Punktown: Shades Of Grey Part 11

The Paxton Antiquarian Museum, situated in a better part of town, was an impressive structure. It conjured an ancient castle, but for the central verdigris dome and the balcony where a succession of holographic historical figures came out to gaze pensively across Punktown.

The inside was a maze of delights-halls of primitive carriages, the bleached carca.s.s of a recovered wooden s.h.i.+p, tomb goods, crockery, gla.s.s cases where preserved clothing hovered, Stone Age tools and temple sculptures. Griffin was humming inside.

A tiny hidden camera attached to the side of his sungla.s.ses recorded his visit. Casually, safe behind his shades, he paid particular attention to the layout of the place, trying to discern what security features were in place. Getting in would not be difficult, but getting out...

A certain large circular room set aside for traveling displays contained the Yos.h.i.+zawa exhibit. The brain floated in a luminous green dome on a stone pedestal mounted on a platform in the center. Holograms, journals under gla.s.s, sketches and even an old writing desk ringed the perimeter. A pensive, bluish, life-sized Yos.h.i.+zawa stood with his arms folded, grinning pleasantly.

Griffin stuck his hands in his jacket so that no one would notice that he was trembling. He stood mere paces from the brain-pale in its serene green liquid. He wanted to reach out and touch the gla.s.s but suspected that such an action would trigger alarms. So he stared...for longer than he should have.

He had always thought of his creature as a specimen, a lesser life form, until he saw that piece in the newspaper. True, he had given it some degree of sentience, but it was not until that serendipitous moment when his eyes fell on the article that he considered imbuing his creation with greatness.

Parents always want their children to aspire to a greatness that surpa.s.ses their own, don't they? Ha, ha!

The creature seemed to be sleeping, huddled on the padded floor, its s.h.a.ggy black coat pouring down from its limbs and body as if it were melting. Griffin turned up The Womb audio so that he could hear it breathing. He remembered sleeping like that as a boy, curled so tightly, as if he could disappear into himself. Its face, while murky in the defiant vid screen, was notably simian, but wasn't there some reflected essence of his own? I think I failed to mention that the first ingredient in the creature's composition had come from Griffin. He did not like to think that it was a matter of vanity...it had simply seemed the inevitable thing to do.

Griffin bent to the microphone and whispered, "Soon we'll be able to converse. Imagine that? You will be brilliant. I will no longer be your inventor...we will be friends, brothers."

Griffin ground out his cigarette and turned to go to work.

The plan ran smoothly. Following work, Griffin took a shuttle out to the antiquarian museum where he wandered like any other spectator in its depths. Near to closing time, he ducked past the Hall of Mollusks, past a room ranked with primitive armor, into the Burial Customs Suite. He had checked this room on his previous trip and determined that certain objects were not armed with contact-alarms. So, when no one else was in view, he slipped into a side chamber lined with upright coffins of varied size and style and climbed into one that was made of pale wood.

It was just a matter of waiting...time enough for his heart to slow down. A palm-sized silent laser drill had provided a hole for breathing (he regretted having to put a hole in a museum artifact). He peered out through this, saw that the main lights had been shut off. A soft whirring sound came within range and he wondered if it were some type of floor buffer being run by a cleaning crew. A dark shape floated past-a guard robot. That was to be expected.

Griffin was no stranger to claustrophobic situations. His living quarters and the lab were quite confining, and back when he was going through the skin replacement stage of recuperation he had been forced to lie still for weeks on end in this or that Plexiglas tank. Spending two hours in a coffin was not so bad.

Arise and walk. Ha!

The casket door-almost disappointingly-did not creak when opened.

Griffin was quick and quiet in his sneakers but the place seemed suddenly endless as he made his way toward the Yos.h.i.+zawa exhibit. He could hear the distant hum of a robot echoing gently in the dark. Small auxiliary lights, inconspicuously positioned, provided the only illumination and the place took on an eerie cast. Suits of shadowy armor loomed, stuffed bears and period-dressed mannequins stared from corners.

