The Blood Moon rose above the canopy, huge, scarred by vast craters. The crimson light that poured down seemed thick, a viscous light that dripped through the crystal, spattering fire. Nomun noticed a change in the jungle’s internal light. Did the memwort’s heart beat faster, did it pump a richer blood? A hot dazzling pink began to flow along the crystal. Pulse followed pulse, faster and faster, until the jungle blazed, and Nomun was forced to shield his eyes from the glare.
On the ridge, the jungle abandoned its semblance of chaos and revealed its structure. The web of crystal flowed together into a line of great toroids, marching like fiery vertebrae over the crest of the node toward the distant intemode beach. Light whirled fiercely within the toroids, and Nomun stopped for a moment to admire that energetic beauty. The moment stretched out, and Nomun began to imagine he was about to understand something of his situation; perhaps if he just watched long enough, opened himself to the light, somehow he might remember. What memories they must carry, he thought, and he began to feel a frightening urge. By the time Nomun reached the dorsal ridge, he wanted to press himself to the glow, to fill the empty places in his mind.
He approached the nearest toroid, moving slowly, as in a dream. It was five or six meters tall, a wreath of light woven from a thousand strands of jungle. He stopped so close to it that he might have reached out and touched its glorious surface. He closed his eyes; the fight beat through his eyelids, almost undiminished in intensity. He swayed there, mindless, until a sound from behind alerted him, too late. He turned and ducked, but something glanced off the back of his head, hard enough to pitch him forward against the toroid.
The crystal was hard, and shockingly cold. He twisted onto his back. Jade Nomun stood over him, smiling, holding a heavy chunk of crystal high.
«Time to go, clone,» Jade Nomun said.
Nomun struggled to move, but could not, trapped in light thick as honey. He waited for the impact.
But Jade Nomun was trapped in the light, too... frozen in the act of striking. The elegant face was twisted in a snarl of frustration, but fear had begun to seep into the cloudy eyes.
The light brightened until all vision was lost, replaced by a white glare that filled Nomun utterly.
... And he was a child in his mother’s hardcar, riding through Howlytown. His mother, deep in conversation with her womanfriend Marlain, paid no attention to him, so he amused himself by peering through the armored window at the strange life of Howlytown.
The streets lay between rivers of light in the early evening. The programmable facades of the crumbling buildings flashed a million messages, projected a thousand colorful scenes. Most of it made no sense to him, but he was fascinated, all the same. Usually he could catch only a tantalizing glimpse of Howlytown before his mother opaqued the window, and so he was trying to make the most of this rare opportunity.
Few of Howlytown’s inhabitants were out so early, but there were still plenty of amazing sights. On one comer he saw a firedancer, turning cartwheels inside her cloud of green and blue flame. Across the street, an elderly mnemon sat in a steel kiosk, guarded by two huge mechdogs. The sign above his kiosk read: «New Regrets for Old.» The mechdogs lay on either side of the kiosk, waving the huge pink pompoms attached to their tails. Nomun laughed.
At the next cross street, the hardcar paused for a moment, to allow a great steel landbarge to pass. The barge scraped slowly down the street, striking an occasional spray of sparks from the littered surface. It displayed the red skull-and-spiral logo of one of Howlytown’s warlords; the muzzles of grasers emerged from turrets at either end of the top deck.
While they waited, Nomun saw an ugly sight. A procession of naked men and women emerged from the dark mouth of an alley, cabled together neck-to-neck. They were led by a rotund dwarf wearing lavender armor. The coffle shuffled to a stop by the curb, so close to Nomun that he might have reached out and touched one of the men, had there been no glass between them. The man had a lean wolfish face; in his eyes was a disturbing absence. Slaves, Nomun thought, feeling both pity and curiosity.
Slowly the man turned and looked at Nomun. Or so it seemed, although the hardcar’s windows were set for one-way vision. The man’s eyes drifted away for a moment, then snapped back, filled abruptly with fierce nameless emotion. He reached for his shoulder, twisted at something there, and the arm fell off. There was no blood. Nomun caught a glimpse of something metallic where the arm had disconnected.
With an unnaturally swift movement, the man bent, picked up his arm by the wrist and slammed it against Nomun’s window, though no sound penetrated the armored glass. He dropped his arm, jerked away the arm of the woman next to him. She reacted with dull bemusement, swaying and smiling. The man drew back to strike the hardcar again with his new weapon, and then the dwarf was on him, slashing at him with a painstick. The man fell to his knees, unconscious, eyes rolled up into his head, supported only by the cable that leashed him to the others.
The dwarf picked up the woman’s arm, turning it this way and that, as if inspecting it for damage. Eventually he locked it back on her shoulder. At his direction she flexed it. The dwarf turned his attention to the man’s arm, shaking his helmeted head over the arm’s condition. Nomun could see split flesh and ruptured conduit.
The hardcar moved on. Nomun glanced at his mother. She had noticed nothing, nor had Marlain.
Just before they reached the security lock that led out of Howlytown, the hardcar passed through a crowd of grim-faced women dressed in black. Nomun stared at them with such intensity that Marlain glanced out.
«Oh,» Marlain said. «The Barrens.»
«What’s wrong with them, Mother?» Nomun asked, for even to his young eyes it was obvious that something was dreadfully wrong.
His mother smoothed his hair and opaqued the window. «They have no children,» she said. «They live outside the Pale, so they must carry the Korr virus. Else they would breed us all to death. They are allowed no children, either of the egg or of the flesh. Do you understand? They are sterile; and also their cells are useless to the doners.»
«The enforcers should drive them away,» Marlain said. «Like vultures, they seem to me. Did you hear what happened in Darkway Howlytown? Just last week it was. A man and his daughter were waiting at the security lock, as we are. A fire started in the rotor pods, and they were forced out of their car. The Barrens swarmed over them, with their scrapers and tissue vials. By the time the enforcers came out, the poor little girl’s hands were nothing but bones and tatters.»
«Marlain!» said Nomun’s mother, pulling him close.
«Sorry; I’m sorry. But it’s horrid, somehow, to think that in a few years Howlytown will be infested with a thousand copies of that innocent one.» Marlain shook her head, her face a mask of disapproval.
His mother held him tightly. «Don’t worry, Nomun. That could never happen to you.»
The jungle was quiescent, lit only by an occasional blue flicker. Jade Nomun was sprawled across Nomun’s legs, still clutching the piece of crystal with which he had meant to brain Nomun. Nomun pushed him away and the elegantly dressed body rolled bonelessly to its back.
Perhaps he is dead, Nomun thought The idea was pleasant, and he sat back against the now- dark toroid, to gather his strength.
He recalled the fugue-memory. How comforting it must be, to have a head full of such things, instead of this aching emptiness. But now he had at least one, even if it was not his own. Though perhaps it was; the mother had called her child Nomun. He considered the possibility that the memwort belonged to him, or to one of the others who claimed the name. He laughed. Absurd. Why would the owner expose himself willingly to the dangers of the memwort, and to the more deadly hatreds of his clones?