—the colorful, traditional Tikkihotto ax that was the in-vogue hand-to-hand combat weapon for gangs right now. But his wallet, still with a few small bills in it, had not been taken. Speculation was that
the woman in the alley had been slaughtered by some disturbed pervert who had been titillated to a feverish state in the sex vids shop
. But the woman had not been raped. And speculation was that the young man on the traffic island had been struck by a speeding hovercar when trying to cross the street, the impact flinging him into the tree. But how could a hit-and-run driver have scooped the man’s eyes out of their sockets, and slashed off both his ears but left the skull between them intact?

3: The Children

Kiwi wore her hair in a shiny blue-black
helmet,
straight bangs over her eyebrows, neat as plastic. She was thirteen but looked ten, like a sickly ten-year-old, like a lollipop with a black head. Her father was Anglo and her mother Vietnamese. Sometimes she bolted out to the traffic island and played there with her friends. She had never been assaulted or robbed on the island by tougher kids because her brother was seventeen and had already killed two other boys with his blue and orange e-ikko. She wore earrings he had given her, which she supposed were stolen, that played tinkling ancient-sounding music box music like a baby might listen to when you activated them. Sometimes she left them in when she went to bed and played the music to soothe
herself
and distract her from her parents’ shouting...but she was always quick to silence them when she heard her father plodding into her room. She would want to pretend that she was asleep. But even if she rolled onto her belly and feigned slumber, he might still sit down heavily on the edge of her mattress. He would begin stroking her shiny blue-black helmet of hair, his voice slurred with alcohol or maybe even anodyne gas, his whispered words tripping over each other’s feet, his hand caressing her head on and on as if it kept slipping off. When she was younger he might have read a story to her, or simply recited one that he could remember. But lately his bedside litany was more in the way of reminiscence than fairy tale, though they both shared a similar quality coming from him. Sometimes his reminiscences varied, but usually and basically they were the same. By the time he finished his bedside monologue, he might be softly sobbing. He would mutter an apology and pull her blanket up to her jaw and wish her candy-coated dreams. Sometimes Kiwi played the music box
ear rings
again when he’d left, to drown out the echo of his drunken litany. Though ultimately she felt too sorry for her father to do so, sometimes Kiwi thought she should ask her mother to make him stop. His sobbing made her want to sob, as well.

4: The Litany

“You look just like your mother...your mother more than me. And Tri looks more like me. That’s fair, huh? Son like father, daughter like mother? You’re so beautiful.
So, so beautiful.
You remind me of your mother when I first met her. We were both seventeen years old. She looked fourteen. She had a fourteen-year-old sister. She would have been your aunt. She would have been your Aunt
Lan
, but you never met her. Can I tell you a secret? I loved your mother the minute I saw her, but I loved your Aunt
Lan
, too. She was just a kid, but she was so beautiful, and so sweet, just like you. She and your mother used to live around the corner from here, on Meter Street, and they used to play on that willow tree like you do now. When I moved here with my mother it was summer and I met these two beautiful, beautiful girls in their little summer outfits and their yellow-brown skin. Your mother had long, long hair, down to her cute tiny bum. But Aunt
Lan
had short hair, just like you.
Short hair even blacker than your mother’s black hair.
One day we sat in their apartment watching VT and Aunt
Lan
lay down on the sofa and put her head in my lap. Your mother didn’t seem to mind too much; she just clicked her tongue and ignored her. But I stroked her hair. Just stroked and stroked for a whole hour.
Like a dog with its head on your knee.
At the time I didn’t know if she was asleep or awake. But the way she looked up at me after, and smiled at me, I knew she’d been awake all the time. For that hour she and I were in love and it was like we were totally alone. It was the greatest hour of love I ever knew. I don’t know why. I’m sorry to tell you that. I love your mother. But maybe it was the greatest hour of love in my life only later on, when I thought about it afterwards, after what happened. There was a serial killer in the neighborhood that winter. He cut the head off a homeless man and left him on a tenement
roof top
. They only found him in the spring, though. And there was a policeman, of all people, a forcer, and they found him in his car with the motor still running, and he looked okay from the waist up but he was cut to ribbons below the belt. Then there was a woman they found in her own apartment, all sliced and slashed, sitting in a rocking chair in front of her VT. And your poor Aunt
Lan
. Poor, poor, beautiful little Aunt
Lan
. They found her up in that willow tree she loved to climb on like a monkey. She climbed up so fast one time when I was chasing her; I couldn’t catch her. I was big and couldn’t get up very far but she was so light she could climb way up into those yellow branches. They hung all around her like...like a beaded curtain, and she smiled down at me so cute, so adorable. Out of my reach. She wasn’t that high up when they found her, but she was there in the tree, with snow on her face...on her open eyes. They told me. I was glad I didn’t see her. But I can picture the snow on her black hair, making it look old and gray. If I’d seen her I would’ve wiped it off. Wiped it off. Wiped the blood off her face. Oh God. Oh dear God. She was so beautiful, your Aunt
Lan
. So sweet...like you...she looked just like you...oh God. Ohhh God. I’m sorry, honey. Never mind. You’re my good little girl.
My sweet little girl.
You have candy-coated dreams, now.”