Punktown: Shades of Grey (35 page)

Behind the food stand, Silvia still sat on the ground, petting Sweetie. The strange light of the green flame flickered on his fur like the reflections of a swimming pool.
A sound of soft steps came from behind and a gentle voice, muffled in its mask.

“Miss?” It was a Sarikian accent.

Silvia looked up over her shoulder at a tall figure whose mask portrayed an old man—it looked as if he had died in blissful sleep.

“May I help you?” He swept an open hand in the direction of the fire.

Silvia sniffled and nodded. “Thanks,” she said, standing.

The man bent and lifted the dog into his arms, noticing it was missing an ear. He turned slowly and walked out into the open, Silvia following. The crowd let them through until they were at the edge of the fire and the man, whispering a prayer, tossed Sweetie in.

“Happy Death Day,” Silvia muttered.

12. Two Weeks Later

Adele knew that Silvia meant well, but she also knew that there was no way she could keep her promise of finding Sweetie. Two weeks had passed now and Adele was not an idealistic person. She sat by the window looking out at the sprawling, impassive city. She did not play music. She hardly ate. She drank tea and stared at the city and slept. Slept too much, but never long enough.

After the first week she had walked down to a place the locals called The Coin House, an old tenement with outer walls that had been made of a cheap experimental plastic. The walls, now yellowed and softening, were a strange glinting texture along the lower level where people hammered coins into the thing for luck. Stupid old woman, stupid superstition, she thought, turning away from her own offering.

The air was hot and the tea was getting cold and Adele was starting to doze off, sitting there by the open window when she heard the familiar bark. She looked around her new studio flat, a clutter of unpacked books. The bark came again—it came from outside. She turned to the window and looked below where Silvia stood smiling up with Sweetie on a leash beside her.

“Sweetie!”

The old woman bounded down the stairs, out of the building, and rushed to embrace the dog.

“Sweetie—my God, it’s you!”

“I told you I’d find him,” Silvia said, grinning.

It was a good lie, Silvia thought. She had given Sweetie’s ear to her beloved Roger Brine of the burgeoning cloning center and let him work his magic. She hoped that Adele would not notice that the new version was a bit younger than the original.

“Sweetie—it’s you. It’s you!”

Being a clone, this animal would not remember the old woman. Perhaps, Silvia hoped, if there was mercy in the universe, then some measure of the love Adele and Sweetie once shared had somehow passed on to the replica from its host.

Sweetie looked up at Adele, smiled and licked her face.

— | — | —

GREY AREA

Biographical Data

Compiled by Jeffry Thomas

1. JEFFREY THOMAS:

     
author

2. SCOTT THOMAS:

     
author

3. TRAVIS ANTHONY SOUMIS:

     
artist

4. DAVID G. BARNETT:

     
publisher
/designer

JEFFREY THOMAS is the oldest of three sons born to Robert and Lorraine Thomas, and took an early interest in the arts. His mother relates that even as a toddler, little Jeffrey (born Dana Thomas, but his parents changed his name a short while after his birth because Dana reminded them too much of a mutant child by that name living on their street, who was fond of catching and eating the neighborhood pets) would pause mesmerized in front of the VT when a horror movie such as
Into My Sickness
or
God Is Alone
played, and that in his boyhood he covered reams of paper with his drawings and filled computer chips with his own crude stories (crude in subject matter more so than in execution).

Thomas worked a variety of jobs in his twenties and thirties (carapace waxer at a farm that raised giant beetles, their shells used in the creation of
Scarab
hovercars; operator of the Vomit Comet and Screamer rides at the annual Paxton Fair; production operator at Cugok Pharmaceuticals; proofreader at Paxton Printing) before his career as a writer, which rocketed when he switched from the fiction of books such as
Letters From Hades
and
Boneland
to the nonfiction studies of his hometown and its citizens,
Punktown
,
Monstrocity
and
Everybody Scream!

In recent years, proving himself to be something of a renaissance man, Thomas has broadened his artistic horizons by acting in such movies as the thriller
Die, Plaid-Skirt Schoolgirl Kittens, Die
(learning Japanese, archery and taxidermy for the role) and the musical
Mutant Cabaret
(as the only nonmutant in the cast, the single-person “audience” captured by the demented mutant dance troupe—one of its members played by Thomas’ cat-munching childhood neighbor, whom he suggested for the part). More recently, Thomas has also made a bit of a name for himself as a cadaver artist. His puppet show
Rivendance
(while dismissed by one narrow-minded critic—whom we shall discuss later—as “
Mutant Cabaret
with mutilated dead bodies hanging from wires in place of dancing mutants”) was quite successful, and his performance art display of cadavers (their bodies pumped full of various pigments) dropped from the roofs of buildings in Industrial Square,
Sidewalk Canvas
, had critics hailing him as “a modern day Jackson Pollack.”

