The Parallel Man (10 page)

“Not quite, perhaps,” said Droste gently. “But as nearly that as you’re ready to hear now, I think.”

“How long?” I asked, making my voice as strong as I could.

Droste’s eyes met mine as he said quietly, “As nearly as we can tell from the time of your last genuine memory until now is about five hundred years.”

After that I was too dazed to put up much resistance to what they asked of me. I followed the man named Justinian Droste to a part of the battlements which, because it overlooked the Ladies Court, was normally forbidden to bachelor knights. A sort of bridge made of some grey metallic substance extended from the battlements to . . . I rubbed my eyes and looked again. A long arrow’s flight away there was a jagged hole in the sky itself, and the metal bridge disappeared into it! Beyond the hole there was a gray-walled corridor which reminded me of the room in which the immobile “court ladies” had stood.

“Block out the bridge and the gap with your hand, then take it away,” said Droste quietly. “Then you’ll get some idea of the tricks of perspective which they used in building this place.” I did as he said. When my hand covered the bridge and the hole I seemed to be looking out into a broad vista of mountains beyond the valley in which Castle Crag stood. But when I took my hand away I could see that the sky and mountains were some sort of picture, marvelously done, and that a strongly shot arrow could easily have struck that “sky.”

The bridge was narrow but steady as a rock as I put my foot on it. “You wish me to go this way?” I asked Droste, and he nodded. Half expecting to fall through the bridge or find myself in some unimaginable heaven or hell when I had crossed it, I walked over the bridge, with only a glance at what seemed to be the abyss below me. I have always had a good head for heights, but the feeling that I was in a waking dream helped take away any apprehension I might have felt the strange bridge and its impossible terminus.

The “sky” seemed to be made of some translucent stuff, some of which lay in shards on the floor of the gray corridor. I picked up a shard and looked at it, feeling as if I were a child in a nursery-story dream. The corridor itself was drably utilitarian, with smooth gray walls and a slightly resilient floor of somewhat darker gray. Droste came over the bridge behind me and walked along by my side. After a long stretch of corridor we came to a great circular space larger than the inside of the castle keep. Above us there was no roof; we stood as if at the bottom of a great well. The circle of blue high above was no larger than a shield. “That’s the real sky,” said Droste.

In the middle of the circular space were two great metal discs on which stood glittering machines and chairs which looked luxuriously soft. Seated in a chair near the center of the disc was a woman in close-fitting garments like Droste’s; she faced a glittering array of lights and switches on a sort of table before her. As we walked toward the disc she turned toward us, and her whole chair swiveled to match her movement; a minor marvel, but one which startled me more than some of the greater marvels I had seen. “Citizen Droste?” she said sharply, seeing my sword; her hands moved sharply toward one part of the array of lights and switches before her.

“It’s all right,” said Droste reassuringly and I felt a small spurt of amusement as I realized that the woman must have thought that I had taken Droste captive. In fact, I was captive, not to his weapons, for he had shown none, but to my own ignorance. Until I knew more—much more—I did not dare to take action. But time and observation are great healers of ignorance; I could wait.

Droste waved me courteously to a seat on the platform and said to the woman, “Take us on in to the city; General Hospital. Andres will take the rest of the party back on the cargo disc.” The woman looked a little dubiously at my sword, which I had laid across my knees for lack of a better place to put it, but gave a sort of salute and busied herself at her table. Suddenly I realized that the ground had dropped away and that we were rising in the shaft like a bucket in the well I had likened it to.

As we cleared the rim of the shaft I saw about me low arid hills and scrubby vegetation. We continued to rise until we were high above the hills, with the mouth of the shaft we had come out of only a small dark circle. Then the platform began to move smoothly and silently above the ground. We were moving away from the sun, which if this new world was anything like the one I was used to, meant that we were going east or west. But the dry desert landscape and clear sky gave me no hint whether it was morning or evening.

