Martian Knightlife Read online

  But the person sprawled leisurely and smiling in the leather chair behind the desk in the chaotic office, his face thrown into relief by the sole light from the lamp standing at one end beside him, wasn't Leo at all. Dressed casually but elegantly in a blue jacket with white shirt, he was lean and tanned, with a regally cut face of strong jaw, sensitive mouth, and narrow nose and cheeks, the overall effect softened by wavy brown hair. His eyes were pale blue, fixing her with an intensity that was unsettling despite his relaxed posture and easygoing expression. "Elaine, I take it," he greeted cheerfully. "I'm so glad you could come. Sorry about the late hour and the mild deception. But as you yourself are only too well aware, we don't have a lot of time." He indicated a chair already drawn up on the far side of the desk. "Make yourself comfortable. There are some coffee self-brews if you'd like."

  "Who are you? Where's Leo?"

  "Kennilworth Troon, at your service. Or, I suppose it would be more precise to say, at Leo's. I'm representing him. You could say, as a kind of attorney."

  "Whatever this is, I don't want any part of it." Elaine's reaction was automatic. What she meant was that she didn't want to be involved in anything deeper than she was in already. Before she had registered any conscious decision, she had turned and started opening the door. And then she stopped. He had called no warning, done nothing to stop her. She could sense him watching her. If she had been happy with the existing situation, she wouldn't be here. If Troon's appearance meant there was a way to change it—for better or worse as the case may be—there was only one way she was going to know. His manner was telling her that she was the one who stood to be affected. It was up to her. She closed the door and turned back. Troon waved again at the chair, still smiling, as if he had been waiting for her to arrive at the inevitable for herself.

  "Would you like something?" he asked again as she sat down. Elaine shook her head. "Probably best. I'd imagine you've had enough stimulants and depressants today already, one way or another. It's the stress of these situations, you know. Plays havoc with the nervous system."

  Elaine's faculties were regrouping after her initial confusion. "What kind of attorney are you?" she demanded. "Who ever heard of meeting for business in a place like this?"

  "The owner is an old friend of mine. I can recommend him personally if you're ever interested in getting a good deal from inside the trade. You'd need to know how to bargain, though." Troon looked around. "Actually, you're right. It was something of a psychological ploy, I suppose. You'd hardly have expected Leo to suggest some public place, would you?"

  How much did this man Troon know? Where did he fit in? Elaine couldn't even begin framing guesses. "Where is Leo?" she asked again.

  Ignoring her question, Troon recited, "Elaine Lydia Corley. Current residence, 14B Watergardens, Embarcadero. Profession, nursing practitioner with a specialty in neural physiology." The clear blue eyes fixed on her, losing a shade of their playfulness. "Just the person who'd know how to resuscitate a body from stasis suspension and substitute one that was past caring; also, how to tell a monitoring computer to carry on reporting what it's supposed to be seeing . . . if anyone should want to do something strange like that. But there's no saying what some people might get up to, is there?"

  Cold, clammy feelings slithered down Elaine's spine. Knots tightened in her stomach, and for a moment she thought she was going to be physically sick. When she tried to lick her lips, she found that her mouth had gone dry. She opened her purse on her knee, rummaged for the tube of "tigers," and shook one of the yellow-and-black capsules into her palm. Troon unfolded from the chair and walked across the office to pour a cup of water from a dispenser by the window. He was tall, powerfully built, but moved lightly with catlike economy of effort. Elaine popped the capsule into her mouth and took the cup when he offered it, but her hand shook, spilling some of the contents. Troon took the cup from her and held it while she sipped and swallowed. She nodded in acknowledgment. He set the cup down on the desk, went back around to the other side, and sat down.

  "Also, the professional working partner of Henry Balmer," he resumed as if nothing had happened. "You know, I've always been fascinated by hypnosis. Can it really do all the things you hear about—deaden pain, make people ten times stronger, enable them to recall things they thought they'd forgotten? It's supposed to be capable of doing the opposite, too: people can be made to forget a whole chunk of their life, just on experiencing a posthypnotic trigger . . ." Troon shrugged, as if trying to think of an example. "Maybe a graphic design that they've been programmed to respond to. Do you think it's possible, Elaine? Can Henry do things like that?" He paused, pointedly. "Or could the popular beliefs be overrating things a bit? Might it not work as well as it's supposed to sometimes?"

  Elaine felt any inner resistance she might have mustered collapse in defeat. There was no point in trying to bluff or evade. He knew everything. And the only way he could have known was as he had just intimated: the posthypnotic suggestion hadn't worked properly; the other Sarda had come out of the process remembering. The whole scheme was blown. . . . She looked up to meet Troon's eyes as the implication hit her. He seemed to be waiting, as if reading her thoughts and giving her time to put the obvious conclusion together. At least, in his own strangely capricious way, he had shown grace enough to spare her a direct conflict from the beginning.

  "He was the other Leo—the one that I talked to," she whispered.

  "Of course. You've got your one hidden away somewhere. We've no way of tracing him."

