My Brother's Keeper

by Charles Sheffield

  I had always taken health for granted, and never been really sick in my whole life. That made me a bad patient. My convalescence broke naturally into two phases: very sick, then very bored. I gradually began to regain full control of the left side of my body, but no one could tell me how fast that should happen. The operation that Sir Westcott had performed on me was experimental—as he explained, the previous subjects had been dogs, where it was much commoner to have available members of the same litter.

  It may sound ridiculous to say that things could be boring when I had to learn to control and live with a body that was more like a patchwork quilt than the standard human model. But the body was merely a nuisance rather than a real source of interest. Inside six weeks I was up and about, and had even taken the classical step in patient recovery—the "turn for the nurse." Tess Thomson handled my clumsy advance without missing a beat of my pulse, and took it for the good omen that it was.

  One week more, and I was given the run of the hospital wards. Although there was plenty of evidence of imperfect body control as I hobbled, staggered and leaked (kidneys and bladder still partly out of control) along the corridors, the presence of Leo's brain segment was not apparent. Sir Westcott dismissed as "predictable and minor" most of the things that worried me.

  Predictable and minor—good doctors' talk. It included incredible blinding headaches, dizziness, nausea (he blamed the ear for that, not the brain, but the distinction was a fine one to the sufferer), insomnia, sneezing fits, aphasia, weak bladder, sudden and stupefying lethargy, uncontrollable weeping, muscular spasms, and a rolling left eye. I don't know where the left eye took its orders from, but I never knew where it would be looking, or why, even though I was beginning to receive random images from it.

  I poured out this whole catalog of woes to Sir Westcott. He would eat another apple and say, "Most interesting."

  It went slowly. Two months after my first conversation with Sir Westcott Shaw I was ready to climb the walls. I had enough control to walk from one end of the hospital to the other without falling down, visibly twitching, or peeing myself. On the strength of that I applied (pleaded might be a better word) for a day outside.

  Where would you go?

  I had anticipated that question. To the Zoo. Where else?

  As I mentioned earlier, it's natural to assume that anyone who performs frequently in public must be extroverted and thrive on attention. After all, applause is rightly regarded as the purest form of ego-food. I like that as much as anyone else, but once I'm offstage I have always found it hard to meet people or to feel at home among new faces. Leo was the confident and the outgoing one. I would find myself again and again in a big city, the day of an evening recital, free and with nowhere to go. Movies staled after a while, and I had no taste for museums, horse racing, or dog shows.

  Zoos were another matter. Before I was twenty I was a connoisseur. Most big cities have a zoo of some kind, or at worst an aviary. I looked forward to seeing the pandas whenever I went to Washington, the snow leopards in San Diego, the giraffes at Whipsnade, the gorillas in Riyadh, springbok herd in Denver, sealions in Sydney, elephants in Tokyo, lions and tigers in Santiago, and hippopotami in Montevideo and Berlin.

  My favorites, wherever I went (and the psychologists can make what they like of it) were the snakes and reptiles.

  So if Sir Westcott would let me out for a day, I would go to the new London Zoo. I told him about my long-time hobby, but I didn't tell him my secondary motive. Maybe I was reluctant to admit it, even to myself. My secondary motive was fear.

  Sir Westcott had given me plenty of material to read about the human brain, and I had struggled through most of it. It's surprising how fast we learn things when they apply to us personally. One message that was repeated in paper after paper was the importance of the right hemisphere of the brain for music. Even if I recovered my health completely—even if Leo and I became a single and integrated personality—the old career of concert pianist might be closed to me. I might be able to read the notes easily enough, but if the feel had gone no amount of technique could hide it. I was scared.

  As for the technique: there is a story that was told to me when I was ten years old and attributed to Horowitz, but it's so much a part of pianistic folklore that it could have been said originally by Rachmaninov, or Liszt, or any virtuoso all the way back to Mozart and Clementi. "If I do not practice for one day I know it; if I do not practice for two days my fellow pianists know it; if I do not practice for three days everyone knows it."

