New Title 2, page 10
We see the female clone gazing up at the crucified clone on the wall.
PAGE 8, PANEL 4:
Caption: “‘No, Sal…I’m sorry, but I can’t. Goodbye. No…goodbye, Sal.’”
The girl has risen, and stares into a jar containing one of those eerie little clone embryos.
PAGE 8, PANEL 5:
Caption: “‘Don’t be afraid…I won’t let anything happen to you.’”
Drew has come to the girl’s side, taking her hand.
PAGE 8, PANEL 6:
No caption.
His arm around her, Drew walks her to their bed.
PAGE 9, PANEL 1:
Caption. “Another night in the arms of his masterpiece. And another morning dawns in the city of Punktown…”
Drew lies in bed—alone.
PAGE 9, PANEL 2:
Caption: “…but his lover is not beside him.”
Drew has sat up, and looks concerned to have found himself alone in bed.
PAGE 9, PANEL 3:
Caption: “And while Drew has been deeply sleeping, someone has been busy in his lab.”
The crucified creature lies dead, slumped against the wall. It has been freed from its spikes, but a spike stabbed into its chest has put it out of its misery. Embryos lie dead on the floor, poured out of their now empty jars.
PAGE 9, PANEL 4:
“‘Oh my God…what have you done to my work?’”
Drew leaps out of bed in search of the woman. In the background, we see the door to his studio is wide open.
PAGE 9, PANEL 5:
Caption: “He spots her on his balcony, in the cold morning air.”
The clone stands against the railing, watching him. Her hair blows. She looks sad but determined. She holds something in her arms like a baby.
PAGE 9, PANEL 6:
Caption: “ ‘No, wait…don’t. Please…’ “
Drew has stepped out onto the balcony, holding up his hands to calm the creature.
PAGE 10, PANEL 1:
Caption: “ ‘I won’t send you away, I promise you! I promise!’ “
We see what she cradles in her arms: a close-up of the bodiless head Drew calls Robespierre. Its eyes are rolled up, since it’s obviously dead now. It’s as if she’s holding Drew’s own handsome head, with its beauty mark.
PAGE 10, PANEL 2:
No caption.
Close-up on the girl’s face. A tear rolling free.
PAGE 10, PANEL 3:
No caption.
The girl steps over the railing into empty space, still clutching the head in her arms.
PAGE 10, PANEL 4:
Caption: “ ‘Nooooo!’ “
Drew lunging forward frantically, but too late, grasping at air.
PAGE 10, PANEL 5:
No caption.
Drew rushes down the fire escape affixed to the side of the old warehouse building.
PAGE 10, PANEL 6:
No caption.
In a frame nearly identical to the second frame of the story, Drew stands over the crumpled body of the woman, curled like a fetus in the street, the disembodied head clutched to her. She is dead. And so is part of Drew.
The Color Shrain
- Three -
Specola couldn’t resist buying the shrain-colored suit when he saw the mannequin wearing it in The Maledrobe, in Punktown’s multi-leveled Canberra Mall. The mannequin was an animatronic Tikkihotto, turning slowly this way and that, smiling at and greeting customers near the store’s entrance. Like a live Tikkihotto, it appeared to be an entirely human male except for the realistically wavering ocular filaments which radiated out from its deep skull sockets, like worms from the eyes of a dead man.
The mannequin no doubt portrayed a Tikkihotto because only the Tikkihottos could accurately see and appreciate the color shrain. This was a much contested fact. Though everyone acknowledged the superior visual sensitivities and abilities of the Tikkihottos, the point was raised that some sort of enhancing spectacles or brain chip should allow nonTikkihottos to view the color as well. But not only was this not possible, but no scan or graphics program had been developed which could reveal the color to nonTikkihottos as the Tikkihottos claimed it should be seen. Attempts to achieve the desired effect had been dismissed by Tikkihottos. More controversial yet was the fact that the color could not be viewed even from experiencing the perceptions of Tikkihottos through virtual link-up and memory recording. The Tikkihottos countered that it wasn’t about scans or comprograms, chips or VR keyhole peeping—or even about their organs of vision, however complex. It was about how their Tikkihotto brains received, processed and interpreted what their eyes saw.
