Multitude

by Swanson, Peter Joseph

  “Venus!” Lady Hatchet sobbed. She bent down and with the hand that wasn’t over her bleeding eye-socket she tenderly lifted the bloody shreds of what was left of Venus. “Oh no!”

  “Grad schoolers?” Thorn asked. “I’m going to kill all of them with my bare hands! Damn them all!”

  “A DNA test will prove everything, damn you.” Eleven Jane said, stepping up behind them.

  “Why are you holding a gun at me? I’m the cop.”

  Eleven Jane frowned. “And you are a murder suspect.”

  “Me?” Thorn asked, “How do I know you didn’t just do this to her? You’re the one who wants to destroy everything.”

  “I was busy… on my way here to apprehend you for this. I have my alibi well recorded. Now, git!”

  At gunpoint he was locked in a glass closet for a jail. He commented, “A hippistick with a gun?”

  Eleven Jane aimed it at his head. “Grow up.” Then she left him alone.

  In his head he heard himself laughing. But he wasn’t laughing. Somebody else in his head was laughing, or was radioing into his head just to laugh. Then all he heard was garble, with a voice that finally said, “He can kill them all.” Then he listened to a few more hours of static.

  Eleven Jane returned with water. He pleaded, “I didn’t kill her, of course. And my DNA means nothing, here. There’s so many of me around here somewhere, I fear.”

  Eleven Jane avoided his eyes. “How do we know you’re not the wrong clone?”

  “What?”

  “How do we know. We do know Thorn didn’t commit a crime since we know he cared about Venus. But what if you did because you’re somebody else who never even met her? You might even go by the same name.”

  “How? From where? I’m wearing his clothes.”

  “Sooooo… he switched clothes.”

  “Where would I come from then? I was with Lady Hatchet. She can say it was the real me. She was with me the whole time. And we met Nuremburg. He knows his clones right off. He’s a kid. They’re shrewd.”

  “She can be tricked. Kids can be tricked. You can make a switch with another clone of you when they’re off looking somewhere else. How many new distracting things have you all looked at today?”

  “No, and where would that other clone come from?”

  Eleven Jane said, “Out of the imaginary playpen of fishtank. Maybe you don’t even realize it. Maybe the grad schoolers are playing games again with clone minds and our minds. Maybe there are dozens—hundreds of you somewhere around here and maybe they’re all out walking around, laughing at us all, switching places when it suits them.”

  He asked, “Has there been a funeral for Venus, yet?”

  She finally looked into his eyes. “Do you want to go?”

  “Of course. I went to Madam Wintermirror’s.”

  She scoffed. “If you’re the wrong clone, they did you up good. Pretending to care. What a glossy piece of spit you are.”

  “I’m me! The good one. The one you went swimming with.”

  “I have to wonder.”

  “Ask Nuremburg! He’ll tell you my accent is different. I can’t fake that!”

  The clone Christopher Goi and hippistick Malbri Three walked in, reading their pens. Christopher Goi stated, “Out with him, he’s not the one.”

  “My accent could have just told you that, if you’d just asked the kid.”

  “Lucky you.” Eleven Jane promptly opened the door.

  Thorn stepped out and gave her a big bear hug. “I’m free!”

  She pulled away. “You’re a gorilla.”

  “Not lucky us, dude.” Malbri Three frowned.

  “My clone committed the murder?” Thorn surmised.

  Christopher Goi nodded. “It’s your DNA, alright, but DNA doesn’t copy perfectly.”

  “A sloppy clone,” Eleven Jane frowned. “Damn, and it’s a crazed murderer. Poor Venus! Why her! Why not kill somebody awful! Why her! She was the sweetest!”

  Thorn said, “I heard my own voice on my radio and just knew that’s what it was, but… didn’t want to know.”

  Malbri Three nodded. “I can imagine it’s scary to hear yourself like that.”

  Thorn asked Christopher Goi, “How did it feel having Chrysalis Joy out?”

  “He wasn’t murdering,” Christopher Goi stated.

