Ghosts of Punktown (2 page)

     EL BASHA is my preferred source for Middle Eastern dining, and I must always order my favorite dish on the menu,
falafel
. I once sat at the next table over from Triad crime lord Ng Yueh-sheng, who was also a loyal patron of this establishment, mere weeks before a rival gang’s bomb blew him to pieces smaller than the diced tomatoes in a
tabouleh
salad. But don’t worry, it didn’t happen in
El Basha
. Get thee there, and enjoy! (See
Precious Metal
in
Punktown
.)

     PHO PAXTON, in the neighborhood dubbed Willow Tree – after a great shaggy tree of that type dominating a traffic island in the vicinity – offers the best Vietnamese cuisine that I have encountered in the city. More importantly, my wife Hong considers it to be Punktown’s best Vietnamese restaurant as well, and since she herself is Vietnamese, her opinion carries weight with me. It’s a smallish place, located at street level in a somewhat worn brick building in the old Choom style, but don’t let the looks fool you; the fare is colorful, vibrant, delicious. One must, of course, try the house specialty:
pho bo
, or beef noodle soup (
pho
pronounced roughly as “fur”). It is the quintessential Vietnamese dish. Another favorite of mine is
banh xeo
, a kind of stuffed crepe. I am also extremely fond of
banh mi
, the Vietnamese equivalent of a submarine sandwich, but this is fast food and I suggest you head over to the
Dalat Sandwich Stop
on nearby Meter Street for that treat. But even more heavenly to me than Vietnamese food is Vietnamese coffee (
ca phe
). It is served in a glass topped by a little metal filter cup, and your saliva will drop in synch with the teasingly slow drip of those savory dark beads. Want it cold? Have ice put in the glass. Hot or cold, I like it best with a thick layer of sweetened condensed milk at the bottom. My wife knows I could subsist on her kisses and
ca phe
alone, and thus accommodates me in abundance, but when we were first married she was also constantly plying me with
tom
and
ruou
. As this is Oasis, not the old Earth that spawned these recipes, sometimes adjustments have to be made.
Tom
are shrimp, yet in Punktown the Vietnamese often use in their dishes a local breed of crustacean like a very large prawn but with eight weirdly human-shaped feet.
Ruou
, or specifically
ruou can
, is rice wine. When shrimp and wine were all but oozing out of my ears, my new bride finally admitted to me that these items were good for
ong xa’s
(husband’s) “baby.” And whatever is good for
ong xa’s
“baby” is in turn good for
ba xa’s
(wife’s) “baby” as well, obviously. But Oasis’ human-footed shrimp can impart properties even beyond the aphrodisiacal. A cousin to the breed used by Vietnamese cooks is used by drug peddlers as the main ingredient in the hallucinogenic nicknamed “kaleidoscopes.” Because these breeds are such close cousins, a local restaurant that shall remain nameless once made a grave mix-up that caused their patrons to imagine such things as the “shrimp” running off the tables on eight little sneaker-clad feet, and the meat on their plates lifting its head and making barking sounds (yes, back on Earth man’s best friend is known to appear in the Vietnamese diet – one must eat what is at hand – but in this city I’ve only seen dog sold as a comestible in the neighborhood of Luzon, and however adventurous my palate may be, dog is something I avoid like I avoid gray-fleshed cricket urchins). In any case, fines were slapped, the restaurant remained in business, and the customers returned to their senses – some of them possibly hoping, in vain, for a second helping.

     QUIDD’S MARKET in the upscale neighborhood of Beaumonde Square is not a restaurant, but more of a mall of food. It is a titanic cornucopia, contained within an extensive brick structure in the pre-colonial Choom style, with a majestic central rotunda.
Quidd’s
is thronged with people, and thronged with food stalls and edible offerings that put even the diverse menu of
Café Quay
to shame. Indeed, I don’t think there’s another spot in town that in one place offers such a wide collection of foodstuffs. It is a museum of victuals! I have never gone there without wondering at some point what the hell I was looking at – and if I was particularly brave that day, what the hell I was eating. But no matter how many types of food I gorge myself on there, I always follow it up with a cup of ice cream. And don’t even get me started on the assortment of ice cream! (See
Deadstock
and
Health Agent
.)

