She shook her head. “These aren’t the villas. We aren’t at the very top.”
“We can see what there is along the way, if we can.”
“Damn you, you’re just going to get us killed!”
They stepped into a dark empty room lit by a crude opening in the ceiling. They climbed stone steps and entered an odd store. Lady Hatchet picked up a white bonnet, sniffed it, and put it back down. “I’m in a time machine,” she said, walking to the window to look out. “This is a general store. We’re in a Wild West town in the 1800s. Damn.” Lady Hatchet waved it all off superciliously. “Not my cup of tea.”
Thorn asked, “This is where the scientists live? In a dumb old museum town? What junk.”
They went outside and looked around. “Phhh. It doesn’t even look entirely convincing if you ask me.” She yelled out, “Hello? Anybody home? Hello?” Her voice bounced off the far ceiling, although a hologram covered it to look like a sky with wispy clouds.
Thorn walked around the corner of the livery stable and saw a gorgeous hayfield. Beyond that was a distant woods. He couldn’t go any farther than a wood fence, though. The countryside was just a hologram against a boundary wall. “It’s gorgeous.”
“Open those barn doors. I want to look inside. I bet there were a lot of square dances and rolls in the hay, in there.”
Thorn shuddered. “I wonder if there are any cats in there.”
“You afraid of cats?”
“Just before Chrysalis Joy died he remembered a barn cat. He told me how in his first life on Earth it had been his pet and then went to the barn and went wild. I didn’t remember what barns and cats were at that time. But seeing all this, it all comes back. All of it. I understand what he was trying to tell me, now. No matter what kind of a world you give a cat they go wild when they can if they can get away to a barn. Then they start to live their own life.”
She narrowed her eyes as she looked at him. “You have been slow to remember things. You weren’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
He smiled vapidly. “You thought that by now I’d have the wisdom of the ages?”
She shook her head. “It just wouldn’t be fair, would it, for such a pretty young thing as you to have the wisdom of the ages. But still, when you’ve lived life over and over, don’t you at some point pick something up?”
“I think so but I keep forgetting it again and again…”
A boy’s voice said, “Who are you?”
They turned and saw a barefoot boy wearing a brown toga. Lady Hatchet asked him, “Who are you?”
The boy looked Thorn up and down and took a nervous step back. “You’re not my dad. You talk different. You have an odd accent.”
“Of course I’m not your dad.”
The boy said, “You look just like him. You must be a clone of him.”
“A clone of me is your dad?” Thorn saw some of his face in the boy’s face. He shuddered. “Are you a clone?”
The boy shook his head. “Dad said I was blood born. He said it was disgusting.” He regarded Lady Hatchet. “What are you?”
“Old. And… blood born, too. If genetics is random and accidental then it’s real—so we don’t regard it as disgusting.”
He shrugged. “I don’t remember it so I don’t know if it’s real.”
Lady Hatchet tapped her noggin. “Our own memory of being born is never in here but it’s real, alright.”
Thorn asked, “Who’s your mom?”
The boy shrugged. “She disappeared a few years ago. Just disappeared. When dad went crazy she was out of here, I guess. Are you crazy, too?”
Thorn hesitantly answered, “I don’t think so.”
Lady Hatchet asked, “What is your name?”
“Nuremburg.”
She smiled. “Hello Nuremburg. How old are you?”
“Twelve, I think. I don’t know. I don’t ever think about that, not toooo much.”
She looked around. “Where is everybody? Is your crazy father around?”
Nuremburg looked down the dusty street. “Here? I hope not! You don’t want my dad around. He went crazy.” The boy showed them that his two front teeth were gone. “He hits me when he shows up. I bet he’d go really crazy to see you.” The boy took another step backwards. “You’re not going to hit me, are you?”
Thorn put his hands behind his back. “Of course not.”
Lady Hatchet frowned. “And he didn’t even get you new teeth. Nobody did? Who are these rotten robber scientists?”
