Thorn asked, “I wonder why my memories hurt so much physically.”
“Some people do get sick from memories. Some people even get emotionally ill.”
“Maybe I’m just like everybody else with my nightmares anytime of the day or night.” Thorn saw a movement in the far distance. “What was that?”
“What.”
Thorn pointed. “See it? A bit of an animal or something.”
Mack asked, “A mountain goatbot? Did they build one of those now?” He chuckled, but it was forced and nervous.
“I don’t think so.”
Mack shook his head. “Maybe spies. Maybe your eagle eyes spotted our first grad schooler sighting.”
“I didn’t think it looked like a person but I couldn’t be sure.”
“Maybe it’s somebody else from the city, out for sport.”
Thorn asked, “Lots of people come out here?”
“Some. Did you know Venus and Lady Hatchet met on a rock-climbing contest, here? Just near here?”
“No. You mean they didn’t just meet working together wheeling off dead clones?”
“We use to have contests and carnivals every year, here, before a huge group of workers left to go back to Earth. Those old women were having another terrible midlife crises, huge purple hair, wearing far too much pink rouge, and trying to climb all over the place just for attention. Lady Hatchet kept beating Venus at all the games. They got into a violent fight. They’ve been the closest of friends and coworkers ever since they were forced to make up. It went to court and they were found so guilty. They have to be friends until the day they die. Those kinds of sentences never stick, but it did to them. It’s all too funny, really, if you’d been there.” Mack moaned. “That reminds of the funeral. I got to get back to work. Let’s get back down and make sure the old women haven’t taken over.”
Thorn said, “Wintermirror wasn’t afraid of death, real death, was she?”
“Nah. She said that being dead was like being how you were before you were born, and you weren’t freaked out before you were born. I disagree with her. Madam Wintermirror had such a long full bossy life so she’s changed us all so much with her life. She’s now a lot more than how she was before she was born. You didn’t get to hear her when she had her cunning and wit. You met her just before she dropped dead. Her brain was half gone when you heard her. You should have heard her in her prime. Then you’d know why she was the boss. Let’s go. Let’s make sure the dinosaurs haven’t taken over.”
Thorn pointed. “Don’t you want to see what was over there? Don’t you want to see what was crawling around down there, first?”
Mack chuckled nervously again. “It’s dark. Your eyes could have been playing tricks. We hope it wasn’t the bad guys.”
“It seemed like… a huge spider. Maybe.”
“A spider! Damn!”
“Something big, whatever it was. As big as a table.” Thorn nodded. “Yeah, that was my impression. Or a big huge skeleton hand. Something like that, I’m pretty sure. But it was so far away.”
Mack said, “I don’t think I want to know what it was, then.”
“If it’s dangerous we should know about it.”
“It’s probably gone by now. Let’s go. Time for church.”
* *
Wearing a white funeral robe, as everyone else was, Thorn decided he was getting closer to heaven. He felt like he was in some purgatory that was burning off and tapering away. The veil between the living and the dead was thinning. He could feel it—he knew he was now becoming close to glory because he was so fortunate to be where he could enjoy an epic display of grand religion. His soul stirred.
The Stained Glass Choir Window hologram sang from on high, following the crowd, as the mourners walked. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, the way to dusty death of all your dots. Out, out, far away sun. Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor patron that had an hour in a cave and then was seen no more. It was marketing full of sound and fury, signifying nothing when the spending is over. The logo has been removed. If I only had a brain.”
A procession walked from the huge legs of the tall statue of a union worker, The Colossus of Gaol, to the city bridge. Then it crossed over toward the side of the lake with the hippistick tent camp, to combine the separate attending societies. Thorn became disappointed. As they left the city the religious display was no longer supplemented by machines. So it no longer seemed stupendously grand to him.
The crowd ended at the lakeside cemetery in dim red light. A wide circle of thirty pillars of salt, a meter wide and ten meters high, surrounded a stark white grid platform. Thorn watched from the distance, standing next to one of the salt pillars. He stood inconspicuously next to Malbri Three, nervous of any hostile anti-clone union members who might be in attendance and might be overly emotional. There were so many unknown faces in the line of people waiting to speak.
A woman said, “Madam Wintermirror was the first person I knew who wanted to keep one foot in cloning and the other in rebellion. She helped inspire a new way of living for all of us that rejected extremism and embraced the easy contradictions of the angry human mind.”
A man said, “Madam Wintermirror has been put through the green mill and is now only the powder of soil. She only made up a few small handfuls. Millions will have to die like her to make this place a real field of fertile soil that can be called a farm field. How many dead plants did it take to finally build up all the soil of Earth for us to use up? Her monument should be that she was among the first powder to make this a field of soil that someday will be fit to be a field of barley.”
Eleven Jane stepped forward and began to sing loudly, as she wailed in grief, “Black spots on Earth. Fire pits! No picnics with meat chips and lifeless in bed without pushing up daisies! No daisies! Disease! Daisies in the vanity garden where dreamers sneak between funerals!”
Those who knew the dirge joined in, “The sun will shine in a circular path in any direction without irony. Life was brief.”
Thorn said to Malbri Three, “Damn is she beautiful.”
