The corpse smeared to the floor, dead.

The spattered elevator slid open. Two enraged Klu-Koza women charged out, eating utensils clutched offensively.

The human whirled to face the attack. He crammed the imploder into the nearest gut. The powerful blast littered the room with wild wet entrails. The next blast blew the other animal nearly in half.

Kloud came upon this scene on the back of a burly opponent. His boot knife was firmly implanted in its nearly nonexistent neck, and he was twisting it like a motorcycle throttle.

The fleshy face contorted with its horrific distress. In a frantic attempt at survival, the Klu-Koza rammed itself back-first against a wall, sandwiching the human man.

"c.o.c.ksucker!" scolded Kloud, giving the knife another pa.s.sionate twist.

"Golm-ba!"

"Suck!"

Kloud withdrew his knife and carefully injected it into the spot directly between the enemy's shoulder blades. Green steam gushed from a punctured organ, filling Kloud's face with a repulsive stench. The Klu-Koza sank to its knees and Kloud leapt free.

The creature remained in its kneeling position even after death had made a hive of its body.

The two teams met in the central office room of the third floor after killing everything in between their separate entrance routes. Bleeding and jam-splashed, they stood in sweaty exhaustion.

Murphy adjusted his helmet and wiped some putrid enemy debris from his face. An empty pistol hung like a weight in one hand.

"The forcers are coming, Captain," Kloud panted, listening.

"I know. Let's move out."

The hazy green lighting of the Post appeared to be permanent. A melancholy ba.s.s line vibrated thickly from the standard barroom jukebox. Beer mugs clinked, adding periods to the ends of great war tales. Wrinkled veterans sat in surrender.

A corner vid-tank cast a bluish light on the acc.u.mulation of creased faces. The blue tint made them look like ghosts.

The door opened suddenly as four men entered. The first, a tall st.u.r.dy man with a stoic face and long dark hair, stared back at the audience of elders. The three others stood back in the shadows respectfully, almost like bodyguards. Murphy walked to the bar and plopped two large money bags onto the counter. Two thirds of the contents of the captured safe.

"This is for you," he addressed the old veterans. He gave a rigid salute before turning and leading his men back into the night.

Whispered awe filled the smoky chamber as the age-worn soldiers crowded around the two plump sacks. Suddenly one of the Choom bartenders disrupted the commotion.

"Hey, look at this!"

He pointed up at the vid-screen. It was a long shot of a large burning building. Police and fire vehicles surrounded the Klu-Koza emba.s.sy. The news camera zoomed in on the curious flag flapping defiantly above the smoldering castle-the flag of Tusk Company.

THE MERCIFUL UNIVERSE.

1. Company in Wherever The Park, sardonically nicknamed by the locals, was a rubble-strewn lot where a tenement had once loomed. Some fool necromancer on an obscure spiritual quest had attempted to open a doorway to a distant dimension and in the process, blown the building to smithereens. Whether or not he was successful is open to speculation, but forty-two of his neighbors unwillingly accompanied him to wherever. Silvia imagined their soft grey voices whispering up from the shadowy pockets and blackberry-colored puddles between jagged slabs of concrete.

All the parents in the neighborhood warned their children to avoid The Park; all the children either played there or, as in Silvia's case, cut through. It was the broken heart of the neighborhood, bordered on one side by bland rows of middle cla.s.s apartment boxes, by Little Manila on another and by the glossy fortress of Nex-Tech Labs to the west. Residents dwelling in Punktown could do much worse, of course-there were neighborhoods in the city that would have made h.e.l.l blush. Each weekday Silvia would depart the school bus and make her way across the flattened corpse of the tenement, climbing over beds of brick like giant rusty teeth and half buried cables like calcified tree roots.

The voices always came to her, small and thin, spider web voices like breezes, stealing out from the horrible texture of that micro-landscape. One afternoon she heard a voice that actually belonged to a living creature. It was not a human voice. It was following the accident over at Nex-Tech. The lab, a.s.sociated with the medical school at Mercy Hospital, conducted research on animals, some of which had escaped following the blast that tore open the left wing of the complex. Explosions, it seems, were becoming a tradition in that section of town.

