"Now," she said at last, drawing me to the large central couch. Her eyes were like stars. "My love. My dearest alien love."
Despairing, desperate, on the brink, I said, "Look!"
Tore off the rest of my clothing and let her see me naked.
"Two?" she whispered in disbelief. "But how—"
"I don't know!" I roared, feeling tears of frustrated lust start from my eyes. "I don't know!"
"Then we'll have to experiment," she said. Her face was radiant and her touch gentle. "The entire ensemble is more streamlined. Elegant. Very different, of course, but actually quite beautiful."
"Beautiful....?"
"Hush now," she said, and began the experimentation.
I crept out of her bed shortly after 0500 hours, leaving her deep in sleep, and had a quick shower. After collecting my clothes from the sitting room and putting them on, I took the phone down to the kitchen to make my call to Karl Nazarlan.
Once again I cut out the video option. Before entering his personal code, I programmed an emergency voice-mail override and activated his ringer. Then I held my breath as the buzzing began.
Be there, old friend. Don't be dead because of me.
His face appeared, puffy from slumber and mad as a hornet. "Who's there? Do you know what friggin' time it is?"
I said, "It's five twenty-two on a dark November morning."
"Show your face, you inconsiderate bastard!" he raged. "Hector, if this is you calling from that goddamned deer-camp of yours, I'm going to wring your bloody black neck."
"It's not Hector." I tried to make my voice sound as normal as possible. "Engage Phase XII encryption, Karl. Do it now. Someone might be listening."
I heard cursing, some of it in a language that might have been Armenian, then the signals indicating that the call was secure.
"Well?" Karl snarled. "If you know me, you know that nobody ever, ever taps my phone. Who the hell is this?"
"It's Helly Frost. The real one, not the demiclone fake who's been masquerading as me for the past half year."
"The real—"
"Asahel Ethan Frost, alias Helmut Icicle, alias Cap'n Helly, the fish-flickin' fool of Eyebrow Cay, freesoil planet Kedge-Lockaby, Zone 23, Perseus Spur."
"Oh, my God!"
"The Haluk bagged me out in Sagittarius and made a Helly demiclone. I finally escaped from the xenos a few days ago—and I'm ringy, riled, and swoll up with mad like a chuckwalla lizard trapped in a fuckin' hobnail boot!"
"It's you, all right," Karl conceded after a brief, incredulous silence. "Now that I think about it, your double never did quite come across as a proper cowboy."
"I'll bet. The fictitious gent hi question is none other than our old chum, Alistair Drummond."
"Christ on a crutch! They turned Drummond into a demi of you?"
"Yeah. I'm going to have a devil of a job taking him down, too. But I'll do it or die trying."
"That sneaking bastard! He did an incredible job. Played you to the hilt. I don't mind telling you it nearly broke my heart when it seemed you were repudiating all the evidence against the Haluk that we sweated blood for. I had to figure you'd sold out to protect Rampart's bottom line. You want to tell me the whole story?"
"Later. I need your help, Karl. Right now, if you can manage it."
"Where you calling from?"
"I'm at my ex-wife's place in Toronto." I gave him the address, told hun about the lack of adjacent hopper pads, pleaded with him to come as soon as possible, as clandestinely as possible, in a ground vehicle.
"No problem at all. My girlfriend has a catering business. I'll borrow one of her vans."
"Girlfriend?" Karl had been a solitary widower for as long as I'd known him.
"Lots of things happened while you were floating. Some good, some not so good. What do you need? Weapons?"
"An Ivanov Squire will suffice. I also need a phone primed with a new personal code—use the name Helmut Icicle. Get into Rampart's database, retrieve all my old dex listings and links, and install them in the new phone."
"Uh-huh. Anything else?"
"A set of full soft body armor, size XLT; a regular Anonyme anorak in XL; a pair of lightweight mittens; a sturdy pair of boots, size twelve medium. Oh, yes. Another set of Joru robes. No makeup or fright-wig necessary this time."
I told him briefly what I hoped to accomplish that day at Rampart Tower and at the Commonwealth Assembly. He uttered a disappointed expletive when I told him how tight the time frame was for scrubbing the new Haluk colonies, and wanted to know how the interactive citizen vote could be invoked.
