Karel still said nothing. Intellectually his position was that the SHG should feel no more and no less responsible for the individual tragedies that resulted from their operations than the bomber pilots who helped rid the world of Nazi death camps should feel responsible for the individual tragedies that befell German civilians in the cities they bombed. There would have been mashed legs there as well. There would have been many decapitated girlfriends. But he couldn’t say that without incriminating himself further. After all, his position was supposed to be that the SHG weren’t ‘his people’ at all.
“Yes. I can see why he’s angry,” he said. “I would be too in his place. But those laboratories, those technologies, they’re brewing up all kinds of horrors for the future. They’re blurring the boundaries between a human being and a thing. You don’t have to be a Christian to see that, surely? Without that distinction, there…”
He broke off.
“But I’m not going to change your mind here am I?”
Mr Thomas laughed pleasantly.
“I’m a public servant, Mr Slade. My opinions are neither here nor there.”
“How can you be a public servant if you don’t obey the law?”
“Ah, but those are the written laws you’re talking about Mr Slade, aren’t they? Laws for the daylight, laws for the public stage. You’ve got to bear in mind that every public stage also needs a behind-the-scenes, a backstage. There’s got to be a place where it can be a bit messy and untidy, and where it’s okay to leave the ropes and props and bits of scenery lying about. Do you know what I mean? The show’s the thing, the show’s what it’s all about – that’s indisputable – but it’s what goes on behind the scenes that keeps it all going.”
Mr Thomas stood up.
“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t I leave you here to think for a little while? You think about what you could do to help us, and I’ll nip out and have a quick word with Mr Occam there, see if I can persuade him to cut you a little bit of slack.”
Fifteen minutes at least, thought Karel, sitting in the middle of the empty room. Get through three more times what I’ve done so far and that will be an hour ticked off already.
And it would only be another hour before Caroline realised he wasn’t on the plane. She’d know at once that something was wrong. She’d know to inform Matthew using the agreed code. Matthew would set the wheels moving to get everything in the SHG battened down in readiness for the coming storm, and Caroline meanwhile would do the worried wife routine, using all the formidable resources she possessed as a TV celebrity and famous beauty: phoning the TV stations and the international press, phoning lawyers and churches and civil rights groups, e-mailing the two million members of Christians for Human Integrity. Twenty-four hours? Who needed twenty-four hours? It would be a couple of hours at most before the light of day began to break through into Mr Thomas’s ‘behind-the-scenes’ and Messrs Occam and Thomas began to feel the heat.
It was worrying that they knew about Leon Schultz though. How had they found out? How did they know about Mr French and Mr Gray? What else did they already know?
The door opened. Mr Thomas came back in, followed by a sombre Mr Occam. They both sat down in their chairs in front of him. It was as if Karel was being interviewed for a job.
“We’ve decided to give you a bit of information,” said Mr Thomas. “Something we’ve been holding back from you. We think it may help you come to a conclusion.”
Mr Occam stood up, walked slowly over to Karel’s throne. Karel braced himself for another blow. But instead the sombre black man leant forward and placed his hands on the ends of the chair arms, so that his face and Karel’s were no more than a foot apart.
“You’re not Karel Slade,” he said, and for the first time he very faintly smiled.
His breath smelled of tobacco and peppermint and garlic.
“What do you mean I’m not Karel Slade? Of course I am!”
Instinctively Karel looked past the implacable Mr Occam to the accommodating Mr Thomas. But Mr Thomas made the regretful grimace of a person who reluctantly confirms bad news
“It’s very hard to take in I know,” he said, “but it’s true. You’re actually a copy of Karel Slade; you’re not Karel Slade himself. In fact the real Karel Slade knows nothing of you at all. He knows nothing of any of this.”
Mr Thomas paused like an experienced psychotherapist giving a client some space to process a difficult truth. Karel needed it. He was frozen in the sense that a computer can be frozen when so overloaded with tasks that it can’t proceed with any of them.
“Incidentally,” Mr Thomas said, “it’s actually a lot later in the day than you probably think it is. It’s actually early evening. The real Karel Slade got up at 6.30 this morning, caught his plane and is now back with his wife, Caroline. They’re at a restaurant with Caroline’s brother John and his new fiancée Sue. I believe the meal is in celebration of John and Sue’s engagement.”
“Not without me, they’re not. That was my idea.”
“It was actually Karel Slade’s idea. You think it was your idea because your brain is an exact copy of Slade’s and contains all his memories and thoughts.”
“Oh come on,” said the man who still believed himself to be Karel Slade, “I can see you’re trying to disorientate me, but to suggest I’m some sort of clone is really absurd.”
“Not a clone,” said Mr Occam.
“No of course not,” said Mr Thomas. “That would be absurd. A cloned copy of you would take forty-eight years to grow – and even then it would only be a body copy of you. It wouldn’t have your memories. And it’s your memories that we’re after.”
He leaned closer.
“No, you’re not a clone, Mr Slade, you’re a field-induced copy. Last night when Karel Slade got into that hotel bed he didn’t know it but he was actually getting into a scanner. The precise imprint of his body on the surface of space-time was recorded, right down to the subatomic level. And then this imprint – this field – was reproduced by an Inducer in the mineral bath from which you eventually emerged. It’s a bit like dropping a crystal into a solution. It takes a bit of time, though, which was why we had to tinker with the clocks before we put you back in that fake-up of your hotel room and waited for you to wake up.”
Karel knew about the field induction process. Like artificial intelligence and genetically engineered babies, it was one of the things that Christians for Human Integrity and the SHG were both fiercely opposed to.
“But no one’s ever copied more than a few cells,” he said, “and the government declared a moratorium on the whole thing a year ago, pending the report of the Inter-House Committee on Ethics.”
Mr Thomas nodded.
“But we’re back to what we were talking about earlier, aren’t we? About the difference between the public stage and behind-the-scenes? There is a moratorium on field induction research and it’s perfectly appropriate in a civilised society that there should be, but behind-the-scenes has its own needs.”
“You mean you just went ahead with field-induction in secret?”
“Well we couldn’t pass up on a technology like that, could we? Not in all conscience. As you pointed out yourself at the beginning of this session, suspects have all kinds of rights – and properly so. They can’t be physically hurt. They’ve got to have a lawyer present. They can’t be held for more than a short period of time. It’s all very laudable. But we’ve got a responsibility to protect the public and if we can work with a copy of the suspect, none of those problems need apply. What’s more, if we do it right, the suspect and his associates need never even know that we’re onto them. Karel Slade for example has no idea you’re here and that you’re about to incriminate him and the entire leadership of the SHG by telling us everything he knows.”