Presently I could see ahead of us what I thought at first was a curious group of mountain peaks. Then a certain regularity of shape and arrangement told me that these were monstrous buildings; each not only bigger than Castle Thorn but bigger than Castle Crag, Castle Thorn and all. There seemed to be parks and gardens at the foot of the towers, and one great stretch of what seemed to be greensward, looking oddly out of place in the desert setting. The woman spoke into the air as we approached the towers and was answered by a disembodied voice. Her hands played among the levers on her table and she said to Droste, “We’ll have to loop around the starport; a starship is lifting and their GE fields can interfere even at this distance; it’s a big cargo ship.”

Droste nodded and leaned forward to look at the stretch of greensward, which we were now swerving to pass on our right. From the green area a gigantic black disc began to rise into the air. As it rose I thought that I could feel a faint tremor in our own flight, but that was soon gone as the black disc rose higher and higher until it dwindled into a dot in the sky. “Ever want to flit?” Droste asked the woman.

She shook her head with a smile. “Home is good enough for me,” she said. “The operational height of this little buggy is as far as I want to get from Mother Earth.”

Droste smiled back at her and turned to me. “You’re coming out into a wider world in more senses than one, King Casmir,” he said. “Wider than you can know now.”

I laughed shortly. “So it would seem, ser,” I said. “No need to call me King, though; it is clear enough that my kingdom down under the hills was only a mummery, and my true throne gone to others these many years. The family name of the lords of Thorn is Jagellon; that, I suppose, is still mine.”

“Indeed,” said Droste with a curious note in his voice, Could it be pity? But he went on in a serious tone. “You know better than I what you have lost,” he said. “But there is plenty for you to thank the Mercy for. I’ve seen other people from pre-tech societies meet our modern gadgetry for the first time and show everything from panic, fear to religious awe, to retreat into insanity. And it’s worse for you because of the way you’ve been deceived for the past two years and the sudden way you learned of it. But you’ve hardly turned a hair.”

It was an odd phrase but I could see that he meant that I had shown no sign of fear or amazement. What else, I wondered, did he expect from a knight of Thorn? But perhaps he knew as little of the knights of Thorn as I of what he termed “gadgetry.”

I tried to keep that impassivity he had praised as our flying disc rushed toward one of the great towers, lifting at the last possible moment to come to rest on a broad flat roof at the top of the tower. As the woman dropped her hands from her table of lights she cast me a glance; I thought that in her own way she had been testing my courage. I grinned at her and she was startled into an answering smile. I heard and felt a brisk breeze blowing at the top of the tower and realized that a sort of barely perceivable thickening of the air which had surrounded our disc in flight had now vanished.

“This is a hospital, a place of healing,” said Droste. “With your permission our Healers will give you a quick going over and see what sort of shape you’re in. You show the signs of freshly healed hurts.” I nodded without showing any emotion, but a sudden stab of hope shot through me. Whatever these people were, enchanters or something else, they seemed to have powers that would have been called magical in Carpathia. Their healing arts must be well advanced beyond anything known in my homeland. Perhaps, perhaps they could heal me of the Falling Sickness and make me a whole man again. I had often thought that I would trade my kingdom for freedom from the Falling Sickness; perhaps my wish had been strangely granted.

I followed Droste over to a part of the roof that seemed no different from the rest except that it had a large circle painted on it. We came to a halt and I looked at Droste in puzzlement, but suddenly the part of the roof within the circle flashed white and then began to sink slowly. I could not quite check an instinctive movement and Droste said quietly, “Just another means of transportation. It will take us down to the examining room.” I nodded and rested my hands on the hilt of my sword, noting as I did so that the sword point went a little way into the material below my feet. Perhaps at need I could hack my way out of any place I wanted free of.

But when the sinking circle stopped in a room filled with more gleaming objects across which lights flashed I was faced with a small woman with an untidy mop of gray hair, clothed in a close-fitting white garment. “Please put the sword and your outer garments on the table there and come over to the examination area,” she said crisply, and I obeyed meekly. She reminded me strongly of my old nurse and I could imagine her reaction if I demanded to keep my sword.

The “examining area” was another circle on the floor, but this one did not move. I stood within it and my skin tingled, then turned hot and cold as the gray-haired woman moved from one to another of the small tables and chests which ringed the circle on which I stood. Another woman dressed in white came from somewhere else in the room and looked at me in surprise. I concealed my own surprise, for her skin was darker than that of an old herdsman burned by the suns of many summers, and her hair was a mass of tightly coiled black ringlets. After the first surprise of her appearance I found her beautiful in her own way and I gave her a smile. She smiled back and said, “Hello, Casmir.”

