A Borrowed Man Read online

  “Certainly. All men are. Women lie and lie—do you know that?”

  I said, “I suppose I do now.”

  “It’s one of the things men tell each other, and it’s true. We women lie and lie, because we’re good at it. Men generally tell the truth because they’re not.”

  “I have nearly half a century of memories. Doesn’t that make me old?”

  “Certainly not. I’m a good judge of age. Shall I tell you how old you are?”

  I nodded and tried to smile, although no smile came. “I wish you would.”

  “You’re twenty-one or twenty-two, but you could easily pass for thirty or more. Most people wouldn’t believe that you’re only twenty-two.”

  Although Colette would and did. And it was not quite true, I decided, that I had an old man’s memories and a young man’s mind. That was what they had taught me to believe, but it was not really that simple. How old was my judgment? I think your judgment depends on both those things, but it depends more on something else, something I cannot put my finger on. On insight and this other thing. Only I am a lot younger than Colette thought.

  I could study the mountains in the middle distance when we landed in what looked like the ruined garden of some abandoned estate. There were trees like towers of bells, and patches of golden-green sunlight. A waterfall roared about a hundred paces away. “This grass is fresh and very soft,” I said when our hovercab had lifted off, “but I wouldn’t think you’d want to sit on the ground in that skirt.”

  Colette nodded and waved her hand, leading me to a couple of stones about a hundred steps away. I dusted off both with my handkerchief, which got me a really great smile, and I sat on mine after she had sat down.

  Opening her shaping bag, she took out the plastic-bound book she had shown me before. “Books like this are almost obsolete now. Did you know it?”

  “The librarians have told me so. I would hate to believe it.”

  “You must, because it’s true.”

  I wanted to walk. That was a new feeling for me, or maybe only an old buried one coming back, one so old I had forgotten it. I got up and walked up and down, not fast but not slow. Books—real books printed on paper—were the heart and soul of a whole culture that had been mine. Cultures are like people, it seems. Sure, they get old and die; but sometimes they die even when they are not very old at all.

  “I can see you’re trying to keep this age straight.” Colette herself was trying hard not to laugh.

  Still dizzy with thought, I nodded.

  “That’s good. Do it. I’ll stop talking until you sit again.”

  Without paying much attention to what I did, I had gone to the edge of the waterfall. I guess it was pretty small, no higher than some of the belltower trees, but really pretty. I must have watched it for ten or fifteen minutes. Maybe more.

  At last I went back to her. “You told me that books are almost obsolete, yet you carry that one in your shaping bag. That must mean that this secret you’re looking for is in there, or you think it is. You were afraid of our being overheard—afraid there were hidden listening devices in the library.”

  She nodded, looking grim.

  “Why would the police be snooping our conversation?”

  “They wouldn’t be interested—not as far as I know, or at least not seriously.” She shut up for a long look at the book. “You may be right. I…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll certainly consider it. Probably for quite a while.”

  I sat down again. “Are you yourself a scientist?”

  She laughed and shook her head. “What makes you think I might be?”

  “Our earlier conversation. I didn’t ask about a map that might give the location of buried treasure. I talked about formulas and diagrams, none of which you challenged. So it’s a scientific secret, or at least you think that it might be.”

  “Yes, it might.”

  “But you yourself are no sort of scientist. What are you, then?”

  “What do I look like?”

  I shrugged. “A wealthy, well-educated young lady.”

  “Close enough! Let’s leave it at that.” She had been reading the book. “You mustn’t ask me how I know the secret’s in here.”

  “In that case, you’d certainly lie if I did.” I smiled, remembering something she had said.

  She nodded.

  “So I won’t. Tell me this, please, and don’t lie. Is it in all copies of that book, or only in that one?”

  “You…” She hesitated. “I don’t really know. What difference does it make?”

  “A great deal, or so I think. If it is in this one alone, we need only look for a difference between this copy and the rest; but if it’s in all the copies, that approach would be quite useless.”

  “If it’s in all the copies, it must be in the text.”

  “Correct,” I said.

  “While if it’s only in this one, there could be some difference in text. Or else something physical, like the chemical ink you talked about, or the errata sheet.”

  “Exactly. Are you good with modern screens? I knew next to nothing about the wonderful computers of my own time, and I know less than nothing about the screens you use now.”

  “No, not at all.” She paused. “Some people are fascinated by them.”

  “You aren’t, I take it.”

  “No.” She opened the book and closed it again. “I’m not. Those people are mostly boys, and they get into the mathematics—all sorts of things that machines can handle much better than we can.”

  “We may have to enlist one of those boys, in that case. Millions of books are available in digital form, or so I’ve heard.”

  “Several digital forms, really.” She smiled. “I see I’ve let the helium out. I’m sorry. Really, I am.”

  “Not necessarily. Why several forms?”

  “Sometimes people want to see the author’s original text, prior to editing. In other cases there are several forms. Suppose a Chinese book has been translated into English. There could be three or four translations, and arguments about which translation is best.”

  “Is that a translation?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve researched it, and it was written in late English—in the language we’re speaking, in other words.”

  “Is that the only language in use now?”

  She shook her head again. “There are dozens of others.”

  “In time—”

  She nodded again. “Yes. I know what you’re going to say, and I agree: there may be a planetary language. But it hasn’t happened yet and perhaps it never will.”

  “Since we don’t have to worry about translations, what do we have to worry about? The author’s original text?”

  She smiled. “You should know.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You wrote it.” She handed me the book.

  I glanced at the title page and shook my head. “I see I did, but this one must have been written after my death. I don’t remember it at all.”

  “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

  COLETTE’S STORY

  “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.”