A light snow was falling and the rows of apartment houses were grey in the grey light. Ten-year-old brunette Silvia, a plain-faced twig of a girl, got off the bus, cut through The Park and went to the second-floor flat she shared with her mother. In the dark of her mother's room, she reached into a cluttered bureau drawer and felt around for the small black laser-camera. Her hand b.u.mped another small black object and her dead father's voice came rasping from the drawer.

He was reading from a guide booklet, listing vid-programs that might have been worth watching. Movies mostly. He could enjoy little else in his final days as he lay there in that room, his disease progressed, his voice a gritty hiss, the wreath of pain in his throat squeezing off the blood required by his memory so that he had to resort to the palm recorder to remind him what shows to tune in to.

Silvia listened for several moments, refused to let herself cry, then grabbed the recorder and shut it off.

It was not supposed to snow in January, but the workers from the weather control plants were on strike. Snow softened the broken splay of The Park, where Silvia returned with her mother's camera. She had toyed with the device and found that by adjusting some of its controls, she could take pictures that were more dreamy than realistic, the colors and focus distorted. Punktown looked less threatening portrayed in luminous crayon.

She took a picture of the skyline with snow coming down, then the distant buildings of Little Manila with its terrible sounds of c.o.c.k fights and cheering. The glossy monstrosity of Nex-Tech with one side blown open, a great ghostly tarp of clear plastic rustling over the wound. That's when she heard the voice.

It was a faint, uncertain sound from a jumble of twisted metal and broken wall. The wreckage formed a cave-like opening. Silvia crouched and moved stealthily closer. The voice sounded again and something moved in the darkness.

"Come out," Silvia offered. "I won't hurt you."

The girl got too close and the animal started, scurried out from its cover and sprang away. While it did not move with the grace of a cat, it certainly looked like one and it managed enough speed to elude the girl as it scrabbled off into the increasing snow.

Back at the flat, Silvia printed out her photos. The last one showed the cat, thin and grey, a ghost in the white air as it made its escape. With her father dead, no siblings, and her mother working two jobs, Silvia thought it might be nice to have a pet. She could use a little company.

2. The Winter Mission One of the older boys from the neighborhood tripped Silvia after the bus hissed away. The boy's friends sn.i.g.g.e.red and the lot of them swaggered off and the girl, refusing to cry, picked up her books. The photo of the cat had fallen out of her math book and lay forgotten in the snow as she headed home.

The Park was surreal in the snow. It was a stranger place still, since the lab explosion. An emaciated dog with a shaved head, a small silvery box fitted with tangled wires embedded in the top of its skull, lay half buried, a froth of ice caked about its open mouth. Further along, dead and broken on a heap of frosted bricks, an intentionally crippled kitten with scorched robot hind limbs gazed with foggy green eyes as Silvia paused and stared. Her heart, at ten, was only now learning to hate. Still, she could hurt nothing and even now did not imagine doing violence to the men of science who had violated these animals.

After leaving her books at the flat, she went downstairs to visit the strange, nice Mrs. Waterfall. The woman, her own quarters full of books and incense and violin music, gave the girl a can of dog food. Back in the cold, bundled in her winter garments, Silvia set out for The Park.

Someone had fashioned a grinning snowman and fitted it with a beer bottle phallus.

"Come out. Come out, come out."

Grey wind came stinging from the west and the shrieks of fighting birds put banshees in her ears. She found that jumble of wreckage where the cat had sheltered the previous afternoon, bent and saw its small huddled form.

"Hi," Silvia whispered.

The scrawny figure receded deeper into its shadows.

"You must be hungry... I brought you something."

Silvia set a plate on the snow, scooped out some of the dog food and moved back several yards. Dusk was turning the snow blue and the Nex-Tech buildings were a great sterile tomb in the distance, forbidding behind a high fence of razor-wire.

