New Title 2, page 13
Something from the planet Ram, Jerly Bonsu would guess. Idly, he opened one of its drawers. He was glad he did. There was a thick wad of bills in there, which he tucked into a front pocket after making sure Violet wasn’t looking.
In another drawer of the beautiful chest he found a Scimitar .55, red enamel with silvery glitter. He pulled this out and tucked it in the front of his pants.
In a third drawer, he found a plastic prehistoric monster, a Shredder, and he held it before his eyes only a moment before he tossed it away from him, where it skittered to a stop against Specola’s leg.
Atop the beautiful indigo chest was a conical silver cage, and in this cage was a dead butterfly, though the eyes painted on its unmoving wings stared open against their background of shrain.
Trash
The boys scrambled across the robot hovercleaner like monkeys, affixing chains, whooping and shouting. They had cornered it in an alley, and blocked its path. It was programmed not to run people down in the course of its sucking up and digesting of refuse.
The chains were hooked to the rear of two stolen hovercars, and with these the boys began to pull the massive robot onto its side. One chain snapped, but finally with a creak and then a crash, the old machine lay on its side like a beached whale.
But in toppling, the robot had fallen atop a boy named Keith, pinning his legs under its great hulk. He screamed in agony…and then in terror, as an insect-like appendage unfolded from the metal beast and reached for him. It was going to feed him into its maw…
A second limb unfolded, and using it for leverage, the robot was able to prop itself up just a little, as if raising a bit from a deathbed.
The cleaner robot pulled Keith out from under it. Then it fell back onto its side heavily. The two arms did not move again.
Before driving Keith to the hospital in one of their stolen hovercars, the other boys stood around the dead machine, staring at it mutely, uncomprehendingly. They could not give expression to their feelings…any more than they could fathom those of the machine they had destroyed.
Behind the Masque
“I found myself within a strange city…”
–Poe, Eleonora
In the same story, Mr. Poe also said that, “the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence—whether much that is glorious—whether all that is profound—does not spring from disease of thought.” Now, I am not saying that I think Diego Kaji was a profound man in any way. Though he was a man of great wealth, I do not think he was responsible for producing anything glorious, unless one would consider his large house perched atop the Turquoise Tower to be glorious (many consider it an aberration). But there is no doubt that he was a man of great intelligence and creativity, a man with distinct esthetic tastes however unconventional—a man with a personal vision, however diseased that vision might seem when perceived through the eyes of others who are not Diego Kaji.
Nothing more about Diego Kaji would ever be learned from his own lips. Only by observing his environment, his possessions, could we the living hope to understand him now. Diego Kaji had committed suicide by hanging himself from the chandelier that overhung the foyer of his mansion atop the Turquoise Tower in Beaumonde Square, one of the most affluent sections of the city of Paxton.
Paxton is a colony city on the planet we Earthers call Oasis. We call Paxton (the “Town of Peace”) Punktown, because this is a more fitting appellation. Crime and violence run rampant in the streets of Punktown. The perpetrators are human and nonhuman, mutant and automaton alike. Their crimes are often as shockingly alien as their physical bodies; who could imagine that a race of beings from one world might want to run up to you in the street and paint a yellow stripe down your nose? While this might merely exasperate and inconvenience you or I, it would be the greatest of malicious thrills to this race, akin to rape. Not so terrible in our eyes, you might well say. But you would doubtless be more alarmed to have a member of another race, from another world, leap upon you from an alley mouth so as to clip off one or both of your thumbs, because these resemble closely their jointed phalluses, and are used to concoct aphrodisiacs in unlicenced apothecaries. Yes, it can get very unpleasant, downright dangerous down on the street level of Punktown. It should be no surprise that a man of wealth would want to raise himself high above these flood waters, to sequester himself safely atop a plastic turquoise edifice protected by armed security teams. Though no security team had, in the end, protected Diego Kaji from violence by his own two hands.