  I had not touched a piano for three months. I was not trained for any life other than a pianist. What was I going to do with myself from now until old age?

  For an hour or two I had the wild idea that I might take Leo's job—after all, I was partly entitled to it. But it was out of the question. For one thing, he was legally dead. With two people going into the hospital, and only one coming out of it, something had to be done to make a rational record. Worse than that, though, I had no idea what Leo did for a living. He always seemed to be trotting off around the world for the U.S. State Department—a year in India, a year in Africa. But as to what he did there, I was as incompetent to assume that duty as he would have been to play the Brahms' Second.

  That's when I got the idea that maybe my hobby could be turned into my job. If I eventually recovered sufficiently to return to the concert stage, fine. If not, over the past ten years I had built up more knowledge of snakes and reptiles than the average zookeeper. Leo and I had both been blessed with unusual memories. That might be a place to use it.

  Both Sir Westcott and Tess gave me cautionary lectures before I was allowed to leave the hospital. No excitement, they said, and no exertion. Remember you are still early in your recovery, and if you feel at all dizzy sit down right where you are and ask for help. I nodded meekly—all I wanted to do was get out of there and on my way.

  The weather was warm but I wore a knitted wool cap. My appearance in the mirror was something I had learned to live with. Others might balk at a tall, shambling figure, dot-and-carry-one in his walk, and with scars all over his head. Stubbly black hair was reluctantly growing to cover them, but I had a long way to go. No prizes for my appearance, unless it was in the scarecrow-of-the-year category.

  It had been three years since I had last visited this zoo. I took my time, savoring each enclosure. There was a new small mammal house, and an improved environment for viewing nocturnals, with recessed red bulbs and a thermal infrared viewer on some cages.

  Thursday afternoon was not a busy time. I saw two parties of schoolchildren, one policeman, and one young couple who walked arm-in-arm and never, so far as I could tell, looked at any of the animals. I dawdled through the Monkey House, then went last of all to see the reptiles. The Reptile House had been horridly renamed as the Herpetarium. Somebody had more erudition than sense.

  It was highly satisfying. Crocodiles, snakes, lizards, turtles, and even a rare specimen of Rhynchocephalia, the tuatera lizard.

  I had thought the place was deserted. So it was rather a shock when I turned from a glass cage containing a blase-looking puff adder and caught sight of a woman in a dark blue dress peering at me from the other end of the long room. She dodged quickly out of sight behind the central row of exhibits. I took a couple of steps in that direction, then my pulse began to hammer away at about twice its usual rate, I felt dizzy and nauseated, and there was no choice but to sit down on the ledge that ran in front of the cage.

  Avoid all excitement, Tess had said, and I felt I had done my best. It was difficult to understand why a brief glimpse of an unremarkable—and unfamiliar—face should wipe me out so completely.

  In a minute or so I was under good enough control to walk the length of the Reptile House. The woman had disappeared. I continued through the exhibits—fine specimens of Draco lizards, and some unusual Hydrophidae, sea-snakes over seven feet long—but I felt shaken and some of my enjoyment had gone.

  As I was leaving the Reptile House I s
aw her again. This time I had a better look. She was about thirty years old, maybe five-feet five, and a bit too thin. She walked towards me, looking sideways towards the sealions' pool as we passed and avoiding my eyes completely. Her profile was a little too sharp for beauty.

  "Follow me, Leo."

  The words came so softly that I wondered if they might be a fabrication of my poor battered brain. I turned, but she walked on and did not look round.

  Had she really spoken? I thought of calling to her, then decided it might be very embarrassing if I had misheard. I hesitated, and trailed along after her at a respectable distance. We sauntered along, past the Monkey House, through the aviary, and finally on out to the car park. I thought for a moment that I had lost her there. She had disappeared. Then I saw that a grey van on the left had its rear doors open, and I walked hesitantly towards it as though intending to walk right past.

