Identity Matrix (1982)

THE IDENTITY MATRIX

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resem-blance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 1982 by Jack L. Chalker

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Book

Baen Enterprises 260 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y.

First Baen printing, January 1986 ISBN: 0-671; 65547-

Cover art by Dawn Wilson

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by

SIMON & SCHUSTER

MASS MERCHANDISE SALES COMPANY

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N.Y.

This one's for my technical advisors, Bill Hixon, Dave Weems, Ben

Yalow, Ron Bounds, and Mike Lalor, to whom all nasty cards and letters

should be sent.

This time the horror was an old woman.

She ambled down the little street that was like all slum back alleys in every
city in the world: garbage-littered, closed-in, filled with the cries of babies, the
yells of aimless adults, and smelling like too many people were cramped into
too little space, a fact further attested to by the long lines of frayed washing
hung from fire escape to fire escape.

She toddled along, dressed in a faded green and very baggy print dress
decorated with faded orange flowers, garb that seemed to accent rather than
hide, the effects of age and improper diet. The dress itself was rumpled, as if
she slept in it and removed it only for an occasional super-bleached washing.

She
halted in the middle of the street as some wisps of wind broke the heat
of the day and rolled discarded trash from one side to the other and looked
cautiously around
.

A lone young black male, barely fifteen, dressed in old, faded shorts that
had been cut off from a well-worn pair of blue jeans, and little else, was idly
humming an incompre-hensible tune as he tossed a little red rubber ball
against the wall and caught it.

She stopped to watch him for a moment, her kindly face breaking into a
satisfied smile as it squinted to observe the young man.

She liked them young, and he looked in excellent health.

The solitary ball player hadn't even noticed her; he didn't notice as she
positioned herself carefully behind him and took one last glance around.

After a few more seconds the kid threw the ball against the cracking brick
facade a little too hard and ran into her as he chased the flying red missile
that sailed overhead. She fell, then muttered something he couldn't hear under
her breath and started to pick herself up.

The kid was extremely apologetic, and she smiled a toothless smile at him.

"That's all right, boy," she told him kindly, "jest hep me back up to my old
feet."

She held out her hand, and he took it, pulling her up.

Suddenly, so quickly that he didn't even have time to think, he stiffened,
then shook himself and looked down at the old woman again.

She appeared to have fainted and lay collapsed in a heap in the middle of
the street. Carefully, he knelt down beside her and groped for something
strapped to her leg, a small case, held in place by an elastic band.

Carefully removing the case, he opened it and removed a hypodermic
needle. Taking her limp arm, he found a vein, then stuck the needle into it and
pushed the plunger slowly, injecting air.

Satisfied he walked down the street to where it came to another, larger and

,

busier one, and dropped the syringe down the sewer so casually without
stopping that no one would have noticed that anything had been discarded.

A little farther down the street a young white woman waited tensely at the
wheel of a yellow Volkswagen, motor running.

Without a word, the young black man opened the pas-senger door, got in,
and settled down. Without even a glance, the woman started the car forward,
and, within a minute, was out of sight, lost in a sea of thousands of little cars
heading into and out of the inner city.

He walked into the old morgue with an air of confident authority. A police
sergeant greeted him just inside, and after exchanging a few words they made
their way down a long, echoey hall lined with ancient marble, their foot-steps
ghostly intrusions on the quiet.

They entered the main room and both shivered slightly, for it was a good
deal colder here than in the rest of the building and in extreme contrast to the
heat of the muggy August night.

One wall was filled with what looked like huge airport lockers of a dull
gray. The sergeant checked the names and numbers, then nodded and turned
the shiny aluminum handle on the third from the bottom.

The compartment slid out on well-greased rollers reveal-ing a body
wrapped in a clinical white sheet with the city's seal on it. Methodically, the
sergeant pulled back the cover to reveal the body of an elderly woman, Jane
Doe #8, wearing a faded green flowered dress.

The man nodded gravely then removed a small fingerprint kit from his suit
pocket and took her index finger's indentations carefully.

The sergeant recovered the body and slid it back into the refrigerated
compartment, while the man reached into his inside jacket pocket and took a
small card from a worn leather billfold.

He put the card next to the one on which the old wom-an's prints stood out
clearly, nodded to himself, and grunted, a sour expression on his face.

"It's her, all right," he said disappointedly. "That old bitch beat me again."

Chapter One

I should have known better than to go to a bar on a Friday night, even in Whitehorse, Yukon territory.

Whitehorse has that aura of backwoods pioneer behind it, but about the only evidence of roughing it left in, the now modern, metropolitan city are a few multi-story apartments made of logs and the prices you have to pay for everything. Long ago the old frontier gave way not just to traffic lights but traffic jams, parking meters, and modern, plush motels and restaurants. The motel I was in might as well have been in New York, or maybe Cedar Rapids, with its neon, its prefabricated twin double beds and little bands reading "sanitized for your protection" and several channels of cable televi-sion—in color, of course.