His crime upon himself was not so alien, so unfathomable, I suppose. Kaji was on the Board of Directors of a company that produced cloned laborers. These clones were cast from a master set of six males; convicts sentenced to death had signed over rights for their likenesses to be produced for these purposes. Because it was illegal, you see, to produce clones of living people at that time. The moral and ethical questions of cloning slosh back and forth endlessly like amniotic solution in a lab tech’s beaker. For some years, this cloning operation made its owners quite wealthy. But lately there had been scandals, not the least of which was the murder of Ephraim Mayda, an important union figure, at the hands of an escaped clone. It developed that this seemingly vengeful clone was actually the pawn of larger forces. There had come investigations; the media had made much of the controversies. And so it was that Diego Kaji—my employer—stood upon the railing of his balcony and stepped off into empty space with a cord around his neck, causing the great glistening chandelier to sway and scintillate like a crystallized jellyfish, its glittering tentacles tinkling slower and slower as the little circles Kaji traced grew smaller and smaller. He was dangling utterly still when Lan, one of the servants, spotted him in the morning. Her screams summoned others. I myself saw him before he was brought down.
I can’t say I liked Diego Kaji. I respected him, because I was paid to do so. I did appreciate it when he would inquire about my wife’s welfare after she was mugged and beaten by a group of youths; he even gave me paid time off, sent a basket of rare fruits and a veritable rain forest of endangered blossoms to our apartment. But truthfully, I felt better when I did not encounter him face-to-face in my movements about his mansion. I was thankful that he spent most of his time at his office within the cloning operation. But he had an office in his home, as well, and one time he called me into this room to share a glass of brandy with him. I accepted his invitation, though I respectfully declined the cigar he offered. He seemed slightly drunk, and maybe a little bored. Perhaps even lonely. He was between wives. His girlfriends changed so frequently that I could scarcely remember what name to address them by. At any rate, this night he was chatty, and the chat went pleasantly enough until he patted my knee, and the patting became a rubbing, up and down my thigh. Taken by surprise (though, having seen some of the parties at the house, I shouldn’t have been; no, not at all), I stood abruptly and excused myself. I was afraid that he would dismiss me from my services for rebuffing him, but the next day when we chanced upon each other in one of the hallways he simply smiled at me and said hello as cheerfully as if I had dreamed the whole incident.
I was not close to him, not a butler or bodyguard or chauffeur—though he had those. I was the head of maintenance at the mansion. I made sure that every machine, and every living body in my team, was performing its task properly. The cleaning crew answered to me. It was my responsibility, too, if a fountain of wine stopped spurting. If holographic nude male dancers with arrows jutting out of them like Saint Sebastian started dancing in slow motion or speeded up motion or vanished like elusive ghosts altogether. I did mention that Diego Kaji was a man with unique tastes? Jaded tastes. There was enough to do to keep me and my people and my several automatons busy every day. The house he had built upon the flat roof of the Turquoise Tower was very large. It was a synthesis of every style that appealed to him, a Frankenstein’s monster of grafted parts that somehow all came together in an unlikely whole. Towers and gables and gargoyles. There was an adjacent chapel with a steeple and it had stained glass windows that portrayed beautiful naked women with bat-like devil wings. Various wives and girlfriends had posed for these demonic likenesses. Many an orgy had taken place upon the chapel’s floor, with Diego Kaji presiding over the events at the altar.
I had never participated in these revelries; had done my best to be out of the house when they occurred, though I was always on call. My wife and I had once received a formal invitation to one of these events, ostensibly a Halloween costume party. On the card, it was called a “masque.” Somehow my wife and I were able to decline, and thankfully my employer had never invited me to attend one of his special events—as a guest—again. It was disturbing enough to have to replace a circuit chip in a pleasure robot while lovely teenage girls looked on and giggled. Unsettling enough when I was called upon to lower a man tightly bound in a cocoon of black leather when the chain he dangled from would not deliver him back to the floor.
Maybe I’m a prude, in my old age, but I’m not so sure that even in my youth, unmarried, I would have fit in with the revelers at Diego Kaji’s “masques.”