  Eleven Jane pointed out, “And he didn’t come from a murderer. Thorn started out as a murderer. There could be some very scary Thorn clones out there now. ”

  “This rock was a prison,” Malbri Three said. “This place is full of clones that started as the worse crazy criminals.”

  “The clone who did this to our dear friend is a terrible clone.” Christopher Goi looked gravely to Thorn. “He’s too much for us to handle but not for you to handle. You need to go stop him.”

  Thorn nodded. “Yeah! Before another sweet innocent kind woman like Venus is killed.”

  Malbri Three said, “Go then and get him while I help Eleven Jane prepare the hippisticks for the perfect sabotage.”

  “First, there’s that funeral,” Eleven Jane reminded him. “No, Thorn, you didn’t miss it. Lady Hatchet has to get out of bed first. We’ll wait for her.”

  “She’s sick?” Thorn asked.

  “Sick in the heart,” Malbri Three answered. “She took what happened to Venus the hardest. Naturally.”

  “I’ll go see her,” Thorn said.

  Eleven Jane shook her head. “She’s not seeing anyone so you’ll have to just talk to her. Radio her.” She gave a pen to him.

  “Lady Hatchet?” Thorn called. “They say you won’t get out of bed. Hello?”

  “Who are you?”

  “It’s me!”

  “Phhh. Killer clown!”

  “I didn’t do it! The other me did it!”

  “You didn’t stop yourself either.”

  “Talk to me! Hello? You still there?”

  Lady Hatchet said, “Yes, I hear you. And you don’t need to give me your damn crocodile tears.”

  Thorn said, “I hope you’re not crying your new eye out.”

  “You’re too damn young to understand.” Lady Hatchet let out a sob. “Sure, if somebody your age died then you’d find your damn mind in a void, a great chaos of self pity. But an old woman dies and you just think that’s the way it is. She was damn old. Let her be dead. Old people should be dead. You get old and die and that’s natural. What else are old people supposed to do, but die. Old people are in the way anyway. Get the hell out of the way you old woman! You old knackered tart, die!” She sobbed.

  “I didn’t think that at all.”

  “Old people aren’t as people people as young people. You don’t want to be around them. You don’t find them clever. They don’t dance or make you laugh, not for real like you laugh with people your own age. Damn you. I hate you!”

  “No, no,” he insisted. “She was my friend, too.”

  “Your elderly friend,” Lady Hatchet said. “If she was your young friend you’d be on drugs right now trying to dull the pain of living in such a cruel and heartless pointless cold universe that is a vacuum of lifeless nothing. Nothing! Damn it! Damn you, young clone! Damn you!” She sobbed more.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “Where are you? You’re not going to hurt yourself!”

  She sobbed again. “Pfff! No, I’m not sitting on a gyro bike at the edge of a cliff. I’m just waiting for all the stages of mourning to pass so I can at least get out of bed.”

  “The stages of mourning?” he asked. “What?”

  Lady Hatchet said, “I don’t remember what they are. Some damn brain doctors say there are eight and some make it four. Does it matter? I tried to make it even simpler by smashing things. Damn everything! Everything should be smashed!”

  “Did it help you feel better?”

  “Phhh.”

  “What! Tell me!”

  “No. It didn’t help. I pulled a damn muscle!”

  “Will you be alright?” he asked.


  Lady Hatchet wept. After sniffling it back, she added, “Then I fell on my knees in despair and cracked them up pretty good too! Don’t ever just fall onto your knees. No, no matter how sad you are!”

  “Will you be alright?”

  “I took a knee pill. My rusted knees are fine, now. I’m just sad and I want to lay here and rot for a while. I feel really bad about my knees. I feel really bad about myself. I feel just rotten terrible about Venus! Who else is going to call me to tell me something stupid? Damn, to tell me anything at all. Nobody else is going to call me. She always called me because who else was she going to call that was old enough to understand her. Who else is going to remember the time I beat her in shuffleboard all day long at the park that isn’t even there anymore. And that dance when I got married before she did, but that didn’t last. We promised to never mention it again and then we couldn’t stop laughing about it for years, and I mean laugh damn hard pee your pants kind of hard! Nobody else would laugh with me about all that old stuff. You wouldn’t understand. You don’t even know what I’m talking about. But it would make us laugh until we cried. She knew my nastiest secrets, and I had too many, I’m a damn pill. And I knew some dirt on her, too. Now none of that matters. I knew she was thinking about me all the time. She had to. We had a history! That history only mattered when there was two of us to threaten each other where it mattered. What do I have now? What do you have? All you’re thinking about all the time is how you want to look up Eleven Jane’s skirt.”