Eventually the cat ventured out, sniffing the air. In their enthusiasm to eliminate blindness in Tikkihotto people (those humanoid beings whose eyes were wispy translucent filaments) the researchers at Nex-Tech had removed the cat's native eyes and given it synthetic ghostly wires, like misplaced whiskers, to see with. The projections on the left side of its face were crumpled and blackened, probably from the explosion, and were likely accountable for the creature's uncharacteristic awkwardness.

The cat took small furtive steps, its serpentine eyes straining in the gloom, wriggling tentacle-like. Unable to see Silvia crouched shivering in the snow, it found the food and ate.

Silvia returned the following day and the snow returned too, the local atmosphere celebrating this temporary freedom from restriction, but negotiations were ongoing between the weather control workers and the union; inevitably nature would yield to technology.

It was lighter out this time when Silvia set down her offering of dog food. The skittish animal poked out of its cavern but pulled back suddenly, startled by the distant howling of a dog-from Little Manila or Nex-Tech? The beast remained in its shelter until Silvia moved back, out of its view.

"Good boy, Skinny."

The cat now had a name.

3. The Melting Sentry The girl was crying the third day, when she showed up at the door of Mrs. Waterfall's apartment. Most of the tenants avoided Mrs. Waterfall; she didn't seem to care much for company. She was odd, private, loyal only to her ailing Chihuahua and the sandalwood shadows of her solitary lair. But Silvia liked her well enough.

"Skinny-he ran away!" Silvia announced.

Mrs. Waterfall sat her down and gave her tea.

"What happened, Silvia?"

"I tried to pat him and he ran off."

"How do you know it's a male?" the woman asked, peering out through her long, white frenzy of hair.

"Woman's intuition," the child explained.

Adele Waterfall suppressed a smile. "Not to worry-he'll be back. As long as you keep bringing the food he'll be back. But you have to be patient. That animal has suffered serious trauma at the hands of people. It will take time for him to trust you."

Mrs. Waterfall was right. Weeks pa.s.sed before the cat would eat with Silvia close by, even more weeks before it was responding to her calling its name. But now it came readily at the sound of her voice, stumbling and grey in the snow-out from its hiding place, its thin tail held high-to gobble its food.

Nearly March and still The Park was lumpy and white with snow. Silvia climbed off the bus, trudged across the wintered rubble, walked up her street, grey with slush and houses. She dropped off her books, prepared Skinny's meal and headed back out.

The ruin of a snowman stood like a sentry. Rain and warmer days had given him a deteriorated look, the face a ghostly blur. Gunshots barked from Little Manila and the helicars of wealthy executives hummed insect-like as they swarmed away from the Nex-Tech structures.

"Skinny," Silvia called, approaching the cat's shelter (which she had lined with towels stolen from home).

Skinny meowed and stepped out, eyes like pad thai noodles swimming.

"Time to eat. Are you hungry?"

Skinny meowed, tail saluting. Silvia set down his plate and stayed close. This time she gently held out her hand and the cat, never having made contact before, touched the tip of a finger with his nose.

A white blur came from the right-the tightly packed s...o...b..ll struck Skinny hard in the head and broke wetly, spitting cold sparks in Silvia's face. Skinny shook his head, staggered a few steps and fell dead.

The laughter of older boys came from somewhere behind. The boys swaggered off toward the bland grey apartment houses, hooting.

Silvia held Skinny for the first time, pressed him to her jerking chest. Her tears fell on his fur. That night she slept with the body of her small companion cuddled in her bed, the small hand recorder too, her dead father's rasping voice listing movies in the dark.

4. Adele Waterfall Adele was fifty when she moved into the building that overlooked the lot where a tenement had exploded. She had lived with her husband Floyd in a better part of the city up until the time of his death. His helicar had plummeted fifteen stories. Some jokester at the factory had planted an empty beer bottle in the works of the vehicle and over time it had broken up, several fragments sneaking into a fuel line where they precipitated the fatal blockage. This fact was never disclosed, however; it seems the car manufacturer pa.s.sed a clandestine sum of munits to investigators who listed the cause of the wreck as an operator error.