  "In here."

  The soft call would have been inaudible to someone ten yards away.

  The inside was dark. I climbed up the rear step, then moved forwards on my knees onto a pile of carpets or felt matting. The door clicked to behind me. The painted-over windows allowed enough light inside for me to see the shadow of the woman, crouching in front of me. Before I could move she leaned forward, put her arms around me, and laid her head on my chest.

  "Leo. Oh, Leo, thank God. I've wondered and I've prayed." Even though the voice was muffled against my coat, her accent was unmistakably American. "Thank God. I thought you were in cover, but there was no way of knowing while you were still inside that hospital."

  I pulled myself away, tingling with the smell of a strangely familiar perfume.

  "I'm not Leo," I said, after a second or two.

  She stiffened. "Leo, Leo . . ."

  "I'm not Leo. Leo is—was—" I found myself struggling to say it, almost as though I was forcing myself to acknowledge something for the first time. "Leo was killed in an accident."

  My pulse was thumping again, up around a hundred and forty. Sir Westcott would give me hell if he found out—and it wasn't my fault. Even as I had that thought, another more peevish one crept in. It was typical that Leo, with a girl in every port, should be calling forth tears of joy and sorrow, whereas no one worried at all about what happened to me. The woman in front of me had made a snorting, incredulous sound when I said Leo was dead.

  "But you can't be—" she began. Then she leaned away to the front of the van's compartment, and picked up a thing like a flashlight from the pile of rugs.

  "Give me your hand." When I didn't move, she reached out, raised my left hand, and pressed a switch on the side of the metal cylinder she was holding. Nothing at all happened, but she gave a groan of pure misery and slumped her head forward to her chest.

  "It's true," she said after a few seconds. "You're not Leo. You're the brother, the twin brother. Not Leo at all."

  It is never flattering to feel that you are being described as an object rather than a person. To her, I was clearly the wrong thing, no substitute for Leo. I began to feel an anger that even mastered my confusion.

  "Now that you seem to know who I am, maybe you'd like to return the compliment," I said. "Who are you, and why did you ask me to follow you here? If it comes to that, how did you know I'd be here at the Zoo today?"

  It was brusque, but it brought her out of her silent misery. She lifted her head and shrugged.

  "I followed you here from the hospital. I thought you were Leo, and I had to talk to him. About his work."

  "So why didn't you ask me back near the hospital?"

  "It might not have been safe." She hesitated. "Look, we must talk. I am Valnora Warren. Leo and I worked together and we were close friends."

  I leaned back on the pile of rugs and took a deep breath. If she had been close to Leo, would it be any kindness to tell her what had really happened? It would be no consolation to her to know that in a sense Leo lived on, inside me.

  While I was thinking about that, another memory seemed to brush against my consciousness. I was reliving the last helicopter ride that Leo and I had made, when he told me that he needed to talk to me. There had been no time to find out why, but I could recall his worry and tension. Until I knew more about her, it seemed to me that the less I told Valnora Warren, the better.

  She seemed to have herself under good control now. As our eyes became used to the dim light, I could see her peering anxiously at me, nervously rubbing her fingers along the smooth material of her dress.

  "Look—Lionel, isn't it?—I know this must seem peculiar to you. Leo and I worked together, off and on, for a long time—eight years. We were very close, so I know from what he told me that you and he were even closer."

  From the way she spoke, I sensed that she had been about as close to Leo as anyone could get. I remembered the way she had grabbed me when I first came into the van. I just nodded. "Leo and I were very close."

  "But you didn't see each other very often, did you? I was wondering, did he ever tell you much about the work that he did?"

  Her question was tentative, and I could feel a premonition building inside my head like a black thundercloud. She was too nervous. It made me aware that Leo's own emotion, that final evening, had been more than tension. He had been afraid, eager to talk to me in a way that was quite different from the usual easy familiarity that we had built up over the years.

  "We talked about his work sometimes," I said. "We talked about everything we did."