  Eleven Jane and Thorn looked at each other in alarm. Thorn’s face was bright red, as he pleaded, “Come to a funeral for her. I’m sure that has to be one of steps of mourning, no matter what system of counting you use.”

  “The old woman is dead! Horribly murdered! I want to kill people! I want to tear this entire damn rock apart and spin it deeper into space than any stupid damn hippiestick could! She’s dead! I’m so sad, I’m just numb! I’m furious! She’s dead! Do you get it? Damn it! She ain’t coming back! She’s not calling me anymore! I’m not pushing clowns around with her anymore. Now the only old damn slog is me. I’m the oldest women on this asteroid now! I used to be young!”

  Thorn said, “You have to come and say goodbye in a way that’ll have meaning.”

  “Saying goodbye means somebody can hear you damn say it. She won’t hear me again. Nobody will. Nobody heard me like she did. She heard me and understood what I was saying—the meaning behind it. She knew that if I sniffed twice a certain way it meant I was just kidding. We had ways of glancing at each other that meant piles of words. We had a history!”

  Thorn argued. “You have to do it for you. You have to actually do it so you have the memory of it. We have to do a funeral. You have to be a part of ritual.”

  “I don’t care about that damn showy nonsense, anymore. I’m far too old and tired for ritual. Ritual always involves standing around with people. I’ll be the oldest one there. How horrible for me. I hate other people. I’d rather be in bed doing nothing because nothing can be done. Staying in bed and thinking about how much I hate everything, and how life is nothing without friends your own age, is the only honest thing to do.”

  “Yeah you do care. Of course you do.”

  Lady Hatchet pouted, “I don’t. Rituals are pathetic and impotent. They don’t make anything real happen!”

  “You do too care! And they’re what you do when you feel impotent! A ritual like a funeral is the only thing you can make happen when you can’t do anything else, but you want to do something anyway!”

  “Listen you little damn baby clone! I was twenty once and just full of myself! I was full up to my chin of all the glory of what the world could be. And I had the energy for it. Then I was fifty and woke up to admit that things got dull and the light of the day seemed a lot less golden. I just shuffled around in a tub of chores. But when I was seventy I had a complete rebirth, lost all my self-esteem problems of when I was young and too stupid about all the smallest things, and just lived! Now I’m too old to rip up the carpet. I’m scared. My teeth hurt. I fell on my knees and they bruised! My hair is about as soft as grade z wire, which isn’t! Venus was worse off and we were both old… but she was slaughtered! She is gone!”

  Thorn said, “So, you’re old. I’m agreeing with you! Now come on and get out of bed.”

  She moaned. “Old people outlive other old people. They can be lucky for it but unlucky because who wants to outlive all of their lifelong friends and be left alone. Damn!”

  “You have a lot of friends.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah, so what! Phhh. Babies. They aren’t anybody I can belittle with just one gesture of my pinky. I could make Venus so very mad at me by just pointing my pinky at her a certain way, when I thought she was being a dingbat and really needed slapped hard. Who am I going to do that to, now? When she thought I needed a good sound slap in the face she had a way of widening her eyes and turning away from me that made me want to pounce on her and kill her. Who will do that to me now, to put me in my place? How does anybody under a hundred even communicate with anybody else with any finesse at all?”

  “But, we’re still people,” he argued, feeling utterly unpersuasive and inarticulate. He wondered if he really could understand what she was feeling at his age, only four scatterbrained years out of the fishtank. “I don’t know how you feel but you could tell me. I could try to think about it. I can at least be an ear. You can be a mentor for me so when I get old I can remember what you said and not feel like a stupid human pioneer.”