“Dude. Get real. She’s been crying. She looks awful.”
“She looks just beautiful, sad like that. I want to just take her in my arms and hold her tight to my chest. And then kiss her neck. I’m sure she would like the comfort and she’d want me even closer. She’s so beautiful.”
“Are you on LSD?”
“When she cries, her lips need kissed.”
“You’re on LSD.”
Thorn grabbed his chest. “She is sad and she needs to be held and…”
“I’m sorry,” a voice buzzed through Thorn’s head.
He asked Malbri Three. “Did you just say, I’m sorry?”
“Nope.”
“Wow! Crap! A radio in my head just said I’m sorry, and I’m horribly afraid to say this… but it sounded exactly like Chrysalis Joy!”
“Another clone?”
“A dead clone. But I just heard his voice as clear as tubes and it was sorry!”
“Why would anybody broadcast sorry to us out here at Madam Wintermirror’s funeral? Somebody weepy in administration?”
Thorn insisted, “It sounded just like Chrysalis Joy. He was my best friend but he’s dead. I saw him frozen in ice along with the rest of the batch of him. It was ghastly! They say it’s primitive and horrible to freeze clones in ice like that. They say they should modernize the clone killing. I say they should stop the clone killing altogether!”
“Maybe he still has other clones walking around out there or maybe it was just a recording somehow unsticking.”
“But sorry? At a funeral? It sounds deliberate.”
“I don’t know, dude.” Malbri Three shrugged.
“I am not a damn decoyboy!” the voice in his head added. Thorn shuddered with fear.
“Let’s walk.” Malbri Three tugged on Thorn’s sleeve. “You look horrible.” They strolled down a path to the lake and then went out onto the floating docks and looked over at th
e distant city glowing with blue light. “It looks sinister, doesn’t it?”
Thorn said, “I think it looks great, from here. But up close you can see it’s abandoned and getting dusty.”
“Why don’t you just join us at the camp, here,” Malbri Three invited. “Stay behind and leave all the world you knew.”
“I can’t go back to the world I knew. That was Earth. I was a criminal. It was a long time ago. It’s been destroyed since then. It was destroyed long long ago…”
“No, I mean leave that puny union and their puny job. Leave it and join us. They can’t help you.”
“I didn’t ever think they could. I was planning on helping them. Somehow.”
“By being a hostage? That’s crazy thinking.”
Thorn shrugged. “Maybe I can help them all find heaven. Maybe there’s an elevator they didn’t know about just over…”
“There is no heaven like that.”
Thorn’s expression hardened. “It’s what I really believe, deep down. What I’ve seen so far hasn’t taken all that away. It’s still a belief. You can’t give up your religious beliefs just because they’ve been challenged.”
“Join us here. The new union leadership is going to have new problems they just can’t understand.”
“What do you know about unions?”
“I’ve a channel to the library. I read. Animals on earth evolved to fight, while humans veered off on the quest to shop. Labor unions fought for shopping power which saved the economy since capitalism needed shopping populations to demand the supply. Jobs are created by customers. unions greatly expanded the middle class. Unions were important in their day for bringing benefits and health care and days off and a contented old age of accelerated shopping. But that was then.”
Thorn agreed. “This city already provides all those needs no matter who you are and what you do... or don’t do.”
“Now in space,” Malbri Three continued, “the union is fighting for eternal life. That’s very new in all the millions of years of life or hundreds of years of unions. When you think thoughts so unprecedented then the mind goes numb with greed, a new greed that has nothing to do with capital. And the robber scientists won’t share their power, as new weapons are always kept hidden. The robber scientists don’t have to share and the economy won’t collapse from it. We’re playing with new rules that don’t seem to have any consequences. If the robber scientists have new cloned bodies then they can just hide until the union grows old and everybody in it dies. We’ll all be buried here somebody.”
“Why salt,” Thorn asked, looking back at the ring of pillars up on the hill. “Funeral salt?”
“The pillars should be salt.”
“I just thought it sort of odd. A bit cheap, or is it?”
“No,” Malbri Three said. “Not for space. In fact, since space mining, precious stones and metals are customary all over the place. In space, salt is very rare and diamonds aren’t at all. So salt is our rare precious material. It’s our formality. Our spiritual metaphor. Salt was the ocean water that we began in and we’ll always carry it with us still in our blood. We carry the timeless ocean in our heart and veins, into space. So salt has a new symbolic significance for deep space and for a deep space cemetery and burial ritual.”
“I remember when salt was nothing on Earth. I remember the first time I was Thorn. I hope most my memories are accurate and were dubbed down to me the right way. I hope I am who I think I was. Sometimes I think I picked up some other memories, too. I think the radio waves went too far—leaked past those around me in next door fishtanks.”
Malbri Three slapped Thorn on the back. “Dude. You’re so much more than just a clone. Really, a person.”
“Well of course. I just have to wonder who that is exactly.”
“If you stayed with us hippisticks I’m sure we’d vote you in to agree that you had a soul.”
“A soul?” Thorn was puzzled. “You can’t vote on a thing like that.”
“I don’t say things lightly,” Malbri Three said, “we try to take as much of our traditions from the past. From Earth.”