     J. J. REDHOOK’S CRAB CABIN serves another sort of local crustacean, this
being a large white critter more like a silverfish despite its popular name of “white-crab.” Mr. Redhook’s stilt-legged “cabin” extends partway over the old cooling basin of a discontinued plastic company, and in the waters of said basin Mr. Redhook not only breeds the white-crabs, but a kind of weed that when cooked up resembles noodles (but it has nothing on the rice noodles use in
pho
, believe me). A nice little place, but the coffee is nothing to write home about, either. Once, when driving my wheeled vehicle along the highway a short distance from this establishment, I ran over something crunchy and stopped to have a look. The white-crabs might not have human feet, but I found that they do occasionally escape from their artificial pond to do a bit of exploration. (See
The Palace of Nothingness
in
Punktown
.)

     ZEBO’S SAUCER is located within the grounds of the annual Paxton Fair, though in recent years its owner – a small, huge-eyed being named Zebo – is known to move this mobile diner down to the warmer climes of the Outback Colony during the winter. Rumors are that the saucer-sh
aped diner is in fact the spacecraft it appears to be. Indeed, framed upon its walls are blurry photographs Zebo claims were taken of his craft (later appearing in books and magazines) as long ago as the 20
^th
Century, when he was supposedly part of an interstellar exploration team. The menu consists of comfort foods – but comfort foods of a fair variety of planets, from Earthly burgers to the bland porridges favored by Zebo’s race. I like the place a lot, and Zebo is a great guy, but I often get the uneasy feeling that he’s...observing me, even jotting notes in the pad he uses to take orders...as if maybe he hasn’t stopped doing his research on the human race, after all, this diner business merely a facade. But a tasty facade it is. (See
Everybody Scream!
.)

     And there you have it, just the briefest of introductions to the countless eateries the megalopolis of Punktown has to offer. But tonight rather than venture out into the city (after all, it can be rather hazardous after hours), I suggest you call for a delivery or room service, then sit back in the relative safety of your hotel room and enjoy the buffet that follows. Some of the dishes may be exotic and warming, while others you may find a bit distasteful or hard to swallow. But you did come to experience Punktown in all its diverse flavors, didn’t you?

In His Sights

1

     The other young returnees kept looking at him, wondering what horrors were concealed by his mask. The mask looked like several layers of black plastic vacuum-formed to his face, with openings for his eyes, nostrils and mouth. From his eyes, with their epicanthic folds, they could at least tell that he was of Asian ancestry. But what wounding had he suffered? Had he been spattered with hot, corrosive plasma from a mortar round? Sprayed with acid or minced with
shrapnel in some Ha Jiin booby trap? The other men – and there were some female soldiers, too – felt pity for him. And also shame, at being relieved that it wasn’t them forced to wear the healing black mask.

     But he wasn’t healing. Because he wasn’t wounded, at least not in the ways they speculated on.

     He was simply hiding his face.

     Though he knew it would, his face shouldn’t have shocked the others in a purely physical sense. After all, this was Punktown. The city had been called Paxton, of course, when Earth colonists had first founded it, but it hadn’t taken long for its nickname to come about, for its predestined character to make itself manifest. Races other than human had come to colonize the city as well, over the decades. Included among the few truly humanoid races that dwelt within the megalopolis were the Choom – indigenous to this world, which the Earth colonists had renamed Oasis. They had frog-like mouths that sliced their faces back to their ears. Then there were the Tikkihotto, who in place of eyes had bundles of clear tendrils that squirmed in the air as if to assemble vision with their sensitive touch. But there were far stranger beings in Punktown. Beautiful, by the Earthly conception of such things, or hideous. In addition, there were mutants of every deformity, corresponding to every cruel whim of nature (nature as distorted through pollution and radiation). So, it would seem illogical that any
one in Punktown would feel self-conscious enough to hide their features by pretending to have been disfigured. But it wasn’t simply self-consciousness that had caused the young man to don his mask.

     It pos
sibly went so far as self-preservation.