There was a long dark hall dedicated to an impressive collection of Mahnzee artifacts, close by the room with the brain. There had not been time previously to take in this collection, and while Griffin's adrenalin was dragging him to his prize, he could not resist just taking a quick peek.

The Mahnzee were an extinct race of humanoid beings from Mahneez. They had died out many centuries before colonists ever planted a flag on the place. No one had ever seen one alive, obviously, but there had been a good number of mummies recovered over the years. Some of these hung in a big gla.s.s case, brittle and dehydrated. They were all about four feet high, emaciated, a shriveled grey. Their natural facial features remained a mystery as the Mahnzee had worn symbiotic masks of small living barnacles. The mummies squinted out of their gla.s.s, their faces pebbled, blackened, hideous. No mummified children had ever been found but there was a case showing petrified larvae the size of cuc.u.mbers.

Other treasures included two huge conch-like sh.e.l.ls which the Mahnzee had used as homes. Taking up most of one side of the hall was a gigantic sixty-foot cephalopod sh.e.l.l. Whether the giant squid sh.e.l.ls were found abandoned by the little Mahnzee or whether the creatures were somehow hunted was unclear, though it was certain that the great, tapering, bone-colored tubes had been used as chambered tombs.

Griffin wondered how many archaeologists had died recovering the remarkable display of objects, for the Mahnzee burials were famous for their b.o.o.by traps.

A waxy pool of luminosity showed on the floor outside of the Yos.h.i.+zawa display. Griffin pulled a flat compact ray-pistol from a hip holster and followed the glow into the room. The brain slept in its green orb and the ghostly blue hologram stood grinning.

Stay calm. Swift, but calm.

The inside of Griffin's jacket was lined with various hidden pockets. He put his gun back in its holster and took out the rest of his equipment. A folded up plastic bag, with a small attached gas-cylinder, would contain and support the brain. The palm-sized laser-cutter would slice an opening in the top of the gla.s.s. But first there was an alarm to deactivate.

Griffin heard the soft distant whir of a robot and froze momentarily until it was gone. He took a small circular device of metallic black and-crazy as it seems-pressed it to the side of the globe. In a fraction of a second, the contact sensors hooked to the alarm had their energy sucked into Griffin's (homemade) device, which magnified the emissions and sent them back to the scan-base with so much force that the system overloaded and burnt out.

Ha! Stay calm-swift and calm.

Next came the laser-cutter. It was quiet at first, the ambery glow giving Griffin jaundiced fingers.

d.a.m.n...this is thick gla.s.s!

Griffin had to boost the power on the cutter so that it was not as quiet as before; in fact, it hummed so loudly that he did not hear the whirring sound outside the door to the exhibit.

Come on-cut! Cut!

There was a whoosh of sound and a pale blue beam struck the globe and bounced up into the darkness. Griffin jolted and pulled back from the brain, dropped the cutter, drew his pistol. The robot, something like a black snowman on a raised flat base, swivelled to follow him with one of its protrusions. Another beam flashed and tore through the sleeve of Griffin's jacket, brus.h.i.+ng his arm.

Bending into a combat crouch, Griffin squeezed off three quick shots, the firefly beams striking the robot square in the middle. The machine squealed and blew back, skidding with a crash into a display case of Yos.h.i.+zawa's writings. Gla.s.s and paper scattered and the robot sagged, its thin arms jerking spasmodically.

Griffin collected his tools and stuffed them into his pockets before das.h.i.+ng out of the room. In all likelihood the guard had sent a call out to the other robots as soon as it spotted him. There was probably a link to a security agency and the forcers, too. It was time to run.

