A Borrowed Man (3 page)

“Oh, come now!”

“I meant almost. After my last scan, in other words, and nobody thought it was worthwhile to make another. I suppose I wasn't selling all that well. As to the author's—as to my original text…”

“Yes? Tell me!”

“I don't think we have to worry. I wasn't generally edited a lot. You couldn't hide an enormous secret in minor corrections of punctuation and the like, or I don't see how you could.”

“And it would have to be something you, the author,
could
see.”

“Which is why you thought I might be the one to help you?”

“Exactly. I've talked to experts on codes and ciphers. Nothing they told me seemed to lead anywhere; then I thought of you. Are you sure you don't know what you put in this book?”

“I am.” I opened the book and read a few paragraphs. “It seems to be in my style, or something very near it, so I doubt the title page is lying. I don't recall writing it, but the copyright date must—”

“What's the matter?”

“I just thought of something, that's all. You knew where these stones were.”

She nodded.

“So you've been here before. Isn't it possible that the hearers you fear are listening to us? That they've bugged it?”

“I doubt it. It's been almost three years since I was here last.”

“You sat on these stones.”

She nodded.

“And he sat on this one I'm sitting on.”

“Oh, stars! Now you'll want to know who he was, and whether I still care about him, and how much I cared about him when I did, and whether we slept together a lot, and if he and I—”

I had raised my hand. “No!”

“You don't have to shout at me.”

“I wasn't shouting, but if it seemed like that to you, I apologize most humbly. All I'm saying is that this site could be bugged. Perhaps it's unlikely, but it's certainly possible.”

“How about over there?” She pointed across the stream.

I agreed.

The stream was narrow and deep, with a fast current. The land on the other side was rough with broken building stones. We walked slowly, I wearing the one pair of low shoes that was all I had, and Colette in screw-heeled fashion boots. I wondered how soon she would want to stop. Now I think she was probably thinking something like that about me.

After a while she said, “Not all the animals here are harmless, you know.”

I shook my head. “I didn't.”

“Some of the dangerous ones have been killed off; but they keep coming back, bears and wolves, and panthers that look like big Siamese cats.”

“Were they less dangerous near the waterfall?” We were still walking.

“Yes, because there was no scent trail for the animal to pick up. We're leaving one now.”

I nodded. “Then let's stop and talk here.”

“There's no place for the hovercab to land.”

“We can go back.”

“If anything's tracking us, we'll meet it. You realize that, I hope.”

“In that case, the sooner we start back, the safer we'll be.”

“Not if they're listening.” She paused. “I know you're right—they might have found out about that spot.”

“Who are they? Do you know?”

“First I want to sit down. Isn't that terrible?”

I shook my head. “We've walked quite a distance, and you're wearing screw heels. I didn't think we'd come this far.”

We went back to the stream. The water was well below ground level there, and we sat on the bank. We hadn't been there long before she pulled off her boots and splashed the water with her feet. I pulled off my shoes and stockings, and did it, too.

 

2

C
OLETTE'S
S
TORY

“I had a brother named Conrad, Mr. Smithe. He was two years older than I, and although he had teased me as a child we were on very good terms as brothers and sisters go. He was always kind and protective of me, and I loved him for it—even when it was a trifle embarrassing.” Colette sighed. “We played together as children—played screen games, and ran footraces. All sorts of stuff. Eventually he became an engineer and I a teacher.”

She paused, looking thoughtful. “I hope I don't look like a teacher, but perhaps I do. Do you know about the eds in our schools?”

I nodded and said that I knew they existed but little more than that.

“They're excellent—wonderful—if the student really wants to learn. If she doesn't, they're worthless. The teacher's task is to light that fire and puff it into a blaze. You'll think I'm being melodramatic, but I'm not; that's what it's like. That's what it is! Sometimes you can see it catch, by just watching their faces. Sometimes you don't know how hot it is until it burns you a little. The student asks a round dozen good questions, you have to admit you don't have answers to most of them, and your student goes off searching sites and diskers and even looking into what we call the physical texts sometimes. Usually it's next to impossible to get anyone under the age of twenty to open a real book.”

I nodded to show I understood.

“I'm going on too long about teaching, I know. I'll try to cut it short. My mother died. I got leave to go home and attend her funeral; I did and hurried back to my students.”

I said that I was sorry, and that it must have been terribly hard.

“Here I'm supposed to say that it's all right and I'm over it.” Colette's eyes flashed. “It's the polite thing to say and I know it—but it isn't all right! Not one filthy bit all right! Death is a horror, an atrocity and an injustice, and I wish to heaven we could kill it, for a change. I went back to work, but I still miss my mother terribly. Now that I've got the money, I'm going to have her recloned.” She drew breath.

“A few years later my father died, too. You'll have a lot of questions about him when I'm finished, so I want to tell you right now that I won't be able to answer most of them. He was a brilliant man.” Colette paused, staring away, her violet eyes cloudy with thoughts. “Brilliant, but brilliant in ways most people didn't appreciate. Brilliant and—and horribly secretive.”

I nodded, feeling that every word she said increased the likelihood that she would check me out for a second time next quarter or next year.

“When I was a little girl he lost job after job. Eventually I realized what was happening and came to dread it. He'd last a year in a new job, possibly two, then be out of work again. When I was in my early teens, he stopped looking for new jobs and started doing things on his own, giving financial advice, managing investments for other people, and so forth. Consulting. All sorts of things. He put out a little newsletter, just one screen each week. It cost more than most of them do, but before long he had over a thousand subscribers. He made investments of his own, investments that prospered. He never talked about any of those things to me, you understand, or to my brother. If he talked about them to my mother, she never told us anything about it. I doubt that he did; he wasn't the kind of man who confides in his wife—who confides in anyone. What little I know about him I learned from people outside the family, from other teachers and from the parents of my students, mostly. All I knew at the time was that we moved into a big house and suddenly there was more than enough money for college for Conrad and later for me. Two flitters, then another for me. Very few families can afford one flitter.”

