Punktown: Shades of Grey (13 page)

Loring
watched
as people were loaded into its one small train of four linked carts. The train would be pulled along a track, if only symbolically, by a sled team of four mechanical babies, harnessed and yoked. The mechanical babies had skin of fluorescent pink rubber, cracked and split away around the joints, with glowing green bulbs for eyes, a number of which were blindly darkened. One baby’s hairless head, huge even for a fetus, hung on its broken neck so that its chin rested on its chest. The riders were strapped in. A recording of loud, frenetic religious music crashed to life, and the babies began to slide their legs in their grooves laboriously. They dragged the train up an incline and through a wall of black hanging strips like tentacles, into the maw of the Temple. Loring heard women begin to scream like virgins borne up to the rim of a volcano.

It was Nettie who first got him to ride in the Temple. That evening, they had stood on these same sticky cobblestones, regarding the ride together. She had been holding his arm and shouted her explanation of the structure while the music blared and the incense wafted to them.

The Phlotus were one of the
rarest
of the many varied races that had settled in the Earth colony, and were strangely both very shy and private, and yet fascinated with the cultures of others, particularly those of Earth. That would explain why the sled team of babies more closely resembled human infants than the Phlotus themselves, who were not so plump or pink. But the babies, Nettie told Loring, were a sort of group of angels or spirit guides who bore to heaven the souls of the dead. Actually, however, there were four heavens, and first the spirit team had to see the dead through the four hells. Needless to say, not all souls made it through the filter-like layers of the various hells and heavens. But if they did, in the final heaven they were considered fully purged of their former life and worthy of being reborn.

Loring watched, waiting for the train to reappear. Less screaming now
;
they must have made it through the four hells. Someone brushed his arm in passing and he looked so sharply at the person—a woman—that she seemed more startled than he. An unfamiliar face, very pretty, that turned quickly from his intense gaze and blended away into the throngs. When Loring returned his stare to the Temple, he saw the glow of green eyes through another sheet of black strips, crowning pink heads, and then the babies emerged, pulling the train behind them.
Grins of nervous relief.
Each person on the train, it became more evident as they disembarked, carried a little doll that they hadn’t possessed before entering into the Temple of the Sea of Milk.

Loring saw one man toss his doll into a trash zapper as he passed it. His girlfriend swatted his arm and scolded him, but laughed and held her own doll protectively to her breasts.

A dozen floating steps, and he found himself in line. He had not been on the ride since that first time, with Nettie, but it had been increasingly in his thoughts, its remembered colors growing brighter, its sounds louder,
the
incense more suffocating. At night from his flat he had tried to separate its lights from the other distant carnival lights, as if seeking figures in the constellations. Especially now that he had graduated, and had only another two months before he had to leave the dorm apartment. Especially now that he had to find a job. Especially now that Nettie had gone away with all the others.

While he waited in the queue, he heard a rustling noise to his right, and looked toward the trash zapper there. One might have expected to see a homeless person rummaging for food, but the noise came from within the zapper. Its red bulb indicated that it was not burning the trash as it should and would have to
be dumped to be emptied
. As the rustling died down inside the zapper, Loring shuddered.

The next group climbed aboard the train. The
couple in the end cart were
well-dressed young executive types, Loring judged from their emblematic clothing and hair styles. They were as flawless as mannequins, he with his too easy, too confident grin,
she with her too easy, too confident (though not wholly natural) beauty
. It was difficult landing a good job; some of his friends from school, upper classmen who had graduated last year or even the year before, were still searching, drifting from one temporary slot to the next, either out of desperate need or at the very least, restless discontent. But these two looked only too safe, only too insulated in their good fortune. Despite their fanatical hard work, how effortless it seemed for some. It was a mystery to him. They jealously seized upon these jobs, and then hoarded them, kept others outside the fortress.

Look at him laugh.
His arm around the woman’s shoulders in a show of possessiveness.
All that was so easy for him, too, wasn’t it? The Phlotus attendant locked them securely in their own little compartment, locked everyone else out.

The train rattled on into the depths of the structure and Loring lifted his gaze to the top of the ride, where on a circular external track four huge, dragon-like sperm—chrome-bright and considerably fanged—chased each other’s tails around and around in the endless, voracious cycle of life.

This religion was like so many others, he reflected, as if they were mass-produced: based on a reverential fear of sex and death, rejecting nature’s actual approach to rebirth. Though it was a little less escapist than some of that ilk, in that a final spiritual liberation from the body was never fully, permanently achieved (at least, not in a really desirable way: spirits stranded in the heavens were obligated to become laborers there). Time in the afterlife was as much time in the beforelife: it was a period of purification, of spiritual education for the start of a new existence in the flesh.

Loring reached the attendant, seated at its console. He passed the being a
ten munit
bill (he got three in change; an expensive single ride, but one did get that doll), watching its face throughout the transaction. The Phlotus was much thinner than the slavish overgrown babies, its skin more coral-colored than shocking pink, its green eyes almost black rather than glowng. The toothless black suction cup of a mouth curled upward a bit in what must have been an attempt at a smile. This one was a female, as hairless as the males and indistinguishable from them except for her rather appealing breasts, high and full, stretching the material of her body stocking.