The route to the exit was blocked by a stout black security machine which was approaching at a startling rate of speed. Griffin had no choice but to detour through the long dark Mahnzee hall. From the sound of things, there was more than one robot whirring behind him. Cold blue beams sliced past the running man, vanis.h.i.+ng down the aisle like tracers. Another volley-several beams. .h.i.t the case of mummies, the brittle bodies breaking as if papier-mache. More beams-Griffin let out a yelp and sagged to the floor, landing on his back, his eyes closed.

The robots slowed and looked at one another, then proceeded gingerly, engines whispering...closer to the figure on the floor. These were cheap (and not terribly sophisticated) guard models, not equipped with life-scan technology-they would need to visually inspect the human to determine whether he was alive or not. They were several yards away when Griffin's hand raised and the room flashed green. One beam for each of the robots. The first actually seemed to scream, its head a pinata of black shrapnel. The other, hit lower, floundered, strobing, its chest a crater of smoky spaghetti and fireflies.

Griffin-who had not actually been hit-picked himself up. Most ray weapons would not have penetrated the robots' armor, but he, being the inventor that he was, had made a few modifications to his pistol...

A piece of gla.s.s fell out of the broken display case and Griffin flinched. Sound carried curiously there in the museum and that of the shard cras.h.i.+ng tinkled high in the great room, like hidden wind chimes up in the vaulted darkness. There were other noises, too-the soft crackling of sparks in the guts of a broken robot, the hollow droning of another advancing, close blood thumping in the ears.

Move! Move! The forcers will be here any second!

Peripheral motion spun Griffin and he fired. One of the Mahnzee mummies, jerked by the earlier blasts, had been swinging in its shattered box. The fresh green beam knocked it through the gla.s.s side panel and the wispy grey mummy hit the hard floor, its head breaking into small pieces like a scattered puzzle.

More motion-another robot appeared at one of the far ends of the hall. Griffin darted for the closest cover-into the wide dark mouth of the giant squid sh.e.l.l. Deep into the dark tomb where his heartbeat and his footfalls were the same. The ceiling grew lower the deeper he went, the squid sh.e.l.l tapering until he reached the rear chamber. A plate seemed to s.h.i.+ft beneath his step and a thick door of icy calcium hissed down and banged shut behind him.

s.h.i.+t! A trap! A f.u.c.king Mahnzee trap!

Griffin chuckled in the darkness. It was the third day, so far as he could tell-but he couldn't really tell. He sat in his own urine, chuckling. Maybe, he thought, this was Mother Nature exerting some poetic justice...fair treatment for one arrogant enough to sidestep evolution. She was an artist, he was a poser, a meddler.

How long will the air last?

The ray-pistol that had shattered armored robots was no match for Mother Nature's squid sh.e.l.l. Griffin had drained the weapon firing in one spot-to no effect. He had to chuckle (admirably, ironically) at that. What else could he do?

"I'm sorry," he said, but was the apology meant for Nature or for something else?

The shadowy, thinning creature, vague on the monitor, vague behind a bright rain of static, vague in a screen that no one saw, was slumped in a corner. It was hungry and perhaps-though no one would ever know-perhaps it missed its creator.

A SHADE OF GREY.

He fell in love for just a moment, in the broken penny-colored light and summery verdigris of the Fern Museum. Mother was towing him through the gla.s.s-encased jungle when he spotted a woman weeping by a fountain. She was on parole from heaven-gold as picture-book August, eyes the blue of ghosts, with bored fans stirring her hair, a restless nimbus. Coffin's ten-year-old heart doubled in age at the sight of her; but what did he know of romance when he didn't even have enough pubic hair to braid?

A small bird had gotten into the museum and a robot worker-a cross between Spartacus and a wheelchair-had gone after it. Whirring about with a net at the end of a telescoping arm, the robot had further agitated the terrified bird, which, in a desperate attempt at escape, had flown full-force into one of the expansive windowpanes. The wee black bird thumped on the gla.s.s, splashed in the fountain pool, flailed a bit, then floated, a frayed clump of coal.