Specola’s eyes interpreted the shrain-colored suit as the color of absinthe. Not the artificial emerald green of absinthe wannabes, but the real stuff, with clumps of the poisonous herb wormwood floating in it like fragments of flesh in a bottle of formaldehyde from which some deformed infant had been removed. He had a bottle of authentic absinthe, killingly bitter, in his fridge, and its color was a more subtle and watery sort of green, with almost a touch of yellow, even of gray, about it. An unhealthy almost non-color. That was the best way he could describe his new suit: absinthe-colored. That’s how he would describe shrain, this fashion season’s most popular hue.
While he was completing his purchase, which included a dark green fez with a gold tassel to go with the suit (he couldn’t find a shrain fez, and hoped a Tikkihotto wouldn’t think his choice clashed), Specola heard a commotion toward the front of the store. As he began to leave for the mall proper, two security guards jogged past him…and by the time he reached the entrance, he saw them freeing a shoplifter from the grip of the Tikkihotto mannequin, who had seized him and held him until the guards could arrive.
««—»»
Specola had bought his bottle of absinthe from a bartender friend at his favorite elbow-propper, Café Prague, on Goitre Lane, an artsy little tributary of Forma Street. The painters, poets and holomakers who dwelt there, often in little cadres to afford the rents, benefitted from the frisson between the creative ether of their romantic capillary and the largely illegal commerce of the hot pulsing artery of Forma Street.
Café Prague was built out of blocks of greenish lucite, so that from the inside one could see the watery lights of the wheeled and hovering traffic passing along Goitre Lane, the occasional swoop of a helicar. Conversely, from the outside, the café’s interior glowed like an aquarium. In each and every brick-like block, which also composed the bar and even the ceiling and floor, there was a large insect entombed as if in amber. Huge moths, prehistoric-seeming dragonflies, nonterrestrial and mutated invertebrates the likes of which Specola had never seen even in books. It was almost educational, but sometimes a bit eerie after too much absinthe, however thinned with water and clouded with sugar. Once Specola could swear he saw the legs of a large millipede wriggling in waves like cilia.
In a booth tonight instead of at the bar, he stared at the wall beside him, into one block in particular, which fossilized an immense beetle with its carapace opened, from which spread several pairs of iridescent wings. It had multiple pincered jaws. Each block had its own very faint luminosity, maybe a subtle glow dye, so that their color was reflected on his face. The blocks were, to Specola’s mind, the color of shrain.
A finger flipped the tassel of his fez from back to forward. Swiveling around, Specola almost involuntarily materialized his automatic—a Scimitar .55 with a ruby red and sparkle-dusted enamel sheen—into his hand. He was too nervous about carrying a gun in a holster, kept it instead securely stashed, but readily accessible, in his Chest.
“Ooh. Look at you all glossed up like a real gangster.” It was Violet, and Blanca was with her as usual. Vaguely reluctant, Specola moved his mind away from the checkered grip of his pistol, which was neatly folded up like origami in the Chest. Violet had a frizzy thick cape of reddish hair and uncannily pale lynx-shaped eyes, a deep gluey kind of voice halfway between a drunken moan and a drugged chuckle. Specola had seen her playfully chase a friend down the street once and her run was laughably awkward; she didn’t strike him as remotely dangerous, physically. And yet, he knew enough to be as wary of her as he was of Blanca, whom he had seen break off the two front teeth of an unsolicited admirer in this very establishment by driving his head into the bar. Blanca was a few years younger than her partner, perhaps as young as nineteen, with her black hair gathered back and the surliest face he had ever seen on a woman, an unchanging expression except when she rarely smiled, which was even more intimidating. Her smoldering eyes were ever narrowed and one lid seemed droopier than the other, maybe from a blow whose damage had never been cosmetically repaired.
