The ground was spongy with a bed of orange-brown needles, the path dappled blue and gold with rustling shadow. The house where they had lunched was lost behind them. After the house, which had struck Mendeni as some eccentric but fascinating art museum, he was not surprised to find that the grounds beyond it had been much landscaped and coiffed into equally ostentatious gardens...but now they had entered into a more natural section of the dark woods.
He was already acquainted with his surroundings in a way, however, as he had looked at satellite pictures of the property previously. That was what had started it all, in fact. Paxton University’s history department had been granted limited use of the satellite in order to search for the ruins or traces of historical sites in what little forest remained in this region. He had been discouraged from viewing corporate-owned properties at anything but a discreet distance, so he had reluctantly turned away from his puzzled examination of an oddly unfocused factory his wandering scans had chanced upon in Punktown’s second largest industrial sector, and he had been flat-out forbidden to scan private property...but when he saw what was on the Bellakees’ land he couldn’t restrain himself from approaching them. Luckily for him, they had welcomed his interest...made him their guest today for the first time.
“Here we are, my boy,” announced Mr. Bellakee proudly, as if he had installed the relic on the grounds himself. He turned to grin at Mendeni, his smile white as paper in his tanned face. Mrs. Bellakee was smiling more subtly, as befitted her aura of reserve. She was a strikingly beautiful woman in her early thirties, younger than her husband by two decades. Lipstick as red as her glasses were dark, the two seeming to define her face. Mendeni had found his eyes constantly returning to that face and her fit, graceful body despite all the art in the house and flowers outside it. But his eyes were now drawn to the object his host indicated, as the trees seemed to part like curtains to reveal it.
It was an idol built by his own people, a century before the arrival of Earth colonists; a temple of the Raloom faith, of which Mendeni’s own paternal grandfather had been a member. The idol/temple was in the form of a huge head and shoulders, rising up from the ground as if the rest of its titan’s body might be buried below. The great bust was entirely fashioned out of iron, once a majestic black but now corroded to a rusty red. The Chooms were outwardly identical to the Earth people except for their mouths, which spread back nearly to their ears. This feature was reflected in the iron face, the mouth held in a huge solemn frown. It would be difficult to tell if the eyes depicted were meant to be open or closed through the rough-textured coat of corrosion, had Mendeni not already known that the eyes of Raloom were eternally gazing into the soul of each and every one of his worshipers.
“What do you think?” asked Mrs. Bellakee in a respectful whisper, as if they stood in a great cathedral. She stood so close beside him that their shoulders touched. He found himself deeply inhaling her perfume. “He’s quite handsome, isn’t he? I think he looks rather like you, actually.”
“It’s magnificent,” he managed, his attention torn between the two works of art. “I’ve never seen one whole before except in a museum. Again...I really have to thank you two. This is a true thrill for me...”
“Come inside it,” invited Mr. Bellakee, leading the way. Grinning, waving beckoningly. The others followed him as if he were a priest conducting them within. There were metal steps behind the iron sphinx, ascending into the back of its head. The metal doors opened smoothly—and Mendeni realized that they were newly fashioned doors on clean new hinges.
How could they alter the relic like that? How could they tamper with it so? But before he could verbalize his concerns in some polite way, the three of them were inside the temple.
“Oh my God,” Mendeni muttered under his breath.
It was to Mendeni as if they had scooped out the brain of one man to implant an alien brain in its place. Gone was the circular altar that should be in here. Instead, there was a circular bed. Jars of aromatic oil burned sultrily, and there was a vidcamera mounted on a tripod.
Mendeni turned to his hosts in horror, uncomprehending, and saw that Mrs. Bellakee was pulling her thin summer dress up over her head. Her sunglasses were gone but the lipstick smile remained. Now she was as naked as a goddess or a sacrifice in the wavering light from the oil jars, so that their glow and aroma seemed to be generated by her body.
“I’ve seen you looking at me,” she said, again in a whisper, as if in mocking awe of the place.
Mendeni glanced at Mr. Bellakee, who rested a reassuring hand on his arm. “Don’t worry, my boy, I’m not asking to join in. I’ll watch from the house.” He gestured at the camera. “My wife liked your look when she saw you on the vidphone...and I’m sure you liked hers.”
“But...” Mendeni began. His eyes darted back to that glorious flesh against the rough rusted walls. Oddly, the decaying metal seemed more transitory, the soft flesh more lasting.
Bellakee patted his arm again and kissed his wife’s cheek on the way out. Then Mrs. Bellakee lay back on the bed, propping up one leg. Smiling at him, both horizontally and vertically. Waiting for him, an offering to the new goddess.
At last, after staring at her a while longer, Mendeni was almost surprised to find his fingers working at his shirt’s seal strip. Outside, he heard one of the two frolicking baboons grunt loudly, wildly at the other.
As he lay atop her, he found he couldn’t look at her beautiful face any longer. Instead, he lifted his gaze to the curved walls. The inner skull of the great Raloom...who, though he had been lobotomized, though his eyes were on the outside of the temple and crusted in decay, seemed to be gazing sternly and despairingly straight into Mendeni’s soul.