  "You know where he had been before he came to London?"

  "He was away in the East, and on his way back to Washington."

  "Do you know where in the East?" Her intensity was painful.

  "No. Look here, if you want to sit and cross-examine me you'd better start by telling me what all this is about. Otherwise, the hell with it. I'll go back to the hospital."

  "No. Please don't go." She was biting her lip, trying to make up her mind about something. "I shouldn't, but I'll—I'll answer some questions. Some things I just can't talk about. But you'll have to try and answer some of my questions, too."

  "We'll see. I won't make any promises." (I couldn't—I had no idea what information I might have that could possibly be interesting to her.)

  "All right. What do you want to know?"

  "For a start, what's that thing?"

  I pointed at the cylinder like a flashlight that was sitting on the rugs beside her.

  "It's an ultraviolet lamp." She picked it up. "Leo had a small tattoo on his left wrist—invisible in ordinary light, but it would fluoresce in ultraviolet light. That's how I knew—" She paused, and looked down.

  "Is that usual for people who work for the U.S. State Department?"

  She hesitated again, and leaned back against the metal panel of the van. "I can't answer that. At least, I may be able to, but I'll have to call and get permission. I felt so sure that you were Leo, I didn't . . ." She seemed all set to disappear again in her trance of grief. "When you last saw him, did he tell you—"

  "You find out if you can tell me what you know, then I'll tell you what I know. I don't care for all this mystery."

  "I'll know what I can tell you by tomorrow." She tried to force a smile. "Could we have dinner then? If you'll do it, I promise that I'll be able to give you answers—more than I can now."

  "Tomorrow?" The idea would make Sir Westcott choke on his apple, for me to be out two days in a row, but what the hell, he wasn't my keeper. "Where and when?"

  "In London? Can you meet me, at, say, eight o'clock?"

  "I hope so. Whereabouts?"

  "How about Bertorellis, in Charlotte Street?"

  "I know it. I'll meet you there, if you'll answer me one more question now."

  She looked uneasy. "If I can."

  "Was Leo's job a dangerous one?"

  She made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "You've been leading me on. He told you, didn't he? I thought he might have, even though he wasn't supposed to. Would you answer one question for me
, before you go?"

  "I had my turn. What do you want to know?"

  "Did he ever mention to you somebody with the initials T.P.?"

  "What do they stand for?"

  "I don't know—that's what I hoped you'd be able to tell me. It was somebody that I'm sure was trying to hurt him. Someone he'd heard of and I'm sure he knew rather well. But he was afraid of them. In his last message to me the tape was hard to hear, but he said that the thing he was scared of most was that T.P. would get him."

  "Sorry." I shook my head and raised myself higher on my knees in the van. "I can't help you there. He never mentioned anything to me."

  "Well, never mind." She gave a shaky little sort of laugh. She had come up on her knees too, as I started to open the door, and she was almost in an attitude of prayer. "It's astonishing, you look so like him. . . . Be careful when you leave here. I'll see you tomorrow night, right?" She gave another little groan when the light from outside the van fell on my face. "You look so like him . . ."

  I closed the van door quietly on her misery and limped away into the late afternoon sunshine. I was sorry for her, but there wasn't a thing I could do about it. And the inside of my head was beginning to hurt badly, buzzing and whirring as though somebody had taken a power saw and was busy trimming off the rear of my skull case. Memory and speculation clashed and fought for my attention. Before Leo met me and we took our fatal ride together, he had come from Zurich. And before that, he had been doing—what? and where?

  I felt terrible, dry-mouthed and panting as I reached the subway. And when I got back to the hospital, I caught hell from Tess, and then a second hell from Sir Westcott. I had arrived two hours later than I said I would. Didn't I realize that I was still a very sick man, far to sick to overtax myself like this? And didn't I know how important it was to avoid too much mental stimulation? Well, thank Heaven that the Zoo was a nice, restful place for me to visit. Tess made me a glass of warm milk.