The train returned to port, the couple in the last cart now clutching their dolls—which were as Loring remembered them: with their pale skin, dark eyes and stick-thin limbs, a more accurate representation of the Phlotus than the team of babies. These were meant to portray the new, reborn souls of the perfect couple, as if they might improve upon their perfection. They looked like proud parents, and no doubt having their children would be just this easy for them

Nettie had taken her doll with her, back to her dorm, that night. His doll he had left somewhere in his apartment, though somehow he had lost it…perhaps accidentally thrown it away, or packed it away and forgotten where. (Or maybe, he thought, maybe it had escaped…abandoned him also…)

Again, he shuddered, but remembered how Nettie told him she had heard the Phlotus put a kind of large salamander inside the rubbery body of each doll, and that was what caused the movements, enabled them to crawl about and such, until the animal—which could survive quite a long time on the fat and water of its own body—perished at last, and the doll went still.

The dolls seemed to have bendable wires in their limbs, as well, however, and as they strolled away the couple linked their dolls together in an embrace that looked more carnal than romantic. Predators even in love, he thought, sneering inwardly, and then he saw that the ride operator was beckoning for him to step up into his carriage. He was locked inside it alone.

A jarring detonation of music from ruined speakers, a jolt of initial movement and a puff of choking incense and the ghost train
was
lurching ahead. Loring had been seated in the front car, and except for the screams that were to come momentarily he might have been totally alone on the ride. He watched the cracked backs of the stalwart spirit guards churn and strain as the train was dragged into the darkness beyond the tattered veil.

Straight to hell.
This, being the first hell before the ascent, was deemed the worst, and so its demons were the most ghastly…and here they were tremendously obese, symbolizing the fleshy prison of matter. In blue-lit alcoves in the dark walls, mechanized monsters turned their heads stiffly on blubbery necks, waving arms with jerky threat, their eyes glowing blue in faces that were not only huge, but horribly wrinkled and aged. One of these gargantuan lost souls—wingless like the rest but airborne nonetheless—swooped low over Loring’s head, and he sank down into his seat, more afraid that it would fall and crush him than he was of the great black O of its widely stretched sucker-mouth. Blasts of wind issued from the mouths of some demons, others sporting ooze from sores, the yellow mock pus collecting in the pools in which the behemoths squatted, to be recycled: grotesque fountains. Boils or tumors pulsed on some of the automated mannequins, operated by air bladders.

Loring felt a strange impulse to leap out of the train when the scene grew particularly dark, to crouch down and scurry off and hide within the ride, to search out the mysteries behind its illusions. This sudden fantasy went so far as to have him living inside the Temple, unknown even to the Phlotus, keeping out of the way of their maintenance, sneaking out at night to scavenge food like the homeless denizens of the park. No need to worry about jobs and apartments and relationships. He would be a true ghost amongst these plastic apparitions.

More demons in the next hells, but they grew progressively less obese, their sloughing skins hanging from them in shreds and ribbons as they apparently shed them, the new skin beneath shiny and less wrinkled, with no more sores or tumors. But the eyes still glared blue, the arms still clawed at the riders who passed like Dante and Virgil through their company. A low-flying ghoul swept its tattered skin across the top of Loring’s head. He remembered how Nettie had shrieked and crushed his arm in both of hers, pressing it into her soft breasts. Her knees had buried their heads timidly under one of his legs, her face nuzzling into his neck while she whimpered and giggled. He had sucked in the smell of her hair as if it were a drug. That night had been the first time they went to bed. This ride had seemed to bear them toward that contact.

The walls grew steadily less dark, revealing great turning gears, pumping pistons, and no matter how primitive or old this temple was, the machinery covering the walls was obviously bogus: meant to represent the inner workings of the cosmos.

The train pushed through a screen into the first of the heavens, the blue lighting ever growing brighter and whiter. The beings here did not suffer, but—of the same caste as the spirit guides—labored at the machinery on the walls, pulling levers, turning their heads to watch the train pass with their green glowing eyes. A white rain began to fall. It was a holographic drizzle of milk. The Phlotus held sacred the life-giving milk their females fed their young, but also, their amniotic fluid was just as white, the milk that nurtured life in the womb, the elixir of creation. This manna fell in greater torrents as they ascended through the four heavens, until it began to pool right up to the edges of the carts (the babies wading diligently through it), a convincing effect except for the occasional bursts of static that would break up the illusion.

In clear tanks worked into the machinery of the walls, dolls floated and drifted in water, new souls waiting in the wings. And streams of plastic were seen pouring into molds, and ovens glowing in the walls, and stamps pressing down, and conveyor belts delivering new dolls in a supine procession. The riders were watching the actual manufacture of the dolls that would become each one’s prize and icon (though the mechanical angels only appeared to be operating the machinery which churned out the purified, reincarnated souls). One belt passed close to the train, following a parallel course, bearing seven of the newly minted dolls.
One for each of them.
Loring noted, as he reached out for his doll, that he must be the only single occupant of the four carts.

The doll’s rubbery skin was still warm in his hands, gave off an odd strong odor. It did not move…to his relief. If a salamander was indeed sealed inside, this hot flesh was a cruel suffocating prison.

The train pushed through the final screen, back into the open air. It stopped, the passengers with their alter egos in miniature returning to the corporeal world. Loring held his doll loosely as he walked across the cobblestones, thinking he might hand it to a child, but for some reason he didn’t. For some reason he brought it back to his apartment. It could replace the one he had received that night with Nettie, that memento which he had somehow lost.

He lay in the dark that night with the noise of an arguing couple a muffled rumble above him, while the greasy fried dilkies he had eaten at the carnival rumbled in his guts. At last, however, he slept.