     “Santos, Edgar,” a voice said from a speaker. The name was spelt out on a screen as well, and showed Santos’ military ID number. The man in the black mask looked up and watched as Edgar Santos pushed away the little VT he had been watching, affixed to the arm of his chair. He headed off to one of the offices, its number also displayed on the information screen.
Santos.
There were a few more names to be called, alphabetically, before they got to the masked man. Stake, Jeremy.

     Stake sat in a long row of plastic chairs of a terrible orange color. His row faced a row opposite. Trying not to look at the people seated across from him, despite how they stole glances at him, Stake couldn’t help but be reminded of the first time he had been sent to the planet of the Ha Jiin. The
dimension
of the Ha Jiin.

     It had been over four years ago. The then nineteen-year-old Jeremy Stake had sat with a group of young men and women, humans and humanoids, with no Ha Jiin blood yet on their hands. None of their own blood yet spilled. They had sat just like this, in two rows inside a metal Theta pod, waiting to have their material beings
shifted
. Smuggled inside a bullet fired through page after page in the closed book of realities, taking a shortcut through infinity. The transdimensional pod had hummed with an almost subliminal vibration under their boots and asses. They had looked at each other’s faces in nervousness. A few of these troop pods had gone missing, taking a wrong turn somehow, perhaps ending up in some alternate plane from which there was no return or maybe just ceasing to be.

     Sometimes Stake wondered if he truly had returned to his own plane. Might this be a subtle variation on the world he had left? If so, might some subtly different Jeremy Stake have taken his place in his reality? And if so, had he come back without the need for disguise?

     Well, such alternate versions of oneself had not in fact been discovered in any of the realms that Theta research/technology had given the Earth Colonies access to. But extradimensional races had certainly been encountered. There were the beetle-like Coleopteroids, derisively called Bedbugs. The putty-like L’lewed. The more humanoid Antse people, who covered their bland gray bodies entirely in the gorgeous flayed skins of great creatures called flukes. And then, there were the blue-skinned Ha Jiin. One of the most human of races. One of the most beautiful. And deadly.

     “Severance, Amy Jo,” called the speaker’s voice. Stake watched a young woman rise to attend her appointment. She was one of those who had come today in uniform rather than street clothes. It was really a personal decision. Maybe she was proud of it. Maybe she was simply still in the military mind-set. Under her arm she carried a black beret, her uniform itself patterned in shades of blue, from dark navy to bright azure to pastel. Stake was in his street clothes, but he had an identical set of camouflaged fatigues among his belongings.

     The Blue War, they had called it.

     It was over now. Everybody coming home. Everybody being sifted back into a world that would be different for them, whether it was a secretly distorted variation or not.

     “Buddy? Hey...brother?”

     Stake turned his head, which glistened black like obs
idian. He met the eyes of a Choom with a severe crew cut.

     “What happened to you?”

     There. Someone had overtly invaded his privacy. Someone either too unthinking – or too compassionate – to just leave him be.

     Stake had an answer prepared, though. “I was in some caverns, and there were major gas concentrations. A plasma grenade caused it to ignite.” That was what they had been doing there. Traveled so far for, bled so long for. Officially, it was to lend support to the emerging Jin Haa nation. But everyone knew it was really all about those rich subterranean gases.

     The Choom made an exaggerated wincing expression. “Ouch. I heard of that happening. You gonna be all right?” He gestured at his own face. “Will it get back to normal?”

     “I don’t know,” Stake said. He wasn’t lying about that part. “I don’t know.”

*     *     *

     The Veterans Administration worker whose office Stake was directed to was a stern-faced black woman who introduced herself as Miriam Khaled. She was studying her screens when Stake let himself in. She looked up at him in a bit of a double-take, a little surprised by his appearance, but she dropped her eyes to his file again as he took a seat in front of her desk.

     “Will you be my caseworker?” he asked her.

     “No...you won’t be given a particular caseworker; you can meet with anyone here at the VA about your concerns,” she said as she read from his records. “Corporal Stake. I see you have a very distinguished four years of service. Hm. Assigned to several deep penetration units. You captured an enemy sniper who was quite a local legend to her people.”