Life had been good on Danvers Street. Adele had had room for a small herb garden and there was a birch tree where she hung a clear plastic bird feeder. The couple had installed eight-foot fences around their humble oasis of a yard, both of them being quiet, private creatures. They had plenty of room for their beloved books and a finished bas.e.m.e.nt where they could play their music. Floyd was skilled with a violin and Adele had mastered the harpsichord (a small electric version, actually). They liked nothing better than a quiet meal followed by some shared concerti grossi by the ancient master Corelli, or the contemporary composer Scor-rul.

Adele had sold the house following Floyd's accident-no longer able to afford it on her own. His pension and the money from the sale would have to support her. She was too much of a recluse to go out into the ice and madness of the external world. So she moved to a modest apartment in a middle cla.s.s neighborhood.

There were worse places to be, the woman mused, although the landlord was not the most generous of creatures. The air-conditioning system was faulty and Adele was forced to have her windows open during the summer. She was glad when Silvia and her parents moved in, having tired of hearing the moans of the woman upstairs, having tired of the squeaking of the woman's spider-like robot lover (or was it the bedsprings? Both?). At any rate, the family of three made for more tolerable neighbors.

Life was a shadow without Floyd; the only music came from recorded chips, her herbs came from jars; she rarely cooked meals from scratch, but relied on prepared food ordered by computer from a delivery market. The three-legged Chihuahua, Muscles, that she and Floyd had rescued from a pound, died of natural causes that first winter, just weeks before Silvia's cat friend was murdered by local bullies. Without Muscles, the solitude was even more than our eccentric, iconoclastic Adele Waterfall cared for. Lately she found herself becoming overly fond of Bach's Come Sweet Death.

5. Wires Like Cobras April thawed the snow and the warmer days seemed to take some of the steam out of the thrust to end the weather controllers' strike, though one city official maintained that they were terrorizing the city through their insubordination. Adele had ordered some fresh daisies from the delivery market and set out into The Park to place them at Skinny's grave.

She had labored with the neighbor girl to build a burial cairn of bricks near where the cat had lived in a hollow under heaped concrete. Now that the snow was gone, one could see the occasional power cable snaking through the sprawl of wrecked tenement, these cables being illegal taps, stealing electricity from businesses to divert it to this or that apartment across the way. The cheap line used by the power-theives occasionally gave out, breaking; the wires would thrash back and forth, spewing sparks. The rich and the poor were kindred in their grasping.

Working her way through the lot, Adele tensed at the sound of hissing. Just yards now from Skinny's monument, she saw a wire dancing and spitting and a dog of pale grey flat on its side, smoking from a blackened kiss on its right flank. Adrenalin punched Adele in the heart.

It must be dead, she thought, electrocuted by the thrashing cable, but she saw the dog's side rising and falling and one of the front paws twitched. With her blood sprinting dizzying laps through her, Adele took the heaviest chunk of concrete she could lift and wobbled closer to the electric cobra. The wire swung close to the dog and the woman bent close, pinning it with the slab.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!" Adele cursed the power-purloiners.

She knelt by the dog and put a bony hand on its bony chest. It was thin, even for a greyhound, likely an escapee from the expansive dog farm that supplied both Nex-Tech and Little Manila. They were too far from the dog racing track for it to have come from there; besides, they usually shot their dogs once the beasts' proficiency in racing had waned.

"You poor sweet thing," Adele whispered, stroking its pointed face. The dog lifted its head weakly and she saw that the left eye was cloudy, blind.

6. Ten Years Later Smartie Pants, Silvia's father had called her, endearingly. Indeed. A scholarship sent her to Miniosis College of Arts and Sciences, away from the grey home streets of Paxton. She was twenty now, engaged to one Roger Brine, a brilliant and humane young man, graduate of Silvia's university, with a snug position at a burgeoning cloning center. After graduation Silvia hoped that their combined incomes would be enough to help her mother move to Miniosis, out of the old neighborhood, for the crime level there had increased substantially over the past ten years.