“Perhaps you’d better tell him how you happen to know his name,” said Justinian Droste, who had been standing in the background.

The dark woman said, “We met about a month ago when I was on night duty at Central Receiving Hospital in Alba Cirque. He hadn’t seen a dark-skinned person before and we talked a little about that. He was a bit worried about a history of what sounded like epileptic seizures, but from the nerve-path scarring it looked as if someone had used a neural interrupter on him repeatedly over a period of a couple of years. They were treating him with Lysergol and the scarring should be . . . Oh!”

She was looking at the surface of one of the tables and her face was troubled. “The scarring is back, as bad as ever!” she said. “I don’t see how that’s possible, in fact I’d say it was medically impossible. Unless . . .” She looked at me with a question in her eyes.

“No, my Lady,” I said. “I have not seen you before—to my loss.” I turned to Droste, “It seems that I have a double,” I told him.

He nodded, his face grim. “Not only you but the whole setup in which we found you.” Some things which he and the man called Andres had said flashed through my mind: “The same man,” Andres had said, and Droste had spoken of a map of “the other place” as a guide to Castle Thom.

There was an indrawn breath from the dark woman and she said softly, “The Mortifer case!”

I caught her eyes and spoke gently, but with authority. “You have guessed something, Lady. Can you riddle me this riddle?”

She looked gravely into my eyes and said, “You and the man I met must be clones, duplicates grown from the cells of a prototype. There are new techniques for retrieving memories from the cellular record of the prototype; that was what Academician Mortifer was experimenting with, from the reports I’ve heard. Experiments have been done on animals but experimentation on humans is strictly forbidden by commonwealth law, and clones have the same rights as natural-borns.” Her eyes went to Droste. “You’re Justinian Droste, aren’t you?” she asked, “of the Citizen’s Liberties Union? Your group tracked down Mortifer’s experiments and denounced him to the authorities.”

Droste nodded and turned to me. “You had to know sooner or later,” he said, “and perhaps this is as good a way as any. Our group, as Nurse Nerere says, is opposed to experimentation on human beings—or sapient beings of any species for that matter. Most attempts at such experimentation need rather elaborate technological support; we have ways of getting to know about such things. Not long ago we got on the track of Mortifer’s experiments. First we found the first cavern, with your double and an identical setup to the one we took you from. We arrived at a rather dramatic moment, in fact.”

He hesitated, then went on. “I’ll tell you about that another time. Anyway, we investigated the setup and found some rather curious relay equipment. Eventually we traced the relays and found your cavern. There don’t seem to be any more. So far as I can tell, Mortifer had set up two identical men in identical surroundings and was subjecting them to identical stimuli. What he hoped to prove I’m not sure.”

I looked at my hands, at what I could see of my body. “Then I am . . . a . . . a homunculus?” I asked. “Made by Mortifer in the image of some real man?” My voice I think I kept steady, but only with a tremendous effort.

“No,” said the dark woman fiercely, “you’re as human as any of us; you’ve just been birthed by a more elaborate process. Ordinary conception uses cells from both parents; your cells are taken only from your prototype. But his cells contain genetic coding from two parents. Probably the most sensible way to look at it is that you, your double and your prototype are identical triplets, except that the prototype was born first and by more traditional means.”

“Your humanity is recognized by the Commonwealth,” said Droste, “and I’ll soon give you evidence of that. For that matter it’s recognized by the church your prototype belonged to, if that matters to you. It would have to him; he was a devout man by all accounts. But Mortifer might have interfered with those memories; it would fit what I know of the man.”

I was calmer now, not only because of their words but because I was realizing that no matter what my birth I was alive and in possession of my powers. Then another dismaying thought struck me. “My . . . prototype . . . he must be. . .”

Droste nodded and said calmly, “Dead these five hundred years. But before he died he unified Carpathia he’s remembered as the greatest of their kings. And your double gave signs of some rather unusual talents before he disappeared.”