“They did that on Earth?” Thorn questioned.
“Sure. It seems that to have a soul is mostly a citizenship thing. It’s important to have the establishment decide you’re equal to them. That’s what the library said, anyway. It should know. It’s read all the books.”
“Really?”
“It’s hard to decipher history from books because they disagree with each other. I love it when the books get fighting. They’re getting to where they can sort themselves out. But every book thinks it’s important and nobody wants to lose without a fight.”
Venus walked up to them. “There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Damn you Malbri Three, kidnapping my clone and ducking out before a funeral ends all the way. Damn.”
He chuckled. “This clone is all yours?”
“We have to get back. We’re meeting in the terminal food court. But don’t tell anybody. Only a few have been told. It’ll be a special meeting, being that it features a talking clone.”
Malbri Three raised his eyebrows. “Union meetings are becoming secret? That’s dangerous.”
She shook her head as if it was all beyond crazy. “There’s an angry protest right now, this very moment, in the city. There was a boycott of our funeral and a protest in the union hall about the burial of Madam Wintermirror. It just blew up. They think she should have been statueized. They think this hippistick treatment is blasphemy. They think that to put a dead body in a cemetery is in extreeemely poor taste. They say it’s a shocking disgrace. A lot of people are very mad.”
“That’s all?” Thorn said. “That’s no reason for a protest.”
“It was a nice funeral,” Malbri Three said.
“I agree.” Venus wiped a tear. “I was moved by it. But it struck a nasty nerve to some. Madam Wintermirror was a righteous symbol of the union that Mack just can’t replace. They’re all hopping damn mad right now. Anger is easy to rile up in angry people when they’re also grieving, but this is certainly a sign of something deeper. Much deeper.”
“It always is.” Malbri Three nodded.
“Look!” Venus gasped. They saw flames shoot out of one of the buildings in the city. “City Hall is on fire!” She shook her head in astonishment. “It’s never been used for anything… but still.”
Six huge water hydrants flew over to it, dragging long hoses into the lake. They blasted water all over it and extinguished it.
Thorn frowned. “It can’t be heaven if it’s on fire.”
Venus slapped at his arm. “Don’t be silly. Of course it isn’t heaven. We told you that. Were you still trying to believe in all that old stuff?”
There was a tangent in the lake at the end of one of the hoses. He pointed it out. “What was that?”
Malbri Three made a face. “Did that look like something was fighting with the water hoses?”
Thorn shrugged. “Maybe the hoses were trying to suck something up that didn’t want to be sucked up!”
Venus shuddered and grabbed Thorn’s arm. “Let’s go before those crazy people decide to protest something else.”
“You coming with us to the union meeting?” Thorn asked Malbri Three, hopefully. “You always have interesting things to say, and they say this will be a special meeting.” He smiled. “I’m there.”
“Sorry, dude.” He gave a face of great disapproval. “I won’t cross that bridge to step into sin.”
Venus pulled Thorn away. “Neither are we, we’re flying, dammit.”
“How?” Malbri Three asked.
“A few days before she died, Madam Wintermirror had pulled an old kite out of her closet. I was afraid of it, but seeing how the hydrants are flying so well I think it would be safe enough. And fun.” She was interrupted by commotion under the bridge. “What’s that?”
There was a scream.
Malbri Three cried out, “What going on!”
Venus
pulled at Thorn. As they came near, they saw a bright red human skeleton at the water’s edge.
“If it’s a hippistick,” Lady Hatchet said, already there, nervously pushing up on her gray roll of hair, “we’ll have no record to test against. We’ll never know who it is. Was!”
“Of course we do,” Eleven Jane answered, visibly shaken. “Jun Jun Two swims the lake as much as anybody and he’s been missing now for hours.”
Malbri Three insisted, “All swimming should be banned until we understand what just happened.”
Eleven Jane cried, “Who could have eaten Jun Jun Two like that? Oh!” She staggered as if she could faint. Thorn took her arms just enough to hold her up.
He said to her, “I have you.”
Malbri Three said, as if jealous, “Yeah, a clone comfort.”
Hearing him, Eleven Jane pulled herself away. “I won’t fall over.”
Thorn glared at Malbri Three like he wanted to punch him.
The water hydrants rolled up their hoses and flew away. “Oh here comes our ride,” Venus pointed up. From the cave sky far over the lake, from behind a cloud of black smoke, the empty kite arrived. It was flying erratically and missing them all completely, finally crashing into a far wall. Before it floated up to the ceiling it broke into three pieces and caught on fire. “We’ll be taking the car.”
chapter 7: there will be no revolution as long as there is good shopping
In the city at a deserted shopping mall, at a boutique on the third floor that was lined with dusty shelves and mannequins machine-cut from huge space diamonds, Venus and Lady Hatchet rummaged for an outfit for Thorn.
“Why can’t I just wear this robe?”
“Phhh. Hippistick,” Lady Hatchet explained, disdainfully.
“But doesn’t a person like Eleven Jane want to see men in clothes like these?”
“Sure, a little robe looks damn cute on you way over there in their lazy cave but we’re in the big city now. Pants!”
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