The woman had witnessed all this with horror, had even tried to dissuade the feverous machine, to no avail. She rushed to the fountain and stood there lamenting, as Coffin and his mother made their way through the lush maze of foliage.

"I'll get it," the robot croaked, exhaling blue, a plump cigar wedged into its mouth vent.

The woman gave the robot an accusatory look, then gently scooped the dead bird from the fountain pool and pressed it to her bosom. It left a damp stain on the white of her breezy dress. She held it against herself, as if it were her very heart, long lost, and now a soggy flightless thing.

Coffin's own heart broke just then, watching her-the first break of many-as his mother tugged him around the corner and into the oblivious bright activity of the gift shop.

It was the least expected thing. Coffin's ten-year-old heart had grown into his twenty-eight-year-old body, and he was making his way down Fortune Street on his way home from work, when he heard a voice from the past. Sounded like a frog in a breadbox.

"Hey, pal, can ya spare a bill or two...I'm savin' for a lube job."

Coffin stopped. He was between two amber-tiled tenements, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a bag of crullers in the other-the hazards of working at Brewland. An alley full of flies and old mattresses and damp cardboard opened on his left. The robot was hardly distinguishable from its setting, the alley like a huge infected wound, a poison clutter of bed frames, and stacks of black garbage bags like dominatrix snowwomen.

"Well, I-" Coffin, too lean, too freckled and bookish with gla.s.ses, was about to lie about not having any small bills, when he noticed the cigar.

While the torso of the robot had been striped with graffiti, and one of its wheels was missing, and a length of glittering Christmas tree garland was drooped about its stout neck like a Honolulu lei...he remembered this machine. The fat cigar was squeezed into a thin, smoke-browned mouth grid, under the black doork.n.o.b eyes.

"Hey, didn't you used to work at the Fern Museum?" Coffin asked.

A laugh, or a cough, puffed through the vent. "s.h.i.+t, yes. Been over ten years since then. I got canned for riding over some rich old broad's foot."

"Oh." Coffin didn't know what else to say. He'd never been one for small talk, especially with task-bots. "Say, um, I think I could spare a few munits..."

The robot wheezed, "Ahh, you're a saint, kid. Ya got a nice face-I can always tell a nice face. But your hands are full; here, I'll hold your coffee..."

A spindly arm came up and the rust-freckled fingers took Coffin's Styrofoam cup. The human pulled out his wallet and was selecting bills when he heard a loud slurp, then something like a lawnmower backfiring...a burp, then the crunch of empty Styrofoam.

"Hey! You drank my coffee!"

The doork.n.o.bs gazed up. "Good stuff, too. Indonesian beans, or Kalian? I'm crazy about Sumatra Mandheling, but Kalian marsh-bean has such a smooth nutty aftertaste."

Coffin took a step back. "I didn't know task-bots could drink coffee."

"Well, I bet there's a lot ya don't know about task-bots."

"I guess." Coffin had second thoughts about parting with his money at this point, feeling rather taken. He had really been looking forward to that hot cup of Mandheling. Still, he held out the five ones and turned to head on his way.

Slim metal fingers plucked the money away and the robot hissed out a clot of smoke through its vent, which was now slick, as well as brown. "Thanks, kid."

Coffin rode up in the lift with a neighbor he called Roger Thesaurus-Rex, a bald drum of a man, tempest-bearded and waxen, whose conversational interchanges invariably consisted of an approximate repet.i.tion of whatever was said to him.

"Nice day," Coffin noted blandly, waiting for his floor, "but a bit chill."

"Fine day, though rather cool."

The apartment was small and neat...a kitchenette, a bath, and a bedroom where Coffin squeezed his desk and comp and vid-screen in with his bureau and bed. The living room, largest chamber in the flat, contained a small city.