The boy shrugged. “They’re gone. They ain’t where I ever am. But I stay here mostly so I can be by myself. Nobody else comes to this place anymore.”
Thorn looked around in worry. “Where’s your father?”
“Oh don’t worry. He ain’t here. He hardly comes here. But he went crazy and who knows what crazy people do all day.”
“He doesn’t live here?”
“Oh, nobody lives here. This is just a safari. One of them.”
“How many of these safari places are there?”
Nuremburg looked around. “I think there were four. But the other ones don’t have any air anymore. There was a place of Venice things and parties. I went there every Christmas before dad went crazy. It would snow and we’d ice skate in a big square. It was full of pigeons. But that doesn’t have any air anymore so I can’t go there anyway. That whole place is now covered in ice, all of it. The sky is all icicles. I went there once with an air mask and it was really weird to see it that way. All the people are too busy to be around anymore, to fix it. Or they went away and went back to Earth. Or they died. People change. Places change. Have you ever seen a whole town covered in ice?”
Thorn asked, “Can we see where the scientists used to live? Are there any that still walk around? I have a lot of questions for them.”
The boy shook his head. “I’d rather not.”
“Why?”
“If we see my dad then there will be a big fight. He gets more and more crazy all the time.”
Thorn asked, “Can we talk to somebody else besides your dad? I don’t really want to talk to a clone of myself, anyway. That would be very weird for me.”
“I haven’t seen anybody else but you two in almost three months now. I’m keeping away from him, just because. I do what I want.” He pushed his tongue out between his missing teeth.
Lady Hatchet gasped again. “You stay all by yourself all the time?”
Nuremburg nodded. “It’s just me and the old Indian sage in the desert. But he don’t do or say toooo much.”
Thorn looked around. “Where’s that? Who’s he?”
Nuremburg pointed. “Past the canyon. Let’s go. I’ll show you. It’ll be fun!” He smiled big and took their cuffs to pull them along. They walked with him.
Lady Hatchet smiled, happy that he was smiling. “You don’t have anybody to play with you, do you? Come back with us and we’ll get you some new front teeth, and there’s many hippistick children and adults to care for you. They’ve planned a great act of sabotage and you’ll be much safer to be with them when it happens. You could die in a place like this. Everything could be destroyed. Especially a place like this. It’s so open. You’d certainly be buried in all this sand.”
Thorn said, “I want to meet this old Indian sage, first. There’s certainly time for that. Maybe he can tell me what happened to everybody and what’s going on with the robber scientists.”
The boy laughed. “He don’t say toooo much.”
“You called him a sage.”
“That’s what they called him.” They walked down a hill to an aluminum canoe at the shore near a stream.
Lady Hatchet paused. “I’m not getting in that.”
The boy traipsed to it. “It’s fun! It’s so much fun! I wanna show you! Let’s go!”
“No.”
“Please! It’s fun!”
“I do not get wet!”
Thorn picked her up and put her in, and then stepped in, himself. Thorn said to he
r, “It’s dry in a boat, don’t worry. I won’t let you get wet.”
The boy paddled them away. They canoed past a row of dead pine trees and went into a canyon. Thorn said, “It’s a shame Mack isn’t here. He would have loved this place.”
“It used to be more exciting,” the boy said. “They hunted Indians. But then they stopped making them and they all ran out.”
Lady Hatchet looked up into the close canyon walls. “Hunted? With what?”
“Old fashioned guns, of course. Even though they didn’t shoot straight, being so old fashioned, they still shot them all. The Indians all gone now. They took a long time to grow anyway. What’s the word for it? Extinct. Now they’re all extinct. You can see their bodies drying up, if you want, sometime. You have to hike up there to see that. It’s neat. There’s no buzzards to pick them clean. I saw a movie once how that used to happen on Earth, for real. Here they just lay there and dry up. One of them started growing plants out of him. That was neat to see. But then he dried up too much and the plants died.”
Thorn said, “But the sage is still around. You said he was.”
“No. He’s extinct, too.”