"I don't know that much about it. You can ask Joanna to explain the thing when you get here. Watch your back en route. The Haluk probably have had you under surveillance for several days, ever since I broke out of their embassy in Macpherson Tower."
"The day I can't slip a tail is the day I get fitted for my halo and start taking harp lessons. Is there anything else I can bring you?"
"No, but there are a couple of other things you can do. Do you remember the report I sent you on the Sheltok carrier pirate attack?"
"The Haluk corsairs operating in the Sag? Sure. I certified it."
"Can you access it quickly and send a copy to Ef Sontag's office?"
He didn't reply immediately. Then: "Yes, I can do that. What else?"
"After today's action, I'm going to hide out for a little while until things cool off. I'll need a fast, well-armed hopper. I'd like you to requisition one of Rampart's big Garrisons—"
"Sorry," Karl said. "Can't do that. Your alter ego cost me my job. A couple of weeks before you supposedly returned from the death-traps of Sagittarius and turned into a raving capitalist, I came down with a mysterious virus that the Rampart medics couldn't cure. I was bounced from my vice-presidency with a nice pension that I never thought I'd live to spend. Big surprise! When I went to an independent physician for treatment, the deadly bug turned up its toes. How do you like that shit? Fake Helly and his friends were clearing the decks."
That explained his hesitation about the Sheltok report. He'd have to hack it out of the Rampart database, along with my phone files. I had no doubt that he'd do the job immaculately.
"I suppose Lotte, Cassius, and Hector were deep-sixed along with you," I said.
"Correct. They're all living in the area, retired and bored stiff. You got something in mind?"
"I'll need the entire staff of your old Department of Special Projects immediately—provided I can pull off a certain ploy over at Rampart this morning. Put your folks on alert, but warn them it's gonna be balls-to-the-walls this time. I suspect Rampart may be infested with other demiclones besides Fake Helly. You and your gang may have to extract them, and the job just might begin this afternoon."
"Christ. Okay, I'll get on it. Anything else?"
"Can you get hold of any kind of hopper at all?"
"Cassius has a Tupo he keeps at Toronto Island Airport. Kind of slow and not armed. I'm sure he'd—"
Joanna had come into the kitchen and was listening shamelessly.
I said, "Get it if you can, but I really need that other stuff. Come as soon as possible. We'll sort everything out when you get here."
"Okay. It'll be damned good to see you again, Helly."
"Oh, no it won't," I said, and hit the End pad of my phone.
Joanna was wearing jeans, a metallic gold turtleneck, and a loosely knit white sweater with a shawl collar.
"You didn't show yourself to your friend?"
"Not everyone thinks the Haluk form is beautiful."
"All of you isn't," she said, smiling slyly. "Only the essentials."
"Well, Karl Nazarian is a tough old buzzard, but I still want to reintroduce myself to him tactfully. That goes for our other guests as well. I may need your assistance."
"Oh, my. Then you'd better strengthen my resolve by plying me with a pot of strong hot coffee. You do remember how to make it? If not, I'm open to other inducements."
"Are you
, indeed," I murmured. "Let's induce."
A taxi carrying Beatrice Mangan and Efrem Sontag arrived shortly after seven. As we had arranged it, I lurked in the upstairs sitting room while Joanna gave Bea and the Delegate coffee, peppermint tea, and muffins with Bonne Maman black cherry preserves. After about ten minutes Joanna brought Bea up with her equipment to do the DNA test. The astonishment of my former ICS colleague was brief and her interest in my exotic body entirely clinical.
Joanna stood by during the blood-drawing and cursory physical exam. I absolutely refused to strip down.
"Damn," said Bea Mangan. Then she smiled at Joanna.
I swear Bea knew. How do women do that...?
Working with her impressive machine on the table in front of the blank holoscreen, Bea quickly developed a genetic profile from my biosample, then compared it with the one in her ICS files, studying screen after screen of esoteric data.
"Fascinating! It's you all right, Helly, but overlaid with suppressing sequences from your late Haluk demiclone. You're a genetic palimpsest, my man. A human parchment with the original writing not quite erased, written over with something terribly new."
Joanna laughed appreciatively. "What a cogent metaphor."