After Kaji’s suicide there was a lot of activity of a less pleasurable variety about the big house. Lawyers removed computers, while business partners fretted in the background. Ex-wives squabbled over ownership of this painting or that sculpture; a two thousand year old Kodju vase was dropped and shattered during one particularly ugly confrontation of this type. And I was given duties. Very solemn duties. They were considered an extension of the cleaning I had always overseen during my employment—which I knew was soon to end.
“Good man, Rod,” one of my boss’s former business partners muttered, patting me on the back for no apparent reason, as I met him coming out of Mr. Kaji’s home office. This was the cocooned man I had helped get down that time.
I erased the memories of pleasure robots. I removed and burned holograph chips of underage nude mutant girls cavorting. It gave me satisfaction to see some of these things destroyed at last, though another part of me was disgusted at myself for aiding in their disappearance. For cleansing Diego Kaji’s memory.
“Ahh…did you get rid of that enema robot yet?” one former guest of the house whispered to me outside the huge, two-leveled library. He was obviously a little embarrassed to ask.
“Yes sir,” I assured him.
“Oh,” he said, and I realized he was disappointed, had wanted to take it with him. He nodded at the threshold to the library. “Those books of erotic art prints from Ram?”
“I think Mr. Blemish took those,” I reported.
“Bastard,” the man mumbled, whisking away, maybe hoping to locate Mr. Blemish elsewhere within the mansion.
I had things to do, at that moment, in the library. I entered it. I touched a code on the keypad by the door frame. I heard the big double doors of violet Ramon wood clunk into place, firmly locked. Then I turned to face the high-ceilinged room.
My boss had been a voracious reader. He loved books as artifacts, as objects, preferred to read from actual volumes rather than off a monitor. This room held quite the collection even now, however much its contents had already been pilfered and censored. I approached a locked cabinet set into a section of wall that was not filled with built-in bookcases. This showcase held some of Mr. Kaji’s most prized, most priceless volumes. One of the items displayed behind glass was an original copy of the Pioneer magazine, in which was printed the story The Tell-Tale Heart, by Edgar Allan Poe—Diego Kaji’s very favorite author. But it was from the displayed copy of The Stylus, a literary journal edited by Poe, that Kaji’s people had managed to isolate and extract the correct DNA. Oil from a thumb, a bit of rubbed-off cell, still clinging to the brittle paper even after all these many, many years.
I was one of the very few people in the mansion atop the Turquoise Tower who knew about the switch hidden under the lower edge of the glass showcase’s frame—and the foremost of those few was already dead. I flipped this switch, and with barely a whisper, the section of wall in which the cabinet was set swung inwards. I passed through the narrow portal, and pushed the hidden door back into place.
The corridor was too cramped, too chilly, and quite unnecessarily murky. Into its walls, cells were recessed. One cell had only bars to contain its occupant, but it had no occupant now. Mr. Kaji had sold his clone of motion picture actress Jayne Mansfield to a friend. I didn’t know much about her other than that she and her little dog had been killed in an automobile accident in the 20th Century. Mr. Kaji had acquired her “death car” and it was still displayed in his adjacent garage, a miniature museum of motor vehicles. It was from this that he had had her blood, and thus her DNA, extracted. I remembered seeing her at some of the masques. Even when she was attired—in some glittery sheath which her ample curves seemed ready to burst—her eyes flailed the walls, the ceiling, the groping people around her in a vacant drugged panic. She had less than the mind of a little dog, now.
I was relieved that I would not have to destroy her, scrub her like a lichen off the face of Diego Kaji’s tombstone. Despite all that I had done for him over the years, I had never had to kill a woman—even a cloned woman—before.
The next cell had a clear wall, like that glass showcase containing several of Poe’s works, and from within a man seated on the closed lid of a toilet gazed out at me warily. He had a glittering, shimmering cape around his shoulders against the chill but otherwise he was naked. A white jumpsuit lay crumpled, soiled, upon the floor. The crusted tray of his most recent meal rested atop his bolted-down table. The man made a little grunting sound; hardly the beautiful music that had achieved his fame. His hair drooped in greasy black spikes across his forehead, though the blue-black color was dyed; the servants saw to this when they drugged him and washed and shaved him. Some clones were placid, but this one tended to fight, become violent, thrash around madly like a martial artist fighting off an army of assailants. I’d heard he’d been gleefully tortured one night after breaking the nose of one of Mr. Kaji’s female guests.
