Stolen Faces,
Stolen Names
BY RAY ALDRIDGE
Illustrations by Janet Aulisio Dannheiser
/Science Fiction Age, March 1995/
Nomun woke just before sundown on a beach of shattered diamonds, the glitter cold against his back. He rolled to his knees and found himself in a crowd. They all wore Nomun’s face.
Seven Nomuns stared, hot-eyed.
One Nomun lay at the edge of the water, a smear of blood at his mouth. His dead eyes gazed up at the sky.
The last Nomun reached out a hand to help Nomun to his feet.
Nomun took the hand and stood, though the world still wavered.
He concentrated on the helpful one and saw his own face as it might have looked a thousand years before. Ten thousand years? «Thank you,» Nomun said.
A smile lit Young Nomun’s dark features. «Yes. And you are?»
«Nomun,» Nomun said, and as he spoke, he realized he remembered nothing but his name and his face. For some reason he felt no great surprise; it was almost as if he had made the same discovery many times before.
«Of course,» Young Nomun said, his smile growing wider. The others made a collective sound of disgust, a sort of growling hiss, full of contempt. Nomun jerked and released Young Nomun’s hand.
A Nomun with white hair sniggered. Like several of the others, he wore a unisuit of vaguely military cut, the fabric showing dark frayed patches where weapon pouches had been ripped away. A terrible scar crossed the high forehead at an angle, then cut downward through the left eye socket and furrowed the cheek. The eye had been replaced by a mech prosthesis, a blind metallic gleam in the damaged flesh.
Scar Nomun flexed his hands and moved close. «We really should have killed the clone before he woke. It would still be easy,» said Scar Nomun.
Young Nomun stepped between them. «No. You’ll kill no more of us.»
Scar Nomun laughed. «You were foolish to stop me, clone. It would have been just the two of us, then. You’re young and strong. Who knows, in the end you might have stolen my name.»
Nomun looked at Scar Nomun’s hands. The palms were thick and calloused, the fingers long and muscular; those hands must have crushed the throat of the dead one. Nomun glanced down at his own hands and shuddered.
To distract himself, he studied the others. Their faces were so similar that they seemed to disappear, leaving visible only the harsh emotions each bore: hatred, fury, fear. Nomun put his hands to his own face. The skin was dry and deeply furrowed. Am I old? he wondered. 
A Nomun in black silk and silver lace stepped forward. A jade disk in one ear lobe matched the cloudy green of his eyes. «Putting aside the question of our identities, perhaps we should consider other questions,» said Jade Nomun. «Where are we? Who has brought us here? For what purpose?»
A gaunt Nomun with a chempump laced to his neck spoke. «Do you care?» Pump Nomun asked, his fingers fluttering at the worn keyboard of the pump. His face abruptly cleared, becoming almost as peaceful as the dead one’s. He gazed off across the sunset sea. «Look... great beauty.»
«Beauty?» asked a Nomun whose features seemed blurred by centuries of self-indulgence. «Only a rothead would see beauty here,» said Soft Nomun. «It’s cold, I’ll be hungry soon, there’s no place to sit down. The light is almost gone.» Soft Nomun turned fearful eyes on the crystal jungle behind them.
Nomun noticed the jungle for the first time. Fifty meters inland, angular shapes rose black against the darkening sky; slow pulses of blue light flickered beneath the canopy. A shock of recognition flew through him–but no word, no image followed. «What is it?» he asked Young Nomun.
«It’s a memwort. We’re on the terminal moraine of a memworL So says that one.» Young Nomun indicated a Nomun whose naked torso gleamed like blued metal. Nomun looked again and saw that Blue Nomun’s torso was metal, cunningly articulated at the waist. His arms were forged to resemble human arms, but armored hydraulic lines veined them.
The cyborg spoke in a high clear voice. «Yes, a memwort a plantlike macro-organism. A memory storage biodevice, adapted from a natural species.» He sniffed. «A costly, inefficient mechanism; the same quantity of memory could be better maintained on a monomol chip the size of my thumbnail. Conspicuous consumption of the most blatant sort. The fantasy of a disordered, melodramatic mind, one unconcerned with safety or efficiency. Look!» He gestured at the glittering beach. «We stand on broken memories.»
«Whose memories?» The Nomun who spoke was beautiful, his face subtly reshaped by some great lineamentor. The wideset eyes, the hawk nose, the sharp cheeks, the long jaw, the thin-lipped slash of a mouth, the black hair swept back from the forehead; each feature was distilled from its original harshness into clean perfection. Handsome Nomun’s voice was a rich tenor. «Whose memories? I have many enemies.»
Blue Nomun turned a severe eye on Handsome Nomun. «How would I know? My datacache is extensive, but not omniscient. Be amazed by what I do know.»
«And what do you know, clone?»
«I know, first, that I am not a clone!» Blue Nomun took a step toward Handsome Nomun, servos whirring, powerful hands grinding into fists.
«Yes, yes,» interrupted the last Nomun, in a voice that shook with fear. This Nomun carried no distinguishing mark; he wore no jewelry, his clothes were nondescript, his hair was cut in no particular style. «This is all very interesting. But even I know at least one thing: someone intends to punish us! Why? Because someone knows we’re impostors.»
Of all of us, Nomun thought, False Nomun is the only one who does not believe himself to be the Nomun.
«Whoever brought us here intends our destruction; nothing could be more obvious,» said False Nomun.
Nomun turned away from the jungle and looked out over the sea Its surface was like polished iron; not a ripple disturbed the reflection of the great red sun that touched the horizon. A kilometer to the east he saw an island; after a moment he decided it must be another memwort. Its terminal beach trailed away to the north. It grew south like a chain of bright beads, each node taller and more lustrous, until it crested in a glistening cone, around which blue lightning flared, though there were no clouds.
When he looked back at the sun, it was half gone, but now he saw shapes moving slowly against the red disk, growing larger.
«Look,» Nomun said. «What are they?»
Blue Nomun turned and stared. «Breathboats,» he said. «We are on Coal then. I thought so.»
Nomun watched the boats drift closer.
There were three of them. The masts seemed impossibly liigh and delicate, ten times the length of the craft. The sails were a transparent glimmer against the sunset sky, thousands of square meters of monomol film spread to the imperceptible breeze. Each hull seemed a dark fleck riding at the bottom of a glorious soap bubble. Nomun had seen this loveliness before–of that he was sure. Still, there were no meaningful echoes in this whisper of memory.
The others watched the breathboats with varying degrees of tension.
«Perhaps our captors arrive,» said Handsome Nomun.
«Should we take refuge in the jungle?» asked Soft Nomun. «Who knows what they plan for us?»
«That would not be advisable,» said Blue Nomun in pedantic tones. «The ‘jungle’ growths are, in fact, the exposed ganglia of the memwort. Should you stumble against the wrong synapse in the dark, you might well be trapped in an irreversible fugue.»
Scar Nomun spat, just missing the toe of Nomun’s boot «Coal. A rich man’s playworld. Whoever collected us seems less formidable already.»