Back | Next
Contents

16

Sarda burst out of the side room opening off Alazahad's office just as Kieran turned the overhead light on from the switch by the door. "What do you think you're doing?" Sarda demanded shrilly, waving his arms in agitation at the door. "You let her go! Now she'll go straight to Balmer and the other me with the story. . . . And we still don't even know where they are!"

The outer door opened, and June came in with Mahom. They had been positioned outside in one of the cars lined up on the front of the lot. One press of the recall button on the phone in Kieran's pocket would have activated June's number, giving them the signal to pull up behind Elaine's car to prevent her from leaving. Evidently, Kieran had chosen not to. "What happened?" June asked, sending a puzzled look from him to Sarda.

"He . . . he let her go!" Sarda stammered. "He had her cold. I heard everything. She'd as good as confessed. Another half hour, and we'd have found out all we needed to nail them and get the money back."

"Yes, you could have gotten the money back . . . and lost her," Kieran said to Sarda. "I presumed you'd rather have both. Actually, I think you can do better still."

Sarda's sails crumpled, windless. "What are you talking about?" he retorted.

"Hey, trust the man," Mahom told him. "If I know anything, it's that the Knight has his reasons."

"You don't remember anything about her," Kieran said.

Sarda shook his head. "Of course I don't. All I do know is that I'm in a hole for five million, and you just let somebody walk away with it."

"That's the problem. You don't know how it was with you two." Kieran waved a hand at the comscreen on Alazahad's desk. "Replay that call you made to her earlier this evening and look at it," he said. "Look at what it's telling you. And I saw it all over her face here again just now."

"What? You saw what? What are you talking about?"

"She's in love with you, man! You! The Leo she used to know, before he started having ideas about getting even with his other self, and turned into someone else. She didn't get mixed up in this for a share of any money. She did it to keep the man she had then. Was she supposed to trust this process that everyone said would create the same person, identically? How could she? He didn't even trust it himself."

Sarda gave June a bemused look, asking if it made sense to her. For the moment she could only return a shrug. "But you didn't talk about anything like this," he objected, looking back at Kieran.

"I didn't have to. Her face and body language said it all—plus the fact that she came here. . . . She came because she thought she would find someone she'd lost."

"Well, maybe." Sarda seemed none the wiser. "But I still don't see what good it did, letting her go like that. Why do it?"

Kieran sighed patiently. "When you called her earlier, she assumed you had to be the original, as we intended. But even in that short time she saw the Leo that she'd known at the beginning, who didn't know anything about this scheme that got dreamed up later—because that's exactly who you are. She thought that the original had somehow reverted to what he had been. But then she realized that her Leo—the one she came here to find—is now the enemy, itching to get even." Kieran gestured toward Sarda in a way that said the proof couldn't be any plainer than that. "She couldn't deal with it for the moment, so she left. If we'd wheeled you in at that point, it would have created a fight between the two of you that could never have been mended. Oh, sure . . . a half hour with the hot irons and the thumbscrews, and we could probably have learned all we needed to take everything to Herbert and Max, stop whatever Elaine's friends are up to, and recover your five million. But whatever you and Elaine had would have been lost. And I happen to think it was something worth trying to hang onto, Leo."

June was staring at Kieran with a look that seemed to say that no matter how long she knew him, he would never cease to amaze her. Alazahad had no idea what was going on, and was happy to leave everything to the rest of them.

Sarda looked at Kieran uncertainly, apparently expecting more. Kieran's manner suggested that he'd said all that should be necessary. "So what happens now?" Sarda asked finally, at the same time glancing at June to ask if he had missed something.

"We wait for her to come back," Kieran said, as if it should have been obvious. "Well, not literally here, of course. I assume she'll call."

Sarda was still not really any nearer. "How do you know she'll do that?" he asked.

"Well, I don't in any mathematical sense. Call it an instinct derived from many years of intense application to the study of human nature. If all the—"

"Wha-at?!" Sarda emitted a strangled protest verging on a shriek. His eyes bulged; his yellow mane shook; his shaggy mustache took on life and bristled. "You're telling me now that this whole thing is based on nothing more than a hunch of yours?!"

"Instinct," Kieran corrected. "More refined, less impulsive. It carries imputations of greater sophistication and more solid groundings in reality. The weak part about relying on logic is always in the assumptions."