  “I feel like rotting in my bed for now,” Lady Venus answered. “That’s all. Why not, I’ve already wept in it. There’s no damn point in anything else. All that’s left for me to do now is rot. Damn rot. It’s all rust. I just can’t get any older and more broken down!” She sobbed. “We both hated to be the first one to work so we met for coffee first. You would have thought we were lovers if you saw us. But we were never lovers. I never liked the smell of her. They say friendship has to be treated like fragile glass. We tried to outdo each other for who could throw the largest boulder, but do it with our wit.” She sobbed louder.

  Eleven Jane stepped up to him and took his pen, talking forcefully into it. “We’ll have the funeral in a week. You can rot until then. In a week you’ll mop yourself up and come out to cry and bawl for Venus, properly, then go back to rotting if that’s what you like.”

  “Damn you.”

  “We’ll have snacks,” she added. “You can help make something for us all to eat in honor of your friend. You should do something with your sorrow. Why don’t you make some flowers? And make Venus’ favorite snack. Only you know what that is. Wasn’t it something with potato starch and cheddar cheese ersatz hash? What was that called?”

  “She called the damn crap ersatz hash and I’m not eating anything ever again,” Lady Hatchet cried. “I’m not going to the vending machine for her potato crap that you know all just came from rearranged clone molecules, anyway. Her favorite vending machine will just have to go to rust, now. And I am doing something. I’m rotting. And, I may break some more things. Damn everything! When this place all tips over I’ll have already broken everything, damn it! You’ll be damn too late!”

  Eleven Jane said, “It was a monstrous tragedy and we’re all so upset we don’t even know what to say about it, but if you’re not eating at the funeral then we’ll come find you and totally electrocute the joy of life back into you.”

  “You will not.”

  Eleven Jane said, “A subscription to shock treatments would do you good. Every red nurse autobot would be glad to do it and repeat the procedure as many times as required. And we’ll make sure we throw a bucket of water on you first so that you’re so very conductive.”

  “You will not!”

  “We’ll all be there and suffer together. We’ll carry you to the funeral all zapped up and prop you there, grinning like the mad woman that you are, if we have to.”

  “Phhh! Damn you!”

  Thorn snatched the
pen back from Eleven Jane. “I won’t let her electrocute the hell out of you, or get you wet, I promise. But I’ll carry you if I have to.”

  Lady Hatchet chuckled. “Romantic, but vapid, you sweet stupid clone.”

  “Are you really all right?” he asked. “Should I come over? Where are you?”

  Lady Hatchet said, “I had a dream that scared me so bad. I’m afraid of dreaming, it just twists my thoughts around my neck and they choke me! When I was young I mostly just dreamt about getting pegged by something gorgeous. Now ugly murderers come out at me from every panel and drawer. Death comes out at me. My mother is disappointed in me. I dream that I have failed. I have failed in everything in life and my mother looks at me like I’m not even real. But she can’t find me. She’s on Earth looking everywhere to say how I disappointed her so much. She wants me to do better so she can brag to her sisters about me. That’s all that matters to her. And Venus isn’t here so that I can pretend I’m better than her because I took all those damn diction classes and learned some big words. They are all gone. Now I’m really nothing.”

  Thorn assured her, “That’s a common dream. I’m afraid of being a failure all the time. Try being a damn clone. Try feeling real after that?”

  “What do clones dream?”

  “I don’t know about everybody else, but…” Thorn finally realized the mean father in his dreams wasn’t his but was the memory of some mean man who’d been dead many years before he even had this life. “Dreams can be overrated. People in dreams can be nonsense people.”

  “When is the damn funeral?”

  Thorn smiled. “You’ll come?”

  “Me and my best friends the white unicorns who love and protect me. They are eternal. They will tell me to keep going.”

  * *

  Four days later, outside the hippistick camp at the cemetery at a plot next to Madam Wintermirror’s grave, they gathered at the circle of salt pillars. “Where’s Nuremburg?” Thorn asked Eleven Jane.