  The call had been a trick. She stared at the cup in front of her on the desk, and considered her options now. Troon waited. She could get up and leave, putting herself back in the situation that had been getting more unbearable by the hour; or she could wait and see what kind of alternative there was. Put that way, it didn't leave a lot of choice.

  "Very well, Mr. Troon," she acknowledged. "What do you want?"

  He nodded in a satisfied way; at the same time, his manner became businesslike. "I think you've worked out for yourself what happened. I can't guarantee anything, but obviously your best way to make things easiest for yourself would be to cooperate and come clean. We need to know where the original Sarda and Henry Balmer are now, and how far they've progressed with the rest of the plan. . . ."

  Elaine had stopped listening somewhere around halfway through what Troon was saying. She gasped barely audibly and slumped back in the chair, shaking her head in protest. For what it meant was that the Leo she thought she had glimpsed again briefly on the screen less than an hour ago, the person she had felt for and wanted to preserve, was the one who now knew her only as a betrayer. Revenge would be his only motive now; restitution, his object. The only Sarda she had prospects of sharing the future with was the one at present in hiding—the one she had come to despise and reject.

  All she knew was that she couldn't face the Leo that Troon was presumably intending to confront her with now. Somehow she was on her feet, as if another power had taken over her body and she were just a spectator of its movements. "I'm sorry, I can't . . ." She clutched a hand to her mouth. "It's too much. . . ."

  Troon watched, his eyes reading her intently; yet he remained sitting, unmoving. She turned, and the surroundings blurred into a tunnel of confused impressions leading her toward the door; then she was outside in sudden darkness beneath the flashing colored lights, and climbing into her car. She was vaguely aware of starting the motor, backing out from beside the Kodiak, expecting Troon or someone else to run out and stop her. But nothing happened. Then she was back on the roadway and heading in the direction of Lowell center. . . .

  When her mind began functioning coherently again, she was through the Trapezium and halfway back to Embarcadero, with no clear recollection of getting there.

  16

  Sarda burst out of the side room opening off Alazahad's office just as Kieran turned the overhead light on from the switch by the door. "What do you think you're doing?" Sarda demanded shrilly, waving his a
rms in agitation at the door. "You let her go! Now she'll go straight to Balmer and the other me with the story. . . . And we still don't even know where they are!"

  The outer door opened, and June came in with Mahom. They had been positioned outside in one of the cars lined up on the front of the lot. One press of the recall button on the phone in Kieran's pocket would have activated June's number, giving them the signal to pull up behind Elaine's car to prevent her from leaving. Evidently, Kieran had chosen not to. "What happened?" June asked, sending a puzzled look from him to Sarda.

  "He . . . he let her go!" Sarda stammered. "He had her cold. I heard everything. She'd as good as confessed. Another half hour, and we'd have found out all we needed to nail them and get the money back."

  "Yes, you could have gotten the money back . . . and lost her," Kieran said to Sarda. "I presumed you'd rather have both. Actually, I think you can do better still."

  Sarda's sails crumpled, windless. "What are you talking about?" he retorted.

  "Hey, trust the man," Mahom told him. "If I know anything, it's that the Knight has his reasons."

  "You don't remember anything about her," Kieran said.

  Sarda shook his head. "Of course I don't. All I do know is that I'm in a hole for five million, and you just let somebody walk away with it."

  "That's the problem. You don't know how it was with you two." Kieran waved a hand at the comscreen on Alazahad's desk. "Replay that call you made to her earlier this evening and look at it," he said. "Look at what it's telling you. And I saw it all over her face here again just now."

  "What? You saw what? What are you talking about?"

  "She's in love with you, man! You! The Leo she used to know, before he started having ideas about getting even with his other self, and turned into someone else. She didn't get mixed up in this for a share of any money. She did it to keep the man she had then. Was she supposed to trust this process that everyone said would create the same person, identically? How could she? He didn't even trust it himself."

  Sarda gave June a bemused look, asking if it made sense to her. For the moment she could only return a shrug. "But you didn't talk about anything like this," he objected, looking back at Kieran.

  "I didn't have to. Her face and body language said it all—plus the fact that she came here. . . . She came because she thought she would find someone she'd lost."

  "Well, maybe." Sarda seemed none the wiser. "But I still don't see what good it did, letting her go like that. Why do it?"

  Kieran sighed patiently. "When you called her earlier, she assumed you had to be the original, as we intended. But even in that short time she saw the Leo that she'd known at the beginning, who didn't know anything about this scheme that got dreamed up later—because that's exactly who you are. She thought that the original had somehow reverted to what he had been. But then she realized that her Leo—the one she came here to find—is now the enemy, itching to get even." Kieran gestured toward Sarda in a way that said the proof couldn't be any plainer than that. "She couldn't deal with it for the moment, so she left. If we'd wheeled you in at that point, it would have created a fight between the two of you that could never have been mended. Oh, sure . . . a half hour with the hot irons and the thumbscrews, and we could probably have learned all we needed to take everything to Herbert and Max, stop whatever Elaine's friends are up to, and recover your five million. But whatever you and Elaine had would have been lost. And I happen to think it was something worth trying to hang onto, Leo."

