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 internode 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.
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 corner 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
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.