The slope leveled out The crystal ganglia were smaller, more delicate, and Nomun surmised that they were still growing. Pink flickered through gaps in the jungle; Nomun slowed, stopped more frequently to listen. Something tightened inside him. He reached out with all his senses, sifting the jungle for the death hidden there. Nothing. He went on.
He paused at the edge of the active zone. Directly before him, slender angular tendrils broke from the glistening surface. They were motionless, but the hot light that pulsed in them gave them a treacherous, shifting quality. He sighed. He took one last look around, listened. Still nothing.
Nomun stepped into the zone, moving with slow-motion caution. The surface seemed to give slightly under his feet, trembling visibly with each careful footstep.
Jade Nomun and Young Nomun came from the jungle’s edge. Young Nomun retreated before Jade Nomun, whose face was wild. Pulses of emotion crossed it in slow-breaking waves; hate, fear, pride, horror, triumph.
«Wait,» Nomun said, making useless warding gestures.
«Wait,» Young Nomun said, as Jade Nomun rushed at him.
As Nomun watched helplessly, the two fell among the pink tendrils, tearing at each other.
... and Nomun paced the catwalk that circled the breath- boat’s main hold. Age and memory pressed on him, so heavy. He shook with that weight; he almost staggered.
At each of the stasis cages, he paused to look up into his own face. «Once again....» He was muttering in a broken voice, and in a lucid moment he thought; I would seem mad to anyone who listened. His head jerked around. Is anyone listening? Watching? The notion frightened him so much that he had to stop and lean his forehead against the solid reassuring metal of the hull. No, no... don’t be so foolish, old man.
He calmed himself by a great effort of will.
At the next cage, the frozen face had a terrible scar. Where did he come from? He remembered: He had found that Nomun on Sook, had taken him from an armored burrow beneath the Black Tear slave compound. Anger pulsed through him. A Nomun slaver; it was unbearable. He hoped that Nomun died early and painfully. Oh yes.
He walked to another cage. The face was beautiful; still Nomun, but transfigured into a mask of nobility and grace. Nomun shuddered. A politician, that one, high in a government that regulated slavery.
«Die, die, you die too,» Nomun hissed.
He drifted on. He looked up at a cyborged Nomun. The face was inhumanly calm, the frozen eyes reflecting nothing. Why had he taken this one? Ah... he was working as a trade analyst. The consortium that employed him had a thousand tentacles; some of them dipped into the slave trade. The cyborg must have known.... Nomun drew back, confused by the intensity of his hatred. One of the Nomuns had to survive, at least one.
Another Nomun, this one dressed in elegant garments. Jade gleamed in one ear. The face was Nomun’s, but it was as if the familiar features concealed the skull of a hyena. An assassin, he thought. Skilled with poison, skilled with the wire and the pin knife. He stood for a bit, and another thought crept into his mind. How are we different, he and I?
The next cage held a young Nomun, his face unmarked, innocent Nomun struggled to remember where this one had come from, but his head was too full, aching from the building pressure of memory. It will be so sweet to shed this weight, he thought.
Nomun reached out, touched a button. The young Nomun was still motionless, but inside that dark head, the brain caught fire, slowly warmed to the level of dream.
«Can you hear me?» Nomun asked.
The soft calm voice issued from a speaker on the stasis cage. «Yes. What a strange dream.»
«What do you dream?» Nomun demanded.
A long pause. Then: «I torture myself efficiently. I refuse to confess, though the pain is terrible. I dig deeper into my flesh, with fire, with knife, with lash. Still I say nothing; perhaps I have nothing to tell, but I will not admit it. I will not give up, I will get the truth out of me or I will die trying. I...»
«Enough,» Nomun said. «Enough....» He shuddered, clutched his hands to his head. The young Nomun was picking up transients, the pointless writhings of Nomun’s overloaded mind. He pressed another button, and the Nomun’s brain accelerated to a higher level of function. The eyes showed a spark of life now.
Nomun tugged down the headband of a privacy mask, fumbled at the switch. There was a memory associated with that mask; had someone given it to him, long ago? But the memory was gone, given to the memwort. All that remained was a little sore spot where the memory had been. That was the drawback to the memwort–once buried in the crystal the memory was gone... but not its pain. Each trip to the memwort left him clean, but added to the store of sourceless aches in his mind.
He found the switch, and a black mist covered his face. Why am I hiding my face? he wondered. He won’t remember any of this when he’s thawed. But Nomun left the mask on.
The voice from the speaker was sharper, more focused. «Where am I? Who are you? Why are you holding me?»
Nomun took a deep breath. «You’re at sea, like the rest of us. I’m a man; I took you from wherever I found you because of your name.»
«My name?»
«But it isn’t your name; it doesn’t belong to you. You’ve stolen it from someone.»
«It’s the name my parents gave me.» The voice seemed puzzled. ‘They weren’t your parents! They bought you in some alley, from a fleshseller; they brought you home in ajar. Though perhaps you were implanted into the woman’s womb.»
A pause, as if the young Nomun were pondering this allegation. «I find this hard to believe.»
Nomun rubbed at his face, pushed his fingers through his tangled hair. «It’s true. Ten thousand Nomuns walk a thousand worlds. You’re only an unimportant one. Those who bought you hoped you would do as well as the original Nomun, hoped you would get rich and share your wealth. Where did you grow up? No, don’t answer, I know. I don’t know the name, but it was on some backwater world where you would be unlikely to hear about the other Nomuns until you’d made your own mark. And then, when you heard, what did you think?»
«It’s true that news seldom reaches Melluce. The other Nomuns? Rumors about myself, echoed from far away. Flattering to be the source of legend, so early in my career.» The voice paused for a bit «So you claim to be the original Nomun?» Nomun fingered the privacy mask band. «I never said that» «If not, why would you care?»
A good question. Nomun tried to follow the thought, but it slipped away, to hide in the confusion filling his head. «What?» The voice grew sharper. «I asked: why would you care that another uses the name. And what will you do with me?» Nomun drew a shuddering breath. «I don’t care,» he lied. «My purpose isn’t revenge,» he lied again. «A test That’s what this is. Yes. To see which of you is the truest Nomun.» As soon as he said it, he felt the truth of it and the falsehood.
«Truest? What does that mean?»
«Who knows?» Nomun laughed, but the sound of his laughter frightened him. He punched the switch, and the young Nomun fell silent.
He stood beside the stasis cage for a while, as motionless as one of his captives. He heard the anchor chain rattle out of the hawsepipe; a moment later, the pale-haired captain came down the companionway into the hold.