My mind raced, rejecting possibility after possibility, then I said slowly, “In the river at the foot of this crag there is a little island which has been left wild because of a tragedy which happened there many years ago. I will set guards on the banks who will permit nothing to come to that island from this time until midnight tomorrow night. At that time I will swim over from the shore to the island and wait for you. The guards will let one man, either swimming or, in deference to your age, in a wooden boat, land on that island after me. Screens will be set to prevent either of us taking any metal or any energy device onto the island. We will be face to face with only our bodies and our wits. The first of us to leave the island may pass freely where he wills; you have my word on that. Thus, you may come and parley and leave freely. Or you may come and try to kill me and leave in safety after you have done it. But the screens will keep you from sending an android in your place, since there are both metal and energy devices in an android. Does it content you?”
Mortifer’s face was impassive, but I could tell from the way his eyes slitted that he was thinking. Then a little quirk at the corner of his mouth betrayed the fact that he was pleased. “Agreed,” he said. “After midnight tomorrow.” Then the image was gone.
I gave orders to have the island searched by men and machines and to have guards and screens set up on the banks. “Don’t neglect any possibility,” I told my men. “Look out for any openings under water, such as old sewers. If anything comes up or down that river except one lone human in a wooden boat or swimming take whatever measures are necessary to destroy or capture it. Let anyone who can think of a way to outwit these precautions discuss it with my bodyguard. If a way can be thought of countering the danger, do it without consulting me; only if you see some peril which cannot be countered should you tell me of it.”
Mortifer undoubtedly had at least one scheme which pleased him enough to make him agree to my terms; before the time of our meeting he would undoubtedly have others in reserve. I was wagering that my strength and wit would be equal to anything, which Mortifer could do alone and without arms. Some form of poison would perhaps be his safest trick, and I took thought about how he might try to infect me with it and how I could counter him. I would not put it past him to give himself some disease to pass on to me but if he could cure himself of it, surely I could be cured myself. Would he send an agent, or a clone from his own flesh infected with something incurable? That had to be thought of; I consulted with physicians as to what poison or disease he might use. They pumped me full of their potions and assured me that for a day or two I was proof against any poison or disease which could be spread by simple contact. Something in the bloodstream was another matter; if it came to a fight I would have to beware scratches or bites.
For my part I put great hope in one simple and secret weapon; the Jagellon Gift. There was a good chance that I had never met the real Mortifer in the flesh; that he had used two repeating androids, one at each replica of Castle Thorn. For surely to meet either myself or the other Casmir in the flesh while sending an android to the other would have meant a difference in his treatment of us which would have threatened his scheme of “everything the same,” for the two of us. If he had met me only through the medium of an android then perhaps he was not an exception to the success of the Jagellon Gift, and I might be able to confuse him if not actually bend him to my will. But even apart from the Jagellon gift I had ensured that the surroundings of our meeting were more in the world I remembered than in this world of machines and energy devices that I lived in now. A primitive island offered many possibilities.
I swam over a little before midnight, so as to reach the island exactly at the stroke of twelve as it sounded from one of the churches in the city. Then I set to work to use every second until Mortifer arrived. Mortifer might know this island, might have studied maps and pictures of it with care, but I had played on this island as a boy and he would never know it as I knew it.
I had swum over in shirt and breeches with supple leather shoes tied round my neck with their own laces. I soon found the rocks that broke into sharp shards when properly tapped. On the third try I had a workable knife with which I cut myself a staff and a bow, stringing it with a bootlace. The other lace I used to tie sharp stone points onto the sturdy reeds I made into arrows. It was a stroke of luck that I found a shore bird’s nest with some feathers in it and three eggs. With a grin I took the eggs and put them in a sack I improvised from my shirt-tail; they might make distracting missiles. I withdrew to a hollow in the rocky hill at the center of the island and watched the shore while I split the feathers and stuck them to my crude arrows with a glue improvised from birdlime and the white of an egg. The island was too high to climb on three sides; a swimmer or a man in a boat could only land on the shore within my field of view. So long as the sliver of moon was not obscured by clouds I had perfect observation of anything approaching that shore. When I had fletched the arrows I made a sling from my other shirt-tail and a few remaining bits of shoelace, then folded the tops of my boots down to hold them on comfortably without their laces.
I was now armed as well as I could arm myself quickly to keep Mortifer at a distance if it came to a combat. He would only fight me, I reckoned, if he had poison or some other device up his sleeve; even if he had been my equal at combat he would chance nothing on a fair fight. I had reckoned correctly that he would not come immediately, hoping to play on my nerves by the delay. When I had been younger and more impatient he had sometimes got under my guard by playing a waiting game and I had thought that he would try that trick again. I let myself relax, keeping only my senses on the stretch. I was aware of the smells of the island and the small, normal sounds of birds and little animals going about their nocturnal affairs. Suddenly there was the squawk of a sea bird and a splash. I grinned; there was one point on the cliffs where it looked as if they could be climbed, but many a skinned knee and knuckle had taught me that the appearance was illusionary. Still, five hundred years might have worn down even that hard rock; I did not relax again until the grumpy muttering of the sea bird assured me that the climber had given up that route. Without ignoring other possibilities I looked most often to the end of the beach nearest the cliff that my opponent had tried to climb. There were broken rocks there and a man swimming along the cliffs might use them as shelter to make a stealthy approach to the beach.