Rising from the bedrock of cl.u.s.tered card tables, it was a sprawling miniature of spires and domes, a maze of bridges and streets, of mock temples and wh.o.r.ehouses and sad, haunted tenements, like the one he lived in. Mother hadn't been able to afford the schooling to facilitate Coffin's architectural impulses, thus the imaginary city within the city. Punktown Junior, he called it, although it was not so much a replica of his habitat, as an evocation of its jumbled diversity, its textures and contrasts, its beautiful incongruity.

After dinner he went straight to it. He hunched-surgeon with a glue gun-as the hours dreamed past. He was putting tiny frames around the broken windows in a four-decker, a reptilian thing with meticulous grey tiles he'd fas.h.i.+oned from flakes of cardboard.

His eyes wandered down the length of the tenement and lingered on the alley which separated it from the gla.s.sy structure next door. Inspired by the Fern Museum, this building was made from a salvaged aquarium. A tiny black bird sat on the roof.

Two lovers were rus.h.i.+ng through the rain on Fortune Street. The man was laughing behind a damp cigarette, and the woman, lovely and chocolate, had a dress like a windy curtain. Coffin smiled and looked down as the pair whisked past, perfume and nicotine.

Rain drummed the white lid of his Styrofoam cup. Rain made the tenements look like great sticks of slippery b.u.t.ter. Rain brought puddles for the feet, and a muting grey that turned red neon to rose.

Coffin walked on the other side of the street, so that he would not have to pa.s.s that robot again, presuming it was still in the alley. He imagined it hadn't moved, seeing as it was missing one of its major wheels. He was right; there it was, slumped and stained, like a trash can with big black eyes, propped against the mounded garbage bags. Like a sick old man with too many pillows.

Hoping he would not be noticed, Coffin picked up his pace. He glanced over once more as he was moving out of range, and noticed that the robot had two of its spindly arms extended and was cracking open peanuts to feed to a twitchy audience of damp grey pigeons. It was even singing to them, its voice froggy, a gargle of static.

Coffin dreamed that he was inside his tiny city. He was following a woman. Her heart was a small black bird, and she herself had great fern wings. She was dodging through the echoing buildings, glancing over her shoulder, smiling sadly. The bird was a mascot for broken hearts, all of them gathered into one dark heap.

He lost her trail after a while, and found himself alone in one of the lifts. In his dream, the city, like the staggered creation in his parlor, was comprised of cardboard, and other collected bits...tubing and sc.r.a.ps, details harvested from dead radios. He followed the echo of the woman's steps and ended up in a vacant apartment, a room of grey cardboard with dusky stains, soft from rain. He was alone.

Coffin touched the center of a soggy wall. He thought he heard weeping on the other side. The wall gave, organically soft, its musty layers peeling to give him a port hole. He pressed his face up to have a look.

There was not much to see, for all the shadows. There might have been a window somewhere, or a small, solitary bulb overgrown with webs, winking faulty voltage. A vague naked woman, with shadows for hair, was slumped deflated in a corner, slackly staring with twin scoops of darkness that might not have contained eyes. Her wings were only stains on the wall, like a dank watercolor of petrified ferns. Like fish skeletons infused.

An oversized tadpole, slick and black in its pre-limb state, was clutched in the woman's mouth as if a matador's rose, weakly waving its tail. It was a great black teardrop, wheezing its last from fluttery gills.

Coffin woke to the shrill of his alarm clock, his face pressed into a damp pillow.

A cup of coffee in each hand, Coffin walked faster than usual. He had stopped at the small market across the street from Brewland and purchased a package of cigars. On he went, down Fortune, with its mustard tenements lined up along the puddles, and the pigeons staggering like boozers.

Pigeons went up, with a gargling sort of noise, when Coffin came to the alley between two of the yellow behemoths. Empty peanut sh.e.l.ls were strewn like bullet casings from a machine gun.

"Hey," the robot croaked, tilting its head up with black doork.n.o.b eyes, "I know you."

Coffin held out one of his cups. "Mandheling, right?"