Two years ago, Thomas was killed in a shuttle accident when returning to the planet Oasis from a writer’s convention in the visiting orbital city of Port Haven. (Some have suggested the craft was sabotaged by one Cy Heliotrope, a highly plagiaristic writer, neurotically jealous of any other author working within the same subgenres—even though he steals from those same authors shamelessly.) Fortunately, this was at a time when cloning was not restricted to generic labor drones, and Thomas’ body was successfully replicated. However, when a chip of his memories was fed into the new clone’s brain, it
was found to have been switched
(either accidentally or, again, a work of sabotage by you-know-who) with the back-up file memories of a businessman of Japanese heritage. (One film critic theorized that residual memories from this businessman, left over after Thomas had his brain scrubbed and his own memories properly input, made it easier for him to learn Japanese for his aforementioned movie role; not so ironically, perhaps, this critic who pooh-poohed Thomas’ hard work in learning Japanese is the same disgruntled author who has tried to sabotage Thomas’ career, when not sabotaging his means of transport, and if he thinks Thomas isn’t onto him about
that
he’s a bigger fool than he is an egotist.)

Currently, Thomas is reviving and polishing his long-anticipated book
Health Agent
, the true account of the crime spree of Punktown’s insane artist Toll Loveland, who among other “artistic statements” spread deadly disease to his performance-goers. In another unprofessional personal attack, this time on Thomas’ cadaver performance
Sidewalk Canvas
, Mr. Bloated Ego (—and body!) even went so far as to liken Jeffrey Thomas to Toll Loveland, and suggest that Thomas was motivated to write
Health Agent
as a way to glorify the artist rather than the dedicated Health Agency investigator who finally brought Loveland down. Mr. Thomas could only rebut, at that time, that if Mr. Smart Critic’s massive carcass were to be filled with pigment and dropped from a skyscraper in Industrial Square, the resultant explosion of paint would put a fresh coat on half the block, and it would be the greatest artistic achievement of Senor Gordo’s life (er, and death).

But this pathetic swine’s antics had not ended yet. In the most recent incident of obsessive harassment, Thomas was leaving a coffee shop on Forma Street, B Level, when a helicar swooped so low that it almost buzzed his scalp, and a balloon filled with purple paint was hurled out at him, missing him but striking a nearby Choom man—who along with Thomas drew a pistol and fired after the retreating vehicle. But whereas Thomas scored a few good hits that he hoped cracked the vehicle’s chitin shell (its make was, maybe very intentionally, a
Scarab
), the Choom unfortunately grazed a bystander, a Tikkihotto gentleman, who pulled his own weapon and returned fire, hitting the Choom man with an explosive round that vaporized his head before he even hit the pavement with a splat of red that, in combination with the purple, looked like a mocking imitation of Thomas’ brilliant
Sidewalk Canvas
work—perhaps his cowardly, portly rival’s intention all along.
Now
who is emulating the diseased “art” forms of Toll Loveland, Mr. Hypocritical Critic?

But the most unsettling aspect of this whole incident was the visage Thomas saw leering back at him through the rear window of the
Scarab
after it had buzzed him—for it was
his very own face
. Thomas can only conclude that his disturbed nemesis somehow obtained another clone of his body (Heliotrope really must have some insider at that cloning facility), and had his own memories implanted into this new vessel, in the ultimate form of plagiarism. Not that Thomas can blame him; the new cover is surely an improvement on the old book, so to speak. Now, if Heliotrope will only have a copy of Thomas’ memory file switched with his own mind, too, he will finally and fully become the artist he believes himself to be.

SCOTT THOMAS has been accused of being a pseudonym for brother Jeffrey, a pen name by which to bring out yet more of his seemingly limitless number of books; in essence, Scott and Jeffrey have been thought of by some as being the same person. In a way, they are. Or at least, they might be considered twins—although Scott was born two years after his older twin.

When he was two years old, Jeffrey suffered a breathing ailment that required him to undergo a medical scan, something he had never had performed before. During the scan it was discovered that in his chest, beginning to compress one of his lungs, was a dermoid cyst, or teratoma, a mass that was found to contain several teeth, much sebaceous material, a bit of cerebral matter, a single fingernail, and tangles of blondish hair. It was the presence in this cyst of cerebral matter that inspired Robert and Lorraine Thomas to give the plucky little tumor a chance at independent life. They had the cyst removed, and the cells latent within it were sparked into accelerated growth. The result was a very distinct individual, today known and renowned as the author (of such collections of fiction as
Cobwebs and Whispers
and the aptly titled
Shadows of Flesh
) as Scott Robert Thomas.

This theme of twinning has recently raised its head(s) again in the life of Scott Thomas.

It has become common knowledge of late that the once utterly mysterious Vlessi
race are
actually the extra-dimensional counterparts of people from our own dimension (though a Vlessi’s counterpart in our plane of existence could be anything from a Choom to a human, a child or an adult, or even a being of the opposite sex). The Vlessi, who even now seldom visit our dimension, are themselves a nonhuman race: tall and slender, with sleek white fur and cloven hooves, and a bulky head resembling a human pelvis, with six eyes scattered across it. They are usually naked except for a scarf, its color or material often signifying social or religious status.