"Whatever—I don't care. But holy Christ . . . !" Sarda waved both hands while he sought for words. "What I'm telling you is, there's nothing to stop her going straight back and blowing everything. And all you're telling me is that you don't think she'll do that! That really makes me feel a lot better, Kieran. You're gambling five million of my money—"

"Mine too," Kieran pointed out. "You more or less insisted yourself that you expected me to have a stake in this."

"Making decisions concerning my personal life that I don't recall ever being invited to give an opinion about . . ."

"It was hardly a feasible option at the time."

"I don't know anything about this woman," Sarda fumed. "What if I don't want this romance that you're so touchingly keen on restoring?"

"If I'm right, we still stand to do a lot better. They have to be into this for more than just a split of five million. To find out what, we need Elaine as a willing ally through choice, not a reluctant snitch who was bullied into divulging the minimum she could get away with. I'm prepared to gamble that her feelings for the Leo-who-was will make that choice."

"And what if you're wrong?" Sarda asked dubiously.

Kieran clapped an arm cheerfully around his shoulder as they headed for the door, while Alazahad turned out the lights. "In that case, Leo, I know just the person to go to who can make us forget our sorrows and everything connected with them," he said.

* * *

They drove in the Kodiak through the tunnel connecting Gorky canyon to Nineveh, heading back to June's place, where Sarda had left his own vehicle. In his own mind, Kieran allowed that Elaine would need time to wrestle with her thoughts and reach a decision. In the meantime, he was trying anything to distract Sarda from constantly trying to come back to the subject.

"I was thinking over what you said about DNA being the program for a complete, self-assembling factory—much more complicated than any program people have ever written."

"Uh-huh." In the seat behind Kieran and June, Sarda returned from other ruminations. "Unimaginably more complicated. The whole set of plans needed to build a spaceliner wouldn't make a dent in it."

"So could a program like that just have written itself—out of random accidents, for no reason?"

"What makes you think it did?" Sarda asked.

Kieran shrugged. "That's what they taught everybody when I went to school."

"Outside of Earth, nobody in the business believes that anymore," Sarda said. "Start changing lines of the machine-tool codes for making spaceliner parts at random, and you'll end up with a pile of junk—if anything works at all. With what you're talking about, it's a lot of trillions times more guaranteed. In short, it's ridiculous." He seemed about to elaborate further, but then his eyes wandered away, and he pulled pensively at his mustache. "How can you be sure? I can't believe you just let her walk away. We're fooling ourselves. She's not gonna be coming back."

"Just give it until morning, Leo."

"We might not have until morning. They could pull out and be gone anytime."

"Not if they're involved in higher stakes. Nothing's going to happen tonight."

"But how—"

"So why are things different on Earth?" June asked Sarda, turning her head from the seat beside Kieran.

"What? Oh . . . it's the same as with a lot of things. They've all got turf and reputations to protect. I used to be an orthodox materialist once. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to see their line as being as dogmatic as the fundamentalism that it was invented to replace. That was why I decided to move out—to be part of an environment where questioning is permissible and it's okay to look at alternatives."

"So what do you think?" Kieran asked him. "Where did genetic codes come from?"

"Nobody knows. It's what a lot of scientists out there are trying to figure out. . . . But I'd guess there has to be some kind of intelligence at work. You can't get away from it."

"Sounds like you've got a religious side, Leo," June commented.

"Not really—not the way most people think of it, anyhow. But yeah, I think that the original religions—before they got corrupted and sold out to politics—encapsulated a lot of genuine ancient knowledge. The truth will turn out to be more exciting than anything people ever dreamed up."

For a while, Sarda fell quiet. Kieran waited hopefully for some even deeper philosophical revelations and speculation.

"And even if she wanted to, how could she get back? She doesn't have your real name, and you didn't give her a number."

"Love will find a way, Leo," Kieran sighed.

* * *

Sarda called from his office the first thing next morning, while Kieran and June were finishing breakfast. "I got a message from Elaine!" he announced. "She called my administrative assistant at home—either she knew the name already, or she tracked it down since last night. She wants to know how to contact Mr. Troon."

"Now do you believe in instinct and the arcane arts of divining human nature?" Kieran asked him.

"Okay, yeah, yeah. You were right; I was wrong . . . maybe. So what do I do?"

"Give your assistant my number and tell her to relay it back," Kieran replied.

Elaine was through in less than fifteen minutes. "I'm sorry about last night," she said, when Kieran answered. "I was confused and upset—but I think you knew that. I've been thinking about things, and I'd like to talk. It needs to be as soon as possible. Where can we meet?"

 

Back | Next
Contents
Framed