At last I caught a glimpse of a shadowy form among the rocks. As long as it stayed there I could see little of it, but eventually my opponent would have to land. After a long pause, during which he must have been surveying the island as best he could, I saw an oblong shadow drift into shore and heard the scrunch of gravel. Against the paler color of the beach I could see that it was an inflatable boat. By great good fortune one of my men had suggested that I use such a craft to save myself a swim and I had been curious enough to examine one. A thought struck me and I picked up an arrow and fitted it on the bow I had made. Such boats were normally inflated with air, but what was to prevent Mortifer from filling it with a noxious gas and releasing it against me unexpectedly? As soon as I saw the figure of a man slip away from the boat for the shelter of a rock I drew back the arrow and fired it at the inflatable boat.
At that distance with so large a target even my crude weapon could hardly miss. There was a loud hiss and the boat shriveled and dwindled. The dark figure on the beach ran frantically away from it and I thought that my guess had been a good one; if he merely feared another arrow he would have done better to stay behind his rock. “I said a wooden boat,” I called softly and then quietly slid over the edge of my hollow into a little ravine beside it.
As well I did, for the figure on the beach raised his hand and there was a snapping sound and a missile of some sort hummed over my head into the hollow. A good try for a snap shot at a voice from the dark. I thought that what he had must be something like a small crossbow; the missile had buzzed like a crossbow quarrell. If that was so, he would need to reset it before he could fi
re again. I rose to my feet, swung my sling around my head once and let fly an egg at his position. There was a squelching sound as it hit and the dark figure plunged back into the sea. I grinned as I slid into another prepared position, a little closer to the beach. I had reckoned that my opponent’s imagination would magnify a simple bird’s egg into some noxious substance which he would try to wash off as quickly as possible.
He was indeed scrubbing at his skin where the egg had hit, then he plunged into the water again and swam a few strokes. But in a moment he rose to his feet, tossed something away from him and waded back into shore. A voice which could have been Mortifer’s but which sounded different enough to put me on guard called out. “All right! First round to you, Casmir King! I am counting on the fact that you want to question me, not just kill me. I have no other weapons; come down to the beach and talk. If you do, I may answer some of your questions.”
I trusted him not at all, but that was a powerful bait, as he knew it would be. “Walk over to the large rock to your right,” I called, “and sit on it with your hands at your sides. I’ll come down to you.”
As I remembered, the rock was just a bit too high for even a tall man to sit on with his feet on the ground; my opponent had to perch on it with his feet dangling. From that position he could not come at me without a betraying movement to warn me. When he was sitting down I came softly down the hill and stepped out on the beach a short spearcast away from him. My bow and arrows I had dropped just short of the beach, my staff I held in my hand and my sling with a stone in it was tucked into my breeches in the back. “This will do for now,” I said. “Now tell me, Mortifer, if Mortifer you be, what was the reason for your treatment of me; why the false Carpathia in the cavern, why the androids that looked like the folk of old?”
The figure on the beach shrugged. His face looked like Mortifer’s from this distance but something about the body didn’t fit. The voice, though, sounded more like Mortifer’s when he spoke: “It was a controlled environment; I hoped to learn a good deal about the behavior of a born leader like yourself; perhaps things I could apply to my own purposes. But there was another reason too. Casmir the Tenth defeated my plans for him and then escaped me by dying. It amused me to make a reborn Casmir my experimental subject and eventually my tool.”
“Your tool for what?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“Why, to rule Carpathia first and after that a wider realm,” said the other man mockingly. “With the proper opportunities Casmir could have built an interstellar kingdom, not just united a planet. You’ve made a good start here ‘Casmir King’; any day your puppets in the Council could propose a restoration of the monarchy with you as king and the people would pass the measure. Perhaps that’s what I’ll have ‘Casmir King’ do when he leaves this island.”
“And how do you propose to make me do that?” I asked as mockingly as I could.
“Oh, not you,” said the man on the rock, and put his hands to his head. He pulled something from his head and face and looked up at me with a smile. The smile was the crooked smile of Mortifer, but the face revealed in the moonlight was my own face!
16. The Ghost Hound
“Another clone, of course,” said the man on the rock, “but with my memories instead of those of Casmir the Tenth. That proved—unfortunate—in your case. Besides that I’ve come to the conclusion that the factor I’m looking for is genetic; I can ignore Casmir’s background and training.”
“And the original Mortifer?” I asked softly.
The other man shrugged. “He still exists, so even if you killed this body, ‘Casmir King,’ you wouldn’t have defeated me. But I’ll kill you, of course, and then go back to your followers and take over what you’ve built up. I suppose that I’d better smash your face in or else someone might raise uncomfortable questions. A pity; I’d like to get you in the laboratory and take you apart carefully.”
“You haven’t got me yet, either to smash or to take apart,” I said mockingly.
