Punktown: Shades of Grey (33 page)

The cat took small furtive steps, its serpentine eyes straining in the gloom, wriggling tentacle-like. Unable to see Silvia crouched shivering in the snow, it found the food and ate.

««—»»

Silvia returned the following day and the snow returned too, the local atmosphere celebrating this temporary freedom from restriction, but negotiations were ongoing between the weather control workers and the union; inevitably nature would yield to technology.

It was lighter out this time when Silvia set down her offering of dog food. The skittish animal poked out of its cavern but pulled back suddenly, startled by the distant howling of a dog—from Little Manila or Nex-Tech? The beast remained in its shelter until Silvia moved back, out of its view.

“Good boy, Skinny.”

The cat now had a name.

3. The Melting Sentry

The girl was crying the third day, when she showed up at the door of Mrs. Waterfall’s apartment. Most of the tenants avoided Mrs. Waterfall; she didn’t seem to care much for company. She was odd, private,
loyal
only to her ailing Chihuahua and the sandalwood shadows of her solitary lair. But Silvia liked her well enough.

“Skinny—he ran away!” Silvia announced.

Mrs. Waterfall sat her down and gave her tea.

“What happened, Silvia?”

“I tried to pat him and he ran off.”

“How do you know it’s a male?” the woman asked, peering out through her long, white frenzy of hair.

“Woman’s intuition,” the child explained.

Adele Waterfall suppressed a smile. “Not to worry—he’ll be back. As long as you keep bringing the food he’ll be back. But you have to be patient. That animal has suffered serious trauma at the hands of people. It will take time for him to trust you.”

Mrs. Waterfall was right. Weeks passed before the cat would eat with Silvia close by, even more weeks before it was responding to her calling its name. But now it came readily at the sound of her voice, stumbling and grey in the snow—out from its hiding place, its thin tail held high—to gobble its food.

Nearly March and still The Park was lumpy and white with snow. Silvia climbed off the
bus,
trudged across the wintered rubble, walked up her street, grey with slush and houses. She dropped off her books, prepared Skinny’s meal and headed back out.

The ruin of a snowman stood like a sentry. Rain and warmer days had given him a deteriorated look, the face a ghostly blur. Gunshots barked from Little Manila and the helicars of wealthy executives hummed insect-like as they swarmed away from the Nex-Tech structures.

“Skinny,” Silvia called, approaching the cat’s shelter (which she had lined with towels stolen from home).

Skinny meowed and stepped out, eyes like pad thai noodles swimming.

“Time to eat. Are you hungry?”

Skinny meowed
,
tail saluting
. Silvia set down his plate and stayed close. This time she gently held out her hand and the cat, never having made contact before, touched the tip of a finger with his nose.

A white blur came from the right—the tightly packed snowball struck Skinny hard in the head and broke wetly, spitting cold sparks in Silvia’s face. Skinny shook his head, staggered a few steps and fell dead.

The laughter of older boys came from somewhere behind. The boys swaggered off toward the bland grey apartment houses, hooting.

Silvia held Skinny for the first time, pressed him to her jerking chest. Her tears fell on his fur. That night she slept with the body of her small companion cuddled in her bed, the small hand recorder too, her dead father’s rasping
voice listing
movies in the dark.

4. Adele Waterfall

Adele was fifty when she moved into the building that overlooked the lot where a tenement had exploded. She had lived with her husband Floyd in a better part of the city up until the time of his death. His helicar had plummeted fifteen stories. Some jokester at the factory had planted an empty beer bottle in the works of the vehicle and over time it had broken up, several fragments sneaking into a fuel line where they precipitated the fatal blockage. This fact was never disclosed, however; it seems the car manufacturer passed a clandestine sum of munits to investigators who listed the cause of the wreck as an operator error.

Life had been good on Danvers Street. Adele had had room for a small herb garden and there was a birch tree where she hung a clear plastic bird feeder. The couple had installed eight-foot fences around their humble oasis of a yard, both of them being quiet, private creatures. They had plenty of room for their beloved books and a finished basement where they could play their music. Floyd was skilled with a violin and Adele had mastered the harpsichord (a small electric version, actually). They liked nothing better than a quiet meal followed by some shared concerti grossi by the ancient master Corelli, or the contemporary composer Scor-rul.

Adele had sold the house following Floyd’s accident—no longer able to afford it on her own. His pension and the money from the sale would have to support her. She was too much of a recluse to go out into the ice and madness of the external world. So she moved to a modest apartment in a middle class neighborhood.

There were worse places to be, the woman mused, although the landlord was not the most generous of creatures. The air-conditioning system was faulty and Adele was forced to have her windows open during the summer. She was glad when Silvia and her parents moved in, having tired of hearing the moans of the woman upstairs, having tired of the squeaking of the woman’s spider-like robot lover (or was it the bedsprings?
Both?).
At any rate, the family of three made for more tolerable neighbors.

