Free Ghosts of Punktown by Jeffrey Thomas Page A

weeds had turned brown and brittle over the winter, like veins drained of their blood.
     
         Cynth had had no prior experience with auction houses while living in Miniosis, city of unfaithful fiancés. She supposed she had pursued this job as much out of a sense of nostalgia as anything else. At least, knowing that Jango was situated in the Triplex had cemented her interest when she’d learned about the job.
     
         She’d even briefly, wildly considered backing out of her condo and taking an apartment in Tower 1 instead, until she’d come to her first interview at Jango and seen the condition her former home was in.
     
         She concluded her business on the wrist comp, and then with Colores. He let her go ahead of him as they slipped between two of the displays, placing one hand on the small of her back while making an ushering gesture with the other. There was a crash behind them at that moment, and both spun to look, startled.
     
         Cynth hadn’t taken much notice of the robot before; there was a small fleet of them, of various types, that saw to the building’s upkeep. This was one of several Jango used to move the consignments from storage to the exhibition room, to the auction room and eventually out of the building when it was time for the winning bidders to gather their prizes. The robot had bumped the base of a pedestal, causing the Kalian lamp to fall and shatter. The gelatin had broken into quivering chunks, out of which the fetus’s limbs reached. It looked like a miscarriage lying there, or perhaps an unexpected birth.
     
         Cynth switched her gaze to the robot, which had already begun gathering up the broken shards of glass in delicate brass claws. Its box-like body was scuffed and dinged, but she didn’t know whether it might actually be two decades old.
     
         “Hey,” she called to it.
     
         The sweeping arms paused for one or two moments, as if the machine had become befuddled, and then slowly resumed their work.
     
    *     *     *
     
         “Excuse me – do you work here?”
     
         Cynth turned from watching the snow fall outside the exhibition room’s largest window. “Yes?” She was a little unsettled, not having heard the man approach, but then she was distracted from having found a new message on one of her work computer’s virtual screens. It had read, in large letters: “You abandoned me, Cynthia. I am empty without you.”
     
         The man was a Choom, youngish, and because Cynth had lived all her life in Punktown, and a minority of Chooms had even attended her private schools, she was able to consider him attractive. His face had strong cheekbones and a broad jaw to accommodate the rows of molars hidden behind his ear-to-ear mouth, his eyes gray and his hair cut short and spiky as most Choom males wore it. He looked disheveled in his snow-dampened raincoat over a comforta ble-looking old sweater over a T-shirt. He clutched the latest glossy Jango catalog. “My name is Mendeni. I’m a professor of anthropology at Paxton University. I had some questions about item number twenty-eight?”
     
         “Ah,” Cynth said. “Our statue of Lupool.” She stepped closer to the man, who stood several paces from the stone automaton, which still slumbered though it was well past noon. Maybe the snow had lulled her? “A very popular item, I guess.”
     
         The Choom looked wary. “How so?”
     
         “There was a curator from the Hill Way Galleries in to see it yesterday, though it’s actually not very professional of me to talk about that.”
     
         Mendeni looked warier, or more nervous, by the moment. “No, please, please tell me – it was Richard Colores, wasn’t it? I was going to ask you about that.”
     
         “Yes. Mr. Colores was here, and expressed a great deal of interest in item twenty-eight.”
     
         “Damn him,” Mendeni hissed, flicking his hot gaze toward