  June was staring at Kieran with a look that seemed to say that no matter how long she knew him, he would never cease to amaze her. Alazahad had no idea what was going on, and was happy to leave everything to the rest of them.

  Sarda looked at Kieran uncertainly, apparently expecting more. Kieran's manner suggested that he'd said all that should be necessary. "So what happens now?" Sarda asked finally, at the same time glancing at June to ask if he had missed something.

  "We wait for her to come back," Kieran said, as if it should have been obvious. "Well, not literally here, of course. I assume she'll call."

  Sarda was still not really any nearer. "How do you know she'll do that?" he asked.

  "Well, I don't in any mathematical sense. Call it an instinct derived from many years of intense application to the study of human nature. If all the—"

  "Wha-at?!" Sarda emitted a strangled protest verging on a shriek. His eyes bulged; his yellow mane shook; his shaggy mustache took on life and bristled. "You're telling me now that this whole thing is based on nothing more than a hunch of yours?!"

  "Instinct," Kieran corrected. "More refined, less impulsive. It carries imputations of greater sophistication and more solid groundings in reality. The weak part about relying on logic is always in the assumptions."

  "Whatever—I don't care. But holy Christ . . . !" Sarda waved both hands while he sought for words. "What I'm telling you is, there's nothing to stop her going straight back and blowing everything. And all you're telling me is that you don't think she'll do that! That really makes me feel a lot better, Kieran. You're gambling five million of my money—"

  "Mine too," Kieran pointed out. "You more or less insisted yourself that you expected me to have a stake in this."

  "Making decisions concerning my personal life that I don't recall ever being invited to give an opinion about . . ."

  "It was hardly a feasible option at the time."

  "I don't know anything about this woman," Sarda fumed. "What if I don't want this romance that you're so touchingly keen on restoring?"

  "If I'm right, we still stand to do a lot better. They have to be into this for more than just a split of five million. To find out what, we need Elaine as a willing ally through choice, not a reluctant snitch who was bullied into divulging the minimum she could get away with. I'm prepared to gamble that her feelings for the Leo-who-was will make that choice."

  "And what if you're wrong?" Sarda asked dubiously.

  Kieran clapped an arm cheerfully around his shoulder as they headed for the door, while Alazahad turned out the lights. "In that case, Leo, I know just the person to go to who can make us forget our sorrows and everything connected with them," he said.

  * * *

  They drove in the Kodiak through the tunnel connecting Gorky canyon to Nineveh, heading back to June's place, where Sarda had left his own vehicle. In his own mind, Kieran allowed that Elaine would need time to wrestle with her thoughts and reach a decision. In the meantime, he was trying anything to distract Sarda from constantly trying to come back to the subject.

  "I was thinking over what you said about DNA being the program for a complete, self-assembling factory—much more complicated than any program people have ever written."

  "Uh-huh." In the seat behind Kieran and June, Sarda returned from other ruminations. "Unimaginably more complicated. The whole set of plans needed to build a spaceliner wouldn't make a dent in it."

  "So could a program like that just have written itself—out of random accidents, for no reason?"

  "What makes you think it did?" Sarda asked.

  Kieran shrugged. "That's what they taught everybody when I went to school."

  "Outside of Earth, nobody in the business believes that anymore," Sarda said. "Start changing lines of the machine-tool codes for making spaceliner parts at random, and you'll end up with a pile of junk—if anything works at all. With what you're talking about, it's a lot of trillions times more guaranteed. In short, it's ridiculous." He seemed about to elaborate further, but then his eyes wandered away, and he pulled pensively at his mustache. "How can you be sure? I can't believe you just let her walk away. We're fooling ourselves. She's not gonna be coming back."

  "Just give it until morning, Leo."

  "We might not have until morning. They could pull out and be gone anytime."

  "Not if they're involved in higher stakes. Nothing's going to happen tonight."

  "But how—"

  "So why are things different on Earth?
" June asked Sarda, turning her head from the seat beside Kieran.

  "What? Oh . . . it's the same as with a lot of things. They've all got turf and reputations to protect. I used to be an orthodox materialist once. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to see their line as being as dogmatic as the fundamentalism that it was invented to replace. That was why I decided to move out—to be part of an environment where questioning is permissible and it's okay to look at alternatives."

  "So what do you think?" Kieran asked him. "Where did genetic codes come from?"

  "Nobody knows. It's what a lot of scientists out there are trying to figure out. . . . But I'd guess there has to be some kind of intelligence at work. You can't get away from it."

  "Sounds like you've got a religious side, Leo," June commented.

  "Not really—not the way most people think of it, anyhow. But yeah, I think that the original religions—before they got corrupted and sold out to politics—encapsulated a lot of genuine ancient knowledge. The truth will turn out to be more exciting than anything people ever dreamed up."

  For a while, Sarda fell quiet. Kieran waited hopefully for some even deeper philosophical revelations and speculation.

  "And even if she wanted to, how could she get back? She doesn't have your real name, and you didn't give her a number."