The two women slipped into the booth opposite him. Violet already had a martini from the bar. Blanca had a bottle of Zub beer. Violet slurred thickly, “Mr. Coelacanth seems to think you’ll be a real gangster one fine day, Fritzie. He was fairly impressed with the way you performed your last trick. So he has higher expectations for the next one.”
Specola shifted in his seat, glanced at a nearby table, and said in a hush, “I’m not sure I’d ever consider myself a gangster.”
“Ooh. Didn’t mean to offend.” From her purse, Violet slipped out her credit card. Specola watched as she tapped out a figure on its key pads, then produced his own and held it in his palm while she passed hers above his, covering an activation pad with her thumbprint so as to transfer money from her account to his. With a blip of sound, his card announced that the transaction had taken.
“Looks like you been spending some of your money in advance, Fritz,” Blanca said in her sneering sort of subdued growl. She pinched the cuff of his new jacket. “Expensive suit. You’re so handsome you make me moist.” She smiled. She had lots of teeth, almost like a native Choom. Smiling made her look possessed by a demon.
“Yeah, Fritz, nice.” Violet put away her card. “But the color’s a little drab.”
“It’s shrain,” he said, self-consciously.
Blanca vomited up a laugh. “Shrain. Man, you bought the emperor’s new clothes. That’s gray, man. Gray.”
- TWO -
When he was fifteen, Specola and his mother occupied an apartment directly below a woman and her brother. Agnes Rogers was a widow, and her brother Gerald Spell was an invalid of some sort who lived in her care. Until today, Specola had only heard his muffled coughs through his bedroom ceiling, had never seen or met the man.
On this afternoon, Specola’s mother received a call from her upstairs neighbor, asking for help. She had come home from work to find her brother on the floor, having fallen out of bed. That explained to Specola a heavy thump against his bedroom ceiling shortly after he’d finished his school programs, and now he felt guilty that he hadn’t told his mother about it. He waited for her to ask him if he’d heard anything, but she didn’t. Instead, she told him that Agnes had asked if he could come upstairs and assist her in getting her brother back into bed.
Agnes met him at the door, and led him through the alien apartment into Mr. Spell’s small, murky bedroom. In size and shape it corresponded to his own, directly below, but the most noticeable difference besides the figure on the floor was the sickly air, a sour milkiness born of cloistered exhalation. And the source of it was the milk-fat veal calf of a man, or almost man, at his feet.
He had pajama bottoms on, but his upper body was bare and bloated to a plastic sheen. His head hairless, eyebrows and even lashes gone, and the man’s weirdly thin arms were bent close to the body, hands pressed to the sides of his face in despair, blue eyes wide between some of the splayed fingers. Then Specola realized that the man’s hands weren’t pressed to his face, but fused there. As if his fingers had slipped beneath the skin. His left hand, in fact, was almost entirely absorbed to the wrist.
“I caught it on Ram,” the man rasped up at him, those blue eyes very aware despite the motionless turgescence of his body. “I was in the Colonial Forces there.”
“Don’t worry,” Agnes added with a sigh, squatting to slide her hands under her brother’s shoulders, “it isn’t contagious. Could you get his legs?”
Half lifting, half pushing him up the side of the bed and finally into it, they only almost dropped him once. The helpless dead weight of him, and the baby-soft fat of his body, were embarrassingly intimate. Agnes pulled a sheet over him in a brusque gesture of impatience, then stuck an adhesive disk to his shoulder and tapped keys on a monitor that stood by the bed. “Stop disconnecting this, Gerald. If you hadn’t, I’d have been alerted at work. And stop trying to stand up; you know you can’t.”
“I wasn’t. I rolled over. I was having a dream,” said Mr. Spell. “I could use a bigger bed.”
“And I could use more money. Fritz.” Agnes turned to him. “Can you keep an eye on him for an hour to make sure he’s all right? I’ll run and do some errands, pick up his medicine. I’ll give you five munits.”
“You don’t have to pay me,” Specola told her meekly.
Spell snorted oddly at this. His sister didn’t protest Specola’s offer, and left. Uncomfortable, afraid to look at the man for fear of making either of them self-conscious, he sat in a chair by the wall. Spell grumbled in a phlegmy voice, “You don’t have to baby-sit me, boy; I’m not trying to escape like she thinks I am. Go back downstairs. Or go watch VT in the other room, at least.”