Every few weeks Silvia would borrow Roger's helicar and drive out to visit her mother. It was summer and weeds snaked up out of the clutter of The Park and garbage roasted in the gutters. Sweaty silver-tattooed Choom boys loitering on the sidewalks, called obscenely to the lean young woman with the perky haircut who had grown somewhat prettier with time. While no proponent of capital punishment, she had, at Roger's prompting, purchased a palm-sized pistol. The Stun-Beam 20-20 resembled a .25 automatic, but only fired pale yellow stun rays. The worst it could do was put an eye out, if fired at close range. Roger didn't care for her spending so much time in that depreciating section of the city and felt better knowing she had some form of protection at hand.

Over the years she had stayed in touch with Mrs. Waterfall and even on those weekends when she was too busy to spend much time with her, she would see the woman walking her beloved greyhound. The image of the two walking along side by side had become something of a fixture in her thoughts of home. It was amazing how the dog had breathed life into the woman. Mrs. Waterfall had never gotten around to giving the now aging dog a formal name, but simply grew accustomed to calling him Sweetie.

Sometimes Silvia would visit her old friend. They would sit drinking tea, listening to music chips of Corelli, Sweetie parked by his companion, slender head in her lap, one good eye trained up lovingly as the woman stroked the back of his neck. He actually appeared to smile.

7. A Fateful Note Adele and Sweetie were returning from their afternoon walk when the stocky and brisk George Conch came marching down the sidewalk toward them. A brutish-looking man in mustard-colored shorts, his beer-swollen belly naked and jiggling, the landlord thrust an envelope at the woman with such vigor that she flinched. Startled by the motion, Sweetie growled.

"Shut up or I'll kick ya to death, ya friggin' mutt!" the ogre spat.

Adele would have loved a gun just then and, unlike Silvia, might possibly have used it.

"I'm sick of steppin' in dog c.r.a.p every friggin' time I come over here," the man spat.

"Don't blame me for that-Sweetie only does his business over in The Park."

Conch smirked. "Yeah, right," he said; then, wheeling on his heel, he marched away.

The heat seemed to shrink Adele's flat. Sweetie went straight to his water bowl, slurping and gulping as his master read the letter, hands shaking. In effect, the note said that there had been a change of heart about the pet policy and that she had a week to remove her dog or else she would face eviction.

Finished drinking, Sweetie came over and lay at her feet, his chin resting on one paw.

"We need a new home, Sweetie," Adele said, reaching down, her fingers like trembling birch twigs.

8. The Move The sun was a monster of Icarus heat, a clotted burning wound above the rows of grey boxes. Heat was everywhere, in the exhaust of pa.s.sing cars, in the red paint of obscene graffiti, in the collective buzz of flies, like winged bullet holes on the hot grey walls.

Adele stood sweating on the sidewalk where she had brought Sweetie; the activity of the movers bustling about the cramped flat, dismantling his familiar domain, had made him nervous. She had secured another apartment five miles to the south. While the new building was in a less savory area, the landlord was agreeable to tenants owning pets and kept several himself, so he professed. The heat was weighing heavily on the aging dog and he lay panting in a merciful pool of shadow. Afraid that he might suffer dehydration, Adele squeezed past the movers as they lugged out boxes of her books to shove into the moving truck; she had to fetch his water bowl.

Two Choom teens came around the corner of the building just then, a jug of wine swinging from its sticky neck, their metallic tattoos gleaming. A wheeled car screeched suddenly on the street, a figure leaning out a window with a compact .9mm submachine-gun. The weapon coughed its thunder and the movers dropped down, boxes of books spilling on the sidewalk as bullets chewed the wall of the building and one of the tattooed boys-the target of the attack-went down screaming. The wine bottle broke like blood.