"I hate scholarly jokes," I growled, "particularly when I'm the butt. Can a layman make sense of this analysis? Will we be able to use it to prove my identity to people like Ef Son-tag and Adam Stanislawski, who don't know anything about advanced biology?"
"Stanislawski?" Bea said. "You have been busy." "He'll be here any minute, and so will Karl." "Oh, dear," Joanna said. "I hope they're not hungry. Bea and Ef ate the last of the muffins, and there's not much else in the house."
"Hospitality," I muttered, "is the least of our worries." Bea did something with the machine. "Look here, then. We start over. Enter Original Helly's DNA, comme fa. Now enter Halukoid Helly's DNA, comme ca. Tap the correlation pad, then hit pr6cis, et voila! Go ahead, do it yourself." She walked me through it. At the end the readout said:
POSITIVE MATCH PLUS 1623 ANOMALOUS CODING SEQUENCES SUBSTITUTED FOR PORTIONS OF NORMALLY NONCODING GENETIC MATERIAL.
DO YOU WISH CODON-BY-CODON BREAKDOWN OF ANOMALIES? Y/N.
I told it n.
"Looks good, Bea. Thank you. Can I keep the machine with me today while I confer with some people?"
"You aren't getting rid of me that easily," she said. "If you hope to use that data to convince others of your identity, you'll need a live expert witness to vouch for it. Otherwise you might as well be demonstrating a video game. I volunteer my unimpeachable authority for as long as you need me. I'll operate the psychotronic device, too, if you like."
"Bea ... there's no way I can say how grateful I am."
"Then don't," Bea said. "Are we ready for Sontag's show-and-tell?"
"I'd rather wait until Stanislawski shows up. It'll save time, maybe even reinforce plausibility. We won't wait for Karl Nazarian. He has some necessary items to assemble and it might take him a while. You and Joanna go down and keep Ef company. Show him the test results. I want to sit here and pull some ideas together."
"Of course," Bea said.
They left me alone. I'd already been briefed by Joanna on events of the past half year as we ate our small breakfast, following the inducements. Seeing holovids of "myself" had been bad enough. But I was even more shocked at how quickly the Haluk had moved to insinuate themselves into the Commonwealth economy, dismayed at how readily their reassurances of goodwill had been accepted, in spite of Ef Sontag's efforts to sound the alarm. Not even Brown Fleece's demiclone corpse had significantly swayed public opinion against the Haluk. The Concerns had produced experts of their own who contradicted Bea's evidence.
Ef and his committee had done their best. Unfortunately, the fact remained that the blue aliens were very good for business, and the Hundred Concerns were fearful of rocking the prosperity boat. Their pocket Delegates would vote on the Haluk colonies as they were told to, unless I could unleash a groundswell of citizen opposition in time to make a difference.
I began to dictate to a small e-book. Doing my best to remember incriminating remarks made by the two Haluk leaders as they stood in front of my dystasis tank. Trying to recall details of Barky Tregarth's story, Dolores da Gama's spiteful boasts, and the Sheltok skipper's damning admissions of Haluk piracy being swept under the rug by nervous Concern management.
The front doorbell rang.
I looked out the window, saw a little red Honda Civic parked in front of the town house, and assumed that Karl had changed his mind and acquired another set of wheels. About ten minutes later Joanna came up to the sitting room.
"Adam Stanislawski, the richest man in the galaxy, has arrived. Both he and Ef Sontag have accepted the proof of your identity. You won't have to submit to the truth machine on their behalf. On stage, Blue Boy. The dress rehearsal audience is waiting."
With her leading, I went down to the kitchen. Ef and Adam and Bea were sitting at the table, where cups of coffee and tea shared space with forensic apparatus.
Gasps at my entrance. The two men sat still as statues.
"Good morning, all," I said mildly. "Thanks for coming and thanks for believing. I'm sure you're curious about the circumstances that resulted in my physical change. In just a few minutes I'll satisfy your curiosity and tell the whole story. But first: I hope no one is in need of a defibrillator."
Strained chuckles.
