WHAT IS JONO?

6303 Arcus

A dream: I am discovered and bound and walled in once more, and this time it is the children who make me prisoner, and I am their size, and weak. I protest, fighting to escape the membrane, and they laugh, stuff stones in my mouth, and leave.

Dead sweet devil Alayre comes to me then, trailing her floating veils like pale-orange smoke, her breasts articulating themselves with the muscles of her kind, reaching out to tickle my chest with pointed nipples, rounding, narrowing, bulging above; she takes the stones from my mouth, smiles and kisses me, and her sugared brain poison is on my tongue. I want her; I moan and stretch out to hold her, and she is gone.

The poison works on my dream. I lie broken and paralyzed on the understreet itself, my wall-prison ripped open. The street children gather over me with hissing voices and narrow-bladed knives. Enough, I think, and I fight my way to wakefulness.

The darkness of my room shrouds my eyes, but it is pregnant with danger. I sit upright, and scutterings make me leap to my feet. I dive for the light controls. Dozens of these children boil through the room and cluster in the laboratory entrance. I scrabble for my blade, under the cushions of the couch, but a high sharp voice calls, “No!” in Share.

I turn to see a girl not yet a woman aiming a weapon at me. “Don’t hurt me,” I say.

“What are you?” she asks. Her eyes gleam, red-irised and white, pupils black needle-holes. She is thin but supple and strong. Her skin shines a rich tan.

“I am Jono,” I say. They all gather closer to me, costumed in skins and furs and leaves and skittering fabrics, their stenches brawling in my nostrils, eyes cold and drilling me. A stream of urine issues from a tiny half-dressed one who is clutching one end of a steel bolt and sucking the other end.

“What is Jono?” The girl persists, her weapon steady as the stone around us.

What is Jono indeed? Does anyone know what Jono is, or was? My memory stutters, falters, refuses to reach past those dead millennia, backward in time’s dark abysm. “I am a man,” I tell her. The accents of this time begin to ride better on my lips and tongue.

“You are no man. You stole his skin. Are you Zash?” She shifts the tip of her weapon back, forth, the thickness of a fingernail.

Zash: she must mean the aliens, the Zashinhalh, in that mind-whisper of theirs. “No. I was a man in a wall. I escaped. Now I am a man.”

She places her free hand in that of a boy next to her, his eyesockets filled with dull-gray steel orbs. Her fingers ripple against his palm; he reciprocates, and turns to vanish along the entryway.

All this coming and going makes danger that I will be found. “This is a secret place. How did you find it?”

She points at a squat little boy wearing a tight set of armoring body plates made of glued-together layers of colored paper. “Furusi followed you, and told us. We will not tell anyone.”

Why don’t they just kill me? They could take this place from me as easily as they followed me. But I have this moment, and I have guile.

I wave my arm expansively at the room, and a few children duck and mutter. “Of course you can come here. My home is now your home.”

The sarcasm seems to pass unnoticed, but the girl keeps her weapon on me and her eyes lock on me, wide, and she says, “Every place we choose is our home.”

I smile, and think of ways I can change their bodies with my biologicals. They will not move so quickly then, and then I will take back what is mine.

What is this weapon she holds? It is a gun; I stare at it, and she begins to lower the muzzle of it until it points at my knees. I have won them over.

She pulls the trigger.