IMMOLATION
1: KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES
They had made it snow again this weekend, as they would every weekend until Christmas. Not on the weekdays, hampering the traffic of workers, or so much today as to inconvenience the shoppers; rather, enough to inspire consumers to further holiday spirit, and further purchases.
High atop the Vat, a machine that to some might resemble an oil tanker of old standing on its prow, Magnesium Jones crouched back amongst the conduits and exhaust ports like an infant gargoyle on the verge of crowning. His womb was a steamy one; the heat from the blowers would have cooked a birther like a lobster. Jones was naked, his shoulder pressed against the hood of a whirring fan. When he had instant coffee or soup to make he would boil water by resting a pot atop the fan’s cap. He was not wearing clothes lest they catch fire.
Not all the cultures were designed to be so impervious to heat; some, rather, were unperturbed by extreme cold. On the sixth terrace of the plant proper, which faced the Vat, a group of cultures took break in the open air, a few of them naked and turning their faces up to the powdery blizzard invitingly. It had been an alarming development for many, the Plant’s management allowing cultures to take break. It suggested they needed consideration, even concern.
Jones squinted through the blowing veils of snow. He recognized a number of the laborers. Though all were bald, and all cloned from a mere half dozen masters, their heads were tattooed in individual designs so as to distinguish them from each other. Numbers and letters usually figured into these designs—codes. Some had their names tattooed on their foreheads, and all tattoos were colored according to department: violet for Shipping, gray for the Vat, blue for Cryogenics, red for the Ovens, and so on. Magnesium Jones’s tattoo was of the last color. But there was also some artistry employed in the tattoo designs. They might portray familiar landmarks from Punktown, or from Earth where most of Punktown’s colonists originated, at least in ancestry. Animals, celebrities, sports stars. Magnesium Jones’s tattoo was a ring of flame around his head like a corona, with a few black letters and a bar code in the flames like the charred skeleton of a burnt house.
Some artistry, some fun and flourish, was also employed in the naming of the cultures. On the terrace he recognized Sherlock Jones, Imitation Jone
s and Basketball Jones. He thought he caught a glimpse of Subliminal Jones heading back inside. Waxlips Jones sat on the edge of the railing, dangling his legs over the street far below. Jones Jones held a steaming coffee. Huckleberry Jones was in subdued conversation with Digital Jones. Copyright Jones and M.I. Jones emerged from the building to join the rest.
Watching them, Magnesium Jones missed his own conversations with some of them, missed the single break that he looked forward to through the first ten hours of the work day. But did he miss the creatures themselves, he wondered? He felt a kinship with other cultures, an empathy for their lives, their situations, in a general sense...but that might merely be because he saw himself in them, felt for his own life, his own situation. Sometimes the kinship felt like brotherhood. But affection? Friendship? Love? He wasn’t sure if his feelings could be defined in that way. Or was it just that the birthers felt no more strongly, merely glossed and romanticized their own pale feelings?
But Jones did not share the plight of the robot, the android...the question of whether they could consider themselves alive, of whether they could aspire to actual emotion. He felt very much alive. He felt some very strong emotions. Anger. Hatred. These feelings, unlike love, were not at all ambiguous.
He turned away from the snowy vista of Plant and city beyond, shivering, glad to slip again into his nest of thrumming heat. From an insulated box he had stolen and dragged up here he took some clothing. Some of it was fireproof, some not. The long black coat, with its broad lapels turned up to protect his neck from the snow, had a heated mesh in the lining. Worn gloves, and he pulled a black ski hat over his bald head, as much to conceal his tattoo as to shield his naked scalp from snow. He stared at his wrist, willing numbers to appear there. They told him the time. A feature all the cultures at the Plant possessed, to help them time their work efficiently. He had an appointment, a meeting, but he had plenty of time yet to get there.
As much as he scorned his former life in the Plant, there were some behaviors too ingrained to shake. Magnesium Jones was ever punctual.
* * *
Walking the street, Jones slipped on a pair of dark glasses. In the vicinity of the Plant it would be easy to recognize him as a culture. The six masters had all been birther males, criminals condemned to death (they had been paid for the rights to clone them for industrial labor). Under current law it was illegal to clone living human beings. Clones of living beings might equate themselves with their originals. Clones of living beings might thus believe they had certain rights.
Wealthy people stored clones of themselves in case of mishap, cloned families and friends, illegally. Everyone knew that. For all Jones knew, the president of the Plant might be a clone himself. But still, somehow, the cultures were cultures. Still a breed of their own.
Behind the safe shields of his dark lenses, Jones studied the faces of people he passed on the street. Birthers, Christmas shopping, but their faces closed off in hard privacy. The closer birthers were grouped together, the more cut off they became from each other in that desperate animal need for their own territory, even if it extended no further than their scowls and stern, downcast eyes.
