The Parallel Man (14 page)

I gave my assent and in the chapel of the Castle took their oaths and renewed my own. Then over a scratch meal I consulted with the Old Carpathians about what wrongs should be righted and how it could be done. An elderly woman who was the titular head of the party because of her Jagellon blood was the most helpful to me; the others still hoped, I think, to use me to advance their own schemes. “In theory the Tribune can’t advance any legislation on his own,” the woman told me, “but myself and a few other Old Carpathians are still Council members; you’ve only to tell us what you want proposed and we’ll do it, then you can use your powers to take it to the people.”

“If he’s elected . . .” said one of the others, but just then one of the guides appeared at the door. I nodded permission for him to speak and he said resonantly, “My Lord Tribune, you have been elected with the greatest number of votes ever cast in Carpathia!”

Good rulers are long remembered, but there are few songs and stories about them, for the business of bringing peace and justice to a land is mostly hard work, which makes a poor story. With the aid of Wanda Jagellon, the woman who was titular head of the Old Carpathian Society and Ladislas Mankowitz, the Chief Guide of Castle Thorn, I managed to use the power of the Tribune to root out the worst of the abuses which had grown up. Time after time Wanda or one of the other Old Carpathians would rise in the Council to propose some needed change, and time after time I would judge, “Let go to the People,” before the Council could vote it down. The streets of Thorn and other cities were empty after the time of the evening meal as the citizens watched the debates on their Views and keyed their voting contacts. Then there came the time for Council elections; the Old Carpathians swept the elections and the fight became more subtle. I had to keep the Old Carpathian Party from re-establishing Mortifer’s tyranny with their folk instead of his. But at last we won that fight too.

Everywhere we had encountered tentacles of Mortifer’s power; in the Council, in the Civil Service, in the academies. Some of his followers I won over, some I had to cast out of office or destroy politically, financially or even physically. My own life was constantly under threat; the Castle Guides became again the Knights of Thorn and the Tribune’s bodyguard, recruiting younger men to do part of the job. The Guild of Scholars took over guide’s duties in those parts of the Castle that the Knights and I were not using. Time and again we encountered Mortifer’s agents or followers, but of Mortifer himself there was no sign. I was beginning to wonder if I should pass on the Tribune’s office to Wanda or Ladislas and seek Mortifer off-world.

Then late one night, as I worked alone in my quarters a personal call came in on my View. We had established a special code for those who wished to speak to me privately; much information had reached me in that way from those who feared reprisal if they approached the Tribune in any other way. Because of that, the code was such that there was no way of discovering from what place the call originated. I was not completely surprised, then, when on this night the View showed me the saturnine countenance of Mortifer himself. I ignored his face and searched the background of the picture for any clue to his location. He was too clever for that; it was a gray-walled room that could have been any general utility room in any modem structure on Carpathia. The one thing that the call did tell me was that Mortifer was probably still on Thorn; there was no sign of the subtle clues which technicians had told me would mark a feed-in from off-planet.

“You have already spoiled many lifetimes of work, ‘Casmir King,’ ” said Mortifer in a sneering tone. “I see that it is time that I dealt with you myself.”

I looked back at him with as little expression as I could manage; this man knew me even better than I knew him, having spied on me in moments which I had thought were private; I wanted to give him no clues to my thoughts. I lifted an eyebrow and said as casually as I could, “Your agents have had no great success in ‘dealing with me,’ Mortifer. What more do you think that you can do?”

Mortifer gave a sardonic smile. “I know how your mind works, ‘Casmir King,’ ” he said. “You want to get your hands on me and you will take risks to do it. For my own purposes it suits me to meet you face to face. I think that your vanity will make it hard for you to refuse that offer. Name a time and place where you think that neither of us can betray the other. I will meet you there and show my superiority to you by outwitting your precautions. Then you will be in my hands again, though you may believe that I will be in yours.”

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 fire 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.”