Stolen Faces, Stolen Names полностью

A HIGH MIST obscured the Blood Moon. Nomun moved carefully. Jade Nomun’s mad, gleeful face floated before his mind’s eye. The light in the jungle remained cold, and the shadows were impenetrable. At intervals, Nomun stopped and listened, but he could hear nothing beyond the ragged sound of his own breathing, and the thump of his heart.

He passed the crest of the node without incident. The node fell away steeply to the south, so that Nomun could look out over the jungle canopy. The apex beach formed a wide crescent; within its arms rode a half-dozen breathboats, sails furled, lit only by small green anchor lights. The jungle glowed pale blue, until it ended on the sand. There a narrow zone of hot light flickered. The last barrier, Nomun thought. Fresh memory?

He moved warily down the slope, but nothing attacked him. He wondered how Young Nomun was doing. Had he already fallen to Jade Nomun’s cunning? Nomun felt a sharp twinge of regret...he remembered how Young Nomun had saved him from Scar Nomun. It seemed so long ago.

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 breathboat’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.