But after a few minutes, with the sigh of a man reluctantly picking up a burden, Mr Thomas placed his half-empty cup on the floor, reached into his jacket and took out an automatic pistol with a long white silencer.
Heinz felt no emotion. Less than twenty-four hours ago, after all, he’d been nothing but inanimate matter. He’d been a simple solution of minerals in a bath. Why fear a bullet that would simply return him to his natural state?
“Hey! He needs to know the truth first,” Mr Occam said. “He needs to know the truth before he dies. He should know who he is and the price he’s paid.”
Mr Thomas sighed. Then, with a regretful grimace, he nodded.
“Listen Heinz,” he said gently, lowering the gun. “Mr Occam is quite right. I’m afraid there’s one more thing we haven’t told you. One thing we haven’t been straight with you about. You see, it is true that we copied Karel Slade. It really is true. But here’s the thing. We lied to you when we said you were the copy.”
“What do you mean?”
“He means,” said Mr Occam, “that you really are Karel Slade. We knocked you out with chloroform in your hotel room and brought you here.”
Heinz remembered the hospital smell and the dream of being held down.
“But… That can’t be. I mean… what about the restaurant? I mean we saw Karel Slade in the…”
“He was a copy,” said Mr Thomas. “Though he doesn’t know that of course. He believes he’s the real Karel Slade.”
“But…” Heinz – or Karel – struggled to frame a coherent question. “But why swap us round then? Why not just leave me in the hotel?”
“Copies aren’t perfect. They always die after a week or two. Sometimes it’s a stroke or a heart attack. More often two or three body organs pack up all at once without warning. And copies have a way of just suddenly dying on us if we put too much pressure on them. Doing things this way round avoids that problem. And what’s more it gives us a way of eliminating Karel Slade the terrorist without blowing our cover. It’ll look as if he died of natural causes.”
A small puzzle resolved itself in Karel’s mind.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes I see. Just like with Leon Schultz.”
“Exactly. We copied him too. He told us everything he knew. The rest of you took the copy for the real man and never suspected anything. Your copy will die soon just like his did.”
“He might die tonight, of a heart attack, in bed with that lovely wife of yours,” said Mr Occam, smiling coldly for the second time since Karel had met him.
“James!” reprimanded Mr Thomas.
Karel looked up. He’d barely been touched by Mr Occam’s jibe, but he was rather startled to discover that his tormentor had a first name.
“What’s your given name?” he asked Mr Thomas.
“Herbert,” said Mr Thomas, a little uncomfortably. He quickly formalised things again by prefacing the name with a title. “Agent Herbert Thomas.”
Then he caught Karel’s eye and glanced down at the gun to remind Karel politely of their unfinished business. Karel nodded.
“Give me one minute,” he said. “Just one minute.”
“Of course,” said Mr Thomas. “You need to sort out who you are again. I understand that. Just let me know when you’re ready.”
Transferring the gun to his left hand, he reached down for the remains of his cup of coffee.
“Ever had that thing when you wake up in the morning and, just for a moment, you can’t think who you are?” he asked Mr Occam. “It’s a mystery, this identity thing. I never cease to be amazed how quickly we can persuade a man to part with it. It’s just…”
Then he remembered that these were Karel’s final moments on Earth and he broke off, placing a finger on his lips with an apologetic glance at his prisoner.
In the silence Karel bent forward in his execution chair and tried to pray.
Dear God forgive me.
But there was no sense of a presence listening to him. Well, of course not, he thought. He couldn’t really expect just to pick up the mantle of being Karel Slade again and expect to resume business as usual. Not after what he’d done. It didn’t work like that.
Dear God forgive me, he tried again. I just didn’t know. I didn’t know who I was.
The Marriage of Sea and Sky
“They say,” mused Clancy, looking down on a planet whose entire surface glittered with artificial light, “that Metropolis is the city on which the sun never sets. It’s true in a literal sense because the city covers the whole planet. But it’s true in another sense too. Sunset never happens in Metropolis because there is no-one watching. The city’s inhabitants live inside absorbing worlds of their own construction. They have no attention to spare for that rather bare space under the sky which they call, dismissively, the surface.”
Here he paused.
“Have we finished dictation for now?” enquired Com.
“Wait,” said Clancy.
Com waited. Having no limbs, Com had no choice. Its smooth yellow egg-shape fitted comfortably into Clancy’s hand.
“I am a writer and a traveller,” continued Clancy, reclining on cushions in a small dome-shaped room, its ceiling a hemisphere of stars. “I am a typical Metropolitan soul in many ways, restless, unable to settle, hungry for experience, hungry to feed the gap where love and meaning should be.”
He considered.
“No. Delete that last sentence. And I’ve had a change of heart about our destination. Instruct Sphere to head for the Aristotle Complex. There are several worlds out there which I’ve been meaning to check out.”
Com gave Sphere its instructions in a three-microsecond burst of ultrasound.
“Message received and implemented,” said Sphere to Com, in the same high-speed code. “Shall I send standard notification?”
“Did you wish to notify anyone in the city about your new destination?” Com asked Clancy.
“Hmm,” said Clancy, with an odd smile, “that’s an interesting question. And the answer, interestingly, is no. Take another note, Com, for the book.”
He leant back with his hands behind his head.
“Ten thousand kilometres out,” he dictated, “I changed my destination so that no one could find me if anything went wrong. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to dispense with the safety net, to get a sense of what it must have been like for those early settlers in the fourth millennium, setting out on their one-way journey into the unknown.”
He considered, then shrugged.
“Right Com. At this point add a chapter about the Aristotle Complex. What we know of the early settlers, their motives, their desire to escape from decadence… and so on. Themes: finality, no turning back, taking risks, a complete break with the past.”
“Neo romantic style?”
“Neo romantic with a small twist of hard-boiled. Oh and include three poetic sharp edge sentences. Just three. Low adjective count.”
“Okay. Shall I read it through to you?” said Com, having composed a chapter of two thousand words without causing a gap in the conversation.
“Not now,” said Clancy. “I’m not in the mood. Get me a dinner fixed will you, and something to watch on screen. How long will it be till we reach the Complex?”
“The distance is about five parsecs. It’ll take three days.”