I nodded again.

“I went home for his funeral, of course. Just before I came back here my brother showed me Father's laboratory. It was a fourth-floor complex in our house, a suite that was kept locked any time he wasn't in it and often when he was. There is an office in one room, desks, screens, and keyboards, diskers and even file cabinets—all the things you'd expect, and that's just one room in the suite. There is a chemical laboratory—I suppose you'd call it that—with a thousand different chemicals. Burners, ovens, and scopes. There was a workbench in another room, and machine tools I don't know the names of. You program them with a screen, my brother said, and then they work on and on in a sort of trance. All kinds of things. My brother took down a screen in the office so I could see the safe set into the wall behind it. It was quite large and looked as strong as a bank vault. He told me he was going to hire an expert in to open it and asked if I wanted to be there when they did it. He didn't expect me to trust him, you see. I told him that I didn't have to be there, that he should just do it.” Colette paused. “We talked for a long time after that.”

I said, “I imagine so. Did you refuse your brother's invitation because you didn't want him to think you didn't trust him?”

“Not really. It was because I did trust him, and I was afraid Father had confessed some dreadful secret. He was that kind of man, or at least I thought he might be. I was afraid he'd been blackmailing someone or had recorded a confession to some dreadful crime. If he had, I didn't want to hear it. My brother might or might not tell me about it, but either way would be better—far better—than hearing my father saying it. I … I knew the pain that would be in his voice, and hearing it would hurt me as badly as telling us about it hurt him. Lonely people like my father keep everything locked inside them, and often they suffer terribly because of it.” Colette's soft white hands writhed in her lap.

“Only that wasn't it at all. My brother came to me a few days ago, when I had practically forgotten about the safe. He told me they had opened it the day after I left.” Still watching me, she groped the soft green grass for her shaping bag and took out
Murder on Mars
again.

“He said he knew I'd been expecting bundles of bearer bonds or gold and emeralds. Something of that kind, but there hadn't been anything like that. Just this book. That this book was the only thing that was in there. He wasn't lying. That's what you have to understand. He was not lying.”

I said, “I know you knew him very well.”

“I did. We'd grown up together, and I knew him almost as well as I knew our mother. If he'd been lying, he'd have made up something more plausible. That the safe had been empty and he thought someone must have gotten to it before we did. Or that there had been private papers in there, and he had burned them. Anything. But he said there'd been nothing at all in it but this book, and he was desperately afraid I wouldn't believe him. I knew him, as I said. Even though he didn't lie a lot, he was a better liar than most men; and when he did lie, his lies were always smooth and plausible. This wasn't.”

I held out my hand, and she handed over the book for the second time. I opened it. “Your father's name was Conrad Coldbrook?”

“Yes, and that's his signature. I've compared it to every other example I had, and they all match. Or if it's a forgery, it's probably good enough to fool an expert. Conrad was my brother's name, too; perhaps you remember. My brother was Conrad, Junior, while my father was alive. When father died he dropped the Junior.”

“That's what one does.” I handed the book back to her.

“You don't remember writing this?
‘He was neither angel nor devil, but something for which we have only bad words or none, a being young and ancient, neither good nor evil, who knew too well the roads to the farther stars.'
That's how it begins.”

I had read that, too, and I was about to say I hadn't when it hit me that the words were really a little bit familiar. I took the book again and had another look. It was print-on-demand; but the cover picture might have been lifted from some publisher's edition: two planets, the larger one mottled blue and white, the smaller one dark red, scarred, and choked by a snake.

Colette remarked, “The serpent represents evil, I suppose.”

I was thinking of a dozen other things, but I nodded. “I don't suppose you've read it.”

“No. No, Mr. Smithe, I haven't. The important points are that it was in my father's safe, the only thing he kept there. And that you're listed as the author. Look at the title page.”

I had noticed my name there already, but I checked it again anyhow. It had not been a collaboration or a fix-up of some dead man's unfinished manuscript. On the back of the title page, the copyright date was thirteen years before I died.

Sighing, I opened the book at random.
“Eridean had called them the sewers, but they were enormously larger and more varied than the term implied, tunnels and cellars and subcellars and worse, far beneath the city. There were animals in them, he knew. Animals, men more hostile and more fell than any beast, and plants that throve without the sun, pale growths that feasted upon the living and the dead. Yet what first Apolean met was none of these, but a woman.”

Talking mostly to myself, I said, “I remember it now.”

“Wonderful!”

I turned back to the copyright page. “They give the original publisher.” I held up the book so Colette could see it. “Pixie Press. It was a small press, just one woman and her husband, with a part-time volunteer who was paid mostly in books. My regular publisher didn't want it. My agent tried a few others, then gave up and handed it back to me. Handed it back metaphorically, I mean. Pixie published a limited edition of…”

I stopped to think. “Three hundred and fifty copies. That was it, I'm sure. One hundred signed and boxed, and the rest just hardcovers on acid-proof paper with Zistal dust jackets. This looks like one of those.”

Colette smiled. “I hope it sold for them.”

“It did. The entire edition sold out in a good deal less than a year, Jen told me. She was quite happy about it. It was the first time they had ever had a book sell out in under one year.”

“Now you remember writing it. You must.”

“I do. It was one of the sideline projects I did now and then. When I was stuck on
The Ice-Blue Kiss
I'd work on this for a while. At first it was meant to be a short story.”