“Nuremburg!” Lady Hatcher poked at him. “We’re going to visit with a dead man? I will do no such thing! Turn this boat back, at once, and we’ll go where it’s safer with the hippisticks.”
“No.”
“Posthaste, damn it!”
“No! The really fun part is just up ahead.”
“Turn this boat back at once!” The water picked up speed and they began to hit rapids. Lady Hatchet held on and screamed repeatedly.
Nuremburg laughed like crazy as he paddled furiously to keep them from crashing into the rocks.
Thorn shook his head in amazement. “Mack would have really loved this!”
Past the rapids, they came to a sand dune and Nuremburg paddled the canoe to it and got out. He pointed to the dune. “Over there is the sage.”
“Are you trying to kill us?” She yelled at Thorn, “I was splashed!”
“That will dry in no time.” Thorn picked up Lady Hatchet and carried her over the dune. They spotted a second dune and on top of it was a teepee. Thorn asked, “Is that real or a hologram?”
“It’s real and the sage is inside.” They all walked to it. Inside was a mummified bald man sitting so that he seemed more like a Buddha in a blue quilted bathrobe. “Sit before the sage and then all your answers will come to you.”
“What do you mean?” Lady Hatchet asked, as Thorn helped her onto the soft ground.
Nuremburg said, “All the answers to all the questions that you have are already inside of you. When you sit before the sage in silence then they come to you.”
Lady Hatchet asked, “Who told you that?”
“I did. While sitting here. I was talking to it and then it came to me. I found out that I have all my own answers.”
Lady Hatchet shook her head. “I’m not young enough anymore to have all the answers in me like that.”
Thorn asked the boy, “Just sit here and my answer will come to me?” The boy nodded. Thorn asked the mummified man, “What has become of the robber scientists? How do we clone consciousness? Am I still a criminal anymore? Am I a cop? Will the coming sabotage free all the clones?”
After they sat in silence for a few minutes, smoke blew out of the dead man’s mouth. Thorn sniffed. “What is that?”
Nuremburg breathed in deeply and finally said. “It’s pot.”
Lady Hatchet scrambled to get up, brushing sand off her legs. “Let’s get out of this place before we’re found in puddles of our own drool.” She angrily waved it all off. “Phhh!”
Thorn got up and pulled the boy out of the teepee. “So this is how you spend your days? I’m taking you out of here.”
Nuremburg shook his head. “You can’t take me away. You don’t own me.”
“I’m a clone of your father, and that has to mean something. I have to protect you.”
“You won’t be taking me anywhere. I won’t tell you how to get back up the river.”
Thorn pointed to the top of the canyon. “My guess is we can walk back that way.”
“Then go. But leave me be.”
Lady Hatchet looked him in the eyes. “Listen young man. You cannot be here when the hippisticks sabotage the place.”
“Do what?”
Thorn explained, “They plan to re-spin it for awhile to make it feel like it’s all tipping over.”
Lady Hatchet added, “Discombobulate the whole damn asteroid to hell.”
Thorn continued, “You’ll go flying. You’re going to hit the ceiling and walls. In good conscience I can’t leave you here.”
“Tip this whole place over? This place? All of it?”
Thorn looked around. “You could die, or be left very very hurt… or just buried alive in sand until you suffocate. I can’t leave you—you’re my flesh and blood.”
Nuremburg looked shocked. “They’d do that? Is everybody around here crazy?”
Lady Hatchet nodded. “Anarchy like that is crazy, for sure.”
Thorn warned him, “It’s going to smash up everything, no matter who you are. They want to destroy what they don’t like about the world, which is about everything. They’ve already gone out and adjusted the gravity rockets to change the spin so they can tip the place over, or make it feel like that’s happening. I’m not making this up. You can’t stay here and expect to live to tell about it.”
The boy looked around. “This will all tip over?”
Thorn nodded. “The whole asteroid is going to go into a loop-de-loop in space, and so yes, that’s what it will feel like everywhere inside. Tipping over. And everything around inside will all smash up! That river back there is going to hit the ceiling!”