The bar, too, wasn't much different than anywhere else in North America these days—dark, with a small band (one would think that any act reduced to playing Whitehorse would find a better way to earn a living, but, what the hell, they'd never dream of leaving show business) playing all the latest pop-rock dance tunes pretty badly while lots of the young men and women dressed in suits and designer jeans mingled, talked, and occasionally danced in the small wooden area in front of the stage and barmaids continually looked for poten-tially thirsty patrons at the tables. About the only rustic touches were the stuffed and mounted moose, elk, and bear trophies over the bar (probably made in Hong Kong) and a few plastic pictures of the Trail of '98 on the walls, all impossible to see clearly in the deliber-ately dim light.

I sat there, alone, looking over the scene when the barmaid came over and asked if I wanted another drink. I remember looking up at her and wondering what fac-tory made motel barmaids for the world. The same one that made state troopers and cab drivers, probably.

I
did
need a drink and ordered a bourbon and seven, which arrived promptly.

I sighed, sipped at it, and nib-bled a couple of pretzels, surveying the people in the bar
.

There
were
a few differences, of course. Some old people—I mean
really
old people—were incongruously about, looking like retired salesmen from Des Moines and haggard, elderly grandmothers of forty-four kids, which is probably what they were. What they most certainly were were tourists, part of a group that was one of thousands of geriatric groups that came to Alaska and the Yukon every year on the big cruise liners and by fast jet and motor coach combinations.

Most of their party would be at one of the "authentic" old frontier bars down the street, of course, all about as authentic as Disneyland; but these were the leftovers, the ones whose arthritis was kicking up or who'd been on one too many tours today and just didn't have any juice left. I re-flected that it was a shame that most of those romantic-sounding cruises to exotic Alaska always looked like floating nursing homes, but, I suppose, that age was the only one where you had both the time and the money to do it right. Somebody once said that youth was wasted on the young, who had neither the time nor resources to properly enjoy life, and nowhere was that more graphically illustrated than here.

Still, these people had worked hard and lived full, if extremely dull, lives and shouldn't be begrudged for this last fling. They were lucky in a number of ways, at that.

Most people never get the chance to go coast to coast, let alone to someplace far away like Whitehorse, and, of course, their lives had been satisfying to them, anyway.

Lucky…

I knew I shouldn't have gone to a bar on a Friday night, not even in Whitehorse. You sat there, drinking a little, watching the beautiful people—and the not-so--beautiful people pretending they were—drift in and out, mix it up, watch couples pair up and others mix and match. You sat there and you watched it and you drank a little more, and the more you watched and the longer you sat the more you drank.

It'd be easier, I often thought, if I were physically scarred or deformed or something like that. At least you could understand it then, maybe come to grips with it then, maybe even find somebody who took pity or had sympathy for you so you'd meet and talk and maybe make a new friend. Harder, far harder on a man's psy-che to have the scars, the deformities within, hidden, out of sight but no less crippling or painful.

I finished the bourbon, and, leaving a couple of dol-lars for the barmaid, left the place. Nobody noticed, not even the barmaids.

It was a little after midnight, yet the July sun shone brightly outside, sort of like six or seven anywhere else. It was hard to get used to that most of all, because your eyes told you it was day while your body said it was really late and you were very tired. One of the tour groups was struggling into the lobby looking haggard, turning the place briefly into a mob scene. I just stood and watched as they bid their goodnights, some laugh-ing or joking, and made their way to the elevators to turn in. None noticed me, or gave me the slightest glance, and I waited there until they'd cleared out before going up myself. No use in fighting that mob, not with only two elevators.

I got a newspaper and glanced idly through it while waiting for the elevators to return. Nothing much, really. Internationally, the Russians were yelling about something the CIA supposedly did in some African coun-try I barely knew, the Americans were yelling about a new Russian airbase in the Middle East, there was some sort of local rebellion in Indonesia, and the Common Market was debating the duties on Albanian tomatoes. An earthquake here, a murder there, the U.S. President was pushing for some new missile system, and the Ca-nadian Prime Minister was in the Maritimes trying to keep Newfoundland from seceding. Big deal. I suspected that this same newspaper could be used, with perhaps a few names and locales changed, for roughly every third day of the past two decades.

The elevator came and I got in, riding it swiftly up to my room, still glancing through the wire-service laden local paper. NORAD scrambled in Alaska when a UFO was sighted south of Fairbanks, but it was gone when they'd gotten there, as usual. Ho hum. UFO stories seemed to run in ten-year cycles, with a particular rash of them right now. I remembered meeting the ambassador to Uranus once in San Francisco, really a balding, gray-haired little man with thick glasses who might never really have been anywhere near Uranus, or even Pittsburgh, but got a lot of attention by saying he had so often he almost certainly believed his fantasy himself by now.

I unlocked the door to my room, went in, and flopped on the bed. All the lonely people… That was a line from a song once, when I was growing up, and it was certainly true. The world was full of such people—not the nonentities downstairs, both old and young, who live but might as well not have lived, but the lonely ones, the ones who fly to Uranus in their minds or maybe become flashers in Times Square or take a crack at killing a politician. There were degrees and degrees of it, from the horrible to the hilarious, but those nuts had found a release, a way out. For a few there was no release, no way out, except, perhaps, the ultimate way.