     Stake’s guts knotted tighter at the mention of her. “Yes.” He saw the Ha Jiin woman’s face on his own internal screen. Her blue-skinned, beautiful face. She had been his prisoner for a while. Sometimes he felt he was her prisoner, now.

     “And you have no desire to further your career in the military?”

     “No.”

     “Okay. Um...” She frowned. “I don’t see anything here about your injury.”

     “This isn’t from an injury, ma’am.”

     “No?” She looked up, scowling.

     “Excuse me,” Stake said, and then he reached behind his head to unseal the shiny black mask. He peeled it from his head like a cocoon. Under it, his short dark hair was sweaty and disheveled. His skin was normally almost olive, but had become so pale it was almost of a bluish, corpse-like cast, as if he had been hidden from the sun for months. He watched Khaled’s face. He saw comprehension dawn there; not of the particulars, but at least an understanding as to why he would wear the mask.

     She quickly consulted the files again. “You underwent surgery to perform your penetration missions?”

     “No, ma’am. This isn’t from surgery. I’m a mutant.”

     Miriam Khaled took him in more closely. The young man seated opposite her was almost entirely a Ha Jiin, just as the Ha Jiin were almost entirely human – indistinguishable except for matters of pigment that Stake’s malleable cells could not duplicate, however crafty they were in their mimicry. Despite its best efforts, his skin was not that lovely, ghostly shade of blue. And the Ha Jiin’s eyes, though black, gleamed a laser red when the light struck them a certain way. Even their black hair took on a metallic red quality where the light made it shine. But there were other effects that Stake’s face had been very successful at reproducing. The Ha Jiin’s eyelids possessed the epicanthus of human Asians. Also, it was not uncommon for Ha Jiin men to mark their faces with scars. Stake had two horizontal raised bars on his right cheek, and three on his left cheek, almost as if to indicate that his age was twenty-three. In fact, the scarification was meant to represent the number of family members a man had lost in war. Maybe when they touched their own faces, or saw their reflections, it helped arouse them afresh in their desire to conquer their enemy and avenge their dead. Were it not for his imitation scars, Stake might have passed for an Earth Asian. But those markings were so distinctive.

     Khaled found it in his information at last. “I see. It’s a mutation called...
Caro turbida.
‘Disordered flesh.’ Huh. It’s impressive how it works.” She appeared to regret phrasing it that way. “I mean...”

     “It came in handy when I was doing my penetration work,” he confirmed. “But I had to have my skin dyed blue for those missions.”

     “This happens spontaneously?”

     “Yes. If I look at a person or a picture of a person for too long...or too intensely. It can happen in a matter of minutes. Faster, if I’m trying to get it to happen.”

     “But why do you look like a Ha Jiin now?”

     “The effect can last until I look long enough at another person’s face to trade for theirs. Or, for lack of another subject, sooner or later I’ll revert back to...me. Under normal circumstances, I try not to stare at people too much. I’ve been watching your face more than I normally would. I should have begun looking like you by now.”

     “So why isn’t that happening?”

     “I don’t know,” Stake admitted. “This has never happened to me before. I’m...stuck.”

     “How long has it been?”

     “Three weeks now. Three weeks since I took on the appearance of a man I killed in my last field mission.”

     “But you really don’t know why that is?”

     Stake swallowed. “I, ah, I can’t say for sure.”

     She nodded, and gazed at her computer system. Stake guessed that she was studying a picture of his own, natural face. He knew it would appear subtly unnatural to her. In his default mode, as he called it, the mutant had an oddly unfinished-looking appearance. Too bland, too nondescript, like an oil portrait that had been roughed in but never completed. She had probably seen androids that were more life-like.

     “I can schedule an appointment with one of our doctors at the VA Hospital,” she said. “Or maybe it would be more helpful if you spoke to one of our counselors...”

     “Mm,” he grunted.

     “In any case...do you have a family, Corporal? Anyplace to go?”

     “My mother is dead,” he told her. She had been a mutant, too. They had lived in the Punktown slum called Tin Town; it held the highest concentration of mutants in the city. As far as he knew his father was still alive, if his drug-addicted state could be called that. “No family,” was all the further elaboration he would give.