Nuremburg looked around. “My sand dune! Everything ruined. The orchard is already dead. Now I can’t even keep a sand dune!” He shook his head in dismay, turned, and started to walk the other way.
Thorn asked, “Where are you going?”
He pointed ahead. “There’s a door back here behind the hologram. It takes us to the town.”
Lady Hatchet asked, “Where we first entered?”
He nodded. “We all just went in one big circle.” They walked through the desert sky, went down a hallway, took an elevator up four stories, and stepped into a room that led to the backroom of a saloon. As they walked through the bar, Nuremburg pointed to the stage. On it was a lineup of life-sized marionettes of cancan dancers. “When they kick their legs up you can see they aren’t wearing any underwear.” He giggled wildly, revealing his true lack of maturity.
“Phhh. I bet you spend a lot of time here, then.”
“Oh yes!” He regarded the bar. “The root beer is tooooo good.”
Lady Hatchet finally tore her eyes away from them. “That’s where babies come from when they’re blood born.”
Nuremburg didn’t look convinced.
They walked down the thirteen flights of steps and returned to the room behind the overgrown zoo. Thorn pointed to the elevator and asked Nuremburg, “Where does the elevator go?”
“All kinds of places. All the same places as the stairs.”
“After we’ve left you with the hippisticks, I’m going back up those steps, all the way to all the doors to see what else is all up there along the way.”
“At the very top is the villas,” Nuremburg said. “Where the scientists all used to live.”
Thorn asked, “Who lives there now?”
“I told you. I don’t see anybody around anymore. I hope I don’t. I don’t like getting hit.”
Lady Hatchet asked, “Is it a grand city? Is it as grand at the worker’s city?”
He shook his head. “It’s nice and all. But it’s just a whole bunch of rooms. Lots of rooms. Rooms for everybody when there were thousands of people. They all circle around a big park and a pond. But the trees are all dead now and the pond is all dried up and the sky is just rafters. Now it just see
ms to be only me, when I go there. Sometimes I see somebody but they just run away. It’s just a few crazy people there now, I guess.”
They stepped down into the back room and entered the jungle lab again. The boy ran on ahead, shouting over his shoulder. “It’s best to run through here real fast! It’s scary!”
“Look at that.” Lady Hatchet stood and pointed into the room. “Look!”
Thorn looked at were she was pointing. “What.”
“Those vines weren’t there before. I’m sure of it. They are right in the way, now. Somebody was here and moved them into the room, more.”
Thorn looked around. He looked closely at some of the mummies in the dry fishtanks. “I’m sure they didn’t move by themselves.”
Lady Hatchet went close to them and pulled at them. With a quick jab, a delicate tendril of one of the vines snapped out and struck her in her eye. A leaf at its tip acted as a suction-cup. It pulled the succulent orb clean out of her skull. When the vine snapped back it all vanished, camouflaging completely amongst all the others. “Where’d my eye go! I can’t see it! Oh my crap, that plant just stole my eye!”
He dug in the leaves for it. “I can’t see it anywhere, either!” Thin tendrils vibrated toward him and pricked his skin.
She fell back onto a bed of leaves, curling up and clapping her hands over her face, stunned with pain. A few other vines activated and lurched clumsily and torpidly towards her, only getting a few inches. Thorn snatched her up before she became pricked even worse.
They hurried from the lab, meeting up with Nuremburg who was waiting for them. They rushed out the lab door, down the hall and out the antechamber. “I’m sure glad there’s a hole in the wall. Nuremburg, help me get her through here.”
As he did, he said, “I put the hole here.”
“Why?”
“The doors were all locked.”
Under the dead vine shrouded marquee, Thorn nearly dropped Lady Hatchet on her head, nearly tripping over his own feet, in horror. Venus’s bloody body was on the ground, attacked and hacked apart, her blood and tissues strewn all over the terrace. “Venus! How’d she get here?” Thorn cried. “Who did this? What the hell!”
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