“Hello, my man,” I said to him soothingly. Sadly. I had listened to the man’s music; one could hardly miss it, as Kaji had often played it loudly. But the sadness I felt was not for the destruction of a great talent. That talent had died many generations ago. No, the regret I felt was more like that one would feel bringing a sick pet to the vet to be put down. Not even that regret, really, because this had been Mr. Kaji’s pet, not mine.
I activated a separate clear panel set seamlessly into the larger cell wall, and it slid aside. The man grunted again, looked ready to rise from the toilet, perhaps expecting one of the treats he liked, such as a doughnut. Instead, I raised the handgun I had brought with me, a Scimitar .55, metallic gold with a dusting of red sparkly flakes, and pushed its barrel through the opening and pointed it at the man on the toilet and like the angel of death I squeezed the trigger. The gun emitted only the slightest poof. The man emitted only a soft third grunt before he toppled off the toilet and began melting.
Only when he began dissolving, the blue-glowing plasma spreading rapidly and consuming his cells, did the clone begin to kick and thrash in a mindless attempt at survival, but it was much too late. I slid the opened panel shut again to avoid smelling the fumes as the plasma did its work. The thrashing became a subdued writhing as the man lost shape under the corrosive blanket, his limbs shortening, and then there was no more movement but that of the plasma itself. It being a blue plasma, it only consumed organic matter, and so all that was left when it was finished was the man’s shiny cape, barely stained and empty on the floor of the cell.
The next few cells were empty (for which I was again grateful) except for hanging chains or props and decorations related to their former famous occupants. Maybe Diego Kaji had foreseen his own end longer ago than anyone had suspected, and had thus let his most trusted friends take some of his clones. His most tight-lipped friends. I knew that other angels of death would be visiting some of his less trustworthy friends, but fortunately that was not on my own list of chores. After the last of my work was done in this mansion, this Graceland atop the Turquoise Tower, I would take my savings and move my wife to another city, another colony on another world, perhaps, and change my name and pray that no other servant of the late Diego Kaji ever deemed me a threat to the sanctity of his memory.
I came to the only other remaining clone. The second of the two men that for whatever reason had been idols of Diego Kaji. Perhaps he had thrilled to this man’s stories of madness. Been deliciously chilled, or even titillated by their brooding atmosphere. I had, at my employer’s prompting, read a number of his stories and poems and I could understand Mr. Kaji’s enthusiasm more so than I could his affinity for the music of his other idol. Maybe Diego Kaji was a frustrated author, a would-be singer, and all his own accomplishments were merely what he had made do with.
The other cells I had passed had once been closed off by invisible fields of force; nearly invisible, at least, in that they gave off a pale violet tint so that one would know they were activated. But this cell had no bars, no glass wall, no magnetic field. I came to a wall of brick, as if some of the other servants had already set to work sealing off all traces of this jail. This zoo cage. The front of the cell was entirely bricked up except for one small area at the level of my eyes. This was open, and I could smell an unclean odor wafting out even before I brought my face close to it warily.
No arm shot out to rake at my eyes. No spittle came flying at me. In the murk beyond, lit only by the holographic flame of a mock candle fixed to the wooden table top, I saw a man dressed in a torn and shabby black suit, seated before the candle. Its wavering glow gleamed off his bulbous forehead, made black pools of his mournful deep-set eyes. Though his hair was in disarray and he was due for a shave, his small mustache still looked neat. The head lifted slightly. Silently. From within their pools of darkness those eyes contemplated me, almost as if there were actually a sharp mind behind the waxen mask of fame. The living Halloween mask that this entity had worn to the masques, to the delight of Diego Kaji’s guests.