The other man gave a nasty laugh, all the more disconcerting because it was in my own voice. I realized that when he spoke it was the speech patterns and intonations that made him sound like Mortifer; the voice had always been mine.
“I can take you when I wish,” he said. “Do you think that I’d set up an experiment without an emergency cutoff in case things went wrong? All I have to do is speak one word that will key a reflex I put into you in the tanks. Your breath, your heart, your whole involuntary nervous system will stop. Brain damage in a few moments, death in a few more; I won’t even have to touch you. You can’t possibly reach me in time to keep me from saying that one fatal word. So keep your distance my barbarian warrior; you don’t have long to live in any case and I’d like to know a little more before I finish you.”
I felt as if an icy hand were squeezing my guts, but I forced my wits to work. “And what happens to your body when that word is spoken?” I said softly. “Or even if that word won’t kill you, isn’t there another which will? Do you think that the original Mortifer will leave you alive after you’ve served his purposes? Let me help you get rid of him and let me live to help you. I’m in your hands if what you say is true; I could never be a threat to you. I’ll do whatever you want, put on the mask of Mortifer you wore here and pretend to be your prisoner . . .” My hand groped frantically in the pouch behind me; if that nest was old enough the yolk of the eggs should be thick and glutinous. Would they do? They had to, there was nothing else I could get in time.
“No,” said the other man, “I don’t dare trust you . . .” I crunched the eggs in my hand and clapped my hands to my ears, filling my ear holes with a mess of yolk, white and shell. Yelling like a maniac I ran at the other man with my stick. His mouth was working but I could hear nothing, but an undifferentiated sound. I thrust at his throat with the sharpened end of my stick but he was as quick as I; he struck the stick aside and grabbed for me.
We grappled and rolled on the beach, bodies equally matched and skills of combat seemingly equal too. Several times he almost held me down, while he tried to shout in my ear. Every blow I could land went to his mouth, his throat, his diaphragm. He kneed me and I doubled over in pain, the flaked stone knife digging into my gut as I bent. We were too equally matched; I had to use that knife. I plucked it from my waistband and aimed up for his stomach, but a sudden wriggle of his body deflected my aim and I felt it slip between his ribs. Blood gushed and an expression of astonishment came over the face so like my face; the limbs relaxed. I thought it was a mortal blow, but I dared not trust him; my hand groped for a rock on the beach and I smashed his skull with it.
Before my blood could cool I hit again and again, obliterating his face as he had planned to obliterate mine.
I stumbled to the edge of the water and washed myself compulsively retching but unable to bring up anything. A fragment of an old verse ran through my mind:
I fought a dead man on the shore
And I think the man was me . . .
Presently my shuddering ceased and I walked back to look at the body, its head now a bloody mess. “Forgive me, brother,” I said uselessly. From the moment I had known what he was I had known he had to die. He might have had the Jagellon gift, and the combination of that gift and Mortifer’s mind was too dangerous to let loose in the world. But the necessity was bitter; another score against Mortifer. Had I committed suicide, fratricide or simple murder? I wondered. At any rate there was another death I must accomplish; it was too dangerous to parley with Mortifer any longer, or try to question him; I must kill him on sight.
I examined the body minutely, but it told me nothing. Was this yet a third clone or had Mortifer captured “Casmir Thorn,” stolen his memories and replaced his mind with Mortifer’s? There was no way that I could see of telling. What would have happened to this man eventually; would the Jagellon heritage have overcome the Mortifer memories given time enough? I wanted to think so, and that made this death yet more bitter. Wearily I made a rough cairn of bea
ch rocks over the body, entered the water again and swam with slow strokes back to the place where I had gone into the river to swim to the island. Once ashore, I dispatched technical crews to the island, took a transport disc to the Castle and summoned my closest advisors.
“I met a duplicate of myself on the island,” I told them bluntly. “Mortifer’s plan was that the duplicate come back and take my place. Before we go any farther I want you each to question me about things that have happened since we met until you are absolutely sure that I am the man you elected Tribune.”
Once the inquisition was over I told them the whole story of my encounter on the island and told them for the first time about “Casmir Thorn.” Then I drew some morals. “I am vulnerable,” I told them. “If the man on the island told the truth—and his behavior tells me he did—Mortifer can kill me any time that he can have one word spoken in my ear. I see no way of guarding against that; one of you might tell me tomorrow that a man named Rumplestiltskin had been trying to reach me and I might fall over dead before your eyes.”
“Not necessarily,” said Wanda Jagellon. “I was a nurse for a while before I got involved in politics and I’ll wager that once the reflex is triggered you can be kept alive in a heart-lung field until a psychoneurologist can find the reflex and override it. I’ll give orders to have a medical team with the right equipment standing by in the Castle.”
“My thanks to you, Lady Wanda,” I said with a lighter heart. “That makes the case less desperate, but still it restricts me to places where I can get such medical help quickly. Furthermore, Mortifer could strike me down at a moment of crisis and leave all in confusion. It is past time that we had another Tribune; will you take on the task, my lady?”
The Parallel Man Page 13
