The Sea is Full of Stars

supply all the added power and speed a cop would need to answer an emergency. Since there didn’t seem to be any private vehicles allowed save for the commercial types, it would be easy to patrol the place.

Moving through the open archway that led inside the police building, he felt a tingling all over and decided that there were doors of a sort here. He assumed that this big one was a one-way door; anybody could get in to the station, but that big old fellow over there had to push things on a control board in front of him to let you back out again.

The building was impressive; a kind of hollowed-out design with a vast but well-lit atrium, and on the main floor various signs leading to areas where there were officers and clerks and, to his surprise, flat screens that looked like computer screens, although he was surprised to see they mostly contained meaningless squiggles and that those working on them used massive input pads with an impossible number of buttons, rows and rows of them. Couldn’t they just talk to their computers and get replies?

The central area was a big horseshoe-shaped depression with a series of clerks at desks. He was brought up to one of them by his captors.

“What’s this one?” the clerk asked, sounding more bored than interested.

“New one,” the cop on the right replied. “Apparently just made through the Well from aliens processed through Zone. You want to run him through the system and confirm that such people did arrive? Can’t be too careful these days.”

“Don’t need to,” the clerk responded. “I’m surprised, though, to see this one. Looks just like the other one. Don’t usually get two in the same hex.”

“You have another like me here?” he asked, suddenly excited.

The clerk gave him a nasty look and responded, “You are not to be involved in this discussion. Just keep quiet.” She turned back to the booking cop. “I suppose he doesn’t remember his name?”

“Says he’s—okay, you can talk. What was that name again?”

While taking in all this and thinking of this new other, his mind had wandered from the immediate business of booking him.

“Ming—sorry, Ari Martinez.”

“Ming Ari Martinez. Well, that’s a lot.”

“Just Ari Martinez. Sorry. I was thinking about one of my companions.”

“Suit yourself.” She looked on the screen, punched something up, then swiveled it around so he could see it. “Which one are you?”

He was startled to see a still picture of them sitting in the small lecture hall, all together. Jeez, he looked awful! Not as bad as Kincaid looked, though—or his uncle, if the old bastard made it. His hand went out and toward Beta’s eerie gaze, but then he pointed to the one and only original Ari Martinez. “That one.”

He really did have a dual nature. He had just about all of Ari as well as all of Ming inside his head. They weren’t meshing— they were too clear and distinct for that—but keeping one up and the other in background required effort. He told himself that he had better find some way to manage them and deal with it. Otherwise he’d go to sleep and the next day wake up thinking he was Ming, and that wouldn’t do at all.

They took some sort of holographic photo of him by running a hooplike device over him. He only understood what it was because he saw the image form on a little disk next to the booking clerk’s screen. It was an interesting perspective in about one-fifth scale. A series of squiggles was written under it, it was rotated and checked, and then it vanished, presumably into the central police computer records.

“Take him to Interrogation 302,” the clerk told them. “Detective Shissik will want to question him, and a link with the Interior Police is already established there.”

He didn’t like the sound of “Interior Police.” Still, he wondered if he hadn’t been incredibly stupid. If he’d told them he was Ming and let that personality come up, it would have been cop to cop!

“Interrogation 302” meant that they swam up from booking to the fourth level, entry being “Ground,” and then to and through one of the doorways there. He assumed the squiggles gave the room number.

Inspector Shissik was already there, and there was a small oval object in front of him that looked like a speaker.

Nobody sat; the only furniture was the table on which the speaker rested, and only it was needed.

The Inspector looked up at the two cops who’d brought him in. “You may go,” he said officiously.

“But—” the first one protested, and stopped when the Inspector gave him a withering glare. They left, and Ari heard an ominous buzzing sound indicating that if he tried to leave, it would be a bit different.

“Please relax,” the Inspector said. “I am with the Interior Police. If that term is not familiar to you, it simply means the national police force that sees over the whole of Kalinda. You’re now a Kalindan whether you want to be or not, and there won’t be a third transformation, so you should get to know your new people and new home. You are here to answer some questions about yourself, your erstwhile companions, and a few other things. Then we’ll process you in as a citizen, find you quarters, and test you out for a job. Everyone in Kalinda works at something. If you cannot find a job you enjoy and are good at, we’ll find you a least common denominator one. I do not mean to suggest we’re a slave labor camp, but we do expect everyone to do their part. Is that understood?”

He nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Now, I want to know all about you. What you did where you came from, how you wound up here, and, most particularly, I want you to tell me all that you can about those who came in with you. Just go ahead, and I will interrupt if I have a question.”

He did in fact understand, and he gave the Inspector a fairly whitewashed version of Ari Martinez’s life and times, jobs and relations, and something of an account of who the others were and how they all wound up here. He even admitted that his uncle was a master criminal and a sadist, but managed to give the impression that he wasn’t a part of that. He hoped he sounded convincing.

For a while the Inspector didn’t respond, then he said, “Why did you give the female Ming as an identity downstairs?”

He shrugged. “We—all three of us—were telepathically linked. It appears some of it came with me.”

“It appears that much of it came with you,” the Inspector responded. “The other one, which you weren’t supposed to be told about as yet but know anyway, is quite an amnesiac. It is genuine; we’ve gone through the usual verification steps— drugs, that sort of thing—to convince ourselves. She arrived here a few days ahead of you, although I must tell you that such a time spread for simultaneous processings isn’t all that unusual. It will be interesting to find out where the third is, and in what mental condition, but that will be days, even weeks, unless she, too, comes here. You say you have nearly complete memories?”

“Yes. I can’t say how complete, but if I reach back to common experiences, when we both were there, it is extremely easy to recall it from her point of view. It is almost like both of us were in here, somehow. I didn’t think that was possible with this Well of Souls thing.”

“Well, even the Ancient Ones could not be expected to think of everything. Apparently you and she were both physically and mentally connected when you entered?”

“Yes, she basically was operating me like a puppet.”

“Apparently the Well couldn’t tell the two of you apart, or perceived three consciousnesses in two bodies, and yet was running on the knowledge of your old species. This leads me to the rather interesting question it all raises. Are you certain that you are Ari and not Ming?”

It was a disconcerting question. “But—I’m male, aren’t I?”

“Doesn’t follow at all, for two reasons. Number one, the Well has never let that stand in its way before, nor even in all cases in the recent past. And second, we Kalindans are a bisexual race, it is true, but we’re designed primarily as survivors under almost any circumstances. When you woke up above, you could breathe, couldn’t you?”

“Yes. I wondered about that.”

“You have a blowhole in the back of your head and some rudimentary lungs that are sufficient up top. We’re quite a rarity in races—we can exist in two of the four elements, and we are well-insulated along a lot of temperature extremes. We’re also omnivores and can eat most anything, although there’s much we would not enjoy eating. And we’re born as neuters. Our children have no sexual differentiation at all. Upon puberty, we tend toward one sex or the other, but this can change. If the population falls below healthy levels, males will change over a period of weeks to females. When the population tends to get a bit too large, then a large number of females