Distant shouted chants made him turn his head, though he already knew their source. There was always a group of strikers camped just outside the barrier of the Plant. Tents, smoke from barrel fires, banners rippling in the snowy gusts. There was one group on a hunger strike, emaciated as concentration camp prisoners. A few weeks ago, one woman had self-immolated. Jones had heard screams, and come to the edge of his high hideout to watch. He had marveled at the woman’s calm as she sat cross-legged, a black silhouette with her head already charred bald at the center of a small inferno...had marveled at how she did not run or cry out, panic or lose her resolve. He admired her strength, her commitment. It was a sacrifice for her fellow human beings, an act which would suggest that the birthers felt a greater brotherhood than the cultures did, after all. But then, their society encouraged such feelings, whereas the cultures were discouraged from friendship, companionship, affection.
Then again, maybe the woman had just been insane.
* * *
To reach the basement pub Jones edged through a narrow tunnel of dripping ceramic brick, the floor a metal mesh...below which he heard dark liquid rushing. A section of wall on the right opened up, blocked by chicken wire, and in a dark room like a cage a group of mutants or aliens or mutated aliens gazed out at him as placid as animals waiting to eat or be eaten (and maybe that was so, too); they were so tall their heads scraped the ceiling, thinner than skeletons, with cracked faces that looked shattered and glued back together. Their hair was cobwebs blowing, though to Jones the clotted humid air down here seemed to pool around his legs.
A throb of music grew until he opened a metal door and it exploded in his face like a boobytrap. Slouched heavy backs at a bar, a paunchy naked woman doing a slow grinding dance atop a billiard table. Jones did not so much as glance at her immense breasts, aswirl in smoky colored light like planets; the Plant’s cultures had no sexual cravings, none of them even female.
At a corner table sat a young man with red hair, something seldom seen naturally. He smiled and made a small gesture. Jones headed toward him, slipping off his shades. He watched the man’s hands atop the table; was there a gun resting under the newspaper?
The man’s hair was long and greasy, his beard scruffy and inadequate, but he was good-looking and his voice was friendly. “Glad you decided to come. I’m Nevin Parr.” They shook hands. “Sit down. Drink?”
“Coffee.”
The man motioned to a waitress, who brought them both a coffee. The birther wasn’t dulling his senses with alcohol, either, Jones noted.
“So how did you meet my pal Moodring?” asked the birther, lifting his chipped mug for a cautious sip.
“On the street. He gave me money for food in turn for a small favor.”
“So now you move a little drug for him sometimes. Hold hot weapons for him sometimes.”
Jones frowned at his gloved hands, knotted like mating tarantulas. “I’m disappointed. I thought Moodring was more discreet than that.”
“Please don’t be angry at him; I told you, we’re old pals. So, anyway...should I call you Mr. Jones?” Parr smiled broadly. “Magnesium? Or is it Mag?”
“It’s all equally meaningless.”
“I’ve never really talked with a culture before.”
“We prefer ‘shadow’.”
“All right. Mr. Shadow. So how old are you?”
“Five.”
“Pretty bright for a five year old.”
“Memory-encoded long-chain molecules in a brain drip. I knew my job before I even got out of the tank.”
“Of course. Five, huh? So that’s about the age when they start replacing you guys, right? They say that’s when you start getting uppity...losing control. That’s why you escaped from the Plant, isn’t it? You knew your time was pretty much up.”
“Yes. I knew what was coming. Nine cultures in my crew were removed in two days. They were all about my age. My supervisor told me not to worry, but I knew...”
“Cleaning house. Bringing in the fresh meat. They kill them, don’t they? The old cultures. They incinerate them.”
“Yes.”
“I heard you killed two men in escaping. Two real men.”
“Moodring is very talkative.”
“It isn’t just him. You killed two men. I heard they were looking for you. Call you ‘hothead’, because of your tattoo. Can I see it?”
“That wouldn’t be wise in public, would it?”
“You’re not the only escaped clone around here, but you’re right, we have work that demands discretion. Just that I like tattoos; I have some myself. See?” He rolled up a sleeve, exposing a dark mass that Jones only gave a half glance. “I hear they get pretty wild with your tattoos. Someone must enjoy himself.”
“Robots do the tattooing. They’re just accessing clip art files. Most times it has nothi
ng to do with our function or the name that was chosen for us. It’s done to identify us, and probably for the amusement of our human coworkers. Decorative for them, I suppose.”
“You haven’t been caught, but you’re still living in this area, close to the Plant. You must be stealthy. That’s a useful quality. So where are you staying?”
“That’s none of your concern. When you need me you leave a message with Moodring. When he sees me around he’ll tell me. Moodring doesn’t need to know where I live, either.”
“He your friend, Moodring, or is it just business?”
“I have no friends.”
“That’s too bad. I think you and I could be friends.”
“You don’t know how much that means to me. So, why did you want me? Because I’m a culture? And if so, why?”
“Again...because you killed two men escaping the Plant. I know you can kill again, given the right incentive.”
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