“I’m all right here,” Specola said softly, pretending to look about him at framed photographs of some exotic, tropical place. Temples of red and gold nestled among blue-green fronds. In one holophoto, the fronds stirred and clouds scudded and several green dragonflies of prehistoric dimensions floated from one edge of the frame to the other. Eventually, his gaze dropped to a bureau against the wall beside him.
“Like it?” Spell asked. “I took that home from Ram with me. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
It was. The chest, or bureau, was small and delicate, made of a wood thickly lacquered an indigo blue. Gold trim, and gold-painted designs: insects flying across its drawers, and gold knobs shaped like cocoons of some kind.
“Both my sisters want it. Agnes, and my sister in Miniosis. When I die they’ll crawl over this rotting mushroom body of mine to get at that beauty. And you know what, boy?”
“What?” Tearing his eyes off the exquisite piece of craftsmanship, Specola looked over at him.
“I don’t want either of them to get their hands on it. Not that. I had that in my room on Ram for eight years.” Did the man’s blue eyes, through his blurring fingers, gaze over at the holophoto where the dragonflies flew into and out of sight in an endless cycle? “Eight years.”
Specola returned his own gaze to the lovely chest, where he could see a dim reflection of his face in its gloss.
“When I’m gone, I don’t want those hyenas to have it,” Mr. Spell husked.
- FOUR -
With the adrenalin that skittered centipede-like through his body, and the lopsided yawing of his stomach, the last thing Specola seemed to need before he went to the museum was a coffee. Nevertheless, he pulled his hovercar into the lot of a trendy little café, Mutter’s Java Bar. If nothing more, it was a means of stalling just a little bit longer. But then again, while he might be in the employ of Mr. Coelacanth, he was not strictly on a time-clock. Specola had had those kind of jobs. After a while, he had felt that he should have a time-clock by his bed. One by his toilet. He never wanted to scan himself into a time-clock again.
Warming a stool at the very end of the long curved bar, Specola spied on a woman seated a little bit distant from himself. She was a Kalian, lovely, her skin gray as smooth stone and eyes black like obsidian, with the religious scarring of her gender. But she was also a modern woman, scandalously lacking the blue turban meant to hide her thick black hair. Her beauty and her culture made her all the more unobtainable, all the more desirable to him. She glanced at Specola only once, met his eyes before he could divert them, before he could even think to smile, then looked away, dismissing him…even dressed as he was in his handsome new suit and fez.
She left a tip on the bar; a few coins. Then she left. Specola’s eyes followed her to the door, and when she was through it, returned to the spot where she had been. The heavy white mug. The spoon on its napkin. The coins.
Specola thought to steal the coins (not because it was money, but because it had been hers), but he didn’t want the waitress to be cheated. And didn’t want the waitress to resent the Kalian woman, especially if she were a regular.
Instead, Specola returned his gaze to the mug, and fixed it there.
In his mind, he saw the mug not even as a holograph, but as a two dimensional photograph. A photograph he then picked up in his hands. These astral hands then folded the photograph in half, creasing it neatly. Folded it again the other way. Then again. And again. Making sure the package remained tight, the smaller and smaller it became.
Then, when the folded up image was no larger than the size of a pill, he pressed it against his navel. The navel of his mind, like an orifice situated in the front of his brain. He pressed it there until it slipped inside him, into a dark interior, inserted the pill until it was gone, into his safe. His security deposit box. The place he had come to call, in his teen years, his Chest.
And indeed, it was as though the coffee mug was now inside his chest. Inside his physical body. But he did not feel its weight, its hardness. He did not, in fact, know where it truly was at this moment. Only that, wherever it was, it was a place that he owned. His very own little closet between planes. A crawlspace between space and time.
The waitress’ back was turned when the mug vanished, in a silent blink, from the counter top. When she turned, she scooped up the coins, collected the spoon and napkin, and rushed down the counter to refill another customer’s cup.