Life was a shadow without Floyd; the only music came from recorded chips, her herbs came from jars; she rarely cooked meals from scratch, but relied on prepared food ordered by computer from a delivery market. The three-legged Chihuahua, Muscles, that she and Floyd had rescued from a pound, died of natural causes that first winter, just weeks before Silvia’s cat friend was murdered by local bullies. Without Muscles, the solitude was even more than our eccentric, iconoclastic Adele Waterfall cared for. Lately she found herself becoming overly fond of Bach’s
Come Sweet Death
.

5. Wires Like Cobras

April thawed the snow and the warmer days seemed to take some of the steam out of the thrust to end the weather controllers’ strike, though one city official maintained that they were terrorizing the city through their insubordination. Adele had ordered some fresh daisies from the delivery market and set out into The Park to place them at Skinny’s grave.

She had labored with the neighbor girl to build a burial cairn of bricks near where the cat had lived in a hollow under heaped concrete. Now that the snow was gone, one could see the occasional power cable snaking through the sprawl of wrecked tenement, these cables being illegal taps, stealing electricity from businesses to divert it to this or that apartment across the way. The cheap line used by the power-theives occasionally gave out, breaking; the wires would thrash back and forth, spewing sparks. The rich and the poor were kindred in their grasping.

Working her way through the lot, Adele tensed at the sound of hissing. Just yards now from Skinny’s monument, she saw a wire dancing and spitting and a dog of pale grey flat on its side, smoking from a blackened kiss on its right flank. Adrenalin punched Adele in the heart.

It must be dead, she thought, electrocuted by the thrashing cable, but she saw the dog’s side rising and falling and one of the front paws twitched. With her blood sprinting dizzying laps through her, Adele took the heaviest chunk of concrete she could lift and wobbled closer to the electric cobra. The wire swung close to the dog and the woman bent close, pinning it with the slab.

“Bastards!” Adele cursed the power-purloiners.

She knelt by the dog and put a bony hand on its bony chest. It was thin, even for a greyhound, likely an escapee from the expansive dog farm that supplied both Nex-Tech and Little Manila. They were too far from the dog racing track for it to have come from there; besides, they usually shot their dogs once the beasts’ proficiency in racing had waned.

“You poor sweet thing,” Adele whispered, stroking its pointed face. The dog lifted its head weakly and she saw that the left eye was cloudy, blind.

6. Ten Years Later

Smartie Pants, Silvia’s father had called her, endearingly. Indeed. A scholarship sent her to Miniosis College of Arts and Sciences, away from the grey home streets of Paxton. She was twenty now, engaged to one Roger Brine, a brilliant and humane young man, graduate of Silvia’s university, with a snug position at a burgeoning cloning center. After graduation Silvia hoped that their combined incomes would be enough to help her mother move to Miniosis, out of the old neighborhood, for the crime level there had increased substantially over the past ten years.

Every few weeks Silvia would borrow Roger’s helicar and drive out to visit her mother. It was summer and weeds snaked up out of the clutter of The Park and garbage roasted in the gutters. Sweaty silver-tattooed Choom boys loitering on the sidewalks, called obscenely to the lean young woman with the perky haircut who had grown somewhat prettier with time. While no proponent of capital punishment, she had, at Roger’s prompting, purchased a palm-sized pistol. The Stun-Beam 20-20 resembled a .25 automatic, but only fired pale yellow stun rays. The worst it could do was put an eye out, if fired at close range. Roger didn’t care for her spending so much time in that depreciating section of the city and felt better knowing she had some form of protection at hand.

Over the years she had stayed in touch with Mrs. Waterfall and even on those weekends when she was too busy to spend much time with her, she would see the woman walking her beloved greyhound. The image of the two walking along side by side had become something of a fixture in her thoughts of home. It was amazing how the dog had breathed life into the woman. Mrs. Waterfall had never gotten around to giving the now aging dog a formal name, but simply grew accustomed to calling him Sweetie.

Sometimes Silvia would visit her old friend. They would sit drinking tea, listening to music chips of Corelli, Sweetie parked by his companion, slender head in her lap, one good eye trained up lovingly as the woman stroked the back of his neck. He actually appeared to smile.

7. A Fateful Note

Adele and Sweetie were returning from their afternoon walk when the stocky and brisk George Conch came marching down the sidewalk toward them. A brutish-looking man in mustard-colored shorts, his beer-swollen belly naked and jiggling, the landlord thrust an envelope at the woman with such vigor that she flinched. Startled by the motion, Sweetie growled.

“Shut up or I’ll kick ya to death, ya friggin’ mutt!” the ogre spat.

Adele would have loved a gun just then and, unlike Silvia, might possibly have used it.

“I’m sick of steppin’ in dog crap every friggin’ time I come over here,” the man spat.

“Don’t blame me for that—Sweetie only does his business over in The Park.”

Conch smirked. “Yeah, right,” he said; then, wheeling on his heel, he marched away.

The heat seemed to shrink Adele’s flat. Sweetie went straight to his water bowl, slurping and gulping as his master read the letter, hands shaking. In effect, the note said that there had been a change of heart about the pet policy and that she had a week to remove her dog or else she would face eviction.