"No? Excellent. There are two principal objectives I hope to accomplish today, with your help. The first is the removal of a demiclone agent, loyal to the Haluk, who has-been taking my place as President of Rampart Concern and Corporate Syndic. Adam Stanislawski has pledged to help me accomplish this. When this impostor is deposed by the Board of Directors, I hope to have Vice-Chairman John Ellington, the Macrodur stakeholding representative, elected syndic in his place. He has the stature—and the motivation—necessary to pressure Rampart's so-called pocket Delegates into a one-eighty-degree switch."
Ef Sontag said, "Are you certain this new syndic will obey orders?"
Adam Stanislawski laughed. "John will do as I say."
"And you're certain," Joanna said, "that John is the man you think he is."
"All of my employees have been required to take DNA tests every week," Stanislawski said. "Delegate Sontag's open committee sessions describing demiclone infiltration scared the liver out of me. I instituted the policy at the beginning of September." The Macrodur chairman's blue eyes did their friendly twinkle thing. "And before you ask—I have not excluded myself from the testing. Even though I haven't heard Kelly's story about his latest exploits, I've decided to accept his thesis that a vast Haluk conspiracy exists, and that it poses an immediate threat to humanity. All of Macrodur's, er, political influence will be exerted to defeat the Haluk colonial bill. I'll do my best to see that Rampart does the same. You have my word on it."
The 400-kilo gorilla had spoken. Ef Sontag nodded, showing admirable legislative sangfroid.
I said, "Let's move along. The second objective I hope to accomplish is the one Chairman Stanislawski just iterated. To this end I volunteer to appear today as a witness in Ef's opposition summation in the Assembly. Prior to my appearance, I'll undergo DNA testing and a brief psychotronic interrogation before a conference of the news media. I will then invite the man masquerading as Asahel Frost to step forward and do the same thing. He won't, of course. By the way, the impostor is a human, not •» Haluk. He's a traitor to his race whose behavior can perhaps be explained by the fact that he's a dangerous sociopath. His name is Alistair Drummond."
"Sonuvabitch," said Adam Stanislawski.
"I have my reasons for unveiling myself to the media prior to my appearance before the Assembly," I continued. "It's good psychology to give the Delegates prior warning of a bombshell."
"I agree with the tactic," said Ef Sontag. "We don't want them so shocked by the revelation that they don't pay attention to what you're saying."
"There's anot
her factor favoring media revelation," I continued. "It will warn the general population that something dramatic will happen during the Assembly session, and ensure that the session receives maximum viewer exposure. Professor Joanna DeVet suggested the possibility of an interactive citizen referendum on the colony measure. I believe there's constitutional provision for that."
Sontag didn't look encouraging. "In this situation, I doubt that a majority of the Assembly Delegates would yield their voting power to the people. The provision was designed to apply to grave emergencies, in situations where Delegate factions appear to be hopelessly deadlocked. A vote on new Haluk colonies might not qualify as a grave emergency—especially in the minds of my Conservative colleagues." He considered for a moment. "However, if the vote goes against us tomorrow, as it very well may, there's constitutional provision for an interactive veto if enough citizens express immediate disapproval. Am I right, Professor?"
Joanna nodded. "Delegate Sontag could call for citizen participation from the Assembly floor after the Delegate vote is tallied. Unlike the referendum, a citizen veto poll doesn't require Assembly approval. It can be okayed by the Speaker herself."
"She might be amenable," Ef said, "provided sufficient numbers of citizens had expressed opposition to the measure following the summations. I'll be sure to mention that during our media show."
"Say it again at the end of your summation," I urged.
Joanna said, "You realize that a final veto tally would probably take a couple of days, while PlaNet hits from remote worlds are collated and verified." She looked bemused. "You know, there hasn't been a citizen veto for sixty years. Not since legislation on the death penalty for all Throwaways was shot down."
And if the citizens hadn't gotten off their apathetic duffs and killed that draconian measure, Yours Truly would not be alive today, and in a position to make trouble ...
"Are there any other questions or comments concerning upcoming events at the Assembly this afternoon?" I inquired.
"Do you really think it's wise to expose Alistair Drummond during a media conference?" Bea Mangan queried the room at large. "I'm a medical doctor as well as a geneticist and I did study psychiatry—although I admit mine is very rusty by now. But it seems to me that there's a danger of provoking this man to some very rash actions. He might even try to disrupt the media conference. Perhaps Assembly Security ought to be warned of that possibility."